Visit me there and don’t forget to sign my guestbook.

Air New Zealand’s new TV campaign is authentic, fun, remarkable and well done. On top of everything it will go virally on social media channels. It has already generated quarter of million views on YouTube.

I love this campaign for its creativity, employee engagement, humor and surprise factor. I think it’s brilliant from idea to execution. Well done Air New Zealand!

Check out the TV commercial below on YouTube:

If you want to see how they created the campaign which is as good if not better than the actual commercial check out the YouTube video below:

Well done! With the power of social media this campaign will truly take off. Way to go Air New Zealand! I’d love to follow up and see how the campaign affected their bottom line. Would you be more inclined to travel with Air New Zealand because of this campaign? I would.

Milena Regos Mountain Biking

What do business, marketing and social media marketing have in common with mountain biking in Lake Tahoe?

A lot as I found out yesterday. I went for an amazing bike ride yesterday at Sawtooth Trail near Truckee, CA with my husband. He’s an excellent rider. We started off and within minutes I wasn’t able to see him anymore amongst the pine trees. When he stopped to wait for me, I asked him while trying to catch my breadth: “Why am I biking so slow?”. He responded: “You are not slow at all, you are doing really good. I’m just too fast. Remember to look ahead and prepare for what’s coming ahead of time”. It got me thinking about business in general and how some companies are doing so well yet others fail, how some businesses anticipate what’s coming ahead on the trail and prepare for it by shifting gears on time and how some companies fail to do so and end up in the back of the group. I found a lot of similarities between business, more specifically marketing and mountain biking and I’ll try to explain my analogies here for those of you who understand one or the other or have an appreciation and interest.

1. You have to be passionate about marketing. Otherwise, it will be just a chore for you. Just like biking, if I wasn’t passionate about it and loving every minute of it I wouldn’t be doing it. If you don’t like marketing and you find yourself putting it off because you don’t believe it works or you don’t think it’s important for your business, then find some outside help and hire someone who understands it and knows how to do it well. The same applies to social media marketing. If you are not into it and don’t understand how it’s applicable to your business, you are better off finding someone who does. Your customers are talking about you online and offline. It’s the old word-of-mouth way of communicating turning into a word-of-mouse way of finding advice and referrals about your product and service. People are talking about your company. Do you know what they are saying? Do you care?  Can you afford not to?

2. You always have to push the limit to get better at marketing. Just like biking, if I don’t always try a harder trail, a jump, a technical move I won’t get better. I’ll continue to enjoy it and continue to participate in it but I won’t get better at what I do. It’s the same with marketing. You have to explore things, try something new, fail every once and a while, learn from your mistakes and keep doing it. You will get better with time.

3. Measure it! How do you know what works and what doesn’t if you don’t measure it. Some people think that you can’t measure marketing or social media marketing. I disagree. You can measure a lot of things. It depends on your business strategy and marketing objectives as to what you want to measure. Establish your goals in the beginning. Adjust your goals as you go along. Once a month or more often see how you are doing against your goals. Unless you push yourself and your business to do better against your strategy you won’t have a goal. My mountain bike computer establishes some numerical measurements for me: riding time, highest speed, average speed, etc. These are quantitative measures. The same is available for your marketing efforts. With marketing you can measure customer growth rate, share of preference, share of voice, share of distribution, share of wallet, net promoter score. Online marketing is especially easy to track. You can start with something as simple as Google Analytics to see where your customers are coming from, how much traffic is your website getting, what keywords are driving traffic to your website, how long are they staying on your site (the stickiness of your website), bounce rate to determine how targeted your marketing efforts are and how effective your landing page/ home page is. With pay per search keywords on search engines, you can also measure clicks (how many people clicked on your link), cost per click (how much you are paying to bring a customer via a specific keyword), etc. Google Analytics is a free program. Other programs to help you measure your social media quantitative efforts are AideRSS, Feedburner and Xinu.

With email marketing you can measure how many people opened your email campaign, how many people clicked on a specific link or downloaded something from your website. Depending on what software you use, the tools are probably already built into the system.

With social media marketing, you can measure friends and followers, traffic to your website, direct sales revenue,search engine optimization,  customer service touches and more. You can get more elaborate tools to help  you track conversion of customers and leads and really dig into how successful your marketing and social media efforts are. Some of them I already listed above. Here’s a good post by Jacob Morgan in Social Media Today on how to measure your social media efforts.

Additional businesses to help you with your measuring are:  Mongoose Metrics, WebTrends, Omniture, Hubspot, and Hitbox (now Omniture).  It all depends on what you want to measure and your budget.

There are also qualitative measures that are just as important. How much fun I had on the bike ride, spending time with friends and my husband, getting exercise, enjoying the outdoors. There are qualitative measures as well in marketing and social media marketing that are just as important as quantitative measures. In marketing you have advertising awareness, brand awareness, word of mouth. In social media, you have  corporate reputation, customers engagement, customer feedback sentiment, conversations, customer relationships and more.

Go out there and explore. Practice, learn and have fun while doing it. And most of all Enjoy the Ride!

More resources:

How to measure Social Media ROI for business

Top 10 Google Analytics Tip and Features for Sales and Marketing

How to Measure Marketing Goals

If you don’t measure you can’t manage: The Best Metrics for measuring marketing performance

http://www.visionedgemarketing.com/

Photo Credit: Flickr

Social Media Marketing reminds me a lot of a really good and spicy Bloody Mary.  Here’s the recipe.

In a glass of marketing put:

Ice – your social strategy

Good vodka – that’s your great content – the most important part!

Mix – a lot of listening and talking

Add some black pepper – search

Garnish with hot peppers – that’s your public relations

Add some olives – a little bit of creative (for the content)

Spicy beans – add some technology for applications

Horseradish – mix in project management to respond to customers questions  and feedback you will receive. This is your customer service.

Tabasco sauce – a dash of media to support the content

A stick of celery – to mix everything together and measure how spicy you Bloody Mary is and how effective your social media marketing is. Adjust as necessary.  Drink responsibly. Enjoy!

I ran into a post comment somewhere which gave me this idea. I can’t remember where otherwise, I’ll give the original post credit.

Here’s a practical resource guide on how to find out what people are saying about your brand. Listening to what   people are saying seems to be a hot topic right now but most people don’t know where to start. There are some very good software companies that will help you achieve your goals but they can get expensive or simply are not in your budget especially when there are so many free tools already. I will share with you great tools that will do the job and are free. It will take you some time to set them up and see what works for you but you can’t ignore the conversations on the web. Listening to what’s happening is important because it will help you understand better what your customers want.

1. Google Alerts – free tool that allows you to subscribe for specific keywords and topics of interests. You get an email delivered to your inbox automatically when your search terms get ranked on Google. You need to sign up for this tool. You can monitor your  company, your competitors, any trends that you may be interested in, news or your own name. This one is a must!

2. BackType – another powerful free tool that tracks comments on the Social Web and emails you results. Every time someone mentions your company in a blog or a social news site you get an email. Another must if you want to save yourself time and want the essential information delivered to your inbox. You can view all conversations based on a trend, topic or an article and receive notifications whenever a conversation that you are interested in becomes active. Check it out and sign up today!

3. Tweetbeep – A free tool that works pretty much like Google Alerts but it searches the conversations on Twitter. Every time someone mentions your name, your product, your company and anything else you want to track you get an email. If you are in Twitter, you need to sign up for Tweetbeep. If you are not on Twitter but you want to know what everybody else is talking about on Twitter, again, you need to sign up. Another way to search the conversations on Twitter is with Twitter search.

What about searching all the blogs that are becoming extremely popular these days? Do you know that there are 2 new blogs being created every second! Here are some free tools to help you understand and track what’s important to you on the blogosphere.

1. Technorati – you can search the entire blogosphere with this tool and see what blogs are writing about you. For example, I just searched for “Lake Tahoe” and the site came back with 2,377 results for this keyword. You can also compare the noise about your brand with a competing brand and see who’s getting more exposure. Neat!

2. Google Blogsearch – another free tool for seeing what people are saying on blogs. On my search for “lake tahoe” it returned 297,428 “lake tahoe” related searches.A lot of blogs to go through!

3. BlogPulse – this is a free blog search service provided by Nielsen BuzzMetrics. You can search by keywords or URLs. You can create trends, check out popular trends, follow onversations or go deep into your favorite sites and authors. My search for “lake tahoe” brought back 14,181 results. I have the opportunity to see who’s talking about lake tahoe and I can track the conversation or see the blog’s profile. I really like the trend tool and I can see a lot of useful applications for it in the future.

And finally,there are aggregators that allows you to follow the conversation across various platforms.

1. Friendfeed – It searches across blogs, Twitter, Flickr and 50 other social sites.

2. Spy – Spy is a great tool that allows you to listen to tconversations on the web. It actually aggregates the comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType, and more social websites and RSS readers. Lois Gray wrote a nice article on Spy.

3. Trendrr – if you are interested in tracking trends, I would recommend Trendrr. You can create up to 20 trends for free. Lois Gray wrote another great article about Trendrr on his blog.

4. Socialmention – An excellent tool for monitoring your social exposure. They even give you a social rank and you can subscribe to daily email alerts.

Do you have any favorite tools that you use? Please, share.

Interested in more resources. Check these out:

Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation – a great list from Mashable

Twitter aggregators

How to get the most out of Friendfeed

How to measure online influence

1. In an exciting presentation named ‘The Power of Storytelling” Michael Perman, Senior Director, Consumer Insights, Levi Strauss & Co talked about how to use experiences and memories to create a story about your brand and bring it to life. Have your employees and customers share a story of how they used your product. What memories do they have? What feelings and emotions your products created in them. Post these stories via a blog, a photo, a video and you will bring your product/service to life. People will relate it. They will remember it. And they will buy it. Stories will help you invent the future. Use your imagination to get there.

2. Another good session was presented by a a good panel. The good people from oDesk – Brian Goler, Yield software - Derek Gordon and A&R Edelman – Todd Irwin. They discussed Crossing the Chasm 2.0: Product Marketing in the Digital Age. The phrase was coined in 1991 by Geoffrey Moore in a book titled “Crossing the Chasm”. The panel applied the concept in today’s world with questions like: Has Twitter crossed the Chasm? Most people said no, but the majority agreed that it has crossed the Chasm when applied to business and marketing. Has the iphone crossed the Chasm. Most people tend to think that it has mainly thanks to the iphone applications. How about Facebook? Yes, the audience said, Facebook has crossed the Chasm. Great session and very interactive.Good lessons and take ways for how to break into the digital world with your product.

To illustrate better what the Chasm looks like, I have added the following picture:

3. The third session that resonated with me was Shelly Palmer’s Digital Power User Boot Camp. I was only able to attend one session and I went to the final one. I was very impressed with the amount of information presented and the overview he gave of what’s needed to survive in today’s world: from scanning every paper in your office and creating a searchable PDF, to backing up your computer on a daily basis. He also presented solutions for what cell phones to use, recommended Google apps for a way to allow a group to share documents and calendars, how to create powerpoint presentations and in summary: How to live in today’s digital world. Great info, lots of tips and advice and a good presenter.There was only one thing I’m not sure I agree with. He emphasized the need to update your blog daily. An absolute must he said. I don’t necessarily agree with this statement. One, it’s too often for people to read your blog. Who has the time to read 10-15 blogs of their preference every day. Two, who has the time to update their blog every day. It does take a lot of time.  And finally, I just visited his blog and it hasn’t been updated for the past 5 days. I think that proves my first two points. All and all, great job Shelly. I’ll join in the conversation from your website / blog.

Additional Resources on the topics above:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rethinking_crossing_the_chasm.php

http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/

1. Susan Boyle singing sensation

The news picked up the story of this phenomenal singer and within days the YouTube video went from 1,578,735 views (this is what it was recorded on it when I wrote my previous post) to 19,233,462 views as of the writing of this blog. This is only in a matter of 3 days. As a matter of fact by the time I finished the blog, the video had accumulated another 2,000,000 views within an hour.  In addition to this video, there are millions more views on other videos that are on Susan Boyle. Her amazing singing and performance will continue to grow virally with the power of the Internet. Of course, main news stories picked up the video and it’s been all over traditional media but the viral effect of YouTube and the power it has to build a brand has been proved.There is already an official website for Susan Boyle. At the time of this post, there were 2,355,880 blogs  written that included her name. She went from a no one to a star within a matter of hours. That’s the power of YouTube!

2. The Domino’s Effect

Domino’s spent years building their brand only to be destroyed in seconds by the YouTube video posted by two of their employees. Domino’s has been active in social media with a Twitter account, YouTube account, Facebook page and MySpace page. Domino’s video has been pulled from YouTube since then but you can still see it here if you really want to watch Domino’s employees doing disgusting things to food which is being prepared for customers. The employees say they created the video as a “prank” and since then have been fired from the company. The company itself called them “idiots”. The lesson here is that anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection can do a lot more damage to your company than you can imagine. Another lesson for these two people is that they may discover that finding a new job just got a lot harder for them  and it doesn’t have anything to do with the state of the economy. As a potential employer would you really want to hire a person whose face was on traditional and social media associated with a “prank” on their current employer. This is certainly a bad choice for showing how you are being active in social media.

Domino’s has responded to the “prank” with their own video:

The video has been seen by 353,466 viewers as of the time of this post.

MediaCurves released a survey on how effective the Domino’s apology video has been.

Among the findings:

“Which of the following actions are you likely to perform in the next three months?”

“Do you think the apology response video released by Domino’s USA President, Patrick Doyle, was effective in rectifying and restoring Domino’s image after this incident?”

For more information about this study, you can visit MediaCurves.

This is a story on how a brand can be destroyed with the help of YouTube.

3. ‘The Best job in the World” by Tourism Queensland

One of my favorite examples of how effectively to use social media to generate brand awareness and start up a conversation. Tourism Queensland released a contest for the best job int he world – a caretaker for one of their islands and a person who would blog about their experience while on Hamilton island for a year. Brilliant! The application had to be submitted via a YouTube video. Tourism Queensland put a nice package for the job that included accommodation, travel insurance, and get this: $150,000 AUS for 1 year period. What’s does the job entail? Blogging, traveling on the islands and doing a lot of snorkeling, swimming with the fish, kayaking, sailing, and bushwalking. Amazing! It sounds great right? What’s the catch? Nothing. They are looking to create buzz about their destination and continue the buzz online.  A brilliant idea and awesome execution. They had 34,000 applications for the job from 22 countries. That’s 34,000 youtube videos of people saying why they are the perfect candidate for the job. The news went viral from just one press release and got also picked up by main news agencies around the world. It sure put Queensland on the map. They are still going with their process and the final candidate should be picked up in the first week of May. Stay tuned for more news coming up from this beautiful destination.

As of this post the video had 1,578,735 views.  Susan’s goal was to perform in front of a large audience and she did it so well that jaws dropped. The judges were simply amazed, the audience speechless.  First impressions were forgotten immediately. Thanks to social media, this video is going to go around the world a few times and Susan is going to be a famous singing star! Go Susan!

1. Establish your goals. And make sure the goals you set are SMART: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely. You want to set goals because you want to be able to say how successful your social media efforts are. Is your goal to increase brand awareness, website traffic or increase leads? Whatever it is, write it down so you can revisit it 3 months from now. Start with a small goal in mind. For example, I want to track traffic from Facebook and Twitter to www.diamondpeak.com and see if all the posts and links result in an increase in website traffic.

2. Join in the conversation and start listening. You can’t simply jump in and start blasting your marketing campaigns the old fashioned way. You need to understand that authenticity and transparency are becoming the standard in social media. You can’t hide behind a company brand and just blast your followers and fans. You need to engage and become a part of your community. You need to guide your tribe in the conversation. And you need to show that you are human.

3. Identify the influencers in your field. They may not be necessary your biggest customers but they may and could be talking about your brand. There are online tools that will allow you to do so. You need to connect with the influencers and make sure they talk about your company. Companies are starting to pay cash to big bloggers as long as they blog about them to their followers. Personally, I disagree with this tactic. As long as the bloggers are disclosing the fact that they are getting paid, they are under no other legal obligation. You need to connect with the people who create the most noise about your company hopefully without any monetary compensation but strictly passion for your product/cause/service.

4. Your employees are now your ambassadors. They are online and they are talking about the company to their friends. You need to explain to them your social strategy and have their buy-in. Everything they say about your company is also part of the conversation. Hold a meeting with your employees and explain to them your efforts – an official blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account. Encourage them to participate and explain the goals of your social media strategy.

To be continued…