If you’re a marketing pro in Chicago, join us October 13 for an evening of discussion about building social media marketing campaigns for global brands and local customers.
I’m pleased to be on this panel with some top level local talent including:
Bridget Vetter: Manager of Marketing and PR, Toppers Pizza
Dana Farber: Director of PR & Brand Development, The Barre Code
A fun resource for finding old media clips is The Museum of Classic Chicago Television. They recently found and uploaded this awesome clip from WFLD-TV Channel. It’s the station-created opening to The Stooges Rascals Hour which ran on the station of many years starting in 1977.
Old images + the perfect music = a nice piece of art that you just would not see on a local broadcast anymore.
Last week at Social Media Breakfast Chicago, I was pleased to lead a lively discussion with several smart marketers and community managers on Google+. Everyone is in the planning stages and waiting to see exactly what Google has in store for brands hopefully still this year!
It feels like Google+ is moving forward ever so methodically. There is now an API available though it’s limited to public data at the moment. In fact, this week I connected my Google+ profile to my Engage121account.
The group relayed stories how their brands and clients are anxiously waiting for the business pages to be rolled out. Here is a list of things you can do now to prepare.
1. Get in and use it as a personal profile now to get the feel.
2. Get your colleagues and valued connections from other platforms to join now and learn together. Share some posts with each other or start a Hangout (my favorite function!).
3. Start setting up circles of your brand’s communities. Think of segmenting them just like you would segment targeted mailing lists. We are assuming that one could share circles built in one’s personal profile over to the brand, so much of your targeting prep work can be done here and now.
4. Start collecting Google+ profiles now of your customers, industry experts, and other important influencers – just like Twitter handles in 2009 or phone numbers in 1940.
5. Get your photo to show up in Google searches. This is a great little tip I found from the always-informativemarketing blog by Jim Connolly.
6. Watch what the beta test brands are doing. Check out Ford.
This Saturday at FranCamp in Nashville, I will be leading a roundtable lunch discussion on Google+ for Franchise Systems with my friend Deb Evans. If you’re in the area and interested n social marketing or franchising – or just want a good reason to go spend a day in Music City – please join us! Agenda and registration details below:
Frederick Olmstead was a brilliant landscape architect responsible for such masterpieces as Central Park in NYC and the grounds at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (aka The Chicago World’s Fair). Here are his thoughts on drawing more attendees to the Word’s Fair in June of 1893:
Frederick Olmstead
“This is the advertising now most important to be developed; that of high-strung, contagious enthusiasm, growing from actual excellence: the question being not whether people shall be satisfied, but how much they shall be carried away with admiration, and infect others by their unexpected enjoyment of what they found.”
-Frederick Law Olmstead, 1893
What Olmstead had done first was LISTEN. According to Erik Larson’s The Devil In The White City, after completing his contributions the fair’s grounds and landscaping, Olmstead was busy working on other projects in New York, North Carolina, and Texas. Across the land, people told him of their apprehension about traveling to Chicago due to the recent downturn in the economy, high cost of travel, and the even higher cost of restaurant meals in Chicago (sound familiar?).
This lead Olmstead to tell his colleagues that the way to turn these attitudes around was via the sharing of fair experiences in Chicago by attendees’ with the folks back home. They focused on improvements “most likely to increase the gleam” in the stories people took home.
Did it work? Yes! After the first few months of disappointing attendance, the second half of the fair season saw record-breaking crowds. Word of mouth had indeed spread from awestruck attendees about the must-see wonders introduced in Chicago such as Tesla’s electricity, moving pictures, neon lights, the massive Ferris Wheel, hamburgers, and Scott Joplin’s music.
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