posted by Paige Hebert @ 5:37 PM
Robin Tooms, Savage’s resident brand/web strategist is headed to San Antonio to speak at the American Marketing Association luncheon about social media. Her presentation will touch on managing your “invisible resume” (yep, you have one), how to build a strong personal brand with little planning and why your personal band can do double-duty to market your company. The luncheon takes place February 19th. More details about attendance can be found here.
Follow Robin on Twitter!
2.07.2010
posted by Robin Tooms @ 10:56 PM
Super Bowl Sunday is supposed to be one of the biggest pizza-consuming days of the year. Unless all of these advertisements have been lying to me, you’re supposed to eat pizza today. A lot of it. And for some reason, $10 is the sweet spot. Did you order pizza today and contribute to keeping this economy afloat?
So, how is Domino’s Pizza Turnaround campaign going? Well, it depends on who you ask. In the end, it looks like they’ll measure the success with the same store sales numbers. Boring. Personally, I would like to see them correlate the positive and negative mentions on their social media sites as well. It would be great to know if a certain “sentiment” ranking could be tied to the numbers.
This excerpt really sums it up:
Truly engaging in social media necessitates this kind of imperfect back-and-forth. It requires that companies hand over some control over their brands to their customers publicly. There are enormous benefits to doing so. Endorsement of a product by a large group of strangers, or, better yet, people whom you know, is arguably much more valuable than a one-sided advertisement. But with the advantages of social-media engagement come the downsides. For example, when a customer rants about what may be an isolated incident of lousy service on that company’s Facebook wall, everyone can see it. When a bunch of people don’t like a new product or policy, they can rise up against it together.
Part of Social Media 101 is that when you ask for comments, you will get some negative comments, but you can’t ignore these.
Sidenote: I actually did have pizza last week, but we ordered it through an iPhone app. Again, Domino’s where is your app? As one of my co-workers put it “lazy pizza lovers” like me are looking for this type of service.
2.05.2010
posted by Paige Hebert @ 6:06 PM
The television time slot after the Superbowl is in a word, coveted. So imagine the surprise when the slot was filled by Undercover Boss, a reality show where high level corporate executives trade in their corner offices for a day and get their hands dirty doing some of the company’s most menial and mundane jobs. In the season premier this Sunday, Waste Management president Larry O’Donnell spends the day cleaning port-o-lets at a carnival ground. It doesn’t get more real than that.
Why would programming like this be compelling enough to follow one of television’s most celebrated events? Perhaps it’s a sign of the times. Despite its title, Undercover Boss focuses on the daily toil of the working class – a significant population of the American workforce affected by today’s poor economic climate and rising unemployment rate. Many Americans blame out of touch CEOs for not knowing what is going on in their own companies. Undercover Boss is a way for executives to try to earn back public favor and goodwill and demonstrate their interest and involvement in company operations from top to bottom. So far, reactions to the show have been positive.
Let’s not also forget the show is marketing gold. The second episode will feature 7-Eleven Inc. executive Joe DePinto on the assembly line making donuts – reminding viewers via voiceover that the chain store carries a variety of fresh food products.
Historically, whatever program follows the Superbowl benefits from the game’s built in audience. It will be interesting to see if America will welcome these executives into their living rooms. I, for one, will be watching.
2.02.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 3:29 PM
My first “real” job was working as an ad taker in the classified department of a major metropolitan newspaper. I worked part-time while attending college, but this was my first taste of the world of work, rubbing elbows with journalists, sales and marketing and middle management.
One day the supervisor asked me to cover the real estate desk for someone who was out sick. No problem.
Covering the desk again the next day, a coworker sidled up and said, “You don’t have to do that; it’s not your job,” voice lowered to make her point.
In Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensible?, he offers the antidote to complacency, fear and dispassion – becoming a linchpin – the person who brings her body, mind and soul to the workplace.
“Emotional labor is art,” Godin writes.
I can hear the resistance now. “What? Art in the workplace?!”
Here are a few nuggets quoted from the book to help you reframe your workplace and create a pallet of possibilities:
1. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate and personal.
2. Art is about intent and communication.
3. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient.
If Shakespeare were alive, would he be blogging? I believe he would be using the technology at his disposal to create, communicate and give to his audience, not unlike corporate bloggers today. “People do their art where they find it,” writes Godin, from cave painters to quantum physicists.
He argues that people have been selling themselves short; depth of knowledge combined with nuanced skills and insight are worth a lot. Those companies who have furloughed half their middle age workforce may have eliminated critical linchpins. The stress points are invisible to the eye but, eventually, those cheaper replacement parts will break down (on some level) and the organization will suffer as a result.
Godin adds linchpins to the typical teams of management and labor. These are the people who create order out of chaos, who figure out what to do when there’s no rule book.
Instead of becoming disposable, he suggests that you become indispensable. How? By pouring your best self into your job and overcoming the resistance that holds people back.
Great bosses and world class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations and give their people room to become remarkable.
What would the world of work look like if you created exactly what you want?
1.30.2010
posted by Robin Tooms @ 3:56 PM
With all of the news this week about the iPad and the State of the Union address on Wednesday, you may have missed this little piece of news – the White House has an iPhone app.
Yep, on January 20, 2010, exactly one year after inauguration day, the app launched on the App Store to connect visitors to news, photos, videos etc. released by the White House. The State of the Union video was available through the app as well, so the timing of the release was meant to capitalize on that interest.
While the White House hasn’t figured out exactly how many viewers watched on the app yet, it did announce that more than a terabyte of data was streamed.
The article goes on to mention that this app is part of a larger mobile strategy. Very cool. How many businesses can say that they’ve tackled their mobile strategy yet? The fact that a government site – an honest to goodness bureaucracy – is doing this speaks volumes.
Back in November, with over 100,000 apps available in the Apple App Store, 2009 was announces as the “year of the app.” I actually think that 2010 might deserve that title instead. The iPad will support apps, along with the iPhone. We also now have Android and Palm Pre gaining traction along with Blackberry. Mobile apps (including iPhone apps) are really going to be huge this year.
This weekend is the iPhoneDevCamp in Houston. It’s great to see that Houston has the breadth of talent needed to be a part of the smart phone “tech wave.” I think some people might not see how much tech there is in Houston, but we’ll start hearing a lot more about it.
