Blog de Puree » internet

Unifying Your Digital Content and Marketing Properties

paul — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:41:23 +0000

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.

Random Friday Video: Animal vs. Danimal

paul — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:30:40 +0000

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

How Digital Marketers Can Use Geotagging Applications

paul — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:06:38 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Random Friday Video: Perpetuum Jazzile Sings Toto’s Africa

paul — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:58:05 +0000

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Random Friday Video: Star Wars Geek

paul — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:28:56 +0000

A classic internet meme. Gotta love it. This Star Wars kid with his make-believe light saber just never gets old.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Look at WordPress 3.0

paul — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:32:26 +0000

The second beta of WordPress 3.0 is ready and the official release for public consumption is not far off. There has also been a lot of buzz about some of the new features and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them on Blog de Puree, a WordPress blog.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s got bloggers and content management system (CMS) folks amped up:

Custom Post Types

At this point, WordPress has two default types of content, posts and pages. (You can read posts on this blog and you can view extra pages through the navigation bar at the top of the page. Other themes may have different link placement.) In version 3.0, you can create custom post types with their own attributes for things like press pages, client testimonials, portfolio display, podcasts, video libraries, you name it. WordPress users are not forced into jury rigging posts or pages to fit their needs.

Menu Management

WordPress 3.0 takes control over navigation menus to a whole new level. Using the drag and drop user interface, you can create menus with internal links, external links, category or tag pages, or whatever you choose. Then you can use and manage these menus as a widget in the link management screen.

Custom Taxonomies

The ability to create taxonomies enhances WordPress’ standing as a true CMS. By default, you have the ability to create categories and tags within your site, but now you can add additional layers of meta data, and even make them hierarchical. For example, on this blog, there are over-arching subject categories for each post and more specific tags. Each of these allows readers and search engines to find topics of interest more easily. With version 3.0, I could choose to create another taxonomy for rowing and label posts with names such as sculling, sweeps, coaching, coxswainship, etc. and provide deeper layers of categorization and searchability. I’ve worked on websites with single-layer taxonomies as well as websites with multi-relational and hierarchical taxonomies, and this feature excites the web geek in me.

Multi-site

WordPress 3.0 now allows the management of multiple websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains). The former WordPress multi-user tool has been integrated into the newest version. An average blogger will probably not need this feature because you need to know a bit of code and how to configure server settings, however, for those who run blogging networks, news sites or companies with many employees with branded blogs, this feature is likely to raise an eyebrow or two.

Shortlinks

As Twitter and Facebook become more important, the need to shorten your URLs also becomes more important. With the wp.me URL shortener, you don’t have to rely on other URL shorteners such as TinyURL or bit.ly and can keep your branding intact. That’s right, you can shorten your URL and keep your own domain name. The WordPress blog has more on that feature.

Author Templates

Now everyone gets personal branding! Despite how you feel about personal branding (and I love Doc Searls’ insights here), you can create individual author templates, which are great for multi-author blogs such as this one or if you want to apply different styles or layouts to author pages.

Select Username and Password During WordPress Instillation

Anyone installing a new WordPress blog before 3.0 had their master account default to “admin” as the user name and a password was auto-generated. Now you can create your own user name during install and provide a little more security.

Other New Stuff

If you’re interested in the entire list of new features, upgrades and changes, check out the Codex page for WordPress 3.0.

Viral Heat and Performable: Two New Online Marketing Tools to Check Out

paul — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:08:51 +0000

I’ve been digging into some SaaS online marking tools and came across two new apps that digital marketers should take some time to check out. From getting valuable metrics on the ROI of your social marketing efforts to optimizing our online marketing tools, Viralheat and Performable look like they offer some great features.

Viralheat

Viralheat seems to be a few months old, judging by the history of their “In the press” section. It is a social measurement software as a service platform that provides social marketers and social networking types with an in-depth way to slice and dice information from Facebook, Twitter, “the realtime web,” and viral video. (And I suspect they’ll be adding more sites in the future.) One can then track, react and optimize social campaigns and audience engagement.

Poking around the site reveals a clean and easy-to-use user interface, as well as offering important geolocation data for global brands and an API to embed key statistical information into applications and internal websites for the movers and shakers at your company.

Notably, Viralheat has been instrumental in the helping to decide the outcome of the geolocation war between the two social-geo giants Foursquare and Gowalla after the recent South by Southwest conference.

For marketers grappling with analyzing the right social data, this primer post about ‘Making Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data‘ by Viralheat CEO and founder Raj Kadam on Mashable offers a great starting point.

Performable

Performable is a new product that’s in a closed beta mode. It offers analytics that help to optimize important online marketing tools such as landing pages, lead acquisition forms, newsletter sign up pages, targeted videos and contact forms.

At this point, the information at Performable.com is rather sparse. However, the potential is huge. I’ve been in countless meetings with UI designers, editorial teams, marketing and sales teams, as well as developers, trying to figure out how best to create a landing page, lead acquisition form or newsletter page. Each stakeholder has a different perspective and level of understanding. I would leave frustrated as these pages were diluted into watery mud puddles that proved to be ineffective in the end.

With Performable, one can: A. Easily create numerous variations based on stakeholder input without having to worry about design and development time and B. Easily gain insight from measurable real-time usage statistics. That’s a double win in my book.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any quick data on results or customer testimonials, but this looks like a good group to keep an eye on.

Pixar Goes Viral with Toy Story 3

paul — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:43:28 +0000

Sure, I’m only helping Pixar‘s viral marketing campaign here, but I wanted to point out the great use of word-of-mouth and the Internet.

Coming out on June 18, Toy Story 3 takes viewers through new a new adventure with Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the gang as Andy gets ready to go to college. And Pixar is creating quite a product awareness buzz through YouTube with a bunch of retro videos, most notably the one for Lots-o’-Huggin Bear, one of the new characters in the Toy Story franchise.

Check out the official movie trailer for a few chuckles as well.

Back to the viral video campaign, they’re deliciously 80′s with grainy imaging and a tracking blur on the bottom of the screen. The folks at Pixar created a YouTube channel, MrCrazycommercials, chock full of similar, but real, spots to complete the fun.

Birds of Britain: A video spoof

paul — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:50:07 +0000

Here’s an amusing spoof of a 1970s birds documentary, taken from the “Look Around You” series, a parody of the old British school science programs.

(Thanks to the Birdchick blog for pointing this one out.)

Surfing Census to Study Surfing Habits

paul — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:07:30 +0000

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported that Surf-first.org was launched by “Surfing Magazine journalist Matt Walker in association with the Surfrider Foundation” in order to get a scientific and all-encompassing picture of “who surfers are; where they come from; what they do for work; how, when and where they surf; and where they spend their money in relation to their surfing habits.”

The study will help surfers use the same demographic and analytic information that other powerful lobby groups use when facing political and environmental issues. And why shouldn’t surfers have that ammo as well?

Surfing is not a “beach bum” sport for a minor segent of society with no real direction. The surfing community holds local, regional, national and global competitions. Surfers hold productive jobs in all levels of society. The Surfrider Foundation has made huge strides with its environmental mission. Not to mention, we have a far more unique perspective when it comes to environmental issues. (I haven’t surfed in years, but still consider myself a surfer)

I strongly urge active and inactive surfers to take the survey at Surf-first.org. The information is kept anonymous and it will help strengthen the collective voice of the surfing community.