ClearVerve Marketing, LLC

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Archive for March, 2011

The Twitter Triangle

Thursday, March 31, 2011 — 

 

It’s just like the Bermuda Triangle, and possibly worse. The path to the Twitter Triangle starts out seemingly innocent:

Oh I know. I’ll go take a quick peek on Twitter and get a few updates. That will help me re-focus on the project I’m working on.

Twenty minutes later…

Crap, I’ve been sucked in.

Sucked in usually means doing one or all of the following:

  • Clicking on one story and then reading two or five.
  • Following an interesting tweet by someone you don’t know and checking out that person’s recent tweets. And then maybe another.
  • Vowing to look at ten-ish tweets and then seeing one more beneath those tweets that interests you. And then one more.
  • Finding it hard to stop clicking on the inviting “X New Tweets” box
  • Thinking that you’ll just scroll all the way down the page once before remembering (or pretending to remember) that TWITTER NEVER STOPS SCROLLING.

Twitter makes it hard to stop and easy to keep clicking and scrolling. It gives you everything you want. It’s like those State Farm commercials where you can just say what you want and it magically appears. The only difference is that Twitter doesn’t even make you say anything.

Now, the time you spend in the Twitter Triangle isn’t necessarily WASTED time. But it’s time you didn’t plan on spending doing…that. That. (My definition of “that” is professional development and staying up-to-date on issues that have to do with what you do, and fun.)

Is the solution to just not go on Twitter until you have large chunks of free time? Well that doesn’t seem to make sense because Twitter is there as a feed. If you don’t check it for a whole day, you’re really not using it for what it’s there for.

So then how do you limit yourself to a balanced amount of time on Twitter a day? I try to keep my Twitter time constant but brief during the day and use the starring option as more of a bookmark system. If I know I want to read it later, I favorite the funnier tweets and then spend some time on those later. How do you keep yourself from slipping into the Twitter Triangle (or maybe the Facebook Fog)?

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter @erica_g.

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3 Resources for Facebook Privacy Settings – March 2011 Edition

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 — 

 

It seems like just when we get used to Facebook, things get changed and settings are adjusted.  This can be annoying but we assume they are trying to evolve Facebook to be better.  Information about how to change these settings is hard to find and usually shared via social networking. 

We often get asked about Facebook privacy settings by clients, so we thought it would be helpful to share this with you as well. The following are the top three resources we found helpful to ensure your Facebook privacy settings are up-to-date.  We’ll continue to update these resources as we become aware of changes.

  • All Facebook.com  – provides 10 privacy settings you need to know
  • Mashable – one of our go to sites for social media, provided their top 10 list of settings every user needs to know
  • PC World shared this helpful article on how to not be featured in the Facebook ad campaign that recently launched

If you have any other resources to share, please add comments below.

Susan Schoultz is Client Service Director at Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns.  Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve2.

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What can you do with a hotel room?

Friday, March 25, 2011 — 

 

First of all, notice I said, “What can you do with a hotel room?” not what can you do in a hotel room. Big difference! (And not the subject of this post.)

Recently, a client approached us with an opportunity to do something really fun and challenging. They wanted to create a movie theatre-like experience to accompany a trade show at which they were launching a new product. Important customers were invited to the “theatre” for educational presentations on the new product. We’re really proud of the results, which you can see below. We transformed an ordinary hotel conference room into something that really looked like a theatre with a red carpet and a candy counter. We even popped fresh popcorn throughout the day, making it smell like a theatre too! We’re especially proud of the movie posters lining the sides of the room in which the new product took a starring role in some well-known movies from the past 50 years.

Take a look – we hope you find these photos inspirational!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns.  Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Know Your Audience (Especially if You Accuse Them of Having Rosacea)

Thursday, March 24, 2011 — 

 

I was recently mall-walking with a friend when we were approached by someone working at one of the center kiosks. Normally we would have walked right by, but we were just there to walk and he was offering us hand lotion. Hard to turn down, right?

After a successful hand scrub, hand lotion, and single fingernail shine, he looked at my face and asked, “So, what do you do for the Rosacea on your face?” It was blunt. It was a question. It was supposed to be engaging. But I was taken aback.

“Ummm I don’t have Rosacea.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, your face is red. That’s Rosacea.”

Um, this is winter in Wisconsin. It was cold. The wind was blowing quite briskly. I hadn’t worn a jacket while walking from the car to the mall. I also hadn’t put foundation on that morning. So, yeah my face was reddish. But do you really need to point that out? We stopped to try your HAND products. Don’t point out things that you think need to be improved on the rest of me. And, in my opinion, he should have worked his way there differently if I DID have Rosacea. If he had asked questions like, “oh, do you do anything to calm the redness in your face?” I may have been more interested in what he was trying to sell me.

Would this back and forth have insulted you? I mean, I was (albeit amusedly) insulted enough to ignore everything he said after that point. As soon as he jumped from our hands to my face without us broaching the topic, I was done and tuned out while he went over pricing for all the products we tried, some of which were actually pretty awesome.

My friend, while being just as taken aback as I was, thought his ploy might work on some women. She said that a lot of women purchase a product after being insulted to a point of realizing they need to improve something about themselves in order to look better.

But if you are selling to people who are not like that, you can’t backtrack after an insult.

With all that being said, please take the time to know your audience. And if you are in a place where you are trying to sell a product face to red-face, please use care in how you ask questions that will eventually lead to a comment about your product.

Think I’m wrong? (Not about knowing your audience, that’s a given.) If you think an insult works, I’d love to hear about it. Or if you have your own story about a time when you were insulted enough to be turned off of a product, please share that also!

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter @erica_g.

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Six Times the E-Newsletter

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 — 

 

I opened my email this morning to find six copies of the same exact e-newsletter from a stock photo site that I use.  I’ll leave out the name of this site to be fair as we all have bad situations come up.  Now I realize and respect the fact things can get messed up when sending out emails to a list, but the email I received six times illustrates the importance of a few things to keep in mind with your email campaigns:

1.  Check your email list frequently to make sure there are not duplicates.  If you don’t use a list filter, you can do this manually in an Excel file.  Depending on your list size this could take some time – but it is worth it if you spend a few hours cleaning this up regularly.  Try to go through your lists every month if you can to make sure there are not duplicates.

2.  Send an apology to email subscribers if you mess something up.  This can go a long way to demonstrate you care that you annoyed your email list subscribers.

Susan Schoultz is Client Service Director at Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns.  Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve2.

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Thank you

Friday, March 18, 2011 — 

 

Sometimes in our marketing efforts we can forget the simple things – like the simple act of saying thank you to customers or clients.  When was the last time you sent a quick thank you out to your clients for their business or referral?  It doesn’t have to be a long drawn out “process” to do this. It can be through simple ways like:

  • Including a thank you in your email newsletter
  • When you meet with clients, simply stating thank you sincerely after your discussion and mentioning how much you appreciate the opportunity to work with them
  • Thank clients on anniversaries of working together, your business anniversary, for referrals, or advice from others in your field
  • Start a random acts of thank you effort and each week send out a special hand written thank you note (this is a great post from Girvin Branding on the power of a hand written note) or something out of the ordinary to thank clients
  • Instead of holiday gifts during Christmas – consider a Thanksgiving “giving thanks” message to all clients

Our blog has been up and running now for over a year and we appreciate everyone that reads it.  We want to keep our Promise Marketing idea fuel going so if you ever have comments/suggestions, please respond.

Susan Schoultz is Client Service Director at Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns.  Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve2.

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Creating Communities on Facebook

Friday, March 4, 2011 — 

 

The idea started as a graduate school project for a qualitative research class at Marquette University. My group mates and I discovered a shared interest in social media, nonprofits, and, well, not research. We turned all that into a research project that we all actually enjoyed, and that we can now share with others!

We decided to use each of our undergrad schools (Marquette University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin – Madison) to study communication within Facebook fan pages. I’ll skip some of the in-between stuff.  We did some research with a theory and it was awesome- all of our findings are backed by facts we can point to. Research can be COOL! But that’s not the point of this.

The featured character of each school is the voice of the university (which we called “The Narrator”). In addition to The Narrator each school has a small cast of supporting characters that fall into two main categories: the silent supporters (who voluntarily liked their school’s fan page) and the active cheerleaders (fans who clicked like and commented on the school’s fan page posts in addition to liking the page).

Now, how can this help you? We identified several strategies that can be used to maximize the effectiveness of current or potential Facebook pages:

  • Facebook fan page administrators should post regularly to the page, more than once per week. Regular posts not only offer more opportunities to deliver key messages to the fan page, they also keep fans of the group engaged! And this makes fans more likely to make checking the page part of their daily routine.
  • Post about topics that involve people, places, or events closely associated with your school/business/nonprofit.
  • Use phrases that resonate with your audience. In our study we observed that phrases such as Go Marquette, Ski-U-Mah, and On Wisconsin, rallied fans of each group. Such expressions help to define a group as a community and illustrate the bond members of the community share.
  • Pose questions to fans of the group, building opportunities for fans to be active members. When a question is posed and fans are encouraged to voice their thoughts and opinions, they may feel more essential to and active in the group dynamic.

Do these strategies correlate with what you do? Have you discovered any strategies on your own? We’d love to know! And if you’re interested in more about our research or have questions, let me know!

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter @erica_g.

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