Tag Archives: marketing

Town & City Name Sponsorships


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I just wrote an article which published at Search Engine Land yesterday on the subject of some innovative and occasionally guerrilla marketing tactics that might be used to display advertising promotion via Google Maps. (See: Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps)

One aspect the article touches upon is how some smaller towns and cities might find it attractive to sell the rights to their names in return for sponsor dollars. I find this concept interesting, particularly as many municipalities have begun considering flogging the rights to name all sorts of things from auditoriums to subway stations to city service departments.

In the article I mentioned “DISH, Texas” which sold its name a few years ago to a satellite dish company in return for free satellite TV service for all of its residents. While this is one of the more recent examples of “City Name Sponsorships”, it’s not the first. My coworker, Mike Churchill alerted me to the fact that the small town of “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico” actually changed its name from “Hot Springs” back in 1950 in order to win a radio contest.

Truth or Consequences, NM

The NBC radio program, “Truth or Consequences” offered to broadcast their show from the first town that renamed itself for the show.

In American history, quite a number of towns and cities went through various name transitions over time, but most of these monikers were inspired by people’s names or were descriptive in some way. These days, I suspect that most larger cities would find a lot of resistance to selling off their names — and for well-known cities they’d be losing a lot of “brand equity” if they dropped a well-known name. But, for small towns, there could potentially be a lot of places which might find large corporate investment attractive enough that they could overcome constituents’ resistance to name-change.

Selling a placename is bound to create controversy whenever it happens. Winnipeg’s plans to sell off naming rights on everything from parking meters to bus tickets and even city services has apparently gotten significant criticism.

Kalle Lasn, founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, says selling off naming rights to city services is an example of backward and unimaginative thinking.

“It’s really depressing … They should learn how to be a little bit more innovative. There are ways of cutting back and ways of generating revenue that don’t include selling your soul to corporations.”

(Adbusters is famous for helping promote “Buy Nothing Day” and other anti-commercialism and anti-advertising philosophies.)

Regardless of the controversy, the prospect of abruptly having some saleable assets available is likely to prove too attractive to resist for many city managers during these cash-strapped times. I expect we’ll see some more instances of corporate-sponsored city names appearing in online mapping systems like Google Maps.

Your Audience & Customers Define the Value


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When it comes to traditional marketing, companies are so entrenched in having to define their value statements, and defining them in their marketing messages they don’t even realize that with today’s new technologies and mediums to communicate in, it’s really the customers who are defining what the value is of their products. While company executives are so focused on “features” providing what they perceive is value, they never stop and think about what the person who is plunking down their hard earned dollars to buy the product or service truly perceives as value.

The same can be said of any type of content you are producing for consumption on the internet. In the end it is the audience who is going to decide the value. While you are thinking these are great tips on how to change a light bulb and that’s the value, the audience perceives something else as more valuable about your content. It could be that the tips save them valuable time and money, something you likely hadn’t considered. While you might be thinking certain points of a video you produced about how your product works is the value, the audience viewing it find more value in how it saved them a ton of time figuring out how to integrate your product in with something they are already using, making both products exceptionally useful to them.

value-of-goldOnce your audience finds value in the content you are providing, when they truly believe this content is worth its weight in gold, that’s when it has the potential to spread like wildfire. It may not hit the front page of Digg, but if one loyal audience member finds true value in your content they are going to spread it out to their friends by sharing their experience with it. People love to relate the experiences and those experiences, if valuable, are powerful marketing agents all on their own. The notion of “look what it did for my friend Suzie” after Suzie has explained the value she found is a very persuasive tool, and then all of Suzie’s friends relate it to their friends. If these friends are in social networks like Facebook, MySpace, or an Ning network out there, the potential for the content going from reaching just a few people to instead touching thousands is great.

This is why marketers both online and offline need to stop thinking of themselves as the “be all end all” decider of what is of value in marketing messages. Instead of consistently trying to push messages on an audience or customer base, they need to start sitting back and listening to the current conversations going on about what they are marketing and how those current messages are being received and interpreted. By listening to the conversations marketers can learn a lot more about their demographics and how they think, instead of just assuming because they are a certain age bracket and sex or race they act a certain way. Things change in the real world and the internet and the social media platforms that have been created offer marketers access to a huge , unself-conscious and very brutally honest, focus group.

Let’s face it the way traditional marketing, that of continually pushing the message that’s been carefully crafted, has changed. Audiences become banner blind, they fast forward through commercials on their Tivos, they channel hop on the radio because they do not find these messages or this type of content of any value. Marketers in today’s world of instant soapboxes (blogs) and the world’s fastest telephone chain (Twitter, Facebook & even email) have to now understand what the customers are deeming as value and create content focused on that value, not the values they crafted in a sterile office space to make CEO’s and senior management feel better about themselves. Whether companies like it or not, customers are now defining a lot of what a brand, product or service means.

Siloing Your Marketing Can Be a Killer For a Great Online Strategy


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Marketing SilosDo you have a PR Department, a Marketing Department, an SEO Team, a PPC Crew and just kicked off a Social Media Team? For huge companies this is a way of running a business, or they outsources some of these efforts. Medium size companies usually break things out this way too, and smaller businesses tend to lump everything onto 1 or 2 people due to lack of resources to handle it all. While making departments is definitely a great idea, and putting highly specific skill sets together to make a department or team is a wise thing to do, it can be an instant killer to a great online media marketing strategy if each one of these areas are a “silo” that operates in their own vacuum.

So many times I’ve seen this happen with companies. The Public Relations team thinks they own things, the Marketing Team controls some part of a budget and then the online marketing folks really have no control over anything, or have no clue what the PR team has planned event wise. That social media team is too new to even understand they are part of the marketing budget as well. When things like this happen, it only spells one thing – disaster.

By separating out each piece of this marketing puzzle, and putting each into its own silo, a company is doing itself a big disservice. Regardless of how each piece of this puzzle thinks of itself, it’s all part of marketing it doesn’t matter if its offline or online. Each piece understands its particular specialty much better than the others can understand its inner workings. For example you wouldn’t want a PPC person planning your Public Relations events or your PR person bidding on your PPC campaigns. But what you do want is your PR department letting your PPC team know that there’s an event they are planning that they need to get the word out about, or that your PPC team has just found a great niche to work with that they know your PR Team can really use that information to market some events to.

When you start looking at online marketing and what you need to do to be successful in it, you have to pull everyone who has some sort of stake in how your company is perceived into the mix. Marketing and PR Departments need to be part of the planning, not just because “they were there first”, but because they have to be brought into the new media way of thinking about how companies need to reach and converse with audiences. The old way of just “pushing” marketing onto audiences doesn’t work the way it did before the advent of the internet, blogs and social media sites.

Communicating with these areas requires the special talents of a Social Media Champion, having these efforts found requires both a great SEO and PPC team. Knowing what to say and how the company wants to represent itself is part of Marketing’s job but they need to work with Social Media, SEO and PPC that everything is cohesive. Promoting what the company is doing is what PR does best, but these days you can just slap up a press release and think it’s going to go somewhere, that’s where working with the Social Media & SEO teams can come in and make these events shine on the internet.

One of the great keys to creating a successful online strategies is to get all of these teams working together. You need to get each one understanding that they cannot operate in a vacuum anymore. Siloing information in today’s new marketing world isn’t good for your company or the people working on these teams. Each team has to understand that they are very important to one another, that success cannot be obtained unless they understand how each piece of the new marketing puzzle fits together. If you are a company operating in this siloed manner, you might want to stop and rethink your strategy – what’s more important your success online, or feeding the egos of the departments that are siloed? The survival of your company in these tough economic times isn’t going to ride on someone’s ego, its going to ride on successful teamwork!

Company Branding, Employees & Social Media


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brandingAs more and more companies start to dip their toes into the world of Social Media they are faced with the increasing dilemma of how do they brand themselves, who speaks for them and what is the message they want to convey to their target audiences in this medium. This isn’t just a Fortune 500 company dilemma either, the smallest of companies that have employees that are venturing into this medium have to address the same questions, although they have less red tape to cut through to get to their answers.

Inevitably when we start a social media strategy for a client we are faced with the question, “Who Speaks For Us?” on these channels. Is it the CEO? Does he have time? Is it the marketing department, are they just going to try to jam a message down the community’s throat? Should the Public Relations Director handle this or are they going to try and control what people say? Maybe the Search Marketing team is better equipped, or is their main focus going to be about the links? Somewhere there has to be a happy balance right? Most definitely.

Paired with the question of “Who Speaks For Us” comes along the worry about it just being one voice. One single solitary person speaking for the whole organization. Companies can become very leery of this, quite fast if the person speaking becomes popular, or even an overnight sensation. For this reason its important that companies set out policies and guidelines as well as expectations of employees and their work in the social media space for the company. Once employees get a taste of the attention that social media brings, sometimes the though of Personal Branding can come into play and their intentions and actions can enter into murky waters while they are suppose to be doing work for the company. Beth Harte addresses the idea of Personal Branding very well and as background information to this post, I highly recommend taking a moment or two to read this if you are thinking of building a personal brand or are concerned about employees who might.

Stepping into social media, guns blazing, on fire and ready to roll isn’t always the wisest strategy, especially when you already have invested money, time and other resources into branding (both offline and online) already. Ensuring that your logo, your marketing and your message stays true two what you have already established is imperative, stepping out into social media with a new logo for every employee working on your social media strategy can be damaging to your established work and confusing to your audience. This is why having a plan mapped out for all scenarios, especially when those people you’ve entrusted to build your social media presence decide to leave the company, is essential. You’ve spent a lot of time an resources on building your brand, letting it walk out the door with a employee could be a huge mistake!

zappos_logoDifferent situations require different strategies. Take for example Zappos and their use of the social media tool, Twitter. Zappos employees are encouraged to use Twitter and other Twitter users can identify a Zappos employee by the “Zappos” in their Twitter name. There’s Zappos who’s Tony the CEO, Zappos_Alfred the COO, Zappos_Tid who’s head of the training & call center and even the Zappos_Lynn who’s “now working and playing at Zappos.com“. For Zappos and their adaption of Twitter into the rank and file employees to help promote the company through this form of social media, it’s become a rather important branding piece for them and they’ve formulated a strategy around it.

So before you set out on your adventure in social media, stop first and grab a map! If there’s not a map handy, then ask for directions. I know a bit metophorical, but this is a strange new world in social media, a lot of mistakes have been made by companies who just “jumped in”. However, there’s a lot of great successes by companies who just took to stop and look at their strategies and how to integrate their company branding into the social media plan when they are engaging their customers.