Should you buy your friends?

In the lead-up to World of Concrete 2011, Wacker Neuson ran a fairly aggressive (and judging by their Twitter traffic, successful) campaign to increase their pool of Facebook friends. In short: they bribed them. This tactic can be very successful, but for most small to medium-sized manufacturers I recommend against it.

The plan was simple: take your picture at their booth, upload it to their Facebook page, and win (potentially) an iPad! There was also a related campaign encoura- ging Twitter users to retweet announce- ments about the contest, again by offering an iPad.

This is an impressively well designed cross-platform campaign; it was set to drive traffic to their Facebook page, Twitter stream, and World of Concrete booth; not bad for marketing synergy! The landing page is well designed; it is clear, clean, uncluttered, easy to read, and has prominent subscription and retweet buttons. I would go so far as to say that, in the B2B construction market, this is about the best you could do a campaign of this nature. (Also, check out their YouTube channel; this company really understands social media!)

Here's the problem: unless your company is the size of Wacker Neuson, you probably cannot afford to do this.

Start with the basics: can your company currently afford to buy several iPads just to give away? This tactic is the equivalent of making friends in school by throwing great parties; everyone will come for a free trip to Disneyland, but few will come for microwaved pizza and DVDs. Likewise, as the cost of the giveaway decreases, you see sharply diminishing returns on the campaign. iPads are cool enough and expensive enough that tons of people will jump through hoops to get one; substantially fewer people would take the effort for a $25 gift certificate. This makes finding an effective value-priced incentive extremely difficult.

More importantly, the friends this will make you are not friends you will keep. Like the school party, again, everyone will be your friend until the party is over. If that is the only reason they like you, though, you only keep them as long as you keep throwing parties. I guarantee Wacker Neuson will have a huge boost in Facebook followers during and immediately after the show, and I guarantee that, barring some amazing follow-up campaign, most of them will un-follow or go dormant within a month.

For a company like Wacker Neuson that is probably ok; their social media strategy seems based on TV marketing, meaning they want eyeballs and brand recognition, not an enduring, engaged community. And that brand recognition is probably all they need.

For most manufacturers, though, that is not enough. The construction industry is big enough and varied enough that almost every product is a niche product (granted, some have very large niches). Short-term engagement will not produce the long-term brand recognition that you need, because there are not enough people using your product often enough. For you, social media campaigns need to be about engagement and long-term relationship building, so when the day comes that they need your product, they remember your name.

As in real life, buying online friends is a great strategy if you can afford it. Most of us, though, make friends by being interesting, polite, helpful, and social. And that strategy will help just as much online.

Signs of Change: Procter & Gamble Abandon Soap Operas

Procter & Gamble, the reason why soap operas are called soap operas, has officially moved its advertising focus online. The death of soap operas happened in September, but it was earlier this month, when P&G announced its new social media focus, that the news really sunk in. As Joseph Jaffee said, "This is like Budweiser pulling out of the Super Bowl'; the company whose advertising and support defined the genre has moved on to greener pastures.

Nostalgia aside, this was clearly a smart business decision. Viewership has dropped substantially for daytime tv, and the remaining viewers present the joint challenges of increasing median age and skipping commercials via DVR.


This will not impact most construction product manufacturers directly - few in our industry advertise on tv - but it is a remarkable sign of the growing strength and popularity of digital marketing. In fact, this could be a big boost for companies already engaged in social media, as more viewers will start flooding into the space. Yes, this also means increased competition for their eyeballs, but most of that competition will be on the consumer side; a properly structured SEO campaign will help sort out architects looking for structural concrete from homeowners looking to redo their patio.

Also of interest, the article contained some of the results from the "Old Spice Man" commercials:

• Number of impressions (people who saw, read, or heard about commercials): 1.8 billion.

• Number of YouTube views for Old Spice and related videos: 140 million and counting.

• Increase in Twitter followers for Old Spice: 2,700 percent.

P&G also said Old Spice sales are growing at double digits, taking more of the market for body washes and deodorant. 

"It is such an effective advertising campaign that we are getting impressions that we did not pay for," said P&G CEO Bob McDonald. We've seen this effect in our work too; digital marketing, whether it's social media and viral or SEO and publicity, has incredible potential for reach, spread, and longevity.

Publicity: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Two days ago, I received a phone call from a structural engineer.  She had read an article on the Web about lightweight studcast precast concrete walls.  She wanted to propose them for a project, at a meeting in 24 hours.  She wanted to know where she could get the walls, and since the article had our name and phone number on it, she called.

The article was published in 2007.

The company, Ecolite Concrete,  invested in publicity in 2007, and that investment is still paying dividends.  It might get them a project with a major big-box chain.

Publicity – getting news outlets to give editorial space to your story – has always been a marketing bargain.  You pay to create the publicity materials and interface with the editors, but the page space or air time is free, and you get to tell your product's story in great depth and often at great length.  This is in stark contrast to advertising, where you pay (usually big bucks) for very limited space or time.

In the digital age, publicity has become a better bargain than ever, as this incident dramatically demonstrated.  When newspapers and magazines were still only in print, and TV and radio news were only available as they were being broadcast, the shelf-life of publicity was pretty limited.  Magazines tended to hang around for very long after issue, but the likelihood that any particular article would be casually read - months or even years after it wass printed - decreased with every month, and searching for something in an old issue was cumbersome or impossible.

In the digital world, every communication potentially lasts forever.

Things stay on Web servers a long time.  They get copied from one website to another.  They get posted on Youtube. They get linked all across the globe.  And they can all be searched in ways that would boggle the minds of analog-age index-writers.


I guarantee that the engineer who called me would not have found this information by Googling – three years later – if the information had been in an advertisement.  I'm not even sure you can google the content of ads in the current 'digital editions' of magazines.  The article, which appeared on about seven pages of the magazine, cost a little more to write than one full page ad would cost in some of the major trade magazines.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the inventor of Ecolite was sitting in our office when the phone call came.  Everyone was floored by that bit of serendipity.  Later over dinner, though, he commented that his being there at that moment may have been coincidence, but the engineer finding his product by searching and reading that article was not coincidental at all.  It was exactly the way it’s supposed to work.

5 Tips for Managing Changing Social Media Trends

The internet is a constantly changing landscape, as fluid and changeable as the ocean. That's not news to anyone, yet we're still always surprised to see signs of major changes. Early adopters are already predicting the death of RSS, location-services are seeing check-in burnout even as they start reaching the mainstream, and even techies seem to be fleeing Twitter! This year has also seen serious shots taken at Apple, Facebook, Google, and MySpace, all once or former stalwart, seemingly permanent, fixtures of the internet.

All of them will eventually fade, either to disappear, resurrect with a new focus, or hold a small corner of their once-great empire. Remember when AOL was the biggest thing on the web? Remember who Jeeves was, or why you would ask him anything?

As we wrap up 2010 and finalize our plans for 2011, the best bet is to plan for flexibility. Here are five ways to keep your online marketing limber:


0. Goals and Strategy: Before we even begin looking at updating your marketing plan, take the time to review your goals for online marketing. Who is your audience? What are you trying to achieve? What is your brand affinity? How does this fit into your overall marketing plan? Encouraging people to subscribe to your newsletter requires a very different approach than convincing customers to do their purchasing online.

1. Measure Everything: Many social media tools are struggling to create useful, reliable metrics. We've pretty much accepted that page views are not the panacea we once thought, and "engagement" is powerful and useful, but essentially unmeasurable. That means you will frequently have to create your own measures, and those need to be based on your goals.  No one can cover every social media outlet, so don't waste resources chasing ones that don't work for you.

2. Designate a Marketing R&D Budget: There will always be a new thing to try, or a new tactic for an existing tool. Set aside a portion of your marketing budget to take advantage of those opportunities as they arise. Think of it as the experimental part of R&D; most of it probably won't pay off, but there's still value in that because it saves you from wasting more resources later.

3. Centralize: Ideally, each social network would have a customized message and method, but realistically for most small businesses that's impossible. Designate one part of your online presence as the centerpiece, and let the others point back to it. For Chusid Associates, it's our blog. All our social network profiles, e-newsletters, and websites point back to it, and we run most of our campaigns through here. There will still be Facebook-specific campaigns, or email-only offers, but using the blog as our centerpiece makes it easier to start using new social tools.

4. Follow Your Clients: If none of your clients - or prospects - are using Facebook, there's not much reason for you to be there. If all of them are on LinkedIn, you absolutely need a strong presence there! If next year they switch, so should you. Trying to be the trend leader takes more resources than most building product manufacturers can, or should, devote to the attempt.

5. Accept Change: Most important to maintaining flexibility is acknowledging that you will need flexibility. I stopped listening to one marketing podcast after listening to the host talk about TV ads because it became clear he wanted them to be as powerful as they used to be, and was twisting the facts to prove they were. It is crucial to base your decisions on analysis of the facts, rather than the other way around. The sooner you can accept a campaign is not working, for whatever reason, the sooner you can move to one that does.

A lot of the news is just hype; these technologies aren't going anywhere, at least not yet, and there is a big difference between "diminished" and "dead". Many commentators also see a change in the medium when really there's just a change in the packaging. TV's not dying; we still watch TV shows, we just watch them online. Chat's not dying, it just morphed into texting.

Regardless, change will happen. When it does, will you spend your energy fighting it or taking advantage of it?

Trade Show Treasure Hunt

I saw this idea at GreenBuild. A large, flat screen TV in the Hycrete booth, showing a company video, had a sign saying, "Win this TV." But instead of the usual "deposit your card here" type of drawing, applicants had to answer questions based on information displayed in the booth.

Here is the entry form:











The back of the form had a map showing where to find the answers in the booth:






The quiz would have been more effective as an educational tool if the answers were information the attendee could have used (instead of generic "Option A/B). But still, this is a good idea that got attendees to spend more time in the booth and give it critical attention instead of just a walk-by.

Marketing 101 - Part 2

ADVERTISING, PUBLICITY, AND PROMOTION

Understanding the differences between advertising, publicity (aka PR) and promotion makes any marketing discussion run more smoothly. If you don’t understand these distinctions, a quick review will clear up a lot of misconceptions.

Advertising
Of course, everybody knows what advertising is. We bathe in it daily, like it or not. But for the sake of thoroughness, a short definition needs to be included. Indulge me.

Advertising is when you create a commercial message and pay for the communications channel(s) to disseminate it. It is a postcard in the mail, or space in a newspaper or magazine, on a billboard, website, or blimp. It is time on a TV or radio broadcast, before the feature at a movie theater, before the video on your cellphone, etc.

The key point to understand is that in advertising, you pay for the space or time, and you get to control the content of the message completely. In most media, you also get complete or partial control over when the message appears.

In advertising, the greatest expense is usually the space or time itself. The expense of creating the ad is generally dwarfed by the placement costs, especially when the ad is reused many times. The size of investment for space or time makes it worthwhile to spend a bit of extra effort, thought and money to create great, effective materials.

Publicity
Publicity or PR (which might stand for either Public Relations or Press Relations) is the art of getting space or time for free. You do this by providing content for a magazine, newspaper, TV or radio show, website, etc. They get to use your content for free, which they like, and your message reaches their audience.

With a publication, this may be done by sending out a press release or electronic press kit that contains your message (couched in the form of news), which the publication’s own writing staff can then edit, rewrite, or enhance. It may also be done by arranging for the publication to interview someone who will tell your story to one of their writers, who then writes the interview into an article. You may also arrange to give the publication a “contributed article” that the publication will run - more or less - in the form that you write it. Most construction trade magazines and websites have little or no writing staff, just an editor or two, and get the majority of their content from contributed articles.

For audio and visual media, you may supply pre-recorded content, or provide a spokesperson who will appear for you.

The truth is, we bathe in publicity daily, too, but we are largely unaware of it. Most news media derive a huge proportion of their “editorial” content from the work of publicists. Press releases alert them to what the news is (and spin it to meets the needs of the issuer or the release). The fact of a press release hitting every news outlet simultaneously can, to some degree, create news.

The key difference from advertising is that Publicity is space or time you get for free - your only cost is the creation of the content – but you give up absolute control of how and when it will appear. Publicity is more of a negotiation with the publication, show, etc. The editor can edit it, add to it, and alter it. If PR is handled professionally, this is a collaborative process between the editor and your PR agency or in-house PR rep, who defends your interests and works with the editor to keep the content you want.

(Note: the aforementioned PR agency or in-house department also usually gets the job of Damage Control in the event of mishap or scandal. They get the job because they have experience and relationships with the media. However, it is a thoroughly different activity than what we’re discussing here.)

Promotion
Promotion is a catchall phrase that covers a very wide range of activities and endeavors. Most people think of promotion as a free pen with your company’s name printed on it, but there are many other forms of promotion. What they have in common is that they have more direct engagement with the potential customer, and usually involve giving away something to encourage business.

The giveaway is sometimes just information (a gray area bordering on advertising), but more often it's in the form of a product discount, a gift-with-purchase, a tie-in with a related product, or that pen with the company name on it. It may be a personal appearance by someone connected with the product, or by someone utterly unconnected with it (i.e. a race car driver who has nothing to do with construction) who can attract the attendance of potential customers. It may be a trade show booth.

Promotion is a message, but it is more a communication of goodwill than of information. Promotion helps create a relationship.

Working Together
Each of these forms of marketing help in their own way to create awareness, recognition, and familiarity with a product, brand or company. There is little overlap between them, and well-planned marketing strategy uses each mode in its strength to raise the product’s marketing profile. Each of them, and all of them together, open the door for sales.

Next time: What Advertising Does Best

Selling To Architects: A Visual Approach

Architects think visually. In addition to technical data about your product, they need to see how it looks. The two major ways of presenting your products are still and moving images. First, I need to dispel two prevailing myths.

Myth No. 1: “The new software allows me (or my nephew, or my secretary) to do everything ourselves; we don’t need professionals anymore.” This myth goes back to the time when Microsoft Word had acquired some layout capabilities, and the market immediately became flooded with terrible-looking, hard to read and highly inefficient fliers, ads and brochures. The second act of this drama was emergence of software allowing creating web page without any knowledge of HTML, such as FrontPage, GoLive or Dreamweaver. The result was a proliferation of bloated, slow loading, search engine unfriendly and ultimately very ugly web pages.

This era is coming to an end. The overcrowded and highly competitive Internet space has forced many advertisers to admit their own incompetence and to rely on professional designers and programmers.

Myth No. 2: “The new hardware allows me to shoot photos and videos at very high resolution. I don’t need photographers and videographers anymore.” What’s wrong with this myth? Two things.

• High resolution is probably only 10% of the success of any photo and video production. Other factors include lighting, color balance, depth of field, geometrical distortions, noise reduction, compositional balance, etc.
  
• More importantly, your still or moving images must be able to tell a story, and not just any story, they should convey your consistent marketing message. Professionals may be better equipped to do it.
  

Practical recommendations.

There are many cases when you may need to take pictures or video yourself. Make sure you use the right equipment.

• Still cameras. As I mentioned above, resolution is only a small part of the story. It’s great if your camera can give 10 or more megapixels, this way your image theoretically can be used for a magazine cover. But equally important is the size and quality of the lens and the size and quality of the chip and image processor. To avoid geometrical distortions, use the highest quality lens. Unfortunately, the better the lens, the bigger and heavier it usually gets. Find a reasonable compromise. If you can spend around $3,000, get Canon EOS 5D Mark II. In addition to stunning still images, you will be able to shoot full HD 1920x1080 videos. For smaller budget, you may consider Canon EOS Rebel T1i, which also will let you shoot HD videos. If size, weight and price are important, consider Canon PowerShot SD990 IS. Other manufacturers (Nikon, Olympus and Pentax, for example) make similar products.
  
• Video cameras. Even though some still cameras give you the video option, you may want to consider having a dedicated video camera, especially if you shoot a lot of video. Any universality usually results in lower efficiency. If you have a budget of $4,000 and need to shoot for both American and European markets, you may consider Sony HVR-Z1U, a semi-professional camcorder capable of shooting in both NTSC and PAL as well as in various HD formats. It also allows using external professional microphones. Remember, the quality of sound is what immediately betrays amateur recording, more than the image quality. There are many compact inexpensive HD camcorders on the market. Just make sure they have an external microphone jack.
  

Still image format and resolution.

If someone tells you they need an image with 300dpi, it means absolutely nothing unless they also give you the image size. A 4” x 5” image at 300dpi is virtually identical to a 16.7” x 20.8” image at 72dpi. What counts is the number of pixels, and in this example, the number of pixels is the same, 1200 x 1500. It is true, for high-quality printing, the images need to be 300dpi, which means that they need to have 300 pixels per inch. So, for an 8.5” x 11” page, the images must have (8.5 x 300) x (11 x 300) pixels, i.e. 2550 x 3300 pixels. The actual file size will depend on the color space. For Grayscale images it will make the file 8.03MB, for RGB, 24.1MB, for CMYK, 32.1MB.

RGB images are used for video and web. CMYK images are used for offset printing. In addition to color space, images can be saved in various formats: TIFF, EPS, PNG, GIF, JPG, etc.

Warning: JPG (or JPEG) format uses compression that degrades the image quality. It is OK to use JPG for the web (usually no lower than at 60% JPG quality). It is totally unacceptable to use JPG format for any high-quality printing. Always try to use TIF (or TIFF). There are rare cases when you need to send an image via email, and the TIF file is just too large. In that case, use free file uploading sites (such as yousendit.com, for example) or, if all else fails, use JPG but with at least 60% quality or higher.

Video formats.

Always keep your original raw video files untouched (either on tape or on disk), you may need them for another project one day. If you do video editing yourself, you probably know all the basic video formats. The important distinction to keep in mind is the difference between interlaced and progressive scanning, usually indicated by the letters “i” and “p” (as in 60i or 50p). Interlaced scanning was invented in the beginning of the TV era, when broadcasting equipment could not transmit all 480 horizontal lines at the same time, so the picture was broken into odd and even lines, and these was transmitted one after another. The TV receiver was designed to interlace odd and even lines to create a complete picture. This awkward system is still in place in standard definition TV even though there is no practical need for it other than many years of investment in equipment. The computer screen uses progressive scanning, which means that lines are not broken into even and odd and are transmitted in regular order.

Regardless of how the video was shot, exporting it for TV or DVD requires interlaced scanning. Exporting for web requires progressive scanning.

Where do we go from here?

In this brief article, we just touched the tip of the iceberg. Both photo and video production is both art and science. My final advice: if you need to impress architects with the way your product affects the environment and contributes to the interior or exterior space, hire a professional. It pays in the long run.

Vladimir Paperny, PhD

Planet Green TV's First Birthday

Today's Treehugger newsletter reports that the Planet Green tv station, the first station dedicated to 24-hour environmental programming, celebrated its first birthday last week. From the newsletter's introduction:

Last week was memorable for two reasons. It contained the United Nations' World Environment Day (5th of June), which is the global equivalent of the US's Earth Day. It was also the first birthday for Planet Green, the first 24-hour channel dedicated to the environment. Discovery Communications made television history by launching 16 TV shows whose focus is entirely on fun and engaging tips for eco-friendly living and taking action for the environment. Won't it be great when celebrating such events no longer makes sense, because responsible living will be the only lifestyle we know? It's your actions that'll make that time arrive sooner, than later. Keep up the good work.

This reinforces my earlier post that green, as a movement, is on the way out.