Blogger 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?

September 17, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Hot off the press. Traditional media still king.

According to the 2009 State of the First Amendment Survey, most Americans prefer getting their news from traditional media.Â Â In a recent press release, Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center said,

“…while new forms of obtaining information, including Twitter and social media are much discussed and growing in use, most Americans continue to rely on the same news organizations — including the news reports picked up by online news providers — on which they have relied for decades.”

This is not surprising since the majority of overall advertising budgets are still spent on traditional media, and only a fraction goes to new media. Wherever the most eyeballs go, so goes the budgets. But that small fraction continues to expand and will continue to grow as more people turn to the Internet for their information and entertainment needs. Some traditional media outlets have radically changed their models and have incorporated digital strategies like social media and blogging as part of their news network and are working with bloggers and tweeters to better take advantage of the digital frontier. However, some media sources, like AP News, are trying to regulate their content by putting forth strict guidelines designed to control how their stories are spread across the Internet. Last year, popular site TechCrunch announced it would ban articles and information coming from AP news in response to actions taken by AP News against a popular news aggregate which used their content without permission. More recently, TechCrunch wrote an interesting article titled,Â “Behind The A.P.’s Plan To Become The Web’s News Cop”.Â Also, in a recent ibrandcasting post, I wrote about popular bloggers in Germany who released a manifesto that appears to directly challenge traditional news outlets like AP News and promotes the free flow of information. The role of traditional media in the digital landscape is still a bit blurry. Whether traditional media embraces new technology or tries to mold it as they see fit, one thing is for sure; in the card game of news, traditional media still holds a pretty decent hand.

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.