In a recent Google advertising blog, Google points to research which plainly shows that a large percentage of your Customers use a search engine to find you and find out about you before the make the big purchase.  OK you knew that right? But what does that mean to your brand?

It means that SEO (search engine optimization) is so very important for your brand and for your success.  When was the last time you bought a product with out doing a quick little search? OK maybe if you’re buying a Twinkie and a Coke Zero you might fore go the search but products and service of any price consequence starts with a search more times than not.

Customers are even conducting searchs on their smart phones while in the store.  They search for reviews, information and even price points.  Advertising still has the ability to put your brand voice in the consumers ear but what use to be the whole battle (getting presence of mind) is now only the entry fee into the sales game.  The battle continues into the world wide web and getting your brand/product/service search engine optimized.
Can your customers find your easily?   Or are they finding your competitors more easily?  Scary scary.

Check out this video that walks you through the SEO  tools Spyfu.com, Hittail.com.  (They are paid services and I have no connection with either place.) They will help you figure out your own SEO and reveal a bit of what your competitors are doing.  It rocks pretty hard.  It’s less geek speak but it cuts off mid sentence but it is worth the view.  Check it out and then dive in to your SEO and enjoy the ride.

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It use to be that advertising was considered the comedian who was the opening act for the Rolling Stones. Nobody wanted to hear that guy. They wanted the Stones or Green Day or LAFMO. The point is, advertising was the opening act as we waited for the super star. Things have changed. Now there are a billion opening acts. A billion bad comedians vying for your attention. All screaming buy me, buy me, buy me. It gives us all a big headache and our only defense is to tune out and ignore every comedian we can.

We must entertain to be heard.

Two things need to happen.

First Agencies/Account people stop letting your clients do crappy stuff and then, through all kinds of media paid and un, try and get them into my head. It’s irresponsible and you are polluting my world with bad work that does your client no good. Stop it!

Second, marketing people stop thinking that more is better. More facts about your product/service, more price points, more products, more information, more reasons to buy. Quit thinking you don’t have to be entertaining or creative.  You are not only wasting your money but people will hate you for putting crappy stuff into their spaces (heads, ears, eyes, social media living rooms etc.)

Do something that is smart or cleaver or beautiful or yes even conceptual. Something other than a carton of eggs with a big logo and a line that says BUY EGGS. Don’t be afraid to do great ideas. Don’t spoon feed your consumers they are big boys and girls and will resent you for the insult to their intelligences. Be Creative as you sell your products, tell stories, make me laugh, cry or just be in awe. You have to both entertain and sell.  One with out the other is a waste of time and pollutes our little world with dirty smoggy Badvertising.

Stop it. Be creative.

We all know that to communicate with people you have to talk to them where they live, not where you hope they live. That’s why mobile marketing is growing so rapidly because people live with their smart phones. Not with their TVs or their radios or not with the things people use to read called magazines.

The numbers are staggering. Check out this graphic and great article by the folks @ mashable http://ht.ly/4muG2 Great way to present things. Look at the numbers in the graphic below and you decide if this is The Now.

But as always just because you can find people and talk to those people, doesn’t mean you should. You must have something to say, that they (the consumer) want to hear. Be helpful. Other wise you are just another stalker in the digital realm. Not that fun to be one or to be stalked by one… Be careful out there. And leave me alone Canadian Pharmacy  haha

Social media is your company’s brand face on the web, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, etc. but the questions is who is running this important face of your company? For many companies it’s the person with the least amount of brand experience, the least busy, the least costly individuals. This means interns or the guy in the mail room, the receptionist or worse. Social Media is not so cheap when you do it wrong. It can cost you a huge price. Customer. image, even the future engagements.
Pay attention to who is skippering the social media ship. Yes everyone can help but someone has to be in charge and someone has to pay attention. Someone who understands your brand and the new media. So better to have someone who knows who you are, telling people who you are.  Right?

This can be as simple as having everything go through one person. One voice is a good thing. Don’t rely on a cheap monkey to to the heavy Social Media Brand lifting, it’s counter productive, possibly damaging to the brand and annoying to the monkey…

OK we all know the saying that content is King but it has to be a couple of other things too. It has to play the part of Court Jester and Concierge. I know odd coupling but if it fails to entertain us we will never notice it. If it fails to help us we will be annoyed by it.

TV content can (depending on the brand) still get away with being just the Court Jester. TV has to be interesting and entertaining. The Super Bowl is coming up and that is the mecca (supposedly) of entertaining content. The Super Bowl ads I did a few years back were just that, entertaining. They created a buzz around E-Trade, this was the strategy and it worked. E-Trade is one of the old school .com’s that is still around and still pretty strong. People talked about those ads, they competed with Budweiser, and with Bud they topped the USA Today polls. They were great Court Jesters.

Web content on the other hand still needs to be entertaining but it has to solve problems and be helpful as well. What I’m looking for on the web is sometimes different than what I want on my flat screen. I get annoyed by purely informational ads and boring content that appear on my screen while I’m cruisin the web. They had better be helpful, cool or entertaining and not too sales driven or I get pissed at the brand itself.

Just because you want to say it to the consumer does not mean they want to hear it. The days of talking at the consumer has been dead for a while now. You learn that lesson or you go out of business.

So let’s modify the statement. Content must be interesting, entertaining and helpful to be King.
Content must be part Court Jester and part Concierge.

We all know what happen to unhelpful Concierge and unfunny Court Jesters. One gets no tips while the other loses his head.

Neither is good for us marketing advertising folk.

Good luck.

Ok I’ve heard this one way too much. No I can’t make you a viral video but I can make you a cool youtube video. The viral part is not up to me.

It takes three things to get the sleeper hit or viral video giant. A great idea, a lot of luck and big numbers (oh and a million friends passing it around.)

Anyone knows that to get one “Napoleon Dynamite” you have to make a thousand horrifically bad films, none of which any of us has ever hear of.

Budweiser makes more than a hundred commercials and then picks a select few just days before the Super Bowl to see what tests the best and has the best shot at Super Bowl Fame.

Again to ensure you get a viral or sleeper hit you would need to produce many many pieces with multiple writers and directors and have a lot of cash. And even then it up to the igods.

My first questions when approached with this quarry is why? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to talk to? The great success of W/K and the terrific Old Spice stuff was done with a much bigger budget then most midsize companies have. They are selling the cool. They are not selling the deodorant. And they had to have a great ideas, a big director, special effects and talent. Then they did a crap load of them and threw them against the wall and some stuck and others did not. We know the ones that stuck. They were awesome, the others not so much.

Viral works great if they are very lame or very cool. Both hard to pull off well and harder to repeat. How many more movies have you seen the Vote for Pedro dude in?

The Trick is in the idea, in the numbers and yes still in a little luck. You can produce low budget youtube videos but harness your expectations and know what you want them to accomplish.

So like buying a home is all about the location locations location so it is with marketing and advertising.  Strategy Strategy Strategy! Sure you have a message, sure you want to connect with your consumer but why?  First the WHY then the how will reveal itself.  Or you’ll have to figure it out and we are glad to lend a hand.  Strategy is so important in any medium– marketers know this but they tend to forget it when it comes to social media.  You would never spend TV money with out a strategy but you might then why do it with the Social Media?

Remember Facebook — not a strategy. Twitter — not a Strategy. Foursquare — not a strategy. Gowalla is way more of a game and not strategy. But what these things are is tools.  And they are only as effective as your strategy and the workman swinging the hammer.  So to speak.
“What kind of relationship do you want to have with your customers?”   To quote Jay Baer on this video. What do you want to accomplish?  Remember, be of help to your consumers, don’t be the Amway salesmen dude. We all hate him. lol

One of the things I’ve been involved in recently is a Social Media Audits.  We do some research to discover who is talking about you and where they are talking about you?  Where is the right place to engage your customer and what are they saying about you today and during the last 30 days or so.  You need to know this before you dive into the very necessary strategy development.

But remember Social Media is only a part of your marketing plane.  Interactive reaches your consumer where they play and shop and TV and Radio might be right for your marketing plan too.  But above all you have to continue to be interesting to entertain or to assist or you will never reach your consumer in any medium.  They will ignore you and you will be sad.  lol

Enjoy the interview with Jay on Social Media.

Jay Baer Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Here is a great little speech by an Ad Guy (Rory Sutherland), who makes the case for perception change over real change.  In advertising that is what we do.  We don’t reinvent the product, we don’t do the R&D, we rely on the companies to do the real product heavy lifting.  We are happy to do the whole change perception thing. Call it candy coating or a spoon full of sugar or what ever but it is just words, music mixed with (on good days) ideas that can change perception of a brand.

So marketers and CEO’s and CMO’s  taking care of how your brand is seen and perceived is the expertise of the ad guy.  Making a product that is worth changing perceptions for, is yours.

It makes what we ad guys do seem a little shallow but it is what we do. We help clients change or perpetuate perceptions.   It’s branding. If your brand is a energy drink, a car or a 15 year old boy who needs a date to prom.  It’s all the same.  Affect the perception of your brand and the consumer (or 15 year old girls) will follow.

Ad value with out changing the product?  The Shreddies “case study” in the video below is gut busting.   (TED now has an iphone app you can get to see all of your favorite videos.)

Mr. Sutherland is right “poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.”   that is what we do, or at least try to do again on good days

So take a Listen and get ready to smile then figure out how right  Mr. Sutherland is.

A social media audit is a great place to start when you want to find out what people are saying about you and who they are. If you don’t know who they are, then how or why talk back? What voice do you use? What do they want? I just got a text message from Snowbird Ski Resort in Cottonwood Canyon Utah and all it said was “Seven feet of snow in the last seven days. come on up.”

I got the new free Snowbird iphone app, created by the amazing guys at welikesmall.com , and so of course I gave them my number and name. Now they could of texted me and begged me to come up during the last 30 days of little snow and fewer customers. That is what they needed — Customers. But they waited until they had something I wanted. Snow! So instead of being pissed off that I got a text from some company I was elated.(And normally I do get pissed off)

Give them something they want and your business will grow. Try to “sell” them on their mobile device, facebook, twitter or what ever and you will fail.

Good luck.

david

Now that we’re officially into 2010, why not make a few resolutions. No, we haven’t decided to swear off Diet Coke, commit to touching our toes or at least seeing them or stop calling our ex-girlfriend and breathing heavily into the receiver. While that last one might be appropriate, especially in light of the restraining order, we’ve decided to focus our resolutions on social media. So here are the top five social media resolutions every communications professional should have in this New Year:

I will not jump blindly into social media until I have identified my audiences, goals and results.
I will not pretend to be an unbiased message board/blog reader when I comment about my company – they will find out.
I will actually dedicate the time it takes to maintain my social media tools. Contrary to popular belief, social media is not “free” – it takes hours every week, between strategy, content development and engagement with readers.
I will offer real value to my social media audience, whether in the form of insights, entertainment or deals.
I will listen to and respond quickly to my audience. Social media allows for faster engagement than any other medium. But if we’re slow to interact with them, they’ll go elsewhere.

And then we have to try to keep these resolutions past February 1st. Good Luck

Real time search – Google
This is great. Information is now so fast, there is almost no time for marketers to tell people who they are, or how good they are, or to buy their products.

The consumer (you and me) will tell each other in real time what we need to know! So you just finished your Double Double Animal Style Burger at In and Out. Tweet how great it was. Then half way around the world someone searches for In and Out and up comes your tweet just seconds later. You no longer have to even finish the burger and you can comment. Wow cool and dangerous. (OK half way around the world they can’t get an In and Out Double Double and they will be so envious.)

Marketers, you are no longer in charge of your brand, the consumer is. So you better have amazing customer service and amazing products or I might just tweet you right out of business.

Are there ways to manager this? Yes to a degree, but it takes commitment and the willingness to take a chance and maybe even fail. Wow scary. But gone are the days of a bad product and a great brand perception. It’s just not possible. But if you have a great product find someone to partner with to get out there.

Take a gander at this video off you tube.

Have fun out there.
David Yost
Creative Director