Be Ready Online...

This morning I found a great example of a company being ready online for their offline efforts.

Just finished watching The Office's most recent episode - "Money". One of the highlights of the show is Dwight's agrotourism side business, running his beet farm as a B&B. Dwight is constantly checking TripAdvisor.com to see what type of reviews he's getting. Just for kicks I thought I'd check TripAdvisor to see what type of reviews Schrute Farms receives. Lo and behold NBC is on it, they've created an entry on TripAdvisor that includes a link back to Dunder Mifflin's microsite. The Schrute Farms entry is hysterical, the first review is from "SprinklesMom" warning them about the proprietor's alleged cat killings. Check out the photo gallery too, lots of funny candid travelers pix.

Don't Build It and Hope They Come (Part 3 of 10)

Remember Bud.TV? Launched during last year's Superbowl, Budweiser spent $40M developing and marketing an online TV channel for Bud beer drinkers. According to Google Jim, Bud.TV's August unique visitor number was 60,000... not that great for a $40M ad campaign. Where did Bud go wrong? Thinking their site would be a "destination site" for Bud loyalists.

There are only a handful of destination sites on the Internet - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and MySpace - really own the "destination" market. What Jim suggested was identifying how to best to your brand, your website to these destination sites. This can be done through the use of gadgets or widgets.

As Optiem is headquartered in Cleveland, most of our staff has come down with Tribe fever. Watching our Indians battle the Red Sox for a chance at the World Series is our company's #1 past time. Smart marketing personnel in the Indians front office have leveraged this with a Facebook application, allowing Facebook users to enter their "Tribe Rally Cry" for playback.

Be Ready Online for What's Happening Offline (Part 2 of 10)

I think this is really one of the keys to successful online marketing. You can't always affect what's driving traffic to your site but you can control how your site responds.

One of Google Jim's examples on this point showed a Google Trends chart for "lead in toys". The search traffic spiked, literally going from nothing to significant volume in July/August of this year. This coincides with an earlier post on the MediaHatch, where I reviewed Fisher-Price's initial response to their massive toy recall. Basically Fisher Price's website was not ready to address the questions/concerns in the early days after the recall was announced. However, I do have to give FP kudos on their new "safety" section that includes a multi-media response.

Another great example Jim used was highlighting Google's Hot Trends for August 2nd. Hot Trends is where Google shows you the search terms gaining in volume/popularity. On August 2nd keywords in this section included phrases like "Pretty Woman Lyrics" "We Got the Beat Lyrics" or "Just Once Lyrics". Can you guess what summer hit was on the night before? The Singing Bee, and NBC sure was prepared. NBC's Singing Bee section includes video clips of previous episodes, the ability to buy music from NBCUniversalStore.com and a polling feature for visitors to vote on something related to the most recent show.

Google's 10 Trends Shaping the Digital World (Part 1 of 10)

Just got back from a great luncheon put on by the American Advertising Federation of Cleveland "Google's 10 Trends Shaping the Digital World". The featured speaker was Google's Midwest Director Jim Lecinski and he did a great job explaining to this largely non-technical audience how to best integrate the Internet into marketing campaigns.

Digital Trend #10 - Be Always "On", Consumers are Online 24/7

Makes sense to those experienced with online marketing but for traditional advertisers more familiar with terms like "flighting" the concept of constantly campaigning is harder to grasp. Consumers are online 24/7 and so is your website (hopefully), if someone wants to learn about "hot dog eating competitions" at 2 a.m. they can come to your site. But are you ready...?

More on getting your site prepared for traffic tomorrow.

Who is Using Social Media for PR?

I've gotten quite a few comments online & offline about my previous post on Social Media Newsrooms. Mainly people asking - who is using them? does the press really want them? how could I use this for my company?

Yesterday PR Squared had a great post aggregating companies using Social Media News Releases. Seems to be the appropriate place to host a Social Media News Release would be in a Social Media Newsroom. Why go through all the trouble of creating a dynamic, engaging PR only to house it in a standard, non-conversational press center?