Archives for posts with tag: marketing

San Francisco, farm town.

February 15, 10 //
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Enter the new face of San Francisco’s neighborhood renovation, Hayes Valley Farm. For years, a closed-off chunk of highway has sat in the middle of the growing Hayes Valley neighborhood, and as of a few weeks ago, the volunteer-driven HVF are turning it into a community green space that also provides organic produce to the neighborhood.

Combined with serious marketing savvy (check the quality on their video promotion!), the Hayes Valley Farm has already made a solid web impact with their community-based approach to local farming and public green space.  We highly recommend reading their Twitter, which reads like a Web 2.0 version of Green Acres (“We have already converted 100 cubic yards of mulch, 4,000 lbs of cardboard and 2,000 lbs of manure to soil!”).

Learn more about the Hayes Valley Farm here.

Bad Marketing Causation (When In Rome, Part 2)

February 1, 10 //
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This weekend’s IMDB-fueled anger at the “When In Rome” “viral” “campaign” got our whole team thinking about online media and web marketing. “When In Rome” is a great example of how too often, “marketing” is merely the recycling of techniques that worked for popular brands for smaller, less successful products.

The basic problem with blunt, ugly marketing like the campaign for “When In Rome” is the assumption by most marketing teams:

- When people like a brand, they really like X (X in this case can be social media interaction, YouTube videos, interviews, or in the case of bands, remixes. Got it?)
- X brings a lot of extra attention to these successful campaigns.
- Therefore, if we want to make our client more successful, we should put lots of effort into X for them.

Now, this isn’t the marketing company’s fault. When you start with something nobody really likes, such as “When In Rome,” there aren’t a lot of options for a marketing team other than throw everything at the client and cross fingers. They’re hoping for a semi-successful campaign whilst ignoring the fact that they can only polish a turd for so long. The marketing team has the simple goal of getting people to talk about their client, and buy/attend/pay attention to the client. So they dump on social media plans, iPhone applications, promo events and Facebook fan pages, in hopes of filling a blank report for their high-paying but misguided client.

Millions of dollars are spent on fueling the causational myth that “social media marketing” and other such tools will actually help build a product that nobody actually likes. The same goes for the musical equivalent of misguided marketing — the unwanted remix album. Perhaps made most famous by early aughts favorites Bloc Party, whose double-disc(?) remix record featured unnecessary and generally phoned-in remixes from Erol Alkan, Phones and Ladytron.

The idea with the unwanted remix is the same as the ungodly, overwhelming web campaign — try and engage an audience with common promotional tools to get them to pay attention to something unremarkable. In some cases, it works in the short term, providing MySpace plays, ticket sales and traffic spikes. But in all cases, it results in ugly art and marketing “noise” that is ultimately forgettable.

this is a lead-generation tool

November 4, 09 //
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See this bad boy? You’re damn right it’s a conversion funnel. This is the marketing diagram that web marketing folks live and die by. Basically showing the percentage decrease from each stage of brand interaction, the conversion funnel is an often-cited reference when talking about social media marketing, inbound link creation and SEO work.

My big problem with the conversion funnel is that although it’s correct, and all the online marketing experts that tell clients to blog, Twitter and use AdWords are right, it inspires companies to make terribly uninspired content.

Let me explain.

I am a firm believer in inbound marketing. It’s less obtrusive than mass marketing, and often can target an audience that is not only more receptive to your brand message, but one that is more likely to refer others to your product, as they found your brand via “word of mouth” marketing. It’s important to be present on Twitter, Yelp and on a company blog, to keep up a conversation with this target market and engage new customers. But what irks me is that this strategy to get new customers often results in lazy, uninteresting content — or worse, branding “white noise” that has little to do with connecting to these new interested users. Mortar Agency posted a great metaphor for that type of mindless social media posting.

My point is, needing these inbound tools is one thing, but actually posting interesting content is another. Writing is important, everyone. If you’re not willing to spend at least three days a week coming up with content that someone actually cares about, or in our case, some new rant, then a blog might not be the marketing tool for you. The same goes for a Facebook — find a way to engage, not to just sign someone up and sit idly. To treat these social media tools as marketing machines is to misunderstand the very purpose of using social networking — it should look nothing like junk mail. And, unfortunately, it often does.

Yes, these web outlets are sales tools, but if I see another “Top 5 Marketing Ideas” post, or another idle Facebook page requesting I be a “fan,” I might shoot myself in the face. Really.

ps – if you really want to break the mold, do like Miracle Whip, and add a bizarre networking tool to your Facebook application. Zing!