Creative Marketing
I spent the weekend working out what I think is going to be a very effective marketing program for a music venue in Michigan. Their goals are straightforward:
- Butts in seats
- Develop an opt-in platform for the future.
The promotion will tie into an upcoming concert and will use Twitter, PR and traditional marketing outlets to encourage the public to donate a large volume of small donations to a cause – preferably something local. Mobile text can be used to collect donations, and Twitter’s API allows for collections through applications like TipJoy. Rather than big donors, the focus is on spreading a message virally to collect $1 here, $5 there.
I have high hopes that it will not only raise significant money for the cause, but it seems like it has all the elements in place to go viral pretty quickly.
Let’s hope the client sees it too.
Came across an interesting opportunity to help the American Cancer Society tap into the power of Twitter networks to ramp up fundraising at events.
Events now can have several hundred people to raise money, but the footprint doesn’t extend far beyond that. Twitter and its viral nature, can magnify that audience to thousands very quickly.
Also came across several applications that support online micropayments for donations. One in particular, Tipjoy, looks like it was originally created for blogging, but has really promising applications for charities. By bundling donations, it enables donations as small as $1 without losing it all in processing fees. Basically, Tipjoy takes 3% off the top and the charity keeps the rest.
In a bit of Sunday evening goofiness I cut a video promo for Chicago AMA’s Brandsmart conference on June 18.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=josbLeY5shM&feature=channel_page
It was an interesting experience. First, the details really matter. From comments I heard the other week at Ragan’s Unconference (reg. the Domino’s Pizza video), I knew I had to keep it to 30 seconds or less. I wanted to get the factual info out, but make it fun and memorable with the help of the ridiculously cute puppy, Olivia.
I also learned about the difference between AVI and MP4. AVI is a raw footage format that uses an enormous volume of memory. The 36 second video used 250MB of memory and on my first upload attempts, it took more than an hour, and played out of sync.
I finally found a very easy to use freeware program called Prism Video Converter that let me convert from AVI to MP4. That made a huge difference (5mb) without losing much quality. Thumbs up to that program. Many of the other freeware programs’ trial versions were useless. They only converted half of the video, or put a flashing red “watermark” in the middle of it. Prism has a paid version with more editing tools. If I go more into video, which is likely, they now have the inside track.
Distribution-wise, I went full bore. Posted it to Chicago AMA’s LinkedIn group and Facebook page. I also sent it to contacts in Facebook (and finally sorted my Facebook friends into business and non-business). At the moment, several friends are re-Tweeting it on Twitter, so we’ll see how far it goes.
Accountants don’t know what they’re missing. Who else has this much fun at work?
Generally speaking, I’m pretty skeptical of all the green marketing efforts. They may say that switching to electronic billing saves trees, baby seals and three-legged salamanders, but the fact is that they’re just trying to reduce their printing and postage costs. If I was saving them money, they should share some of that with me in the form of a discount.
Over the weekend, I received a postcard from AT&T wireless that was so cool, I went ahead and switched to paperless billing as a reward for their creative thinking.
The post card – probably timed for Earth Day stuff – had the normal blahblah about saving trees. This card, however, also had wildflower seeds embedded in the paper. Not only was I being asked to switch to paperless billing to save the world. I was being asked to recycle the postcard itself and turn it into fertilizer for wildflowers.
I am now on paperless billing with AT&T, and my kids are eagerly awaiting the wildflowers.
Of course, if the wildflowers don’t grow …
Spent the weekend at the American Marketing Association Leadership Summit. This is a training program for the chapter officers – part inspiration, part training. I’ve been to this before from the IH perspective and the experience was entirely different. Before, it was a chore. This was inspirational. Awesome.
Just for giggles, at a cocktail reception on the first night, George Couris (Chicago AMA President) and I started goofing around with ideas to set Chicago AMA apart at the conference. We worked it out over the dinner and keynote portion of the evening and launched the first Chicago AMA TweetUp, and the results were great.
A few lessons before I describe what we did and how it worked. First, it took 45 minutes to come up with a successful, Twitter-based marketing program. It was creative. It was fun.
It was a glorious mess of improvization the entire way through.
We launched the program without having an event destination in mind, and in fact it was 5pm on Saturday before I’d even settled on the methodology to get followers to the event.
The goal: Get a significant number of attendees to a “secret” event on Saturday night by promoting it virally through Twitter. Can we pull it off in just one day?
The tools: First, the #chiama hashtag – which we’d invented about two weeks before at a Chicago AMA board meeting. We had five or six people from the chapter at the event that night, a total of four available during the day Saturday, and only me for the evening because everyone else already had plans.
The program: A Wine Tasting at Vintner’s Cellar Winery presented as a treasure hunt. We’d spend the day on Saturday building an audience through teasers. Something was coming. It was going to be cool. That’s all they knew. (That’s because that’s all we knew too.)
By the cocktail reception at 5:45, we said we’d start dropping hints and directions to the event.
The Results: Out of an event that had maybe 300-400 people show up, we had a TweetUp with 35 attendees.
We got 10% of a conference to show up to an event that we pulled out of our asses 24 hours before.
Analysis: Wow. The biggest key to this was to rapidly recruit influential ambassadors. Of those on the Twitter feed, the most effective was @marybethonline. She has begun Tweeting with the #amasummit hashtag and we started promoting and using both hashtags. That expanded our audience greatly.
It grew virally from there. As the day progressed, more and more people already knew about it. Some would mention it to me first – “hey, you’re the Twitter guy! Where are we going?” People were posting to the #chiama Twitter stream with questions, promotions. They were reTweeting it.
When I first encountered Twitter six months ago, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been slow getting it, but I’m starting to see this platform’s enormous potential.
I’ll never be bored at a conference again! 
See the full Case Study write up of the Chicago AMA Tweetup.
