Interesting article from the New York Times about how increased advertising spending on blogs, Facebook and Twitter has caused the FTC to require that endorsers disclose payments in cash or in kind from companies whose products they endorse. This demonstrates how important these "testing grounds" for advertising are becoming. In 2007 spending on consumer-generated and social media sites reached $1.01 billion. Stay informed on the latest news by keeping in touch with birdsong gregory advertising, Charlotte, NC
Terry Tate: Office Linebacker was a series of short comedy TV commercials created by Reebok featuring Lester Speight as "Terrible" Terry Tate, a fictitious American Football linebacker who "gives out the pain" to those in the office failling to follow the rules.
Originally Reebok produced 6 episodes between August to December 2002, and this advertising campaign was one of the most successful of those in the history of the Super Bowl halftime shows.
Memorable catch phrases include:
"The pain train's comin!"
"You kill the joe, you make some mo!'"
"You can't cut the cheese wherever you please!"
"Cu'z when its game time, it's pain time!"
"Don't bring that weak ass stuff up in this humpty-bumpty!"
Though successful in attracting viewers and attention, the ads ability to increase recognition of the Reebok brand has been questioned, with only 55% of respondents on an on-line poll indicating they realized the ad was affiliated with the company. However, despite being aired only once on national television, the short was downloaded more than seven million times from Reebok's website.
The branding power of indirect social media, anyone?
For a Charlotte, NC branding agency, we like think we're wide open when it comes to using viral craziness to promote a product, service, or good cause.
Remember the guy who said he’d get a tattoo if 25,000 people joined his Facebook group? Or the lady Well at least that was entertaining (and novel) for the time. Now, however, people are starting to plumb the depths of bad taste and internet-fueled excess. Yes, a man is offering to name his son Batman if he can get 500,000 people make him their Facebook friend.
There are currently about 486,000 fans, so chances are he’ll have reached his goal by now. This questionable parent is also encouraging fans to give him their e-mail addresses so that he can e-mail him the birth certificate once his son is born.
Sounds to me like the “media” company behind the whole thing just wants 500,000 e-mail addresses.
A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
It's a new form of spontaneous group performance art, but it’s easy to see how this type of viral event could be used to promote a brand or marketing event (the famous T-Mobile Liverpool Street Station flash mob in London)
If you don't get it, please call our Charlotte ad agency and ask to speak to Jim.
I had the opportunity to attend Charlotte’s first Social Fresh conference. birdsong gregory was one of several Charlotte advertising agencies who gathered with corporations large and small to hear practitioners in the field of social media share success stories and offer advice for companies who want to utilize social media to contribute to their bottom lines. The biggest takeaway? Having a thoughtful and calculated strategy is the most important indicator of success. What’s your plan for social media? How does it fit into your larger marketing and advertising strategy? Want to tackle it together? Give me a call at 704-332-2299 and let’s talk.
Here at birdsong gregory, our boutique Charlotte ad agency, we specialize in the lost art of simplification and clarity. So as the world's obsession with social media deepens, we've taken it upon ourselves to translate this exciting and complex new landscape into a client-friendly version that doesn't raise more questions than it answers. Here you go . . .
Social media is as simple as its component parts – social interaction meets media – the sites, events, communities and resources that enable people to share with each other, collaborate, communicate and reinvent.
Social media marketing is harnessing that media to drive conversation, build awareness, and spark word of mouth around a brand, individual or particular subject matter.
The big take away? If you company is headquartered in Charlotte, social media can deliver a global audience.
Want to find birdsong gregory on the web? Search for Advertising Agency Charlotte, Branding Agency Charlotte, Charlotte Graphic Design or even Charlotte Social Media. These are just a few of the keyword phrases we try to optimize against because we recognize when prospective clients hit Google to research potential agency partners, it's what they'll be searching for. The more competitive or broad the phrase, the more difficult it is to win. For instance North Caroilina Advertising Agencies is one we continue to pursue, but it's a long haul.
Are you on page one for your company's keywords? If not, give Jim Cusson a call at 704-332-2299 or visit our site at www.birdsonggregory.com
Though recent high-profile media coverage suggests that a large percentage of the US population participates in online social networking and microblogging, more than half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites – MySpace and Facebook – according to a recent Harris Poll from Harris Interactive. This gives a Charlotte marketing agency or a Charlotte ad agency something to consider.
The survey finds that just under half (48%) of US adults have either a MySpace or Facebook account, and that only 16% update their page at least once a day. Usage statistics are much lower for Twitter, with only 5% of Americans saying they currently use it, Harris said. And as expected, Harris reports that there are substantial differences in who is and who isn’t using these selected social networking sites:
Three-fourths of those ages 18-34 (74%) have a Facebook or MySpace account, but this quickly drops off the older people get. Just one-quarter (24%) of those ages 55+ have an account.
Tweeting is also slightly more prevalent among the young, but not by much; only 8% of 18-34-year-olds use Twitter, while 7% of those ages 35-44 use it, 4% of those ages 45-54 and only 1% of those ages 55+ use it.
While men and women use Twitter at the same levels (5% each), women are more likely to have a Facebook or MySpace account (52% vs. 45%).
There is an educational difference in usage of MySpace and Facebook. Two in five people with a high school degree or less (40%) have a Facebook or MySpace account, compared with 55% of those with some college and 52% of those with at least a college degree.
To learn more about how our Charlotte advertising and marketing agency can help you create a measurable, unified online brand, please visit birdsong gregory or contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299.
At least that's what the US Marine Corp thinks. They issued an order recently that bans social media sites including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace on its network. The ban, which will last a year, essentially rules out use of all public social networks by Marines, unless a mission-critical need exists.
According to the order, "These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries. The very nature of [social networks] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage."
Here at birdsong gregory, our full-service Charlotte marketing agency isn't worried about the danger of social networking or our clients. Whether doing B2B marketing or building a consumer brand, companies of any size and in any industry can turn the power (and affordability) of connecting with the right audience into a true competitive advantage – especially in the battle for market share.
To learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit birdsong gregory online, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte
We had been hearing rumors in the Charlotte social media circles for a while, and now it’s here – an upated Twitter homepage. It’s new, it’s very blue, and it’s all about search.
In fact, from the looks of it Twitter has decided to take the simple and straightforward front page route, all centered around search functionality Gone are any attempts to explain Twitter, or a link to the “Twitter in Plain English” video. Instead, the Twitter homepage features a big search box, along with popular topics right now, over the past day, and from this week.
The fresh new look is big departure from the previous homepage, but we’re kind of digging it here at birdsong gregory And the new focus on search makes it a lot easier to keep up with our colleagues in the NC ad agency world.
Companies such as Zappos, Dell, and JetBlue are all known as successes in harnessing the power of social media for business. However, the aforementioned businesses sell directly to consumers. How about the business that sells products to other businesses? What if you’re a company that builds inventory software or administers group benefit plans? Is Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or a company blog going to be of any use?
In a word, yes. There are plenty of companies utilizing the social web for B2B marketing purposes. To help you make sense of it all, here are a couple of tips that our Charlotte ad agency shares with our B2B clients to help them find customers, build up a reputation, and gain the upper hand on landing the big deal. Although the Charlotte social media scene is still catching up to other regions of the country, there is a lot of opportunity for area companies.
Step 1. Build a reputation of expertise
What use is a company blog if you only have 10,000 customers, rather than 10 million? While it may be true that a B2B’s blog or Twitter is not going to be followed by as many people, it doesn’t change the fact that it will affect the decisions of your customers. Say a potential customer becomes aware of your software solution, and goes to your website to find out more about you. How can you stand out from the crowd? By building a blog with your expertise in focus.
If a potential customer comes to your company’s website and sees an active blog with insightful posts on how your company’s product helps customers, reads detailed posts demonstrating your company’s knowledge, and comes across a few case studies, they’re going to be far more inclined to come to you for their needs. North Carolina Ad Agencies need to take note.
Social media provides an outlet for displaying who you and your company are. Talking about your industry in an intelligent way via Twitter and a regularly-updated blog can raise your company’s profile and brand it as a thought leader and expert in its specific business area.
37Signals, the maker of Software-as-a-service business collaboration products, is a prime example of this philosophy in action. Their blog is regularly read by thousands of people, shared among businesses, and has even opened up another revenue stream in the form of a popular job board. Social media builds reputations.
2. Research your customers
Everyone thinks of social media as a communication tool, but not enough people think of it as a research tool. With the ridiculous amount of data produced every day on social networks, blogs, and in conversations, it should be apparent that you can learn tidbits or spot major trends by tracking the social universe.
Know what your customers are saying: If you’re trying to secure a contract from a big business, then they are probably talking to their customers via Twitter, Facebook, and more. Learn what they’re saying to their customers and read the blogs of decision makers to learn what they value and how they think.
Know what your customers’ customers are saying: Your customers don’t care about you – they care about their customers and their bottom line. If you can find behavior patterns in their customers that your product can address, your pitch will resonate more. Driving the point that their current solution doesn’t work, and then proving that with social chatter is even better.
Step 3. Ramp up your networking If you are competing with another company to land a big deal, it always helps to have connections and friendships within the company you’re trying to woo. You should always be networking, because you never know when a contact can become your advocate or even the decision-maker. And that’s where social media can help.
There are a lot of things you can do to get started on the networking front. They key, though, is that you have to reach out. Otherwise, how will people know to listen? While there are literally hundreds of ways to network with potential partners, vendors, clients, businesses, customers, and decision-makers, the truth is it doesn’t matter which tool you use as long as it is one that the other person values. LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo, etc. are always great places to start, but if you can network with them on niche social sites, you’ll stand out just a bit more.
Step 4. Learn from others In the end, you want to come out sharper, more knowledgeable, and better prepared than your competitors. It doesn’t matter if you have 60 or 600,000 customers, and it does not matter whether or not you sell to general consumers or Fortune 500 companies. Almost everyone is using or tracking social media and it provides you a prime opportunity to make you and your business a leader rather than a follower.
- Seek out blogs and publications in your industry and subscribe via RSS
- Network with relevant experts, including those who may only be partially related
- Follow the insights of business leaders on Twitter
- Connect with commenters on your own blog
- Make yourself very easy to find on the web – if people search for your name or your business, you should be at the top of Google’s results. Building a blog, using a Twitter, and creating a decent corporate website always helps
- Keep an open mind
In closing, don’t underestimate how much information is on the web. It’s stunning what you can learn just by reaching out. If you and your business have a strong social presence, it’s simply easier for potential partners, customers, employers, and businesses to find you. So when it comes to B2B marketing, Charlotte needs to get ready!
If you read websites about food, NYC or general wackiness, there's a good chance you've recently run into Scanwiches—a Tumblr with nothing but flatbed scans of bisected deliciousness. It's a fun, creative concept and I can envision how a site like this could anchor the social media marketing strategy for a Charlotte, NC sandwich shop.
At the same time, since most Charlotte graphic design studios have a scanner on the premise, you have to wonder if our sandwich landscape is fertile enough to support a project like this. Probably not.
Now that social media tools have become more mainstream, there have been some interesting developments in this years Tour de France that a Charlotte marketing agency like ours has taken note of (besides Lance Armstrong twittering from inside the race).
If you've ever been a fan of these races, it's pretty common that fans cheer up the participants writing messages on the floor. The NIKE Chalkbot follows the same principle and lets you send your 40 characters message to be drawn on the road by a machine.
To learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit birdsong gregory online, contact me at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Facebook Pages, which let people become “fans” of their favorite brands, people, and places – have become an important piece of the social media strategy for many companies. But how do you measure how well the effort is performing? Raw number of fans is one way, but more important than that are the actual growth rates your Facebook Page is showing.
All Facebook, the blog that covers all things Facebook, has launched a neat tool for doing just that, allowing you to search and sort Facebook pages first by category (consumer product, politician, athlete, etc.), and then either by total number of fans, daily growth rate, or weekly growth rate. The results are pretty interesting, and something you can’t find on Facebook.
To learn more about how our Charlotte advertising and marketing agency can help you create a measurable, unified online brand, please visit birdsong gregory or contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299.
Here at birdsong gregory, our Charlotte NC ad agency has done a lot of conventional advertising and marketing for clients over the years, and we’ve provided the same model that global agencies provide to Fortune 100 brands, i.e., a company has a new product or new message it wants to sell, and so it pays an ad agency to come up with creative ways to reduce complex ideas and brand ideals into a short, single, overarching message.
Think “We bring good things to life” or “Just do it.”
Now, of course, it’s getting harder and harder to grow market share through yesterday’s advertising and marketing strategy. Charlotte, NC companies are increasingly looking to connect with consumers online in deeper, more authentic ways than a few blinking banner ads. But going online and talking about oneself can be risky – not to mention difficult.
Even in the digital age from a brand and marketing perspective many companies (and many Charlotte graphic design firms) are used to and most comfortable with the messaging and branding tactics of broadcast.
But online brand representation is not really an exercise in message reduction; interesting complicated thoughts don’t need to be condensed into a singular message. Brands now have to tell stories and plan activities along parallel pathways. They might even need to tell different stories at the same time and have their audiences filter them out, trusting that they’ll find what they like and ignore what they don’t like.
Let’s use Nike and Blendtec as examples of two extremes of online brands. Nike is a huge company with a lot of products. Its marketing-led brand image is a big part of the value of their products, so they need to do innovative online marketing. There are many brands operating like this, e.g., fashion, car companies, spirits, where marketing is a key component of the brand value.
At the other extreme is Blendtec. You would never have considered buying its $600 industrial blender for your home until you saw a charming guy in a white lab coat asking you, “Will it blend?” This is the more significant extreme: a brand that probably didn’t do any significant marketing until the Internet showed up. Then someone somewhere realized that there is a low-cost medium where you can just be funny or clever and gain a huge audience. Blendtec used the Internet to transform itself from a B2B to a B2C company in barely a year.
What we’re seeing here in Charlotte, however, are thousands of small to middle market companies that have a static website but are slowly waking up to the fact that the Web 2.0 has become much more than a place to park your information and hope potential customers stumble across it somehow. You have to be active for anyone to notice. You have to tell rich stories with a believable, informed, friendly voice. You have to have to take the time to build a conversation with the market – not just throw clever slogans at it. And above all, you have to begin building an effective, believable online brand sooner rather than later. The Internet isn’t going away, and companies that figure out to use content-rich social media to deepen consumer relationships will gain a whole host of cost-effective benefits. If you’d like to know more, please visit birdsong gregory online or give Jim Cusson a call at 704-332-2299.
What is cause marketing? It’s when brands tap into do-gooder impulses to disseminate a marketing message, and if you work at a Charlotte ad agency, please take note of this socially beneficial way to help your clients get attention.
The retailer Target is a good example of cause marketing. The retailer is unusual in that it dedicates five percent of its income to charity. It’s also no stranger to social marketing, having more than 260,000 fans on Facebook.
Last week, it brought the two together by kicking off “Bullseye Gives,” a campaign that invites users to choose from a list of 10 charities to which Target will donate $3 million. The social twist: After voting for a charity, users are invited to broadcast their selection to their Facebook friends via their news feeds, the running summary of updates that is central to the Facebook experience. In less than a week, Target tallied 40,000 votes, which translated into tens of thousands of peer-to-peer impressions.
The effort is one of several undertaken by companies recently that use charities to give people a reason to share brand messages. In the social world, the central front for brands is what’s been called “the stream,” the real-time feed of updates, links and bits of content that has become the defining characteristic of Facebook and Twitter. Entry to the stream is coveted by brands desperate for the word-of-mouth appeal that comes close to a personal recommendation to friends.
What does this mean for B2C and B2B marketing in Charlotte? When you do something good, it used to be that you had to buy a large quantity of media to tell people or do a lot of traditional PR. Now, the potential is for people to tell each other that you do good.
And for some brands, particularly those in low-consideration categories like consumer goods, charities can become a cheap way to get access to the megaphones everyone has in social media. Take Colgate. It created a Facebook application called Smiles that languished for months, with just a few hundred people sharing it. Then it hooked up with SocialVibe to recast the tool to tap into the do-good vibe. The brand offered charitable donations each time users shared Smiles. The result: The widget was shared 500,000 times in five weeks.
At birdsong gregory, we understand that a brand’s online universe extends far beyond a corporate or product website. By creating a digital platform that incorporates mail, search, mobile, social networks, online media tactics and more, we help our clients create memorable online experiences and build long-term customer relationships. And to ensure your brand aligns with online customer touchpoints, we thoroughly research and understand consumer attitudes.
Digital strategies can quickly lose focus if not properly executed. To that end, we make sure a client’s digital assets are properly architected and supported by flexible content-management systems. We also study clients’ web metrics to optimize performance of all online marketing and branding initiatives.
Finally, while digital media provide the most effective channels to target and engage customers, offline media still plays an important role. So our media-agnostic approach to marketing seamlessly integrates digital strategies with offline media to deliver the right message to the right customers at the right time.
To learn more about the online and offline branding, marketing, and advertising services our agency offers, please visit the birdsong gregory website, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Social media marketing has officially become a business. Many in the industry would argue that it’s been a business for years, but until recently it has been a little hush-hush. If you were to count the number of people claiming to be social media gurus, experts, marketers, or strategists a year ago, it would have probably been in the hundreds.
Today, it’s in the tens of thousands, including Charlotte ad agencies and marketing groups.
So if your company is considering moving a few marketing dollars online (where you get a lot more bang for your marketing buck), you need to decide whether to do it yourself, hire someone to do it in-house, or outsource it to a branding agency that can create and execute an effective social media marketing strategy.
Rather than go into a long description of each option, here is a simple “pros and cons” analysis. And here’s a disclaimer, as a member of a Charlotte branding and marketing agency, I am biased towards outsourcing. Our company is scalable to the point that we can handle any client’s online marketing needs however basic or complex. However, this post is intended to be informative – not a sales pitch – so here are some points to consider:
Option 1: Hire Someone to Work Exclusively for Your Company
PROS
Direct control over the messages, branding, and promotions
Dedication – an employee with one company in mind will be more interested in the success of that company than a social media firm with many clients
An ability to keep a finger on the pulse of employees themselves and turn company anecdotes and internal debate into viral content
CONS
Expense to search for, hire, train, and pay a full-time employee
Sick days? Vacations? Accidents? Resignation?
Lack of expertise – while there are exceptions, those who are good enough to truly understand and utilize the power of social media marketing are not going to take a “job” when they know they can make more money as part of a team working with multiple companies and consolidating the efforts whenever appropriate.
In the viral marketing aspect of social media, one person is not able to create the level or volume of branded online marketing content that an experienced branding and marketing agency can
Option 2: Hire an Agency That Does Social Media Marketing
PROS
Leaving it to the experts – a few social media strategy firms really know what they’re doing. They’ve accumulated the resources, accounts, profiles and contacts to take campaigns to the top, to properly build company-related social media assets, and to get the buzz heading in the right direction.
Cost – It’s normally less expensive to hire a firm to do social media marketing compared to hiring an individual or team to work exclusively for a company.
Set goals and monitor result – for most companies, the convenience of being able to set the direction, sit back, and wait for results is extremely appealing.
Changing landscape – social media sites change their procedures regularly. What works today to get a front page story on Digg or massive “retweets” on Twitter may not work tomorrow. A company who is deeply embedded, who breaths social media every day, can be a tremendous benefit.
CONS
There are thousands of companies and individuals offering social media marketing services who can’t spell “Digg” or “Flickr”.
Trying to distinguish between the handful of talented, results-focused firms and the thousands of ad agencies that have simply added the words “social media marketing” to their list of services.
Option 3: Do It Yourself of Add it to the Workload of a Current Employee
PROS
Cheap – all it takes is time
CONS
Cheap – all it takes is time, a LOT of time.
Lack of experience – there are guides, ebooks, and blogs on how to implement proper social media strategies. Some work – most don’t.
Poor execution – having a poorly run social media strategy is worse than not having one at all.
Regardless of what you choose, try to stay flexible. It’s important to know when something isn’t working as well as it should be.
To learn more about the branding, marketing, advertising, and design services our agency offers, please visit birdsong gregory online, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Here at birdsong gregory, our Charlotte branding and advertising agency always counsels clients about the effective use of social media marketing, and we recommend they first speak to their target audience and figure out what messaging (and channel) would appeal to them.
I’m not sure if the manufacturer of Motrin followed our marketing advice, but judging by the enormous backlash the company faced in the fall of 2008 over it’s new Motrin “Mom-Alogue” video, I suspect they didn’t speak to a single mother (at least, they didn’t speak to any that use Twitter and baby slings). Creative Charlotte please take note.
Within hours of pushing this video out into the global social media stream, indignant "Momma Bloggers" began to punish the Motrin brand with vituperative tweats. Apparently, women still enjoy carrying their babies monkey-style, and resented Motrin's implication that offspring was a painful burden to bear.
What can the rest of us learn from this? Never assume you know your target audience. Never assume that just because you’ve created something “viral” that the sentiment will always be positive. And, always build your social media campaign with some input from those who represent ALL your target audience. As more North Carolina advertising agencies began to offer social media marketing services, there will be the increased danger of viral content going bad . . . so please think before you publish.
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