Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

The future of advertising isn't just about the latest digital technology. Technology is, after all, just the "how" of a brand's communication strategy. There's an even bigger movement brewing -- brands bent on doing good.

It's not a new concept, but as of late more and more brands are searching for causes and incorporating them into their communications with consumers. In some instances, these causes become the cornerstone of their communications -- as is the case of Pepsi, who this week launches one of the biggest campaigns for social change I've ever seen from a brand.

It's called Refresh Everything, and it works a lot like our Lenovo Name Your Dream Assignment campaign did. Anyone in America can submit an idea for how to have a positive impact on his or her community. Online users vote for your idea and if it's one of the top vote-getters of the month, you can win a grant from Pepsi to put your idea into action.

For Pepsi, this is more than just a campaign to reach new consumers. Lee Clow calls it "a mechanism for young people to create ideas to make things better," that "will ultimately become part of the global behavior of the brand." It's a gutsy move, putting the entire stock of your brand into one campaign for social change.

But it's also the future of advertising. Why? Because consumers don't want brands to be leeches. They want them to be givers. It's so easy now for consumers to publicly talk about (and rail on) brands, they can easily demand goodness from them. And if every brand is doling out goodness to the world except for yours, well, that's a no-brainer decision for a purchaser.

To lose your brand's leech factor, you don't need $20 million in charitable grant money like Pepsi. There are things you can do, big and small, to make the world a better place. If you have no idea what those things could possibly be, ask us. We'll help you figure some out.

I'm usually not a big fan of pseudo-science when it tries to masquerade as the real thing. So, when I heard about the following formula, I was incredulous.

Behavior = f(Person, Environment)

Essentially, what this is saying is that behavior is a function of both people and the environment they work within. Despite the formulaic approach, I appreciate the intent and "succinctness" it brings.

People.
People have instrinsic and extrinsic motivations. These may be supported by your product. The challenge is to marry their goals with your own. Human nature is hard to change; in many ways, you have little or no control over this factor.

Environment.
Environment is your site and the actions it provides. Think of it as the rails on which your users ride. You have control over this through the features you expose and what you allow people to do. These need to match up with the peoples' motivations.

Behavior.
Behavior is the net result of your work. It's what you want people to do on the site. You can only indirectly address this, through the environment.

To use an example, Flickr's environment is one of photo publishing and sharing. The behavior they want to elicit is photo sharing. They guide the behavior by building out an array of things you can do with your images. You can group them by tag, by collection, by set. You can send them to a group, search by location, explore by "interestingness." Flickr demotes the importance of messaging friends, fiddling with your profile and other actions not focused on photo sharing. By directly focusing on a limited set behaviors and supporting only those with robust features, they keep the purpose of the site from becoming dilute.

Takeaway
The takeaway is that encouraging users to behave in a certain way requires acknowledging motivations and selectively building out features to suport. This is common sense to most of us, but sometimes we lose sight of this. Think about this the next time you feel like your site needs to be social, needs a blog, should use Twitter, or whatever the latest techno-fad is.

People judge how smart you are by the questions you ask. That was the assertion of an executive coach I heard at a recent event. I've heard this before, so I started thinking, How do you ask smart questions?

I prompted co-workers and friends for suggestions. I looked through business books. I Googled. I even posted a question on Twitter. I eventually distilled all the answers into six tips:

Do your homework. Before you start asking anything, get as much information as you can in advance. Your questions will be better informed. (I imagine this is how you ask questions that make you look smart.) Plus, if you build your questions from a base of information, you'll come away with more knowledge in the end.

Ask follow-up questions. Even the simplest question 'Why?' can turn deeper insights. Asking for elaboration on an answer, 'Can you say more about that?' provides more clarity and demonstrates that you're listening.

Go to the source. Make sure to ask the right person for the right answer. Knowing who to ask is just as important as knowing what to ask.

Get different perspectives. Most problems are like an elephant. The answer changes depending on your view. While it is important to go straight to the source, it's also helpful to get different points-of-view.

Envision your end state. Before you ask questions, have a clear objective. Frame your focus questions around getting answers that will help you accomplish this goal. You can also use questions to help others envision your goal, What would it take to accomplish this?

Know when enough is enough. There comes a time when you have to go with the information you have. Even the most patient people will tire of questions. Know how to read the signs: fidgeting, a glance at the watch or a click on the Blackberry, and move on.

 

These six tips are just the start. In the spirit of the topic, I'll end this post with a question: Know any good suggestions for asking smart questions?

Who do I love? Duke Corporate Education.
 
You know what I love?  Well, besides diet soda of course, I love the feeling you get seeing a site that you put your heart and soul into finally launch live on the Web.  Dukece.com launched on Wednesday, check it out if you have a minute.  
 
As we all know, working day in and day out on a project can cause one to get buried in the trenches of day to day project management.  Stepping back from the flurry of activity post launch Wednesday night (with a Coke Zero in hand), I consulted the Blueprint to assess where we finally landed compared to where we started this project almost a year ago.  Looking back on this experience, I fully realize not only the worth of pleasing our clients but also the true value in sticking to strategic objectives defined in the discovery phase.  
 
Thanks to everyone who touched this project and to those who make it possible for us to do work that explores the avenues of imaginative navigation techniques.  Each and every one of you deserve an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper.  I’m buying.

"Content is King," according to our >Cord Silverstein,  our Engagement Marketing VP here at Capstrat. “Content and links are the two main players in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That’s it. There’s not even a close third. Sure, a few minor things can be done to help out, but it’s a lost cause if the main players aren’t in the game.”

Content
Search engines want to deliver the best results to their users. So how does Google decide what your site is about? They evaluate pages much like Web users do: by looking at the words in the page title, in the headers, in bold, and mentioned repeatedly throughout the text.  Google calculates "keyword density" to see what your site is about.

Links
Search engines count the number of links pointing to your site to evaluate how credible and popular it is. Only one-way links count -- you can’t swap links with someone else and get credit for it. Best way to get links? Write good content. Once that’s done, you can participate in online forums, blogs, and social media to get the ball rolling. If you’ve done your job well, people will naturally want to link to your site. They will want to share it with their friends. They will bookmark it on StumbleUpon and recommend it on Digg.

So as you're creating your site, don't focus on SEO, but rather focus on creating great content. Keep in mind how Google reads your site, but remember that if your site has something to offer, the rest pretty much follows suit.


Tools:
See what search engines think your site is about:
http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor

See what links Google gives you credit for:
www.google.com   (search for “link:www.YourSite.com”)

This is the first of three articles about Search Engine Optimization. Specifically, I'm hoping to help you talk about SEO with clients. A big thanks to Cord Silverstein, our Senior VP of Engagement Marketing here at Capstrat, for teaching me what I know!

So let’s get started. Here’s a step-by-step guide for creating a site that Google’s search bots will love.

1. Lay out a clear site structure.
Decide what each page is about. As a general rule, search engines give the home page the most weight in search results. Each hierarchical level into the site is given a lesser PageRank, the value by which Google sorts search results.

2. Write down the keywords and key phrases for each page.
Develop a list of three to five keywords or phrases that summarize each page. Look up the top search terms that people use to find your topic (see keyword tools below). Of course, let basic business sense guide you, and remember that your top-level page needs to have broad keywords. For each level into the site, keywords need to get more specific just like the content.

3. Write content for your pages.
Invest in creative, well-written text! Use a keyword density of 7 -11 %. Seven to eleven out of every 100 words of your text should be the keywords you came up with in Step 2. This is how Google determines the main focus of the text. However, overdoing this density will hurt you – it’s considered spamming ("keyword stuffing").

4. Get people to link to your site.
If your content is good, linking generally takes cares of itself. Visitors will automatically want to share it with their friends. However, you can do a few things to help out:
a) Invite visitors to link to you by putting an embed tag on your site.
b) Participate in online forums and blogs and include a link to your site in your posts and comments.
c) Use keywords as your link text. “Visit our Capstrat blog” is better than “Visit our Capstrat blog here”
d) Check the links Google gives you credit for by googling your URL like this: link:www.yourURL.com

5. Be consistent!
When the search engine bot comes to scan your site, it always looks for the pages that it previously indexed. So don't change your site structure unless you absolutely have to! If you have to move pages, put up a "301 Redirect" page pointing to the content's new location. If it's deleted, put up a custom  (404) error page. If Google search results lead users to a non-existent page, your site’s PageRank ratings will drop big time. Plus, you’ll loose credibility with your users.


Keyword Tools:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

SEO Tools:
http://www.seomoz.org/tools

When clients come to our firm for interactive recommendations they generally have a lot of ideas. The interactive world is scary. There are a lot of acronyms. There are nerds that keep information shrouded in secrecy so that you will have to continue to rely on them. Or worse, there are nerds that complicate things by overexplaining things you don’t need to know.

As a result, clients try to get up to speed on current Internet trends or hide behind their IT person. 

The first thing they will try to tackle and understand is the development language. Clients will often agonize over the language used to develop their site, but this is the wrong focus. Technology is going to change. Developers are smart and they will figure out a way to make new technology work with what you have established. If you build a site and continue to pay attention to the backend as well as the front end, you are going to make a long lasting Web site that will have a longer shelf life. If you build a site and don’t touch it again for 18 months, you are going to have to rebuild it the next time you touch it. So why agonize over the language? Trust the experts.

As a client, your focus should be...

The most important thing you can do as a client is decide what function your Web site will perform. Is it a brochure site? Is it an application? Is it core to your company's business?

There are plenty of companies out there that don’t need to create anything more than a brochure site. We don’t all need social networking sites.

The clients that are most successful are focused on the results, not the way we get there.

Instead of blowing all of your money on a redesign and then doing it again 18-48 months later, spend your money wisely. Invest as you go along. Pay attention to your analytics. Find an expert that is going to keep you up on technology without boring you with the details. You don’t care if Django or Python is the best solution, but you do care that users are finding the right information on the site.

This approach is not always applicable to large companies. When your Web site has to fit into a large-scale enterprise solution, it is very important to perform the due-dilligence to ensure the technologies you invest in will be supported later by your in-house technology team.

As an interactive professional for the past 10 years, I have seen a lot of languages and development theories come and go. Don’t agonize about the language, you’ll always be able to find someone to support it. Instead, focus on the content and the user experience.

Marketing is all about relating to humans. One way to truly be a step ahead is to take the budget you have for your redesign, double it and spend the second half on committed maintenance on your site. It will guarantee a longer lifespan and will help you focus on customers- the reason you made the site.

Have you ever watched a Mom try to reason with a toddler in a toy store? That’s the image that came to mind when I heard about the NFL’s attempt to control its online content. From an article in Ad Age.

It’s great that the NFL is capitalizing on its vast storehouse of clips. Armchair quarterbacks, fantasy football enthusiasts and even casual fans ought to enjoy “instant replays” from today and seasons past. But, while ramping up its Web site, the NFL has decided to restrict other sites from featuring NFL clips. This runs counter to the mass democratization of the Web. It remains to be seen whether this approach will be successful.

And, I had to chuckle when I read that the NFL’s legal team is going to police other news and video sites, including YouTube. Like the Mom trying to wrestle control from a 3-year old, I suspect the NFL would be better off with a less rigid approach.