Blog Archives - Brandsplat

January 18, 2010 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Is your blog a happiness machine?

I came across this really cool advertising stunt by Coca-Cola. The marketing geniuses responsible for the event rigged a Coca-cola vending machine to gave out extra goodies to college students who put their hard earned college coinage into the machine.Â Students who visited the machine got a bevy of freebees designed to make people smile: free bottles of Coke, a pizza, a bouquet of sunflowers, even a very large sub. Imagine if your blog, website or social media campaign followed this same format. Instead of just regurgitating the same stuff over and over, what if a blog or a website or a social media campaign gave you doses of happiness. Okay, you don’t have to spread happiness, but you should strive to make people feel something. Whether you make them laugh, cry or get angry, you are doing what the Coke Machine is doing. You are getting people to engage with your brand. When people come to your site, blog or Facebook page expecting the same-old stuff and you give them a dose of something more…. bonus! And what do you get in return? You get loyalty, readership, engagement and possibly one more person out there who likes you. It’s a simple yet powerful lesson, one that i will aspire to practice as a marketer. So what have you done to spread the good stuff around?

January 8, 2010 By splatter 1 Comment

The online brand building wheel.

If you’re a savvy digital marketer, it’s not enough to have a great website. That’s a given. The name of the game today is expanding your reach beyond your main site. If you start to think of your main site as a hub, and other digital assets like Facebook fan pages, blogs, email campaigns, etc. as spokes or offshoots from the hub, then you’re on the right track. Like a spoke, the additional digital property should be robust enough to support the hub, or your main site. The more spokes you have, the more marketing muscle. If you think of it, digital assets like Facebook and Twitter can cross-over in many areas thus offering a double-whammie. For example, you can automatically send your tweets to your Facebook fan site to keep your fans in the loop. You can also take content like blog entries and post them on your facebook site. In effect, your spokes are can and should cross each other to add support to your hub. Why do this? Here are a couple of reasons:

1) Multiple Entry Points. Some people are on Facebook all day long and consider Twitter a waste of time. The converse is true too. So why limit yourself to one or the other? By spreading your content across multiple platforms, you make it easier for people to interact with your brand.

2) Spreadable Content. If you have a great blog post, why not share it with your closest followers on Twitter or Facebook. Be careful though, you don’t want to bombard your friends with shameless self promotion. As long as your content is good enough, people will be open to a link to your blog. So spread away.

3) Cross-Promote. Let’s say you just created a great YouTube video about the latest widget your company just created on a shoe string budget. Why just use the YouTube platform to promote it? Announcing your opus on Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc., may expose your video to an entirely new audience that would have never come across it. It’s a no brainer.

Having your content spread across multiple platforms can help SEO and can make it easier for people to find you. It can also establish a lasting digital footprint across the web and on search engines. As long as you are creating killer content, why not roll it out in more than one way. Get it? Roll it out. Wheel. Never mind.

November 24, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Street signs, content and the art of stopping eyeballs.

you_are_beautiful

What makes good content? I can wax on and give you the latest ten tips for making great content, but instead I’m going over simplify it because I’m in that kind of mood. Content is just like art. There’s good art and there’s bad art, depending on your perspective. My perspective is I like the kind of art that takes an everyday object and gives it a twist that in turn gets a reaction out of me. Any reaction will do. Here’s an example; I came across a post that documents unique street signs in Lyon, France.Â Â I’ve passed street signs with the international cross-out symbol like these in my travels abroad and here at home as well, yet I have never stopped to take notice of the design. In a matter of milliseconds, my eyes see the sign, synapses fire off registering it as a sign, I may or may not heed the instruction, then the eyeballs get bored and find something else to feed off of. Poof, forgotten seconds after the experience. But these French signs are memorable. There’s a lesson here. Content should be thought of in the same way. Why not approach your next article, newsletter, video, social media campaign etc., with the same kind of goal? Take the everyday concept and put your own personal spin on it. Recycling the same old information that anyone can find on the intertubes is easy. Coming up with a unique angle on a concept takes a heck of a lot more effort and creativity. Do the latter. If you do it right, people may just stop and take notice.

September 8, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Content drives content that drives content.

newtons_cradle

I came across two articles on IKEA this weekend. The Swedish mega-brand is known for their propensity to attach umlauts to furniture names and also for their acumen in advertising and marketing. So is it just serendipity that I came across two related articles on the Swedish home furnishing manufacturer this weekend while perusing the news? Or is it a well-crafted PR maneuver? Or could it be something else entirely? When researching Blog material, I get to spend countless hours perusing news and entertainment stories from traditional sources like magazines, newspapers, press releases and news wires as well as non-traditional outlets like other blogs, micro-blogs and online videos. I’ve also noticed that news articles on specific topics (like IKEA, for example) spike the interest of journalists at the same time. Journalists often reference recent stories and craft their own spin on the news piece. For example, in today’s Los Angeles times there was an IKEA related article referencing how IKEA is able to garner a billion impressions over the last year by keeping in the news. A few days before, I was reading the paper edition (yes, I still read the pulp) of the New York Times and came across an article discussing IKEA’s recent typeface change to their catalog. Today I did a quick search and found similar stories on TIME, NPR , CBS News and ABC news just to name a few. The reason for the flurry of IKEA activity? Often times these stories are coming from the same source like a news wire. Back in the old days, news wouldÂ come in on a ticker tape-style machine that newspapers had hooked up in their offices and they would use those stories to fill the pages of their editions, or they would use them as a jumping off point for a new story. Today, you can get the same kind of news experience on any number of newsfeed services with the click of a keyboard mouse. While you may think this creates the same content over and over, it does more than that. In the case of the Los Angeles Times article mentioned above, it comes at the story from a local angle. While the story opens with a reference to the “typeface change” , the LA times gives it a localized stance and they do their own research and interviews to make the story a rich reading experience. You can say one story begets another with a different perspective. I think this is a good thing. People like me come to the LA Times for the local perspective and want to see the world through the lens of an Angelino. While some may argue that news with a perspective is opinion, I would reply that you cannot extract perspective from anything. Even in the history books, we are reading accounts from an individual or a group of people who had the perspective of the event that would later become history. Or we are getting the readers perspective. Having the ability to have multiple points of perspective allows the reader to sift through the content and come up with their own perspective. And so on.

August 12, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Brandcasting. Launch your brand into the blogosphere. (Part 3 of 7).

One of the most effective ways to spread content about your brand on the Internet is to write a blog.Â Blogging can be a great way to distribute information and good content about your industry. Often times a blog is a good way to set a tone for a brand and allows readers to interact with a real human being within the company. Blogging is a good format to write relevant blog entries that are timely and/or time sensitive. You can easily set up a blog for free. Sites like WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal are among the most popular services that can help you get started. There are others to choose from, so do your own research to find one that’s best for you.

Think of your blog like a daily newspaper. Daily newspapers rely on breaking news and rich/relevant content to attract a growing audience. This is the same strategy you should keep in mind when writing a blog. The idea here is to attract readers who want to check in on a daily basis because your blog is relevant to them, their industry or their likes and dislikes. This can be a time consuming, yet rewarding proposition. If you don’t have the time to write daily entries, you may want to hire a writer who is knowledgeable in your field and employ them to write blog entries that are on topic for you. Or, you may want to consider having a stable of writers, much like a newspaper, who can come at a certain subject from various angles. Successful blogs like the Huffington PostÂ employ this kind of strategy and are able to offer rich content by multiple sources and differing points of view.

The next thing you want to keep in mind is that your loyal readers may want to have an interactive experience with your blog. Think of the Op Ed section of a newspaper. Newspapers will often print opinions of readers in order to give them a voice, and also to get feedback from their readership. You can do this by allowing your readers to comment on your blog entries and to post these comments on your blog. Sometimes readers may post irrelevant comments to your blog. In this case you may choose not to publish comments or simply delete them. The beauty of a blog is that you have total control of the content.

Once you have gotten your feet wet, you may want to consider commenting on other blogs that relate to the subject matter on your blog. This may help you build strong relationships with other experts in your field and will also help build a community of bloggers and readers who are passionate about your industry. It’s often a good idea to offer up intelligent comments to other blogs and hope that they reciprocate on your blog. Linking back to other bloggers and having them link back to you can also help your ranking as search engines will deem your content relevant, thus ranking you higher on search lists.

August 7, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Lifecasters do it with the lights on or off.

You think you spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, your iphone, etc. You probably don’t hold a candle to a new breed of interneterati called “lifecasters” or “lifestreamers” . According to Wikipedia “lifecasting is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media.” Many lifecasters transmit web content 24 hours a day, whether they’re awake or not, through more than one medium. Live video is the preferred medium for most lifecasters, but an ever-increasing number of this group employ social networking like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and blogging, texting and emailing in conjunction with live video feeds. According to a news article in The Press of Atlantic City lifecasters come in all walks of life.Â “Experts say social-networking junkies — people consumed with e-mailing, texting, tweeting, blogging, podcasting and videoing — are everywhere. They’re college students, marketing professionals and journalists. They’re attention-seeking extroverts and anxiety-ridden introverts. They’re young; they’re old.” If this trend takes hold in the mainstream I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we’ll be able to follow the Burger King mascot on his daily routine via a live video stream. Although I’m not so sure I want to watch “The King” walk into a bathroom whilst I nibble on my whopper.Â For now, we’ll just have to settle on bk tweets from the crowned one.

The online brand building wheel.

Follow Us

Street signs, content and the art of stopping eyeballs.

Follow Us

Content drives content that drives content.

Follow Us

Brandcasting. Launch your brand into the blogosphere. (Part 3 of 7).

Follow Us

Lifecasters do it with the lights on or off.

Follow Us