I have a new post up over at ThinkMulticultural about the land grab for Twitter handles and how one newspaper is making use of it.
Check it out here: http://www.thinkmulticultural.com/2009/11/05/twitter-land-grab/
Below are the entries for the 1st annual Sensis Halloween Pumpkin Carving Contest. Who do you think won? Click through to find out the answer!
If you haven’t heard or noticed, the White House Web site – www.whitehouse.gov - has switched from a proprietary back-end Content Management System (CMS) to an open source platform built using Drupal.
Check out the TechPresident story on the back-end rebuild.
This is a big deal, as it is rare for large government agencies, particularly high profile ones such as the White House, to build their public-facing Web sites using open platforms.
As an agency that builds a lot of Web sites for government agencies, the White House’s decision to go with Drupal might signal a major shift in how government agencies, and their IT leadership specifically, look at open source solutions.
While we do not ascribe to the notion that open source is always the best solution for every client, we also think that the tendency for many government agencies to not even consider them as viable options is short-sited. Organizations should weigh the pros and cons of a variety of Web site CMS platforms, regardless of whether they are open source, and then the select the solution that best fits their needs.
Hopefully the White House’s decision to go with Drupal will begin to remove some of the unwarranted stigma still attached to open source platforms among the public sector IT community.
Jose Villa
I was just reading the most recent blog post on David Wigg’s blog “Hitch” (which I just added to our blogroll) on ad agency innovator Copacino & Fujikado, a Seattle-area ad agency.
David interviewed agency principal Jim Copacino, and one of his quotes was brilliant:
“The Burger King ‘Subservient Chicken’ phenomenon opened my eyes to the possibility and power of interactive digital communications. For me, it snapped everything into focus—technology, community, experience, engagement. The fact that it was a brilliant digital interpretation of the 30-year-old ‘Have It Your Way’ positioning vividly illustrated the difference between 20th and 21st century communications.”
As an agency that is always working with offline, traditional “lead” agencies that usually drive the positioning for our clients’ brands, we have consistently struggled to get those partners to understand how to interpret the brand positioning digitally – how to interpret and express the brand positioning leveraging technology, community, and experience with the goal of achieving that elusive goal of engagement.
Jim Copacino has simply and elegantly articulated the challenge and opportunity of digital communications, something that is organic to digital agencies, but unfortunately still very foreign to most traditional agencies.
The “difference between 20th and 21st century communications” – sage!
Jose Villa
A Health care Case Study
(this is part of 2 of a 3-part article on using Web 2.0 strategies in Health care. Click here for Part 1)
Join the current dialogue
Social media trends make Web 2.0 strategies attractive marketing options for health care organizations. Your target audience is already out there communicating with one another, so go ahead and join the conversation by listening to what your audience is saying and contributing to the discussion.
There are already a number of patient social networks –general communities like HealthCentral and MedHelp and disease-focused sites like PatientsLikeMe and DiabetesMine. Watch as former patients talk about the service they received from your organization. Thank people who sing your praises and learn from those who make negative comments about the service they received from your employees.
In addition to these health care-specific outlets, the mainstream social media sites are also engaged in important conversations your organization needs to be aware of. For those just starting out in the social media world, take time to learn about Facebook, Twitter, Technorati (blogs) YouTube and Flickr. These are “common” outlets that can quickly help you see what conversations are going on. For example, for Twitter, you can go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in your organization’s name. This will search through all the Twitter conversations and pull up any mentions of your company.
Start your own community
While there are numerous conversations already going on, sometimes the best way to reach your target audience is to create your own avenue for dialogue. We helped one of our clients, White Memorial Medical Center, create an “I was born at White Memorial” Facebook group. To maintain the authenticity of the discussion occurring on the Facebook page, White Memorial has recruited actual patients born at the hospital to serve as the group’s administrators and be the face of the social media campaign.
White Memorial didn’t want their audience to see this as just another marketing gimmick. At the core of the campaign is an opportunity for White Memorial patients to talk to each other. By helping them see what they have in common – having been born at White Memorial –hopefully that will help forge friendships with one another and a lifelong relationship with the hospital.
The Facebook group has been introduced to the general public through organic and viral marketing, again with the ultimate goal of people viewing this as an authentic and natural place to converse. As the group further develops, it will likely also be connected to White Memorial’s marketing and fundraising efforts.
Check-in next week for Part 3 of this series.
Sensis recently launched an innovative youth-targeted anti-obesity campaign entitled “We’re Fed Up.”
The campaign, sponsored by L.A. County Department of Public Health, was almost a year in the making, and forced our agency to rethink everything we thought we knew about advertising and cause marketing.
I just published an article for MediaPost’s EngageTeens column on the approach that led to the creation of We’re Fed Up… you can read it here.
Jose Villa
PART 1 – Using Web 2.0 Strategies in Health Care Marketing: The Web 2.0 Opportunity
Static Web sites are no longer enough to build lasting relationships with your customer base. Web 2.0 and the growth of social media have created valuable tools for health care organizations to successfully reach their target audience in meaningful ways that can help create lifelong brand ambassadors and loyal customer relationships.
But instead of just jumping onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon, it is important for health care organizations to take a step back and determine how they can strategically use social media as part of their overall communications plan.
The social network consumer
It is a common misconception that social networks are filled only with teenagers and college students. While these populations still comprise a key demographic of social network users, they are by far not the only ones. Earlier this year Facebook stated that women 55 years old and older are its fastest growing demographic. In fact, the 26 to 44 year old age group now accounts for 41 percent of Facebook’s audience. The percent of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 survey.
Twitter, the latest Web 2.0 craze, has infected pop culture with celebrity users like Oprah and Shaquille O’Neal and has become part of politics with its user list including President Barack Obama and numerous members of the U.S. Congress. In the United States alone, according to comScore, Twitter recorded more than 4 million users in February, up more than 1,000 percent from a year ago. This includes a number of businesses utilizing this popular medium to reach their target audiences. One of the interesting things about Twitter is that the 45 to 54-year-old crowd is actually the one driving the increased interest in this outlet, as opposed to 18 to 24 year olds who traditionally were the social media early adopters.
These strong trends continue with the multicultural population as well. More than 40 percent of U.S. Hispanics who go online at least once a month maintain social network profiles, according to Ipsos. In addition, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 43 percent of online U.S. African Americans have a profile on a social network Web site – 12 percent higher than whites / non-Hispanics.
Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or through your own social network, there are multiple ways to reach out and communicate with your target audience. The challenge for any health care organization is figuring out where to start. The first inclination is to jump into anything and everything that is available, but it’s important to find the mediums that work best for each organization and what they are trying to accomplish.
Check-in next week for Part 2 of this series.
How Brands Can Build a Successful App Strategy: 12 Lessons From Benjamin Moore, Bank of America, Kraft and Others
Last week’s Apps for Brands event in New York gathered some top marketers to talk about best practices in developing a mobile app strategy.
The Sensis Take: The marketing of an app is fundamentally the same as the marketing of any other digital property. Notably:
Other Takeaways:
In this AdAge Video Podcast, you can hear an excerpt of MLB.com president Robert Bowman talk about the need to balance an app strategy alongside a mobile web strategy.
Mobile Apps: And Now for a Contrarian’s View: They’re Hot Now, but the Web Will Win in the End
The Sensis Take: While custom apps are a hugely popular tool in the marketer’s arsenal right now, it requires a significant time investment on the part of the consumer to go find and download your app, whereas your WAP site requires only that they visit the site to get the information.
As the mobile web grows, we may find again that platform neutrality trumps the intimacy of a branded app.
STATS: 84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI
The Sensis Take: As an organization that has experience in creating and running social media campaigns, we know that there is a strong ROI in a good campaign. While ROI is not the only metric worth monitoring, the CFOs of the world will start tightening the purse strings if marketers continue to neglect financial benchmarks.
Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations
The Sensis Take: If you are reading this blog, you are probably ahead of the curve (or looking to be) on the issues surrounding social media use. Mashable has put together a list of social media policies of over 80 different organizations. Take a look and see what organizations are doing things that you really want to emulate.
Experiments in Digital Creativity: 87 Cool Things
At last week’s Advertising Week in New York, Google’s Creative Lab gave a presentation on some of the coolest uses they’ve seen of Google technology. We are more than a little impressed.
-Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist
So the much maligned Recovery.gov Web site went live on 9/28 to mostly positive reviews.
The new site provide a lot of information in very engaging formats, including an interactive map and variety of reporting tools on how the Recovery Act money is being spent. It’s also a clean, organized and highly usable Web site. Federal Computer Week ran a nice piece on the site launch.
Yet, as someone who has been running a Web development firm for 11+ years, I still can’t connect the dots on how it could possibly cost $9.5 million to build. Even though it is a large, complex site, with a lot of back-end integration, a sophisticated and highly customized CMS, and significant hardware/hosting infrastructure, not to mention an aggressive roll-out (I think the site was built in 4 or 5 months), the price tag still seems way too steep.
Let’s look at it this way – assuming a $200/hr blended rate, and subtracting a healthy $1 million for hardware and software, that works out to roughly 42,500 man-hours. Assuming a 5 month timeline, that represents 8,500 man-hours per month, or 53 FTEs dedicated to the project. There is no way 53 full-time, 100% dedicated / utilized individuals were required to build this site. No way.
Kudos to Smartronix for making a lot money in 2009!
It seems like everyone in interactive advertising throws the term “engagement” around quite freely. While most may understand what engagement means (check out my deep dive into the concept on MediaPost), I think there is a big disconnect when it comes to actually making digital ads engaging.
We recently had a long back and forth discussion with a client trying to explain what makes an ad engaging. It wasn’t easy, but with some good examples and discussion, I think we were able to distill the concept so they could understand what we were talking about. Some of the key takeaways were that engaging digital ads:
Whenever we see digital ads miss the boat in terms of engagement, it’s usually because either:
Basically, in developing online ads, agencies erroneously treat digital as an extension as opposed to a central part of an integrated campaign. As users spend more and more time online, and media consumption habit “fragment,” assuming a linear consumption of advertising misses the boat.
Jose Villa