Catch phrases are helpful in marketing, but if a brand can move beyond just a catch phrase to a point of sale, it is even more valuable.  Consider Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan from years ago. It still rings in the minds of athletes and non-athletes alike.  “The best part of wakin’ up, is Folgers in your cup” has been sung by both the caffeinated patron and the non-patron.  Slogans such as these run through our minds and bring back a sense of warmth and wonder of a particular season of life when we were watching the commercials and seeing the billboards.  They influence our choices as we peruse the aisles, guiding us to the brand that we purchase.

When considering service companies, branding can go much further than a catchy slogan and drive the potential client to initiate a phone call to your company.  What is your point of sale and how quickly can you get an interested buyer involved?

A great example of this comes to mind when ordering flowers.  When an unexpected occasion comes up and you need to find flowers, what is the first slogan that pops into your head? Is it a slogan, or is it a phone number? I couldn’t tell you the slogan for 1-800-FLOWERS (if they even have one), but I can tell you their phone number. I know that when a last minute floral need arrives, that is the place I’m going to call.  In other words, “Cha-ching!”

Vanity numbers can be one of the most effective ways to drive a point of sale to your business.  They work excellently for generic service needs.  There are other service companies that are using this technique of branding their businesses including: 1-800-Plumber and 1-800-Lawyers.

In writing this article we spoke with Keith Glass of 1-800-Plumber.Com, a national based plumbing company that just recently launched franchises offering plumbing services in Naples and plumbing repair in San Antonio, who commented, “People only call a plumber when they need one and many times it is a flat out emergency.  We built the 1-800-Plumber.Com brand on the premise of being a nationwide, one phone number to call for all your plumbing needs.”

800 vanity branding also sets an expectation of high quality service levels and immediate response.  “Prior to launching the brand, our focus groups confirmed that our phones would need to be answered 24X7 and that our franchisees would need to be outfitted with the most modern technology in the plumbing business.  We had already committed that level of service; yet, the brand expectations re-enforced our need to deliver upon it,” commented Glass.

The one downside with vanity phone numbers in general is that the numbers and letters in today’s modern phone devices do not line up on BlackBerry hand helds and other phones that have computer style keyboards like they did on the old rotary and standard key pad phones you found hanging on the wall in your Mom’s kitchen.  I bring up this point not in an effort to steer you away from vanity branding but it is a point that should lead you to ensure fine details such as including the actual numerical version of the number in your marketing as well as having hyper-link clickable versions of the phone number on your website so that modern phone users can Google, click, and call.

Marketers are finding that vanity 800 numbers are effective in information retention for potential clients and are  training people to look for vanity numbers.  Vanity 800 numbers such as 1-800-Call-ATT make ATT customers feel at ease, knowing that they won’t have to shuffle through numbers in order to find the customer service line when they have account problems. The goal of every successful marketing campaign is to make systems simple and your company, where they’ll spend money easy to reach.  Vanity 800 numbers are one excellent solution to reaching that point of sale.

Your customers, partners, and in many cases employees benefit from communications from your company. The challenge today is that email has become a “worn out” form of communication. There are several reason why people have become worn out with email communication. The first is we get simply TOO MANY EMAILS! The second is that a large portion of emails are very poorly written and do not communicate effectively.

Real Simple Syndication or RSS is a technology that was invented to distribute or syndicate new information from websites.  Subscribers can use any number of readers to see new information in an orderly fashion.  More importantly, you can sort the information and access it when you want to versus having it overtake your inbox.  You can access this information from your iPhone or readers built into browsers and many online services.

Consider creating an RSS feed for your website and distributing it to your customers so they can keep up with your recent information and news.

To read more about RSS feeds and their bennefits, you should read the write-up SmallBusinessNewz did on the topic.

In evaluating Social Media’s potential for your marketing efforts, I think it is important that a marketer understand the overall power that social media possesses. Once something gains momentum in the world of social media, it can be unstoppable. As a marketer you want to be on the proactive side of that equation versus trying to reactively fight your way out of mess. I’ll use two separate topics in this post to highlight the topic of social media and power: consumer vigilantes and communism.

Consumer Vigilantes

We have all been on the phone, frustrated and tired, with the customer support divisions of large companies. Whether trying to get the power turned back on or cable TV installed to correcting an error in our mortgage escrow account, the maze of phone menus, overseas based customer service gaps, and general lack of flexibility from big companies can leave you can feeling angry and helpless.

In the March 3rd 2008 edition of Business Week, they published an article titled “Consumer Vigilantes“. It highlighted several stories of customer service frustration including the infamous one where a 76 year old woman returned to a Comcast office after waiting for 2 1/2 hours to speak to a manager and used a hammer to smash the computer keyboard of an employee. In addition to being arrested, the incident earned the retiree notoriety as Mona “The Hammer” Shaw.

In my opinion as a consumer, the hammer incident itself generated a very poor result in terms of what Mona Shaw intended to do which was get attention from the cable giant and get results for her issue. As a marketer, I will admit that the media attention did promote her story to phenomenal levels. Still, was media distribution really worth going to jail for? In comparison to the approach that Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield took which was to bring up a blog dedicated to customer service issues with Comcast, I’d have to say NO–it wasn’t worth going to jail for. Needless to say, Bob’s blog has has taken off to the point of where it has marked a place in blogosphere history. It’s name? Simple. . .ComCast Must Die!

Others are taking different approaches. One is simply recording these 2, 3, 4, or more customer service calls where you get the same run around with nothing getting solved and uploading it to YouTube for all the world to hear!

The bottom line is that when something takes off in the world of social media, it hits the Internet with force and companies are taking note. As a marketer, you want to be in front of that curve. Likely you want to be proactive and engaged with the Internet at all times. This can range from setting up Google Alerts to simply working with Bloggers. Starbucks does this with the site Starbucks Gossip.

Communism and Bloggers

Whether it be progress in Cuba or China’s stance on Tibetan Monks, blogs are presenting a major challenge for communist governments. CBS News published a story on the uprising of bloggers in Cuba. I definitely don’t want to go into a debate on specific issues in the communist world on this post but I will ask you to compare the return on investment potential of blogging coming out of Cuba coupled with those targeted to reach Cuban audiences when compared to strategies such as TV Marti where the U.S. government has invested 1/2 of a billion dollars in media that is estimated to only reach 1/3 of one percent of the Cuban population.

Conclusion

Social Media is power and the potential is growing. This blog is dedicated to information and thinking that can help marketers to be successful versus scrambling to deal with the Internet. How would you like to go in front of the US Senate to discuss your TV Marti results and not have a social media strategy in place?

Derick Schaefer

Every marketer’s dream is to have the brand, product, service, or experience they are marketing simply take off in viral fashion and soar to altitudes they never imagined. When you are a “with it” brand, all you have to do is crowd control. I’ll use the below photo of The Apple Store in North Park Center in Dallas, TX as an example. Apple makes cool products and people flock to their stores. Look at the crowd of people and notice that there are NO promotional signs in the windows.

When you aren’t “in the groove”, your marketing efforts have to resort to promotion and attempts to create excitement. My next picture was taken two minutes later at The Dell Store (which btw you can’t find in Google so we linked to some pre-opening news article) that is a two minute walk from The Apple Store in the same mall. Notice the “financial promotions” and “discounts” they’ve posted to lure people in. Also notice the empty store! (and the employee coming out from the background came out and yelled at me for taking a picture and threatened to call security. . .I can see why people aren’t hanging out!)

We can’t all be Apple in our marketing efforts but it is possible to create buzz out of the good that we have in our brand, products, or services and increase overall traffic without having to market to one potential customer at a time. If you want to do that online, the key is integrating with Social Networks! And yes, digital marketing (online) needs to be a part of your strategy no matter what you are marketing!

Social Media is a Web 2.0 concept that is built upon core themes of the new Internet. These include sharing, collaboration, user centric technology, and interest based content. On paper, think about yourself and how many networks with which you associate yourself. Your high school, high school graduating class, college, college graduating class, the sports you like, the type of pet you have, your place of work, your industry, your hobbies, etc. Now take that to every human in the world by Internet services that facilitate sharing and collaboration around interests and you have power!

The following graphic referenced from Wikipedia is a great example of the vastness of the topic of Web 2.0:

This blog was created to explore the ever evolving concepts related to Social Media and apply facts, opinions, and general thinking as to how marketers should leverage them. We will do everything from define and review the sites and services available to marketers to talk strategy and provide real world examples.

I invite you to read, participate, contribute, and just flat out enjoy this blog dedicated to social media marketing.

Derick Schaefer