One of my basic rules for social media:

• Inject social media into traditional advertising. 

Although digital marketing might not be as old as television and radio it gives you a great opportunity to reach out to your customers.  Creating a newsletter using your Blog content will connect with your database.

These three examples are taken from a Social.Motive sldie show.  They demonstrate regardless the size of your database you can expect some great results.  Each of these newsletters would cost $500 to $ 1,000 if created from scratch.  In a good social media program they are just an added benefit.

• Open rate in these three examples ranged from 18% to 32%.   You really should be doing this once a month if you want to effectively own your customers and grow your market share.  This is great ROI! 

If your Automotive Ad  Agency or staff is not prepared to execute give us a call.  We put in the game  in a very short order.

On Labor Day, Boise State University will leverage its phenomenal success on the football field to communicate to a national audience its equally impressive accomplishments in academics. A new television commercial that harnesses the innovative spirit of the school debuts on opening-game day, and will broadcast when the high-profile Boise State Broncos hit the field.

“If you’re going to appear on the national stage, you’d better have good stage-hands that know the ropes.” That is the theatrical analogy Frank Zang, communications director of Boise State University, uses to describe his reliance on RIESTER’s experience when it comes to showcasing his school’s attractions on a 30-second TV commercial.  The commercial will air nationally throughout the football season beginning with the Boise State-Virginia Tech game on ESPN this Labor Day, Sept. 6.

In this instance, Zang’s seasoned “stage-hands” are in the form of the creative team from RIESTER, a communications firm with offices in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. The team was led by Jeff Bagley, creative director of RIESTER’s Salt Lake City office.  Bagley has produced six Super Bowl commercials for Intel and Iomega.

“Those are pretty impressive credentials,” says Zang, of Bagley’s Super Bowl experience. “That gives us a lot of confidence in knowing our institutional commercial has been produced by creative folks who know how to create compelling, enlightening and informative messages that will resonate with a national audience.”

“Boise State University is truly unique” said RIESTER CEO Tim Riester, “From their football team to their research labs they have a winning culture.”

The commercial highlights innovation at Boise State, both on and off the football field. The ad begins with the line “Great ideas don’t fall from the sky, they come from people . . . .” A young boy, filled with hope and potential throws an orange paper airplane from the stands at Boise State’s stadium. Images representing innovative academic work happening at Boise State appear next. The paper airplane eventually lands on the blue turf of the Bronco’s field at the feet of a man. The camera pulls back and the man is revealed to be Coach Chris Petersen revealing the tagline: “Innovate at Boise State.”

“Boise State is innovating in so many fields, from the science labs right down to their iconic blue football field,” says Bagley. “All of this is conveyed in the commercial.”

Use this video blog to ensure  you begin with the right platform.

If your automotive ad agency isn’t getting you ahead of the social media wave give me a call.  I promise I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.

Joining the lizards, ducks and dogs are:

• Mayhem, a reckless new character, who has shoved perennial Allstate spokesperson Dennis Haysbert into the backseat
• Actor Mike McGlone, playing a tough-guy reporter who asks rhetorical questions for Geico
• The guy with the blue phone strapped to his body, comedian Bob Wiltfong, who hams it up for Nationwide
• Justin Case, a fictional SafeAuto employee, played by Tim McCarthy

Now’s your chance to vote for the one you find most irritating and view the results. (Tell me you’re not going to vote for Snoopy.) View Poll

View Poll

Things like group cheers, crazy hats and other “tribal” identifiers are great at building social cohesion among like-minded individuals, and can be powerful tools. However, social cohesion is not a great predictor of a successful outcome.

If you want to succeed in a difficult task, the most important step you can take is to get everyone committed to it. In the military this is called “Task Cohesion”, and studies have shown it’s the most important factor in determining whether or not a difficult mission gets completed.

So, how do you create task cohesion? It’s not easy, but it’s relatively simple. The key aspects are:

• Define the task in realistic and concrete terms. Make it memorable and inspiring.
• Create a sense of significance. Allow them to understand the “why” behind the mission.
• Encourage communication from the bottom up and leverage heterogenous skill sets.
• Emphasize “getting the job done” above all else.

This isn’t ground breaking advice, and you’ve probably heard a lot of it before. But, it’s worth remembering. Work is about accomplishing what you set out to do. If you’re leading a project team, the best thing you can do is set a clear goal and get everyone’s buy in. It’s great to have fun along the way, but if the mission fails. It won’t matter.

In 2010 computing is shifting from local resources into the clouds.

Dan Peterson is RIESTER’s IT Director. This post discusses the shift to cloud computing.

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, “whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand.” This computing trend is having a large impact in IT departments and in the development and implementation of marketing campaigns.

Lately there has been a lot written about what cloud computing is, is not, and what it will be. Like any new technology, early adopters attempt to gain a competitive advantage. But economics drive widespread adoption, and today with costs dropping, the migration to the cloud is accelerating. Cloud-based services also often come with added features and benefits.

My head has been in the cloud for quite some time. It just wasn’t called the cloud five to ten years ago. The hype of the day then was SAAS (software as a service) and ASP (application service providers). I was hooked after we deployed our first SAAS product, SPAM filtering. From then on I would ask questions like, “Can we do this through a web browser? Why do we need another server? Can’t we find a service to do this for us?” I didn’t want to build it if I could rent it or pay per use.

Noted technology writer Nicholas Carr makes the case in his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in how computing resources are consumed and delivered. Carr, a former Harvard Business Review executive editor, coined the term World Wide Computer to help define the shift from in-house and personal computing resources to Internet based services.

Carr argues that widespread adoption is driven primarily by economics. He draws a parallel example between the electrification of the United States in the early 1900s and the shift to cloud computing today. Early power plants were isolated and local. As the early electrical grid matured, and it began to make economic sense, industrial electric users began to shut down their internal power plants and started to buy power from the grid. A critical point is that adoption didn’t occur until larger power companies could deliver power cheaper than what it cost local entities to produce their own power.

Enterprises have been building their own data centers (power plants) to deliver computing resources (power) to the business. These data centers are individually owned, maintained and run by the business, usually at considerable cost. Cloud-based services are starting to replace in-house data centers because it’s becoming economically viable. There are other issues that also hinder cloud adoption. Security, compliance and regulation have been hurdles of various heights to market segments like healthcare, finance and government. But those issues are being aggressively addressed and the industry has made great strides. Evidence is the ever growing use of cloud services in the public sector. But the true driver of adoption is still economics. When decision makers see that money can be saved, the other issues quickly get resolved.

The combined use of cloud services and virtualization of in-house servers is a common strategy enterprises and governments are using to reduce costs. This strategy also has an overall “greening” effect. As organizations consume more cloud services, their in-house data centers become smaller. As more users are served with less hardware in a shared cloud environment, the result is an overall a smaller carbon footprint.

At RIESTER, we use various cloud services, including: Google Apps for email, calendaring, and contacts; online backup of laptops and file servers; and virtual servers for testing and production. While all of our moves to the cloud have resulted in cost savings, most also have included feature enhancements. Examples include laptops we can back up from anywhere, video chat, super fast server turn-up, and many more. And who knows what the future holds? If you asked me three years ago if we would be backing up a terabyte of data online I would have told you our Internet connection was too slow and it would cost too much.

The shift to the cloud is having profound effects to our core business as well. The prolific new social media channels that are now available to individuals, organizations and marketers, almost all live in the cloud. These channels include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, other video delivery services and many blogs.

I am looking forward to Mr. Carr’s newest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, it is the newest download to my Kindle. Carr is always a provocative prognosticator and an insightful analyst.

Read more from Nicholas Carr at his blog.

No longer can you afford to ignore the development of a  comprehensive strategy for today’s digital customer.  

This video blog will provide some  insight into today’s customer and how you can connect with them.

If your automotive ad agency is not prepared or ready to attack this new world give us a call.  This is what we do.

1. 9 criteria for brand essence and the accompanying SlideShare deck #1 by a landslide
2. Best branding & marketing books
3. Mayflower’s giant marionette: cute or creepy? Wow! The traffic to this post surprised me. The marionette deeply polarized opinion.
4. P&G brands … itself?
5. G, I don’t get Gatorade’s line extension. Since the post, the Gatorade lineup has changed yet again: G01 Prime, G2 Perform (Where’s the “0?”), and G03 Recover. Not surprised that Tiger’s Focus is gone. The line is a bit simpler, but I still don’t understand why the brand name “Gatorade” is gone.
6. The North Face dilemma: spank the Butt or turn the other cheek? The lawsuit was settled with terms undisclosed. The South Butt is still in business.
7. So who is “the world’s greatest insurance spokesperson in the world?” The marketplace may now be begging for, “Who is the world’s most annoying insurance spokesperson in the world?” Allstate’s Mayhem has joined the contenders.
8. Coke and Pepsi merge, combine logos. This post was intended as satirical commentary on Continental and United’s scrambled new logo, a bastardized combination of their individual marks. Not sure everyone got that. Too obscure. Sorry.
9. When to hire vs. when to outsource
10. BMW uncovers its brand essence: joy

As always, if you have any suggestions for topics or improvements to the blog, please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

If your automotive ad agency is missing the boat or doesn’t see the power of social media I’ll be happy to show you how to make it work.

It would be wise to print  this sheet and post it on your wall.  Everyone needs a reminder now and then to keep you pointed in the proper direction.  Call your cheat sheet.

8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing… By The Altimeter Group.
After pouring over the data from the ecosystem we’re part of, we found a clear pattern. There was a consistent set of criteria we heard from the industries experts, we found the following 8 criteria:

Click on the link above and you can get the entire report.

The only problem with the list is it takes time and focus.  You need to recognize this.  You can’t pretend  your way through social media.  If you’re having your automotive ad agency work on this keep a close eye on the activity.  If you don’t have time to make a social media program work or you’re not happy with what you have give me a call that’s what we do.