Passion for Advertising is Becoming Passion for Social Media

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Andrew Rushmore

I want to begin by greeting our readers, as this will be the first post I have had the honor of contributing to our company’s blog since I came to Steketee Greiner and Company (SGC) almost six months ago. It’s been an amazing journey and I’ve been thrilled to be a member of such a dedicated team of professionals.

In my professional development, before being an employee with SGC, I joined a local organization called Ad 2 West Michigan; in a year I was elected to the role of Chair of Public Service, where I have worked with my friend and professional club associate Ray Cashbaugh (Chair of Creative), as well as the handful of dedicated, to build our charity campaign for the Wealthy Theatre (located in East Grand Rapids).

Ad 2, a division of the AAF (National), is a club for young professionals in Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations between the ages of 18 and 32. In light of my involvement, I had planned to join the AAF and Ad 2 for their National Conference in Orlando, Florida, as a representative of Ad 2 West Michigan even before my employment with Steketee Greiner; imagine my pride to represent not only Ad 2 West Michigan, but also a rapidly growing company driven by an innovative spirit. The passion I have for my relationship to SGC allowed me to network with professionals in the Advertising industry with a vigor that perhaps Seth Godin would be proud of. Continue reading →

Google Fiber Initiative Update (Not a New Report Yet, but Some Thoughts Nonetheless)…

Posted on March 19, 2010 by admin

We’re receiving a number of inquiries from supporters of cities that weren’t included in our report, and the bottom line is that in order for these cities to get on the digital radar, they need to organize their approach by relevant search terms that supporters can find easily and, once connected, more effectively contribute to the campaign. That’s the value of these reports. This is an exercise in demonstrating to viewers the value of developing organized, measurable digital (and social media, etc.) campaigns in order to get the greatest value for the time and spend. The cities that tend to have a more fragmented social media approach (for example, Ann Arbor titling two separate Facebook pages “A2 Fiber” and “Ann Arbor for Google Fiber”) are making it more difficult to be heard as a single voice on a national level and are running the risk of going unnoticed. The way to get noticed beyond your local efforts is to get organized and create a unified, holistic digital/social media strategy of relevant, searchable content. Continue reading →

The Race is On(line) for Google Fiber – How the Candidates are Faring in the Digital Space

Posted on March 17, 2010 by admin

With community events for Google’s fiber initiative beginning on March 19^th and the growing level of online community involvement that’s building here in Grand Rapids, we put together the first in a series of reports measuring the digital conversations and online efforts surrounding the participating cities looking to have Google’s hyper-speed fiber communications lines installed, creating a rank of the top 10 candidate cities by share of the total conversation happening around the initiative online.

This first report ranks the aspiring cities by share of total number of mentions in conversations happening between February 15 to March 17 on digital media channels, and we’ll continue to publish reports weekly showing the collected digital efforts and rankings of the top 10 cities until Google makes its final choice.

Google has multiple factors in their decision making process, including how interested a community is in working with Google, community support, local activities, needs and resources, approved construction methods, local regulatory issues and area broadband speeds. Most participating cities assert that online interaction in their campaigns will increase the chances of favorability in their selection by Google, and we’ll be presenting the data and insights that will ultimately show how important a factor online share of voice is in the process.

The first report is available for download here. Just click on the image below. And stay tuned for additional reports in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: As we continue our research and measurement for our next report, we’ve noticed that some cities’ online efforts are being conducted around nicknames relevant to their campaigns or local communities, rather than the direct name of the city (Ann Arbor and Sarasota, we’re looking at you!). Based on this, we’re filtering at more detailed levels to make sure we’re capturing that information and reporting accurately. We invite any city involved in the initiative NOT directly using their name for their online efforts to reach out to us (either through a comment below or through our Twitter feed – @steketeegreiner) with any specific search terms to make sure that we have your city represented properly.

Using social and going global – The questions you need to ask yourself…

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Brian Steketee

The Industry captains of social media are up against a new challenge these days in trying to make their wonderful platforms useful for corporate America. After sitting through a couple meetings with Facebook over the past few weeks it was clear this is not something that is going to be easily fixed. The discussion started out something like this – Continue reading →

2010 – A pragmatic view

Posted on January 6, 2010 by admin

I enjoy Judy Shapiro’s pragmatic approach to 2010. Meeting the business objectives is the number one goal, even if that means avoiding the glitz and staying with the tried and true. It is easy to be lured down the path of shiny objects only to find expectations are too high and performance underwhelms. I speak from experience on this one. A grounded platform based upon facts and data is where I like to start. Then a comprehensive integrated campaign, with the appropriate amount of attention-getting bling, can follow. Continue reading →

New Strategies for Managing Social Relationships – SRM

Posted on January 4, 2010 by admin

Back in 2002, when we were trying to get our new catalog company off the ground, we quickly learned the value of a customer. The old saying “it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one” came to life when we were buying names of prospects and less than 1.2% of them became customers. The house list was our bread and butter and we learned how to squeeze every last drop of value out of it. We quickly became experts in segmenting our list using the RFM model: Recency, Frequency and Monetary value. It worked well. A new customer was a live customer and we did everything we could to let them know they were valued and keep them engaged. We incentivized heavily to increase purchase frequency and treated our best customers like royalty. Now, segmentation goes much deeper and CRM models have become much more sophisticated, but the same fundamental principles still apply. Today, with brands engaging customers through social channels, how are these relationships managed? What are the rules in a world driven by return on engagement not return on investment? Social Media is changing the brand-to-consumer relationship driving the need for new strategies to take advantage. We call this new strategic approach Social Relationship Management (SRM). Continue reading →

Are you content with your content plan?

Posted on December 9, 2009 by admin

Question: In this developing world of social media and digital marketing, we all know that we need to reconsider the way we’re delivering content to our audiences, but do you feel like you have things under control? There are threads everywhere discussing how we’re losing control of the conversations going on around our brands and how we’ve entered into the age of transparency in messaging. The rage today seems to be around monitoring and measuring and conducting damage assessment and control once a conversation is made public. But let’s consider content in the context of measuring and monitoring and think about how brands can move from “reactive content victim” to “proactive participant in a meaningful conversation.”

So then, how are you developing content in the new media age? How are you planning to update all the social media channels and blog(s) your company is launching, or has already launched over the course of the year? These are big questions, and unless you know the answers to them, you may want to consider scaling your digital media plan to accommodate your ability to create content that will effectively represent your brand effectively in a two-way conversation with your audiences. The key word there is “two-way,” because you’re entering an environment that is built on networks and opinions and transparency, and if you’re merely in a position to launch messaging (even if you’ve spent millions of dollars testing its relevance) into the digital space without being able to measure its effectiveness and, more importantly, without having a strategy on how to respond if a conversation erupts around your thought, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable.

As we get into it, here’s a little background on where we are and where we’re heading:

Web 2.0 has enabled a two-way dialogue. Audiences have become “search savvy,” information flows and, most importantly, the line between professional and amateur content has started to blur. The challenge isn’t finding information, it’s knowing what to do with it…

The new age of Web 3.0 is about semantics. It’s enabling a new distribution relationship around content/data centered around Filtering (information and content) and Context (delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person, with the right device). This approach to content is creating an open source social structure that will allow databases to talk to each other and encourage social network content that urges audiences to use snippets of content as they please and where they please to reach new levels of meaning between brands and audiences.

These changes are creating a MARKETING STRATEGY SHIFT…

Web 2.0 asked us to build massive sites and drive traffic to a place where we could try to control messaging. Web 3.0 is asking us to create content that can travel throughout the digital world via conversations with multiple participants, creating connections that drive content consumption, data collection and new content generation.

So, here’s the rub, and it’s a simple “if/then” proposition: if we’re now in a position that requires us to create content that will enable and respond to conversations about our brand, then how do we generate content plans that aren’t simply focused on feeding information and stories out to audiences, trusting in their ability to run with it? The answer’s simple: plan. Build a plan that maps out your entire content strategy across all your channels for the entire year. Of course, you need to leave some room to be reactive, but if your marketing plans are aligned with your business objectives, you should be able to create a conversation that you can feed to your audiences and interact with in an organized, ongoing basis throughout the year. And if you do this well, you’ll be able to measure not only the sentiment of what’s going on around your brand, but also the effectiveness of your content (for good or bad). Once you know that, you can create a content baseline that allows you to generate planned, targeted content year after year that is valued internally for its measurable effectiveness and externally for your contributions as the subject matter expert around your brand.

Word of Mouth

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Brian Steketee

We all know the importance of viral communications in today’s world. We’re learning even more about it during the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit this week in Las Vegas.

The WOMMA Summit is featuring brand speakers that discuss their real world WOM marketing programs from some of the top companies in the world. They are presenting case studies and educating the audience on the importance of word of mouth and how it relates to their company.

We have been working on some great projects involving word of mouth tactics, one of which is a corporate blogger event. What a great way to spur the spread of conversation about your brand. Get people that are passionate about something and give them your brand experience to inspire them to write about it and share it with all their followers -word of mouth!

We’ve met some great people and have seen some amazing presentations here at WOMMA. Tune in with us… Just go to womma.org and sign up for the live feed to see what the speakers have to say…and spread the word!