The Digital Bus

It’s the Monday after the Super Bowl, and any marketing blog worth its pixels is going to contribute its commentary about the advertisements. While I was watching this year’s festivities, I noticed that many companies are taking a much more subtle approach to their digital marketing strategies than before.

Gone are the days when every dot bomb out there spends more time on their advertising than on their business model. These days, companies are working to integrate their traditional marketing efforts with their digital marketing campaigns, resulting in less intrusive, more interactive points of contact with consumers via social media channels.

A nice example of this is the Volkswagen Punch Dub game. The premise of the commercial is the timeless game wherein the first person to see a Volkswagen driving down the street promptly punches their friend in the arm. While the commercial itself is nothing out of the ordinary for humorous Super Bowl spots, what is unique is the integration of the Punch Dub website and Facebook fan page. These sites allow Volkswagen enthusiasts to customize their attack, play with their friends and (hopefully!) win a shiny new VW of their very own.

Another compelling advertisement touts the personal side of Google’s search engine, walking the viewer through the inevitable circle of taking a study abroad, falling for that beautiful French girl and eventually searching for instructions to that crib from Ikea. This ad strikes me because while Yahoo and Bing are fairly active advertisers, I can’t recall seeing a Google search spot before. Many Silicon Valley companies are taking this soft sell approach in an effort to make technology less technical and more tangible to the people actually doing the clicking.

And if all this is too cerebral for you, there’s always the Dorito’s samurai.

Tags:   Advertising · digital marketing · Ingenex Digital Marketing · integration · super bowlNo Comments.

Have you set up a second Twitter account for the sole purpose of interacting with brands, following them, redeeming coupons, making service requests, and voicing complaints via Twitter? Maybe it’s a good idea.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Complain.

Flickr photo: kaibara87

It makes sense. Personally I hate to bog down my personal Twitter account with complaints or questions to companies about how their product doesn’t work, or to let them know there was a fly in my soup. But the fact is Twitter is a great way to communicate these items.

A Twitter complaint or request holds the brand accountable, and allows for a somewhat public solving of the problem. So if it’s such a good way to communicate with brands, what’s my problem? In my personal Twitter I don’t want to be a complainer.

Positive Tweets for Personal Twitter

I want my personal Twitter to be a bright, shiny Twitter account all about sharing information, helping others, and making the world a better place.

So what is my darker side Twitter? The Twitter account I use purely for following brands. The Twitter I only bust out when I need to make a transaction or launch a complaint. I certainly won’t tell.

Tags:   Brands · Customer Complaints · Engagement · TwitterNo Comments.

Ingenex Digital Marketing attended this year’s Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor to learn more about what’s happening within Michigan’s entrepreneur economy. What an impressive event!

A scooter from Current Motor Company #ace2010 #cumoco

More than 900 attendees turned out to network with entrepreneurs from across the state and interact with compelling new businesses that are driving innovation and job creation here in Michigan. The state-of-the-art facilities at Skyline High School provided an appropriate venue for the diverse, innovative crowd on-hand. Notable companies in attendance included:

• Franklin-based CircleBuilder, winner of the elevator pitch competition and developers of faith-based private social networks,

• Ypsilanti-based WhereToFindCare, winner of the Twitter business idea competition and creators of a free online healthcare research platform for consumers, and

• Ann Arbor-based Current Motor Company, designer and manufacturer of electric motorscooters.

To close out the evening, Michigan Economic Development Corporation Vice President Ned Staebler announced the launch of a new $100,000 SmartZone award as part of the Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest Business Plan Competition. Companies that wish to apply for the competition and vie for the award need to submit a business plan and apply for sponsorship with a local SmartZone by April 23. Click here to learn more.

The ACE 2010 event was an outstanding demonstration of the start-up community and entrepreneurial spirit that is helping Michigan to move its economic recovery forward one small business at a time, and we were inspired by all the amazing people we encountered. Best of luck to all of you entrepreneurs out there!

Tags:   ace2010 · digital marketing · entrepreneur · ingenex · innovation · Michigan · start-upNo Comments.

Michigan is prioritizing healthcare as a growth industry, and these healthcare events in Ann Arbor and Detroit will set the tone for a successful year in 2010 and give you the inside story on the Michigan healthcare industry.

Ingenex Digital Marketing has three upcoming industry events on its radar where thought leaders and influencers will collaborate, communicate and create actionable strategies in the spirit of fostering economic growth in Michigan via the healthcare industry. If you are interested in learning about the local healthcare economy and how sound digital marketing strategies can help push economic momentum in Michigan’s healthcare industry, we encourage you to attend!

Checking the Vitals on Social Media in Healthcare, sponsored by PRSA Detroit.
January 28 at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, 8am
Speakers: Bill Ferris, manager, web services, Henry Ford Health System
Barbara Palazzolo, APR, director, marketing and communications, In-House Hospice
Cande Tschetter, Ph. D., APR, CEO, Tschetter and Associates
Jessica Soulliere, senior public relations representative/social media communications coordinator, University of Michigan Health System

The Future of Our Healthcare System, sponsored by Inforum Michigan
February 1 at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn, 11:30am
Speakers: Nancy Schlichting, President and Chief Executive Officer, Henry Ford Health System
Dr. Patricia Maryland, President and Chief Executive Officer, St. John Health
Jeff Goldsmith, President, HealthFutures

The Business of Healthcare: The Economic Driver of Washtenaw County, sponsored by United Bank & Trust, Hylant Group and LeadersConnect
February 4 at the Four Points Sheraton in Ann Arbor, 7am
Speakers: Doug Strong, Director and Chief Executive Officer, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers
Doug Schneider and Jean Chenoweth, Thomson Reuters
Roger Newton, Esperion Therapeutics
Dick Sarns, founder of Sarns Medical and CEO of NuStep
Mark Sutter, CEO, Terumo CVS

Tags:   digital marketing · healthcare · ingenex · MichiganNo Comments.

Ingenex works closely with Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing (LA2M) to help the marketing community in Ann Arbor share ideas and drive networking.  Today’s LA2M event featured Dee Davey, owner of Creative Ideas Marketing and the Voice of LA2M, as she presented her perspectives on strategic market planning.

By Dee’s count, there are more than 200 different tools and tactics that companies can use to market their businesses, ranging from old school advertising methods to new media technologies.  Which ‘silver bullet’ is right for your business?  According to Dee, the answer is…that depends.

In order to get a clear picture of which tools are the best fit for your business, you must conduct strategic market planning, a process that takes a deep look at what your business is, who your customers are and how you can best meet their needs.  While the final tactics will differ between companies and industries, the overall process applies regardless of whether you’re an established company, an entrepreneur or a worker in transition.

At it’s heart, strategic market planning addresses the tough questions that will help to provide focus to your business.  What is your business?  What are you great at?  Who are your customers?  What do they demand?  How can we bring it all together?  Strategic market planning serves to align your company’s marketing efforts with your business objectives in order to minimize wasteful spending and maximize return on your marketing investment.  This in-depth analysis of your company’s market also helps to uncover new opportunities and address unmet client needs before your competitors do.

Strategic market planning incorporates several key elements of your company’s business.  This includes your integrated brand identity, core competencies, customer needs, trends in your market, changes in the business environment, competitive pressures and the overall marketing mix.

The process for conducting strategic market planning is twofold; an internal discovery program will help you to build a persona around your customers’ behavior and customize your products or services so you can deliver something customers truly value.  An external view uses primary and secondary research to help your company gather and analyze market intelligence in order to understand the environment and learn from both customers and industry experts.  Oftentimes, the most valuable intelligence comes from unexpected sources such as employees who interact with customers on a direct level or experts in unrelated industries!

In summary, Dee’s presentation helped today’s LA2M attendees to learn about how to use strategic market planning to understand customer needs, refine your business model to match those needs and deliver your offerings at the perfect time.

LA2M is a lunch group that meets every Wednesday at 11:45 am to discuss the latest digital and new marketing trends, strategies and techniques.  Join us in person at Conor O’Neill’s or view the presentation online at the LA2M Live Stream.

Tags:   ann arbor · digital marketing · LA2M · Strategic Market Planning1 Comment

Ingenex Digital Marketing is offering new media training to corporations and their marketing teams through the New Media Drivers License Course at MSU. The course created in partnership between Ingenex Digital Marketing and the Department of Advertising, PR & Retailing at Michigan State University has been offered in the classroom since early 2009.

Corporate new media training will benefit organizations by giving them a complete understanding of how to use social media to connect with their customers and build stronger relationships. The course covers the topics social media marketing, digital public relations, search engine optimization (SEO), Google Adwords, YouTube, social bookmarking, blogging for business and more.

The first company to go through the New Media Drivers License Course is Credit Union One with corporate offices in Ferndale, Michigan. Ingenex will train corporations at their offices, for an eleven week course that delivers incredible value to the organization. For details visit our New Media Training for Corporations page on the New Media Drivers License web site.

Tags:   corporate training · digital marketing · new business · New Media Drivers License · servicesNo Comments.

If someone is talking about your company online, and you’re not listening, did it ever really make a sound? The short answer is a resounding yes.

Of course the concept of brand monitoring is old hat for anyone working in the digital marketing industry, but a colleague recently brought to my attention a presentation from Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang that broke social media listening down into several discrete phases.

Owyang’s presentation, “Evolution: the Eight Stages of Listening,” analyzes corporate social media customer interaction into stages that range in complexity from nascent to hyper-advanced. Owyang’s phases of listening are as follows:

1. No Goal at All

2. Tracking of Brand Mentions

3. Identifying Market Risks and Opportunities

4. Improving Campaign Efficiency

5. Measuring Customer Satisfaction

6. Responding to Customer Inquiries

7. Improving Customer Understanding

8. Being Proactive and Anticipating Customers

Are you seeing your own company’s strategy in this list? The power of social networking has opened up myriad opportunities for companies to not only speak to but also interact with their core target audiences, to the point of clairvoyance outlined in Stage Eight. But the fact is that most companies are lagging behind the innovation curve in their social media listening activities, preferring to stay stuck in Stage One or Two and leaving the door open for more nimble competitors to weasel their way into customers’ marketing budgets.

This is Marketing 101 here folks – if you don’t serve your customers, someone else will. As Owyang states in his presentation, “Conversations happen with or without your presence. The control over dialogues is no longer yours.” But what you can control is how you participate in and add value to those dialogues. Now is the time to build a solid digital marketing strategy, one that will take full advantage of social media listening to connect with your customers on an authentic level, identify untapped market opportunities before your competitors can and mitigate smaller problems before they blossom into crises.

Check out Owyang’s presentation yourself by clicking on this link or checking out the embedded slides right here.

http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/evolution-the-eight-stages-of-listening

Tags:   brand monitoring · Business Social Networking · digital marketing · ingenex · Jeremiah Owyang · social media listeningNo Comments.

Amidst the buzz of driving traffic, SEO, PPC, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, let us pause a moment and look out the proverbial window and absorb the concept of Microsites.

Microsites serve as a support page for your company’s main website. The latest bus, not buzz, delivers traffic and information-rich content to get your company the best ride on the digital marketing freeway. Be it a special event, new marketing campaign, or maybe pushing out current content in a whole new format, Microsites are fast-becoming a terrific way to pickup and deliver busloads of site traffic, and so much more.

Consider these benefits of your Microsite:

• Drive additional traffic to it as well as your parent site,
• Increase awareness,
• Offer you an opportunity to communicate, present, or announce something new about your company, i.e., a highly specific cluster of information,
• Provide keyword-rich content, which ultimately ranks higher in search engines and draws repeat visitors,
• Improve your Quality Score with search engines, which ultimately serves to
• Lower your PPC cost.

Examples of successful Microsites include those built around contests or games, such as: “Idol Trivia” by Ford Fusion, “24 Second Challenge” by Fox, and Lenovo’s “Voices of the Summer Games”.

Among successful corporate Microsites are those built around a company’s Team Members, and here’s why:

Suppose people are looking to hire a specific team of experts. If your company’s Team Members are simply listed on your main website, the team of experts will be more difficult to find and far less effective at driving traffic to your site or getting your company hired.

With a separate Microsite showcasing your company’s Team Members, you will greatly improve ranking, hits, increase contacts from clients, and mostly position Team Members (and your company) as experts. In short, it is a perfect way to build credibility and get loads of backlinks to your main site.

A Team Member Microsite allows each member to build, monitor, and modify their own page, much like a “profile” similar to that found on Facebook and LinkedIn. These Team Member Microsites, however, allow your Team Members far more freedom to customize, add outbound links to other Profile Pages (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter), and even link back to your own company’s main site – ultimately increasing your ranking and traffic.

These Team Member Microsites can also include RSS Feeds, Podcasts, and blogs to further engage repeat visitors.

Ingenex Digital is about to launch Team Microsites, a CMS-based product allowing you to build Home, About, Contact, News, and Profiles pages. This product, Team Microsites is a breeze to navigate, gives your company and its members expert credibility, busloads of backlinks to your Company’s main site, and even better, it will give you the freedom to create targeted landing pages as well.

Here are a few ideas to envision for your new Team Microsite:

• Engage your visitors with contests or games;
• Share industry-relevant tips, tricks, and advice straight from the expert employee, which link back your Company’s main website’s related product or service;
• Use this as a conduit for internal communication – keeping all Team Members up-to-date with current happenings;
• Consider networking with other companies via different Microsites for each department.

Best up? Your new Team Microsites will be searchable on Social Harbor, the brainchild of Ingenex Digital Marketing, a Digital Agency founded by Derek Mehraban and located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tags:   digital marketing · ingenex · Microsite · seo · social mediaComments Off

Ingenex just launched a new brand identity and web site for Boston based software company  Illume Software. This company is helping keep the roads safer through GPS enabled software to keep drivers focused on driving. New technology like this is fascinating and I expect big things from Illume Software as they launch their product and gain market share.

Tags:   brand identity · gps · Illume Software · mobile devices · Web Design1 Comment

Ingenex Digital Marketing along with a little help from our friends recently launched a new site for local non-profit LA2M – Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing. The site will be a destination for marketing professionals looking to learn digital marketing, search engine optimization, blogging or any number of marketing related topics covered during the weekly marketing lunch known as LA2M.

LA2M brings speakers from SE Michigan to speak on topics related to marketing in front of a weekly 75+ crowd. The group leans heavily digital, partly because it’s an important topic and partly because I started the group and want to teach people about digital marketing. Of course I’m not the only one doing the teaching, the speakers at LA2M events are fabulous and diverse.

The new site will feature audio and video podcasts from each speaker. The site also has expert content areas and will soon have member profiles. Finally LA2M has a place to call home. The new site will compliment LA2M online presence on Linkedin and Facebook.

I’m also grateful for Ross Johnson and Wayne Eaker who played major roles in the site design, programming and launch. Drupal CMS was used on the site. VC Web Design records the LA2M events for podcast. Take a visit and let me know what you think. http://la2m.org

Tags:   ann arbor · digital marketing · ingenex · LA2M · Web DesignComments Off