Ok, how fun is this? I was asked to design a card for Jack Cards, via my “other life” as art blogger, The Jealous Curator. I used one of my mixed media pieces {and then added a pink birthday hat}, and voila, a birthday card! Jack Cards held a contest for people to come up with a message for the inside of the card, and the results were amazing! Here’s the winning message :

“Wanting to feel a little sexier Lorraine decides to forgo her glasses, leaving Bob and Bob Junior to write these birthday wishes.” 

Ha! I love it! This was written by design blogger, Victoria Smith of sfgirlbybay.com. I think it’s a pretty hilarious/weird addition to an already hilarious/weird image. They go on sale today! YAY!

As I’ve mentioned before, a big part of managing a successful social media strategy is being a good host at a very large cocktail party. Your goal is to build an engaged community of people who like to spend part of their day with you, and don’t feel like they’re being sold to all the time. The other big part, though, is realizing that digital has become a key part of today’s marketing, and should aim to drive a conversion with every social interaction.

Of course, this doesn’t mean opening every tweet with BUY NOW! – that’s an easy way to lose all of your followers in no time — it’s a matter of defining all of the conversions that are meaningful to your brand and looking for natural opportunities to work them into your online conversations.

As part of developing a digital strategy, I’ve started to include a social media conversion pyramid like the one above. It’s by no means exhaustive or identical for each brand, but it should give you a good starting point for defining your own. Basically, it says that while every single one of your Facebook posts resulting in your fans buying something sounds awesome, it’s highly unlikely. Of course, as you monitor your channels, you’ll come across those people who are ready to buy (or at least try) and all they need is a direct link. Done! If you’re passing these by — or worse, not even seeing them — you desperately need a new digital strategy!

More importantly, though, what such a pyramid does is capture the simple fact that while not every tweet is going to cause someone’s wallet to open, it can do a lot of good things for your brand — and a good portion of them will get archived and indexed so that many other potential customers can find them. Let me give you a quick example.

In my previous gig, I ran the global online marketing strategy on the Need for Speed franchise at Electronic Arts. As our Facebook base grew to three, four, five million fans, we realized that our posts had the potential to reach a bigger audience than a lot of traditinal ads, and while they continued to engage our community, we should have a reasonable expectation of them to do more for our brand beyond just driving awareness.

And so, we drafted something similar to what you’re seeing above, and started looking differently at the conversations we were having with our community. For example, let’s say that someone was kind enough to hop on Twitter and @mention us to simply say that they liked our latest game. The least we could do is RT them with a “thank you” and follow them back for being a great fan. But if that’s all we did, in most cases the thread would end there. But what if along with the “thank you”, we asked them what their favourite car was in the game they mentioned? If nothing else, their response would be one more tweet with our handle in it. If they did reply with a make and a model, then we could tweet back with a link to the CARS section of our site which had three amazing shots of that car in-game, hopefully resulting in more traffic to our web portal. (Plus, the portal had been designed in such a way that every CARS page had convenient PREV/NEXT navigation to easily let our fans browse through as many models as they wished, driving up pageviews and time-on-site.) But even if that thread didn’t result in a single clickthrough, we had just turned a single tweet into a conversation, making one follower feel more engaged with our brand, and in the process, showing the rest of our community that we’re paying attention and willing to listen.

Granted, a lot of these conversations never got to a sale, but that’s more than understandable. That’s why it’s a conversion pyramid — not a cube. You’re bound to get more comments than commerce, but it all adds up to a larger strategy of your digital channels working harder for your brand. And I’ve found that fans are willing to give you that benefit of the doubt as long as you remember to be a person first, and a salesperson second — especially if they see you as being useful in helping them solve a problem, or easily find something they were already looking for.

Every time I de-Costanza my wallet, I add to the growing pile of loyalty-points cards which I no longer use. Do these programs even work? They probably do, on some level, or else they wouldn’t keep rolling out.

But, membership numbers and point balances aside, I’ve noticed that I tend to stick with companies with a different philosophy. Ones that, rather than chasing unreasonable expectations of loyalty from their customers, instead focus on their own commitment to being loyal to those who buy their stuff. These are companies that:

• Hire people who are passionate about what they do, make good products, and are proud to stand behind their work.
• Do that quaint thing of having pleasant, knowledgeable human beings answer their phones.
• If a customer tweets positively about them, they acknowledge it and follow them back. (This person just recommended you to all of their friends — rumour has it that’s the most effective form of marketing —  the least you can do is click the “follow” button.)
• If a customer tweets negatively about them, one of those pleasant, knowledgeable human beings answers as soon as possible and helps to get the issue resolved. (That complaint / response pairing is about to get archived for eternity.)
• And, if they’re lucky enough for someone to willingly give them their email address, they are considerate enough to send relevant, short messages (not too often) from an address that doesn’t begin with donotreply@. (If it’s OK for you to email me, it’s OK for me to respond. Remember, all that money that you spend on your marketing every year — the ultimate goal is to elicit a reaction.)

That’s pretty much it. I know I’m oversimplifying a bit for emphasis, but what if it was that simple? (Keeping in mind, of course, that simple does not always mean easy :-)

I don’t know if podcasting is dying out — its demise has been predicted for years. GQ used to have a great one, giving the listener a nice deep-dive on each issue with their writers and editors. It slowed down quite a bit in recent years, but it looks like they may be coming back in a monthly incarnation. I’ve also been a big fan of Slate’s podcasts for years (a sanity-saver back in my long-commute days) and they just keep adding to their impressive menu.

My thinking is that whether the medium overall is slowing down or not, it doesn’t really matter. When it comes to building a brand, you don’t need to attract the general public — you simply start with your best fans and grow from there. Podcasting is a unique opportunity to build a closer relationship with your customers as you whisper sweet-nothings in their ears.

Granted, the medium is more art than science and the success of a podcast depends greatly on the right combination of content and personalities. Then again, it’s a relatively low-cost way of creating high-value, easy-to-digest content that your audience can conveniently receive on a regular basis.

A podcast isn’t something that I’d build an entire strategy around, but it’s an excellent way to round out a solid plan. In my last gig, we launched a weekly podcast in which we kept the episodes under twenty minutes, brought in guests as often as possible, and covered a range of approachable content so that it wouldn’t feel like we were always pushing product. We kept at it, and in less than two years, increased listenership by more than 5x, and surpassed one million downloads.

Just came across this little number on my old YouTube account. It’s from when Danielle and I were both working at TAXI, and every year, the agency chose a different theme for their holiday party. This time around, it was a short film festival, and every movie had to have the same title of The Strangest Thing. The entry above didn’t win best-film (damn you Scorsese!!), but anything that rolls credits with Rock You Like A Hurricane is fine by me.

Yes. We must get these little forest critter lamps, from Anthropologie, for our desks. Bunny for he, and squirrel for she.

My recent post about today’s media tools and the incredible marketing power they give to smaller teams and individuals brought up a related thought — the importance of a strategy that, while knowledgeable in the latest and greatest, is built on a solid foundation of the recent and proven.

To be sure, I’m a huge fan of innovations that are launching on practically a daily basis, but in most cases, they all need some time to develop a model, build an audience, and prove that they’re sustainable. While that happens, just think how much you could do for your brand with a smart marketing and content strategy that includes the following:

- a well-designed website/portal with a good CMS and blogging engine
- properly-maintained Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels
- a lightweight CRM solution with a healthy customer database
- and maybe a small weekly podcast thrown in for fun

Combine these with a well-defined brand, and the sky’s the limit!

I recently heard an NPR Fresh Air interview with David Carr, a media columnist at the New York Times, who appeared in last year’s Page One documentary. They covered a bunch of interesting territory, but my favourite part was his answer to whether he felt a bit strange reporting on the slow demise of his own industry.

David said that, to the contrary, he thinks that rather than heading for extinction, journalism is being reinvigorated. He pointed to his backpack and said that with tools for recording audio and video, editing copy and images, instant fact-checking, and global reach, he carries with him more journalistic potential than an entire newsroom did fifty years ago.

I loved his response when it comes to journalism, but it also made me think that it could easily apply to marketing. I wonder what the mad gentlemen of Sterling Cooper would think of such a backpack.

Oh my word.

I have long wanted to do a feature wall with a bold, beautiful wallpaper pattern … and I think this might be the one! This stunning design is part of a collection called Petal Pusher, and was created by Joy Deangdeelert Cho of Oh Joy! {a fabulous design + food + lifestyle blog}. Do you kinda want to get it too? Yes, I knew you would! Pop on over to Hygge & West, and check out all of the color combinations!

Rings. Made of soap … I know!!! So beautiful!

Korean artist Kyeok Kim has created these lovely pieces as part of her Jewellery as Second Skin series. The idea is that as you wash your hands, the ring slowly disappears leaving your hands smelling like a drop of perfume. It is meant to be “… a sensory experience [that becomes] an unconscious ornament”. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would love an unconscious ornament … but these rings are so gorgeous, I might just opt for never washing my hands while wearing them. Not the point, I know, but I just don’t think I could watch them dissolve!