Case Studies | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

Etch A Sketch Wins, Then Loses with Social Media

Posted on 23. Mar, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, case studies, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

If you’ve been following the political scene over the past few days, it was a big win for Ohio Arts and their classic product, Etch A Sketch.

Eric Fehrnstrom, one of Mitt Romney’s senior advisors, talked to CNN’s “Starting Point” on Wednesday morning, stating that:

“Everything changes. It’s like Etch A Sketch,” he said. “You can shake it up and we start all over again.”

Etch a Sketch sales are booming from the comments, the stock price has doubled, and every major media outlet continues to talk about the historic product as Mitt Romney tries to clean up a PR mess. Even Rick Santorum has been toting around the product at all his campaign stops as a reminder of Romney’s “start over” strategy.

So all good for Etch A Sketch, right? Well, not so much.

Although Ohio Arts just recently sent a box of Etch A Sketch’s to the political candidates as thanks for the support (a great move), I feel they have lost out on a huge opportunity to build their online and social media assets. Here are some thoughts:

Ohio Arts and Etch A Sketch have no Twitter account. This is not uncommon for many consumer products, but this is a huge lost opportunity to pick up fans and followers on the social network. Even this Chicago Tribune article states, “Ohio Arts, alas, does not have a Twitter Handle.” It would not be unlikely for Etch a Sketch to pick up tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of followers over the past few days from the publicity. This was an amazing opportunity to build out a media channel…but alas…
Where’s the Story? I couldn’t find any article or post from the company directly about the happenings, except for a small formal statement on their Facebook page. Just imagine the news that could have been told from a series of original blog posts? Possibly samples of the candidates as an Etch a Sketch in multiple posts. How many would have shared these posts, sending thousands of inbound links to the site, leaving the opportunity to make more connections with fans and followers? Done right, Etch A Sketch could continue this story for months after all the buzz is gone.
Where’s the News? First off, I couldn’t access the Flash only Etch a Sketch site on my iPad, so off to the PC. After searching through the site for about five minutes, I finally found the press room at the bottom of the Ohio Arts page. I was expecting, at minimum, a news release and links to coverage about the events of the past few days. Well, no such luck. The last news release was from March of 2011 (3 of them), then before that you had to go back to 2008.
Where’s the Database? Exposure such as this could have created the opportunity to get a number of direct connections through email updates on the product to fans. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one. Don’t Etch A Sketch fans want regular updates on great stories from the company?

Look, I love Etch a Sketch and I don’t want to be harsh to this great company in any way, but this is a standard case of a company thinking and acting very traditionally and not seeing the great opportunity to build connections directly with fans, journalists and bloggers through multiple media channels. If the company was thinking more like a media company, it would be realistic to assume that this awesome event could have translated into long-term asset creation (channel development and inbound links), instead of just a short-term sales spike.

The original post is titled Etch A Sketch Wins, Then Loses with Social Media , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

The Future of Content Marketing – 6 Differences Between Good and Great [Part 2]

Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, case studies, content marketing, content strategy, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

In part one of this series – The History of Content Marketing – we covered how the barriers to entry for brands becoming media companies have fallen, and now the differences are all but gone.

But don’t start the party just yet.

In a recent study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, although 90% of all companies employ some form of content marketing, the majority are still struggling with creating content that truly engages their customers and delivers results for the company.

Good to Great Content Marketing

So, what separates the good from the great when it comes to content marketing? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. That said, through all the research (both quantitative and qualitative), we’ve found six differences that are separating good to great content marketers.

1. The Focused, Educational Content Platform

Great content marketers have developed (some for many years) targeted, educational content portals similar to what media companies have been doing for decades. A best-of-breed example is P&G:

Home Made Simple – targeting “Moms” on the go
Being Girl – targeting adolescent women
Man of the House – targeting husbands and Dads

What is key about these sites is a laser-like targeting of a super niche category. Where most average content marketers fall down is by going to broad with their content focus. A key to P&G’s success is very specific content targeted to a very specific buyer.

2. Opening Up New Content/Media Markets

The best content marketers are helping to shape the story, and the terminology of their respective markets. Citrix launched Workshifting.com years ago as the online answer for those people whose offices are anywhere – the coffee shop, the airport, the home office…anywhere. The site is chock full of amazing stories to help this buyer, and is perfectly aligned with Citrix products like GoToWebinar and GoToMeeting.

The site and company, through the creation and distribution of compelling and relevant content, have defined the content market for themselves, their customers AND the media. So much so, that leading media publications such as BusinessWeek use Citrix’s own terminology of workshifting.

3. The Chief Storyteller

We are seeing more brands embrace the role of the Chief Storyteller or Chief Content Officer within the marketing organization (more here on team workflow).

Content is being created and distributed in multiple silos in an organization, including:

Social Media
Public Relations
Marketing
Email
Mobile
Search

In many of our interviews with marketers, the heads of these departments were unaware of the stories being created and distributed in other silos. This type of content workflow does not set up for a working customer experience, as content often doesn’t align.

Leading organizations are hiring individuals with strong storytelling backgrounds (often journalists and publishers) to help coordinate and fine tune the content marketing process inside and outside the organization. Examples include:

Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua
Rob Yoegel, Content Marketing Director, Monetate

4. Leveraging Employees in Content Creation

Best of breed content marketers are looking for ways to engage employees in the content creation process. Probably no better example exists than Boston-based VC firm OpenView Venture Partners.

OpenView has gone from literally no original content creation just a few years back to becoming a content marketing powerhouse by leveraging their expert employees. A full 90% of OpenView employees now blog on a regular basis. That blog is a major part of their content platform – OpenView Labs -built specifically for entrepreneurs looking for early stage funding (their target prospect).

Some of the results of OpenView’s content marketing program include:

Over 10,000 opt-in subscribers in 18 months
850% growth in site traffic
Significantly shorter sales cycle
Direct leads and sales
Over 1,000 pieces of original content, including videos, podcasts and blog articles (OpenView has an in-house studio).

For more, see the full case study on OpenView here.

5. Removing the Brand from the Story

For top of the funnel, attraction-oriented content, stories are shared at a significantly higher rate when the brand is removed from the story. That means a removal of sales pitches entirely from the content to engender trust and credibility. Examples include:

PTC – Creo Launch
Adobe – CMO.com
GE – Ecoimagination
Sherwin Williams – Stir

6. Building a Community by Leveraging Outside Experts

More and more, leading brands are working to dominate a content niche, not necessarily through internal experts, but by leveraging outside industry experts as the majority of their thought leadership content creation. According to CMI research, over 50% of brands outsource some part of the content creation process (rising from 55% to 58% year-over-year). Great content marketing means that leveraging outside content experts is a must.

Examples of influencer and expert community sites include:

This original presentation was given at Online Marketing Summit 2012, and the slides are below. Additional details on this presentation can be found at TopRank Online Marketing, who covered the event.

Good to Great Content Marketing – 6 Differences

View more presentations from Content Marketing Institute

The original post is titled The Future of Content Marketing – 6 Differences Between Good and Great [Part 2] , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

McDonald’s Social Media Goes Wrong? Not a Chance

Posted on 26. Jan, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, case studies, McDonalds, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

You’d have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the now historic McDonald’s Twitter campaign launched a few days ago. If you’ve been out of it for a while, here’s the CliffsNotes version:

McDonald’s promoted a Tweet using the Twitter hashtag #McDStories that went like this: ‘When u make something w/pride, people can taste it,’ – McD potato supplier #McDStories http://t.co/HaPM5G9F‘ (source). The link is a video of McDonald’s potato supplier Frank Martinez and includes a heartwarming story about his life as a potato farmer.

Shortly thereafter, consumers from around the world ‘hijacked’ the #McDStories hashtag with, to say the least, some horrible tweets about McDonald’s food quality and overall experience. You can read the most notorious ones here at the Daily Mail and here at Business Insider.

According to McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion:

Last Thursday, we planned to use two different hashtags during a promoted trend – #meetthefarmers and #mcdstories.

While #meetthefarmers was used for the majority of the day and successful in raising awareness of the Supplier Stories campaign, #mcdstories did not go as planned. We quickly pulled #mcdstories and it was promoted for less than two hours.

Within an hour of pulling #McDStories the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1600 to a few dozen. It is also important to keep those numbers in perspective. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald’s overall that day so the traction of #McDStories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that.

With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger.

Since that moment and for the past week, the media attention to this has been ruthless and extremely negative. Just type in McDonald’s Horror Stories into Google to see a sampling.

Rick Wion: This Fry’s For You

Go to any one of the news articles mentioned above and read the comments. There you’ll find pundit after pundit throwing McDonald’s and its social media director Rick Wion under the bus. Well, here’s what I think of that.

If we’ve learned anything about social media, it’s that we have no control and that we HAVE TO experiment. Today I listened to Todd Blackledge, former Penn State University quarterback talk about his mentor, Joe Paterno (at Paterno’s public funeral). During his speech, he said this one saying that reminded him of JoPa: “Success is never final. Failure is never fatal.” So what if #McDStories it didn’t work out as planned? McDonald’s asked for feedback and received it, learning along the way just as Domino’s Pizza and JetBlue have learned and rebounded in there particular situations. Point = If you aren’t experimenting with social media right now, you aren’t trying. Good for Rick.
When McDonald’s saw how negative the hashtag was getting, they quickly pulled the promoted tweet and changed directions. From what I can tell, this took an hour or so. Next time, I have a feeling they’ll be able to move in 30 minutes. Point = Social media is real-time. McDonald’s showed that they had their ears open.
In reading through the comments on this post, Rick Wion (aka rdublife) himself was commenting on certain points brought on by readers that were incorrect. Point = Know when and where to comment when social media turns on you. McDonald’s knew better than to respond to the flurry via Twitter, but definitely were proactive in other channels.
Not too long after this PR nightmare, McDonald’s started yet another hashtag, this time using #LittleThings. So far, the responses have been fairly positive. Point = Get back on the horse. That a boy Rick!
I’m tired of all the comments that said “McDonald’s should have known better”. Why is that? According to BazaarVoice, 80% of all online comments and reviews are positive. Yes, we all know what’s bad about McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Budweiser, but most of the time, people stay friendly. Heck, just ask my kids about McDonald’s. It’s like heaven on earth. Point = For the most part, when you ask for feedback, it’s positive.

Look, I may be seeing this issue with a “the glass is half full” mentality, but the media are all drinking the same Kool-Aid here. Did it turn out great? No. Was it a “horrific catastrophe” as some have proclaimed? Not even close.

From what I can tell, McDonald’s has been laying low (compared to some like Burger King) on the social media front for some time (even with almost 300,000 Twitter followers and 13.8 million Facebook fans). Now they are trying to get into the game…a whole new ball game from what they, or anyone else, is used to. Reminds me of how Wal-Mart took it nice and slow and made some mis-steps before getting into the online retailing game (btw, for Black Friday in 2011, Wal-Mart was the second most visited site behind Amazon.com). McDonald’s is now taking this whole social media content thing pretty seriously, including this example of its crowdsourced mini-movie experiment.

Although I may be the only one, I like the direction McDonald’s is going with this and I’m looking forward to the next idea.

What say you?

Image Credit: the ePerspective

The original post is titled McDonald’s Social Media Goes Wrong? Not a Chance , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

Penn Stater Magazine Handles Scandal the Right Way

Posted on 05. Jan, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, case studies, content marketing, print magazines, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

The last month has been a tough one for Penn State students, alumni and the entire community around University Park. For the first time in my life, I was almost hesitant to say I was a Penn State graduate (I graduated from Penn State in 1997). Something that once we were so proud of, has been tarnished in a truly horrific way.

Penn Stater Cover – January/February 2012 issue

Yesterday, I received the January/February issue of The Penn Stater, the Penn State Alumni magazine (cover to the right). I honestly got chills picking it up. I just held the issue in my hands for what seemed like minutes.

If you can’t make it out, the P-E-N-N S-T-A-T-E letters from the masthead have fallen to the bottom, with the words “Our Darkest Days” just to the right of the letter pile.

A truly bold move by both Editor Tina Hay and Art Director Carole Otypka. Bravo!

A Renewal of Faith

I had to think about this awhile, since I didn’t want to be over dramatic (which I’ve been known to be), but this issue has renewed my faith in Penn State as an institution. It details both sides of the Penn State scandal story and includes a wide variety of students, alumni, fans and thought leaders. Just look at the table of contents…

Collapse: How Could This Happen?
Darkness: Understanding Child Sexual Abuse
Identity: Everything We Thought We Know
Legacy: What Joe Paterno Leaves Behind
Responsibility: On Pride, and Going Forward

The Penn Stater, the primary communication piece that binds the alumni body together and spearheads alumni fundraising, showed how truly powerful both the story and the method (print) can be when done correctly. It’s hard to think this issue would have made such an impact as a digital or tablet version.

One Last Note

Not to be overlooked, it was evident to the Penn Stater staff that this issue would be a firestorm. Instead of just putting it out there, they prepared readers with a warning shot in this post, and quickly followed up on both positive and negative feedback after the issue was delivered.

Tina…thank you. My alumni association renewal check is in the mail.

The original post is titled Penn Stater Magazine Handles Scandal the Right Way , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

Coca-Cola Bets the Farm on Content Marketing: Content 2020

Posted on 03. Jan, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, Branded Content, case studies, content marketing, content strategy, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Coca-Cola's Jonathan Mildenhall

If you’ve ever seen the movie Jerry McGuire, you remember the blue mission statement. This is the moment in the movie when Jerry McGuire (played by Tom Cruise) wakes up in a cold sweat and writes, what he believes, to be the future direction for his sports agency.

Well, Coca-Cola’s marketing mission statement is Content 2020, a content marketing brainchild of Coca-Cola’s Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, who recently stated that:

“All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”

I spent the better part of an hour reviewing the two videos below, and I encourage all marketing professionals (both client and agency side) to set aside 20 minutes to review these two short videos (video one is seven minutes, video two is 10 minutes). It’s that important.

Why Is Content 2020 So Important?

Content 2020 feels more like an internal video prepared especially for the Coca-Cola marketing team, laying out their strategic vision for the future. Overall, it’s the strategy that Coca-Cola’s marketing future rest on the ideals of content marketing.

Coca-Cola needs to move from creative excellence to content excellence,
They need to develop content that makes a commitment to making the world a better place and to develop value and significance in people’s lives…while at the same time driving business objectives for Coca-Cola, and
Through the stories they tell, to provoke conversations and earn a disproportionate share of popular culture.

Specifically, check out the 3:30 mark of video two on the 70/20/10 model for content development.

In the beginning, the claim is made that Coca-Cola must create the world’s most compelling content. Toward the end, the comment is made that Coca-Cola can no longer rely on being 30-Second-TV-Centric.

Amen to that.

Enjoy…and I would love to hear your comments on the videos.

Photo courtesy jonathanmildenhall.com.

The original post is titled Coca-Cola Bets the Farm on Content Marketing: Content 2020 , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .

4 B2C Examples of How Companies are Using Twitter to Attract & Engage Customers

Posted on 03. Jan, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in B2C, Blog, case studies, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, Twitter

Make Your Tweets Count

If you are a B2C company, interaction on a social platform like Twitter can increase engagement and even sales if executed properly. Small businesses like Tender boutique in Birmingham, Michigan have promoted special offers on Twitter and sold out in just a few days.

Social interaction via platforms like Twitter allow companies to gain a true understanding of their prospect base and serve as a real-time source of market research.

Customer engagement is a key benefit of executing a B2C Twitter marketing strategy. A recent survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey found 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy from or recommend a brand they follow. Twitter is also a great resource for crowdsourcing new ideas, getting feedback on current products or campaigns, and figuring out what it is that your customers really want.

Still not convinced that Twitter has potential for impacting your business? The four examples included below provide insight into how other B2C businesses both small and large have used Twitter to attract and engage new customers.

San Francisco’s Creme Brulee Man

Photo from @cremebruleecart

Curtis Kimball began selling crème brûlée from a food cart in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2009. At the time, the crème brûlée cart was not licensed, so his only way of communicating with potential customers was through the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. After only a few years, The Creme Brulee Man has over 20,000 followers on Twitter alone. Curtis still uses his Twitter account as a means of letting consumers know where he will be on a daily basis. What started as a small meager cart has now become thriving catering and food cart business in the heart of San Francisco, largely due to one man’s innovative use of Twitter.

JetBlue Tackles Issues via Twitter

JetBlue tackles Customer Service Via Twitter

Photo from @JetBlue

JetBlue Airways has taken a customer focused approach to Twitter since first signing up in 2007. The airline company is focused on solving customer issues, providing flight information for concerned passengers, and receiving feedback. The flow of communication almost reminds you of talking to an actual employee at the ticket counter. JetBlue will do everything from looking up your flight number, to providing refunds or credits via the communication on their Twitter account. With over 1.6 million followers JetBlue is keeping customers happy and encouraging interaction.

Frozen Yogurt with a Twist

Photo from @tastidlite

Tennessee based frozen yogurt company Tasti D-Lite has been in business since 1987. Recently, the frozen yogurt company has taken social innovation to a new level. In addition to an active blog and social networks the company has created a loyalty program that is linked to customers’ social profiles. A swipe of the card in-store can create a check-in, Tweet and Facebook status update. A recent article in Entrepreneur magazine said that Tasti-D-Lite has found 1 in 5 TastiRewards members are generating connections to at least one social network, and 18% of those are generating automatic check-ins on foursquare.

Sharpie Attracts a Younger Generation

Photo from @sharpie

Sharpie recently ran a campaign to attract teenagers via their Twitter network. The campaign was aimed at self expression through creativity using the product. Through a combination of promoted Twitter accounts and a tweet campaign targeted at users with interests in music and writing, Sharpie was able to increase their follower base 600%. Users also began using the hashtag #Sharpie which reflected positive brand association with conversations about creativity.

These four B2C companies are only a fraction of the consumer focused businesses online who are seeing an impact on customer acquisition and engagement through the use of social media sites like Twitter. As you can see there is a common theme of: listening to the customers, providing information customers need, and rewarding customers for their loyalty.

What B2C companies do you think have done a good job of engaging their followers? Which companies do you follow? Are you following @toprank on Twitter? You should!

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