In the last days the news has been bad, and there have been some bad news, the worse of that is the Tsunami that hit Haiti. That has been really a bad happening, but there is the need to say that lot of things are getting done, countries and private companies are sending their support in every form possible. At the moment there is the need of everything and in moments like those is great to see how people actually help each other, even if divided by an ocean.

Anyway I’m going to analyze what’s going on around this happening in a way to make people understand how those emergencies creates a possibility on “Corporate Responsibility” for Companies. Basically what usually happens is that companies tries to act in an ethical way so to create a social friendly image around the brand, something that can be used in a way to cover mistakes and the profit that they are having, simply giving it back to the community in forms of things that can help the community that they are profiting on.

The second aspect is that to get the best on the image is to find something that people cares about, that are conscious about the problem, that people see the problem directly. Usually those ideas and needs are usually well covered by the media, giving in this way a bounce effect to the company in form of free advertising. Simply happens that the company uses the media coverage on a problem in a way to increase their good branding.

What actually (unfortunately) is happening in Haiti happened to create an impressive media coverage, and companies decided to move their means and their brands in a way to help those people. That is a good deed from companies, but there is the need to understand that they do that mostly on a branding side.

What happened in Haiti is something new, and like everything new attracts the attention of everyone, media start to coverage the news and keep giving updates, then after a couple of weeks the news is no more new, decreasing the interest of people and so the media. With this loss of focus slowly it disappear, making room for something else.

It’s sad to say that but in the world there are a lot of things that need attention to take care about, problems that companies should help solving before that the media arrives, but that wouldn’t give a good Return of Investment on the charity given, more the happening is covered, more ROI there would be.

How many of you know about the “Rwanda Genocide” happened in 1994? from what I can remember there wasn’t an huge media coverage, but something really bad happened. In this case there is an another factor that needs to be considered, that was a war, not an natural disaster. For companies could have been hard to find a side where to stay and support.

Even Tiger Woods after all the bad media coverage on him decided to donate $2.000.000 in a way to help Haiti. As can be seen from this quick post there is a lot of factors that needs to be taken care of when planning an emergency Corporate Responsibility plan, in this case companies are giving their best side in a will to help people.

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Tonight I was writing a post for this blog about Spam (that I will release soon) when I have found this Direct Marketing campaign made by Unicef, that actually made me think a lot, and made me think from the first moment that It was really a bad idea of direct marketing, not for the result, but for the direct emotional effects on the people targeted.

The Direct Marketing campaign consist in sending faxes to people at their workplace, with a message like “My mom told me you are my father, please call this number”, but once the number is called Unicef answer. In my opinion this is really a bad Direct marketing campaign, because makes the person uncomfortable on a part of his life that probably he doesn’t want to share.

Why I’m so worried about this campaign?

Where They Send – They send this fax to workplaces, where people actually (and usually) are willing to keep their professional and private life separated. Lot of people that I know they don’t share anything private with coworkers. It’s a professional choice, everyone can choose to do so, to let them know by others as they are willing to. If this fax arrives to the studio of a Doctor (for the doctor) and is an assistant that picks up the message, the scenario is that the assistant can know something dark of the past of the boss, crossing the line between private and professional. Ok it’s an hoax, but it can create some judgments to the assistant, potentially cracking the consistency of the person.

What They Send – They send an emotional message. Stronger is the emotion, stronger the message is delivered and fixed in the mind of the target. In this message the emotion can be GUILT, REGRET, SECRECY (not good emotions). Probably some of the people could have a “dark side” or something can have happened in their past, making an old hurt open. All the package of emotions are not positive ones like LOVE, WILL, CHANGE and so on… they touch the dark side of the emotional spectrum.

Privacy Needed – Thinking about this idea, I have thought about the zones of the personal life that a marketer can touch of the target, when creating a campaign, in a way to deliver the message.

Marketers can touch only the Green Zone, that is what everyone see, meaning that you are conscious of who you are and what your values are, and how you are seen by others. There is nothing to hide, the target is safe and you can use what you know about the target to bring the emotion to the message. The Orange Zone is something that others know but that the target doesn’t, that can be considered in some ways an ok area where to invest, the secret is not to make uncomfortable the target (for example selling soap to a person that stinks but that he doesn’t consider himself owner of bad smell, everyone knows but him). The Red Zone is somewhere that no-one except the target can enter, is something that only he knows and everything that is that zone has to kept secret and not willing to share (or it will be in the Green One). That is something with an hight privacy.

Unicef with this campaign managed to trigger all the things that should never been touched, Bad Emotions, Privacy Violation and Hidden Facts. Probably some that called had some recall in their past about a missing son or else, and probably the hight percentage of donations, comes from the guilt and the will to feel better after that something so bad come out.

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In the last weeks I managed to reconsider some of the potential uses of shortening services, while I was at the university I created a shortening service called 21Url (now closed and offline) that had the idea to generate the creation of analytics for the urls that were shortened by the users.

A service that I personally use (and love) is Bit.Ly, that integrates perfectly with my Twitter Client and manages to give me an accurate feedback on my twitter activity, giving me a feedback on how I’m acting in that environment and more important about the feedback that I get from my followers.

This service can be used also in the opposite side of the analytics, with the data that it gather we can understand also how a specific blog/site/page is performing globally between the twitter users, those data can be considered at the same level of Alexa. Here are some points:

Market Share & Validity of Bit.Ly
First of all we have to understand how valid are the data that this service provide. We have to assume that the data comes from a good source composed by a sufficient number of individuals that uses the service, in this way looking at the traffic generated we can think that it serves a wide range of users, that can give an objectivity of the data. To do that there is the need to compare different services by using a good (and almost reilable) source, Alexa.

As can be seen Bit.Ly is the one that has a bigger reach between similar services, giving us the idea that the data that provides comes from a big variety of people, giving validity to the data provided.

Personal Analysis
Looking at the times that people made a click on the link you shared, you can understand how much your followers cares about what you share with them, creating a big understanding about the very real activity of your network. It’s good to have thousands of followers, but how many of them actually cares about you and what you share, are they looking forward to see what you are reading? Looking at the difference between Followers and Clicks you can start understanding how much you are considered by the community. With a little passion you can also see what categories of links receive more clicks by the community, giving you also a feedback about what the community care, and what they think you are good at. If you receive a lot of click on links about Agriculture and less about Phones, probably your community is made by farmers, or they consider yourself a good source of links about agriculture.

Like Alexa for Twitter
Just by giving a brief look at the total number of clicks received, you can actually see the grade of authority that it owns on Internet. If it received a lot of clicks can mean for example that a lot of people shared it (empowering it with authority), or that some super followed people shared it… but the real information that manages to validate the info is the number of people that actually shared the link on their profile. Looking at the Echo (we can call so the resonance of the link on twitter) that the link owns, we are able to own an objective data about the real traffic and consideration of a web-site.
If a site that talks about Online Branding has a low Echo can mean for example that it is not considered by the community as important, that their efforts haven’t been inside Social Media, or that the community doesn’t use bit.Ly.

New People
There is the possibility to see if someone else decided to share your link the same page via Twitter. This is an opportunity for profiling other users, managing in this way to understand their ideas and what else they share and what they are interested to. Doing that you have the possibility to discover also new source of information, and discover by using them new trends and possibilities.

Demographic
Like every analytics works you can see for example where and when you receive more clicks, giving you an hint about the type of users that are more “attracted” by your sharing stream, and in this way decide where to put more effort and resources.

Those are some of the many possibilities that this service can give us on analytics… and those information combined between them can give to every user insights important to create a better brand and improve the communication.

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During this week I have spotted some good adverting campaign on the web, but one of them managed to attract me more than others, for the way it has been placed and also considering the way that the advertisers used the environment to give to the audience the better impression and transmit the core values of the product. The advertisement can be seen in the image below and can be found at this link.

This advertisement can teach us a lesson on how values can be improved and how they can be reinforced by the environment thy are placed inside. Every product has some values, something that can be projected in the mind of our potential customers, values that will make them decide between you and your competitor… values are what people perceive and buy.

The product that is represented in this advertisement is a truck, a Pick-Up truck that in the US are used a lot by construction workers of every kind, and usually advertisers tend to compare every truck with values like reliability, power, toughness, resistance and all the range of values that the target want to drive. On television you can see pretty good commercials of tough man making testing those kind of trucks by doing things that can be soon only on movies. But what is the difference with this advertising? The difference stands on the value perceived by the people.

They created a bridge for the value “Toughness” of the product, by using the place and time when the right type of customers would have been present, by creating an impressive advertising.

Where – A football stadium, a place where two teams made of gladiators are going to fight for victory. Football is a sport where being Tough is not an option. You have be so if you want to win and prevail.

When – During a match of the home team (Detroit Lions), a moment where the training and the strength of the teams will be the core of the afternoon.

What – The product is pure strength, “if the poster of it can lift a load of bricks, imagine what can do the Truck”

Who – The main category of the football fans are construction workers, or people that are related to that type of job.

In the mean while I have made a sketch of a way to measure the possibility that you can have in placing an advertising in the right place and time based on the value you want to send. That can be seen in the picture below:

In this scheme are represented the values explained before. in this graph there is the need to put for those three categories the things that are more and less representative for the core value of the product. Stronger is the value, closer to the center it has to be put. In this way you can have a simpler view of different ways where the value is more perceived by the audience. The three factors (all gravitate around the value) that has to be considered are:

Who is considered… – Here you have to put the category of people that does a job or are involved in the value that your product represent and that you want to use and show in the Advertising.

What product’s Characteristic represent… – Which part of your product represent the Value you want to use? This is important because will be used in the advertising. It has to be clear in the mind of the customer the link between the part and value.

When and Where it’s… - When and where there will be the expression of this value? When the value will be considered as integral part of the event? and When?

Everything is about the value you want to represent and use, more this link and value will be around the customer, more he will perceived it as a Product’s value, and this will give you a leverage during his own purchase choice.

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In the last days I have been considering the various evolutions of Twitter and I had some time to monitor the changes that those brought not only to companies that need to update their clients, but also to people and how they tend to use those features to save time and also to use them to get the best for their Branding Efforts.

Twitter introduced the List feature that is important in a way to categorize your friends for themes or any way you want it. like every person we own something that distinguish ourself from others (like a brand) and this idea can be categorized by people. Lists means that you can can put followers in more than a basket in a way to monitor their stream in the most effective way possible. For the ones of you that haven’t tried it at the moment, you can create public or private lists that I have to say are really important also for Public Relations and Brand Management.

On the Personal Branding monitoring, when you look the list that people put you in you can see a lot about the reputation that you have for them, and how your actions managed to create your personal brand. Looking for example I can see that some people insert (I feel honored about) in lists like Marketing and SEO (that is what I do for a living) and also in categories more personal like Suggested or Friends, this mean to me that I’m considered in a good way on my professional and personal side.

This is anyway only the surface of the Brand Monitoring, because we can use the same system of PageRank to understand the real value of our mention on that list. If you are insert on a list named SEO from a person that does SEO full time (and that is listed in other SEO lists), means that your effort in becoming a SEO are well spent, because he knows your value that is proven by his knowledge. The same happens for every other type of category that you want to be insert into, you have to monitor not only the lists you are into, but also the lists that the people list you are inside.

On Personal Relations, I will bring a personal example, I have a private list on twitter, and it’s called “Best Buddies” and this is a list of people that I worked or studied together, that I shared a lot with and I talk to them regularly, doesn’t matter if they are pro or not, they are people that i can call friends. Why this list is private? Simple for PR reasons. I don’t want that people look in this list and feel bad because they are not inside, some of them can take it as a personal thing, even if they know the reason. This is in my opinion a good opportunity to use private lists, so that you can monitor the people close to you and that you share things with and in the same way not make anyone feel bad.

As can be seen there is a lot that can be done with the right use of lists (and also ranking products that can be developed), there is just to understand what the goals are and which are the people that in your opinion are worth to follow to persuade your branding goal.

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The following one is a good example about how a company managed to attract a great number of potential customers by giving their trial product for free and with the application of great values and graphic inside their brand.

Mail Chimp is a company that provides an eMail marketing solution for business of various sizes, and they are doing a great on their marketing and branding environment, some good points are:

1 – Free Trial
They are giving their basic product for free to everyone. The basic account has some limitation in numbers, but is essential for people that owns a small business that is still growing. This free trial is important because the customers get used to it and can understand the possibilities that it can give and all the features available. His means that the customer gets used to the system and when he needs more, he is willing to pay for an upgrade, cause he doesn’t want to change his habits.

2 – Great Graphic and Usability
Every single page of this service inspires happiness. The color used are warm color that inspires freedom and gives a welcome sensation to the user. The system is simple to use and in some steps everything can be changed or modified. This system simply works, meaning also that the user gets a great value for free and this stays in its mind as branding values, and when there will be the need to pay a fee, the customer will know that it’s totally worth. The basic customer gives the customer all the monitoring that he needs for a start (of course more tracking features are always welcome).

3 – Connection with other services
In every venture you do, there is always the need to use more web services in a way to get the best results. Wouldn’t be great to have all of them connected together and sharing data? Mail Chimp does that and make people save a lot of time, time that can be given to something else. (Time saving methods are always welcome and gives a great value).

4 – Happiness
In every part of the product there is this easy going will and mood. This means that there is always the curiosity and by using the product cause it’s not boring.

This is a brief checklist of what this company does as marketing, but when you explore it you will be able to see it more ideas and methods that are using in a way to make their brand image great and valuable.
Probably more analysis will come, but I have to say that what they are doing with the branding is great, cause the expectations and the ideas of the customers are always met and the branding process increased.

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The title for sure is going to express a lot of points that I want to say in this post, and for most of them this concept can be seen as obvious, but in my experience Marketing is not only about target and advertising… marketing is about all the mechanisms that a company has to approach in a way to make its client happy with his own product.

Tweetie 2 is for sure one of the most usable Twitter clients for iPhone, I loved the previous version of this app, and when the second version came out I had no hesitation in downloading it.All the marketing mechanism that they did with the previous version granted them a great coverage of this new version and of course a lot of downloads (and revenue). The first version was easy, simple and reliable, it was doing its job perfectly without problems and cause of my happy experience I decided to upgrade.

After installation I was really happy about the experience and my expectations were met, but not for a long time. After a little I discovered

that it has big issues on synchronization and also in posting new messages, lots of time I was posting old messages again an again every time I was opening the application.

After a couple of weeks of waiting for an update (that never came) I switched to TweetDeck for iPhone, waiting for the update… but now after some time I managed to get used about the software and I’m not really sure to switch back. This is a personal example that shows some important treats that has to be considering on Marketing.

1. Reliability of the Product
If the product is not reliable don’t release it. Every time a new version of something that was perfect is released is bringing with it the expectations of the customers. A product that doesn’t work is unlikely to succeed and create a bad atmosphere around the Brand.

2. Chance for the Competition
When a product doesn’t work the customer loses faith on the brand and to get things done they go to a competitor. The competitor has in this way a chance to impress the new customer showing the solution for their needs. Once the customer is acquired by the competition and get used to the new product, he becomes really a big expense for the company to have it back.

3. Regeneration of the Brand Values
For the reason before not only the re-acquisition of the old customer has a bigger cost, but also the process of Regeneration of the Brand values owns a bigger cost. This is because there is the need to make a PR campaign to have those values back in the mind of possible customers.

To the satisfaction of the customer needs and of a launch of a product, there are a lot of steps involved, steps that has to be linked together and strongly considered. A product that doesn’t work can have the best marketing campaign ever, but if it isn’t reliable is a lack on the mechanism, a lack that compromises everything.

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In the todays world there are different products and services that compete between each other, in a way to win the top position inside the mind of the selected target. Most of the times those products have no differences between each other, except for particulars like price campaigns, packaging and other.

What really differentiate one product from an another one? The values that are embedded inside the product, the ones that potential customers are going to look for when choosing who will provide for their own needs.
In the case of the commercial above, the company Sedex in his own advertising shows that Secrecy and Trust are two core values of their delivery services, that their communication and delivery are handled in a way that no-one will look inside the envelope or box and that is something important for everyone, from the company to the single person. They are pointing on the value of privacy and security that people are giving to their needs.

This means that FedEx or UPS can’t be trusted, or that their service is not secure? Absolutely not. But Sedex is focusing the attention on something different that the speed of delivery, it’s focusing on something that the competitor are not focusing, they found an important value not used by their competitors. If they are going to use well all the possibilities that will grow from this campaign they can have a strong leverage in front of their competitors.

As last note, I want to highlight an episode from Mad Man where this idea of hidden value is used and explained and this can be found on this YouTube Video.

Disclaimer – I haven’t been contacted by Sedex or any other company to talk about this advertising or things mentioned in this post. This is only a pure analysis of a Marketing Campaign.

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There is no doubt that Mobile Marketing is growing and that the new technologies are giving to business some new possibilities, giving the possibility to every user to share ideas and opinions with others via a deeply linked internet environment.
In those days I had the possibility to play after some time this iPhone App called “Flight Control” available here on iTunes. This application is very famous and became viral for its innovative gameplay and possibility to challenge friends.

FireMint, the company that created this game managed to make a lot of revenue from this game, but most important managed to embed in the further versions of the game some more features that managed to keep up the user interest in this application, and recently by integrating social media in a way to challenge other people.

Social Application
This application today is able to share the users’s score on a web site and display them on a ladder where you can see how, who nearby your position, are doing with the same game. This is important because you can meet new people with the same interest on the game, challenge them in an ability contest, and see if your actual friends are playing with that. Other important feature that the company created is to merge those results with a Facebook application, where users can link their Facebook profile to their Flight Control profile and manage to create a stronger link between your actual friends. By making a deeper connections and reference between the real person profile (Facebook) and the gaming person profile (Flight Control), the company manages to ignite a deeper psychological aspect of friendship, because it make discover to friends more affinities between them, creating in this way the possibility to create a deeper link. This means also creating the bases for a great buzz marketing and word of mouth dynamic.

Corporate Responsibility
This application inside one of the last versions insert a new map, that is the Australian Outbacks, and they managed to use this update in a way to create a perception of Corporate Responsibility for the brand. On their Blog post it’s written on how they decided to implement the map with the idea of helping the Royal Flying Doctor Service. This map not only gives a new type of game to the user, but gives him consciousness of some reality that in other ways e would never have found.

This game and company made some great marketing experiences in a way to create an addicting product that creates a great word of mouth and also create a thematic responsible corporate image. This application is pure marketing at the web level.

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Last May came out on the internet a video that for a couple of days gone viral between internet entrepreneurs, StartUp owners and people involved on business on Internet. This video has been created for commercial purposes from a VoIP company based in USA, but owns some great point that i would discuss further below the video:

This Video till now has done 257.048 views, that can be said that it got more attention and global coverage that if it would have been aired on the traditional TV channel. The message and the values that they are sharing with other people is not just the name of the company, but a set of messages and ideas that the target that they are approaching is fond and believes about.

1. Embedding the message
They embed the spirit of the StartUp people, the venture, the risk, the will to make new things in a better and new ways, the spirit of the challenge, all values that made countries like USA great countries.

2. Target for USA
Entrepreneurs are not an exclusive of USA, you can find them all over the world and all of them have the same spirit of venture and challenge. Anyway the message is clear as the target, they make a lot of referral to US values, because they want to attract US entrepreneurs, this because they provide their services inside the USA.

3. Target of Tech Savvy Companies
By using internet to show their message, they decided to focus on companies that are tech/internet savvy enough that can valuate the product that they are proposing. VoIP is still a new technology (a technology that is growing) that sometimes is hard to explain to people. Their message is available on YouTube, and targets companies, people that probably already know what VoIP is.

4. Happy and Positive Message
Their message is positive, saying that the economy can be healed by the efforts of great people like entrepreneurs and that the challenge brings at the end the satisfaction and the realization of a dream.

This message is more that a commercial, has been well written and managed to communicate great values, has been an example of faith and recognition of what means to be an entrepreneur. It was inspirational and people were sharing it with others, sharing the meaning, not the product… but of course the product was embedded with the message and the spirit, giving also a great branding image to the company that embeds those values.

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