1. Social Media has changed marketing…forever.

Gone are the days of broadcasting your brand message from the rooftops for all the world to hear. Social media has created an outlet through which brands can interact with the consumer to gain insights, feedback, and a better understanding of what the customer wants and needs. Marketing is now a two way street, where listening is just as important as talking.

Barry Libert (@barrylibert) presented a great case study on Nike that demonstrated the brand’s attempt to ‘be where the customers are’. Over the course of the past three years, Nike has reduced its spending on TV and broadcast by 40% while simultaneously enhancing its community engagement through social media programs, mobile apps, and interactive web software. The result? Increased revenue and a strong community fanbase that they can continue to draw from for future social media based marketing efforts.

2. Mobile optimization is a must

Are you reading this blog article on a mobile device? Chances are, for at least half of you the answer is yes. As Tim Hayden (@thetimhayden) pointed out, “at least 90% of Americans are within 3 feet of their mobile devices 24/7”. We are living in a mobile world, which means one thing for companies: if your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re missing an important opportunity to engage your customer.

It’s important to keep in mind that optimizing your site for mobile is not just about quick load times and mobile technology. It’s about understanding the user experience and the way consumers interact with your site on a mobile interface. Don’t just take your current site and put it on a mobile platform. Condense your content and create a unique site that is tailored to the mobile experience. Doing so will make a world of a difference when engaging your customer on a mobile platform.

3. Content is still King.

Yes, social media has changed marketing forever. But fundamentally, social media marketing is still marketing. You can Tweet all day every day, but if you’re not employing an effective content marketing strategy, you might as well not be Tweeting at all.

So what’s ‘good content’ for social media? Ask your customer. Or, better yet, let your customer create the content. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) phrased it best when he advised companies to “make the customer the hero”. By using the customer experience to create great content, you are creating social media marketing that engages the customer and that will likely result in a high level of fan or follower activity.

The message that we took away from IMS is this: marketing isn’t just about pushing a message anymore; it’s about customer interaction and brand reaction. The most effective marketing campaigns today use insights gained from social media to drive a reactive and targeted comprehensive strategy.

Visit The Pulse Network’s YouTube channel to view recordings of the presentations at Inbound Marketing Summit 2012.

Are you in business to get big or get bought?

If you’re contemplating a move in either direction, we strongly recommend ‘putting your game face on.’

How can you ascertain whether or not your company needs such a face? Just take a look around. At your industry. At your competitors. (Chances are excellent that none of them are standing still.) If your assessment at the end of this look-around is “we look good enough” – you probably don’t.

The signs are easy to spot.

• A logo that practically screams, “Ignore me!”
• Messaging that whines, “Me, too.”
• A vintage 2003 website, for example. Worse, if it’s not optimized. What’s your status in a search? Is it content-rich. Is there lead capture tactics or do visitors come and go – never to return.
• Sales / company materials that should be renting space in your storeroom because they’re so outdated, but you take pity on them because the local landfill is so short on amenities.

Loathe as we are to recommend cosmetic surgery, a make-over of some sort is clearly in order here. A revitalized brand yields a new attitude. Ask Allstate, State Farm, or Farmer’s Insurance. Formerly frowsy brands that would rather tranquilize you than engage with you, they’re now home to Mayhem Guy, immediate gratification, and Farmer’s University, respectively.

(OK, they’re operating in the high-rent district, but you get our point; It’s just as important in the B2B space as it is in consumer.

A new game face is something that looks to the future rather than something you drag around, leg-ironed to the past. It conveys to your customers you’re vital, prospects you’re worthy of their short list potential suitors you’re credible and a player, and the competition to beware.

So lead with your face, a move that’s counter-intuitive everywhere but here. And get it on.

Only a tagline can occupy the remarkably valuable and visible marketing real estate cheek-by-jowl with your logo; paradoxically, this exact real estate is incredibly ill-suited for the appearance of anything else.

And only a tagline can simultaneously emotionalize and/or dimensionalize your brand, ingratiate it to your customers, and energize your employees.

Typically, a tag draws its animating force from the company’s core statements. The alchemy occurs in drawing out the essence of your company from these statements.

Over time, taglines have been Balkanized into a number of camps by anal-retentive types who just can’t resist categorizing things into a number of camps. These are:  descriptive, motivating/imperative (“Just do it.”), evocative, stimulating, supportive and superlative.

In terms of practical implementation, however, there is often significantly more overlap. Some of the most successful corporate taglines are in fact hybrids, conveying not just what a company does, but also its attitude and/or perspective about what it does. (GE: “We bring good things to life.”)

Candidly, there are alternatives to the thoughtful, on-strategy, brand-aware birthing of taglines.  Random tagline/slogan generators tagline/slogan generators exist, promising results that are “weird”  “funny” or “useful.” (In this case, two out of three ain’t…good.) And there will always be the purists who default to nothing/nada/no tagline, reasoning that their prospects and customers know who they are.

Right you are, Amalgamated Industries!

To see how a tagline can work for a campaign as well as a corporation, make a cool move and view our Cool Move case study.

(And those pens and mouse pads aren’t getting any younger. Time to ditch the mouse pads, by the way.)

Here’s the deal. You already know that your trade show is a target-rich environment and home to a captive audience, or you wouldn’t be there. The very good news is that very few exhibitors – your direct competition included – know what to do with this fact.

This no time for half-measures – and the perfect time for a little creativity.

Say your new technology can genuinely beat the pants off your competitor’s old technology. Easy to say, but tough to get it to register. But what if you bury that old technology – with a casket, New Orleans style funeral procession, funeral service, mourners, eulogies, the works? That’s what we did for a lighting client, and it lit up the joint, tickled the folks working the show and generated a ton of appointments. (We pulled it off a few years ago, and people are still talking about it.) See some pictures from the event below, just click a thumbnail.

When you think about it, all you need to expand the size of your booth to the size of the show is an idea you can run with. Same client: Different year. Before The Sopranos hit the screen, we came up with a gangster theme that was a huge hit. (Or ‘whack.’ Whatever it was, it killed.) See the The Offer You Can’t Refuse.

Here’s the deal (part 2).

Alpha prospects are busy people with agendas of their own, but they’re people first and prospects second. If you can entertain them somehow, while remaining conceptually connected to your sales proposition, they’ll have a heck of a time forgetting you.

Deploying an awareness & engagement strategy at an industry or consumer event – like we do for clients all the time – can significantly increase your ROI.

So next time, given the kind of scratch you’re laying out just to be there, give them something to remember you by – besides a tote bag. We can show you how.

If your company is still hanging in there through waves of financial meltdowns, you can proudly call yourself “survivor.”

Feel free to pat yourself on the back – for about five seconds. Then consider an unforeseen ramification or two of the global shake-out. Competition that fell by the wayside has been replaced by leaner, meaner competitors – companies you may have never heard of that are nevertheless all too ready to take a hunk out of your market share. Your grand five-year plan has been temporarily replaced – and certainly altered – by the more immediate issue of successfully seeing in the New Year. Your employees, while doubtless happy to still be drawing paychecks, have likely forgotten the focus on your company’s “big picture” – which has changed, anyway.

Beautiful thing, the free enterprise system.

So, what’s your next move?

Try “relaxing.”

We realize it’s counterintuitive, but it’s also critical. Take a minute– about the time it takes in the life of your brand – to think about who your company is and what it has to offer. Define yourself rather than being defined. Create a set of corporate statements – mission, vision, brand proposition, elevator speech – or carefully re-visit them if they’re already out there.

It’s not indulgent. It’s imperative. And, frankly, it’s not something you can do alone. (It’s kind of like trying to take a 360% look at yourself in the bathroom mirror – hopefully flattering, but far from complete.)

That said, we’re not talking heavy lifting here. No massive messaging exercises. No market research firms talking to everyone you’ve never met about something they know nothing about. In broad strokes, you know where you’re going and what you have to offer. Our job is to build clarity around these data points to ensure that everyone else knows them, too.

Our process goes like this – we interview you and others you specify and audit your competition. From there, we develop a working brand platform. From there, we generate your core statements. Elapsed time: 6-8 weeks.

Whether you’re pitching eyecare or middleware, getting your story straight frees you to be pro-active rather than reactive. It lets your workforce know where you’re headed. It puts your competition on notice. And it sets you up tactically for the development of branding that’s fundamentally sound – and similarly common-sensical.

Recently, on a hot Friday in July, I gave a presentation to the Rhode Island Chapter of the Environmental Business Council of New England. For a hot Friday in July, there was a surprisingly good turnout, about 35 in all. Energy project developers, clean-tech focused VC and legal types – in short, those who have a vested  interest in moving the ball forward on energy projects in the state…

“Developments in Rhode Island Energy Programs” covered the waterfront, from regulatory and zoning issues to building community acceptance for energy developments. At the invitation of Chris Rein, our good friend at the ESS Group, I dove into the latter topic.

Typically – and this is the case with our work on the Smart Grid, too – talk of promoting energy projects lags far behind talk of everything else in energy projects. On one level, this is completely understandable. After all, you must ensure your project is viable – dotting numerous i’s and crossing a boatload of t’s along the way – before can say much about it.

On the other hand, failure to engage with the community on its terms and at the earliest possible opportunity is as risky to your project as it gets. An all-too-prevailing mindset is a switch on “Build It, and They Will Come.” Either that, or it’s “Build It, and They Will Acquiesce…or Knuckle Under.”

Neither approach works.

My pitch to EBC was simply this: Reasons that communities line up against energy projects have as much to do with human nature as they do with your project. It’s a tale as old as time – fear of the unknown. The sooner you inform and educate via an integrated outreach effort and come forth with the facts about your project with complete transparency, the sooner you make friends rather than enemies. Conversely, the longer you procrastinate, the greater the chance of turning potential supporters into opponents of your project.

And as with any introduction, making an appropriate first impression is everything – and these days, that means branding.

Bradwood Landing is a good case in point. A proposed multi-million-dollar LNG-receiving plant on Oregon’s Columbia River, the project had opposition lining up well before we got there. We quickly got to work putting a face on the project – creating a project identity, and developing a set of outreach tools including, project website , fact sheets, PPT presentations, etc.  Followed by community engagement at the grassroots level, a fact-based print campaign and a testimonial-based radio campaign, we continued to build project support. Within 12 months, we grew Bradwood’s base of supporters from 100 to 2500 – converting many of its early opponents into supporters.

You can read the entire case study here.

In a follow-on panel discussion at the EBC, a developer commented, “That’s great but, unlike Bradwood landing, my project’s not that big.”

It doesn’t matter, I told him. The good news is that an outreach effort and the “articles of introduction” are entirely scalable. Of course, they’re also non-negotiable. These days, permitting and siting your project is tougher than ever. In this environment, the benefits of branding, pro-active community outreach and transparent messaging cannot possibly be overstated.

Simply stated, promoting the vision and benefits of an energy infrastructure project – and educating in a fact-based and responsible manner – will contribute significantly to the success of any energy project.