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Blip is the official blog of Martino Flynn, an advertising, public relations, and online marketing firm located in the Paris of the Finger Lakes region: Rochester, New York. Blip chronicles our discoveries, insights, and occasionally over-the-top rants about the ever-changing world of online and traditional media, content, design, marketing, public relations, and persuasion.
Congratulations. You’ve decided that it’s time to move forward with your social media initiative. You may read the statistic by Forrester Research that by the end of 2009, 85% of all consumers will be reading or reviewing social content. There’s a good chance that your customers and prospects fall into that category and you don’t want to miss any opportunities. So you jump right into it. Your marketing director starts writing blogs that are being linked to your company’s Facebook page and your CEO is tweeting about the latest activities of the day.
All of this is going on while your intern is running around the office with a camcorder taping anything that moves in an effort to populate your YouTube channel. Good move? More like a big mistake, unless you have a strategic social media plan in place that confirms that all of this activity makes sense. The social media options that are out there are completely overwhelming and there’s an inclination to feel that you have to participate in everything. Developing a comprehensive strategic social media plan requires a holistic approach that integrates social media into your organization’s current traditional marketing strategies. It is an effort that requires a sustainable plan driven by measurable objectives.
The first step in assisting in the development of a strategic plan is to engage in active listening. This will help you to understand the current mindset and perceptions of your employees, customers, competitors, and prospects regarding your brand and your industry, as well as where these conversations are taking place online. When you combine your current traditional marketing strategy with a social media initiative, active listening will assist in providing the strategic roadmap for your company’s success.
A solid strategic plan will place you in the conversations utilizing tactics and applications that make sense and will position you and your brand in a good light.
OK, so this story is a little dated but it still teaches some pretty compelling lessons. Last fall, Motrin decided it would launch a social media campaign for International Baby Wearing Week by producing a viral video for YouTube. Motrin suggested that carrying babies was like a fashion accessory. A fashion accessory that could cause aches and pains—with Motrin to the rescue. Check out the video:
Apparently, moms were neither pleased nor impressed. Furthermore, this campaign was launched late on a Friday afternoon and left unmonitored over the weekend by the company. And the backlash that weekend was measured in millions of negative impressions within the social media world. And the Motrin debacle earned the top spot on the social media Darwin awards.
The Lessons Learned:
Test your campaign with a small audience—also known as the “disaster check.”
If you’re going to use social media, know that reaction times are measured in minutes and be ready to respond 24/7. Your target audience has the the power, so make sure you’re always listening.
Motrin is a fine brand, and if someone hadn’t been asleep at the wheel that weekend, the brand could have taken a gentle tap versus a big old black eye.
If you do any email marketing, Microsoft is in a position to save you money or cost you money.
Most people think of email design and development as simpler than design and development for the web. In some ways it is; after all, an email is just one “page.” On the other hand, designers and developers like us have to make sure an email message looks consistent in all the popular places that people view email, and not only are there more email clients than web browsers, but they’re more segmented. Of course, one of the most popular email clients is Microsoft’s Outlook.
With the last version of Outlook, Microsoft changed its rendering engine, and basically took web designers’ options back to more than 5 years, forcing us to use old, tired, and downright poor techniques, and limiting what we could do designwise in an email. This caused an uproar in the design community and spawned the Email Standards Project, an organization that aims to standardize email rendering so that it’s easier for designers and developers, and thus if you’re a marketer or advertiser, less expensive for you.
The news is just out that Microsoft is planning to continue using their very poor rendering engine in Outlook 2010, the next version that is “in beta” (almost done but not released yet). Again, outrage has begun within the design community. I would like to invite marketers and advertisers to join us, to make enough noise so that Microsoft might just listen to its customers.
What can you do? Let your voice be heard with Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, visit http://fixoutlook.org/ and write a tweet about the project. As of this writing, 12,700 (and climbing quickly) individuals have already done so. There’s no question that Microsoft has the technology and manpower to fix this problem. They are choosing not to (I believe using a security issue as a scapegoat) and it’s costing you time, money, and creative freedom. Help us let them know that web and email standards are time- and money-savers for everyone.
If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, it’s a fairly useful and relatively unknown pseudo-bookmarking tool that allows you to quickly save the long articles you may come across on the web on a daily basis for later reading. In other words, it “facilitates easy reading of long text content.”
A lot of times, with the overabundance of information we encounter on a given day—from email to chats to link sharing to RSS feeds—it’s very difficult to find time to do anything but skim articles and web pages. The guy behind Instapaper, however, contends that there’s little value in quickly skimming content, and that good writing, especially writing that is supposed to be of interest to you, deserves to be read. He also points out that although it may not seem like we have time anymore to sit down and really read, there are certainly times during the day—whether it be while sitting in the waiting room at our doctor’s office, tapping our foot in line at the post office, waiting for a meeting to start, commuting (if you happen to take public transportation to work), or while “sitting on the goofy chairs in the shoe area and being supportive while our wives are shopping”—when we could be catching up on reading what’s of interest to us. To help facilitate this, you’ll find the website is very much mobile-browser-friendly, it’s a totally free service, and there’s even an Instapaper iPhone app available. Great for catching up while sitting in the shoe department.
Overall, the nature of the site is less along the lines of social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg or Reddit, and more along the lines of say, the unsorted bookmarks feature found in Firefox. Its purpose is for quick saving of articles for later reading, rather than the formal bookmarking and tagging/categorizing features found in the aforementioned sites. It’s not really meant for long-term storage. Some people may not like this “unorganized” approach, but I think the creator addresses it nicely when he says it should be used for its purpose—temporary storage of links to articles you’d like to read when you have the time.
The easiest way to get started is to visit Instapaper.com, find the “Read Later” bookmarklet, and drag it into the bookmarks toolbar of your favorite web browser. Now any time you come across an article you want to save, just click the bookmarklet and it automatically saves to your account. I definitely recommend trying it.
I have a sign taped to my office wall that is a quote from legendary creative guru, Lee Clow. It says, “Technology is not a substitute for an idea…it can nurture and allow ideas to get bigger and be more amazing.” For me, it accurately captures a thought that is becoming more and more relevant these days.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a technophobe or anti-technology. Quite the opposite, like Mr. Clow’s quote implies, I am a huge fan of what technology can do for an idea. But too often an idea is bypassed in the hasty desire to utilize the latest techno trend or tactical whiz bang platform. New technologies can expand the scope of an idea and in a lot of cases inspire an entire string of creative-generating thought. But the technology in and of itself is not an idea.
Allow me to give some examples. Everyone wants to jump into the emerging technologies around social media. The allure of thousands of potential prospects interacting with your brand is enough to make a marketing manager light headed. But posting a blog isn’t an idea. It’s a tactical execution. However, planning a new product launch by sending samples to a specific target of influential bloggers and virally spreading it through various social media outlets is an idea born out of necessity—the need to launch quickly with limited marketing dollars. It’s the way new Sucrets ICE was launched. Social media just made the idea bigger and more effective.
Here’s another way technology is making ideas bigger. Recently we launched a web site to celebrate 50 seasons of Buffalo Bills football. Embedded within the site are a variety of ways for visitors to interact and share comments through their Facebook pages. One section invites them to view and share favorite tailgating recipes. Ten lucky contributors will be selected to appear on the Bills All-Access television show “TAILGREATS”. Billy Buffalo, loyal Bills mascot, posted a message on his Facebook page mentioning this fact and we saw recipe submissions increase two-fold.
Have an idea first. Then use technology to make it more amazing.
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A lot of times, with the overabundance of information we encounter on a given day—from email to chats to link sharing to RSS feeds—it’s very difficult to find time to do anything but skim articles and web pages. The 
