Month: September 2008

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TONIGHT: Attend this multicultural marketing how-to and get a great book – FREE!

If you’re member or “friend” of the Milwaukee Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), you may already know that tonight will be a terrific meeting. The topic of the MIMA dinner event is multicultural marketing. We’re honored to have Marquette alum Nancy Hernandez, MBA, founder and president of ABRAZO Marketing.

Nancy Hernandez will discuss interactive marketing in a multi-lingual environment, best practices and case studies. She has been praised by audiences for her no-nonsense approach to the challenge of leaping the culture barriers we all face in an international marketplace. 

Also winning rave reviews is the venue. Based on strong positive feedback, MIMA will again be at Milwaukee’s Intercontinental Hotel — a fitting name for the topic!

DATE:
TONIGHT! Thursday, September 18th, 2008

AGENDA:
Appetizers and cash bar: 5:30-6:00
Speaking engagement: 6:00 – 7:00
Q&A: 7:00 – 7:30

LOCATION:
Intercontinental Hotel
139 E Kilbourn Avenue,
Milwaukee, WI 53202

Register now!

Special Offer To Readers Of This Blog

LIMITED NUMBER ONLY! If you are one of the first 5 people to arrive at the event, you’ll receive a FREE GIFT, courtesy of ec-connection. Its the book New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly, by David Meerman Scott. Let the registration desk know that I sent you and if you’re one of the first 5 to do so, you’ll get the book!


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Try this LinkedIn trick to reduce your stack of colleague business cards

Last night was two firsts for me. I attended a Chicago Cubs baseball game from a rooftop venue across from the stadium. (The Cubs faced my city’s Milwaukee Brewers). The second precedent: Using LinkedIn to reduce or eliminate the need to retain business cards.

I was able to accomplish both because the rooftop socializing event, and a pre-game presentation, were jointly organized by the Milwaukee and Chicago Business Marketing Associations.

Mingling in the posh, luxury box-like meeting room, I had plenty of time to mingle and press the flesh between innings.

By their own estimates, LinkedIn is signing new professionals to its social network at a rate of one every second of every day. In just four years, the site has become de rigueur for executives looking to build their network of contacts. Which is, well, everyone.

It’s an impressive network. Below is a recent summary of who can be found on the site:

A rundown of who is on LinkedIn
A rundown of who is on LinkedIn

The meteoric growth of LinkedIn’s member base means that compared to two years ago, I now rarely search for someone within the site and not find them. And every time I do find someone and add them as a business associate, my own network grows.

Last night I decided to put this ubiquity to the test. For those I spoke to whom I truly saw a value in keeping in touch with (and they with me), I did something different. Instead of simply exchanging business cards, I used my smartphone to go into LinkedIn, search for them, and invite them to add me as a contact.

Now I have something even better than a business card. I have a database entry of these contacts that changes as they move through the ranks of their company, or a future employer. And they have an opportunity to contact me with a favor or other request for assistance — which is, of course, the lifeblood of good business networking.

Looking back at these two firsts from last night, I can tell you I will definitely use the LinkedIn technique again, where appropriate. As for rooftop voyeurism, I must say it was better networking than “spectating.” This shot of my view (unaided by the dozens of big screen televisions throughout the facility) was taken by my smartphone.

The baseball is over there somewhere!
The baseball is over there somewhere!

P.S. Too bad about the Brewers. Better luck tonight in Game #2 of there three-game Chicago line-up.

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Guerilla (and gorilla!) marketing at its finest

How much must a truly stellar promotion of a new business cost? If you’re a small, scrappy start-up willing to take a few risks, the answer is not much.

Steve Fretzin and a few enterprising friends realized that their Chicago networking events were suffering from a lack of publicity. There was no calendar of Chicago-area events specifically for those seeking business networking.

Instead of cursing the darkness, they lit a candle. They created NetworkingMonkey.com.

Then they realized something else. NetworkingMonkey needed publicity even more than their events.

So Fretzin and company found a sharp PR firm and embarked on an aggressive publicity campaign. He told me, “We wanted to make a statement to the city. So we hired 10 actors and sent them into the streets.”

They didn’t leave unarmed. The came packing fruit.

“We had them dressed up in gorilla suits, and we gave them crates and crates of bananas — each with a card that had our value statement and web address. We gave away 7,000 bananas.”

If you have trouble imagining what that must have looked like, click on the video below. The event was well-documented, thanks to their PR partners, who wisely planned the event to coincide with a local television newscast’s “Dance-off Friday.”

The value of this prime time television (and subsequent YouTube) exposure is hard to measure. But since the buy-in wasn’t much more than the purchase of a medium-sized plantation’s worth of bananas, I’d say the ROI of this clever publicity ploy was definitely huge.

The Take-away:

You don’t need a hefty promotional budget if you choose the right partners and use you imagination.

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Context matters with online B-to-B ads

Testing in the online world has never become easier or more affordable. It’s therefore no surprise that many assumptions about online ads are being reconsidered. Today, Enquirio and Google announced the validation of one such tenet. It had been assumed, through common sense and improved response rates, that an ad displayed in the context of similar subject matter will do better than one with no relationship to content.

What do we mean by contextual ad placement? The premise is that if I’m an executive who influences a decision to purchase construction equipment, and I see an ad as I review a construction industry portal site, I am more likely to recall the message — and the brand — than if I saw the same ad on an unrelated site.

In research by Enquirio and commissioned by Google, this assumption was validated. The research methodology included randomized test subjects, given tasks related to the content of the sites they were reviewing. Some sites contained ads that were relevant, others contained the same ads but had no connection to those ads’ subject matter.

Results were gathered in the form of questionnaire answers and aggregate eye scan heat maps of the sites being reviewed.

Two key take-aways:

  • Through contextually relevant business-to-business (B-to-B) ads, purchasers are 52% more likely to associate your message with your brand
  • With contextually relevant B-to-B ads, it is 28% more likely that your brand “will make the cut” and be shortlisted.

The Enquirio site has the whitepaper available for download.