Red Bricks Media’s News Blog

Whatever side of the country you’re on, there is now a Red Bricks Media office to serve your needs. We’re proud to announce that we have officially opened a new office in New York City. With this new office and our location in Hong Kong, we’ve now completed our plans for national and global expansion in 2007.

Heading up our Manhattan office will be operations expert Stanley Wang. Prior to Red Bricks, Stan handled the product marketing and merchandising of the MP3 line at Coby Electronics, the fastest growing product line at Coby with over 30% growth. He also oversaw the operations for CCL, a China based manufacturer with over 2000 employees.

Our CEO Ed Kim sees New York as a strategic location for providing top-notch service. “New York is a prime location to serve not only our New York-based clients, but also the rest of the eastern United States and Europe. Combined with our presence in Hong Kong, we now have a world-wide footprint that helps us work with big brands and global campaigns,” explains Ed.

Our New York office will offer the same full-service capabilities as our San Francisco headquarters, including expertise in both online and traditional forms of marketing. Our client list already includes notable brands based in New York, like Hearst and Oxygen. New client MTS is the first client to start with our New York office.

by Craig Hordlow, Chief Search Strategist

I believe that, by definition, accurate predictions about the future sound outlandish.

Think of the world as we know it in 2007 and try to imagine accurately predicting this reality in 1979.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were interviewed on May 30 at the D5 conference. Clearly, these are two men who have dramatically shaped the world we live in. The interview explored their past and current contributions, and their future aspirations.

There were many aspects of the interview that were fascinating, but from a search perspective, there was a theme that signified a large change in search on the near horizon – one that may seem outlandish.

I believe this change will be the eventual elimination of the browser.

Two of history’s greatest technical visionaries were enthusiastic about rich internet applications. At one point, with a wave of a hand to the ether, Gates described content that existed in “the cloud” – referring to the web as he described the processing limitations of the browser.

Both men described how their companies are making richer applications by developing for devices (iPhone). Jobs also explained the limitations of a web browser, and how the future of the internet lies in a large departure from a browser based experience.

So what does this mean for search?

Well, currently search engines robots cannot read rich internet applications (RIA), which are becoming an increasing part of the web. This means Ajax, JavaScript, Flash and video. As developers move away from the browser, they move away from discoverability.

Despite how sophisticated search engine robots appear, they are actually quite primitive. They only understand very simple text based content, and at the rate developers are employing richer media forms, this is going to become a large problem.

SEOs are aware of this problem and have created solutions – the most common one being creating a robot-friendly version of parts, if not all, of their site for search.

However, this is not a long term solution. At some point, search engines will have to improve their ability to read RIA’s.

Until that day arrives, it is imperative that designers and developers make sure that a robot friendly version of their content exists, and that these pages have been reviewed by a professional SEO. Simply having the pages is not necessarily going to assure desirable ranking.

Red Bricks Media’s most recent Buzz marketing campaign with The CW and Academy of Art University is live and running successfully. Aspiring actors were invited to download a script from a popular CW show and video tape their delivery of it for upload to the website. The entire program is hosted at www.FreeToBeFamous.com. The program is now in a heated voting phase, where visitors can vote for the most successfully delivered script. The winner will get a walk-on acting role on a CW primetime show and the stakes are high, so join the action and vote now!

by Peter Vaughan, Copywriter

“Email marketing is so dead.” Have you ever heard that before? With response rates coming in around the 1.12% mark, email has become a sore subject for many marketers (I display a can of spam on my desk to show my solidarity). The game has gotten tougher, the consumer has become annoyed, and clients are dropping vendors left and right.

However, this is no time to panic. The emergence of the social web has expanded the possibilities and created a shift in the consumer/marketer relationship that favors interaction – everyone wants to be in the know, everyone wants to participate and everyone wants to be famous. Yes, even email has a place in the YouTube, Facebook, Blogging, widget-crazed, crowd-control world of web 2.0 – you just need to know what you’re doing.

The keys to email success in Web 2.0:

Personalization, personalization, personalization – The golden rule.
- Break up your audience into groups and create messaging that speaks to each segment. Thorough market research will pay off in the long run.

- Use an experienced media planner who knows how to rent the right list at the right price.

- Track click behavior and follow up with custom, exclusive offers that drive conversions your consumers began but didn’t complete in a previous round.

2. Content is king again, but don’t overdo it – everyone has ADD

- Make sure your email design is easy to scan and includes non-invasive (text-link) CTAs in the body and again in the P.S. line. Hard CTAs should only go in mastheads or next to product shots.

- For sustained, content-focused newsletter campaigns, use teasing summaries and link to the full article elsewhere. This keeps emails short and drives traffic to your web properties.

- For hard-sale, product-oriented emails, think mail-order catalog. One catchy headline mixed with a product matrix works wonders (ever gotten an Apple iPod email? Those guys are good).

3. Create a relationship, encourage sharing, and sell “the social”

- User-generated content, out-of-the box offers and total transparency are the big winners in today’s web – it’s time to start leveraging email in the same fashion. If you can’t create content to entertain your audience, let your customers do some of the heavy lifting instead, and incentivize them with exclusive offers.

- People want to share things with friends that makes them look and feel cool. Of course, you do need a cool creative team (RBM!) to come up with creative ideas. Pairing sales emails with some light, interactive content is a recipe for success.

- At the very least, consider the magic phrase “send to a friend.” This encourages viral activity which can produce amazing results. Third-party vendors picked up an email offer we designed for Seagate’s FreeAgent hard drive line (purely through word-of-mouth) – our little product email became the top referrer to the FreeAgent site.

Ok, so I broke a rule – this newsletter article is a little content-heavy. But I would like to hear your thoughts and talk further about Red Bricks Media’s approach to email marketing in the web 2.0 landscape. Email me at pvaughan@redbricksmedia.com any time, day or night.

Wherever you are in the nation, chances are Red Bricks Media will soon be visiting a conference near you.

For the past few months, our executives have been busy traveling and sharing our thought leadership at various industry conferences. In June, Elliott Easterling, our co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing, spoke at the Silicon Valley Searchnomics Conference. Searchnomics is a new industry conference that brings together web and internet marketing professionals to share cutting-edge Search Engine knowledge and best practices. Elliott’s presentation included an in depth look at the relationship between Search Marketing and Web 2.0 technologies. Specifically he presented marketers with tools for leveraging Web 2.0 in conjunction with search marketing tactics to build effective integrated campaigns. To request an copy of this presentation please email us at sales [at] RedBricksMedia.com

More recently, in July, our CEO Ed Kim shared insights into search marketing at Baptie’s prestigious Marketing Focus North America conference in San Diego. Ed provided expertise on advanced search marketing methods in his session “Search Marketing – Beyond the Basics, what Search Really Means.” This conference, focused on business-to-business marketing in the technology industry, is widely attended by some of the most senior marketers in the industry. Ed’s key takeaways included how to leverage search throughout the buying cycle, what can and cannot be done through search, how to nurture qualified leads, and challenges of secondary search engines. He illustrated his talk with real-world examples from client Adobe Systems.

In case you missed these last two talks, never fear – we’ve got several more speaking engagements lined up for the next few months, including the Adobe MAX conference, the Marketing Sherpa Brand Summit, and Search Engine Strategies in Chicago, Boston / San Francisco, and San Jose, respectively. Stay tuned for more details!