Word of mouth. Viral activity. Earned media. Consumer activation. Buzz. Whatever you call it – it is the key to mobilizing your campaigns and making your budgets work harder. Every marketer wants it, but few find it in any scale. I asked our agency teams across disciplines to think about some tips to effectively create consumer buzz and incite sharing. Not surprisingly, I got back a list …

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Even in an industry as seemingly young as ours, history seems to repeat itself over and over again. Like many of you I have been listening with a wave of déjà vu to the chatter about various social metrics, including the number of fans, tweets, posts, likes, and shares relative to objectives and ROI. The social metrics discussion is reminiscent of prior evolution in the metrics surrounding …

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The key to almost any successful social initiative is relevance, and one of the primary ways to knit together an audience with appropriate content and experiences is through their location. Sometimes a marketing or business objective is confined to a geographic area, large or small, by the practical reach of a business, by regulation, or by the limits of a particular, defined initiative. Marketers struggle with how …

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There is the old adage that there are no stupid questions. In spirit, this is true. Asking questions demonstrates interest, curiosity, and a thirst for learning. In an interview situation, the right questions can further your candidacy, demonstrate your qualifications, give you an edge over other candidates, help you determine whether the job is a good fit, and generate a positive rapport with the interviewer. However, in …

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Even a complex array of digital marketing tactics can be simplified to two really big buckets – destinations and drivers. The simplicity of this approach has a purpose. It focuses strategists on the important distinctions between the two categories of effort and underscores their interdependency. Destinations are all the places, events, or experiences that we want an audience to find and spend time with. Websites, mobile sites, …

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The value of a Facebook fan has been roundly debated, analyzed, and quantified based on a number of factors, assumptions, and the phase of the moon. For most brands though, the value of a Facebook fan is a proxy for advocacy, loyalty, access, and other measures that are hoped for, planned to, invested in – all to ultimately lead to customers. Traditional marketing has always recognized the …

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Every marketing budget is a struggle – a compromise between the grand plans you wish you could afford and the never-quite-enough budget that you actually have to work with. Not only have your goals increased, but the regions, channels, and devices across which you have to reach your target populations have exploded. With many more opportunities to spend money, you have to keep an even more critical …

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In this age of omni-channel marketing, consumers have numerous points of connection to your brand or company, but they only have one relationship with you. Guarding that relationship means executing across channels in multiple device options wherever that customer happens to be on the globe and in their decision-cycle. It means tailoring every consumer’s experience on the fly for that moment in time and their particular needs, …

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There are many enemies in nature including predators and prey and those competing for territory or mates. Mother Nature designed things in this way to preserve a certain productive balance. It’s not always pretty but unless that balance is disrupted artificially, it tends to work over a long-term horizon. There exists a similar phenomenon in business where departments or job functions exist in a productive state of …

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