The 4 Words You Want to Hear from your Agency Partner

It’s the most important words you can hear from your agency partner.

It has the power to change your company in ways you never realized.

It has nothing to do with money or deliverables or logistics.

Can you guess what it is?

“I have an idea.”

They may say other words to you, like “solutions.” That’s a good term, but it implies that you have “problems.” The branding world isn’t so binary. If there are only problems and solutions, then what are opportunities? What are experiments?

Did your agency partner mention a “plan”? Plans are fine, but they come after ideas. Planning too early can lead to rigidity. If circumstances change and the plan is no longer valid, do you change the plan, scrap the plan…or try to change the circumstances? Plans often mean a great deal of time and energy and shouldn’t be conceived without your input.

Your agency partner might say they have an “answer.” This can be useful, but the right answer requires the right question; are you sure they asked the right one? And what if the question has multiple answers?

Solutions, plans, and answers are all right, but nothing beats an idea.

An idea has the potential to change your entire company. Weren’t Google and Twitter founded on very simple ideas? Walt Disney’s idea was that an amusement park should entertain both children and adults. Ray Kroc’s idea was that a Big Mac should taste the same in New York as it did in Tokyo.

An idea shows that your agency partner has been thinking about your company. They’ve considered your strengths, your weaknesses, your needs, and your goals. And all those factors have coalesced into something that they’re excited to share with you. It may only be a spark, but it could light a wildfire. After all, single idea from your agency partner can open up new revenue streams, launch the creation of new products, or change your entire marketing strategy.

Ideas are powerful things. Arguably all of human progress has relied on one person creating a concept and then spreading it to others. Flight was once only an idea. So was the car, and the camera, and the computer. The light bulb was such a great invention that it now symbolizes all ideas. America is an idea; it reaches across borders and unites people from many different backgrounds.

So if your agency partner hasn’t said “I have an idea” in a while, here’s an idea:

Find a new agency!

Four Ways to Keep Your Employees Committed to Staying Healthy

How Well Are You Doing Wellness?

Absenteeism costs American businesses around $200 billion a year. Promoting wellness at your company not only reduces these losses but lowers your health insurance costs. You may already have bike racks in your parking lot and healthier snacks in your vending machines, but that’s not enough to increase your workers’ health and productivity. Below are four ways, from low-tech to cutting-edge, to keep your employees committed to staying healthy.

1. Copy Costco

The future of corporate wellness programs is to make them social. Wellness-only Facebook pages allow employees to check contest deadlines, share advice, and give each other encouragement. Costco’s Facebook page is particularly effective in getting information to its employees, answering questions, and posting photos of activities.

Similarly, Facebook Events lets companies invite employees to marathons, health screenings, and other activities. Make you let the world's most popular social network work for you.

2. Scratch That Itch

Contests can be social, too. For example, though giveaways are fun, they don’t provide a lot of participation.; once you’ve entered, you’re done. The solution? Scratch-to-win cards. The more an employee participates in the wellness program, or the more benchmarks she passes, the more cards she’ll receive. Scratching off cards is much more engaging than a prize drawing, and colleagues can gather around to cheer each other as the employee discovers what she won. If you have workers who play the lottery, they’ll love scratch cards.

3. Game the System

Virtual gaming is the next step, and software tools like Bunchball’s Nitro can apply game mechanics to any campaign, including corporate wellness. Participants can earn points and rewards each time they take a health quiz, practice for a marathon, or for each day they don’t smoke. Games appeal to people’s innate love of status and competition. New challenges and an ever-changing online leaderboard can ensure that everyone participates, anyone can win, and no one ever gets bored.

4. Life Support

Another social aspect to a wellness program is the support group. Biking and running groups get to exercise together, but the workers trying to quit smoking, or eat healthier, or manage stress are often left to fend for themselves. Creating a group lets them support each other and reward each other’s success. A support group could be a half-hour weekly meeting (with or without management), a special site or message board on your intranet, or a public social support site like 43Things.

Consider all these social aspects when you create or redesign your company’s wellness program. From Facebook to games to old-fashioned face-to-face “social networking,” making your corporate wellness program social can keep your employees engaged, productive, and healthy.

Helping You Help Them

Don't ask me why but it seems that no matter how industrious you are as an HR professional, your success often hinges on the participation of your employees, who, unfortunately, have little motivation to make your job easier.

They’ll drag their feet when it comes to filling out HR materials or completing training – even safety training that could save their lives.

So, direct from the best agency in brand-aligned workforce communications, comes a few professional trade secrets.

Create a clear line-of-sight to "why and when"

First, make sure you communicate both the importance of the materials and the deadline for completing them. The date should be prominent and attached to the materials so the two can’t be separated. If you’re sending materials by email, make sure the deadline is in both the body of the letter and on the materials themselves, whether it’s a PDF, an intranet site, or a spreadsheet. Follow-up with reminders, either in person, by email, or through a public forum like the company newsletter. If there are rewards for finishing early (see below), announce who was won so far, giving motivation to the procrastinators.

You'll Win with Contests

Nothing persuades like competition. Divide your staff by department or into special teams, or make the contest an individual endeavor. Whoever finishes first, or gets the most answers correct, or has the most participation, wins a prize. Contests with multiple prizes, such as weekly winners or both a “best” and a “most” award, work best; if people know the prize has already been won, they have no reason to participate.

Exhibitionism?

Sometimes exhibitions can be as fun as competitions. If you’re implementing a safety program, ask your staff to designate “the most dangerous place in the office,” along with “the safest place in the office” – based on the safety materials, which they have to read to fully participate. Hold a humorous meeting to decide what to call the new floor safety warden (my favorite was “Captain Safeguard”). Give everyone stickers and let them tag potential hazards around the workplace. You can even add a “contest” element by holding an election to pick the safety warden. Any activity that involves the entire company provides extra motivation for reluctant executives to participate.

Your Staff's Favorite Radio Station? WI.FM

“What’s in it for me?” employees ask all too often. There are lots of responses that are well within your budget – or even cost nothing at all. The winning employee(s) can leave early, work from home one day, or host an "all-jeans day" for themselves and their favorite colleagues.

Use your company’s “wall of fame” or Employee of the Month program. (If you don't have one, start one.) Of course, simple public recognition costs nothing: giving the winner a standing ovation at your next staff meeting or posting their achievement on the bulletin board can mean a lot to your workers. Keep the prizes simple- even a pizza, movie pass or Starbucks card can add sizzle to your shtick.

Making success fun makes your workplace more productive – and your job a lot easier.

New Ways to Make Permission Marketing Work For You.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing have made great advances in targeted marketing, allowing brands to focus on their most prized demographics. But none of them can yet answer the most important question: does a particular person actually want to buy your product?

That’s where permission marketing comes in. Coined by best-selling marketing guru Seth Godin, it has included opting in for newsletters, requesting catalogs, or signing up for e-mail updates. Now, innovations such as Facebook Connect and Google Buzz have ushered in a new era of permission marketing. These and other emerging services can provide you with additional opportunities to connect with your chosen audience.

For example, look at how the Huffington Post has led the way. Readers give “permission” by registering for the site with their Facebook or Twitter IDs. The Post then customizes their user experience based on information in the reader’s profile, news feed, and Facebook Likes. In return, the reader can now easily share stories from the Post with their Facebook and Twitter friends, leading to true social marketing.

Bertelsmann, a multinational media company, allows candidates to sign into its career site using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Three reasons to incorporate permission marketing into your next recruitment campaign:

1. Permission marketing creates a group of self-selected candidates who want to learn more about the company. This stands in contrast to “interruption” marketing, in the form of e-mails, banners, or Facebook ads. No matter how relevant or well targeted, many candidates still see these unwanted messages as spam.
2. It allows your brand to build a relationship with candidates over time. Candidates who have given permission have expressed their willingness to learn about a brand and don’t require aggressive, one-shot promotions to grab their attention. This lets you educate the candidates about the company’s employer brand, benefits and opportunities.
3. It strengthens a sense of community and identity, and thus works especially well in company intranets. Since permission marketing specializes in non-anonymous volunteers, it can work especially well in building relationships with a company’s management, employees, and staff. In fact, every B2E (brand-to-employee) strategy should include at least one element of permission marketing.

Start using permission marketing in your current campaigns, whether through traditional opt-in communications or new services like Facebook Connect or Google Buzz. You’ll maximize your resources, greatly increasing your rate of return. You’ll also gain new information about your target demographics from their profiles. Most importantly, you’ll cut through the noise of interruption marketing and convey a personalized, anticipated message to a more receptive audience.

Is Social Networking a Waste of Time?

In HRmarketer CEO Mark Willaman's recent post, he raises the concern that the internet and SMM has gotten out of hand, and is a huge drain on productivity.

What he didn't address though, is the growing positive influence social media has (and will continue to have) on all business.

Social networking is brand awareness. The brains behind digital brand awareness these days are called social media marketers, editors, or managers. Bigger companies, like the New York Times, have a whole team of people managing their social networking sites, while others have a single mind working their Tweets. In fact, a recent study from Jobvite revealed that 13% of 1044 responding job seekers got a job through social networking. I would guess that they wouldn't consider their networking a waste of time.

Depending on the size, outreach, brand, demographic, market and direction of the company, each organization will do its social networking a little differently. They find what works best for them. So, instead of blaming social networking for a company or individual's lack in productivity, I would first evaluate the approach they used.

Here are a few tips:
1. Answer the "what": What are you looking to accomplish?
2. How much time and talent will it involve?
3. Is this a good use of time and talent: What else could you be doing?

Let's just say it's not the constant Tweets that are wasting time, it's the strategy behind it that may need to be reevaluated.

Building Your Coporate Social Brand on LInkedin

If you were buried in snow earlier this week you may have missed the big news about Linkedin going public. Already valued at $2.51 billion, the IPO is only looking to raise another $175 million. Actually, this could easily be accomplished if every registered global user (90 million) donated just $2. And it gets cheaper by the minute. Linkedin reports that it gains a new member every second.

Its great news for those companies looking to build brands on the cheap. In November, Linkedin rolled out a suite of new services designed to help companies showcase their products, client and job opportunities and easily enhance their social brand.

Adam Kleinberg, co-founder and CEO at Traction shares the following primer on Mashable! Those of you still too busy shoveling and salting for the DIY methods, feel free to call BRANDEMiX for some support.

The Basics

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The basic features have not changed since previous iterations of LinkedIn Companies. (In fact, if I have one criticism of the new version it’s the utter lack of integration between the new features and old. The new ones all live under one tab.) You can upload a logo, add a paragraph describing your business, list contacts and attach their profiles. There’s a decent chance someone at your company has already done this. Other legacy features include the ability to post job listings.

LinkedIn also automatically displays the profiles of employees and new hires. This can be a great tool for business development pros because they can quickly discover the people with the “right” job titles at companies they are targeting.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn does this by keyword association, so there is a significant degree of inaccuracy in the profiles listed. Of the forty-four “employees” listed for my agency, at least ten are from other companies with similar names. Allowing administrative control over this would be nice.

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Products & Services

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The biggest new feature of LinkedIn Companies is the addition of the Products & Services tab. Your company can list each of its products or services, upload a 100 x 80 pixel icon and description of each, and create a bullet list of attributes. Pretty standard, right?

This is where we begin to have fun and start to build a really powerful marketing tool. The first thing you’ll notice when you visit a souped-up page is the “carousel.” Through a simple admin tool, you can upload three whopping 640 x 220 banners (JPEG, GIF or PNG, no Flash) that rotate on the page and link to specific URLs that you designate. Obviously, these can be landing pages set up to generate leads. You can also go with a softer sell — my agency put up ads driving toward case studies in our website portfolio.

The impact of these is substantial and the fact that LinkedIn allows you to create links that take users away from their website (and advertising revenue) is to be applauded.

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YouTube Videos

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You can now also embed a YouTube video on the Overview page and each of the individual Products & Services pages you create. When done well, video is a powerful tool to convey your message to customers. This is a huge opportunity to engage people in a contextually relevant manner. You can use a different video on every page and embedding them is as simple as copying and pasting a URL from YouTube.

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Recommendations

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Probably the most important new feature is the ability to solicit recommendations from your customers for each of your products or services. This works just like the Recommendations feature does on an individual LinkedIn profile. You’ll want to take the time to edit the default message when asking for an endorsement.

This will soon become a vital reference checkpoint that people use before doing business with your company. According to Forrester Research (in Groundswell), 83% of us say we are at least somewhat influenced by word-of-mouth. While the highly edited “Success Stories” on your website may comprehensively cover the breadth of benefits and messages you want to convey, their impact is no match for a three sentence endorsement attached to the personal profile of an enthusiastic customer.

LinkedIn has elected to give you administrative approval over which testimonials go on your profile. Users are savvy and will recognize this, so don’t think Recommendations can replace actually having good products and services. Google is only a click away.

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Audiences

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This is where LinkedIn Companies gets powerful. LinkedIn allows you to completely customize how you present your products and services to distinct audience segments.

If your ears just perked up, you may work for a company with a diverse customer base or product offering. Or maybe you’re a marketer who knows that creating content that is relevant to your target is essential for provoking engagement, inciting response and maximizing ROI.

Either way, you’re probably realizing that this is not something you’re going to do in one afternoon. You’re going to want to be strategic in your approach and thoughtful about the content you create.

Taking advantage of Audiences may take strategic planning, but it won’t take technical acumen. LinkedIn lets you easily “Create an audience segment,” select its attributes (job title, seniority, company size, industry, location, etc.) with a few clicks and then edit a clone of your base company profile.

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Offers and Campaigns

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Each product or service (for each audience segment) also has a placeholder for a unique offer associated with it. For example, you can easily create an offer for a free white paper or a free coupon for your tasty and delicious consumer packaged good.

Once you’ve got your products and services all set up, you can create targeted Campaigns to drive traffic to your profile. LinkedIn has a self-service tool with simple filtering options to find the right audience. Self-service is a good thing because it means you don’t have to be a big company with a big budget to start generating traffic, leads and revenue.

The system works a lot like Google AdWords. You can create multiple versions of your campaign — up to fifteen of them — to see what works best. You can set a daily budget and a maximum bid for either clicks or CPMs (cost per thousand views). And you can set campaigns to run indefinitely or until a specific date.

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Analytics

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Lastly, it wouldn’t be digital if you couldn’t measure it. LinkedIn has some nice charts that allow you to view your performance in terms of page views, visitors, clicks on various types of content visits by industry and followers.

What I really like is that LinkedIn compares your performance in each of these categories with similar companies, so you have a contextually relevant benchmark. I don’t like that I can’t export any of these charts to Excel or embed them in a dashboard. But hey, a guy can dream, right?

Overall, I think LinkedIn Companies could become as important to brands as websites or Facebook Pages. It’s worth taking the time to do them well to harness the power these new features can provide.

How to Make It Stick

Over the years, while the fundamental principals of marketing have generally remained the same, digital marketing has given us a gift we can use to our advantage.

Unlike print marketing, marketing across Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon, we can actually see our audience. We can get direct and immediate feedback from them. By clicking on their profile, we can tell if they are married, have kids, and where they grew up. Invasion of privacy? Maybe. Effective for marketing? Definitely.

By tracking the words your visitor is searching for and using them, you can increase traffic to your site. Then, wait and observe your audience's behavior, and use that insight in order to maximize marketing techniques.

Trust me, it works. Make them realize your brand has a human and personal feel to it, and connect with them more.

Essentially, the best trick to make it stick is giving your audience what they want to see.