December 13, 2008
I will probably be posting quite a bit less often with this latest development. I wanted to share the news with you as soon as it was made public. (feed and e-mail readers, please click on the headline to see the video)
You know there are very few things that would take me away from the blog….but come on!
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December 12, 2008
Drew’s Note: Here’s part three of Sandy’s grab the mic guest post. (see parts one and two here)
Without further ado…enjoy Sandy Carter!
Case Study 3: IBM video game seeds market
This holiday season, buying a Nintendo Wii, or the latest online games need not make you feel guilty. According to The Apply Group, at least 100 of the Global Fortune 500 will use gaming to educate their employees by 2012, with the USA, the UK and Germany leading the way.
With that in mind, we decided to leverage social marketing in education with a serious game. Thousands of universities around the world now have access to Innov8, IBM’s new "serious game.” Now students of IT management who grew up playing video games can benefit in learning activities in a fun way, like flight simulators teaching pilots to fly airplanes.
By interacting with the video game, students can make real-life business situation decisions.
They can see the results of their decisions right away, and if they make a mistake, it’s much more private than “failing” in front of a classroom of their colleagues. Because a love of gaming is shared around the world, professors have told us the game can help to bridge cultural barriers.
While it is too soon to measure the full implications, there’s a new business environment emerging. We cannot ignore the changing group dynamics and social implications. In fact, we should tap into the most innovative ideas to redefine the fundamental nature of educating the market.
Just as games present us with situations that invite players to make choices, consider the advantage of using graphics and decision-making steps of games in business. Using Social Media, we could allow decision makers to immerse themselves in the real-world simulations, judging cause and effect before making decisions.
Sandy Carter is author of the new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0, which leverages the ANGELS methodology (ANGELS stands for: Analyze the Market, Nail the Strategy, Go- to- Market socially, Energize the Channel & Market, Leads and Revenue, and Scream with Technology.) Sandy is IBM’s Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy, and Channels. She is responsible for IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA initiatives and is in charge of one of IBM’s premier brands, IBM WebSphere.
Sandy blogs at Marketing 2.0: From a whisper to a scream and you can catch her on Twitter too!
Every Friday is "grab the mic" day. Want to grab the mic and be a guest blogger on Drew’s Marketing Minute? Shoot me an e-mail.
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December 12, 2008
Image by Britt Selvitelle via Flickr
Drew’s Note: Here’s part two of Sandy’s grab the mic guest post. (see part one here)
Without further ado…enjoy Sandy Carter!
Case Study 2: Dell Uses Twitter To Drive Sales
Twitter allows people to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Businesses like Dell (and IBM) are using Twitter in more corporate instances.
Dell Outlet has inventory based only on equipment that is returned to Dell, which therefore can fluctuate quite a bit. When there is a large inventory "bubble" of a particular model, there may be time to generate an e-mail campaign to promote that particular system and generate more demand.
However, when the bubble is smaller, the major lever to drive sales has been to lower the price of the overstocked model.
Dell Outlet came up with the idea that Twitter may be a solution to the challenges presented, by offering Twitter-specific promotions and featured products. The goals were:
Dell Outlet’s Twitter strategy revolves around regularly posting Twitter-only offers. When a new tweet is posted, it generally provides followers a coupon code to obtain a discount on that particular model in the Dell Outlet. Typically, this coupon is exclusive to Twitter, so they are able to measure the redemptions and know that it was due to being posted on Twitter. Twitter followers may share coupons easily with Twitter friends in a viral fashion.
For Dell, Twitter represented a new way to reach customers. Ricardo Guerrero, a key visionary for this work at Dell, claims that per their latest surveys, a significant portion of people who bought through Twitter were not aware of the Dell Outlet before Twitter. And by tracking the coupon code, in the first year utilizing Twitter as a promotional tool, Dell Outlet generated over $500,000 in revenue in sales of refurbished systems.
Sandy Carter is author of the new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0, which leverages the ANGELS methodology (ANGELS stands for: Analyze the Market, Nail the Strategy, Go- to- Market socially, Energize the Channel & Market, Leads and Revenue, and Scream with Technology.) Sandy is IBM’s Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy, and Channels. She is responsible for IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA initiatives and is in charge of one of IBM’s premier brands, IBM WebSphere.
Sandy blogs at Marketing 2.0: From a whisper to a scream and you can catch her on Twitter too!
Every Friday is "grab the mic" day. Want to grab the mic and be a guest blogger on Drew’s Marketing Minute? Shoot me an e-mail.
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December 12, 2008
Drew’s Note: As you know, I try to host guest bloggers every Friday. Sandy Carter just finished writing her newest book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0. The book contains 54+ case studies of companies who have successfully blended traditional marketing tactics with their web 2.0 brethren.
Sandy kindly offered to share summaries of three of her book’s case studies. Rather than cram all three into one very long blog post….I’ve broken them up and will post them separately throughout today.
Without further ado…enjoy Sandy Carter!
OK. I admit it. I tweet multiple times a day, I have 2 blogs, and I love technology. My passion is reaching customers and having them connect with my company in new and smart ways. As such, I experiment, learn from my peers, and measure these new tools for marketing.
As a marketing executive at IBM, I have found that these Marketing 2.0 techniques, combined with traditional marketing methods, drive down costs and increase revenue. My passion led to a book which resulted in over 54 case studies of companies using these hybrid combinations today and I’d like to summarize highlights from 3 of those stories.
Case Study 1: The Coca-Cola Company and Eepybird.com use Lightly Branding
People are very visual. In a recent preview of Google’s year-end Zeitgeist, “youtube” is so far listed among the fastest-rising search terms of 2008. Combine that interest in video with word-of-mouth and you have a powerful influencer in your marketing mix. Let us have a look at a compelling example of “lightly branding”, or the impact of others putting a face on your brand and then “endorsing” it by virally passing it around!
We are no doubt all familiar with the video of 2 “scientists”, 101 bottles of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos that showed the reaction of the 2 products together in a huge fountain effect.
After initially being posted online and shared with just one person, by the end of that night, there were over 20,000 views. Interesting, but perhaps less well-known, is the background on the inspiration for those videos. A juggler and a lawyer/entertainer, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, respectively, are the originators of these experiments and it was the wildly enthusiastic response (both online and in-person at their local theatre where they perform) that set them on a path to spending the next several months working on creating more effects and the concept was born.
Their company, EepyBird, combines the power of entertainment and marketing to assist companies in lightly branding their products. Not long after the initial buzz, EepyBird had heard from both Mentos and The Coca-Cola Company. Michael Donnelly, director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, realized the potential from this viral video and its impact on the company brand and sales, and said he saw it as an opportunity to celebrate creativity, self-expression and amateur artistry. The two companies formed a partnership and went on to create another experiment (#214), including a viral video advertising contest called “Poetry in Motion”, in which customers were challenged to produce and create their own videos and the winner was flown out to work directly with EepyBird on the next video. Once again, this video saw a huge amount of viral buzz, with EepyBird citing over eight million views.
In this case study, EepyBird’s videos helped customers to see the Diet Coke and Mentos brands in a new medium that was both authentic and fun. Customers were experiencing the brand without watching a commercial and this propelled users to share it with their respective social networks resulting in buzz around the world.
But what was the ROI of lightly branding? The results were that Diet Coke saw significant sales of 2-liter bottles and, Mentos’ sales increased by about 15%.
Sandy Carter is author of the new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0, which leverages the ANGELS methodology (ANGELS stands for: Analyze the Market, Nail the Strategy, Go- to- Market socially, Energize the Channel & Market, Leads and Revenue, and Scream with Technology.) Sandy is IBM’s Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy, and Channels. She is responsible for IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA initiatives and is in charge of one of IBM’s premier brands, IBM WebSphere.
Sandy blogs at Marketing 2.0: From a whisper to a scream and you can catch her on Twitter too!
Every Friday is "grab the mic" day. Want to grab the mic and be a guest blogger on Drew’s Marketing Minute? Shoot me an e-mail.
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December 11, 2008
I hope you’re not good. Good is fine. Acceptable. Meets my expectations. Good is boring. In fact, for most of us — it’s invisible.
When was the last time you told a friend about an experience you had that was good? A meal that was good. Customer service that was adequate. Nothing wrong…but nothing special either?
You didn’t — right? Something extraordinary (good or bad) needs to happen to get you to tell someone about it.
We don’t notice, let alone talk about the ordinary. The expected. The good enough. We don’t get excited unless something extraordinary happens. That’s how we live our lives as consumers.
But when we put on our marketing hat, we’re astonished that the marketplace doesn’t applaud our efforts every day. Truth be told…many organizations are satisfied with just delivering satisfactory.
You don’t have to create a circus in your consultation room or have minstrels wandering through your store. You don’t have to serve gourmet snacks outside the dressing room. But you do have to find a way to infuse something remarkable into your product or service.
Now here’s the tricky part – it also has to be genuine. Consumers are not only jaded but they’re smart. Rightfully so – they hate being manipulated and they can spot insincerity a mile away. So a manufactured moment feels forced and insulting. The trick to creating the extraordinary is that it needs to come from the heart. The heart of the organization. Your brand.
It’s not as hard as you might think to take the leap to extraordinary. Take stock. Scrutinize every time you interact with a client and let your imagination off its leash. How could you change that moment and go beyond good to reach for spectacular? What would feel special and genuine from both your customers and your employees’ point of view?
What could you do that’s worth talking about?
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December 8, 2008
My daughter will be 16 next summer. Which means she sends a lot of text messages. It also means I send a lot of text messages. When in Rome…
One truth I have discovered is that even in that abbreviated medium, it’s easy to be long-winded.
For every sentence I text, her retention and response gets shorter. The briefer I am, the more attention she pays and the more importance she seems to assign to my message.
If I really want an answer to a specific question or really want her to hear me about something, I use a single sentence. Then, I get her full attention.
Boy, is there a marketing lesson in that.
The more copy you use to deliver your messages…the less important they seem. The more messages you shove into a single ad, blog post or brochure — the more likely your big message will be lost in the blur.
When it really matters….say less.
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December 8, 2008
I conducted the MMG brand discovery process for a non-profit over the weekend (hard to gather volunteer board members during the work week) and at the end of a long but fruitful day, their board president said, "I’ve learned so much today. Not just about marketing our organization but this stuff applies to my work, my relationships…my life!"
He’s right of course. Marketing’s core lessons are not only universal but they’re really basic tenets of relationships.
A few years ago, I wrote a series that I think is a very good reminder to all of us of these core lessons. I hope you’ll take a few minutes and read the entire "Marketing Tips from My Italian Grandma" series. Even if you vaguely remember some of them…I promise an ah ha moment or two.
I’ve love to get your thoughts on the series and the lessons.
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December 7, 2008
The minds behind Working Smarter (SmartDraw‘s blog) decided that they would create a small network of blogs that they believe can serve business leaders with practical, actionable information and ideas.
As they said in their official announcement: "Today we are proud to formally announce the launch of the Working Smarter Network, WSN for short, an exclusive consortium of websites and blogs that provide varied, relevant and useful information to help business people become more effective."
I’m delighted to report that I was invited to be one of the 13 charter members. If you’d like to check out the other sites that were invited to join….here you go.
I have no doubt you’ll find some useful and thought provoking reading among these sites.
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December 5, 2008
I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit freaked out that it’s the gift giving season again. But…I’m bucking it up and spending much of the weekend shopping. You?
I can help you cross one thing off your list. My good friend Mitch Matthews and his wife Mel created a game a few years ago that is really gaining national traction.
Much like the iPod, this game is the perfect blend of form and function.
Cool looking and a blast to play….Do You Q Friends and Do You Q Dates (two different versions with completely different questions) are perfect for family gatherings, work parties (at MMG, we play it via e-mail at work) or just about anywhere.
It’s a thought-provoking, laughter ensuing game that helps you connect. It really is the perfect stocking stuffer. It’s also an excellent way to open staff meetings, freak out an interviewee or toss in your briefcase as you board a plane.
Now, you can buy one online or you can win one of five FREE games that I have to give away. To be entered into the drawing…just leave a comment below. That’s it.
I’ll randomly pick five numbers and voila, we’ll have our winners.
Because I want to get these mailed to you before the end of the holiday season….we’ll announce winners on Thursday morning.
Update: You bet — we’ll mail it to anywhere on the globe. So don’t think you’re not eligible if you’re not in the States!
Update #2: The contest is closed. I asked my daughter to pick 5 random numbers and as a result the winners are: Justin Brady, Jill Konrath, Ed Moriarty, Karin and Monica. I will be in touch to find out which version of the game you’d like.
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December 5, 2008
Drew’s Note: As I try to do every Friday, I’m pleased to bring you a guest post. Meet another thought leader who shares his insights via the blogosphere. So without further ado…Sam Carpenter. Again. Enjoy!
Most people want two things: peace and prosperity. I was – and still am – no different.
Eight years ago, I was working ridiculously long hours for meager pay, crumbling under stress, and had zero time for myself or my family. The President and CEO of Centratel, a struggling telephone answering service business that specializes in emergency message relay, I put in 80 to 100-hour workweeks for 15 years, simply trying to keep my business and personal life afloat.
It was a week-to-week epic, making payroll, keeping staff and clients happy, and covering the bills for me and my children. I had no close personal friends or romantic relationships. After a decade and a half of this torment, my body was a wreck from the stress, and my doctor – convinced I was depressed – prescribed anti-depressants and then stimulants.
In my book Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More, I describe my step-by-step transformation to now working 2 hours a week, instead of 80, and how, in a steeply declining telephone answering service industry, Centratel has blossomed, with more than 900 clients across the United States.
Follow these five integral steps to “working less and making more” and your operation will become enormously more efficient. At the same time, watch your personal life become more relaxed and rewarding for yourself and the people you care about.
Understand there is a universal propensity for order and efficiency. Despite the contentions of mass media, 99.9 percent of everything works just fine. Consider the systems of your life: The car you drive, the TV you watch, and the miraculous body that carries you around. You just have to “climb on board” and work to enhance the quality of the systems of your life that are not exactly the way you want them to be.
Shift your mechanical perspective of the world’s workings. Take a position “outside and slightly above” your work and your life. Understand that by perfecting a primary system’s sub-systems, the primary system will in turn be perfected.
End the fire-killing. Instead of repairing problems as they arise, dig one layer deeper, identify the inefficiencies, fix the dysfunctional systems that cause the inefficiencies, and stop problems from re-occurring.
Create simple yet comprehensive documentation. It has to happen. Boring, but true: the existence of documented protocols is the single greatest difference between large successful businesses and small struggling businesses.
Hire people who “get it.” You must surround yourself with people who agree with your system’s philosophy and methodology. If your employees aren’t on the same page, you won’t get the results you want.
So, if your day is too busy fixing recurring problems, take a step out of the fire-killing routine and get down to the heart of what is producing the recurring problems. Could it be that within your operation, processes are not being maintained and upgraded, tasks are not being delegated or automated, and attention isn’t being paid to the documentation and control of the systems that create the results? If so, then go to work and tweak those faulty systems into perfection.
Sam Carpenter has been featured by dozens of national media, including NPR, ESPN radio, The Wall Street Journal radio, Startup Nation, KTLA Morning News (Los Angeles), and Small Business Television. President and CEO of Centratel, the number one telephone answering service in the United States, he has a background in engineering, publishing, and journalism. Visit www.workthesystem.com to purchase your copy of his book, Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More, and to register for one of his two-day Work The System Boot Camps.
Every Friday is "grab the mic" day. Want to grab the mic and be a guest blogger on Drew’s Marketing Minute? Shoot me an e-mail.
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