Fun Viral campaign - 'The Office' TV Show

When I was looking at my gmail I saw this google ad word link showed up in the top navigation area which was link to a "Dunder and Mifflin" press release . This press release was for a promotion to VP of one of their "employees". I did a double take, as I realized the name of the company was the one where the TV show, 'The Office', takes place.

For those of you who are not familiar with the TV show, 'The Office', it is about this paper supplies company named "Dunder and Mifflin", and the quirky team of people that work there.

When you clicked on the link it takes you to the press release page with the announcement of the promotion of one of the characters on the show to VP at Dunder and Mifflin. Once there you can browse through the entire "corporate" site, and even go into the company's intranet site.
With references to the cast of characters on the show through out, those familar with the show, will get a big kick out of it. One option on the intranet site is to generate your own ad you can post on your blog or website to promote Dunder and Mifflin.

Overall this is a great campaign to keep the existing viewers happy, and also a great way to bring back viewers who have stopped watching.

The "intranet site "also acts as a viewer forum and social networking about the show. They can build and personalize their own page, with favorites, post photos, design and share what their desk looks like, and more. Forum participants are challenged to accomplish different tasks each week. Everyone who has a profile on the site can compete and get ranked according to how well they did. The intranet site is highly interactive and with clear call to actions to take viral actions to promote the show and the website.

The campaign viral goals appear to be:
+ Provide an interactive personalized social forum to encourage people to keep talk about the show
+ Encourage loyal viewers to use their word of mouth to drive awareness of the show and the sites
+ Increase web traffic and time spent on site
+ Support and encourage loyalty of TV show viewership

I think this is a fun viral campaign for The Office!
Of course maybe I am biased because I really like the TV show.

Great site to check out for its viral tactics!

Print marketing - why include it in your marketing plan?

Print marketing has been around for hundreds of years. Some of the most early common examples include newspapers, in the seventeenth century, which included line or classified advertising. Now we have so many forms of advertising, but all are not equal in their effectiveness on your target audiences.

There are two main ways for you to effectively implement print marketing:

Press releases / PR
Costs : As little as $80; Can include PR agency time or your time spent writing and distributing an optimized press release
Distribution:

Paid print advertising:
Costs: Much higher than PR; On the cheap end, for a post card mailer (with a very small distribution) you may only have to put out about $300 dollars. On the average it is more likely to run in the thousands of dollars, depending on the form of collateral (can include advertisements in direct mail pieces, catalogs, print ads in magazines, newspapers and fliers, point of purchase materials in stores etc).

How print compares to other forms of marketing tools:
Longer lifespan
Print mail has the potential of a longer lifespan than a TV commercial or radio. For example, people tend to re-read their magazines and even pass them onto other people.

Clear vertical market targeting
With all the market segment specific cable TV channels (SPIKE for men, Lifetime for women) out there, you can get some level of a vertical market focus. When using print marketing, you can find even more specific vertical marketing opportunities, whether it is an industry or hobby specific magazine or direct mail piece to a carefully selected group.

There is every type of magazine, newsletter and newspaper out there you can imagine. Topics can range from: Fly Fishing, Real Estate Investments, Stock Market Investing, Food and Wine, Scrapbooking, Hawaii, Monster Trucks, Science Fiction, etc. All of these print media's have all done a lot of research on their demographics to help them sell ads, and they are all willing to share this info with you for free.

For your direct mail pieces, you can build, purchase or rent vertical specific databases made up of your target audiences. You can even do A /B testing of different pieces offering different discounts, or different layouts and messaging, to see what is most effective.

Must have in your strategic marketing plan:
All in all, it is important to make sure you include some component of print marketing in your strategic marketing plan. At the very least you should build an optimized press release which has the potential of showing up in market specific magazines and newsletters, or even online in forums and blogs. You should also evaluate closely any print advertising opportunities.

And don't forget to think outside the box. I recently saw a print ad for a high end mattress in Food and Wine, and I understand they have received quite a favorable response from that placement.

Winner for Best Microsite

I always love finding great online ad campaigns, and in my browsing the web I found this award winning mircrosite generated by an ad agency I admire a lot, Avenue A Razorfish.
This is the perfect website for the virtual holiday gift giving season. On this microsite, you click on an unopened wrap present to reveal your virtual gift. Once you see the gift you can either save it as a wallpaper, re-gift it (send it onto a friend for them to open) or pick a new one.

I am openly admitting I had a lot of fun clicking on present after present. I even found some that I forwarded onto friends because they either fit their personality perfectly or they were just hilarious.

Each present comes with some silly message, and "gifts" range from a beer stein gun (??) to a rubber ducky, action figures, and even food.

Overall a very nice online viral campaign! And if the time I spend clicking through hundreds of gifts and forwarding to my friends, also a very successful one too!

Hope you enjoy as much as I have!

A cool online jargon Dictionary for everyone

As we all know, the online environment is changing every nano-second, and so are the terms and abbreviations used on it. So how do we keep up? Try using an online jargon dictionary.
One of my favorite sites is netlingo.

Using an online dictionary will help you keep up to speed with your generation X and Y, and how they are commicating on the web, which will allow you to speak in their language in your content and messaging to them.

In the case of netlingo, they cover a wide range of areas and terms (and I have included examples of each below):

Texting Abbrevations (good for online chat or texting) -
2G2B4G -Too Good To Be Forgotten
ASLMH - Age/Sex/Location/Music/Hobbies
BTDTGTS -Been There, Done That, Got The T-shirt
GIWIST -Gee, I Wish I'd Said That

Smileys (good for online chat or texting)-

:-{ - Angry

:-.) - Cindy Crawford

%) - Confused

>:-l - Klingon


Online jargon -

Angry garden salad - Slang for a poorly designed Web site graphical user interface (GUI) with incorrect code behind it (so that if you click on one thing it launches another).

Cappuccino cowboy or cowgirl - A nickname for a person who just has to have a Starbucks coffee or other type of roadie on the way to work. It refers to men and women (cappuccino cowgirls) who live in the suburbs and commute to the city each day to work in the industry.

Siliconia -Nicknames for cities and areas with a heavy concentration of high-tech firms. "Siliconia" began as appropriations of names beginning with "Silicon" in areas outside of Silicon Valley; the names are meant to capture something unique about the area's regional character.


Online Business Terms -

Backlink (incoming link) - One of the most important and challenging factors in promoting your website is encouraging other Web sites to link to yours. The more sites that link to yours, especially if they have similar or related content, the more of an "authority" you become in the eyes of the search engines.

Chortal - Known primarily as a Chinese portal , the largest "chortal" is Sina, created by CEO Wang Zhidong

Collaborative Filtering - The process by which a software program sifts through user profiles or usage patterns and makes recommendations based on purchasing habits. For example, if you go to a Web site looking for a book on vegetarian cooking, and you click on the profile of that book, collaborative filtering technology kicks in and recommends a list of similar books....(though many see it as a cross between capitalism and big brother).

Online marketing -

1% rule - An emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online, then one will create content , ten will interact with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it (also known as lurking). Earlier metrics garnered from online community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing data due to social networking sites and blogs creates a different picture. The lesson? A website that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of ten people just pass by.

Coolhunting (aka innovation scouts) -A market research technique in which a researcher goes out into the real world to see "what's cool" among the younger generation (Generation Y). A person who knows how to unearth new ideas and spot trends before others do is known as an "innovation scout."

CPA - aka -Cost per action -An online advertising payment model in which the publisher is only paid when a user takes a desired action (such as filling out a form or making a purchase).

White Hat - "White hat" search engine optimization seeks to work with the search engines' strengths, rather than their weaknesses. By creating valid HTML code, well-written and keyword-rich content, and a carefully organized website, white hat SEO specialist seek to create the kind of site that search engines are looking for. White hat SEO is more difficult to pursue because it relies on many "soft" factors (such as high quality content, effective site organization, building strong link relationships, regular blogging, etc.).

Also on netlingo you can find terms for Net hardware, Net software, Net technology, Net programming, Net organizations and other technical terms.

So don't be surprised one day if you see in high schools and universities, kids taking online language classes instead of french or Spanish! ;-) LOL - TTYL

Links to some additional online term dictionaries you may want to also look at:
Webopedia -http://www.webopedia.com/
Internet Marketing Dictionary - http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/

Innovative marketing for tv shows focusing on Generation Y and Z

I was out on the web, searching for articles how other companies are implementing innovative marketing plans, and I googled upon this article about Cartoon Networks /POGO. They are getting ready to launching several new show and the article discussed their innovative marketing plan they are implementing to insure a successful launch.

Naturally since we are talking cartoon shows, their main target audience is some Generation Y but mostly Generation Z. Their pre and post launch efforts are being supported by on air, off air, online and trade.

Their objective: Acquiring audiences that are not currently present watching their network and creating a massive pull for them through a series of major marketing activities and events, in essence their goal is to turn their new cartoon show, ‘Ben 10’ into phenomenon.

Something I had never heard of for a cartoon show, a Green Carpet premier.

Also planned are:

+ School contact programs to build character familiarisation and create hype around the show (200,000 kids across four cities).

+ Cinema branding and advertising tie-up is on the anvil (leading multiplex chain across 8-10 cities).

+ An interactive micro site for ‘Ben 10’ was launched on October 10th, 2007 - with all marketing efforts appearing to also drive traffic to this site.

+ Video Game with 'Ben 10' theme called Savage Pursuit (POGO tie in)



Something innovative about the banner ad campaign:

On the article web page, are 3 banner ads, and all of them were for the 'Ben 10' show. It is the first time I have run into a web page, where one product, one promotion has monopolized the ad content areas. I actually think this could be a highly effective way to make a strong message about your promotion or product. Generally a lot of web pages are saturated with information and ad overload. So by locking in all the ad spaces on a single web page, definitely helps drive awareness and probably will increase your click through as well.

What do you think? Let me know?

Viral campaigns - Putting all the pieces together

Viral campaigns are great on so many levels. It is essentially, in it's truest form, a word of mouth campaign, and is potentially the cheapest, most effective marketing tool you can have.

Yes, you can hire an agency, or in Ooma's case, Ashton Kutcher, to run your viral campaign, but you can also have a very successful viral campaign for as cheap as around a thousand bucks. So even rogue entrepreneurs can take advantage of this marketing method.

So what are some of the best practices, you can use in your viral marketing campaign? I did a major search on the web to highlight some of the best practices out there.

Putting together a viral campaign, ask yourself the same questions you need to define when generating any other solid marketing plan:

Why
What is the campaign goal or goals you are trying to achieve and at the end of the campaign, how can you measure your success (ROI) If your goal is to increase awareness, then web traffic metrics should suffice, but if your goal is to increase sales make sure your are including some trackable means (surveys, coupons, sales from traffic from a specific micro site or tag). Other goals can include a customer taking a specific action, like playing a game, etc.

Who
Who are your market segment / target audiences? Are your market segments oriented on: Sex? The health of the environment? Video Games? Advice on raising children? Hip Hop? How well you know your market will determine what type of viral campaign to run.

What
What content, promotion, experience, activity or discount would be compelling enough to excite your target audience to make them care about your campaign to make it go wildly viral and forward it onto others? Some examples include: An online game or activity, coupon or exclusive discount, valuable information (ex. ebook), a free product (a song or software program), a donation to a charity, personal empowerment (save a tree)

Where
Are you focusing on a specific region? or country?

How
What strategies, tactics and communication methods should you use based on your target audience?
Your activities should include as many are appropriate to your market segment and budget allows:
1) Send out an optimized press release
2) Blog seeding - strategic placement on blogs (ideally on some highly influential blogger's sites)
and offer a range of to add badges, buttons and graphics which they can add to their blog to link to your site
3) E-mails
4) Texts
5) Post in online forums or social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
6) Radio stations
7) You Tube videos
etc.

When
Timed with a launch or other event? Expected lifespan of campaign. And if you find your viral campaign has done really well but it's effectiveness is slowing down, one option is to send out a press release announcing it's success to re-kindle the buzz

Some great sites to check out for more info:
Marketing Sherpa
Tips for Optimizing Viral Marketing Campaigns
Viral & Buzz Marketing Association

The upstream lifecycle of emails (aka why e-mails are like salmon)

The uphill battle of our e-mail lifecycles

There are so many challenges we face, as marketers in order to make a successful e-mail campaign happen. We spend a lot of time, thought, money and energy building something we deem to be a great e-mail.
Next we send it out to our database list (all opt in of course!) , which we have carefully crafted and defined in order to maximize our reach of our chosen market segments. And here is where the e-mail lifecycle starts to face it's fight for it's life.

The salmon run parallel

An e-mail lifecycle shares a lot of parallels with salmon and their mating challenges. In order to mate, a salmon's goal is to swim upstream, get past such hazards as bears and other predators, diseases and water hazards, then find a mate and consummate the relationship. E-mails must electronically also swim upstream, get past spam blockers, stand out in over packed e-mail boxes, avoid getting randomly deleted and get the customer to open the e-mail and call out a clear call to action, a solution message, or even provide some information the customer deems valuable in order to successfully accomplish its goal, the click through. Don't you just love metaphors?

Carefully crafted databases and following the rules of e-mail protocol will help you get those e-mails into the actual inbox. This is all process oriented and not very creative really. Besides just because you have managed to get the e-mail in their box does not mean that once they open it, they will click through. This is where the actual e-mail content, design and function itself is critical. I have seen e-mails that are so overwhelming that I generally delete it immediately. I have also seen poor formatting come through, which means they didn't test the e-mail to make sure it translated correctly. My favorites and the ones that seem the most successful are simple and clean, great graphics and clearly focus on no more that 3 solutions and have clear call to actions.

There are of course, exceptions to this rule. Most online media websites will list a variety of teasers to articles and products on their websites. In most cases the goals of these e-mails are to get click through and acquire customer interaction.

An award winning e-mail

Once such media e-mail that I recently found and found aesthetically pleasing considering how many ranges of topics (music types) they were trying to cover. Ideally, it would be great if Sirius Satellite Radio could clearly identify what specific music genres customer were listening to and narrow down the length of the e-mail, but overall I think it is a nice clean design and it even won an Internet ad award.

Making your website interactvive and fun for your customers

Any good online marketing program can get traffic to your site, but once they get to your website, how to you make them want to stay?

In addition to a great site design, friendly user interface, well worded product detail pages, flash demos and product/customer solution selector tools, there are more things you can do to make your website stand out amongst the rest, keep them coming back, and increase their chances of telling friends about your site.

Of course, what additional features you decide to add to your website depend on whether you are focusing on b2b or b2c, and more specifically who your target audiences are.
In this blog I want to focus more on b2c, the consumer.

Now keep in mind that the goal of adding additional features is not to turn your website into an arcade, unless of course, your target audiences are kids and teenagers. The goal I recommend focusing on is adding interactivity into your website.

These activities should:

+ Help customers learn about your product in a fun way
+ Add to the voice of an online community made up of customers and potential customers
+ Encourage return visits to your site
+ Make them want to forward your site to friends

Some of the ideas out there that seem to be effective out on the world wide web are:

Kitchy Games -
My favorite are the kitchy ones that are simple like magic 8 ball, or fortune cookies. You can customize what the responses are.

Give away virtual product virally-
Hire a developer to turn one or several of your products into virual objects that can be used in virtual worlds like SIMs or Second Life. Let these potential cusotmers download these virual products from your website for free.
Imagine if you have a cool product like designer lamps, and a 'Second Life' user, comes to your site to download a virtual version of your products to use in their virual environment as part of their decor. Then they tell all their friends. etc.

Message Boards / Community Blogs / Virtual Chat rooms -
Set up a forum for your customers or potential customers to communicate and bond. Also it is really important to allow at least some level of customization photos, wallpaper, quotes, participation ranking. The more personalization a person can do to their online environment, increases their potential for loyalty to the product and also increase the average number of return visits. Also, it would be good to create a special exclusive forum for a "black belt community" or "inner circle elite group". Like frequent flyer miles allow you to special airline club privilledges, or belonging to any other special club, once you have proved your worth, you get exclusive access to special offers. It is critical to make these people feel extra special, they are your on the street product evangelist, viral cheerleeders and most importantly they are the innovators who reach the early adopters.


You can find examples of these suggested options through out the web. If you have the technical funds or staff you can have any of these ideas customized specifically to your target audiences, however if you are on a limited budget, you can also get generic versions of most of these for free or a low cost.

Taking care of the Planet, Taking Care of Business

Green products and supplies for the office have come a long way over the last decade

It used to be that you could only purchase recycled paper products. Now there is a wide range of products and services out there that will help you get your office green, by saving green and saving the planet at the same time! Plus it doesn't hurt that it is a great excuse to send out a press release (online of course to save the trees), announcing how socially responsible your company is.

Create a feel good mindset among your employees when they realize you care about not only the global environment, but the environment of the workspace as well. Unfortunately, most workers face on a daily basis toxic paint on the wall, to poor working and dirty ventilation systems and other work toxic hazards caused by modern materials used in construction over the last decade (asbestos anyone?).

I have found a few helpful sites to help you green up:

Office Supplies:
Green Office
Green Earth Office Supplies
Greenline Paper Company and other office supplies too!

eWaste - getting rid of old electronics - desktops, notebooks, televisions etc.:
Computer Recycling for Education
HP Supplies Recycling
Or there are a lot of Charities that will take your old toner cartridges and recycle them for money and use those funds to help their cause -
For Example: Town Cats - a Northern California cat rescue - who uses the funds to take care of cats whose owners have died or who would have been killed at an Animal Shelter. They house and take care of them until they can find them permanent homes.

Recycling for the Office:
Earth 911 - Helping Business Help the Environment - Recycling Guide
Waste Online - Key office wastes and what to do with each one of them (UK Site)

Building Green:
World Resources Institute
U.S. Green Building Council

If you have any other sources for green business I should consider adding, let me know!

Article from eMarketer: Word of Mouth Marketing Best Practices

I just read a great article on eMarketer, featuring Aliza Freud, CEO of SheSpeaks.
It discusses the latest research (Feb 2007 / July 2006) on their marketing research and how word of mouth works in the online environment.

It gave statistics for male and female internet users biggest influences when deciding on a product. Interestingly, the top 3 purchasing influences for men and women were:

#1 : Recommendation of a Friend = male 92% / female 95%
This could be verbal or online- though a social networking, online forums and message boards, ect
#2 : Magazine Ads = male - 70% /female - 75%
#3 : TV Ads = male -69% / female - 74%

How they measured effectiveness of word of mouth / organic recommendations, were through looking at such factors as:
1) member self reporting
2) forwarding of e-mails or special offers from clients to member's friends
3) promo redemption
4) link click through

I always love it when they give information on average return rates, and Freud shared within this article, that the average buzz companies average 3-4 recommendations per person, but that their company has generated as much as 6 - 7 recommendations per person.

A major factor that contributes to how often recommendations are forwared are heavily based on the person's percieved value of a promotion within the marketing vehicle (ex. e-mail)

Things to consider when evaluating the value of a direct print campaign:

I love checklists - they keep me organized and I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I check something off.

And since I am sure I am not the only marketer out there that likes this sort of thing, I thought it would be fun to share my list of things I would consider when evaluating a pre-direct mail plan (and some post mortem items to consider too).

~ Your Market Segment and the most effective marketing tool to reach them
~ Size of your prospect market
~ Your Marketing budget
~ Design costs (In house or outside vendor / ad agency?)
~ Print costs
~ Database clean-up and prep costs
~ Postal rates and discounts, direct mail piece versus a corporate catalog have very different rates
~ Total program cost and what will it cost you per-piece cost before distribution
~ Response rate - for direct mail average response rates average .5 to 2% response rate
~ Conversion rate -This is taking the number of people who respond to the direct mail and who actually make a purchase
~ $$ generated per sale = your return on investment
~ Cost per sale - this helps with the post mortem and also contributes to the ROI story

How you decorate your office cube, says a lot about you

You spend over 2000+ hours in your office a year.
Let's face it, until you retire, win the lottery, run off an join a Buddhist monastery or maybe the circus, that is a long time to be staring at pre-fabricated walls. Luckily, there is something you can do about increasing the comfort level in the time spend at the office, through thoughtful decor.

There are a lot of reasons people have no decor, or very little decor in their office space.
You might have been a repeat victim of the Silicon Valley bust, and have lost your confidence in job security - usually these people, if they do have any decor, it can easily be carried out in small one box.
Another option is you are a type A neat freak, and can't stand any clutter whatsoever, as it might mess up your neat stacks or folders of projects, (listed in order of priority and alphabetically)
Or you simply have no priority or interest in making your office personalized.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have seen some cubes so decked out with decor that you can't seen the walls and their office space looks more like a Lego museum, than some place you would actually sit down and work. Or they have so many plants in their cube, you secretly wonder if they should have actually been a botanist instead.

I am more of the in between sort. I enjoy some decoration around me. They are nice visual distractions if my eyes need a break from staring at the computer screen for long periods. My favorite decor can range from whimsy or to zen. The right decor can offer a de-stress factor as well. A rubber ducky on your desk, can remind you not to take things to seriously. A mini zen sand garden can allow you to take a minute to rake a flowing peaceful design, reminding you to calm. A plant is not only is attractive, but it offers up fresh oxygen in a world of office recirculated ventilation. At eBay, they encourage all of the employees to decorate their cube based on their eBay collections - the options are endless.

You do need to put some thought into your decor, as you don't want to give your co-workers the wrong impression. One time when I was working at computer company in Sunnyvale, I noticed that one of my co-workers had a whip in her office. You can imagine what kind of message this said about them. So remember, just like the clothes you wear, and the things you say represent you, so does your cube decor (and even the lack of decor says things about you as well!).

So here are some links for you to check out to help you get ideas to decorate your cube and make it all you.


Cutsie desk toys:
Solar powered head bopping characters or dancing flowers
Japanese solar desk characters

Action Figures, Rubber Duckies, to the absolute weird
Smoking Ceramic Baby or a Corn Dog Air Freshener anyone?
McPhee.com

Office supplies with a feminine and urban flair
See Jane Work

Book with 20 ideas to transform your work cube
garden theme, ski lodge, safari, CEO and more
Take Your Office Space from Drab to Fab! By Kelley L. Moore

Your co-worker away on a two week vacation and you think their office needs a little sprucing up? Here are some hilarious ideas that other have done to help "decorate" their co-worker's cube.
http://cubejinx.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyleandkelly/sets/491220/show/
http://www.insanitech.com/wool/

Some unusual ideas for Premiums at your company sponsored event or for a Tradeshow

When you walk over to a booth at just about any trade show you get the standard, booth decor, demos running on computers, bowls of treats, brochures and other collateral, and of course some kind of premium (see my other blog post about redundant premiums).

So I thought I would look out there to see what other kinds of premiums that are out there that have an interesting twist to them. There are some very creative, crazy and weird ideas out there, but all worthwhile to consider if it helps you blue sky a great idea for a premium for your event.

Rent an Oxygen bar and offer a free massage

Advantages:
+ Get the customer to stay longer at your booth
+ Give the customer a positive experience at your booth and a free plastic massage tool
+ Be perceived as ultra hip and future tech
+ Be a positive, relaxing and fun gathering place - an oasis in the intensity of the tradeshow
+ Reach innovators, youth driven market segments, and holistic health minded
+ Make your booth stand out from the rest

Disadvantages:
- Stick tubes in your nose to receive the oxygen
- Bad association of hospital stay with oxygen to the nose, if your product is health insurance
- People have short term memories and may not remember you provided a massage and free oxygen
- May not use the plastic massage tool - ever


Give away prizes every day of event

Advantages:
+ Great lead generator
+ Great database builder
+ Maximize your marketing dollar spend
By offering a few large prizes (company product, trip, gift card, invitation to an exclusive event, etc -) , it can actually be a cheaper marketing cost than if you were to purchase thousands of t-shirts or other premiums.
_ Reduce your cost to ship, store and organize all premiums at events

Disadvantages:
- If you don't select the correct prizes for your prize giveaway, it could be a bust
- Need bandwidth and proper format to follow up on all the leads - otherwise this will be a wasted effort



Overall: For any of these premiums to work, you have to make sure it matches your target audience and doesn't conflict with your marketing goals.

If you have had any premium ideas that have been highly effective, feel free to share with me what those are!

Which giveaways, premiums to get for your company's marketing activities

Whenever I go to a trade show, or receive a premium as a gift from a company, it always speaks volumes about who the company is, what they represent and can even affect if I want to do business.

Repetitive and redundant Premiums:
In reviewing all the premiums I have received from companies over the years, they tend to fall in a very small range of types of items:
+ Office Supplies (pens, mouse pads, monitor screen cleaners, notepads, calculators, etc)
+ Clothing (Polo's, polar fleece, t-shirts, etc)
+ Bags or carriers of some sorts (backpacks, laptop carriers, book bags, etc)
+ Other - (blankets, golf tees, stress toys, mini fans that hang around your neck and other gimmicky things)

The Saturation problem:
Living in the Silicon Valley, I cannot tell you how many times I have seen company branded premiums for sale at someone's garage sale. And, admittedly, if you looked in my closet, you would see an assortment of these things in boxes (and generally not being used).

I think we all initially happily take these premiums with greedy appreciation. I think it is the hunter and gatherer in us all. The idea of getting something for free, appeals to most everyone.

But when you take it home and realize you only own two notebooks (one personal and one work) and you realize you now have a total seven laptop bags (all premium items with different corporate logos, of course), the space these items take up to store and the practicality of having a whacked ratio of bags to notebooks, then suddenly that new laptop back is something you have to donate to Goodwill, sell in a garage sale or give to a needy college student.

Is this how you want your good marketing dollar investments to end up? --I would hope not.

How can you avoid the problem:
So the best solution is to seriously think about how and what premiums you want to invest in.
The best way to do this is look at your marketing plan, your company core values and what types of venues are these going to be given away (tradeshow, customer gift, promotion etc).

Here are some key questions to ask yourself to help you further define what giveaway to select and leverage
( inspired by article from frugalmarketing.com and I have added some of my comments, and insights below as well:
1) What do you want to achieve by giving away a premium item?
Drive Brand awareness? To qualify for the premium, do they need to complete a call to action like sign up for your online newsletter (lead generation)? etc
2) Who and what size is your target audience for receiving the item?
Based on your audience what types of items might they actually desire and USE?
3) Where and how will it be distributed
Is size a consideration in how you distribute it?
4) What is your budget?
Of course any customer would love a new convertible BMW as a premium, but unless your product has a multimillion dollar price tag, you have to be realistic about what you can spend per customer, based on how many premiums you need to acquire for your marketing activities.
5) How will the item encourage a customer or potential customer to do business with you?
6) What associations could the premium have to a customer
Is it Fun, organization oriented , helpful and efficient, etc?
7) Is there a way to track the effectiveness and ROI of the premium?

But at the end of the day, the biggest result we are looking for is if it helped us maintain the satisfaction of our existing customer base, and of course, also if it helped our business developement efforts and gained new customers.

In future posts, I will try to call out some premiums that I find interesting and unusual that have the potential of being highly effective with your potential customers and existing customers. (depending on, of course, if they are would match your target market, fall within your budget and if they fit in your strategic marketing activities)

Search Engine Optimization –

Generating the right key words and key phrases for your website, industry and market segments

When I was hired on as a consultant at a major multi-national logistics company, one of the projects I worked on was generating a ROI driven national online marketing program, and one of the deliverables was a list of keywords and key phrases to be used for the organic and paid search engine optimization part of the program.

What resources to use to generate your initial list?

Since I was not intially familiar with the industry, the first thing I did was work with the product marketing team and also did a lot of research online. My initial goal was to build a very large catch-all list that covered all possible words and phrases that could be searched by our end customers.
By working cross functionally, I was able to compile a list of industry words and terms that were appropriate to what our customers might be searching under. Since this was a logistics company (B2B), I also looked at industry magazines and websites to add more words and phrases to the list. This was all in addition to using the keyword generators found through multiple sources (see Google, Overture -Yahoo, and Wordtracker links below)

How to refine and prioritize the list

When it came time to refine this large list of key words and phrases there were several factors I looked at:

+ Ranking in major search engine optimization
Tools like Word tracker, Yahoo/ Overture and Google keyword tools + What words and phrases were showing up for the competition
+ How well the word or phrase most intuitively matched to the company solutions and the customer pain points
+ Which words was the logistics corporate parent already paying for, on order to prevent cannibalization

How to define your lists:
Paid versus Organic (Natural) Search Engine Optimization Lists

Once the list was refined and re-reviewed and approved by the cross functional team, I organized them into two lists, paid and organic search lists.

Since I was working with a tight budget, my strategy was to maximize the entire prime list of key words and phrases for our organic website optimization and carefully prioritize and pull out of the list, the keywords and key phrases that we would use for the paid optimization, through Google and Overture (Yahoo!). There were two main factors I used to define which words would be selected for the paid list.

+ Which words and phrases had the best chances of driving (ROI) a purchase or transaction on the website, once they clicked -through
+ What words and phrases would help us best reach other strategic marketing goals the company was trying to achieve

After this list break down and having put together a solid national online marketing program, I informally presented to the Director of Product Marketing and the VP of Marketing and was able to explain the process and decision making that went into it. It was successfully received and both gave their approval of the program.

In some other blog post, I will speak more about the national online marketing plan I built and some of the best practices that came out of that experience.

Welcome to my Online Marketing Blog

Why this blog:
Over the years, I have done lots of online reasearch on the best practices for Marketing and I have been lucky enough to come across lots of ideas and links that would be great to consolidate into one area.

In addition to using this as a way to highlight what is interesting out there in the Marketing world, I am also interested in occaisionally discussing other business things like: cool accessories for the office, women in business, green practices in the work environment, etc.

Subjects that really interest me in Marketing field include:

+ Ovearall Online Marketing Programs

+ Search Engine Optimization
+ Viral Marketing
+ Effectiveness of all ranges of marketing tactics
+ The psychology of marketing:
customer online experiences, universal body language communications, strategic language use to influence effective marketing

My background:
I am located in the South Bay in Northern California and have a BA in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing, but would like to pursue getting my MBA.

Recent Activity
For the last 3 years I have been consulting three major Fortune 500 companies (FedEx, Symantec and HP (HPShopping.com)

~ I have provided such services as project management for global scale partner store experiences
~ Launched over 200+ skus and managed inventory merchandised and marketed these products through their full lifecycles
~ Generated a National Online Marketing program using the best practices out there
~ Worked with vendors to generate online sales tools, flash demos and developer tools
~ Acted as product evangelist to in communications and training for sales teams and call centers agents
~ Investigated sales inhibitors and generated a plan of action to counter internal and external objections

This blog will allow me a forum to keep a thumb on the latest trends in marketing and continue to increase my knowledge base, as I am always happiest when I am learning something new!

Also I am always open to hearing about new marketing tactics or strategies, that are groundbreaking, cool and innovative. So please feel free to share.

Lets get started!
May the Best Marketer Win!
Holly Hansen