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Category: Marketing and Branding (Page 7 of 13)

marketing, branding, advertising, promotion, positioning, strategy, business

Where I’ve Been (Since I’ve Not Been Blogging)

This blog has been woefully neglected over the past couple months.  It’s not for a lack of ideas or opinions; I’ve got plenty.  Instead, it’s more an issue of habit and focus.  The former’s insufficiently formed as it relates to punching out short pieces here.  The latter’s been divided over other projects.

So: a quick rundown of things I’ve been doing instead of blogging and in addition to working full time (in a plenty demanding position) and being a very highly rated husband and father (really, just ask ’em).

EthanBeute, San Diego, ocean, photography, West Coast, waves, surf, water, beach

La Jolla, California: One of the places I've been instead of sitting down and blogging.

  • A family vacation to San Diego that inspired 11 photo sets, including visits to the Pacific Ocean (several), Joshua Tree National Park, Cabrillo National Monument, Torrey Pines State Park, Legoland, Los Angeles and more.  The photo above comes compliments of and merits compliments to my wonderful wife.
  • Landing an MBA scholarship from the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an award for which I was pleased, excited, honored and appreciative.  Sure, it just involved completing their scholarship application, tightening up ye olde resume and constructing a couple short essays, but it still required dedicating an entire Saturday morning to the effort.  It all adds up.
  • Theme-building, copy writing and copy editing for Seeds Children’s Home.  For a decade, they’ve been providing food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care and discipleship to orphans and other children in need from the Kipsongo slum in Kitale, Kenya.  They’re launching an emergency fundraising campaign to get an orphanage built after the home they were renting was sold, displacing the orphans and their full time care providers.  This one’s just getting started; there’s plenty of work to be done.  I was invited into the project by a friend whose sales and marketing consultancy website I reworked earlier this year.
  • Messaging strategy and copy editing for Roundhouse Support, which specializes in technically supporting apps and app developers.  Little of my work is yet live, but the site’s getting a nice upgrade from Infront, a leading web design, development and SEO company here in Colorado Springs.
  • Learning about myself with the Culture Index, an assessment tool recommended highly by an esteemed colleague who specializes in true, internal branding.  I completed the online portion and await my initial and foll0w-up meetings to interpret the results and to turn them into practical action.
  • Ongoing miscellany with BombBomb, a video email marketing startup here in Colorado Springs.  Great idea (seriously, try it free!).  Great team.  Great fun.

Meanwhile, summer’s here!  Though I’ve enjoyed some quality outdoor time, I’ve only made it to one summit so far this season.

I do love this blog.  I also love helping people, learning things and going outside.  Everything in moderation, I guess!

Naming Your Business: Mix and Match for a Perfectly Generic Name

You’re welcome in advance for this one.

Naming your business can be challenging.  Do you use your name?  Do you include explicitly the kind of business it is?  Is it more abstract and evocative?

For your next cemetery, golf course, apartment complex, condo development, housing subdivision, retirement home (err … senior living center) or any of a handful of other business ventures, just mix and match the words below into pairs.

Obviously, I’m devoting insufficient time to this blog.  Not only should there be more posts more often, this list should have been produced as an infographic or – better yet – a little interactive program.  Regardless, your generic name awaits!

sign, business name, generic name, name game, naming your business

Your generic business name does not belong in such a beautiful place.

ALL-PURPOSE (can be used as first or second word in your name)

Hill(s)

Meadow(s)

Willow(s)

Pine(s)

Forest

Park

Glen

Aspen

Grove

Hollow

Valley

Wood(s)

Pebble

Boulder

Canyon

Farm(s)

Gable(s)

Garden(s)

Cove

Creek

Stream

Lake(s)

Spring(s)

Spring (season)

Winter

 

ONLY TO START (can only be used as first word your name)

Whispering

Rolling

Running

Flying

Thundering (use with caution)

Bear, Fox, Deer or other animal (bonus: need not be regionally appropriate!)

 

ONLY TO END (should only be used as the second of the two words in your name)

Crossing(s)

Run

Manor

Estate(s)

Terrace

Plural of any of the all-purpose words

 

Have you been to that new golf course Boulder Terrace!?  Have you visited my new apartment at Whispering Pines!?  Did she just buy the last home in Fox Valley!?  Is your grandfather buried at Forest Glen!?

Again, you’re welcome.

I have certainly missed some of the wonderfully generic words available.  Please use the comment section to:

a) add more words (and qualify them if necessary) and/or

b) add more business ventures for which this mix+match is appropriate

As always, thanks for visiting and for reading.  Disclaimer: I do not advocate for generic naming of businesses.

 

Phone Books: Legal Spam

We’ve got “do-not-call” registries.  We’ve got CAN-SPAM.  And we’ve still got tons (hundreds of thousands of tons) of phone books being dumped upon us.  I don’t propose that it be illegal, but I am frustrated by the incredible waste of resources it represents.

Here’s the latest in legal spam; it greeted me upon my return home from work tonight.

Spam Unsolicited Mail Yellow Pages Book

Thanks for the spam, Verizon.

It’s not quite irony, but there’s something funny about their QR Code pitch to download their app.  Really?  You had to print, bag and deliver door-to-door an unsolicited pitch to download your app?  No better way to reach me with that message!?

To those of you hoping to eliminate unsolicited messages of all kinds, here is a wonderful resource from ecocycle.org (based in Longmont, Colorado).  It’s a collection of links to online forms to remove yourself from lists.

And to those businesses still paying tens of thousands of dollars each year for magnets, covers, inside covers and back covers … I recommend this.  (Exception: if the primary demographic you’re hoping to reach is something like adults 60+, then the phone book might be a great place to invest)

 

Results from Free Facebook Ads

If you read magazines like Wired or Inc. (yes, both still appear in print on actual paper), you may have noticed offers from Google and Facebook on those little pull-out/fall-out cards that are annoyingly tucked, glued or stapled into just about every magazine.

The offers are basically identical and provide a unique code to cash in for $75 in Google Adwords or $50 in Facebook Ads.  It’s a smart way for each company to invite prospects into their easy and cost-effective ad systems.  It’s free money for me and wholly trackable sampling for them.

While reading the recent issue of Inc. featuring a cover story from Jason Fried about how to get good at making money (note: I really enjoy his ongoing involvement with Inc.), I decided to take Facebook up on their offer.  I used the $50 ad credit to prop up a community page I made for my neighborhood, Ivywild Neighborhood – Colorado Springs.

Ivywild, Ad, Facebook, Facebook Ad, Neighborhood, Colorado, Sign, Advertisement

My set-it-and-forget-it Facebook ad for "Ivywild Neighborhood - Colorado Springs"

My approach was smart from the start, but lazy through the finish (I never A/B tested or adjusted any copy or imagery).  I set up the ad to target people who:

Why Bristol?  They’ve got the biggest Facebook fanbase – by far – of any neighborhood business (about 3,500).  Along with The Blue Star and J Gregory Salon, Bristol is also right across the street from the sign that marks, declares and names the neighborhood.  I used this familiar sign as the primary image in the ad; it’s also the primary profile picture of the community page.

The ad clicked through to the Info section of the Ivywild community page, which defines the purpose of the page, the informal boundaries of the neigbhorhood and a touch of history.  I favored this over the wall, because the page has limited user interaction at this point; it isn’t as “alive” as I’d like it to be.

I set it up as a cost per click campaign with a budget of $5 per day.  I let it run past the 10 free days and ended up paying $15 out of pocket.

Campaign results (rounded):

  • 180,000 impressions with a click through rate of 0.06%
  • 50,000 “social impressions” with a click through rate of 0.094%
  • Total clicks of 110 / Total “social clicks” of 48
  • Total CPC of $0.59 / Total CPM of $0.35
  • 97 fans before the campaign, 163 at the conclusion of the campaign
  • 60% conversion rate (66 fans from 110 clicks)
  • Cost per conversion of about $1

Facebook’s social metrics refer to impressions that include the names of people to whom you’re connected who already like the page.  As seen in the results above, the social piece is pretty powerful.  Though they accounted for 28% of the impressions, they accounted for 44% of the clicks.

This free, simple effort grew the page 68%.  It was fun, easy and interesting.

I recommend you pull the offer out of a magazine on a newsstand today … unless they’re only running it with paid subscribers (all the better for tracking and measuring), in which case I won’t advocate you pulling the offer from a magazine in someone’s mail box.

Here’s a simple something I wrote back in May 2010 about why I created the page.

Who Trumps How Many: This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis

Earlier, in my brief examination of social whoring, I included a mention of “who” being more important than “how many.”  The basic idea: 10 Twitter followers truly locked in to you – your persona, your concept, your product, your service or your brand – are more valuable than 1,000 followers who are just hanging on for the follow-back.  Not genius, but fundamental and oft overlooked.

For several  months, I’ve been watching This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis.  This morning, I realized that a) I should bring this excellent, entertaining production to your attention and b) it perfectly illustrates the idea.

Regarding TWiST itself: It’s a YouTube channel under the This Week In web TV network.  It’s a round table format about – obviously – startup companies, entrepreneurship, venture capital, angel investing, founders, CEOs, etc.

Guests have included Gary Vaynerchuk, Groupon founder Andrew Mason, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, the founding developer of WordPress, the director of search at Bing, the founder and CEO of Gowalla, the founder and CEO of EventBrite and more than a hundred others.  Themed segments and episodes include Shark Tank (very frequent, idea pitch and judgment), Founders Roundtable, Global Meetups and more.

Regarding who versus how many: Dozens of the episodes (of which there are 120 or so) have fewer than 100 views.  Most have views in the 100-1,000 range.  A handful of views are in the 2,000+ range.  Total subscribers … 402.  Note: this does NOT take into account the live audience of each show.

A traditional take on these kinds of numbers – unimpressive.  A local television station provides 2,000 simultaneous views for even poorly-watched programs.  Though insanely inane, other YouTube channels have far greater reach – like ShaneDawsonTV2 with 250,000,000+ video views and 1,600,000+ subscribers.

So how do Calacanis and company land sponsorship from leading software companies like email service provider Mail Chimp?  (Note: my ESP of choice is BombBomb, who’s putting video inside the inbox).  Those few hundred subscribers and few thousand viewers represent a tight, high quality community of entrepreneurs, tech/web people, investors and financiers.  It’s probably as dense a concentration of these types as you can reach.

I guarantee that buy isn’t on an old school cost per thousand basis.  I’d also bet that if you looked at the sponsorship (however it’s structured) on a CPM basis, the CPM would be astronomical compared to most online buys.  There’s a premium on concentrations of smart, shrewd, softwarey people.  Yes, I made that last adjective up.

The point?  Sure, more viewers and subscribers would be good for TWiST, but who makes up that audience is far more important than how many there are.

Here’s an embed of a recent episode with Tony Conrad, co-founder of About.Me (sold to AOL for $800M four days after launch) among many other projects and successes.  If for no other reason, you should watch this to learn how the About.Me team lined up that killer url – obviously a fundamental piece of their overall strategy.

More on Jason Calacanis on Wikipedia.
Follow Jason Calacanis on Twitter.
Check out my About.Me page.

Disruptive Innovation: Clark Gilbert and Deseret Media

As a business, television is obviously being disrupted on at least two sides.  On the viewership side, lifestyle and technology changes mean less and less appointment viewing (and commercial watching).  On the revenue side, pure play internet companies with wholly measurable and cost effective solutions are creating far more competition for local advertising dollars.

In the face of this, I’m fond of saying that people will always seek and find great content and money will always seek and find people.  There are, however, several significant distribution, cost structure and business model hurdles standing in front of traditional broadcasters and publishers.

Where do you look for ideas and inspiration when in need of new business models due to fundamentally disruptive threat in and around your industry?  Perhaps to a former Harvard Business School innovation and entrepreneurship scholar who’s since gone real world.

The keynote address below was delivered by Clark Gilbert, president and CEO of Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media, at the Borrell & Associates Local Mobile Advertising Conference last September in Dallas.  I’ve watched it a few times and decided to give it the same treatment I gave a month or two ago to an excellent presentation from Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV.com and VaynerMedia.

Based on his involvement at Harvard and in the Newspaper Next project, Gilbert makes two fundamental points about disruptive innovation.  First, only 9% of companies in disrupted industries survive the shift.  Let’s be generous and double that; still, fewer than one in five traditional broadcasters and publishers will survive if historical trends hold.  Second, a necessary precursor to that survival is the establishment of a separate division, physical location, profit/loss statements, sales team, content team, technology team, etc.  The teams should include a significant portion of “outsiders” to the traditional, disrupted industry.

Walking the talk, Gilbert now heads up the newspaper, radio, television and digital operations of Deseret Media, which is owned by the LDS church.  Certainly, the Mormon connection provides several advantages, like an automatic, worldwide audience that trusts you implicitly.  Regardless, he provides a ton of excellent insight in this presentation.

Because it’s a local mobile advertising conference, Gilbert covers well SMS, mobile/geo and deals programs.  In addition, though, he covers his entire turf, including the insanely well-trafficked KSL.com, among other properties.

One of the more interesting themes that runs through his full presentation is mindset, semantics, framing – changing the way you talk about something in order to change the way you perceive, understand and think about it.  Listen for key phrases that he repeats to help re-frame things toward a new perception or understanding.

I highly recommend the full version, but I can only embed here the 5-minute highlights edit posted to YouTube:

Borrell used this nice content tease on YouTube to drive traffic into his site for the full presentation, which can be seen here.

Here’s a content breakdown, so you can choose an appropriate in-point, should your time be limited:

1:20  The Newspaper Next project – how disruption happened in the past, historical look, put in context of newspapers

4:10  Gilbert starts, gives up on newspapers/media, refusing to learn, 10 years of communicating same message

6:10  Digital assets – what’s under his control as CEO of Deseret Media

6:45  Parallel story of disruption in another industry (mainframe, minicomputer, personal computer)

9:30  Waves of disruption, historical media trends

10:50  Empirical evidence that’s overwhelming, inarguable and irrefutable – in the face of a disruptive threat, you must have a separate division, location, p/l, sales force, content teams, etc.

12:00  Success rate of responding to predictive threat is 9%

15:30  Red Sox Nation effect – what the web allows

17:15  KSL.com stats

18:15  How he built his team

19:30  Strategy is never more than 49% of the solution

21:30  Symbiotic relationship between trust in news product and relevance in online marketplace – driving traffic

23:30  SMS – old technology, standard across platforms, local market spend forecast

26:00  Self-serve model beneficial and NECESSARY

29:00  “Deals” strategy, why you must have one

31:10  Why disruptive technology isn’t disruptive to customers who adopt it

33:30  Why Groupon, LivingSocial and other deals advertisers are vampires or leeches

39:15  Private labeling their deals program

40:00  Only legacy asset he inherited … brand trust

42:45  Why they’re selective about deals partners – don’t take all comers – elements of good partnership

45:30  How Google ruined relationship selling

48:00  Organizational structure required to live through disruptive innovation

49:45  Q&A starts

50:10  Groupon, fund raising and brand building

53:30  TV versus radio in driving subscribers to deal signups

55:00  How the sales team is organized

56:45  Cannibalization of other digital products by deals products? No Traditional media obsesses here

58:00  Digital content production – traditional journalists’ inability to decouple story telling from medium

01:00:00  Ramping up investment in digital media

01:03:30  On trust

01:05:15  Elements, factors and design of partnerships between 3rd parties and media properties

01:09:30  Optimism for media companies

Again, I highly recommend viewing the entire piece.  I’ve done so several times.

If you’re inclined, please share here anything you enjoyed, disputed or wondered about Gilbert’s presentation.

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