Blog de Puree

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Thinking about the myriad of Internet tools available to digital marketers, brand managers, content publishers and community professionals is enough to make many professionals want to hide under their desk and quiver in fear. I see weekly requests for advice and ‘what tools are out there for…” questions through my social and professional circles, and there’s no doubt that managing all these assets is a daunting task.

Thankfully, there is a strategy that digital professionals can use to wrangle all the madness: Unification.

With more than one audience to contend with it’s imperative that you go where your fans, followers and users are. There’s the corporate website, company blog (or blogs), Facbook and Linkedin pages, Twitter account, YouTube channel, Foursquare presence, the list goes on. The hazard is that it can also dilute your brand and overextend your resources. This is where unification comes in.

Associate Editor Jennifer Van Grove, from Mashable, has a great article on managing company brands on the Web and touches on unification as one of her five main tips. She points out a great use case, Director of Interactive Marketing for the Chicago Bulls, Jeremy Thum. Jeremy and the Chicago Bulls Interactive Marketing Department is redesigning Bulls.com and focusing on pulling all of its online initiatives together with BullsConnect to provide a consistent brand experience across all fronts.

BullsConnect creates

a singular login and commenting experience across their online properties. In the future, they’ll be incentivizing fan activity with a Chicago Bulls points-based loyalty system to draw attention to this unification initiative. Moving forward the team will also work to bring a “Lite” version of BullsTV to their Facebook Page, as well as use it to spruce up their “dormant YouTube channel.

Thum explains that they have and will continue to re-build or build digital marketing components that are unified while still allowing unique opportunities to engage fans on the Web.

David Churbuck, the VP of Global Marketing at Lenovo also has interesting thoughts on this topic, though he refers to it as “recentralization” and focuses on digital marketing.

He describes how, in 2005 and subsequent years, IDG merged customer databases with the creation of IDG Connect. This database and lead generation consolidation assisted with providing a unified customer experience.

I had the opportunity to work on part of the IDGConnect project through the redevelopment and launch of CXO Media’s (part of the IDG family) e-newsletter program. Two of the challenges we had to overcome were sharing and combining CXO’s subscriber database with the other business units and implementing an email service provider (ESP) solution that allowed subscribers from all IDG properties to have one account management experience. My team led the way by choosing and testing a powerful ESP (Lyris) that was customizable and easy enough to distribute and teach to the other units.

Churbuck also touches on the challenges of managing far-flung social networking assets. He aptly points out:

Brands are falling over themselves to establish a presence on the highest populated social networks and sharing services. First: you can’t be everywhere, second, this is where the real chaos is occurring.

This has presented a real challenge for content and marketing teams worldwide. Global brands especially face a tough road. As Churbuck shares, “digital brands don’t have national boundaries.”

Why try to unify? You can’t control what others do and where they do it, but you can at least work toward ensuring a consistent message and experience.

Tags: brand experience, content management, digital marketing, marketing, social networking

Find out what happened when the band OK Go encountered Animal from the Muppets at the Webby Awards. Honestly, nobody can stare down Animal.

Tags: muppets

I haven’t been helping birds or wildlife in the Gulf region, but I did my small share for birds yesterday by saving a Black-capped Chickadee from the clutches of the nasty cat that lives across the street.

At about 6:30 a.m., I looked out my office window and noticed the neighbor’s black and white cat batting something around in the backyard. Thinking it had a House Sparrow, I wasn’t too concerned. (They are an invasive, non-native bird species and not federally protected) But on closer inspection from the kitchen door downstairs, I saw what looked like a gray bird with a black head.

The cat dashed when I opened the door and there on the ground was a pitiful looking Chickadee, missing some tail feathers, some of it’s belly skin showing and it was face down, breathing heavily. It was still alive! I gently scooped it up in my hands and noticed that its eyes were still open and alert. The poor little critter was pretty well mauled and traumatized.

Not knowing what to do with it at first, I put him in the seed tray on the bird feeder pole. Then I ran inside and got a small box and lined it with soft rags at the bottom. I also dropped in a handful of black oil sunflower seeds from the bird seed bucket and ran back outside to get the bird. The little critter was still laying on the tray and when I tried to lift it up again, it was clutching at the grate with its toenails. Gently, I pulled his toenails out, cupped it in my hand and lay it into the box.

The injured Black-capped Chickadee resting on soft rags after being saved from the neighbor's cat. (Photo by Randye Kerstein/Kerstein Creative)

I thought about bringing it in the house, but there at the screen door was our cat, Bouche, eye-balling the activity with much curiosity. (Bouche is an indoor cat and only watches birds for sport) Inside was definitely not an option. So, I placed the box on the back porch between our grill and the wall of the house, where it was protected from the misting rain.

A call to the local animal control was a no-go because they don’t take in injured wild animals. In fact, it’s illegal to do so. A call to the local Audubon Society also proved fruitless and I left a message. But a quick search online yielded that I was right on track: Box, soft towels or rags, some food and a quiet spot for the animal to recover.

Sure enough, within about 20 minutes, the little bird was munching on sunflower seeds and looked a little better. Fifteen minutes after that, it was fluttering its wings and preening. Randye got a good photo or two at that point. Ten minutes later, it was gone leaving sunflower seed shells and a poop.

The Chickadee starts to recover and munches on sunflower seeds. Note the seed in its mouth. (Photo by Randye Kerstein/Kerstein Creative)

Before I went to work, I checked outside one last time to make sure it wasn’t face down in the dirt beside our back deck and saw it sitting on the middle of the chain link fence on the side yard staring at me. As if to show me it was OK, the Chickadee fluttered up one chain rung, then another. Then it flew to the top of the fence, and subsequently to a high branch in our neighbor’s Japanese Maple tree.

The little Chickadee was saved and that was a great way to start the day.

Tags: bird watching, black-capped chickadee

When things get too awful and everything has gone to hell in a hand basket, all you can do is laugh.

When you watch this, note the reference to Kevin Costner, who will apparently test his water cleaning technology on the spill. It’s usually laughable when Hollywood gets political, but I sure do hope Kevin can pull it off.

Tags: environment, kevin costner, oil, video

All animals need good dental work, don’t you think?

I know people love to get together to dance. And flash mobs are a relatively new and interesting phenomenon. But this. Flash mob dancing? I love it!

A random flash mob does Do Re Mi (from The Sound of Music) in the Central Station of Antwerp, Belgium.

Tags: dancing, flash mob

There’s a pleasant House Finch couple that have become regulars at our backyard feeders. They can be seen in the mornings and evenings eating sunflower seed.

A male and female House Finch. (Photo by Will Elder, NPS via nps.gov)

I started noticing the male finch about three weeks ago. Since then, he and his mate have been visiting almost daily.

Year-round residents, the House Finch is a small-bodied, convivial bird that flies in from high perches in surrounding trees to sit and eat seeds on our feeders. The House Finch is a Western United States and Mexican finch and not native, however, it is not invasive like House Sparrows or European Starlings. According to AllAboutBirds.org:

In 1940 a small number of finches were turned loose on Long Island, New York, after failed attempts to sell them as cage birds (“Hollywood finches”). They quickly started breeding and spread across almost all of the eastern United States and southern Canada within the next 50 years.

The House Finch is similar to the Purple Finch, which we also see from time to time. The key to telling them apart is that the House Finch is a brighter red, while the Purple Finch has a darker, richer purple/red coloration that covers more of the chest, belly, wings and back.

The Purple Finch. Note the darker red hues and that are prevalent on a larger portion of the bird's body. (Photo by Brandon Green via AllAboutBirds.com)

Tags: bird watching, house finch, purple finch

I came across a Mashable.com article for journalists last week that I thought would be valuable for online marketing and community professionals as well. 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare pointed out some key elements that news writers can engage their audience and source valuable information. And those use-cases can also be extremely valuable for digital marketing teams.

For those not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a geo-tagging application for online and mobile users that tells your friends know where you are and vice versa. It also provides you with online schwag such as points, badges and even coupons for use at local businesses. It’s also not the only geo-tagging game in town and anyone interested should check out Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Where and Hot Potato.

Like journalists, marketing professionals often need to target communities and get valuable information. In today’s social environment, where interacting with one’s audience is a key element, these geo-tagging apps have the potential for greatness. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the valuable ways to use them:

1. Find targeted contacts. With geo-tagging applications, you can attach real people to actual places. Find people who frequent certain types of establishments. Reach out and chat. Find out what type of people are going where. There’s valuable information here.
2. Get tips on local business, customers and competitors. Users leave lots of tips regarding local businesses and venues which provide insight that a professional analyst may not be privy to. Knowing how people view a restaurant chain or coffee shop can be gold for marketing teams.
3. Learn about people you’re profiling. You can learn a lot about people based on where they go and things they say. Make more friends on apps such as Foursquare and you can follow their activity, as well as begin to understand their habits. Find out where folks are going and you can “accidentally” show up to observe activity. Yeh, it’s essentially like cyber-stalking, but if you have a relationship with them, it’s not too creepy.
4. Discover and monitor trends. This is easy with Foursquare and other apps. Find out where people are suddenly going and why. Find out if a local joint that sells competing products is becoming popular and why. More gold here.
5. Publish and distribute content. As a member of a community, there has to be some give with the take—one of the golden rules of digital marketing—and it pays to link to places you go, as well as share your tips. An online marketer would be wise to share tips and information about places you like, in addition to just peddling your product or service.
6. Crowdsource real-time information and reward readers with badges, etc. People just love online schwag and badges. It’s like Internet coolness merit badges. You need to find out what people think about your client’s juice stores or a local event? Create a badge, ask folks to check out and offer them incentives with badges and coupons. Forget surveys, this is uber-valuable marketing information. You can also offer different badges and incentives for different levels of participation.

Geo-tagging applications now provide digital marketers a fast, effective way to gather market information about clients, businesses, services and the people who rely on them. Tools such as this could be a massive game-changer for marketing budgets and gathering valuable metrics. I believe that any marketing team or service with their salt should be looking into using one of these tools.

And be sure to read this hard-hitting article about social networking tools and how we cover them.

Tags: crowdsourcing, foursquare, geotagging, gowalla, marketing, Online marketing

Remember when you were in the chorus or glee club? Well, some of you, anyway.

A colleague of mine sent a link along for Perptuum Jazzile, Slovenia’s only jazz choir. I was blown away by this vid and it gave me goose bumps. Here’s hoping you enjoy it and find yourself singing in your next shower.

You gotta check out some of the other vids by Perpetuum on YouTube, such as Stevie Wonder’s ‘As’ and Mas Que Nada. They make the kids on Glee seem like pathetic amateurs.

Tags: jazz, movies, music, singing