Gaining Twitter Followers & Earned Media

Gaining twitter followers is hard. Hey, it’s called “earned media” for a reason. This past week I have been reading up on as much material as possible on the topic and wanted to share a few insights.

Engagement is key. Twitter and all of social media in general is a two way road. This is not a top down message, so act accordingly: ask followers interesting and off beat questions, answer questions, and retweet interesting content your followers generate. Of course, this takes a lot of time and effort. Please refer to the second sentence of this post.

Provide true value. Post interesting and relevant links. Tweet interesting quotes that are brand related (especially if it has something to do with current events). Value will earn you retweets. Retweets are one of the best way to gain followers.

Be consistent. Be present on your account daily. Hootsuite is a great tool for this. It enables you to schedule your tweets. No one is going to follow a sporadic account.

Be spontaneous. Don’t make your message predictable. There is no formula for this stuff. Have fun with it. For example, make a mini contest.

Those four insights emerged as pretty consistent themes in everything I have read. If you guys have any more ideas on how to become a social media rock star, please don’t hesitate to share them here!

sweetgreen Marketing

I am super excited to announce that I am now part of the sweetgreen team. sweetgreen is an awesome salad meets frozen yogurt concept that has been doing incredibly well in DC and is growing rapidly. I will be helping to coordinate all of their marketing efforts. What struck me most about the opportunity is the ability to truly make an immediate impact on the business, along with the entrepreneurial start up atmosphere. sweetgreen loves innovative marketing – think block party events and smart phone bar code scanning – and I think this is the perfect place for me to further delve into lifestyle brand creation and management. Along the way I will be chronicling my experiences and insights much like what I did with Arnold over the summer. So if you are an aspiring marketing wizard you will hopefully find these posts relevant and contribute to the conversation. Hope everyone has had a great weekend!

And of course you can follow sweetgreen on twitter here.

Insights from 42 Entertainment

Here are some great fundamental insights from 42 Entertainment, the guys behind the Dark Knight ARG that I still like to rave about.
About 100 words – that is all it takes for 42 Entertainment to give their brand vision and sales pitch. And the bottom line is that it is very compelling. These guys have a unique perspective and are pushing the industry envelope in interactive brand story telling.

Here is a great interview with CEO Susan Bonds that delves deeper into 42 Entertainment’s unique vision for marketing and story telling.

Shock Mansion

Shock Mansion is an online lifestyle entertainment website that covers fashion, cars, tattoos, celebrities, events and all other things crazy. Led by Kieran Mansion, Sean Mansion, Jake Hollywood and Sam Lyons, Shock Mansion specializes in high end photography and event marketing as well. Most recently, Shock Mansion created the Famous Stars and Straps booth artwork for Magic 2009.

This month, they caught my attention through an article from Heavy Hitters magazine. Their entrepreneurial story was very inspirational and they perfectly highlight the importance of reinvesting into a business after an initial success, which is exactly what they did after creating Crooked Uniform, a cult clothing line:

We started a clothing company called Crooked Uniform. We used to drive around like drug dealers visiting customers, but we were selling t-shirts, stickers, and hats, not weed. They were literally sold from the boot of our car. Looking back it was a pretty classic way to start out, but it taught us to hustle hard. And if you wanted money you had to go out and get it for yourself. Nobody was going to give it to you for free. We invested [our initial profits] straight back into our company.

The work definitely speaks for itself and they are slowly starting to expand outside of their native Australia. I am very interested to see what the future holds for these guys.

Red Bull Gets It!

The first day of my senior year was off to a slightly rough start. It was about 11:30AM and I was running late to a class. After a nice long summer, I just wasn’t 100% ready to be back to school. Coming up to the dining hall, I began to see a crowd (not surprising,  since  freshman seem to love going to the dining hall in large groups). But the crowd was not for the dining hall, it was in fact to get aboard a huge vintage Red Bull tour bus that was handing out free Red Bull Cola to all of the returning Hoyas. The scene immediately put a great big smile on my face. After years and years of being a big fan of Red Bull, they never seem to cease making me happy as a loyal customer. And that perhaps is one of the biggest strengths of Red Bull, the ability to simultaneously reach out and connect to die hard brand lovers and new potential drinkers. After grabbing a can, the day instantly got a little better. Cheers to Red Bull.

Arnold Internship: Reflection

I wanted to keep this short and sweet, so I am just going to make a list with my biggest ten takeaways that come to mind from my experience this summer:

1. Overall, it was a very valuable experience – nothing that I could have acquired from talking to people, reading books, etc.
2. My favorite part was talking to everyone and getting their own personal insights on the industry and ad agency life in general
3. My least favorite part was discovering that ad agencies do in fact have as much paperwork as a more traditional company
4. The intern project was another highlight – the chance to dream, scheme, and create something courageous and out there
5. New business is an art that is especially fun to watch and participate in
6. There are lots of meetings and face to face interaction every day
7. Prioritizing is the biggest skill necessary to be a great entry level account manager
8. This is not the job for you if you are looking for a 9 to 5
9. The agency structure is relatively pyramid based and the base of that pyramid is incredibly young
10. Every day is different (though the paperwork can be pretty similar)

This wraps up my adventures at Arnold. Hopefully you guys found it helpful as you search for internships and enter the marketing world. I wish everyone the best of luck!

Arnold Internship: Week 10

The finish line is in sight – the Arnold internship is winding down. A few days ago our team presented our integrated marketing communications strategy for BCBS as a final project. This was perhaps the most challenging and ultimately most rewarding part of my experience here because it allowed me to wear many different hats. It was just like being part of your own mini agency and we definitely had a lot of fun in the process, even going so far as making a video spoof of the typical day in the life of an Arthur DC (our fake agency) employee. Once again, I learned some valuable lessons along the way and wanted to share those:

Establish authority and credibility – Our team conducted 19 intercepts, 15 IMS analyses, read 43 articles and blogs, read another 40 surveys and reports, and conducted 5 in-depth interviews. And most importantly, we let our “client” know these things up front. Doing lots of homework early on made us knowledgeable in the subject matter and comfortable in talking about it. This makes our sell that much easier down the line.

Tell a story – Though we knew our pitch in it out, the outsider did not. A good narrative made the presentation easy to follow. Keeping the slides photo based and having only about 100 words of text throughout the whole presentation made our story even easier to follow. Some good free stock photo sites that really helped us with telling a story through pictures were www.sxc.hu and www.compfight.com

Little details matter – From how our presenters would transition speaking to how we physically arranged the room – no detail was left untouched. We even made sure to have snacks and drinks available, along with placecards with team photos and names. One thing I keep seeing in the agency world is that new business is much like show business. Everything has to be just right to set a good atmosphere.

Next week, I will post an overall reflection of the agency internship experience.

CPB Mole: A Tale Of Personal Branding

The quick story: guy tries to get a job at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, guy doesn’t get the job, guy invents a fictitious job (“the interactive mole”), resigns from his fictitious job, and gets a linked-in recommendation from Alex Bogusky. If the short story still leaves you feeling hazy on details, you can find a longer version here.

What I find amazing about the whole endeavor is that it is an incredible case study for personal branding. In fact, it’s more like a personal brand gone viral. The story has just enough mysticism and originality to capture the attention of not only the agency in question, but to get countless mentions on ad sites, blogs, and twitter. Good narrative made the story sticky, and good leverage of social media made the story gain an audience. And for me this is the big takeaway – resumes and cover letters can only get you so far, to truly stand out in today’s highly competitive world you need to have a relevant, compelling personal brand story.

Arnold Internship: Week 7

The past few weeks I have been immersing myself into our intern project: developing an integrated marketing communication plan for an existing client. It’s a good taste of what a new business pitch is like. Most agencies have similar projects to enable everyone to wear more hats and act like a copy writer, art director, strategist, and planner all in one day. In fact, in the past few weeks I have spent as much as 20 hours per week working on the project. It’s all for good reason. In three weeks we will be presenting our hard work to the rest of the agency.

I would like to share two valuable insights I have learned in this process. The first is that marketing sometimes becomes an art of reductionism. We have spent countless hours (probably 300+ hours as a team of 7 people) developing our insights and strategy all to reach one very frustrating place. The frustrating place is when you realize that there are a lot of brand truths and a lot of interesting insights about the target. How do you pick just one angle? How do you find out the intersection of what is meaningful about a brand and what is meaningful to the target? Well, this is where that art of reductionism comes in. This is the time when boiling all of those hours of work into a cohesive two minute narrative illustrating the problem, insights, and strategy becomes crucial. Making this mini elevator pitch about your process so far is very painful and at times seemingly impossible, but the minute you do it (and we did it today) you gain a lot of clarity on the assignment.

The second most important takeaway I had is the importance of linking insights to strategy to creative. All three need to be cohesive and build onto each other. It’s a series of “if this is true, then this is true and works” statements that any person should be able to see. You may have plenty of cool ideas, but if they aren’t on strategy they become pretty irrelevant. This is where I found making lists for success especially helpful in framing what you are developing. Coming up with a “creative scorecard” is an easy way to focus the group during brainstorming sessions. It also can serve as a very helpful tool in introducing your work to an outside audience.

Happy Belated 4th!

I thought this is a great time to debut my first official attempt at copy and art direction: my design for the Arnold July 4th party. I’ve been doing graphics for a long time now, but this is the first time I am putting some work up on the blog. The rationale behind what you see is simple: keep the work consistent with the Arnold website and have a conversational tone.