Category Archives: Marketing

Surprise! You’re actually a brand manager!

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Coming out of an existential funk, I’m finally reading the books I’ve accumulated over the past few months but havent had the passion to pick up. It’s no mistake that two of these are by David Ogilvy.

No, I’m not an advertiser, although I’ve often dreamed of working at an ad agency (pre-Mad Men craze). But, I am an integrated marketer, so I know that advertising, marketing and public relations all need to work together. These days though, the lines are blurred on which is which. Understanding the mind of an ad man only helps to push you that much further – especially when his decisions are based entirely on what works, not what’s pretty or makes the client/agency ‘feel good’.

In beginning Ogilvy on Advertising last night I stumbled upon this gem:

“every advertisement must contribute to the brand image”

He goes on to state that the brand image is the brand personality. In all of our work with social media we often discuss tone, voice and even personality. But how many of us see ourselves as brand managers?

Too many times social media is seen as a sales tactic: something to drive traffic and generate leads. For those who measure, these are what they point to as their outcomes. You hear much less about brand and brand personality, changing sentiment and perception over time. Are these less important because they do not sound tangible or businessey enough?

The thing is, we can measure sentiment and perception, as well as how it contributes to ‘sales’. But it takes a lot more effort and there is no one perfect equation that creates success for everyone across the board. It comes down to one thing and one thing only: do the work. Only you can determine what baselines are for your organization and how you need to affect them in order to meet organizational goals. No one can tell you how to do this, they can only tell you what has worked for them. It may not work for you. One size does not fit all.

The mediums may have changed since Ogilvy’s time but the principles have not: do the research, dont go by your gut alone and if it’s still selling dont trash it until its not.

Remember Your Voice: Riffs Conjured by Dave Grohl

davegrohlsxswI may not be sure about how I feel about SXSW, but what I’m crystal clear on are my feelings for Dave Grohl. Even though they exist, I’m not speaking of romantic feelings, but those of respect, admiration and envy. To be someone who can harness the inner drive to create an album playing every instrument himself – not to mention the talent he exudes doing so – is something I’ve always aspired to. Being in a funk lately, this talk seemed tailor-made for me.

Until recently, I saw Grohl purely as a musician. But when I watched his SXSW keynote (and then read and reread it several times), I was shocked at how deeply it affected me on multiple levels. He spoke of how ‘the musician comes first’ and ‘finding your voice’. That at all costs, it needs to be fed, nurtured and free to grow and change. No matter how much technology changes us, there is one thing that remains the same within us. There is something that can deeply move each of us to action. The problem is that many of us deny it. We push it down. We neglect it. Some of us may not even know what our ‘thing’ is. Many of us abandon it. We condemn ourselves to mundane societal norms, tasks and checklists that do nothing for our inner world. We are not truly living.

As a musician who abandoned her ‘voice’ many years ago, this got me thinking. I had just finished reading Getting Unstuck: A Guide to Finding Your Next Career Path and concluded that my ‘thing’ was creativity. To be happy in my career, I need to be able to use creativity to solve problems and find new ways to deliver results. This makes me happy. This is what I am good at. This is what I bring to the table. But how am I using this talent to feel like I’m living up to my potential? How can I use it better to meet the needs of an organization while not sacrificing anything? How do you turn your talent (voice) into a career?

Many of us have passion for what we do. We research. We strategize. We share results and ‘cool things’ we’ve found. But sometimes we get lost in the shuffling of electronic paper (Mashable posts) and our competitive nature (Klout scores). As marketers we get lumped in with people we’ve labeled as snake charmers and ladder climbers. When we lose sight of what’s really important, pursuing creative solutions, we are not pushing our voice to its limit. We’re lip syncing someone else’s song. A song that everyone else knows the words and pitches to. And it’s boring.

“It’s YOUR VOICE. Cherish it. Respect it. Nurture it. Challenge it. Stretch it and scream until it’s fucking gone. Because everyone is blessed with at least that, and who knows how long it will last . . .”

How are you finding ways to do this in your career and in your life every day?

The Scroll – A Strategic Social Media + Brand Move

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Our social media baby has finally arrived: Hamilton College’s ‘The Scroll’ is a platform born of love, research, cold sweats and lots and lots of discussion. Still in beta testing, we’re adding in the last bits of functionality but released this on campus, to alums and the broader social media community today.

Not only a fun, interactive way to find a variety of conversations at once, The Scroll was the answer to our top five questions about social media use and authentic branding of our institution:

1. Many in our audience do not use Social Media/Twitter/Facebook/Etc. Or do they?

Perhaps the issue is that our audience never really knew they could engage with us in this way? The Scroll aims to be a solution: pull together all of the valuable conversations about our institution  from a variety of platforms and audiences and allow them to be shared back out via the platform of the user’s choice. Even if you are not a social media user, like some of our older alumni, now, you can see the conversations as they happen and choose to participate or spectate as you so desire. Instead of creating a one time campaign, The Scroll can be used over and over again, highlighting daily and trending content, and adding in new accounts as they become available. It is platform agnostic, although primarily fed via Twitter (as we work out the inevitable, and ubiquitous Facebook and Tumblr kinks).

2. Departmental and community accounts fade/die.

While it may be easy to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, we all know that the difficulty lies in upkeep and maintaining your relevancy. Now, in order to be highlighted on The Scroll, accounts need to stay on top of their game to produce relevant and timely content. Competition among groups and accounts will hopefully sustain the content influx, along with targeted social media campaigns, especially those from events. Organic content trumps all, and the main content goal of The Scroll is authentic,transparent content, live from our students, alumni and community.

3. Our audience, if it does use social, doesn’t connect with us this way. Do they?

Beyond creation of accounts, we need to market them. We recently launched a companion campaign ‘Share & Engage’ to fully flesh out the reasoning behind projects like The Scroll: we invite our audience to share their thoughts, engage in a dialog with us and to push around and create content that is relevant to their individual Hamilton experience. By piecing these together, we create the real and total Hamiltonian experience  Other projects in this include our social media directory, adding comment and sharing functionality to our news stories, a newly updated and social media inclusive alumni directory and an interactive map project.

4. There isn’t that much content being shared about us. Is there?

By creating a fire-hose of social media content, funneled from campus and alumni community accounts and tags, we’re able to unearth conversations that may have previously fallen through the cracks. By showcasing this content to our communities, we allow them greater opportunities to engage in discussions, reconnect with friends & faculty  or just share funny ideas and memes. This will need to be maintained, but we’re already creating creative content campaigns where ever and whenever we can, built with alumni and student feedback. By giving ownership to our audience in many ways, we’re hoping to make this truly their platform.

5. It’s difficult to follow a conversation with multiple people, on multiple platforms in social media. 

The hope is that The Scroll brings together all of the content that we may have not seen previously. Conversations on similar topics in a variety of places can now live together and a broader picture painted. We also allow for a variety of viewpoints so that the true nature of life at Hamilton can come through. As we began to see our reliance on a platform like Storify grow, we decided to try our hand at taking on something similar in-house.

It remains to be seen how The Scroll will be accepted and used, but ultimately it was a fun, calculated risk to take. We’re hoping conversations grow because of it and that our audience feels more in touch with the place that they call, have called or will call, home.