Yet Another Example Why Proofreading Is Of Critical Importance

Unfortunately, nothing can derail a marketing campaign faster than a major typographical error, a regrettable breach of etiquette, the incorrect translation of a foreign language, or some other noteworthy faux pas. And in the social media age, where such errors can go viral in a matter of seconds and almost instantly gain worldwide notoriety, the potential embarrassment and humiliation knows no bounds, either culturally or geographically.

Marketing and public relations textbooks are filled with famous examples of mistakes like these. Now, enter Exhibit #Gazillion, and the next addition to these tomes, courtesy of the redevelopment commission of the city of South Bend, Indiana.

According to WANE-TV, the CBS affiliate in Fort Wayne, Indiana, an embarrassing South Bend digital billboard with a very noticeable spelling error, has been pulled because of the severity of the typo. Situated at the intersection of State Road 23 and Ironwood in South Bend, and installed just this past Thursday, the billboard encouraged people to go to "southbendon.com" to review the "15 best things about our PUBIC schools." Obviously it was supposed to say "public", but the "l" was left out. A photo of the billboard follows below:

Inexplicably (and ironically), WANE-TV's sister station, WSBT-TV, reports that four people from the Blue Waters Group, the ad agency responsible, actually proofread the copy before the billboard went up, and the mistake got by all of them. There's no comment from any of the principals involved on EXACTLY how such a noticeable error slipped through the cracks on an ad with hardly ANY text. Unacceptable!

Click here if you'd like to view the WANE-TV news segment on this story...

10 PR Measurement Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

Editor's Note: The following is a well-written guest blog post from Katie Delahaye Paine, chief executive officer of KDPaine & Partners, LLC, a New Hampshire-based research consultancy that provides public relations (PR) measurement and accountability for corporations, non-profits, and government agencies worldwide. This article first appeared in The Measurement Standard, a monthly newsletter published by Paine, and generally regarded as the world's first and most comprehensive PR measurement publication.
__________________________________________________

Despite the best laid plans, public relations measurement programs can sometimes go awry. You can't always anticipate how everything will go, and your elegant research design rarely seems to play out quite as you planned. Let's face it, unforeseen problems and errors can creep in, and part of your job is to figure out how to get the job done anyway.

But there are certain errors your program just won't survive. These mistakes will ruin your data or analysis and leave you with no options but to learn an expensive lesson and start over. Here are 10 fatal research errors to avoid:

1. Clipping systems that miss clips. We won't name names, but you should regularly test your provider. Do what we call a "Pub/Month" check: Look back over the statistics for the last year and see on average how many articles you get in your key publications. If you are below that for the current month, or if you have zero clips for the month, someone's probably missing your clips.

2. Dirty data from your content provider. This means errors like not differentiating between nytimes.com and The New York Times. Again, check the data on a monthly basis to make sure that it includes what it's supposed to.

3. Bad circulation figures (impressions). It doesn't matter if it's off by 10 or even 100. But we've seen cases where providers have moved commas and made the NY Times circulation 14 million instead of 1.4 million. Do a reality check.

4. Corporate articles that end up in product categories and vice versa. This needs to be checked monthly or even weekly for the first six months to make sure that it reflects reality.

5. An unclear definition of tonality. Ask three people what a positive article is and you'll get three different answers. We define it as "leaves the reader more likely to do business with, invest in, or go to work for the company." How you define it is your own business, just make sure it's consistent.

6. An unclear understanding of key messages. Again, do a monthly reality check.

7. Not comparing apples to apples in a competitive analysis. This includes errors like looking at your own local coverage but not the local coverage of your competition.

8. Not being clear about the universe of publications. Make up a written list of search terms as well as a list of the print/online publications, and social media outlets to be covered.

9. Not having control of the names and mailing list for your survey. Beware of merging lists: You can end up with two surveys in one household just because the middle initial is left off one name but not the other.

10. Not being clear about what social media you want to measure. Are you interested in user reviews, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Foursquare, or all of the above? Chose the outlets your target audience uses.

© 2010 Ragan Communications, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of Ragan Communications, Inc. and KDPaine & Partners, LLC. All rights reserved.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Lives...On Twitter, Of Course

Now that Twitter has taken off worldwide as a legitimate communication channel and means of personal and corporate expression, it was only a matter of time before well-known personalities who haven't been with us for years were given voices (and oftentimes, multiple voices; some by authorized parties, some not) in the Twitterverse. Want to follow The King? Go for it. Janis Joplin? Absolutely. And Bob Marley? Wicked, mon. The list is practically endless...

...But I hadn't seen much from late political figures, until I read this interesting piece over the weekend by Bob Salsberg of the Associated Press. According to the story, exactly 50 years ago, a pregnant Jacqueline Kennedy penned a weekly newspaper column, called "Campaign Wife," which discussed political policies and issues, and offered her personal stories and advice on subjects such as child-rearing and shopping. In an intriguing experiment, communications staff members at the John F. Kennedy President Library and Museum in Boston, Mass., are using Twitter to recreate Jackie's glimpses into the life of a presidential candidate's spouse. The first tweets, expressing her dismay at not being able to campaign in person, were posted this part Friday — exactly 50 years to the day that her first syndicated column was published.

From Oct. 5, 1960, this AP file photo shows Jacqueline Kennedy posing at her typewriter where she writes her weekly "Candidate's Wife" column in her Georgetown home in Washington D.C. Courtesy: © Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Twitter feed, @JBK1960, is a companion to the library's primary Twitter stream, @Kennedy1960, which reconstructs day-to-day develoments in the 1960 campaign and has more than 4,250 followers as of this afternoon.

Both educational and entertaining, the Jackie acccount provides very interesting insight into one of the most popular and fascinating First Ladies in American history, and a unique perspective on her husband, who remains one of the most beloved and admired presidents of all time. It's worth checking out if you have a few moments.

E-Mail and Social Media: Can't We All Just Get Along?

Editor's Note: The following is a useful and highly-educational blog post, which details how to effectively integrate of e-mail and social media communications, written by the outstanding editorial staff at MarketingVOX, an online publication which keeps marketers and media professionals abreast of industry news, trends, and culture.
________________________________________________

When Ben & Jerry’s announced this summer that it would exclusively market its products via social media – discontinuing its e-mail marketing initiatives – eyebrows were raised. While there has been much debate over the advantages of e-mail versus social media, few advocate entirely ditching one for the other. In fact, the best practice gaining traction is to integrate the best of these channels. Unfortunately few firms have done so, leading to siloed e-mail and social media marketing operations.

The benefits of this approach, though, are clear. A study by Emarketer, for example, called "Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection," found that joining the two approaches provide new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects. "The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections."

12 Tips
To nudge firms along this path, CoTweet and ExactTarget, in their latest report, The Collaborative Future, offer 12 tips to integrate these channels.

1. Promote Facebook games, applications, and competitions in e-mail and on Twitter.
2. Feature winners of Facebook competitions in your e-mail newsletter.
3. Tweet about exclusive content that’s only available to e-mail subscribers.
4. Promote exclusive deals on Facebook and Twitter, but make it only available to e-mail subscribers.
5. Post links to Web versions of your best e-mails on Facebook and Twitter.
6. Include Like and Follow buttons in e-mail newsletters and promotions.
7. Include links to your Twitter and Facebook pages in e-mail newsletters.
8. Collect e-mail addresses at the point of conversion for consumers who link to your site from Facebook and Twitter.
9. Create an e-mail segment containing Twitter followers, and provide them with additional “insider information” through e-mail.
10. Include questions posted on Twitter and Facebook in your e-mails, and then answer them.
11. Encourage e-mail subscribers to post questions on Facebook and/or Twitter.
12. Host videos on your Facebook page. Include links in your e-mails and post links on Twitter.

© 2003-2010 Watershed Publishing. Reprinted courtesy of MarketingVOX, a Watershed Publishing property. All rights reserved.

The Pros And Cons Of Product Sampling

This past Saturday, I walked to the end of the driveway, like I do every morning, to pick up the copies of my two daily newspapers, the Ventura County Star and the Wall Street Journal. On this morning, however, I got something a little extra: the Ventura County Star was enclosed in a special branded poly bag featuring a sample box of General Mills' WHEATIES® Fuel and a large, four-color coupon for the cereal.

It really made me sit up and take notice, not for the obvious reason that a breakfast cereal came with my morning newspapers, but because: 1.) Product samples of this nature are included in my local daily newspaper on a very limited basis...only 2-3 times a year, in fact (actually, this was the first instance of 2010 in the Star); and 2.) This tactic is normally reserved for new product introductions, of which WHEATIES Fuel is not. In fact, according to the following article in the July 22, 2009, edition of the New York Times, WHEATIES Fuel has now been on the market for well over a year. (Editor's Note: In the interest of full disclosure, and in only a very minor coincidence, I do eat WHEATIES Fuel, but I have only been doing so for several months. I regularly eat other brands of healthy breakfast cereal, and I have no official ties to the product or the manufacturer.) In any case, I began to think about the marketing implications associated with this program, and more specifically, about the pros and cons of product sampling:

1. Normally for New, Not Existing, Product Introductions: As already stated, product sampling normally accompanies the introduction of a new product to increase brand awareness and consumer trial. So why is General Mills sending out sample boxes of WHEATIES Fuel now? This tells me that sales must be extremely weak. It also indicates that, given the tremendous marketing investment to date in the brand extension, the company is desperately attempting to boost sales to justify these large expenditures. The New York Times references a multi-million dollar marketing campaign behind the product, not to mention expensive endorsement deals with five prominent athletes, including St. Louis Cardinals first baseman and three-time National League MVP Albert Pujols and Indianapolis Colts quarterback and four-time NFL MVP Peyton Manning.
2. Expensive: Product sampling like this is extremely expensive. However, it does put the product directly in the hands of consumers, but there is no definitive way to ensure consumers actually USE or EAT it once it arrives. A better tactic is to distribute prepared product samples in stores, as is often seen at Costco and Sam's Club, where representatives can physically see shoppers' reactions to a product when it is consumed.
3. Difficult to Track Actual Trial: As alluded to above, another con of product sampling is that it is difficult to track actual consumer consumption. Honestly, most consumers will simply toss the product in the trash can. The best General Mills can hope for is that consumers will redeem the coupon that came with the sample, and this will temporarily boost sales. This is far easier for the company to monitor since the coupon carries a unique bar code associated with the promotion, and that code is scanned when redeemed.
4. Immediate Impact Unknown: Like with many other consumer marketing activities, it will be some time before General Mills sees definitive return on its product sampling investment. To generate immediate impact, consumer brands typically prefer to use coupons, contests, and other in-store vehicles to drive sell-through. Although a coupon was present in this case, it is the sample box of cereal that is most significant, meaning that General Mills wants people to physically try the product before buying.

In the final analysis, WHEATIES Fuel will most likely be successful, particularly since the product is targeted at men, and because of its professional athlete endorsements. And honestly, it's a solid product with an appealing, pleasant taste and excellent nutritional benefits. But General Mills' consumer marketing approach is flawed, as evidenced by this latest sample drop in newspapers. I think the sampling would be much more effective if distributed in stores, at NFL stadiums, and at experiential football fairs and fan fests.

Just A Matter Of Time: Dilbert Lampoons Corporate Social Media Strategies, Programs

Now, I don't read the comics section much any longer because of various time and business constraints. However, as of late, I've been revisiting Scott Adams' ubiquitous and frequently humorous comic strip, Dilbert, distributed to my daily newspaper, the Ventura County Star, by United Feature Syndicate.

To my surprise and glee, in today's installment of the strip, Adams lambasts the adoption (or seemingly lack thereof) of social media in today's corporations. Check it out below; it's worth a laugh on a Monday:

60 Proven Ways to Increase Your Online Marketing Influence

Editor's Note: The following is an extremely insightful guest blog post about cultivating online influence written by Jeanne Hopkins, director of marketing at HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet marketing startup whose software helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads, and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers.
________________________________________________

On July 7, in the late afternoon, I tuned in to The Influencer Project. For the next 60 minutes (actually it was closer to 62 minutes), I listened to 60 online experts tell at least one proven way to increase your influence online. We’re talking real experts like David Meerman Scott, Anne Holland, Brian Solis, Todd Defren and our own Mike Volpe, and all of the unmentioned names are equal in expertise to those I mentioned. While some of the advice was obvious, like create valuable content or get on Facebook, what resonated was that these experts – all of whom have influence online, so they do know what they’re talking about – were passionate about their one or two tips.

As a sponsor for this event, we have permission from ThoughtLead, the program organizers, to offer our community both the audio file and the complete transcript. For those of you who don’t have 62 minutes to spare, I’ve taken the liberty of shortening it even more – to 60 sentences.

This will give you the headlines, but you may want to take the additional time and understand why these experts came up with their practical advice. I cannot remember when I've received this much solid advice in such a short amount of time.

1. Stop talking about your products and services and create valuable content.

2. Increase conversion rates on your landing pages by improving your buttons.

3. Build your thought leadership and digital influence through transparency.

4. Demonstrate commitment and increase your digital influence through consistency.

5. Know where you’re going, then make what you say about the people around you.

6. Follow better people.

7. Align yourself with outstanding strategic partners.

8. Make connections online, then meet the person in the real world, offline.

9. Create content that stands for something: ‘Higher purpose content marketing.’

10. Look under the hood of the shiny new technologies coming out.

11. Believe in ‘social objects’ as the way we socialize and share with others.

12. Avoid ‘incestuous blogging’ and look outside your circle.

13. Start talking to people.

14. Think about your narrative strategy because people connect with stories worth telling.

15. Find people who have your audience but not your products and co-create with them.

16. Establish influence either through complete honesty or absolute fakery - not in between.

17. Give your content roots and give it wings.

18. Try Facebook advertising.

19. Develop your online influence by getting offline and meeting people in real life.

20. Get very, very good at filtering and aggregating content.

21. Be early in the news cycles of any conversation of interest, then make context explicit.

22. Increase visibility through web video; the fastest way to get your message out there.

23. Feel passionate about your content and overcome your fears of reaching out.

24. Defy convention where it’s appropriate.

25. Share good content consistently.

26. Let your passion shine to create meaningful relationships and build deep connections.

27. Learn how to talk more about other people.

28. Get on Facebook, get on Faceboook now, and use it for your business.

29. Make people around you more successful than you are, and share stories from the heart.

30. Talk about what you know because content is always king.

31. Make something worth talking about.

32. Get your self properly interviewed.

33. Repeat your tweets.

34. Get more influence online by moving offline.

35. Really understand your audience, then build things that really help them.

36. Master one niche, own that niche, then use webinar marketing to promote your brand.

37. Think about what gifts and expertise you have that you can leverage to help others.

38. Map a strategy for integrating social media with other tactics.

39. Change from thinking about my influence to our influence.

40. Get active in other people’s communities.

41. Build "digital dimensionality" by showing your many different sides.

42. Listen to the conversations taking place around you, then start to engage.

43. Network with other influencers and make them aware of your consistent value.

44. Think about the authenticity, consistency, and depth of your voice and story

45. Be willing to shake up your world.

46. Learn to be a storyteller, understand the psychology of people, create quality content.

47. Share ideas liberally and get increased accountability from the digital community.

48. Establish your business model before you attempt to become influential online.

49. Be consistent, connect the practical with the profound, and listen for the silence.

50. Find a unique niche you can own, focus on it and become known for that.

51. Find out what social network your customers are using and be there for them.

52. Build a community of readers by figuring out ways to get people talking.

53. Make friends along the way by helping others achieve their goals.

54. Think about social media as strategy to enhance your existing marketing goals.

55. Be systematic in establishing relationships with those on the same business path.

56. Become an advocate for gifted up and comers as they enter social media.

57. Start the media arm of your company that educates, inspires and entertains.

58. Give more than you get and build trust and relationships over time.

59. Take a look at what you have that others can’t do and use it to get where you need to go.

60. Figure out your value, identify influential individuals and connect to them directly.

© 2010 HubSpot, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of HubSpot, Inc. All rights reserved.

Drake University Fails To Make Grade With New D+ Advantage Campaign

As the higher education market has become more competitive and sophisticated over the past decade, both for-profit (e.g, Corinthian Colleges, DeVry University, University of Phoenix, etc.) and traditional non-profit universities have proactively created and executed integrated marketing communications campaigns designed to garner more students, faculty members, government funding, research grants, alumni support and donations, corporate partners, and enhanced local, regional, national, and global reputations in specific disciplines.

After all, higher education is big business, with billions and billions of dollars at stake each year, so it makes sense that today's generation of colleges and universities aggressively differentiate themselves using a broad range of tactics to achieve certain objectives. Most of the campaigns I've seen focus on typical criteria: the latest US News & World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, recent awards and research grants, diverse student bodies and faculties, athletic team prowess, cultural, social, and recreational opportunities, and a whole slew of other benefits and value adds. In addition, most of the campaigns are relatively conservative and predictable, but occasionally, I see real flashes of genius, creativity, and brilliance. Unfortunatey, this is not one of them.

And that leads us to Exhibit A for collegiate marketing gone awry: Des Moines, Iowa-based Drake University's new "D+ Advantage" campaign. That's right: D+. As Brett Michael Dykes points out in this piece on Yahoo!'s The Upshot, "If you were going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a higher education, would you want the end result to be known as a 'D+' education? Probably not." For the record, the tag line for the new campaign is not all that bad: "Your passion + our experience."

But the general problem with the campaign is in the execution. As we all know, and as numerous Drake faculty, students, and alumni pointed out, D+ is universally synonymous with sub-par academic performance. Adweek's Tim Nudd noted on his AdFreak blog that the campaign "seems to position Drake as a school whose standards barely exceed total failure."

Drake University officials defend the campaign as "intentionally edgy" and appropriate for the target audience. In a communiqué to students, faculty, and alumni, university leaders said, "The D+ was not designed to stand alone or represent a grade. Instead, it was designed to be paired with prose and draw attention to the distinctive advantages of the Drake experience. Our experience in the survey and in the field suggests that the kind of students whom we want to attract to Drake easily understand and appreciate the irony of the D+, and that it is having the intended effect of encouraging students to find out more about what makes Drake so special."

That very well may be, but when it comes to traditional branding and on-point marketing creativity, there's only one letter grade for Drake University that makes sense in this case: F.

Actually, the campaign could have packed the same punch if it was dubbed "The Drake Advantage" and was branded with a compelling, but alternative, visual presence.

Social Media: The Movie

Not be confused with Track Down, Code Rush, Babbage, Steal This Film, Pirates Of Silicon Valley, or even Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, but Social Media: The Movie, the latest fact-based docudrama about the high technology sector, is coming very soon to a cineplex near you.

Haven't heard of it? That's O.K., because that's not the real title.

I'm actually talking about The Social Network, a major theatrical film scheduled for release just two months from today on October 1, 2010, and directed by critically-acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher. Written by master screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Malice, Charlies Wilson's War, and NBC's "The West Wing"), and adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 New York Times best-selling book The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network is a dramatization of the founding of the global social networking phenomenon Facebook. The film's tag line? Check out the official movie poster below:

The dramedy, distributed by Columbia Pictures, features an ensemble cast, including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rashida Jones, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Malese Jow, and Joseph Mazzello. Although no one from Facebook's senior management team, including co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were involved with the project, one co-founder, Eduardo Saverin (played by Garfield in the film), was a consultant for Mezrich's book. In the film, Eisenberg, who most recently starred opposite Woody Harrelson in last year's Zombieland, portrays Zuckerberg.

Not enough star power for you? Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Spacey is the film's executive producer, and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, along with partner Atticus Ross, is providing the musical score. And let's not forget Fincher's own impressive directorial resume, which includes Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), and Zodiac (2007). In addition, he received an Academy Award nomination for best director for his 2008 film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Academy Award-Nominated Director David Fincher

As you would expect, much of the advance hype, and the overall theatrical marketing strategy for the film, have been driven by a plethora of social media and online marketing tactics. The centerpiece of these efforts is a recently-launched Facebook-themed and highly sophisiticated Website, TheSocialNetwork-Movie.com, which opens into a large-form portal with photos, videos and cast information arranged into Facebook-like collage. Naturally, the site maintains the same theme used in the teasers, trailers and TV spots for the film, with words such as “Punk,” “Traitor” and “Genius” displayed either on their own or overlayed over other photographs. Like most online destinations for new films, the site also contains access to cast information, an official synopsis, cast publicity stills, and news stories about the film.

What's interesting about all this, besides the obvious, is how QUICKLY the book has been turned into a completed feature film with major Hollywood talent behind it. If you know Hollywood like I do, it often takes years, sometimes decades, for all the stars to align on a given concept. And the bigger the acting and production names involved, usually the more time it takes, mostly because of existing contracts, previous commitments from the players, and of course, financial support, which is in limited supply these days in The Entertainment Capital of the World.

But the need to move quickly is certainly understandable: worldwide user participation and advertiser and investor interest in Facebook have never been higher, particularly as the company moves toward its highly-anticipated IPO in the next 18 months. As a result, there's no doubt that Columbia Pictures, part of Sony Pictures Studios, wished to leverage all of this interest and activity by purchasing the rights to the book and releasing the film just over one year after the book's release.

And without further adieu, here is the official trailer for the film: