Photo by hotmayo on Flickr

To print or not to print? That is the question.

I had an interesting conversation with a client last week regarding a very successful digital campaign. Successful and measurable. Bonus.

We started talking ROI, future campaign budgeting, and the hazards of completely moving away from traditional media. This particular client has seen solid success and increased sales by largely focusing on digital media with a strong emphasis on social media. But, the audience for the product is very niche, easy to segment, and prone to online, super-savvy digital consumers.

We’re hearing it loud and clear. The temptation is to shift traditional media budgets from broad-based awareness activity, to very targeted, segmented and measurable non-traditional media. So what’s the answer? It depends on the objectives of the campaign.

I like digital media. I like the fact that I can see exactly how a campaign is performing in real time. I like that prospects and customers can interact with a brand. However, there are many things that impact that interaction. Typically there is a certain level of awareness and trust that precedes an interaction. That is where traditional media continues to make a powerful difference. Basically, you have to look at the entire scope of the campaign, consider the integration and determine the points of interaction. We want to lead consumers down a path to purchase by using an impartial media mix.

It is smart to always consider print, television, radio, billboard to possibly play a part in a campaign. Think about how you personally look at brands and receive messages. What are you subconsciously picking up as you drive by a billboard? What magazines do you browse through? How often do you read the newspaper? And at what point do you go online when considering a purchase? When you do go online, what are you looking for? Is it product information? Product reviews? Specs? Options? Pricing?

That experience and the timing involved vary by what you are purchasing, how large of a purchase it is, how long the sales cycle is, etc.  In order to reach you, different mediums need to be leveraged at different stages and tie back into the objectives.  It’s the same with every product or service we promote. It’s the blend of outreach that gleans the best results.

With every channel, measure, evaluate and adjust as you go. Because we have more opportunities to look at campaigns in real-time, we want to use that information to our advantage.  We shouldn’t be thinking of digital at the expense of traditional media. Instead, think of how the two work in tandem.

Social media usage by businesses in Fargo, Duluth, St. Cloud, Grand Forks and Anchorage is increasing everyday and rightfully so. It’s a great way to connect and engage customers and prospects. And having a solid strategy to do so will allow you to move the needle and help you reach your goals and objectives for your social media program and your business.

With this increase in usage, however, HR directors are scrambling to govern social media activities by employees. This has led to companies large and small creating social media policies for their employees.

Mike Volpe from Hubspot takes a different look at social media policy development in his post Why Social Media Policy is Stupid. In his post Mike states “… the best “policy” is to hire smart people, give them the right coaching and training, set the correct culture around customer interaction, and then punish those who misbehave.” Although we have a social media policy for employees at Flint Group and have helped many clients develop social media strategies and social media policies, I kind of agree with him.

So what do you think, do businesses need a social media policy?

Last week we had a little interaction on our Facebook Fan Page regarding a recent article from Open Forum titled “Forget the Phonebook: 3 Local Marketing Initiatives with Higher ROIs.” The article provided information about three online services that they believe provide a higher return than the Phonebook – Yelp, Google Local and Yahoo Local.

As mobility and the speed and availability of connectivity continue to increase, local search is becoming much easier and much more efficient to accomplish online, rather than having to sift through the yellow or white pages. Besides that, they are adding value to their services through partnerships, user reviews and ratings, and more.

So is the Phonebook dead or nearing its death? What online services do you get the best return from? Please leave your comments below or on our Facebook page.

Today Andy and Alissa Pesta sit down to discuss her tenure at Flint Interactive and the Flint Group, staying on top of new trends and advancements on the web and what the future of digital marketing looks like. We also talk about her family, working remotely and coming back to work after her first child.

To market the publication of the book Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, StudioE9 created the Viral Loop Facebook app that uses an algorithm of the following computations to calculate your monetary value to Facebook:

1) Facebook’s dollar value   2)  Your level of activity   3)  The number of, and activity of your friends

Proving the meaning of his book, the author Adam L. Penenberg wanted to place a dollar value on social-network activity. The more active you are within the application, the more you are worth to Facebook. It’s like picking up quarters on your way to a party. It drives the user to accrue social worth while increasing brand awareness. For every user that clicked on the ad within in the app, 13% purchased the book.

Compare yourself to Michael Jackson and Ashton Kircher by viewing the real-time feed of social elites at Fast Company.

For more information:
How much are you worth to Facebook? by Adam L. Penenberg

I sit down with Libby Issendorf, Digital Strategist for the Flint Group, to discuss her past experience at Campbell Mithun and what brought her to Fargo. We’ll also talk about her social media work with the US Speedskating team, her upcoming trip to the Winter Olympics, and where businesses should start their social media efforts.

About a week ago I booked a long overdue family vacation.  We looked at several options from resorts to villas to cruises, and settled on a cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line.  Needless to say, my 4 and 6 year olds were bouncing off the walls. 

Last night I was thinking about the process we went through in booking our trip.  Many queries started either on Google Maps, Cruise Reviews or Trip Advisor.  From there, it was usually a brief stop on the website for the property, then right back to consumer reviews and photos on a third-party site.  This happened over and over.

When we settled on the cruise, we wanted to look at the excursions the ship had to offer. We found ourselves off the NCL website and on to caribbeanportreviews.com to get what we really wanted, which was firsthand opinions of the excursions. My kids wanted to see every square inch of the ship, so we looked at pictures posted by past vacationers, again off the corporate site.  NCL did provide some nice 360 view tools, but there were large parts of the ship missing.

I have seven different websites bookmarked, and when I put them all together, they answered most of the questions we had.  It shouldn’t take that many sites to get the content I’m looking for.  That just leads to a very poor customer experience.  I know it is a big undertaking, but why wouldn’t NCL want to provide a one-stop platform for this information?  Six of the seven sites (the seventh being ncl.com) I used to make my decision had information on all the major cruise lines.  Do they really want potential customers reading about everything everyone else has to offer? 

Are you providing what your customers want? Have you asked them what they want?  Remember, if they are not getting the information they need from you, they are getting it from someplace else.  Do you know where that is?

People are looking for authentic content when making buying decisions.  You need to provide the opportunity for your customers to provide it.  If you don’t have the capacity to maintain a sharing platform, you need to at least provide links out to sites that have this information, like Amazon reviews, Yelp, or Trip Advisor.  Make it easy for your audience. 

Question:  Are reviews, tips and photos less credible when they are on a corporate website, even if they are not being sanitized?  Do you trust them?  Would you go to a third party site anyway?  Tell me what you think.

Traditional evolution of business has lead to segmentation by department for many companies. Marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, finance and fulfillment are some of the most common. But digital communications is creating a virtualization and convergence that is dramatically changing the way businesses operate.

How customers engage with companies has changed with the explosion of digital and social networking tools. Customers have wrested power to engage with companies on their own terms and in a fully visible environment. One-to-one conversations have now become open forum, placing greater pressure on companies to be well organized and prompt in response.

Customers can choose to engage on your company website using Google Sidewiki or your own message boards. They can also engage via social media outposts should you have a presence there. And if you don’t have social media outposts, they can still engage your brand in discussion whether you are present or not!

A service question, warranty question, sales question, human resources question, finance question or shipping question or concern can all be directed to the same place in the digital environment. Customers look at your company as one entity, not as a network of departments, and they expect your company to respond as one entity. The lines blur, the departments converge and at the end of the cycle only one thing matters – have you answered the customer’s question?

Your company’s success is based on the brand promise that you communicate to your customers. How well you manage customer expectations through their engagement with your brand, your company, ultimately determines your long-term viability and growth.

Step back and have a look at your organizational structure. Now look at all your customer touch points. Are you prepared to respond to your customers in an efficient, timely manner regardless of question? Do you have a strategy for managing customer interaction in a digital open-forum environment? Are your departments prepared and trained to work cross-functionally?

If not, it is time for digital strategy and social media strategy to integrate with your company’s management and planning process. Your customers are already converging. Are you prepared?

Colin is a senior strategist for AadlandFlint and the Flint Group. Follow him on Twitter at @colinnclarke.

Image courtesy CubeFigures.com

I recently attended the Resource Development Council of Alaska’s annual conference in Anchorage. The conference is always a great opportunity to gauge the pulse of Alaska’s economy and get a sense for the year ahead. I attended every session over the course of two days and was struck with a recurring theme. When dealing with resource development issues, managing misinformation holds great importance.

At the conference a number of different industries shared their challenges with managing misinformation as they sought to proceed with resource development projects. Examples from tourism, fisheries, mining, oil and gas exploration and timber were all shared. All industries critical to the economic health of the state, and all industries facing challenges in managing misinformation in their development efforts.

In recent years misinformation management could be handled through traditional public relations means – a fact-correction press release, a media announcement, an on-air interview or even through paid advertising. But as our digital world has been expanding the power of traditional media has been waning. As a result, the means by which misinformation is being generated and shared has changed greatly. Blogs, message boards, opinion sites, comments sections and all related means of social media have completely changed the way audiences consume information.

So what steps should industries take to manage misinformation in this new, open-source environment?

1) Develop a formalized, managed “listening program.” You can do it on your own through a combination of Google Reader, Google Blogsearch, Twitter Search and Technorati, but plan on investing time on a daily basis to manage your searches. An alternative, you can engage an organization that can establish, monitor and analyze mentions through use of professional tools that provide dashboarding and reporting functions. If you cannot invest the time on your own or not sure where to begin, consider seeking out the help of a digital strategy firm to get you started.

2) Leverage the transparency of social media. Assuming your organization has nothing to hide, be proactive in citing research, objectives, permitting processes, progress and delays. Transparency is key to managing misinformation. If you’ve got nothing to hide, prove it by sharing everything and do so in a very public environment. Post updates, blog entries, wins and losses to your web site or blog site. Include presentations and videos, photos and supporting research. Leverage YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter, Facebook, Ning and other sites to share your information. In a battle of misinformation make sure your information is through, detailed and accessible through multiple sources across the web.

3) Have a social media crisis plan. In the world of social media you cannot affort to wait to respond to an inflammatory situation. Waiting the weekend for Monday to arrive or even waiting 24 hours to respond to a situation released via the web can be too late. In the case of resource development industries there are often millions at stake with every project. A runaway topic, comment or posting against your project can happen in a matter of hours. Your organization must have a plan in place to monitor, assess, and if necessary, react in 24 hours or less. For those who may have seen the Domino’s Pizza YouTube crisis earlier in the year, this reponse was released by Domino’s corporate within 24 hours. Their crisis plan was implemented quickly and without hesitation.

Managing misinformation has always been a challenge in resource development industries. There are organizations bent on stifling progress of any sort and their greatest source of power is through public confusion and misinformation. With the expansion of digital communications tools and the unprecendented potential reach of social media networks, organizations are better suited than ever before to provide clear, relevant information before a maliciously intented group has any opportunity to mislead or misinform. Listen, be transparent and be prepared. Use today’s digital tools to your advantage in the battle against misinformation.

Colin is a senior strategist for AadlandFlint and the Flint Group. Follow him on Twitter at @colinnclarke.

When the Resource Development Council (RDC) of Alaska holds its Annual Conference November 18-19, they expect to draw a record number of participants. Why? Because the conference is introducing new micro-blogging technology that will track each speaker session with live updates posted directly to the RDC’s website.

Micro-blogging can be described as posting short messages, in real-time, to the web. For the RDC’s 5,000 members Statewide, this means they can still participate in the two-day event even if they cannot attend in person.

AadlandFlint, the digital communications agency behind bringing the technology to Alaska, sees the application as a natural progression from instant messaging and live-streaming. As Colin Clarke, AadlandFlint’s senior strategist explains, the micro-blogging tool means that key points from each speaker will be blogged in real-time directly to the RDC’s website, allowing anyone with an internet connection to join in and follow along with each session – in real-time – from wherever they are.

However as Clarke points out, the application is not simply about providing information for otherwise absent participants. It also provides a way to enhance the interactiveness of the conference. Participants both at the conference venue and those connected virtually to it can post comments live as the speaker is presenting. This is achieved through clever use of Twitter, where by using a special hash tag code followers can ‘tweet’ about proceedings and their tweets will instantaneously appear on the conference feed.

This is the first time that micro-blogging has been used in the State as a conference tool and overcomes many of the difficulties that some of the alternatives, such as live-streaming, can run up against. Live-streaming involves recording a presentation and feeding the recording directly to the website allowing viewers to follow along in real time. But a major problem with live-streaming is that it requires high bandwidth for it to work smoothly and also requires a follower to be watching constantly to keep up with proceedings. With micro-blogging a participant can leave the room, return, scroll back over the micro-blog updates and catch up very quickly. And with the Twitter feed they can also review the responses that the presenter got.

“We’re not talking about trawling back through verbatim transcripts, the micro-blogs will summarize key points quickly and succinctly,” says Clarke.

A micro-blog record from each session will also be saved on the RDC website post-conference so both attendees and non-attendees can go back and review the discussions and comments from every session at their own convenience.

Clarke says that the level of ‘connectivity’ in Alaska is amazing. WIFI access, web enabled handhelds, digital mobile service and more. The most recent census stats for connectivity found that Alaska is the second most connected State in the US by household. “So it’s extremely forward thinking of the RDC to take advantage of that connection and make the most of it,” he said.

RDC executive director Jason Brune said the RDC is excited to provide the new technology to its members. “It’s a great opportunity to extend the reach of our annual conference and we thank AadlandFlint for their digital expertise in providing this tool for us.”

About AadlandFlint
AadlandFlint is a leader in digital strategy providing the best in social media strategy, online training tools, web architecture, email marketing and more. Here are some places where you can follow along with the latest information on marketing communications with a digital edge.

AadlandFlint Blog

Brand Bytes / Anchorage Daily News Blog

Follow Senior Strategist, Colin N. Clarke on Twitter

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