Be Human. Get Personal with your Customers

Take time to get close to your customer base, because in 2010 customers will continue to dictate your marketing efforts. Take care to polish up your company’s blog and social media channels, like facebook and twitter, and keep them healthy by posting regularly. If your communications are sparse, users won’t respect you as an authority. It is necessary to participate in conversation and contribute valuable content to be respected in your marketplace. Providing direct and timely responses to customer feedback is a powerful and effective marketing tool.

Follow the Search Funnel

In-depth conversion tracking and analysis can shed light onto the profitability of search campaigns. Just as some keywords or ads may provide a great number of clicks but low conversion levels, high-converting keywords and ads provide different levels of customer engagement and revenue over longer periods of time. These sorts of ‘deep dives’ into conversion tracking will provide more customization, optimization, and ROI in the long term.

Analyze and Synthesize

Research and invest in new tracking technologies and tools in the marketplace which will benefit your marketing campaigns. Social media tracking, for example, gives concrete insights into what your customers are saying about your brand. This newfound ability to listen to and adapt to customer trends in real-time is a valuable resource. Likewise, a comprehensive and properly configured analytics platform is probably the most important tool that a marketing team can have. If your marketing data isn’t interpretable and actionable, it isn’t useful.

Diversify and Integrate

Your many marketing channels should be working as one. Integrated campaigns consistently perform better than campaigns running separately. When insights are shared among functional marketing teams, a comprehensive strategy may then be developed which incorporates findings and best practices from each marketing channel.

Audit and Update

Everything has a ‘Best By’ date, and your website and marketing collateral are no exception. Consumer tastes change as quickly as the seasons, and the images and copy which will generate positive responses need to be refreshed frequently as well. Update your paid search ad copy – revamp your homepage! Optimization of imagery and messaging are often overlooked, but the results are valuable marketing assets.

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 By Peter Vaughan, Copywriter

On the eve of December 9^th VEVO took over New York City with a launch party that included celebrity musicians like Bono, Lady Gaga and John Mayer. At the same time, millions of internet users waited eagerly for the return of music videos, an art form that television networks like MTV and VH1 slowly started moving away from years ago. As the clock struck midnight and the site went live, VEVO’s traffic servers struggled to handle the flood of eyeballs that flocked to the music video revolution.

But make no mistake about it, this wasn’t some kind of happy accident. Red Bricks Media worked closely with VEVO to architect an effective social media strategy that included tactics on channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even eBay. At the heart of our campaign were viral videos featuring popular musicians in an act of defiance against obsolete media, a sentiment that would come to embody VEVO’s brand message.

To help seed these videos online, Red Bricks Media contacted influential bloggers in the music world offering exclusive video access and b-roll footage. The result was over 300,000 combined views in just three days. Additionally, these viewers were prompted to check out VEVO’s blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts to engage in pre-launch discussions, trivia contests and charity events like an eBay auction of 3 signed copies of Adam Lambert’s latest CD.

In the end, the best indicator of our success came from the mouths of consumers themselves. On the night of launch we became a trending topic on Twitter, sharing the conversation spotlight with keywords like “Christmas” and “Tiger Woods” (one week after he dropped his now famous ball). Using Techrigy’s buzz tracking capabilities we could also react to real-time conversation trends like usability feedback and brand shout-outs in order to keep engagement levels high throughout the night.

So what’s our best piece of advice for brands wishing to achieve the same success? Harnessing the power of social media isn’t just about creative thinking and intensive strategic planning – it’s about a willingness to have an engaging, transparent and collaborative conversation. Until marketers understand the fact that they can’t control everything that’s said about their brand, they will never be able to truly reap the rewards of platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Listening to what consumers are saying and encouraging them to become partners in shaping products and services will create the best possible result.

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Your name, sir?

Kelly Olson.

And what is it that you do here, at Red Bricks Media?

I am the COO and CFO at Red Bricks. The CFO side is pretty self-explanatory. I deal with all the company finances and make sure we have money in the bank. On the COO side, I work with all of our service lines and functional managers in a supporting role as well as working closely with The West Coast Client Services group to help manage client relationships as best as possible.

It’s not common that you run into someone with the dual roles of CFO and COO. Some might call you a Superman as you seem to be tasked with a Herculean degree of responsibility. Do you see yourself as Super?

Well, if I had to choose a superpower, it would be the ability to not have to sleep, because you could always be spending more time on the business to improve things. But no, I don’t view myself as a Superman and I couldn’t do what I do without having a solid management team in place, which I’m glad to say we do.

If you weren’t doing this job, at this company, at this time in history, what different career path could you see yourself in?

The things that would most interest me would be teaching and coaching, which I think would be pretty attainable. [At this point in the interview, Kelly launches in to his world famous football metaphors. I never know what he is talking about when he does this, so I have stricken it from the record.] And the other path that has always interested me has been film directing.

Interesting indeed. I was not aware you had a bit of the old creative yearning. Nice one. Desert island, three films, go!

‘The 3^rd Man’. I’m a big Orson Welles fan. ‘Rear Window’ or pretty much any Hitchcock film for that matter. And ‘Fargo’, a Coen Brothers masterpiece.

Wow. Who knew? Okay one last work-related question: How would you describe the aesthetic style of your office?

Pretty poor.

I completely agree. I might even go so far as to call it awful. Moving on, can you describe an ideal Saturday for Kelly Olson?

Hit a local college football game. Do some tailgating before hand. Head home for a nap afterwards. Meet up with friends for a good meal in the evening and then if I’m up for it, maybe hit a club or two and do a little dancing.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you describe yourself as a dancer?

A 5 or a 6.

How modest of you. Will we be seeing you and your stylistic moves at this year’s holiday party?

There is a definite possibility of that happening. However, I can tell you with complete certainty that you won’t be witnessing any pole dancing.

Will you save a dance for me?

Only if it’s a slow one.

As told to Russell Bongard, RBM Creative Director - 2009

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by Ben Kou, Account Manager

Whether you’re an Armageddon scholar or not, you can’t help but notice that the price of gas keeps climbing, Vladimir Putin is sending submarines to claim the North Pole, and China is slowly kicking America’s butt economically. Throw in some radical Middle Eastern terrorist groups and it’s not completely absurd to imagine all these elements fomenting another world war over the most precious resource on the planet – oil.

In fact, such a scenario is so easy to imagine that THQ built their latest first-person shooter, Frontlines: Fuel of War, on this exact premise. It’s the Red Star Alliance (China, Russia and a handful of former Soviet States) against the Western Alliance (read – US, England, and Europe) in another war to end all wars.

What does Red Bricks Media have to do with all this? In order to build interest in advance of the official release of Frontlines: Fuel of War, THQ contracted Red Bricks Media to concept, design and manage an alternate reality game allowing players to experience the frontlines of tomorrow, today.

After signing up to play at http://www.exeoinc.com, players become involved in an online search to uncover just how another world war could come to fruition. After reading blogs, discovering secret YouTube channels, befriending characters on Facebook and phoning in covert rescue missions, players discover the who, what, where and when in the world of Frontlines: Fuel of War.

“We wanted people to interact with real online channels like Facebook, Flickr and Google search in order to feel like all this is really happening, that there is a real Exeo Incorporated out there developing futuristic weapons and peak oil research and selling it to the highest bidder,” related Red Bricks Media CEO, Ed Kim.

Red Bricks Media upped the reality factor by using paid search as the backbone of the campaign. “You might be searching for real world news, say things like ‘North Pole oil reserve’ and you would come across one of Exeo Incorporated’s ads and click on it thinking it was real. Almost immediately, you become aware that something’s not right,” noted Media Director Andrew Leinicke. “It’s all just part of the game.”

Even fictitious characters in the Frontlines: Fuel of War game get in on the action. War journalist Wayne Andrews has his own blog on Wordpress (www.wayneandrews.wordpress.com) which describes his mysterious disappearance after discovering a secret Exeo Incorporated facility in the deserts of Iraq.

“I kind of feel like Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds over the radio,” said copywriter Peter Vaughan. “I hope people don’t get too freaked out by all this, but at the same time I think we all wanted to create a concept that would raise some eyebrows.”

To get in on the Countdown to War action, visit http://www.exeoinc.com – but remember, it’s only a game.

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by Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

Eight months ago the creative team at Red Bricks Media performed an experiment: we wanted to see if we could create a viral video on YouTube. There were a few videos that inspired us:

* OK Go: Here it Goes Again
* Teaspoon Slide Guitar
* My Hands are Bananas
* Tea Partay

It’s easy to see why each of these videos is viral, because they all contain one or more “viral” elements: humor, uniqueness, strangeness, and of course, undeniable talent in the form of musicianship, synchronized dancing, singing, and a well-written script.

So how does one get viral on YouTube without incredible talent, high production value, a great idea, lots of practice, or many thousands of dollars?

Red Bricks Media did it, in a modestly successful way, by creating:
* a catchy, impossible-to-avoid video title
* tags that cast a wide net for content seekers
* arguably controversial (taboo) content
* a video featuring an animal

The headline/title? Dog Attacks Polar Bear.
The tags? Rottweiler, Dog Attack, Polar Bear.
The content? Our own beloved Massimo, demolishing a one-foot high, paper-mache polar bear.

See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1CBXGp9s9Y

What were our measurements for success? They were modest: 100 views a day, and at least 100 comments, over the course of a year.

The results?
143,000+ views in 250 days = ~570 views a day, and 144 comments so far. Success!

We don’t deny—especially considering the recent indictment of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick for dogfighting—that the video can be construed as controversial or taboo, and perhaps this is the main contributor to its viral nature.

In our opinion, however, and being semantic professionals, we believe the most important viral feature of the video is the video title. People are tempted to watch the video because it says, “Dog Attacks Polar Bear”, and they want to see if the video delivers on what the headline promises, because obviously the headline creates a sensational, titillating idea that YouTubers just can’t help but watch. Apparently, people really do want to see a real dog attack a real polar bear.

Addressing the very opinionated comment section and any outlying concerns from our readers, I can only say this: Massimo is the most loving dog you can ever hope to encounter, which is more than I can say for the rabid population of YouTube, whose comments reveal a dark side of anonymous internet chatter.

If any readers still doubt Mossimo’s loving nature, come by the office anytime. He’s definitely got some love for you.

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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!

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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.

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by Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

There was a discussion at Red Bricks Media recently between our chief search strategist, Craig Hordlow, and the Red Bricks Media creative services team, regarding the pros and cons of employing Flash as a primary web design component. In particular, the discussion revolved around the following question: how does Flash design fit within the larger framework of a search engine optimization strategy? The conversation went something like this:

Craig: “Flash is to SEO what fire is to your home: a total disaster.”
Creative: “But what about interactivity? What about the cool factor?”
Craig: “People want info quickly. They don’t want to figure out which floating monkey to click on to get back to the home page.”
Creative team: “We love monkeys, especially floating monkeys.”

This heavily paraphrased conversation highlights an ongoing conundrum for many in the marketing community: build more interactivity and cutting-edge design into the web experience via Flash, or build easily indexable and discoverable websites for search using more traditional web language?

As we discovered in redesigning the new Red Bricks Media website, there is no simple answer. There are valid reasons to build a website, using different information architecture strategies, in order to satisfy different goals and end uses, for the benefit of many different target audiences.

Knowing this, opportunities abound to employ both Flash and/or more traditional web language in the fulfillment of a successful marketing strategy. I suppose it really depends on the objectives of your marketing strategy. The desire to entertain, wow and impress your customers with cutting-edge Flash design shouldn’t interrupt or trump the need to be discoverable, indexable and searchable via Google and Yahoo, and vice versa.

Scouring the internet, as well as some useful in-office brains, has yielded helpful tips in approaching the deployment of Flash and how it may fit into your SEO strategy:

1. Don’t place Flash content where advertising normally lives on a web page. Why? It will likely be ignored or mistaken for…you guessed it…advertising.
2. If Flash content will live within a page keep it to half the screen or less and preferably on the left side of the page, per widely read eye behavior studies.
3. Make Flash complementary to the message on the page, not the message itself.
   a. We all know how effective a half-heard, half-understood message can be!
4. Speaking of half: half the country still dials up to the internet, meaning you can lose precious customers in the extra seconds it takes your Flash content to load.
5. Don’t use Flash to tell a story about a product/service, use it to enhance the story.
   a. Use HTML to express important purchase/learn more text info on the page
   b. Use Flash to emphasize product details (360 view, colors, sizes, etc.)
6. Create keyword-rich, SEO-informed title tag and meta descriptions on every page where Flash content is featured.
7. Provide a “text equivalent” for every non-text element on a Flash page.
   a. This goes for Flash as well as images, maps, applets, audio, video, etc.
   b. Providing equivalent information for inaccessible content is also the primary way to make your website accessible to people with disabilities.

Hopefully, your marketing strategy won’t call for a comprehensive, highly integrated SEO strategy using a 100% Flash website. If so, you may want to have a conversation with Craig and our SEO team, who may in turn recommend that you develop a new SEO strategy and a new website, or at the very least, a website without the floating monkeys.

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