Last week I attended the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview, as I typically do each year. While not the block-buster event of years past, attendance for the charity event rebounded some and over $2.5 million dollars was raised to support those in need.

More than ever before, new ways of thinking about the automobile were showcased and this picture of a three-wheeled car epitomizes the changing mood of this industry and the willingness of the public to consider what was never considered in the past (or even laughed at).

The same mood is washing over the marketing industry and our clients. For the small marketing firm, this “mood swing” has swung open the door of opportunity where previously gatekeepers once stood (you know who you are!). Our biggest challenge of 2010 will be taking advantage of this opportunity and meeting the demands of clients whose doors we didn’t dare dream of walking through last year. The key to success is collaboration—with other small companies, with big companies, with freelance talent. Collaboration will drive innovation and creativity in the marketing space—to service those leading the economic recovery.

A bit Pollyanna for those of you who know me, but I think 2010 will be a rockin’ year for marketers in more ways that one!

I’m totally scamming this from Social Media Insider and want to give them credit…but AMEN! Here it is, my friends: 100 WAYS TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA!! (good marketing partners will sit down and determine which of these—or which combination—help you reach your business objectives):

1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts
2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions
3. Shift in buzz over time
4. Buzz by time of day / daypart
5. Seasonality of buzz
6. Competitive buzz
7. Buzz by category / topic
8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)
9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)
10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)
11. Mainstream media mentions
12. Fans
13. Followers
14. Friends
15. Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends
16. Rate of virality / pass-along
17. Change in virality rates over time
18. Second-degree reach (connections to fans, followers, and friends exposed – by people or impressions)
19. Embeds / Installs
20. Downloads
21. Uploads
22. User-initiated views (e.g., for videos)
23. Ratio of embeds or favoriting to views
24. Likes / favorites
25. Comments
26. Ratings
27. Social bookmarks
28. Subscriptions (RSS, podcasts, video series)
29. Pageviews (for blogs, microsites, etc)
30. Effective CPM based on spend per impressions received
31. Change in search engine rankings for the site linked to through social media
32. Change in search engine share of voice for all social sites promoting the brand
33. Increase in searches due to social activity
34. Percentage of buzz containing links
35. Links ranked by influence of publishers
36. Percentage of buzz containing multimedia (images, video, audio)
37. Share of voice on social sites when running earned and paid media in same environment
38. Influence of consumers reached
39. Influence of publishers reached (e.g., blogs)
40. Influence of brands participating in social channels
41. Demographics of target audience engaged with social channels
42. Demographics of audience reached through social media
43. Social media habits/interests of target audience
44. Geography of participating consumers
45. Sentiment by volume of posts
46. Sentiment by volume of impressions
47. Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs
48. Languages spoken by participating consumers
49. Time spent with distributed content
50. Time spent on site through social media referrals
51. Method of content discovery (search, pass-along, discovery engines, etc)
52. Clicks
53. Percentage of traffic generated from earned media
54. View-throughs
55. Number of interactions
56. Interaction/engagement rate
57. Frequency of social interactions per consumer
58. Percentage of videos viewed
59. Polls taken / votes received
60. Brand association
61. Purchase consideration
62. Number of user-generated submissions received
63. Exposures of virtual gifts
64. Number of virtual gifts given
65. Relative popularity of content
66. Tags added
67. Attributes of tags (e.g., how well they match the brand’s perception of itself)
68. Registrations from third-party social logins (e.g., Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth)
69. Registrations by channel (e.g., Web, desktop application, mobile application, SMS, etc)
70. Contest entries
71. Number of chat room participants
72. Wiki contributors
73. Impact of offline marketing/events on social marketing programs or buzz
74. User-generated content created that can be used by the marketer in other channels
75. Customers assisted
76. Savings per customer assisted through direct social media interactions compared to other channels (e.g., call centers, in-store)
77. Savings generated by enabling customers to connect with each other
78. Impact on first contact resolution (FCR) (hat tip to Forrester Research for that one)
79. Customer satisfaction
80. Volume of customer feedback generated
81. Research & development time saved based on feedback from social media
82. Suggestions implemented from social feedback
83. Costs saved from not spending on traditional research
84. Impact on online sales
85. Impact on offline sales
86. Discount redemption rate
87. Impact on other offline behavior (e.g., TV tune-in)
88. Leads generated
89. Products sampled
90. Visits to store locator pages
91. Conversion change due to user ratings, reviews
92. Rate of customer/visitor retention
93. Impact on customer lifetime value
94. Customer acquisition / retention costs through social media
95. Change in market share
96. Earned media’s impact on results from paid media
97. Responses to socially posted events
98. Attendance generated at in-person events
99. Employees reached (for internal programs)
100. Job applications received

DON’T LET ANYONE (EVEN YOUR AGENCY) TELL YOU IT CAN’T BE MEASURED.

Blown away by this guy’s candidness… pretty rough but he’s right on. We’re not here to give you pretty graphics, we’re here to provide solutions to your problems. If that solution is a pretty graphic then you bet it’ll be an amazing graphic. But first and foremost… how can we at A Few Good Marketers help you solve your business problem?

PLUS – I love the “If you can’t handle the truth.” It’s perfect for us for, well, obvious reasons!

Attendance Through The Roof

The first ever East English Village home tour was a huge success. Highlighting the architecture, amenities and community organization, “The Other Village Home Tour” was instrumental in bringing over 200 fresh new eyes to the small village located on Detroit’s East Side. Featuring distressed sale homes, the tour was meant to shine a spotlight on the real-estate gems available in the neighborhood.

A Few Good Marketers played a key role in the branding and marketing of the event, originally estimated by experienced tour organizers to draw 50 – 75 people. By 3pm the day before the tour, 175 had registered online. By the time the tour had closed the total attendance was 220, an increase of 293% over the original estimate.

A Few Good Marketers  participated in planning meetings a few months before and leading up to the event, and was responsible for all print and interactive work for the tour that included: Website for information and registration, tour day pamphlets, association brochures (that can be used year-round), directional event signage, tour posters, and advertisements in local publications The Metro Times and Between The Lines.

The tour included 4 houses ,  4 garden rest stops with food, beverages and entertainment, and a registration home that displayed the  ”Kennedy Rug,” a vintage needlepoint that Jacqueline Kennedy purchased and used in the White House. Two packed buses made two circuits each of the tour route, one with your’s truly co-guiding with megaphone.

More about East English Village here http://www.eastenglishvillage.org

You can also visit the tour site we created for the event here http://www.eastenglishvillage.org/tour

I was talking to a colleague the other day (who is with a major agency in town) and we were commenting on how the business of being an ad agency is going through a world of change.  A much needed change.  As the owner and partner in an independent marketing firm (some call us a small agency), we’ve had to refine our business model to fit the economic and client climate of today—just to put food on our tables.  Maybe it’s that sort of imperative that has eventually come to the ad agency world, with clients who are willing to ‘shop around RFPs’ after 75+ years of remarkable service.  Mind you, not every ad was remarkable, but I’ve made my rounds and every major agency I’ve worked for has over-serviced their clients with little gratitude in return.  What is an agency to do?

It has to consider the type of model we use at A Few Good Marketers—and one I’m sure many small businesses have come to master.  We are a virtual company, so we have mastered the fine are of free applications on the web;  free file sharing, free large file transfers, free email, free conference calls, free video calls, free content management platforms for our client websites…and the list goes on.  This mean we have remarkably low overhead—as in, almost none at all, relatively speaking.  We’ve also mastered the art of churning project work which is not a model well suited to support extravagant offices and employment perks.  It takes careful business planning and an investment in business development as a core competency.   And in order to service this project machine, we’ve had to master the use of contract talent.  Now, agencies are used to the freelance world for creative talent, but we’re using contractors for all lines of work—from strategy to PR to development.  And we get to match our talent with exactly what the client needs.  Imagine that!  We don’t have to use the copy guy down the hall who simply cannot write to a female audience or the developer or pushes everything into .NET because he’s a Microsoft junkie.  We just pick the right talent for the job.  And then we pay them just for that job.  And then we move on to the next project.

We’ve also had to learn how to manage a talent pool and workforce in disparate locations who are not connected under some European parent umbrella company and beholden to work together.  But—surprise!—there are plenty of seriously talented individuals seeking work who provide outstanding contributions to client deliverables.  Sometimes, we deliver projects for clients and never actually see or meet with our talent in person.  That’s right.  They are hundreds of miles away, but just one click away on the other end of Skype if we need them.  Being able to walk down the hall and see your production team hard at work is over-rated and over-priced.

The client benefits in all of this obvious to us because we believe it is our strength.  We can deliver diversity in talent, ideas and creative while dedicating the majority of the client’s budget to actual work deliverables instead of paying for overhead.  We can quickly morph our team into the talent set that is needed as marketing/advertising needs ebb and flow.  We believe many clients today have the ‘food on the table’ imperative and see opportunity in the changing marketplace of communication services.  In the end, great ideas and great work will prevail, but it might be found in new places or unlikely partnerships.

http://www.afewgoodmarketers.com

Helping out a great, local community here in Detroit

A Few Good Marketers is helping out a local community showcase their abandoned homes in an effort to get people to move in. East English Village is a great area of Detroit with about 3000 unique, hand-crafted homes build in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s.

Residents and organizers are excited to show off their neighborhood and are looking forward to attracting new families and professionals to their community.

A Showcase Home will be featured on the tour with furnishings from McGlaughlin’s, carpets from The Original Hagopian and design elements from Elegance By Design of Ferndale. Also featured in the registration home will be the Kennedy Rug, an exquisite needlepoint creation of rich colors and elegant detail formerly in place at the West Wing of the John F. Kennedy White House. In the
early sixties, the rug was a familiar accent in a room that entertained dignitaries, astronauts, as well as the Kennedy family.

A Few Good Marketers is handling all aspects of advertising, PR and interactive for the organization as service to the community. Work also includes facebook, twitter and flickr accounts that are fed and managed by the AFGM staff.

Want to go on the tour? Simply register at www.eastenglishvillage.org/tour and show up on tour day. Attendance is free and you’ll be amazed by this Detroit neighborhood, its architecture and community.

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A Few Good Marketers goes to AdTech

Well that was an interesting trip. Patty and I spent the day at Navy Pier in Chicago this past Tuesday meeting and learning, finding new solutions for our client. Interesting show and some great products despite a pretty low turnout.

Brafton Custom News

Pretty great resource for custom news with Brafton Custom News. This company creates custom news for your webites and newsletters in your industry. Basically it’s like hiring a taff of writers to help your organization become information leaders. Totally customizeable for your business, this would be a great asset for many of our clients.

iSpeakVideo

Nothing new here… but I really like the product, quick turnaround times and low cost of this solution. If you’ve ever used avatars to help explain a complicated product or service like I have, then you’ll appreciate this company. iSpeakVideo

Windy City Social

Hope Bertram founded Windy City Social and we met up with her at the show. Hope’s group helps out companies in the greater Chicago area grow their businesses through networking events and online communities. Check them out..

Neat little site for very nice horse stables up north.

Holly Hansz-Ax is a really cool lady certified to teach and train. This is a truly beautiful place to board and train your horse.

This is Holly’s first website, and we created a new logo/brand for her company, Horse Dreamers. We like the wood-grained horse… how about you?

You can visit them at www.horsedreamers.net

Its the thing that nags at marketers.  That always comes back to haunt us if we don’t do it.  Yep, its setting metrics with a client BEFORE the campaign.  I’ve always been a big fan of setting metrics and objectives up front–but sometimes a great idea or cool execution gets in the way of understanding what what success metrics should be.  There’s lots of great discussion going on today with social media, the various ways to measure the medium, what really constitutes success.  The bottom line is that you and your client define success.  Together.   This is a good discussion on the various ways ’success’ can be viewed–and makes the point that strategic objectives evolve over time, and so do metrics.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=110475

We just launched a site for a really cool client, Diligence Ready (www.diligenceready.com).

This is an service that allows companies and investors to track all records needed to sell, and have the documentation ready at a moments notice.

Not that it’s related, but it reminds me of an interview I read with Warren Buffet a few years back. In it was described a transaction he managed that took only 1 month: The acquisition of a billion dollar company. He said something like if you couldn’t complete a purchase or merger in a short time frame it wasn’t worth doing. I always remembered that.

Diligence Ready is a tool that will help investors gauge when a company is ready to sell, and provide all the documentation necessary asap. A very cool project indeed!

Michael Singer, our client and founder of Leapfrog Holdings, LLC, had this to say about our services. “As a small business owner myself, I can appreciate the professionalism, affordability and flexibility that working with A Few Good Marketers provides. I get the benefit of big agency experience without the big agency prices—it’s just the right fit.”

The site was built out in Wordpress so that the Leapfrog team can update the site at will.

Thanks Mike!

I hate to add yet another marketing  fad to my vocabulary, but I loved this AdAge story on using “social video marketing.”

 

The story focused on a viral video Samsung shot –using their new cell phone’s HD camcorder – and posted to YouTube. The video concludes with an optical illusion and a challenge: figure out how they did it. Naturally, watching the video again in high definition helps.  

So far, 1 million people have watched the video on YouTube alone, and 2,000 people posted comments. According to AdAge, the average viewing time was actually more than the run time, indicating that people paused, rewound, and rewatched the clip over and over again. I can’t remember the last television ad I watched even once (thank you, TiVo), much less twice!

A few weeks later, Samsung posted another video, revealing the secret of the trick. Note how the “secret” perfectly supports the product attributes of the HD camera phone. Also note how many people invested a lot of time looking for clues … noticing details like sock color and garden gnome position.

Very, very cool.

Video: The Samsung HD challenge

Video: The “secret” revealed!

This past March when I was up at 3am during one project’s development phase, struggling to come up with something that was original, not boring and still tactful, I became frustrated. Sometimes the creative juices just seem to be on vacation, or asleep. For me, there seems to be no magic key, scientific method or steps to take to trick the creativity. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Sometimes I do what I did that early morning and turn to the web. I typed “writers block for graphic designers.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk is what I found. And what a find!

Immediately I sent this link out to all of my friends and colleagues. Some of them are my partners here in A Few Good Marketers, some of them are in our extended network of designers, project managers and biz dev folks, and some were some of my friends who, by their own account, are not “creative.” Not surprisingly, all designers loved it. Also not surprisingly, everyone else didn’t watch it because they felt it didn’t apply to them.

“I’m not creative.”

That’s what I found so compelling about this speech. It is focused on artists and performers, but can also be applied to everyone. An accountant trying to balance an extremely complicated bank account would be called “a genius” if he balanced it to the penny.

So it is in this spirit that I share this video once again. No matter what your profession or job, you can take something positive from this talk.

And thank you, Elizabeth Gilbert, for and entertaining and inspirational 10 minutes!

StrongMail Systems, Inc., released new survey data that points to the emergence of social media as a direct marketing channel and a significant planned investment in email marketing and social media programs in the second half of 2009.

500 marketers, responding to an online survey from May 21 to June 1, 2009, report a wide-spread reach for ownership of social media within the various facets of marketing:

• 29% of respondents state that social media responsibility is owned by multiple departments
• 36% of survey respondents state that the direct marketing department owns social media
• 9% of the respondents report that social media is owned by public relations departments
• 5% have a dedicated social media department

The survey revealed that social media is a hot initiative with email marketers, with 66% planning to integrate the two channels in 2009, and 48% who have already formulated a strategy for achieving this initiative. Of marketers planning to increase budgets in 2009, 83% will increase spend in email marketing, followed by social media at 62%.

There is still widespread confusion regarding how a social media strategy for email marketing should be implemented, notes the report:

• 55% of respondents report that one of their biggest challenges with integrating social media and email marketing is determining metrics by which to measure success
• 48% say establishing business goals for the program is the biggest challenge

Social media has grown to the stage where it needs an owner and a purpose within marketing, concludes the report. StrongMail believes that the intrinsic interconnection between social media and email make it an ideal direct channel, as Email continues to drive engagement in social networks by alerting members of new content and updates. And, says the report, the ability to communicate relevant messages within social networks is critical to a business’ success in the medium.

Ryan Deutsch, vice president of strategic services and market development, concludes that “Leveraging social media is a valuable tool for meeting direct marketing objectives… but needs to be tied to metrics such as purchases, new customer acquisition or customer retention… in line with the business’s overall direct marketing objectives.”

Wow, do you remember Letraset?

I just read this article from the NYT (published back in Feb) about how much graphic design has changed over the past 20 years with the introduction of new technologies. Michael Beirut is probably close to 20 years older than me, but I’m young enough to remember letraset, pencils and erasers. OH and onion skin.

Beirut reminisces and quickly ponders what may be lost with current computer technologies. I too have had this thought. One of my greatest obstacles in design when I first started college was learning how to just start drawing. I wanted to draw the final product. My first viscom teacher gave me very sage advice, advice that sticks with me today when starting out a project on my trusty computer.

Here it is: JUST START. Put the pencil down and start sketching. Sketch a bubble diagram if you have to, draw a cartoon of you working on the project, write out the name of the project over and over again. I don’t care, just start something. In many ways this is how I still work even if it isn’t a pencil and onionskin. If I’m starting a website project, sometimes I jump ahead and start playing with typography, art and homepage themes. It’s something to get the creative juices flowing, and for a visual person, that is very important.

Anyway, just a quick thought and my own personal take on this article. And a chance to post a picture of a used letraset page…CAN YOU BELIEVE WE USED TO DO THIS?

AFGM just launched a new site for The Villages of Detroit CDC in downtown Detroit. Check it out and let us know what you think!

The AICP (Association of Independent Commercial Producers) awarded the Best Commercial Award on Tuesday night to this ad from Cadbury. Have you see this before?

It’s interesting that I was just having this conversation the other day with someone about memorable commercials. It’s important to get key messaging out, but also important not to put people to sleep. There’s a big difference between a great, memorable advertisement and a funny, memorable bit. One just has to be funny… the other has to motivate you to go out an buy something.

Ok so it’s not that simple. But you get the picture. I just find it amazing how well this commercial combines something so simply entertaining, no seeming connection to chocolate or any food for that matter, with a strong message. Cadbury = fun. “Look how much fun this is. You could have fun like this too. Oh how can you do that? Go buy a Cadbury bar. Oh and tell your friends how cool this commercial is.”

What a cool area of business we work in!

The New Yorker goes New Age.

A relatively new application for the iPhone was used to create the cover of the New Yorker, the New York Times reports this morning.

WOW. Completely on the iphone. Not on a Mac with a stylus, on a small screen with a finger.

This got me to wondering just how portable things will soon get for us creative types. It wasn’t long ago that anyone creating graphics or art pieces were chained to a desk and a large workstation or mac. I personally work off a laptop because, well, I’m fickle and like to change scenery. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that 6 years ago… laptops just couldn’t support my software demands. Now it’s me that can’t trip up my laptop… believe me I’ve tried (All programs open… large files… nothin’ Not even a slight whine from my pc).

Still… that tiny screen. How in the heck did he get so precise? How exactly did he get the fine lines plus the large smudges in this piece? Amazing to me. So amazing I paid the $4.99 for the app and have been playing around with it ever since. It’s pretty amazing. You can zoom to get the detail, or use a transparency on your stroke to get a watercolor effect.  Some of my initial try-outs are below from my Flickr stream.

We won’t be comping ad campaigns from the phone anytime soon, but this is still pretty amazing. You can check out the story on the cover here… it has an awesome movie showing the steps the artist took to create the piece.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/05/jorge-colombo-iphone-cover.html

Here are my iPhone sketches… maybe more to come:

Ad Age posted a great column about the “basics” of Public Relations for clients, such as “PR Doesn’t Replace Advertising,” and “You Can’t Control the Message.” More interesting to me was the growth in PR-related spending in 2008:

Marketers are spending more on PR and getting excited about it, too. Talk of “earned media” has gone from conference rooms at PR shops to center stage at the Ad Age Digital Conference. Veronis Suhler said that U.S. spending on PR rose 7.1% in 2008. WPP noted PR was the fastest-growing discipline, and the holding company was up 17.3% in the discipline in 2008.

These numbers illustrate an ongoing trend in the marketing industry as the internet shifts corporate communications from mass advertising to two-way conversations with customers. This will cause marketers to increasingly shift resources in to “Public Relations” as a way to talk with their customers, rather than at them.

http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=136530

In these topsy turvy economic times, a “clean sheet of paper” in business can be down right daunting. Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change, recently blogged about the two different approaches to a “clean sheet of paper.”

Whether you are rebranding or reengineering your company, developing a new marketing campaign, or just digging deeper in the trenches in an efffort to weather the storm, that clean sheet of paper needs a basic strategy to drive your attack plan. Right now, your organization needs direction and the very best thinking. Accountability and ownership will win out over waiting for someone else to decide now more than ever. And it always helps to surround yourself with creative and innovative thinkers.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/a-clean-sheet-of-paper.html

A couple of weeks ago, Phil Johnson wrote a great piece on social media and the difficulties in implementing social media programs on behalf of clients. Like many of us, Phil’s agency was talking the talk, but not walking the walk. A number of new books and recently published case studies are opening client minds to this new platform for brand conversation—and as big brands make public their social media results, marketers will be challenged to make room for this channel in their brands strategy work. Everyone should start playing around!

http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=136559

We’re here setting up the booth for the show. Just put up the video screens and they look AWESOME (rotating long-form infomercials… pretty cool!)

Brian is going to tape video segments at the show promoting the client, including interviews with me, Monte and Mary as we go to seminars. I’m not sure what seminar I’m going to yet. I better look thin though, Kallies!

This show is at Moscone West in San Francisco. We were here just last year for NADA and had a great show then. I know we’ll have another great one here.

We just got into the hotel and we’re already on a conference call in my room. Look I haven’t even unpacked.

This is going to be a great show! We’ve got Brian Kallies taping video segments again (I’ll be on it too yikes), and a really cool booth. Me and I are going to be doing alot of shopping in our minivan…thank god I’m a good driver and never get lost. Ahem.

Here we were last night at the step-and-repeat of the premiere party for Pitchmen. This awesome new show stars Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan, and our client is the lead sponsor for the premiere party. We worked closely with the event planners to create several cool elements, including a martini bar, press waiting area and a microsite with live streaming video from the event.

Here we are in Chicago at the Home & Housewares show. We’ve coordinated an awards program for our client. It’s going to be pretty cool!

Check it out… that’s Billy Mays and Anthony “Sully” Sullivan demonstrating the Dual Saw. MSNBC is taping it! Mary is in the background… can you see her?

Our client talking about the cool iPod touch we customized. All of their clients at the show were linked with customized accounts through Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.

What a whirlwind couple of weeks! We’ve been busy getting ready for a client’s show at the Electronic Retailers Association Conference in Miami March 1-3rd.

Now we’re here and it’s a blast. We’ve got custom iPod touches, models, blog sites, a party, human billboards… a hundred cool things planned for what I’m sure is going to be a great show!

Check out our models getting ready to go out as human billboards to walk the conference floor. This should be interesting!

And I don’t mean partying. We’ve got this GREAT demo for our client’s product, DualSaw (you really should check this thing out… originally invented to help EMS cut people out of crashed cars. It doesn’t produce sparks and has no kick-back. www.dualsaw.com).

Anyway, check us out. It’s 12:30 am and we’re making marshmallow shooters for the demo tomorrow IN MY HOTEL ROOM. It smells like melting plastic from the pvc… what’s really cool is this is a demo for Dual Saw to show how easy it cuts, and we’re using the Dual Saw to prep for the demo. This is Monte cutting the pvc… look closely and you’ll see Patty’s hands holding it.