Winner of the Artober Sweepstakes Giveaway Announced!

Thanks to everyone who entered. Watch the thrilling official drawing, unscripted and recorded LIVE on Halloween Night on Facebook. [If the link doesn't work, please copy and paste in your browser.]

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=676690869&v=app_2392950137#!/video/video.php?v=446907465869

Again, thanks everyone for entering, following my blogs and joining my art page on Facebook. Stay tuned for another giveaway soon.

Domino's Delivers With Truth In Advertising - No Lie!

In today's Advertising Age, an article addresses one of the most brilliant and potentially dangerous ad campaigns we've seen in some time.

With new CMO, Russell Weiner in place, the 2000+ pizza chain was in trouble. Taking a research approach the company came to painfully realize that their product sucked. They needed a major overhaul from the ground up and rather than glossing over their reputation of delivering sub-par pie, whose tastelessness was often outdone by its poor presentation and a blurring between pizza and pizza box, Domino's called it out.

For me, this speaks to the new age of conversational marketing. We don't own our brands, we can only do what we can to shape them. In today's era of social media, consumer ratings a la Yelp, and micro-publishing like this very blog here, Domino's embraced the masses, their gripes and their bad reputation and out in the public eye, turned it all around and allowed pizza fans everywhere to have a voice in the transformation.

This is probably the best example ever of a major brand embracing the power of social media and crowdsourcing and combining it with the reach and emotional impact of traditional media. Not to sounds like a socialist, but Domino's Pizza became the Pizza of the People.

With Gap's recent logo redesign debacle, and legions of social media micro publishing bashing the new design, you have to wonder - was this a true misstep in a major re-branding initiative or just a publicity stunt? Whatever it was, they sure got out there in the press - although was it truth or was it just puppet masters pulling on some strings?

One thing is for sure, Domino's addressed their brand at it's core and came out with a makeover that's driven sales up over 30% in one year. Can you say cha-ching?

Today's world is no longer about one way communications telling people what a brand should mean to them - it's a 2-way conversation that addresses brands at every conceivable touch point. The Mad Men world of smoke and mirrors is over. As marketers, our new challenge is to truly shape market-driven products and brands, that our target audiences love and buy and make part of their lives. Embrace the masses or the next time you look over your shoulder they may be coming after you with pitchforks, burning torches and a taste for your brand's blood.

To read the Advertising Age article, please visit:

http://adage.com/article?article_id=146782

Crowdsourcing Promotion Using Social Media

In yesterday’s Clickz article, “Crowdsourcing – An Efficient and Disruptive Force in Digital Marketing”, author Robin Neifield discusses the efficiencies and benefits of crowdsourcing video production for online initiatives. It made me think about a client I’m currently working with whose model is very much in the realm of crowdsourcing but on the promotional side.
With many marketers still struggling to get their heads around social media new solutions are popping up to take advantage of the social media revolution – no doubt this phenomenon came on fast and it came on big, so the lag to fully grasp and utilize social media is understandable.

The young startup I’m working with enables the social graph and the power of crowdsourcing to effectively take the guess work out of social media executions. With a CPA model – and that’s Cost Per Action, a platform agnostic technology, rewards on the user side and deep connections in the music space, they certainly seem to have all sides covered.

With around 40k monthly active users and growing fast and a user profile indicative of the social influencers so many brands are looking to reach, their advertiser appeal is already getting traction, with brands such as Airwalk and Rockstar already utilizing their platform. Imprinting their promotions within the social graph, their campaigns are inherently viral, as social media news feeds, tweets and profile postings expand the core reach to the millions. And research is pouring out over the value of social network recommendations over traditional online advertising approaches as this ‘word of mouth’ type of promotion takes messaging to the realm of the personal recommendation.

Crowdsourcing has it place in many channels in the digital space and none more powerful than marketing and promotions – the key is to create the hooks that turn the inhabitants of the crowd into your brand ambassadors and your effective digital ‘street team’ – make it worth their while, make it relevant to their lives, and create value across the chain and watch the crowd move your marketing.

Stay tuned for more information about this value-packed approach to social media marketing and if you have any questions in the meantime, email me at guywborgford@gmail.com.

Personal & Professional Branding in the Age of Social Media - Part 2

LinkedIn and Personal Branding – Part 11

Once we’ve got a head shot that doesn’t make us cringe, we need to form a tagline that sums up who we are and why we’re different. Think ad slogan and summarize to recruiters why they should buy. This tagline can also reflect our most salient keywords to increase search effectiveness on LinkedIn. Once this is done, it’s time to get to the meat of our LinkedIn and professional brand.

One of the true beauties of LinkedIn is it takes what is usually relegated to only two pages and allows you to expand on that, offering virtually unlimited space to tell your story. Rules of tight, pithy writing still apply, but here our goal changes somewhat – taking what was a highly refined document designed to summarize what’s so great about us as quickly and as succinctly as possible to a page that not only tells our story, but also packs in keywords and keyword density to optimize our LinkedIn brand for search.

What was highly edited or even left off our print resume can now be extrapolated on, added to, embellished and packed full of keywords that target our desired career move. Whereas our print piece may have had to forego consulting work, we can now add in these career points, detailing this experience with core keywords that increase our keyword density and search results.

Aside from building our text-based persona, we can also supplement our LinkedIn profile with applications that can showcase other aspects of our abilities and accomplishments. I used a combination of Microsoft PowerPoint, with Google Documents and an application on LinkedIn that allows me to embed this presentation on my LinkedIn profile. As a creative type, this allowed me to showcase some of my creative work, without having to go through the process of building and hosting a web site. It’s easy to update and gives recruiters a one-stop shop to get a solid understanding of my work and my abilities.

As a blogger, I’m also able to use LinkedIn applications to post my latest blog postings on LinkedIn – these synopses show the blog headline, first few words of text and a link to my blog, which is directly related to my industry – it all comes together easily using a combination of Blogger, Twitter and LinkedIn applications. Combined, these tools further keep my profile fresh and show prospective clients and employers how I think and possibly why I’m a great for their organization.

Building your personal and professional brand is very much like building a product or company brand. It takes thoughtful positioning, differentiation and consistency, so it’s imperative that once you’ve built your brand you stick with it over time as any marketing program worth doing needs time to take root and grow. So, build your brand, start your blog and stick with it. You may think that no one’s reading or watching, but that’s not the point – it’s about engaging with your industry, your POTENTIAL audience and above all else, yourself.

Personal Branding In The Age Of Social Media. What's Your USP?

Social media had changed the way many of us communicate. No one can debate that. And across social media sites our personality and face to the world is communicated to friends, family, co-workers, business partners, prospective employers and just about anyone else you can think of. Welcome to age of personal branding.

Personally, no where has this been more critically evident than on LinkedIn. Finding myself laid off back at the end of June, LinkedIn became a much bigger part of my life. Although consulting work took up my summer, I found myself in job search mode in September and quickly realized how the game had changed.

After meeting with my most-awesome career coach, Cindy Pain, she educated me on the value of LinkedIn and the modern mantra of the personal brand. Like product marketing, personal branding begins with determining ones differentiation in the market and USP. How are you different? What makes you tick in ways that makes most other people talk? What unique characteristics are going to make you stand out from other candidates or business partners? And why are those differences valuable? It's not an easy task - sometimes the most difficult sell is ourselves, especially when one is raised under the tenets that modestly and being humble are positive traits.

Overcoming these barriers is easy to do when one looks at the competition. How are the best in the business selling themselves? IMHO, the best don't resort to hyperbole or schmaltz, they focus on what's core to their personal brand and what's unique and then translate those characteristics into a key message of value that is then reiterated throughout all social media touch points and points of communication digital, analog and interpersonal.

For me, this process began with the development of my head shot. As a photographer, I of course had to control the process. It wasn't easy. I suddenly found myself thinking back to a episode of Seinfeld, where Jerry dated a two-face, who, depending on the lighting, looked either as pretty as a picture, or let's just say, not so pretty. To watch what I'm talking about check out this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xi9kgnvjQE

Funny stuff, but not if it's you and your personal brand we're talking about!

This is your face to the outside world, so better make it good. Try different angles, sides and lighting situations. Get the money shot then crop it for your cover to your personal brand.

Next post I'll talk about building out your brand in different ways and how to take your product to market in the most effective way possible.

Connecting to GLBT Consumers By Just Being Nice!

In today’s Advertising Age article “Why (and How) You Should Go After the Gay Dollar” author Bradley Johnson points out some solid ways GLBT consumers and their friends and family can reward companies for taking progressive stands on human equality.

According to the article, things are getting much better as we awaken as a culture that we are all just simple humans spinning out of control on this relatively little blue marble in the middle of infinity and under it all, we are equal…although arguably the GLBT community has more disposable purchasing power.

In summary the author lists five main tenets for brands to exist in peaceful and profitable coexistence with the GLBT community:

1. Don't be a hypocrite
2. Stand up for civil rights
3. Advertise in gay media
4. Be so good they say you're bad
5. Do the right thing when no one is looking

The author gives great examples of each and calls out some companies that are not cutting it – so as progressive citizens in favor of human rights, we should cut them from our shopping trips.

Despite all this, the question remains is what makes a dollar gay? Is it genetic? Are they gay when their printed at the US mint or do they become gay by being circulated around the Castro District in San Francisco? Did they have overbearing Andrew Jacksons as fathers or overprotective Alexis Hamiltons as mothers? Are these dollars naturally better dressed than their hetero dollar brothers? So many questions, so little solid research to put the debate to rest.

To read the full article visit here:
http://adage.com/article?article_id=146358

Convergence Media & The Mile High Club

With just 2 weeks to put it all together, we knew we had to scramble, yet we knew we could get it done. Flip video, the wildly popular and diminutive video recording device wanted to do something big. Their launch was 14 days away. On the calendar was AEG’s Mile High Music Festival in Denver, CO.



Working with Jay Lotz and the AEG team, our crackerjack project management team and label relations lead put together the brand experience for Flip. We cleared content capture with bands including Thievery Corporation, Ben Harper, Gogol Bordello, Matt Nathanson and Matt Kearney and as part of the content experience had the bands agree to take the Flip cameras in hand and shoot their own footage of back stage and on the podium in front of tens of thousands of music fans.


AEG ran the high def content capture of the performances, which was streamed live and distributed by taking over RealPlayer with the Flip Video Music Experience. After the show we worked with the bands and cleared tracks for on-demand video streaming, while a Mile High Online Radio Channel featured acts from across the 4 stages and 2 days.


A street team of 10 Flip Video Brand Ambassadors toured the festival grounds, shooting video of the revelers with the tiny handheld cameras. Signage, still photos and a robust online media campaign pulled it all together, delivering well over 2 million visits to the Mile High Music Festival pages and exposing the Flip Video brand to over 60,000 music festival attendees at the event.


Our Project Management goddesses, Gina Perino and Sabrina Sutherland worked around the clock uploading the latest footage onto the custom branded Flip Video Hub, while I cased out the stages to shoot photos of the artists for the Flip Video Music Experience – see a few of my shots here.


At the end of it all we surpassed our client’s expectations and pulled it all off in just under 2 weeks time. Working with pros like AEG is a big plus. They are an amazing group to work with and really went the extra ‘mile’ to take this complex program of integrated music sponsorship elements to new a new high. [Puns intended].

Can Media Silos Be Broken? I Say YES!

An commentary in yesterday’s AdAge speaks to a core issue plaguing marketers today. Ellen Oppenheim speaks about the silos prevalent in advertising and marketing communication and how rarely is there synergy across media that seamlessly blends the media and engages the consumers with a common creative thread and message, regardless of platform.

In my experience, the core issue begins with strategy. In this critical phase I think too many marketers are looking at media as separate entities and although across media there may be overarching goals and objectives, strategists are still addressing creative as separate communication points, depending on the medium.

It’s time for agencies to stop thinking about how they can out-smart their competition with creative that edgier, funnier or just more outlandish. That’s all great and imperative to the industry as a communication forum, but now is the time to address the one component of marketing communications that drives all others – the audience.

In today’s world of fragmented audiences and rich and engaging media on the go, digital billboards, social experiences, deep integration and memorable sponsorship opportunities, marketers need to think audience first. It seems like a no-brainer but I see not too many signs that this is truly top of mind.

So, what the heck am I talking about?

In the strategic phase it all starts with the target. Duh! Who are they? Where do they go? How do THEY communicate? What makes THEM shout out? What gives THEM goosebumps? Getting inside their skin and into their lives gives marketers a tapestry of their social lives and lets face it – regardless of how amazing TV creative is, or how cutting edge a mobile program may be - it’s what the audience does or how they feel after exposure to the message that really counts, otherwise why advertise?

Providing value and choice to become part of the conversation goes hand in hand. TV, needs to hook to mobile, mobile needs to hook to web, web needs to hook to social, social needs to hook to print or even DR – and by providing a perceived value to the target that we know hits their hot buttons – and multiple ways to join in that conversation, depending on that consumer’s preferred method of discourse, we set the stage for the promise of 1:1 consumer communication, shaping our brands around what our target consumers really want.

Now that’s a mouthful capable of chomping away at any silo.

Link to the original post here:

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=146284


What do YOU think?

Artober Art Sweepstakes Giveaway - 4 Easy Ways To Win!

Artoberest Original Art Giveaway!

4 easy ways to win!

Yes, it’s time for a shameless self-promotion – but there’s something in it for YOU! There are 4 easy ways your can win the original painting shown here - if any of the links don't work for you, just copy and paste the URL into your browser:

1. Everyone who follows my media blog @ http://guywborgford.blogspot.com/ is automatically entered to win this original painting by yours truly – me! All you have to do is click the ‘Follow’ button and get entered to win.

2. Double your chances of winning by following my art and design blog here:
http://modmandesign.blogspot.com/

3. And get yet another chance by ‘liking’ my art page on Facebook here:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=676690869&v=app_7723691927#!/group.php?gid=199778103672

4. Are you a Tweeter? Get your fourth chance to win by following me on twitter here:
http://twitter.com/gborgford

You never have to read a word I write, just add me, follow me and like me. Does that sound desperate? It’s not – it’s marketing, peeps!

On Halloween night, I’m taking all the entries and drawing the prize for this 24”x36” acrylic on canvas piece entitled “Grass and The Hoppers” approximate value $750.00.

Your chances of winning are dependent on the number of ways you sign up and the total number of entries. Got a partner? Get them to enter to and double up your chances…kids…get them to sign up too and get the whole family in on it! It’s easy and your chances of winning are awesome! Sure it’s not a payday like the lottery, but winning is always FUN and I’m getting old, so once I croak, this painting could be worth MILLION$. OK, maybe not millions, but maybe a few bucks.

So, don’t hesitate. Follow my blogs, LIKE my art Facebook page and follow my tweets and you could WIN!

Thanks and have a great week!

Guy

Social Media and Direct Response - Mashing Up Old and New

Mashable recently posted an article about driving response through social media marketing initiatives. It took me back to my old-skool direct response print days and at the same time, brought in my years of experience developing and creating interactive direct response programs for clients.

With the advent of social media, the old-skool rules of DR still come into play. I think what happens is marketers continue to think that it's about getting the LIKE, or the SHARE. In the case of the mashable post, their goal was getting donations and that's where the focus needed to be from the get-go. All the Likes and Shares don't mean squat unless what's being shared is the call to action to donate and a direct link to a page where people can drop their credit card.

The mashing up of social media initiatives and a DR calls to action necessitates discipline. One needs to define ONE action at a time. If donating is the key action, then messaging in social media needs to center around that...not LIKES, not posting or anything else. For those who donate online it needs to be made easy for them to then post to their social graphs that they donated...and the resulting link back needs to go directly to the donation page and call to action. The more steps we expect consumers to take, the more likely they are to fall off our path.

Read the original article here:

http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=210062532&gid=3359796&type=member&item=30886010&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2F2010%2F09%2F28%2Fsocial-media-conversion-science%2F&urlhash=nSRi&goback=.gde_3359796_member_30886010