Category: Sales & Marketing

ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com: Recently, my colleague Max Kalehoff and I put together a list of “Top Ten Principles of Consumer Consumer Generated Ad Campaigns.” Max added a few additional thoughts on top of this list in his most recent MediaPost column. You may also recall an earlier blog post on this topic in the context of Super Bowl advertising. Key message: by all means test the waters, but keep a good check list in front of you!
1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals: Ensure that your strategy aligns with well-defined goals and objectives, and create a measurement framework for program planning, tracking, adjusting and evaluating.
2. Keep It Authentic: Leverage the full creative power of the participants and don’t set narrow guidelines on the creative. .
3. Be Transparent: Don’t play fast and loose with the fact that the brand facilitated content creation.
4. Encourage Advocacy: Don’t be shy about allowing entrants to vote for their favorites and encourage their friends and family to vote.
5. Empower Syndication: Make it simple to upload, simple to share, simple to embed on blogs and other community and video platforms.
6. Tap The Long Tail: Don’t hesitate to leverage non-winners for other marketing purposes. Embrace them as passionate and loyal stakeholders, and use the Web site as a repository for their rich content.
7. Capture The Moment: Capitalize on “great brand moments” when consumers are highly vested and more likely to advocate, such as new product launches, purchases, or actual brand use and enjoyment.
8. Be Consistent: If you create an environment of dialogue and interaction, stakeholders will notice inconsistencies across other customer touch points or company silos.
9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation: You’ve got to take the bad with the good. While a good strategy will acknowledge and plan for detractors, the reality is that everyone is empowered to publish.
10. Move From Campaign To Platform: Campaigns may have clear beginnings and endings, but there may be dimensions of your program that want to live on forever. Prepare a platform to facilitate and leverage sustained engagement and brand return.
Ten Tips & Principles of Consumer Generated Advertising Campaigns [ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com]

ClickZ: With all the talk about user-generated content (UGC), marketers often overlook one of the most effective ways to exploit this concept: providing a way for your target audience to share their photos on your site. With today’s tools, photo-sharing is easier and more cost-effective than you might think.
As a non-text content, customer photographs allow marketers to tap into social media. Though only a small percentage of users submit their snapshots, these images attract more viewers and others interested in experiencing them in other ways, such as mash-ups. These images can appear on your site, your blog, or photo-sharing and other third-party sites.
Add User Photographs to Your Site [ClickZ]

WiseCamel.com: Like you, I like strippers.
However, I generally find myself leaving the strip club with an empty wallet. Any business that can get you to spend all of your money is a good one to be in.
But while walking out of a club one evening, I realized that a big reason they have such a good business is because strippers are such great salespeople. It is not simply due to the fact that they are selling to stupid, horny men like myself, but because they use a lot of highly effective sales and marketing techniques.
You too can achieve great success by applying sales and marketing techniques of strippers. Here are the 10 sales and marketing techniques I have learned from strippers.
10 Sales and Marketing Tips I learned from Strippers [WiseCamel.com]

Mediapost: With the childhood obesity issue and food marketing back in the headlines, McDonald’s is launching a summer PR effort it says is in response to consumer rather than political pressure. Six moms will serve as embedded citizen reporters, covering the company from the inside.
McDonald’s cites a March survey by GfK Roper Custom Research showing that nearly 90% of moms believe it’s important that fast-food restaurants provide more information about the food they serve.
The six moms–of different ethnicities and from disparate parts of the country–will report to the outside world via blog and video on a McDonald’s Web site for the next few months. They will be getting an insider’s “Willy Wonka” view of the Oak Ridge, IL-based company, and how it chooses, prepares, and distributes food.
Through the Moms’ Quality Correspondents program, the women will meet McDonald’s nutritionists, chefs, ingredient suppliers, executives and others.
McDonald’s Lets Mom Bloggers Into The Kitchen [Mediapost]

PowerHomeBiz: Online videos are growing in popularity, as more and more people watch videos on the Web — from movie previews to amateur productions. Broadband penetration is increasing especially in the United States, allowing more Internet users to enjoy sound, movement, advanced interactivity, and hence videos online.
You can create product demonstration or video instructional videos to show visitors how to use the products you sell. These videos allow customers to see your products beyond the 2-dimensional pictures, and provide them an opportunity to see how the product works, understand the functions of the product, help them know what they can do with the products, and give a better sense of the size and shape of the product.
You can also offer videos that appeal to your audiences as additional content of your site. Visitors are likely to come back to your site if you offer videos related to their interests that cannot be found anywhere else. Better yet, make the visitors feel more valued and important by letting them share their own videos about your topic.
Google bought the video sharing site YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion in 2006, a clear indication of the growing power of videos. With YouTube’s traffic quadrupling in the first half of the year, companies are flocking to YouTube to boost brand awareness and benefit from the power of viral marketing.
How to Use Video and Rich Media to Drive Online Sales and Loyalty [PowerHomeBiz]