With the growing popularity of smartphones, mobile marketing has transformed into a billion dollar industry. Smartphones allow companies to target consumers through websites, texts, applications, and direct voicemail messages. Mobile marketing is an effective way to reach a target audience, but must be done properly. Many times companies are too aggressive and their messages are ignored by receivers.

Kleenex is one company basing their new marketing campaign around this popular trend. Getmommed.com is the site established by Kleenex to cater to consumers’ psychological needs for extra motherly care during the cold and flu season. Consumers are encouraged to visit the promotional site via Kimberly-Clark’s main Web page, print advertisements, and television commercials. Site visitors can complete a quiz matching them to one of eight cyber moms. Pick Magnolia and this Mom can cure your cold with home-style cooking, while Lisa offers craft and home decor ideas. Kleenex reports the most popular Mom is Jessica, the “Best Friend” Mom. After signing up on the site, consumers are able to request wake-up calls, text reminders, Facebook messages, and words of encouragement from their new Mom.

The GetMommed.com Web site makes sure you have adequate access to motherly TLC this cold and flu season.

Kleenex combines internet and mobile marketing, resulting in a highly interactive campaign. They avoid sending text blasts and e-mail advertisements to consumers, instead offering helpful services that consumers can voluntarily register for. Companies who want to effectively utilize mobile marketing to target their consumers can follow these simple rules.

Integration is key

Smartphones have given users the capability to scan all types of advertising mediums, so integration of all platforms is now extremely important in a company’s campaign. Kleenex effectively merged their platforms and prompted consumers to visit their site through print and television ads.

Give and you shall receive

Offer helpful services or incentives that smartphone owners will use on a daily basis. Kleenex offers weather updates, wake-up calls, or text reminders. These tools provide emotional consumer appeal and help build brand loyalty and awareness.

Get Social with Social Media

Leverage your marketing plan and business with social media sites. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all platforms that can take your campaign to the next level. Remember that connection of all social media outlets is key. Display links for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts on your campaign’s homepage. Kleenex integrates Facebook links on their main page, allowing visitors to view each cyber mom’s Facebook and befriend them.

Get to know Magnolia, Lisa, and the rest of the Moms through Kleenex’s Webisodes on YouTube.

Kleenex has successfully entered the cyberspace of consumers with these simple rules and the help of eight fictional Moms. They continue to establish strong emotional ties with consumers and create long-term brand loyalty. Follow Kleenex’ lead and your company could be seeing similar results.

With the economy in a state of recession, many consumers are paying close attention to product pricing and contemplating the switch from brand name to generic. Marie Callender’s and Campbell’s Soup are two notable brands using emotional marketing tactics to target consumers. Attempting to maintain brand loyalty, advertisers create meaning for their products by marketing to the emotions of their consumers. This method, called “pseudo-spiritual” marketing, emerged in the 1990’s and with the recession has gained popularity once again. Now consumers aren’t buying for the necessity; they are buying for the emotional appeal of a product.

Marie Callender’s partnered with Con-Agra foods to produce an array of home-style frozen food entrees including chicken pot pie, lasagna, and country fried chicken. Marketers reach out emotionally to consumers attempting to recreate feelings associated with the home and childhood memories. Marie Callender’s hopes consumers will pair compassion and love with their entrees. This is obvious with their slogan, “food from the heart prepared with love and care.” Creating a meaning behind their products helps to build communities of loyal consumers, who won’t stray to generic brands when times are tough.

In this commercial Marie Callender’s uses the childhood memory of baking with Grandmother as a “pseudo-spiritual” tactic.

Campbell’s has been an avid “pseudo-spiritual” marketer since the beginning. Their commercials generate themes of family, love, and meal-time connection. One of their most memorable uses of “pseudo- spiritual” marketing is this popular holiday television commercial.

Similar to Marie Callender’s strategy, Campbell’s has successfully utilized “pseudo-spiritual” marketing to generate strong emotional connections between products and consumers. Both companies continue to maintain their sales and brand loyalty. So next time you pick a brand name over generic, you may want to ask yourself, “why?”

In the war to win your customers’ attention, you are not competing against other marketers; you are competing with your customers’ friends’ Facebook walls. On September 17, 2009, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of Trust Agents, talked to us about how to win attention in a world of information overload.

It’s all about building trust with people so that they will listen when you have something to say. Brogan and Smith provided helpful tips from their own experience for breaking through the white noise of everyday life and getting attention.

1. Make a Habit out of Breaking Habits.

When you interrupt the patterns that govern people’s lives by saying and doing the unexpected in a manner that is helpful or insightful to others, you wake them up, you jolt them out of their mental auto-pilot mode, and you become visible.

With social media, you have the opportunity to become visible through many channels and to be seen as a whole person rather than a flat corporate entity. Brogan and Smith encourage companies to put a face to their marketing. Also, when you have a habit of breaking habits, you become more creative and more open to new ideas, which in turn fuels your ability to develop new angles and opportunities for yourself.

2. Stand Out, Start Something.

If you’re competing against others, you’ve already lost, say Brogan and Smith. Citing Cirque du Soleil and the iPhone as examples of game changers in their respective industries, they noted the importance of carving out more profitable spaces in which your company can operate.

For instance, PodCamp, a Barcamp-style “unconference” for new media enthusiasts and professionals co-founded by Brogan and Christopher Penn in 2006, was a way of standing out and starting something. By creating a community around a shared passion, they created the Next Big Thing without quite realizing it. That flood of attention and enthusiasm benefited them even as it created momentum for everyone involved.

“The only difference between a community and an audience is which way you point the chairs.”
—Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan on the evolution of PodCamp (interview with Adele McAlear)

(Toward the end of the presentation, an audience member amended this advice as “listen and then start something.” Don’t forget to check out what’s already going on and start participating before starting something new. Perhaps your Next Big Thing has already begun and is waiting for you to join.)

3. Build Your Network Ahead of Need.

Just as the worst time to find a job is right after you’ve lost one, the worst time to find a customer is right when you need one. If you have built relationships with people before you need the sale, it’s that much easier to get them to be receptive to your offer.

4. Create a Culture of Giving.

Chris Brogan describes his call-to-action as “Come back—I’ll give you more.” He says that by creating a culture in which he makes a habit of doing things to help people, he’s “training people to be nice” to him. Indeed, by setting the example of giving value to people without asking for something in return, you train others to pay it forward in a similar fashion. It’s no wonder that eventually you would become the beneficiary of that goodwill. As with collaborative efforts like PodCamp, generosity and inclusion build conversation and engagement, which is a recipe for trust and attention.

And speaking of recipes…

5. Give your customers recipes in which you are the ingredient.

You won’t find a can of cream of mushroom soup that doesn’t have a recipe on the label that requires cream of mushroom soup. Likewise, you should frame yourself as a necessary ingredient in your customers’ success. I found this piece of advice to be one of the most concrete of the presentation, and one that many of us could run with, when we decide how it applies to us.

What would a recipe for your business look like? If you sell widgets, could you suggest projects on your Web site that use that widget? If you sell expertise, could you create an event around that area of knowledge? AMA members, write in with your ideas and get some collaboration going!

On August 27, 2009, Hilton Graham, Director of Digital Strategy with Hanes Brands, Inc, and Adam Keats, Senior Vice President at Weber Shandwick, discussed how Hanes is using social media to build better relationships with its customers.

What Is Social Media?

Social media is an umbrella term for the tools and technology people use to interact with content. It is the mechanism by which brand marketing has evolved from a monologue (one-to-one communication from advertiser to consumer) to a seriously super-charged dialogue in which many people can publish their message about a brand to many others.

Social media content is characterized as:

• Easy to interact with
• Easy to share
• Capable of generating realtime feedback
• Not being constrained by time and space

Social media has democratized brand messaging. Hanes was ready to join the conversation. Here is how they did it.

Hanes and Social Media: Tiptoeing into the Fray

Hanes’ overall strategy is to using social media tools to start a dialogue with their customers. They plan to accomplish this by:

• Developing a blogger network (the Hanes Comfort Crew)
• Tapping into their customers’ passion points (Passionately Pink for the Cure, Disney Celebrate in Comfort campaigns)
• Going where their customers are (Twitter, Facebook, real-world events such as the BlogHer conference)

I found it notable that several times during the presentation Graham described Hanes’ strategy as “tiptoeing.” To me this indicated a level of seriousness and humility that companies need if they are to survive and thrive in social spaces on the Web. Hanes is entering the social networking realm with a plan that prioritizes its customers’ needs and does not attempt to define or dominate the conversations that it starts with them.

The Hanes Comfort Crew

The Hanes Comfort Crew is a group of bloggers who broadly represent Hanes’ customer base: moms and dads, fashion and lifestyle mavens. These bloggers are not paid to write about Hanes. They were selected because they already had an affinity for the brand and had followings who were likely to share or be receptive to that affinity. Hanes gives these bloggers opportunities and ideas to talk about the Hanes brand in an authentic way. For instance, Hanes held its Comfort Crew kickoff by inviting the bloggers and their families to Disney World, where they discussed the products, tested out how the Hanes “wedgie-free panties” held up against a day of roller coaster rides, and created a lot of fun memories worth blogging home about.

Hanes also attended the BlogHer conference for women bloggers, where they built up even more buzz with their conversation-sparking T-shirt swag bags, footrubs at their Hanes Comfort Social, and expansion of the Comfort Crew (the original crew members each were invited to find 3–4 recruits from the conference attendees).

Hanes Got Crafty at the BlogHer Conference With These Cool T-shirt Totes

How Hanes Measures Success

Hanes takes a methodical approach to social media marketing, carefully crafting its message, setting goals, and measuring successes, just as it has always done with its traditional marketing tactics.

• They determined benchmarks for success in both traditional and social media.
• They looked at current brand conversations in both traditional and social media (e.g., number of blog posts about Hanes, number of tweets, print and TV ad circulation, etc.).
• They set goals to increase levels of conversation by 10% in both traditional and social media.
• They continued tracking and reporting monthly performance in each category.

2 Must-Do’s for Your Company

Graham and Keats left us with two cardinal rules for interacting with our customers in the social media realm:

1. When someone praises your brand, say Thank You.
2. If you make a mistake, apologize (quickly).

Other Takeaways

• Create real conversations by having interesting things to talk about and giving people things and experiences that they value. Hanes has a lot going on! They’re partnering with companies and celebrities we love to offer experiences worth talking about and participating in. I Googled Hanes and came up a T-shirt design competition to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, a Disney World vacation giveaway, a Michael Jordan celebrity invitational golf trip giveaway, an invitation to share your most embarrassing wedgie story (for a prize, of course!), dozens of news stories and videos, and reams of blog discussions.
• Don’t restrict your “social media marketing” to virtual venues. Go where your customers are in the real world, too.
• Create goals and success criteria for your social media marketing campaigns. Be methodical. Measure your results.
• Don’t say you’re great. Just be great. Social media gives people a way to spread their approval further and faster than ever before. Many thanks to Graham and Keats for showing how well Hanes has learned this lesson.

As seen on TV, well-known pitchman Billy Mays, the “yell-and-sell OxiClean guy,” recently passed away. At this point, we’d already been mourning Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who had both passed away just two days before. Mays, like Jackson, was only fifty when he died—becoming the third celebrity to die within two days.

Many in my generation grew up loathing the Sunday morning infomercials that just stunk compared to Saturday’s glorious proliferation of cartoons. Whenever Billy Mays hogged the airwaves, we rolled our eyes (and covered our ears) at “Orange-Glo guy.” But hate him or love him, we all knew who he was. And he was always there year after year, still managing to stay in our TVs—because his infomercials worked. Mays knew about direct response marketing, and until only recently, I didn’t realize how brilliant he really was.

Billy Mays in a better light

My ad internship boss gave me the first eye-opener, mentioning in passing one day how much she loves Billy Mays.

“Really?” I’d said, floored by my bewilderment.

“Yeah! I love his show Pitchmen. Did you know these people actually study pitching as a career?” (I didn’t.)

“Being a pitchman is a difficult craft. People work hard finding out the best way to do it and crafting their style and personal brand.”

“Wow,” the brilliantly eloquent intern had replied.

How strange. The anti-entertainment guy was entertaining—and even admirable—to some people. All these years, I’d asked the TV in irritation: “does he really have to talk that way?” and it turns out that the answer is yes—a boisterously loud and Billy-Mays-style “yes!”

If you ever catch a glimpse of Mays’ show Pitchmen, you’ll find out that he actually isn’t always on loudspeaker-mode. Suddenly, you begin to see him as a businessman: impressively engrossed in his work, dedicated and decisive. And an expert at branding (yes, branding) and a pioneer in the realm of direct response marketing.

Why It All Worked

1. He developed and protected signature elements for a distinct identity. Mays never changed his look. People recognized his blue shirt, bearded smile, and double thumbs-up pose. He also had “that voice” that was always loud and at the same pitch, and it faithfully rang in every show with “Hi, Billy Mays here.”
2. He strictly focused his product profile. We all came to know Mays as the guy who always introduces us to “new household solutions that really work”—and that’s kind of a big deal; not all infomercials get to enjoy the same level of integrity. To be successful, Mays knew you couldn’t rely on chance; he had a formula to achieve his credibility. In addition to specializing in something he came to know a lot about, Mays only pitched the products that truly worked and from which the public could benefit.
3. He applied time-tested knowledge of transactional dynamics. Mays knew how to start and close the pitch in a single dialogue. He knew that thirty seconds was efficient for impulse purchases, while products of mid-range prices would best fit with a two-minute frame (the approximate duration of one commercial break). For more considered purchases, he allotted an entire half hour—plenty of deliberation time for the thoughtful consumer.

And ultimately, didn’t it all work? These fledgling products were able to enter a mature market (and countless household cabinets country-wide). Chances are, you or someone close to you has purchased one of those green-and-purple bottles of Kaboom, and it’s sitting under your very own kitchen sink right now.

You’d never compare Mays’ bearded smile to Fawcett’s pin-up poster smile, nor his shows to Jackson’s chart-topping music videos. But if Mays’ kind of kitchen-sink appeal doesn’t make an average guy like him just as much of an American icon, then I don’t know what does.

Joanne Hung, originally from Sugar Land, Texas, is currently interning at Steel Advertising & Interactive in Austin. She will be a fourth-year student in the fall at the University of Texas, where she will continue completing her Plan II and Adverting degrees, as well as her portfolio in the Texas Creative sequence. She can be reached by email at jyhung220@yahoo.com.

On June 18th, 2009, the AMA hosted speaker Jill Griffin, author of Taming The Search-And-Switch Customer, at the Cool River Cafe in Austin. With her North Carolina accent in full effect, Jill shared “oodles” of knowledge and research aimed at helping companies with customer retention.

Jill Griffin is known all over the world as an expert in the three customer-keeping competencies: customer loyalty, winning customers back, and managing the search and switch customer. Customer retention has become a trending topic at a time when buyers are more price sensitive and budgets are being drastically cut. In addition to the current economic conditions, the popularity of Google and Social Media have muddied the waters even more. Customers seem only as loyal as the lowest price they find online. Fortunately, those of us in attendance last Thursday have the benefit of Jill’s strategy for defending our customers from online competition.

For those AMA’ers who couldn’t make it, and the millions of Austin AMA blog readers around the world, here’s what all businesses need know about keeping their customers:

1. Make defending your brand, and your customers, online a priority. This one seems obvious, but I’m sure Jill mentioned it for a reason. Defending your brand is kind of like exercising. It’s good for us, we need to do it, we might even enjoy it, but we always put it off until tomorrow. Actively making this part of our strategy is half the battle.

2. You need to ace the “Worth It” test. The longer we’ve been in business, the less we know about what’s going on in the mind of our customer. We may not know what the next best buying alternative is, or maybe our front liners don’t know what sets the brand apart. Jill’s “Worth It” test shows us exactly where we need improvement in the search and switch customer department.

The “Worth it” Test:

1. Versus your next best buying alternative, my brand provides real, substantive differences that you consider important.

2. My brand provides you tangible, convincing proof of these differences.

3. You can easily articulate my brand’s differences.

4. You are served by employees who exemplify my brand’s differences through word and deed.

5. Relative to the price difference, you perceive my brand as delivering substantially more value than your next best buying alternative.

3. You have to think beyond the tactics to win. It wouldn’t have been a gathering of professionals without the mention of social media. Jill pointed out something we might miss as our excitement for Twitter grows. If we don’t have a point of difference to communicate to our customers, it doesn’t matter how big our reach is, how many mentions we have, or if Oprah is following us.

I know I might have been too busy with my steak and asparagus to catch all the best points of Jill’s presentation, so please add anything I missed in the comments below. Also, any feedback or experiences implementing the “Worth It” test would be immensely helpful to everyone.

-@joshdward

Josh Ward is the Relationship Strategist at Volacci, an Austin based SEO company. He specializes in applying essential human relations and communication techniques in the online world of conversations. His services are available for your corporate event, birthday partys, and weddings. Read Josh’s blog about life, the universe, and everything at partner.Volacci.com. Josh lives in the Austin area with his beautiful wife and their 4 kids.

One of the earliest and most visible steps in developing a strong brand is choosing the right name.  Branding veteran Mike Carr offers five great tips for selecting the right name for your brand.

Naming Tip #1: MEMORABILITY

Think about building a brand as a war.  In a war, there are many battles to be fought, some of which are OK to lose.  But, there are a few key battles you must win to win the war. The key battle when it comes to the brand name is memorability.  If the name is sticky, if it gets inside the head of your target quickly and isn’t forgotten, then you can spend your budget building preference in your brand.  If the name isn’t memorable, you often burn through your budget just trying to build awareness. You then have nothing left to build your brand.  You lose the war.

Naming Tip #2:  NO NEGATIVES

Don’t allow anyone in your naming session to say anything negative until the very end.  New names are inherently fragile.  Allowing critical comments to surface too quickly kills off some great ideas.  Also, the majority of what you’ll come up with in your naming session is garbage, anyway. So focusing on what you don’t like is distracting.

Naming Tip #3:  BE AN ADVOCATE.

Taking the negative off of the table isn’t enough.  You need to encourage everyone to advocate for their favorite names rather than be the silent skeptic.  Ask everyone to pick their favorites and share with the group what they like about them.  Or if they don’t like the whole name, ask them to talk about the part of it they do like.  Is the idea behind the name appealing to them?  Is there a root embedded in the name that they find intriguing?  Do they have any new ideas to suggest using an existing name as a starting point?  What you are after during this process is for everyone to become as engaged and as upbeat as possible.  You will find yourselves talking one another into names that you initially weren’t that excited about.

Naming Tip #4:  THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER.

Try to react to each idea as a prospective customer might react to it.  Maybe they’ll react positively to a name that connects with them emotionally, rather than a more literal or descriptive name that is easier to understand but sounds like all of the others that are already out there. Or maybe they’ll look at a number of different names before deciding what to buy. Thinking like your customers and prospects is what great naming is all about.

Naming Tip #5:  GO WITH A RISKIER NAME.

The best names are rarely the safest. They’re typically the riskiest. There is no such thing as a perfect name.  The names with the greatest potential often have the most glaring weaknesses.  So focus on the potential a name brings to a table.  Is it memorable?  Is it easy to say and spell?  Does it connect emotionally?  Is it engaging?  Does it differentiate from the competitive set?  Is it a name that generates excitement and passion.  A name people want to talk about.  An engaging, sticky name.

Mike Carr

Mike Carr, an AMA member since 1985, has over 30 years of experience in marketing and marketing research, including more than 20 years in the branding and naming business. Prior to founding NameStormers, Mike was President of The Salinon Corporation and was Sr. Vice President of Compucon, an A. C. Nielsen subsidiary where he led Communications Marketing Research for U.S. and European Nielsen clients.  Mike can be reached at mike@namestormers.com or 512-267-1814.

On May 21, 2009, marketers from all over Austin converged on the Hilton for the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) where the Austin AMA and the OMS jointly hosted the luncheon as a part of the Power Lunch Series. The speaker was Paula Berg, who shared her successes and failures in Social Media for Southwest Airlines.

Through my recent adventures into Social Media I have found chests full of theory and only a few hidden nuggets of practical usable knowledge. At least that was the case until Paula Berg took the stage last week at the Austin AMA - OMS luncheon. As our barbecue lunch began to settle, Paula walked us through her ups and downs in Social Media for Southwest Airlines. Like most companies, Southwest started their foray into Social Media with a blog, but Paul and her team have since utilized everything from Twitter to YouTube.

Southwest Airlines Emerging Media Presentation

I’m sure that Paula didn’t have a top ten list in mind while she was presenting, but in the spirit of Social Media here are the 10 things Paul taught us about Social Media:

1. It can help you reach a new demographic. The Nuts About Southwest blog started as a replacement for A&E’s Airline. The show allowed Southwest to reach a different demographic by giving customers an inside look at their culture. All you need to know is who you want to target and where they hang out.
2. It’s OK to not have a strategy as long as you have a strategy?!? Paula mentioned she didn’t have a strategy when they started the blog, but I think she was just being modest. The strategy, or maybe we should call it a goal, was to give customers an inside look at Southwest. What they didn’t anticipate was all the things the blog would become. Social Media is so new, don’t try and put too narrow a scope on your strategy. It’s very much like a box of chocolates…
3. It’s good to have a presence in Social Media before you have a crisis. Blogs in response to bad press are not seen as authentic. You need to create conversations using Social Media before it’s too late.
4. Immediate, passionate feedback exists at no cost. Southwest was able to avoid using too much ink when customers print boarding passes, and discovered the real reason people don’t like their open seating policy. Paula has been able to create an open relationship with customers where they offer feedback because they know they will be heard.
5. You need thick skin. Criticism, warranted or not, hurts. The lesson is to be prepared to take the good with the bad.
6. When the media won’t listen, take your message directly to the people. Paula and her team “fought fire with fire” when responding to a couple of young ladies claiming they were treated unfairly because of their good looks. Since the media was only interested in one side of the story, Southwest created a video response that went viral. The only videos viewed more that week were of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
7. Listen. Some of the most valuable information Paula received was from listening to what people where saying- especially on Twitter. Southwest first discovered their “rapping flight attendant” through a twitter post. It’s amazing to think you might learn something about your own company reading your Twitter feed!
8. Never stop the conversation. When people comment on your blog posts, respond. This goes right along with listening. Social Media is a two way street. Don’t ignore people when they talk to you.
9. Social Media causes sleeplessness. Someone asked Paula what the ROI is for Southwest’s Social Media efforts. From Southwest’s point of view, it is huge. The only cost for them was paying Paula, and, over the past three years, she has worked many hours of free overtime. Social Media never sleeps, and neither does Paula. If you decide to immerse yourself this world, be ready with a case of red bull and a trusty mobile device.
10. Southwest will be flying to Hawaii and Mexico in the near future. Paula was kind enough to slip us this insider information after her presentation. This doesn’t really have any Social Media implications, but twitter probably works better on the beach.

- Josh

From Paula Berg, Manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines.  Paula will speak at the Austin AMA’s Keynote Luncheon, part of the Power Lunch Series, on Thursday, May 21.  This month’s luncheon will be held in association with the Online Marketing Summit, a national educational event for marketing professionals.

April marked our third full year in the blogosphere, and I think the following photo sums up our experience.

Whether on a plane, in a plane, or in a plane costume, we’ve been completely consumed with social media.  I often joke that we haven’t slept in three years - which would be funny if it weren’t true - but I think we’ve finally turned a corner.

First, we’ve grown.  What began with two passionate Employees pursuing social media in addition to their day jobs has become an “Emerging Media Team,” with six of the most talented, creative, and passionate people I know.  We can now take vacations without taking our blackberries (gasp!).  Not that we would, but theoretically, we could!

Second, after all of the blood, sweat and tears, the sleepless nights, the blunders and the triumphs, I think our social media efforts may have finally “come of age.”

If one blog year is equal to 10 human years, that would make us about 30.  And, if you look at our evolution, that seems about right.

Our first year, we were learning to crawl, figuring out how it all worked, and finding our voice.  Our second year, we found our stride, we discovered our rhythm, and we gained some confidence.   By year three, we were fearless, we took risks, and pushed the envelope.

And, now, as we enter our fourth year in the blogosphere, we’ve matured a bit, we know who we are and what we need to do.  Today, we’re focused on doing it all better.

While we’ve learned from our past mistakes, we know there will be more to come.  We named our team Emerging Media rather than social media, because we want to continue to grow and evolve.  And, if we want to stay ahead of the curve, we’ll have to continue to forge through unchartered territory.  But that’s what makes it exciting.

We’re ready to mount that corporate blogging horse, and as we say in the airline industry.getting there is half the fun!

At next week’s meeting, I’ll share where we’ve been, where we’re going, our biggest successes, our biggest failures, and every lesson we’ve learned along the way.  I hope you will join me.

In the meantime, feel free to share your successes or failures, lessons you’ve learned along the way, your fears moving forward, or anything you’d like to discuss when we meet next week.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Paula’s presentation at the April Keynote Luncheon will be held in association with the Online Marketing Summit on Thursday, May 21, 2009.  This national educational event for marketing professionals offers the opportunity to learn and share with hundreds of peers and experts in Social Media, Search, Email, Analytics, Behavioral Targeting, and Website Strategy.  You can register for the full event or for the luncheon only.  Join us!

Paula Berg is the Manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines, the nation’s leading low-fare air carrier and the largest domestic airline in terms of Customers carried. Over the last three years, Paula has managed and developed the Company’s corporate blog, “Nuts About Southwest.” In 2007 and 2008, “Nuts” was named Best Blog by PR News and has been recognized in major publications ranging from Wired Magazine to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to managing the Company blog, Paula leads Southwest’s online communication and social media efforts.

When John Ellett, owner of local advertising agency nFusion, speaks in front of college groups, it’s an Anheuser-Busch account that gets the most attention. Using interactive marketing, nFusion created a Bacardi Silver brand campaign, The Pick-Up Hall of Shame. The interactive campaign launched in January 2007 and is still running and pulling in viewers.

Yes, you have to be 21 to enter the website featuring all the flavors of Bacardi Silver. So, many of those college students have only heard of, not sampled the brand. After skimming through the over 1500 entries made by site visitors, the real list of Pick-Up Lines is surprisingly small. My favorite line was:

I wish I was a tear, that way I’d be born in your eye, live on your cheek, and die on your lips.

Many of the pick-up lines referenced advertising slogans:

When I studied advertising at Syracuse University, I chose a Bacardi ad for a critical analysis assignment. Through that exercise, I learned my first rule of advertising: Men like to look at women in ads. Women like to look at women in ads.

Bacardi often sells the social aspect of its product. So it was natural to continue the “fun feature” of the branding in nFusion’s campaign. The “Worse Pick-Up Line” feature is very viral. Of the viewers that “stick”, 82 percent of them will share the campaign with their community, add or rate the lines. That is an outstanding metric which shows the conversion of lookers to doers. The viewers spread the campaign through social bookmarking, adding it to their MySpace pages, or by forwarding it to their friends.

While we can’t trace actual sales that result from the Pick-Up Line feature, the Anheuser-Busch executives approve of it enough to let it to run for two years. In interactive marketing, that’s like dog years. I like how nFusion runs the flavor buttons at the bottom of the screen with a new flavor tag for the latest version of Bacardi Silver. The new flavor tag refreshes the content.

Bacardi Silver’s interactive marketing accomplishes the goals of stickiness and engagement with its target demographic. It also has a timeless quality — the pick-up line, “You must be wearing spacepants, because you’re out of the world,” could have come out of the David Bowie disco days of the 70s. There’s no other explanation for such a bad pick-up line. Why do you think this campaign works?

About the Author

Brenda Hessney

Brenda Hessney is a successful Austin marketing specialist with a knack for quickly analyzing, planning, and implementing effective, cost efficient sales campaigns.