Archive for year 2012
The evolution of an idea. A {growtoon}.
Sep 21st
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Joey Strawn is a social media strategist that loves enjoying a good book and then drawing in it. Check him out on Twitter: @joey_strawn
Coca-Cola’s bold move from creative excellence to content domination
Sep 20th
Click here if you can’t view this Video of Coca-Cola strategy.
Think about this marketing challenge: How do you keep a product that never changes relevant and interesting for 125 years?
Now, let’s take it a step further. This product is becoming LESS relevant because it is relatively generic, flooded with competitors and a target of health and environmental activist groups.
But it gets even MORE difficult — You have to keep this product in the hearts and minds of people across every culture and country in the world.
Of course I’m talking about Coca-Cola, a company I admire very much because of it marketing excellence. And now Coke is turning to content marketing to drive the relevance of its colored sugar water in entirely new ways.
In this remarkable and entertaining video, Coca-Cola reveals its strategic plans to light up the world of content marketing and storytelling to enable profitability, connection, and positive world change.
Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at Coca-Cola Company explains how Coke will leverage the opportunities in the new media landscape and transform one-way storytelling into dynamic storytelling hoping to add value and significance to peoples lives. Jonathan describes the challenge of content creation in an enlightening way, reminding us that “every contact point with a customer should tell an emotional story”.
This video is full of rich ideas like linking to “liquid content,” creating provocations that spur not just dialogue but action, and the importance of influential “data whisperers” to drive awareness and change. I hope you enjoy this rare insight into a company marketing strategy.
Part 2 of this video can be found here: Coca Cola Content Strategy.
How to Turn a Small Blog Audience into Small Army
Sep 19th
By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Every single day we focus on how to get more traffic to our blogs, increase our conversion rates, and sell more. The result is an obsession with raising our Klout scores, increasing the number of followers we have on Twitter and inflating every metric we can in hopes that we’ll become the next … insert famous blogger of your choice.
Let’s get real for a moment. I’m not going to become the next Zen Habits, Chris Brogan, or Seth Godin. Neither are you. They had a substantial head start and don’t appear to be slowing down. But the good news is that you have an edge that you may be overlooking. When your audience is small you can run your blog like a VIP experience.
“If you only have a few readers, treat them like the most important people in the world because they are.” – Chris Guillebeau
Email Each Reader Personally
I have to give credit where it’s due for this idea. Chris Guillbeau told me he emailed every single newsletter subscriber personally for his first 10,000 subscribers. While each one may not have had an impact, the cumulative effect was incredibly powerful. You can’t really argue with his success. I’ve made this part of how I treat my email subscribers and I recently received this email in response.
Thanks for your email! Of all of the resources that I subscribe to, I don’t think I have ever received an actual personal email that wasn’t an obvious use of email marketing personalization features. Your content is awesome, and I am finding it really helpful!
Just to be clear, while this is a tactic, if somebody does respond to you, that provides chance for you to take that relationship further. You’ve just discovered a super fan. Be genuine and engage them.
Write a Post Specifically for Each Reader
A friend mentioned to me in a conversation that he only had 25 readers. I told him to contact each one of them. If you have a small group of readers imagine the impact you could have if you wrote a post dedicated to each one.
Phone or Skype Your Readers
Although we live in an online world, we can’t forget that 95% of communication is non-verbal. When somebody who reads your content hears your voice you go from “that person who writes that blog” to a real person. Let your readers to get to know the real you.
Host a Fireside Chat
This is where an audience becomes a community. It’s no longer a tribe leader communicating with a tribe member. It’s how you become a facilitator of conversation between the members of your tribe.
Visit Your Readers in Person
My friend Mark Lawrence, who was and still is a relatively unknown blogger, runs a start-up called SpotHero. He used all his frequent flyer miles to visit every single person he connected with online. He used his connection with me as an excuse to visit California and to this day we’re friends. His blog is more or less dead, but here I am telling you about it 2 years later. For the A-list bloggers to emulate this they’d have to spend their entire year, every dime they have and possibly their whole life to accomplish this.
The Cost of Failure is Minimal When You’re Small
One of the great things about being relatively small and unknown is that the cost of failure is not that harmful. That gives a blogger with a small audience a tremendous amount of leverage. If Mark Schaefer did something that absolutely bombed on this blog, his audience is substantial and lots of people would know. When you’re small you can take some bigger risks with your creativity. I’m convinced it’s one of the reasons small companies are so innovative, while big companies lose this capability as they grow.
Don’t forget attention is a form of currency on the social web. When people spend theirs with you, give them more than they paid for. Nurturing a small audience is essential to converting a small audience into a small army. So take that small audience and turn into a VIP experience that has people lined up around the block for an opportunity to be part of your army.
Srinivas Rao writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did and his the host-co founder of BlogcastFM. You can follow him on twitter @skooloflife
Picture This: 10 Amazing Photo Sharing Apps
Sep 18th
By {grow} community member Kerry O’Shea Gorgone
I have about a dozen photo apps on my iPhone. It’s possible I have a problem, but they all serve different purposes! Here are my favorites, from frequently used to occasionally launched.
The Must-Haves
Instagram – Free
Like the “Insta” implies, this app makes sharing fast, and the newest version even lets you choose the filter before you take the pic. Whatever my mood, there’s a filter to match, but that’s not why I love Instagram.
I love the little windows Instagram opens into people’s everyday lives. People showcase their passions, hopes and dreams, from the simple to the monumental. They illustrate their sense of irony or whimsy, and reveal their personalities. I think of it as “Instagram intimacy,” or “Instamacy” for short.
Another great thing about Instagram is how easy it is to share from the app. You can upload Instagram images to Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, email your photos to your social circle, and even tweet someone else’s photo that strikes your fancy.
The less than perfect aspects include some counterintuitive UI elements (swiping to the right to delete or reply to a comment isn’t obvious to most users, and placing “reply” right next to “delete” could result in some unintentional slights.
Photoshop Express - Free (with upgrades from $1.99 to $4.99)
The granddaddy of photo doctoring apps, this mobile version enables you to assuage your mom’s fear that she looks bad without make-up, or in the sunlight, or wearing that dress, etc. Knowing I’ll punch up the color or smooth out the speckles makes my subjects more comfortable, and that always makes for a better photo.
From Photoshop, you can upload your creations to Photoshop.com, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Tumblr, email images, or save to camera roll.
Snapseed – $4.99
When you need to break out the big guns, go for Snapseed. At $4.99, it’s expensive by app standards, but prolific photographers will appreciate the granular level of control it gives you over the final image. Add filters, adjust every aspect from contrast to structure, or add “Drama.” (Yeah, that’s a filter.) You can even add a digital frame, for that gallery-ready look. For the newer digital artist, there’s an automatic fix that enables you easily to adjust contrast and color.
Share capability is also supersized, or you can open the edited image in Camera+ or ColorSplash for more fine-tuning and fun.
My Fun-to-Haves
Diptic - $0.99 (with optional “expandable” layouts available)
Example of Diptic
Simply put, the best $0.99 cents I’ve ever spent!
I love Diptic for before and after photos, progression photos (like my son coming down the slide) or for showing the front and back of a sexy muscle car! However you use it, Diptic is great for letting you combine different images into a single, eye-catching collage using one of 52 customizable layouts. The app has 14 filters you can apply, or share to Instagram and use one of those. You can also upload to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Camera+ or ColorSplash.
Incredibooth – $0.99 (with optional add-ons)
The fun of a photo booth in the palm of your hand! Better, really, because you don’t have to keep dropping coins in. You can choose filters prior to posing, and can share the entire strip or any single photo to Facebook or Twitter, email it, or save to your camera roll for additional doctoring.
Hipstamatic – $0.99 (with optional add-ons)
I like to play with this when I get sick of the same old Instagram filters. Somehow not as fun as Instagram, but it’s great for moody photos. The biggest downside is that you can’t add effects to existing images from your camera roll: you have to take a new picture. Huge bummer, which makes it less appealing to me and, I’m sure, many others.
Just Because I Want Them
Marblecam – FREE
Marblecam Example
This free app does one thing: distorts part of your image so it looks like there’s a marble in it. The right subject and the right light make this one thing awesome, but you can’t choose what gets “marbleized” or make adjustments. Still fun to use once in a while and, given the price, I’m not complaining.
Email your marbleized image, or share via Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You can even open the pic in ColorSplash or Camera+, and punch up the contrast or tweak the color.
Color Splash
ColorSplash – $0.99
Like Marblecam, this app’s really good at one thing. Ever see a black and white picture of people milling around a rainy street, and the only thing in color is a red umbrella? This app can do that.
I use it to showcase the artwork on my Johnny Cupcakes shirts. ColorSplash lets you save the session, which is useful, because it can take a while to brush the color out or in. Share, save, print, or send to a slew of other compatible photo apps.
Flipagram - $0.99
Flipagram lets you turn your Instagram photos into a movie. You provide the title text, choose the images, and even select background music (just make sure you have the rights to use it). My masterpieces to date include Carporn: the Movie and a Flipagram for my son’s birthday. Very fun app, especially for special occasion slideshows. Share directly to your social networks or save to your camera roll.
My Hidden Gem
Panorama 360 – $0.99
This one takes some getting used to, but when you view a finished panorama, it will take your breath away. Panorama 360 offers a whole new way to stand in someone’s shoes, and see the world around them (and above them), just as they do. Here’s what it looks like: Panorama 360 example. Be gentle: capturing a great image with this app takes patience, but it’s worth the effort! Share to the usual social networks.
What did I miss? Which apps are your favorites?
Kerry O’Shea Gorgone, JD/MBA, teaches New Media Marketing in the Internet Marketing Master of Science Program at Full Sail University in Winter Park Florida. Follow her on Twitter: @KerryGorgone
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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