When the doors opened, both of my fellow travellers smiled brightly at me as we all exited the same floor only to look a bit dismayed as we walked in the same door and they heard me ask for one of their senior leaders.

I now had a very different impression of the company than I held a few moments ago on the first floor. Was it true? Did it matter?

Chances are those two employees got a little wake-up call that morning. But were they the ones who really needed it? So often, companies devote significant resources to branding and marketing communications without giving thought to a huge component of that brand – their employees.

Your employees are the carriers and delivers of the brand. They are the insiders that know all your secrets and will share them as part of their everyday lives, oftentimes without intending harm. They are also the fuel that powers your business.  Without their full support, you are not running at peak performance.

Engagement matters

Employee engagement, a hot topic in boardrooms and management circles, is a new term for an old challenge – getting employees to willingly apply all their knowledge and skills to manifest the company vision and deliver the heart and soul of the brand.

The ever increasing pressures to compete in a tough economy coupled with the needs and expectations of a mobile, global workforce spanning three very diverse generations have surfaced the need to proactively attract and retain the best and the brightest. Unfortunately, many companies focus on attracting employees but do little to retain them other than tweaking compensation and benefits.

A recent Gallop International study determined that businesses rating in the top 24% of employee engagement had a higher level of retention, profitability and customer loyalty. An additional study indicates that 71% percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive. Gallup estimates that disengaged employees impact the bottom line by more than $300 billion just in lost productivity.  They negatively impact the culture and drag down their colleagues in the process.

So what does employee engagement really mean?

So many engagement “programs” end up being just a tactical list of events, intermittent communications and initiatives that are implemented with good intent and quickly abandoned because they have no tangible purpose. Round tables turn into gripe sessions, quarterly meetings become annual occurrences and newsletters come and go depending on who has time or who is in charge.

Alternatively, a communication technology is implemented with the mindset that all employees will now be connected and are thereby engaged. Sound familiar? With a few exceptions, most of the companies struggle with this.

In our experience working with clients to grow and transform their companies, we find that truly engaging employees starts with an overarching, philosophical commitment to building an engaging culture. When employees like who they work for and with and they understand what the company is working to accomplish and how they fit in, they are motivated to be involved and to contribute fully. They are part of the brand.  The good news is this mostly requires leadership commitment and an investment of time and brainpower rather than dollars.

Go to the source

What would I know about your company after riding a few floors with your employees? Are you achieving the highest level of productivity and delivering on your brand from the inside out? I encourage you to ask these questions now. The answers will provide the actionable intelligence to guide your next steps.

The first step of our brand experience work with clients is to conduct a thorough assessment. We go straight to the heart by conducting online surveys and personal interviews with employees. Employees welcome the chance to share and often feel more vested in the brand after being part of the process.

The most common requests we find in companies, regardless of size or longevity, include:

• access to senior leaders,
• guidance from competent management,
• frequent, and concise communications about what matters,
• consistent feedback on personal performance, and
• a way to provide impactful feedback.

When consulted, your employees will ultimately lay out the roadmap for how they want to be engaged. It is up to you to create the path.

In my upcoming posts, I’ll share key elements in building the path to engagement and ideas you can implement immediately to effectively engage your employees, strengthening your brand and increasing productivity and profitability.

A word to the wise… take the elevator.

(If you are ready to explore how your employees are living your brand and aren’t sure where to start, we may be able to help. Get in touch.)

I hear car commercials talk about innovation like it’s something they buy off the shelf. That’s the wrong way to approach building a better product. Innovation is a new solution to user problems and it’s not another buzzword or gimmick.

Many organizations aspire to be thought leaders within their industry, innovating because people inside the organization know what would actually make things better and not just to sell more widgets.

Because I’ve recently caught the DIY/maker bug, I went to the Houston’s GE Garage (currently residing in the Rice University parking lot) to learn about wireless communication with Xbee. 

The entire idea of the GE Garage is to inspire creation of new things. Their facility has an entire fabrication shop complete with welders, laser cutters, 3D printers and an injection molder to let both adults and kids get experience with the tools that are used to create.

It’s a welcoming environment where people are encouraged to design things, print them out, tinker with electronics and produce the types of products we might usually be tempted to associate with seeing “Made in China” on the back.

I believe everyone is capable of building new products. Our society just need to provide a little bit of help and inspiration to get people making. The stories about innovation are all around us.

At the GE Garage, I had the opportunity to meet class instructors who had their lives changed because they saw a need which turned their business upside-down and drove them to use wireless modules to create a great product.

Thats HomeLynx product right there on the table

In New York, it gets cold. Because most people rent, they don’t get access to change the furnace settings whenever they want. Some landlords were keeping the temperature in the building uncomfortably low to save money by not providing heat to tenants.

Long story short, to correct the situations, New York passed a law mandating the minimum amount of heating building owners were required to provide.

Regulations were created to require landlords to monitor the temperature throughout the building and report back to the state for compliance purposes, should anyone complain they weren’t getting enough heating.

HouseLynx found out about this need and created a innovative new product that allowed building owners to sample temperatures from around their buildings wirelessly and log it to a central server. Because the units were wireless and they didn’t have to pay for someone to walk around and collect the data or wire any cables to get the data out, they were able to keep the cost of the solution low.

They even made them smart, able to wake themselves and go to sleep so their batteries last about two years, resulting in crazy low maintenance costs. They solved a problem in a quick and easy way allowing the owners to meet the requirements without adding another large cost to implement and maintain a solution.

The guys at HouseLynx are a great example of how the maker movement transforms companies because they originally wanted to do home automation with their little startup, but they ended up designing a product to fill a niche they didn’t even know existed. Now they are producing hundreds of units trying to keep up with demand and improve their software.

The BakerTweet box that announces fresh bread with a tweet

I hope this culture of building things yourself continues to grow. The spirit of the whole maker movement is critical to our nation’s ability to be innovative.

BrandExtract helps push companies to innovate all the time. By asking the right questions we help companies position themselves as thought leaders and find new niches they can move into with their knowledge.

Yet I think that BrandExtract has room for innovation, too. So here is my challenge to the whole company: let’s make a hardware product. With new tools available like Arduino and Processing, people are able to concept and build new gadgets very quickly.

For example, one creative agency built something for a bakery across the street which they frequented. They created a purpose-driven device called BakerTweet which allows bakers to easily tweet the status of fresh goodies, using a little box mounted in the kitchen instead of a cumbersome laptop.

Customers now know when treats have just come out of the oven.

It’s simple, cheap and has been a fast success. We could create these things for our clients, too.

After spending time at the GE Garage and musing over seemingly endless possibilities for making something myself, I’ve had a bunch of ideas for what we could implement. Perhaps the most compelling place to start would be to design a scavenger hunt experience that has people scan badges from the people who staff booths at conference or trade show in order to collect achievements, win prizes, or enter drawings.

I was at SXSW 2012 this year and noticed all the badges had RFID chips in them, but was very surprised to discover that no one was putting that technology to use for their brand.

We could be the ones who gamify trade-show marketing and change the landscape with a new experience.

Product innovation is about taking something old, stripping it down and then building it back up better than ever before. It’s a tough process and not every new idea will lead to innovation, but if you work hard with the right goals in mind you just might be able to do something truly disruptive in your industry and be labeled as one of those thought leaders that changed the game forever.

From the looks of him, it wasn’t particularly difficult to see he was old, but exactly how old, I’m not sure even he knew. He had what they call granulated eyelids — a constant reminder of mistakes from an age long passed — that caused him to blink excessively like his mind was struggling to accept the pain and the ignorance, the false smiles and the broken dreams of the world around him.  When the moment struck him, when the chaos of the room had reached its peak, he stood. Time hadn’t diminished his mobility, but he took great care, nonetheless, to make every step count as he approached the center of the room. Raising a withered finger on his old, obsidian hand, he demanded the room’s attention. And then, he spoke. ‘I’d like to tell you all a story…’ he said, smiling through age-stained teeth. And the room stood still.”

The power of story is its ability to transport us to worlds outside our own and expose us to ideas we would normally have never been receptive to. As creative strategists, our job is to wage through the clutter and muck of a globally-minded society where the dynamic between content producer and receptive audience has either blurred or all but disappeared. In order to do so, for ourselves and for our clients, we have to create compelling messaging that leaves lasting impressions — that rises above the fray.

How do we do this, you might wonder. Through the lost art of storytelling. By presenting your brand in one of the most accessible and fundamental forms of communication available to us. Your messaging needs to take your audience on a journey.

Thank you, Levar. Because of you, I can now fly twice as high.

Storytelling, you see, is a primal form of communication — one of the few human traits that are universal across all cultures and throughout all recorded history. It connects us all regardless of age, sex, religion, nationality or ideology and, as creatives — as agents of information — it poses the greatest vehicle with which we can expose an audience to our clients’ messages. What makes a story so important and compelling as it relates to conveying information is that it adds an emotional element to the sell.

Homo Emotus
Try not to giggle. This is serious! Now, where was I? Oh yeah, storytelling. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens. As in sapience. As in wisdom or intelligence. But we are beasts of emotion, rather than logic. Research shows that, on the whole, people make decisions based on an emotional response — which they then try to justify through logic and reason. Heart first, mind second. It’s because of this tendency that storytelling can provide the cognitive means of organizing the chaos of bland data into units of meaning we can understand, accept  and, most importantly, remember — bridging the gap between emotion and intellect. Here’s an example:

Imagine you read this basic report:
Ten people were killed on Friday October 13th 2012 inside a bar in downtown Houston.

That's Korean for "Oh no you di'int!"

It’s a bit of a slap in the face, no? The abruptness of it is a bit of a turnoff and you might shut down and switch your attention to something more appealing.

Now, imagine I said:
The air was hot and moist like a drunken kiss on the ill-fated day when those ten unassuming marines — on shore leave after nearly 14 months of active duty — were forever relieved of their precious lives. Houston had experienced an exceptionally summer-like October that year, making everyone downtown just a bit uncomfortable being away from the security of their homes. The familiar symptoms of autumn — the crisp, sharp air that seems to have no real identity of its own, preferring, instead, to showcase the smells of whatever is near; the decaying foliage and drying soil; the way that even sounds seemed to travel faster and clearer and with greater purpose than in any other season, as if nature held its breath in anticipation of winter — were all absent that day. All that remained were the sounds of sadness. It was Friday, the 13th.

Which was more enticing? Which created an emotional response? Which would you remember favorably?

Dayquil or Nyquil?

Stories help to motivate our audience to act because when we’re engulfed in a good story, we let our intellectual guards down. According to Jonathan Gottchall’s article, Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon, entering the fictional world of a story “radically alters the way information is processed,” making us more receptive to new ideas. To prove this, a 2007 study was conducted which found that a test audience responded more positively to advertisements in narrative form as compared with straightforward ads that encouraged viewers to think about the arguments for a product. Studies such as these suggest that people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Kirk Cheyfitz, CEO of Story Worldwide, put it best when he said “Between intellectual understanding and emotional acceptance, lives a great gulf. The only messages anyone will see and hear are the messages they choose to see and hear.” In order to make that decision easier for our desired audience, it’s imperative that we first make an appeal to emotion — to the heart. It’s far more powerful than an appeal to intellect alone. Always ask: “What’s the story?”

Don’t believe me? Take a look at Mr. Don Draper as he weaves a tale of nostalgia for Kodak executives:

[Mega Menus are] big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user’s choices.

A fairly typical example of a useful mega menu.

Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.

He does a great job of explaining the goal and also makes a good case for for using mega-menus, even if you aren’t completely convinced by the title bestowed upon him. I can see his point.

But when has it gone too far?

A less than optimal implementation of a mega menu.

Even Mr. Nielson himself spent most of his article qualifying his support of them, and in a later article pointed out how easy it was for them to go wrong. The main point that pops out at me is this one:

Keep it simple

As time has passed, we all have gotten more or or less used to these simple mega menus, and it’s almost natural for us to try to “spice it up” a bit, or to try to push the limit of their usefulness. I think this is where mega menus have gone wrong.  There was a time when Amazon.com had at least 100 links in each sub menu, probably 500 or more links in all.  Even today, Staples.com is nearly as bad, and has gone so far as to place a banner ad in each of their sub menus.  These are retailers and they want to make access to all their different product lines easier, but in reality they have made it more difficult to find what you actually need.

Sometimes upon mouseover the user is presented with a gazillion links or a thin horizontal strip that they must try to navigate to open yet more boxes of links. Sometimes it’s almost like a game. After about 3 times of failing to thread the needle, the user goes away angry, taking with them  your conversion, your sale, your potential loyal customer, etc (you get my point). A great illustration of the thin “hover tunnel” issue that can be seen in a blog post at UXMovement.com.

I recently came across AJ Kohn’s post “Mega Menus are Mega Awful” over at Blind Five Year Old. I have to say that I agree with almost every word of it. He hysterically declares “Mega menus are the Where’s Waldo of navigation“. I think he make an even more convincing argument why we should all tread very carefully in this Mega Menu abyss.

One of the arguments for these rich mega menus is SEO. Perhaps in the past a large chunk of text/markup added to the top your document might have helped make your content/pages more visible to search engines. But AJ Kohn also does a good job of arguing against this:

Now, I’m not saying that PageRank is the end all to be all, but you’re doing yourself no favors by splitting trust and authority into 400+ pieces.

This goes back to the keep it simple point I made earlier. While some relevant navigation at the top of your document is helpful to UX and SEO, overkill can cost you big. The recent trend with Google is to penalize “over-optimization” techniques. While nobody outside of Googleplex knows for sure what the formula is, you have to think that putting hundreds of links at the top of your page might possibly show up to a bot as a potential problem.

Personally it would look like a link farm to me if I just looked at the first 100 or so lines before I got to any real content. According to this forum post at WebMasterWorld.com, even as far back as 2008, there were rumblings in the SEO community about the potential for disaster when over-using this technique:

Why could this create a problem? I have two ideas. First, we know that anchor text is a heavily weighted element in the algorithm. All that opportunity to go over the top with keywords in anchor text cannot be a good thing. And second, Google reps keep repeating the advice not to go beyond 100 links on a page. Even if more links are now spidered, just think of the pile of semantic confusion that this can throw at the relevance calculations.

All of this added together, I think we can put to rest the myth of the unquestionable usefulness of mega menus. While there might be situations where they can be used in moderation, in my opinion the evidence indicates the need for careful consideration before implementation. 

In my evaluation, a good starting point for implementing mega menus would be to make them perpendicular to the first level, simple, easy to use and so they do not interfere with the normal operation of the site.  Having a large landing area for the first level, and restricting them to two levels at the most.

What’s your take on mega menus?  I’d love to hear other views on this.

While the intricacy of each ranges, 3D printers essentially work by depositing and heating successive layers of powdered materials like resin, plastic or titanium until the digital rendering has been replicated in solid form.

In February, the Smithsonian began a behemoth undertaking in an effort to make its priceless artifacts available to more people and started creating a series of 3D-printed replicas, including a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Even more remarkable, is the story of LayerWise, an innovative metal additive manufacturing company that created a titanium lower jawbone for a transplant patient via 3D printing.

Aside from revolutionizing healthcare and being used for educational purposes, 3D printers are being adopted by numerous industries and for good reason.

Assembly Not Required

Earlier this month, Solidoodle introduced its second-generation self-titled 3D printer, which comes fully assembled for just $499 and has a 6” x 6” x 6” build area. Granted it’s less sophisticated than ones used by the medical community, it still provides a variety of design advantages.

Here are a few of the benefits as explained by Z Corp, one of the leaders in the space:

• Increased Innovation–Within hours, you can print a model of anything your imagination desires. This enables you to get feedback and refine your design almost instantaneously.

• Enhanced Visual Communication–Having a realistic working model of a logo (or shoe design, etc.) compared to computer image, is not only more impactful but also more easily understood when showing to clients.

• Quicker Speed to Market–With the ability to print on demand in your office, you’re able to compress the concept-to-production cycle.

• Reduced Development Costs–3D printing doesn’t require a production line. That means you can print, identify errors and refine your design until it’s perfected without worrying about prototyping, tooling and retooling costs.

• Smaller Environmental Footprint–Since it’s an additive process and contains no prefabricated parts, it results in far less waste than subtractive methods.

• Win Business–With the ability to print a single item, you can allow focus groups and prospects to weigh in on a realistic 3D model of your product before taking it to market.

Louis Would be Proud

Perhaps the greatest benefit of 3D printing is that it favors mass customization as opposed to mass production because it has no prefab constraints. This allows you to conveniently uphold Louis Sullivan’s well-known decree—form ever follows function.

If you’re curious to see how a 3D printer works, here’s a look at the Solidoodle:

Citations:

3D Systems – Advantages of 3D Printing

The Economist – The Printed World

Take a moment to stop and reflect on your marketing and sales budgets. Now multiply that figure by the number of years you have been in business and expect to be in business. The number should seem frighteningly large.

What’s stopping you from tracking even a portion of the budget? How much do really know about the process and costs behind your sales and marketing programs?

Lead generation

How does one measure the cost of a referral versus the cost of a broad-based advertising campaign?

Lead generation programs are often established without first understanding the metrics by which they will be measured and graded against. In most cases with middle-market and small businesses, they are never measured. Surprising, but true.

Many companies are not prepared to measure and attribute leads. They may lack the understanding, time, resources, tools or event the political fortitude to hold the sales and marketing departments accountable.  And there are so many factors at play that it can be overwhelming to establish metrics at all.

As leaders, we want to make sure our people are held accountable but only if we are sure we have done our job to ensure they can be held accountable. It’s not an easy question to honestly answer.

Have you done your job as a leader to ensure these departments can be measured?

The opportunity cost of leads

We’ve seen statistics represented by sales organizations which state that upwards of 80 percent of all salespeople in small businesses fail to live up their hiring goals. How many sales agents have you experienced that meet this shortfall?

In your mental calculations from just a moment ago, did you add in the cost of failure and lost opportunities? Probably not. Yet, these are examples of the many variables used to calculate the true cost of leads.

Did the sales staff fail because they were bad at their jobs or because they didn’t have a reasonable chance in the first place? The Ephor Group says “putting a direct salesperson in front of a prospect with less than a 33% probability of buying is not cost-effective and will lead to failure.” While I may have misgivings about the exactitude of the number resulting from their research, I appreciate the underlying point that the cost of lead generation is more complicated than it might first appear.

Start small

Don’t despair; there is good news.  Lead generation and attribution does not need to be a frightening or hopeless matter. You can start small and work through the cost factors of your lead generation.

Start by framing the types of lead generation and sales vehicles in your organization. Here are a few of the traditional ones we see in most companies:

Since these efforts are often done in concert, you’ll find it more accurate to perform a combined analysis. Start by picking one item from each category which compliment one other.

A case in point

If you market and sell via your website, for example, you might choose Search Engine Marketing and Online Sales. In this case, begin by gathering the cost of your search engine optimization (SEO) and/or pay-per-click (PPC) initiatives.

For the cost of organic website optimization, you will need to factor the compounding effects of the program from its inception. Include the proportionate cost of time from the total compensation for employees if the program has been run from within the organization. If the work is done outside the organization, include the total external cost.

For the cost of paid placement, use the total cost of all media or ad works spent. If you need to start simple, use only the expenses and labor cost (design, writing, management, reporting, etc.) from the past 12 months. Add the hard cost and labor cost together.

Now divide by the revenue generated from online sales.

When calculating your cost per lead, it’s best to look at it at a cost per dollar invested. This allows you to factor for the human element as that cost is often factored on the time or hours spent in sales processes. The division of these two numbers will give you a cost per lead in gross margins.

If you spent $25,000 in SEO time with internal staff writing search-focused content, optimizing the site for organic keyword phrases, and/or testing online engagement forms plus you spent $25,000 in paid ad words or banner ads to drive traffic to your store or shopping cart, you can combine those two numbers and divide by the number of sales generated.

Lets say you generated $500,000 in sales, then $50,000 divided by $500,000 equals $10 per-dollar-invested in sales leads.

This is not a perfectly clean example as you should include the cost of the website development and fees associated with the site such as hosting or SSL certificates for the shopping cart, amortized over the life of the site and proportionally added to the cost of the lead before division.

You can substitute the cost of online sales (if you don’t have a shopping cart online) with the time spent fielding the leads coming through the website. This includes all time spent screening the leads, qualifying the lead, estimating the business and closing the business.  Plus any cost associated with materials (brochures video, etc) used in the closing process.

Monitor your investment

If all this seems too much and overly complicated, just remember what that sales and marketing budget total was when you started reading this post.

Sales and marketing are investments. And like all investments they should be monitored if you want to calculate your return on the investment. So, don’t be afraid to try. Ensure you’re measuring the right things, in the right manner.

What is your most effective sales and marketing channel?

(If you’re not sure how to accurately measure the effectiveness your organization’s marketing and sales programs, we may be able to help. Get in touch.)

Conversion optimization can be applied to many assets and communications from a brand. Conversion optimization tactics and strategies can be applied to design, programming and consulting, among other areas of branding execution.

For example, a local consumer goods company wanted to offer a coupon via Facebook. Our designers focused on making the conversion as easy and noticeable as possible. The total number of coupons downloaded was the metric by which success was to be measured. The Facebook welcome page was purposely designed to lead the visitor to “Like” the page and then download the coupon.

The colors used on the background and on the button were one piece of optimizing conversions in design. The size of the button and where the button lived on the Welcome Page were also factors that were considered and manipulated.

Using the same example of a coupon is the conversion, developers and designers can create an online experience that is likely to drive people to make the conversion. For example, having five different pages a person is directed to before reaching the coupon may cause issues because people don’t want to go through that amount of much work.

To optimize conversions for coupon download campaign, our web development team linked the coupon landing-page directly to the Facebook Welcome Page, so visitors would be able to access the coupon almost immediately upon clicking the “Download Coupon” button. By removing barriers and streamlining the process for the end user, the conversion rate for coupon downloads was higher.

Lastly, conversion optimization can be applied to business consulting. A company may need to take a closer look at itself, its personnel, and processes to optimize conversions. For example, an organization may find that offering a bonus to a company’s sales force gives an incentive to convert prospects into customers. In a different scenario, it could be a geographic targeting solution where the sales force is directed to canvas specific areas that surround stores carrying their product.

Conversion optimization can be applied to all areas of an organization focused on extending the branding process into operations, employee engagement, customer service, market research, and more. A good understanding of conversation optimization can lead to more focused efforts around key performance indicators and generate results that impact business goals.

(If your organization wants to learn more about apply conversion optimization to improve lead generation, new sales, or other measurable goals, we may be able to help. Get in touch.)

The Experiment:
Subjects were shown either a subtly displayed Apple logo,

or the IBM logo,

then asked to name as many uses for a brick as they could think of.

Results:
Researchers found that people who’d seen the Apple logo were more creative in their responses. They were emulating the innovative brand image of Apple as opposed to the calculating, mathematical approach of the International Business Machine (IBM).

The Lesson:
Always make your logos speak to your clients.

This is an interesting bit of marketing information that I would never have come across on purpose. Instead, it was laid at my doorstep because I chose ‘Advertising’ as one of my interests on StumbleUpon.

Advertising is focused, strategic creativity. I know it sounds a bit implausible, no? How can there be rules to creativity? Its very nature is abstract and chaotic, right? It’d be like trying to wrangle steam. And no two people draw the inspiration for their creativity from the same place. I, for example, will typically begin by drowning myself in Coltrane’s A Love Supreme — getting lost in its complexity and beauty; its celebration of life — in order to get my creative wheels turning. In fact, I’ve got it on repeat as I’m writing this blog. But back to my point: just as steam can be made water and water can be made ice, so too can creativity become tangible and purposeful. This isn’t Fine Art, after all. It’s advertising.

Inspiration and the creativity that’s born out of it are at the core of what we do at BrandExtract. It’s what drives our business relationships and creates everlasting impressions in an industry predicated on doing just that. We’re professional dreamers. But how do we come across such innovative creativity? As a creative in an ever-competitive profession, from what spring do we draw our inspiration? Or is there even a single spring out there? As a writer, I draw my inspiration from crime fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, children’s books, horror fiction, film, architecture, interior design, music, nature or simply from within — just to name a few places.

Recently, however, I found a sort of travel guide for exploring the various avenues my creativity could take me through at a site called StumbleUpon.com. It’s quite amazing and very useful for anyone looking to focus their creativity.

Go to Bing.com, one of my favorite search engines, and type in the word “advertising.” What comes up will probably be a litany of sites that include the word “advertising” in some way. My top 3 results were:

Advertising – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia “Advertising is a form of communication used to encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to continue or take some new action. Most…”
Advertising.com “Advertising.com combines the industry’s most advanced technology, precise targeting and quality network to deliver results for advertisers & publishers.”
Advertising — Advertising Strategies, Advertising Careers, and… “Professional advice about advertising and marketing from a veteran in the industry. Highlighting best practices, great examples of advertising, careers, the latest…”

Now, see what happens when you type “advertising” into StumbleUpon. What I got for my very first result was the following:

A gnarly, high-flying ostrich taking a free ride on a Suzuki motorbike in, what looks to be some remote terrain, seen here.

And a series of humorous spanish ads for Yamaha featuring animals displaying very human-like behavior on scooters, seen here…

…and here.

The translation, by the way, is “Some make the street a jungle.”

The Assessment
So what are the benefits of StumbleUpon, you might ask? What can it teach me and how can it help in my creative process? Well, for starters, it’s great for brand discovery. You can spend hours stumbling a client’s industry/topic coming across information you would have never come across even through familiar search engines like the aforementioned Bing or Google. The problem with those sites is that they are very mathematical, which is cool when you’re looking for something specific. But creatives tend to search for the unknown. Using StumbleUpon in tandem with traditional search engines will not only give you a textbook definition of your client’s industry landscape, but will paint the most colorful, accurate and up-to-date picture — giving context and personality.

Creativity
Once you’ve done the brand discovery or assessment, you now have a mind map — a sort of brand psyche — with which to begin your creative. My favorite use for StumbleUpon is as a creative marketing brainstorming tool. The ideas you’ll discover are virtually limitless. It’s a great tool for gaining obscure inspiration and comparing competitive work. You can stumble across logos, typography, writing tips, graphic design, international design trends and just about anything else you can imagine. They say the best artists steal, taking a little from this subject or that, meshing it with their own style to create something wholly new and different. Stumbling presents boundless options in countless industries and fields of study from which creativity can be sparked. You’ll be amazed by what you uncover.

SEM
For search engine marketing, Stumbling provides a great opportunity for identifying clients’ competitors and linking their content to their competition. You can identify possible partnerships for clients as well as opportunities for twitter relationships. It’s a great idea for anyone designing a site to consider adding StumbleUpon icons to their pages and encouraging clients to add industry-relevant material to be stumbled upon.

On StumbleUpon, you’re able to find things that would normally be buried too deep for traditional search engines to discover. It’s an endless road for discovering blogs, social networking and other newer market web trends. If it’s on the web and you’re interested in it, chances are you’ll StumbleUpon it.

In closing, I’d like to leave the reader with 3 pieces I stumble across in my quest for inspiration…

Making Furniture with Magnetism,

Glass Life In The Future,

and, finally, Riusuke Fukahori Paints Three-Dimensional Goldfish.

Enjoy!

“Hey! I like television. I own one and I watch it every day. I think we should make a TV advertisement. I’ve got my home Beta cam and some fun ideas. Let’s just go for it.”

My suspicion is your organization would likely see some pitfalls in that approach.

Our experience has been that most organizations have hobbyist users of social media within their ranks. Some may be focused on using one particular platform, others may dabble in a couple networks. While a few may possibly have deep experience or may have read dozens of books on social media marketing strategies, most have simply been casual users connecting with friends over personal topics or perhaps explored basic networking activities.

While we typically advocate organizations take advantage of the genuine enthusiasm of those staff members who see the capability for social media, we must remember that all these activities affect the brand perception among prospects as well as the brand experience among clients. It’s important to align social activities with business objectives. Most commonly, this is an evolutionary approach and not simply opening the floodgates to anarchy.

Any organization would be wise to ultimately develop those excited staff into empowered, avid champions for the brand. Yet, the horse should come before the cart. We generally advise that it can be imperative for an organization to take some key steps before unleashing untamed enthusiasm so there is a structure and plan in place to evolve the brand experience online.

One of the most critical is ensuring top brass understands the wide potential for social media, how to align with measurable business objectives, and what models are commonly adopted by other organizations on the road from centralized communications to more decentralized models.

With buy-in from leadership, social media has a far greater chance of moving the needle on key performance indicators as it becomes ingrained inside the organization from top to bottom.

Companies often have to prioritize potential opportunities, possible venues or channels, and the best of use of employee time.

• Leadership needs to be fully committed to fostering a culture that plays well with transparency
• A content strategy should be adopted to reflect bonafide business goals
• With so many potential venues, a vetting process is necessary to prioritize your efforts
• The brand voice needs to be formalized in order to protect investments in the brand
• All manner of assets need to be developed from profile descriptions to video clips to graphic elements
• Processes need to be put in place to leverage existing content and develop needed content for the adopted platforms
• Technology options must be reviewed which leads to adoption and deployment of software
• Training needs to be in place to guide all the staff involved in social media
• It may be important to draft and circulate an official policy on social media usage
• Responsibility and scheduling for social monitoring and engagement must be assigned
• The organizations may benefit from a social media crisis playbook to mitigate potential flare ups
• Plan to build in time/budget for ongoing assistance with implementation
• Be certain you’re focused on tracking performance results with periodic in-person meeting to optimize returns for the organization

We typically begin with the social media assessment process as the starting point for understanding the landscape so leadership can make intelligent decisions about how to leverage what has now, effectively, become a de rigueur required activity of all brands just as having a website is now a fundamental business basic even though it was once seen as new and different.

All these elements are part of the comprehensive program which BrandExtract puts in place for other clients so they can proceed with confidence in making sure social media activities align with business objectives and result in a return on investment.

In the past, MMA has used many traditional recruiting tactics such as in-person presentations in cities across the country, its website, advertising in key markets online and in print, and has more recently included social media and SEO to its recruitment marketing mix.

But what do you do when you feel one or more of your marketing channels are ineffective, or not converting at as high a rate as you’d like or need?

Investigate. Analyze. Experiment. Track. Repeat.

When MMA engaged BrandExtract to help reposition the academy’s brand, we immediately set out to investigate the effectiveness of all their channels. We discovered some of MMA’s activities were on the more costly side, in terms of the number of leads generated, compared to other channels it was currently using, as well as channels it hadn’t previously considered using.

As we went through the process of analyzing the spend efficacy, one focus we had centered around MMA’s in-person recruitment presentations. Private, military-style education is certainly a niche product, so MMA normally had 3-6 prospective students and families attending any given in-person recruitment session. Yet, there was all the overhead of travel, accommodation, and meals.

We decided to experiment with adopting a new approach to recruitment: using webinars. Our analysis indicated the use of webinars would allow several opportunities for MMA — students and parents could attend without having to wait for a specific date when MMA came to their local area, students could directly engage with the Academic Dean in addition to the recruiting staff, and most importantly parents could ask questions openly so they were heard by everybody else attending the webinar presentation.

Results?

Right out of the gate, the very first MMA webinar produced more than six times the number of registrants, compared to the in-person events, and cultivated more than three times the typical number of recruitment participants. At a fraction of the cost.

Wish you could replicate such results in your organization?

To know if any of your channels are actually underperforming, you’ll need some kind of lead/prospect attribution system. With traditional methods, organizations accomplish this by including a “Where did you find out about us?” question in phone scripts and website forms. With online channels it can be accomplished by appending tracking code to the end of URLs used in promotions.

Using this newer method, you can track specifically whether or not the May newsletter (for example) drove traffic that eventually filled out an application or scheduled an appointment for a phone call. You can even determine which exact call to action, link, or button drove the desired action.

With enough data, you can evaluate how effective the email channel, as a whole, is over time. Or further, you can track links from Facebook to see if people who interact with your brand there visit more than one or two pages per visit on your website, or eventually fill out an application.

Once you have hard data for each channel (even if it’s just your best guess or is self-identified by the prospect, or in MMA’s case, the prospect’s parents), you can perform a simple analysis on the effectiveness of your spend using the following information: the total dollar amount spent creating content, ads, promotions, etc. for a given channel and the number of total leads from that channel in a given time period.

Depending on the organization, we might recommend splicing data monthly or quarterly so you can compare different parts of the year to each other. If you estimate that you spend $3,000 producing and marketing an email newsletter 12 times per year, that’s a total cost of $36,000. And if you know that all 12 email newsletters resulted in 50 leads each, so you have a cost per prospect acquired of $60 ($36,000/600). Now you have an equalized number you can use to compare the effectiveness of a particular channel versus another channel.

That exemplifies the type of thinking we bring to bear when analyzing business performance for clients. We’re proud to have helped MMA strategically redefine how it can better serve parents during the recruitment process, significantly increase lead generation results, and cut costs in the process, to boot.

As an organization, it’s never too late to change how you recruit whether it’s for leads/prospects or even for human resources/talent acquisition. If you find that some traditional channels are have a much higher cost per prospect, don’t be afraid to try a new channel, or revamp one — just like MMA reducing the number of in-person visits in other cities and adding online webinars to its recruitment strategy.

About MMA and BrandExtract

Over the past 12 months, BrandExtract has engaged with MMA to conduct a brand assessment, developed a new look and feel, new positioning, a completely rearchitected website, and webinar training and support. BE is also supporting MMA with ongoing business consulting and online marketing services such as pay-per-click advertising.