“Immersion is not engagement. Engagement takes place when a story, or a marketing message, provokes some sort of action among the audience—a tweet, a post, a face-to-face conversation over the watercooler. Immersion takes place when the audience forgets that it’s an audience at all. Immersion blurs the lines—between story and marketing, storyteller and audience, illusion and reality. That gives it …
Be a Useful Resource
The content on your website tells the world what you know, what you care about, how you work. Maybe your site’s saying “I know mostly about myself.” Some sites say “I haven’t learned anything new since 2004.” A lot of sites clearly say “Give us money now.” Not exactly the best beginnings to life-long customer relationships. But for those who …
Making Great Nonprofit+Corporate Partnerships
In the Nov 2014 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Shayna Samuels and Glenn Turner of Ripple Strategies summarize the steps to creating successful nonprofit+corporate alliances. “In these symbiotic, public-facing partnerships, the nonprofit and business essentially “hold hands”—they declare a shared mission and execute a marketing campaign around it. The end goal is increased awareness for both entities, along with increased …
Customer Love at Headsets.com
This deck on The Super Pickle Way, the customer service philosophy at Headsets.com, lays out a roadmap to lifelong customer relationships any organization can follow. 16 Customer Service Secrets We Learned at Headsets.com: The Super Pickle Way from Headsets
On Being Relevant
I had big fun last week attending the two-day Hopscotch Design Festival in Raleigh, NC. Hopscotch brought together visual communicators from lots of different backgrounds, representing every conceivable esthetic and showing off boatloads of smart, beautiful and downright nutty designs. The conference itself had no overt theme, but the sessions I attended featured information architects, software developers, architects, curators, graphic …
Twitter Changes Its Timeline Feed
When I hear “timeline,” I think immediately of Facebook, but it’s Twitter in the news recently, talking about “experimenting” with its feed. If you use Twitter’s mobile app (not the desktop), you may notice Twitter has begun offering tweets that have been favorited by someone you follow. AdAge reports that this particular experiment is focused at getting casual users to …
Brand Stories in Video
View PostAre Fewer Readers Seeing Your Facebook Posts This Week?
Last week, Facebook Product Manager Chris Turitzin announced that Facebook has tweaked its News Feed so that text-only posts from brand Pages will be seen by fewer viewers. The social media giant says we interact more when businesses post status updates that include images and links to “quality media.” So if you are an admin for your company’s Facebook page, …
What the NAACP Can Teach Us About Using Data
Did you see Ben Murray’s recent case study in Ad Age about the data-driven marketing his agency, Blue State Digital, has done recently with the NAACP? They’ve been mining their email-response data, looking for better ways to read their membership, engage their supporters and take lightning-quick advantage of The News Cycle to build response and relevance to very fluid stories. …
Does “Brand” Mean What You Think It Means?
It’s good to revisit regularly Seth Godin’s definition of brand: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that…account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer…doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.” [Read the rest of Seth’s …