Jenny Schmitt bio:
Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt is a veteran public relations and marketing professional, trainer and sought-after public speaker. Her 15-year marketing and communications career includes experience in the fields of sports marketing, nonprofit marketing, healthcare communications, and public relations.
You’ve heard about Twitter right? You join about 87% of Americans who’ve heard of it, but maybe you’re part of the 93% who haven’t ventured to try it for personal or for business. While there are lots of case studies to show innovate ways to use Twitter and proof it leads to sales, you just don’t know how to start or if you should. You’re not alone.
We frequently present on Twitter for business. It’s so important to help people get started, especially businesses, that Twitter posts a Twitter for Business Guide on its homepage. But before you get there, let us help you with the first steps.
This presentation was given at Atlanta’s Freelancer’s Forum last week. While a lot of learning happened off the screen, these are the basic steps to get start in and understand more about the world’s most popular short-message platform.
We’ve been telling visual stories for nearly our entire careers. Why? Visual matters because most people are visual learners or can better recall a visual cue than a written one. When YouTube came around 5 years ago a whole new opportunity came up to tell that story directly to an audience – no media required. We’ve been on board every since.
Now wait, if someone tells you they can make a viral video for you, stop there. You (or your agency) can’t make a video viral, you can make it great. Only your audience, your customers, your fans, can take it viral. No matter, even if you think you have a tough product or service, there is always a visual story.
We’re sharing this new branded YouTube page from The Coca-Cola Company. It’s a soon-to-be-classic example (created by Sapient Nitro – deep talent over there) of just where video can take a customer. Coca-Cola a global leader in the refreshment category has taken the World Cup ritual (the on-field celebrations) and asked fans to share their own celebrations if they were playing on the field. Here’s why we think Coca-Cola succeeds:
1. It lets people (the fans) participate directly: send in video, artwork, photography (branded or not)
2. The content is seemingly new, refreshed, all the time and it’s easy to share
3. Coca-Cola can tie-in the campaign with actual events (note the videos with the branded banner)
4. The music is universally appealing, borrowing beats, harmonies from different cultures
5. For a global brand, the World Cup is a near-perfect opportunity to showcase its near-universal appeal
What videos do you think stand out as examples of a great visual story? What would you add?
Since we work with clients in the sports field, and our past includes work at the collegiate, Olympic, professional and amateur levels of sports, we frequently get asked about the best places to find a job in sports. While we could post all kinds of tips, info, networking musts and more about the world of sports, we’re going to keep this simple. Below are our top 10 online resources for job in the sports field:
Just about everyone that is even remotely Web-savvy these days throws around the term “Web 2.0″ (or “social media”) to evoke the evolutionary Web technologies that are enabling rich, interactive and collaborative Web experiences. These experiences are changing the way we interact with people and information. But what is not well understood is how these experiences and enabling technologies should change and elevate your expectations of consultants that you hire to help grow your business. If you are in the market for consulting services in the areas of marketing, communications, sales, business development or recruiting, you should expect a deeply engrained understanding and daily use of the very Web 2.0 ideas that may have left your business behind.
Here are three things you should look for when evaluating your prospective business partner’s understanding of the brave new Web:
1. To be an expert, they have to use it extensively. You wouldn’t hire a landscaper if you drove by their house and saw a weedy front lawn and untrimmed hedges. And you wouldn’t hire a personal trainer that is overweight. If someone says they believe in the transformative potential of Web 2.0, then you need to see proof that they understand it deeply and that they leverage it for the benefit of their own benefit. Do they have a Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace presence? Do they use Twitter or conventional blogs to communicate and collaborate? Or do they have a boring, static Web page that’s difficult to find in search engines? If they don’t understand Web 2.0 enough to raise the awareness of their business, then they can’t do it for yours.
2. If they believe in it, they should stick with it. Your candidate consultants have doubtlessly faced questions about Web 2.0, social networking, etc. so they have likely looked into it and started using it, getting past the first criterion. However, did they just sign up for all of these things to check off items on their Web presence to-do list? Did they create accounts everywhere to get started, then fell quiet? Is their information on all of the various social media and social networking sites stale and abandoned? If they signed up for Twitter and use it once every three weeks, they don’t understand it. If they created a blog, but the last post is from 2006, they don’t believe in it. If they have a corporate MySpace presence but no friends, they don’t see the value in it. If they don’t believe in this stuff for their own benefit, then they will not do you any good with it.
3. How careful are they with their social media identity? For those that do have a modern Web presence, you should peer into their online identity to catch a glimpse of what they think about themselves and their customers. What are they writing about? Who do they associate with? Are there other people talking about them? Are they careful about potentially sensitive information? If they’re not smart caretakers of their own online identity, then they definitely won’t be responsible with yours.
If you cannot define something, can you really master it? I often ask companies, clients and even marketers what their definition of marketing is, only to met by hems, haws, or lengthy explanations. A couple of year’s ago, BrandWeek asked for my definition of the craft for their article on Inside the Mind of a Marketer:
“In today’s environment, effective marketing requires the right product (or right service) with the right messagesdelivered in the right channels at the right time. Miss one of those and say hello to the netherworld of failed products and services.”
It’s the same definition I use today. As landscapes, channels and opportunities change, shift, arise, and close, the fundamentals of marketing must still be addressed if a product is to succeed.
