Creative Concepts

I had a photographer that I lost touch with.  I had another photographer who decided to step away from her business.  I needed a photographer to take pictures of my family….and of course it couldn’t be just any photographer. 

In true social/internet networking fashion, I found a site called SuzySaid.  It is all the rage in Fairfield.  Why?  Because they report on everything that is local and the content is top notch.  I liked them so much I signed up for their email blasts.  I began to trust their content and well Suzy whoever she is (I have heard that it is a bunch of very talented women behind the homepage ).  Because I trust Suzy, I pushed a client their way to advertise (I don’t like advertising and rarely suggest this road but again, I trust and value SuzySaid).  They handled my client so well that I thought all advertisers on the website must be top notch.  Because of all of these experiences, I began to trust everyone and anyone associated with SuzySaid (did I tell you about the 2 amazing restaurants I went to because of SuzySaid restaurant reviews?).  Having said all of this, I saw regular advertisements for a photographer.  The combination of her great photos, she was a regular on SuzySaid, and she had a blog that was updated regularly made me hire her immediately via email, no quesitons asked.

Guess what?  I wasn’t wrong about her, Char from Wink Photography was professional and amazing at caputuring the essence of my family.  Guess what?  SuzySaid has done it again!

Ahhhh, the power of the internet!

For some great pictures of the family, go here.

I am happy to report that the Creative Concepts blog has been nominated for the 2008 Bloggers Choice Awards for Best Blog Design and Best Marketing Blog.  Cool huh?

Jackie Peters over at heavyBlog makes the case here for changing the ”job description” of marketers who use social media as a tool to reach a clients’ conmmunity.  Many great points made.  The biggest point is that social media is way beyond marketing because it is about starting a two way conversation which means a solid message along with listenting vs. pushing out a message to people who you think want the product or service.  Brian Solis also contributes to this concept here.

We at Creative Concepts have also worked hard to define what we do and explain it to the client so they understand the difference between an ad campaign and what we do when we enter the social networks, produce a video or build a blog.  If I get a client old enough to remember the days of TQM (Total Quality Management) then I am good to go (my father was a big TQM guy pushing it out to any company who was interested on behalf of Corning Inc….he was also a Baldridge judge so I know this stuff like the back of my hand!) but if we have someone who is hearing about social media and wants to know more, we have to define it in a way that makes sense today.

I work at this messaging every day for Creative Concepts because I firmly believe that social media is important to the future of every company.  To find a tool that helps you define your business and helps to explain what you do in your own words, to share with all who are interested the goings on of how you do business which allows greater trust from your customer, to hear direclty and immediately from the customer, to respond to that customer immediately and to get help from the customer when it comes to developing new products and more is way beyond marketing.  It is doing business smartly and the ROI is customers that last a lifetime!

On a more personal note, my daugher has been invited by the Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference to attend the 56th Inauguration.  As a fundraiser to help pay for the week of classes and celebrations she has started a blog called TwentEYEighty where she will blog about everything from classroom politics (she is 13 years old) to the campaign of course.  She will blog before, during and after the event in January…it should be great to hear her perspective. 

The power of her blog comes not only in a 13 year old getting her 2 cents out there but also from subscribers supporting her thoughts and people donating through her “donate” button so she can help pay for the week.

Jerelyn’s blog is, as all blogs are, 20% skill, 80% hard work-always with an EYE on the future and hence her tag line and url: www.twentEYEighty.com

Enjoy!

Had a great time speaking at HVDMA (Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association) yesterday. They had a President’s panel where Joe Feigenbaum from TDO, Fern Galperin, independent web consultant, and Matt Staudt from interactive marketing group and myself sat on a podium and answered questions about the web…everything from social media (big topic) to print, email marketing, direct marketing and more.

Interesting format. We met prior to the meeting and chatted and then were thrown lots of questions which for sure kept us on our toes…I was in very good company because Joe, Fern and Matt were confident and knowledgeable about their experiences on the web and how they have been innovators for their clients!

To sum up, we all agreed that the web/internet marketing is one of many powerful channels to use when reaching out to your customers.

Get a good rundown here from Tim Parry of multichannel merchant.

This is a humorous yet realistic look at the road that Facebook is following…too funny and yet very real!!

Faceplant: Turning Users Into Enemies
by George Simpson, Friday, Nov 9, 2007 6:00 AM ET

FACEPLANT, THE “SUPERHOT” SOCIAL NETWORK with 253 monthly users, this week launched its highly anticipated advertising program at a kabob street vendor cart on Manhattan’s creepy Lower East Side.

Faceplant will now give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages featuring staged corporate photos, third-party applications, discussion boards, and even annoying Flash animation–and will let users identify themselves as enemies of a product. Each user’s news feed will contain items like “Bobby Smith now hates his Toyota Prius.” The new system includes a feature dubbed Bacon that lets marketers ask disgruntled Faceplant members visiting their Web sites whether they want to tell other friends on Faceplant about a purchase where they got hosed.

So, for example, friends of “Tim” might receive an update in their news feed that Tim was one of the suckers who paid six bills for an iPhone, including Tim’s photo as well as a small Apple ad with an image of an iPhone and a link to the Apple site (where they can pay less than Tim, but three or four times more than for other similar phones–or simply wait it out for a Google-powered device). The ads expand what has been one of the most powerful features of Faceplant, the news feed, where members see a list of what their friends are doing–hurling photos from their parties, new friends with ample cleavage, favorite bands who sing unprintable lyrics, and so on.

“It is no secret that most Americans hate corporations and can’t wait to trash them to their friends when they are responsible for eco-disasters, third-world slave labor or collusion with Chinese manufacturers who ignore minimum product safety guidelines or simply excess oil profits,” says Faceplant founder and CEO Mac Suckerburger. “Who hasn’t had a bad experience with a lemon product or a moronic subcontinent help-desk guy who speaks English as a third or fourth language? Today we are giving every pissed-off consumer a chance for his complaints to go viral, and prevent millions of others from making the same purchase mistake. Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend.”

“This is simply brilliant,” said one agency media director who attended the invitation-only handing-down of the tablets. “Probably the single thing most youngsters hate more than corporations is their advertising, especially when it intrudes in a space they thought special and removed from commercialism. In one swell foope [sic], Faceplant gives members not only another reason to hate brands, but the means to trash them in real time to millions of others on the site.”

Marketers can also target ads on Faceplant based on more than a dozen demographic and behavioral criteria such as country, age, favorite media, education, gender, political views, movies, and relationship status.

“Jesus, I thought DoubleClick-Google was shooting fish in a barrel, but this will be about as much fun as we can have and still keep our clothes on,” says one privacy advocate who asked only to be identified as “Bin.”

The targeting parameters, once learned by even the dullest Faceplant user, will undoubtedly encourage people to pony up their profiles with highly imaginative information in order to throw off the algorithms that govern the targeting.

“Dude, Faceplant was, like, our space,” says a freshman at Harvard. “Why should we be pawns to the obsessive consumption that is, like, overtaking every aspect of our lives? Today’s consumption is undermining the environmental resource base. It is exacerbating inequalities. And the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. If the trends continue without change–not redistributing from high-income to low-income consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and production technologies, not promoting goods that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs–today’s problems of consumption and human development will worsen. We’re going to fire up the bong and bring the system DOWN, man. It will be power to the people, like my old man marched.”

Click here for more on this article.

Ok, I know it is Labor Day and that I should have been spending every minute with my beautiful family but they were tired from our trip to Southhampton (beautiful weather, great food and wonderful family made it the perfect trip) and I was drawn to my computer, more specifically to Facebook. I am so excited, I just had to share.

We as a company entered Facebook about a month ago well after we had a presence on MySpace for one of our clients. Myspace was a bit of a wild frontier and seemed to move quickly but once we were on there for awhile, we only had the same venues to work with: the one very active group we joined which linked closely to our clients’ product and our “friends” who seem to listen more than interact. Please note that while many agencies create digital ads for these spaces, we believe in creating communities and talking to people while growing the business so we are out there making friends and joining groups on behalf of our clients.

Well when we entered Facebook, it was different. First, it took awhile to become familiar with all that was going on (new apps created literally every minute in addition to a different interface from MySpace slowed us down temporarily). Robert Scoble, famous blogger and vlogger and one of our first friends, was making updates and additions on a regular basis which we could see on our mini feed which updates us about our friends, so I started to follow his path just like I did 4 years ago when I heard him speak live in NYC where he talked about blogging which, at that time, was a new and very strange thing to most of the world including myself.

I slowly have gotten into the swing of things by creating a profile page for myself/Creative Concepts and have uploaded a direct feed for this blog, a neighborhoods app so I can see who my actual neighbors are that are using Facebook (not many), I added a fun wall where I can post video, pictures, slides and more, plus I created a new group for the Business Smart Tools Conference which promotes the conference but more importantly, keeps a new/social media conversation going throughout the year.

I do believe that my intuition about blogging 4 years ago was on the money…I feel the same way about Facebook! Join the fun and let me know so we can be “friends!”

Just got an email from adoptasky.org. It looked like spam but the subject line interested me, Adopt A Sky Project, so I kept it in my follow up folder only to open it up just recently. The point of the site is to bring attention to saving our environment, more specifically, our air. Startling stats, strong visuals and the possiblity to buy a piece of the sky (on the website) is an unusual and pointed way to bring interest and visitors to the site. Take a look and buy, buy buy (it’s free) so you can save our skies.

Speaking of websites, one of our clients has put out an RFP to redo their website. Instead of creating a website for them, we are working as consultants (our choice) to help them weed through the process. Because of our work, the new (or old, may the best agency win) web developers must provide video capability, a blog (which is already up and running), SEO, and other interactive elements for now and for the future. Nothing too crazy here…you would think this is pretty common stuff at this point but you would also be amazed at how many web developers say they can do it all yet they can’t. Some only know flash so SEO is compromised, some do a great design but the backend is dated the minute the site is live, some know web development and think the blog application is the same but it isn’t…the list goes on and on (trust me, I have experienced this firsthand). With all of the options available on the web, the designers are falling behind (not all of course) and relying on old platforms and non existent stat packages which is not OK.

When shopping for your new website, you must ask for SEO (search engine optimization) in all of its forms, a blog if you have the time, video if you can make it happen and an eccommerce element that is designed well and easy to navigate. The world moves quickly so you have to catch up…that is what our clients are paying us for. Advice, choices that have room to grow and a design that is streamlined with the corporate branding! This is what we provide for our clients!

Well, I would like to say that for this very brief moment, we at Creative Concepts can take a breath. We have caught up from the Business Smart Tools Conference which was very exciting, we have reached out to many present and future clients, and we are sitting back and watching a bit to see where we are going and how we are getting there…summer is good for that.

One trend or direction for us started with blogging and is now moving towards social networks. In my mind, they are one in the same with a slight technical difference. I am a huge fan of blogging as many of your know. It is a place where the corporate sector can provide solid content for their fans, they can control the messaging which is a big deal for the more dated mind set of managing the image every step of the way, and the walls are removed between management and the customer through the comment section. So cool…a web tool with legs to stand on!

I believe social networks have the similiar mindset. Now when I say social networks, I mean like myspace, facebook, linkedin and such and when I refer to “working” social networks, I don’t mean posting an ad on the homepage and hoping people get it although many ads on the homepage of myspace are pretty cool. What I mean by “working” social networks, I mean reaching out to new friends/contacts, I mean entering the forums and speaking for the company we represent (with full disclosure of course). We submit questions and answers in a low key way, we are part of the group…we aren’t out selling, we are truly making friends. It takes a lot of work and attention to detail but in my mind, it is the best way to reach out to a whole new generation and a whole new group of people period.

Many of the conferences I have attended don’t talk about this stuff (I have heard a lot about viral marketing and digital ads) but our clients are very interested in the concept of online communities. Business wants to talk to their people, and our clients (and potential clients) want to be a part of a group much like the people on the social networks already.

It’s all very interesting and it keeps us on our toes.

I am off now to visit with TheNewsMarket which is a video distribution channel that in my mind, so far anyway, makes sense!

Until next time!!

Went to Podcamp NYC and had a great time.  Talked about all the reasons why a company should blog:  search engine optimization, reach out to new and old clients and create a community, auto PR when bloggers like your product/service and finally blogging as a crisis management tool.

Well last week, one of my clients, Bigelow Tea, used their blog for just this reason, to manage a crisis. 

I felt that a well established blog with loyal readers would be the spring board for keeping the lid on the media and would prevent clients from loosing faith when managing a serious situation.  This still may be so, but what I observed with Bigelow is that the blog was used first as a communication tool.  Their first official statement hit the blog and the press took notice from there.  Statements going forward were posted on the blog and these weren’t corporate speak statements.  These were heartfelt, behind the scenes, I am doing the best I can, statements from the co-President Cindi Bigelow.  You may not have agreeed with her (and many didn’t) but you had to hand it to her, she laid out her dilemma honestly and was responding directly to the blog comments and emails pouring in from the main website.  The fact that Cindi had the blog to communicate and reach out to others on her own terms was what helped Bigelow Tea get through their situation honestly and humanly which, and time will tell about this one, should only bring loyalty from old and new clients!

The second interesting thing about the blog as a crisis management tool was that many didn’t even read what Cindi said, they came to speak their mind based on what they heard in the press (and the press didn’t get the story right half of the time and you would know this if you read the blog entries).  It was the one place where the commentors weren’t censored…the one place where they could go to vent and they knew they were being heard.  A community was created as divided as they were.

So my belief in blogs is deeper than before.  Blogs, in my mind, are not just a “new” media tool or a social networking pastime…this is real stuff that is here to stay.  A forum and a tool whose mere structure is, will and should be the backbone of every web presence for the corporate sector!