Pure Thinking

Is Your Message, Your Brand, Getting Through The Clutter?

Quick! What is the name of your favorite restaurant? We'll get to this in a minute.

Okay, now on with the blog. The picture above is from a seminar I have done on all aspects of marketing. The idea focuses around a dart board, where the most outer rings are traditional mass media, expensive marketing, we go through the rings and other modes of marketing, as they get less expensive, more effective, until we hit the bulls-eye: Word of Mouth Marketing.

Why the picture? "Somewhere between 254 and 5,000 is a number that represents just how many commercial messages an average consumer gets each day" - Advertising Age, April 2, 2007. That was before the explosion of social media.

To really achieve your marketing goals and help get through the clutter make sure they are SMART; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results oriented, Time Specific. You should also think about where your customers go to get information.

My favorite ad of all time is in the most outer ring of the dart board; Super Bowl Commercials! That ad is the Apple Macintosh 1984 ad. It was edited a bit and used in the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2008 election cycle. 

Most companies can't afford a super bowl ad, let alone any TV commercials. BUT, can you leverage local TV stations for their "Best of" contests they have? Does it make sense with your goals?

As we move from the outer ring we go through national and local print advertising, radio, direct mail, trade shows. 

Closer to the bulls-eye you have websites, micro sites, banner ads, SEO, blogs, and email marketing. Regarding email marketing, one of my favorite books on marketing is Seth Godin's Permission Marketing. It is great for email marketing but a good read to be a successful marketer.

The first ring outside of the bulls-eye in my mind is social media. The rise of popularity of twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn really helps the SMART marketer leverage word of mouth. In a future blog I'll talk about how the combination of email marketing and social media can be extremely powerful.

Bulls-eye: Word of Mouth; your friends, clients, peers, and associations talking about you and recommending you and your company. PR through people writing about you in articles and blogs, customer testimonials.

Back to your favorite restaurant. Why is it your favorite? Have you told other people about it? Word of mouth is powerful isn't it.

How can you leverage aspects of marketing that make sense to help you achieve your SMART goals and help you promote your word of mouth?

By the way. Click here to learn about my favorite restaurant. Turn on your speakers.

John Meyer @johndmeyer

Everybody Needs a Good Scare!

 

I was walking through the mall this weekend, an activity I rarely take part in, and to my surprise I saw Christmas decorations!  I am pretty sure there are a couple major holidays still to come before Christmas.  So to make sure that one of my favorite holidays doesn’t get overlooked, I have decided to share a few of the best Haunted Houses in Colorado. 

While I enjoy a good scare just like the next person, I am always a bit hesitant to pay money to have my worst nightmares come true.  But this year is going to be different!

Featured Haunted Houses:

13^th Floor Haunted House

Location- Denver

Price- $20 General Admission

Website- http://www.13thfloorhauntedhouse.com/ 

The Asylum Haunted House

Location- Northglenn

Price- $15 General Admission

Website- http://www.asylumdenver.com/flash/index.htm

Primitive Fear- 13^th Street Manor

Location- Commerce City

Price- $15 General Admission (online coupons available)

Website- http://www.pf13.net/

Haunted Field of Screams

Location-Thornton

Price- $16 General Admission (online coupon available)

Dead Man’s Night Time Maze

Price- $12

Website- http://www.hauntedfieldofscreams.com/

 

For a complete list visit: www.haunteddenver.com/haunted-houses

 

Happy Halloween!

 

~Emily

Integrating Your Website With Your Social Media

With the creation of the website came the desire to drive all marketing messages to go to the website to learn about your brand and product, and in many instances to buy. Ads in magazines, direct mail pieces, hand outs at trade shows, then email newsletters all had (or should have) "go to our web site for more information and buy now". Websites are wonderful as they are your virtual brochure and can be updated at anytime for the purpose you first designed them; to sell your brand and your product.

Smart marketers also use websites to keep existing customers happy and have them spread the word about you to others.

Some people believe that the advent of social media sites like Facebook and twitter has taken away the importance of a company's website. I totally disagree and feel the social media sites have made it even more important to keep your website the best it can be to sell and support your brand. The integration of the two can be a huge win when managed properly.

I recently started following Jeremiah Owyang's blog WEB STRATEGY. His recent article about "Corporate Websites and Social Networks Begin Integration" is a must read for anyone interested in leveraging the power of combining the best of both worlds of websites and social media. He calls it "Social Sign On". I call it the bulls-eye to get more prospects to your website to buy.

You can read his article here. Let me know what you think. How integrated are your website and social media strategies?

John Meyer  [email protected]  @johndmeyer

Colorado, Technology, and Marketing

Colorado, Technology, and Marketing. Three of my favorite topics and quite exciting that there are so many intertwined relationships with them right now. I'm a Colorado native in love with where I live. I have a great career growing alongside marketing and technology. It's fun working with the team at Pure Brand Communications on all aspects of digital marketing, centering on Pure Listening.

One of the things I like about Pure Brand Communications is how we give back to the community, personally as well as great agency work with non profits like Boys and Girls Clubs, Special Olympics, and Children's Hospital. I volunteer with CSIA, Colorado's Technology Association. On October 7th CSIA is hosting DEMOgala - an event showcasing technology companies and thought leaders in Colorado.

It's wonderful to see how many technology companies have started in Colorado that provide really fantastic marketing solutions. SimpleGeo offers solutions to enable location based services in mobile, web and desktop applications. We've got web conferencing company ReadyTalk, email marketing firm SwiftPage, social media marketing company FiltrBox that is now part of Jive Software. Associated Content's online publishing platform (now part of Yahoo). A really creative CodeBaby that helps you with web site optimization by leveraging the nature of human behavior online and scientific study. There are also applications for mobile marketing like SnapTag from SpyderLynk.

In most blogs each of these companies would have a hot link to their website to learn more about them. In this case I'm going to promote the event where the companies, many others, and their founders and executives will be. On October 7th the companies I mentioned, many more, and over 25 thought leaders will be speaking at CSIA's DEMOgala at the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. Now there's the link that's important. There will be over 1000 people attending.

It will be a great day. I'm looking forward to learning more about all the companies, especially those that are taking marketing to a new level.

John Meyer - [email protected] - @johndmeyer

It's a mad, mad, mobile world

My 79 year-old Mother asked for my business card yesterday.  “Oh no, honey, this isn’t good enough,” she said, inspecting it.  What she objected to was, in Pure fashion, our cards carry minimal information.  No titles.  No color logo.  No picture.  Just a name and brief contact information.   She wanted a Chinese menu to wave in the faces of her bridge club.  Wait till I tell her my vision for our new cards:  Eliminate everything except for a 2D bar code.  More on that in a moment.

This year will mark the intersection of mobile and embedded media in America, in a big way. The penetration of iPhones (and introduction of Android phones) is reaching critical mass.  So, in our company, I have suggested we eliminate everything on our 2010 cards except for a crossword puzzle-looking little mark with embedded information.  Anyone who snaps a picture of it with their camera phone will get ALL my contact information downloaded to their address book, a link to our website (and this blog) and even a personal video.
Much like in Japan, you will be amazed at how your phone will connect you to the physical world.  Want to pay for coffee with your phone?  Starbucks has already rolled out a way to do it.  Want information from that flat Volkswagen print ad?  Wave your phone over the code and a video pops up on your mobile. 

Already, iPhoners are “bumping” contact information, searching restaurants though augmented reality (Yelp) and dropping a trail of breadcrumbs wherever they go (FourSquare and Gowalla).  Mobile phones will be collecting and disseminating more and more information  that exists only in the digital world.  And it’s only starting to gain traction.  My Mom is going to hate this.

-Gregg

Curated @ Arkitip

Newly curated at Arkitip: An incase macbook/pro sleeve by Dutch artist Parra. If you missed the first installment, that shiny, sexy thing down below (by KRINK), there's still some of those there too.

MTV Music

OH: Now I can watch Under Pressure (and any other music video ever aired on MTV) whenever I want.

STD e-Cards

High fives to LA's inSPOT for creating a better way to tell your potentially STD-ridden partners that they  need to, uhh, deal with something. These e-cards can be sent anonmously or otherwise to whoever you may have infected (or been infected by), and even though no method of saying "So... you probably have the herp" can be considered pleasant, this is way less awkward than a phone call.

And no, these e-cards should not be used for practical jokes, because oh man, that would be sick. Hehe.

TV Colors Your Brain

A new study is proving that the color, or absence of color, in the TV programs you watched as a child has an effect on what colors you dream in. Weird, yes, but more on the side of depressing when you consider the following: Study participants who watched black and white TV growing up had a 25% chance of dreaming in black and white; participants who watched mostly color had a 4.4% chance of it; and people who didn't watch TV nearly always dreamed in color. In other words, we can look at this two ways: "Thank God for high res," or "Dear God, what else has TV done to my brain?"

Bye Bye Zima

We might not ever have noticed you were gone, but the teenagers would have. Well, maybe not them either (because apparently they've been ditching you for Sparks?), but if it were still '96, man, we'd be mourning.

It's been real fun- like real real fun- but if the current eighties revival can't even bring you back, it's probably for the best. R.I.P Zima, we'll miss your citrus-y zest.