Old Spice Overkill

Enough with the endless coverage of the Old Spice viral videos.  Marketing is a simple game – you break through the clutter, you build awareness, you make a sale.  Just like baseball is a simple game – you hit the ball, you catch the ball, you throw the ball.

There’s been so much attention given to the success of the campaign, it seems like nobody believed this Internet marketing thing really works.  It does and it’s a solid part of the overall marketing plan.  Just as the description of marketing and baseball above grossly simplify the games, credit should be given to P&G for the overall execution of the Old Spice campaign.  It’s been hard to miss Old Spice lately, whether its online videos, coupons or in-store promotions.  They had an abundance of presence, not a single good tool.  That presence helped break through the clutter and ultimately drive sales.

This is just another example of a well executed marketing plan.  We’re in the midst of relaunching the Huffington Post browser themes.  HuffPost isn’t successful because it rolls out one cool tool for their community.  HuffPost is aggressively building its content, Arianna is everywhere, and they continue to offer community tools like their interactive browser theme.  It’s an ongoing promotional and growth campaign that keeps gathering attention for them.

The same can be seen with The Daily Beast.  It’s another good news site with their own interactive browser theme.  Yet, you’ll also find Tina Brown across the media, whether it’s on Good Morning America or NPR, representing the Daily Beast and its excellent editorial staff.  You can find an example of her brand building for The Daily Beast as well as a list of excellent reads at her Must Reads at NPR.

It’s this hustle on multiple fronts that pays off.  Kudos to the Old Spice marketing team for a big hit.  A nice work across the board to build that success.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: browser theme, business, Daily Beast, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, interactive browser theme, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Old Spice, Tina Brown | No Comments »

Independence Days – July 4th and Otherwise

If you’re a startup or a small business, celebrate your own independence along with that of the U.S.A.’s.  If it helps, do like me and run Brand Thunder’s Independence Day browser theme to help get you in the spirit.

I’ve had a diverse career with a range of companies from big to small.  None of them gave the sense of independence that working for Brand Thunder does.  The difference this time, I think, is that I’m all in.  That doesn’t mean I wasn’t committed or dedicated to my previous jobs, it’s just there’s more riding on this venture from the standpoint of what I can contribute and affect.

Because my efforts can have that direct affect, that leads to the potential of making Brand Thunder work all encompassing as well.  It may be pretty close to that.  There are steady worries and a lot of time trying to work out the current puzzle.  “If I can just solve for this…” is usually how the internal conversation goes.

Yet, there’s never enough time and always more to do.  So, we’re forced to look through a lens that focuses on what’s important and most material.  That lens, however, isn’t just applied to the business.  It’s applied to the personal life as well.  When so much is this important, then all the important things must be considered.  The result has been more and better time spent with the family.

Knowing that the things needing attention the most are getting it is tremendously liberating.  I don’t know if this makes much sense to you, but it does for me.  With the three days this weekend, my time will be split between family, friends, celebrations and Brand Thunder, and I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate independence.  Hope you find your own independence as well.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand thunder, browser theme, Independence Day, july 4, Small business, United States | No Comments »

What Are Your Analytics Telling You?

We announced this week the launch of our interactive browser theme for Sanjeev Kapoor.  We love the fact that he’s a worldwide celebrity chef with an award-winning and record-setting television show.  Even more relevant to us is that this is the first browser theme for one of our top geographic markets.  That point got me thinking about the information about our audience that we look at but don’t monitor as closely as more critical data and what it tells us.

KPI or Just I?

When we look at the traffic to our site and product, there’s a large percentage of it coming from India.  Geography isn’t one of the Key Performance Indicators we track.  (For a good considerations list of KPIs, check out this post by Max Kalehoff.)  Geography is still an indicator of what’s effecting our business.  It’s easily reviewed when we do our occasional exploration of a much broader data set.  Call it an Indicators

The Whole Picture

We’ve all been groomed to look for exit points and keywords that drive traffic, in essence to look at the funnel and see how users are coming into our site and where they leave it.  While we focus on the browser, we’re in the same category of most web sites in determining what’s in the visible space of our user.  We watch monitor resolution of our audience so we know how to optimize the fusion of design, content and functionality featured in our themes.  That includes the width for the theme content and height for the sidebar content.  The trend of browsers going very thin in the chrome will pose interesting design challenges for us, but gives back precious real estate to the web sites.

Data in Aggregate

Having everything laid out in front of you can also help you identify other patterns that might otherwise be missed.  We’re proud of data that shows how users of an interactive browser theme click back to sites more often than their average user — and it can be an exponential difference.  However, putting all the elements side-by-side allowed us to identify an interesting sub-point.  Two commerce placements provided 2.5x the clicks as a single commerce button alone.  That’s a significant difference and great information for our clients to have.

We like finding these little nuggets as we review our data.  What gold do you find when doing your data mining?

Posted in Commentary, News | Tags: browser theme, Data mining, India, Khana Khazana, kpi, Performance indicator, Sanjeev Kapoor | No Comments »

Is Your Web Site “Show Ready”?

I’ve had my home on the market lately and had to live “show ready.”  At a moments notice, the realtor could (and did) call saying “we’ve got a showing scheduled for today.”  The house had to be ready to sell.  Part of the difficulty in these moments is to see the issues with the items we live with every day.

When you’re getting the house ready it’s easy to spot the cracks that need patching, or the paint that needs a fresh coat.  It’s much harder to see what’s part of the everyday that might turn a buyer off, like when I forgot to clean up the yard after my dog.  I got dinged from a buyer on that.

When it comes to your web site, what are the things that get overlooked and your customers might step in?  Here’s a check list of considerations:

• Images – Are the screen shots and imagery you use current?  Are there elements in the images that might work against you.  (I used to work for a major portal and we always made sure our screen shots avoided the story of devastation that was the feature lead.)
• Descriptions – Is the language you’re using still current and accurate?  Are you using terminology that your customer uses?
• Links – Have you clicked through on links, especially after any site redesign or changes?  404 errors and page not found are killers.
• Legal – Is your TOS (Terms of Service) and Privacy Policy up-to-date?  This is another area that should be reviewed after any product or site changes.
• Copyright – Is the copyright current on your web pages?  Seeing a (c) 2005 just looks sloppy.
• Web Browsers – Have you looked at your site in different browsers?  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome.  They each have a large audience, and your standards-based web site should serve them all.  Does it?

Hope your site is “show ready” and it sells!  What are the other easy to miss items to review?

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Browsers, Clients, firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Web browser, Website | No Comments »

World Cup Just One Way to Reach a World Audience

The kick off of the World Cup got me thinking about the marketing opportunity for companies trying to reach a multi-national audience with their product, and my own global expectations for Brand Thunder’s interactive browser themes when we were starting out.

For companies that can afford it, the mega sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup offer a reach not found everyday.  I’m sure it makes sense for the larger companies to maintain their presence.  For smaller companies, we need to think more creatively.

Find Your Extended Sales Force

Brand Thunder leverages a distribution strategy that it began using in the U.S. – working with agencies and organizations that had the new media expertise and the brand relationships to extend the reach of our product.  It’s working well.  Our partner in the UK, KAM Sports International, brought the Scottish Premier League champion Glasgow Rangers into the Brand Thunder client fold.  We’re also about to launch product in Hong Kong through our partner HOTMEDIA, in India through our representative Kevin Jacobs, and are about to announce another large international market partnership.  Is there a sales channel that you can leverage beyond your own?

Leverage Your Product’s Natural Reach

With Firefox being built for the global community, we were prepared to act local for any global opportunity that presented itself at day one.  While we’re making strides in this area as mentioned above, it’s interesting to see that the users are adopting faster than the brands.  Our traffic trends show more than half of users coming from outside the U.S.  We have product categories where U.S. usage is only a third of the user base, and it’s not just in the obvious products like our Euro Football theme.  It’s some of the more general interest themes and it’s interesting to see where and what users find appealing in our gallery of products.  Needless to say, this extended audience wouldn’t be possible if the platform on which we work wasn’t international to begin with.  Is there an international opportunity with your product that you’ve overlooked?

Discover New Distribution Channels

Our clients and their reach to their audience have always been a critical part of our business.  But it’s not been our sole channel to market.  Part of the value add for partners and driver of our growth has been our own distribution efforts.  This includes making sure we’re available on the add-on galleries for the browsers we serve – Addons.Mozilla.org for Firefox and IEAddons.com for Internet Explorer.  We’ve also seen considerable success delivering our browser themes through freeware and shareware download sites.  This is made easier through the use of PAD files.  It has also allowed us to reach users through the sites that serve the product they use (the browser) and the sites that serve their market (download sites across the globe).  Where can you put your product in the hands of new users (more than just an international question)?

None of these suggestions are ground breaking.  However, if we were totally focused on a narrow definition of what our business is and how we do it, any of them could have easily been overlooked.  What are you doing that could easily be extended and expand your market giving you world class appeal at less than World Cup prices?  And what else should we be considering?

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand thunder, browser theme, firefox, Internet Explorer, marketing, World Cup | No Comments »

Stanley Cup Finals and the Maker of Champions

The Breakfast of Champions is the well known slogan of Wheaties, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel, depending on the circles you swing in. Brand Thunder is laying its claim as “the Maker of Champions.” It’s an easy claim when you create your own moniker, and sounds better than reality – “the official new media, affinity marketing tool of the team that wins out.”

Last year, the Stanley Cup Finals pitted the toolbar offering Detroit Redwings with the browser theme supporting Pittsburgh Penguins — and the Penguins prevailed. One W for the browser theme contingent. This year, the technology drama has been left behind as both teams, the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers, are Brand Thunder clients and their fans are avid users of each team’s interactive browser theme. For two consecutive years, Brand Thunder will be a proud partner of the Stanley Cup Champions.

Sure, you can point and say, “well, you’ve not won it all in every sport.” True, but I like our odds. Just look at the past year in sports. One hundred percent of our clients from BCS schools wound up in a BCS Bowl Game (things are looking up for the Duke football team this season!). Brand Thunder clients made it to the NBA finals last year (Orlando Magic) and are contending again this year (Magic and Phoenix Suns). The Superbowl featured a Brand Thunder client (Indianapolis Colts) and the Major League Soccer Champions (Real Salt Lake) are clients as well.

I love pointing out how well our clients are doing. I think it’s great that we’re in such good company. Do I think there’s truth to the claim a Brand Thunder browser theme can make a sports team perform better? To borrow from Bull Durham: “A player on a streak has to respect the streak. If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are!”

Help us respect the streak. If you want to see how Brand Thunder and an interactive browser theme can keep you at the top of your game, give us a shout.

Posted in Commentary, News | Tags: affinity marketing, Breakfast of Champions, browser theme, Chicago Blackhawks, List of Stanley Cup champions, New Media, orlando magic, Philadelphia Flyers, Phoenix Suns, Pittsburgh Penguins | 2 Comments »

Are You a Fan of the Team or the Sport? – Affinity Marketing and Metrics

I’m sure most of us with affinity marketing products look at the fantastic brands, the audience they’ve created and see the power in that connection. And I’m not going to dispute that connection, but intend to elaborate on it.

So much of business is metrics driven. You want to have the necessary reporting in place to run your business, make your daily decisions and adjust your product based on that key data. You’ll find good discussions on key businss metrics from Fred Wilson on Business Insider.

You’ll also have access to more data that may not be necessary on a daily basis, but is useful for a regular high-level look at your business. This gives you the benefit of looking at longer-term trends and correlations across product lines. As an example, I’ve talked about our core product leveraging brand affinity, and in my last post talked about the value of our product extension into topical themes. It’s been interesting looking at the data that compares those versions of our interactive browser themes.

I’ve heard that for the NFL credit cards where football fans can get a card with their favorite team emblazoned on the credit card – in the top 5 of all cards is the straight NFL card (and I think it’s actually in the top 3, but can’t find this data referenced anywhere). That means of the 32 teams in the NFL, the NFL credit card does better than at least 85% of the teams. I would have bet, and lost, that most fans would tend toward their favorite team over the general category of “football.” Instead, the odds are in favor of people choosing the general “NFL” as their preferred logo for their credit card.

We’ve witnessed similar phenomenon with our own product. The success of our more general Football, Baseball or Basketball themes are in line with our most successful sports teams. There are interesting differences, though. Adoption is faster with the teams, but more stable with the category. Stable means we’ll keep a larger percentage of the topical-theme users in the off-season and that base gets built upon with the coming of a new season. I don’t know if that implies fans of the support are more loyal. It could imply that people who align with the team will find their “new” team for the current in-season sport. It does mean that we need a mix of offerings if we want to balance the seasonality effect of our sports team browser themes.

That’s good data to have and one that comes with continuing to review and analyze the data. It’s also helpful because as we look at the product we produce, we can create a product line up that creates steady growth, and lessens volatility.

Are there unique affinity marketing insights you have? Are there business metrics that have shaped your business overtime? We look forward to hearing.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: affinity marketing, browser theme, business metrics, core metrics, Fred Wilson, key metrics, National Football League, NFL | No Comments »

Product Extension for Growing Your Business

The background

To get to the point about product extension, I have to set the groundwork, so bear with me a moment. Brand Thunder’s core business is helping brands talk to their online consumer through our interactive browser themes. It’s an affinity marketing tool where we leverage the powerful connection an audience has to a particular brand.

That connection was vital in helping us solve part of the distribution puzzle. Most online businesses need to drive an audience to your product. If you require the download and installation of software like we do, that’s an additional hurdle. Affinity to a brand can help overcome that.

For any business looking to grow, it considers natural extension to its product lines and for us that direction was to look beyond the brand affinity and see what else fit.

When to Extend

The idea originated when we were analyzing user adoption and the sales cycle. We were seeing great market response from end users with each product launch bringing a spike of new users. There was also great response from our business development efforts as well, but getting an executed agreement always seemed to take longer than a young company would like. Those two were the pain points we were trying to eliminate – shorten the time to market for new releases.

Solving for X

Brand affinity helped build our business, but affinity isn’t related to brands. Since our early success was with sports teams, it made sense to look to more broad offerings in the same category. Naturally, we went for the general fans of baseball, football and basketball. Then we branched into holidays. What both categories did was provide us with themes that had strong following plus a high rate of search and discovery. We knew these topic would be sought out and balance the distribution we were losing from not having a supporting brand.

This decision to create a product extension has been a good one for us, and we continue to build out the offering to this date. This week we just released the Pro Wrestling theme, Golf theme and the recently released Movie Premiere theme. All combine the solid visual elements of our product with the interactive components that keep them engaging over the long term. They are also evergreen in their popularity with their audiences, which gives each a great deal of promise.

These topical themes have been a big win for us. What product extensions have worked for you?

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Affinity, affinity marketing, browser theme, business, Consumer, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Relationship Marketing | No Comments »

The Power of the Connected Community – Ctrl+Alt+Del

The browser theme for Ctrl+Alt+Del went into soft launch this week, but turned into big launch because of the CAD community. As a marketer, I love to see this in action. The connected community illustrates how all the new marketing methods and old methods work together in a cohesive way.

Soft launch typically means Brand Thunder rolls the interactive theme into distribution points where downloads can start to occur in a production environment. This will then be followed by the push on our partner sites and their promotional support.

During the soft launch, we’ll see a steady ramp up of downloads and users. The push on the partner site provides an added lift and we see momentum build as the audience grows. In this case, the avid fan base found the unannounced browser theme. News hit Tim Buckley who made a single tweet and the rush was on. A nice success for a great web comic.

That’s the rapid sharing that can occur in a tight community. It’s important for the key figure, in this case the web comic’s creator, to take the lead in getting the word out. His early and excited comment on Twitter fed the fire to the news that was already starting to buzz.

The continuation of the story is the banner ads that are now running on the site and pointing to the browser theme on cad-comic.com. Community anticipation and awareness is resulting in click-thrus and conversions that will make most marketers envious. Banner ads, which have seen their value plummet over time, still produce especially in an environment where they are used in conjunction with products and services that are part of the community dialogue.

So, the tweets are part of the new marketing methods; the banners I’d consider old marketing methods. They work well because of a well formed community which results from a steady dose of relationship building. Why would web comics be strong in this arena? Because they take the necessary steps to build that community. They share regularly with their community. CAD does this with their regular strip and their more frequent sillies. The authors are known to the community and active in their community. They are real relationships because the comic creators are on the road making time for personal connection. The solid relationships and active community make the mass market promotions more effective because the entire community cares. And caring is the critical component in a powerful community.

Posted in Commentary | No Comments »

Is Acquiring New Customers A Waste of Time?

Last week I was directed to a blog post about the power of having fans of your brand. Teddy Anderson, the author, and I had just met and he mentioned the post and that he’d referenced Brand Thunder in it. How could I not read it?

Some valid points are made about the difference between fans and customers, and why the power is in getting more fans. He even lists resources to help with this. In the brief post, the emphasis is on illustrating why customers are not the goal, but fans are. The point that is alluded to, but not detailed, is that the two are not mutually exclusive.

You should approach your customer development like a baseball farm system. You’ve got your prospecting and recruiting to get new players into the minor leagues, then you move them from single A up to triple A until you can land them in the majors. Not everyone is going to make the jump to the next level, but doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose at the level they attain. Think of your customer acquisition in the same light. Once you’ve made a sale or acquired a new customer, are you done? Not likely. You’re just at the next stage of a growing relationship. It started when the first connection was made with a prospect, it’s grown into a customer relationship and they may yet evolve into fans. They won’t all become fans, but at least the growth potential is there at every stage.

The tools available to companies to encourage that ongoing relationship are plentiful, and that’s the strength of the Internet. As I’ve said in this space before, communication is a key element to building that relationship. And it’s not just open communication, it’s early. You need these customers to feel they’ve got the inside track if they’re ever to move from feeling like a client to feeling like they’re valued.

Yes, Brand Thunder’s browser themes do this, and part of why we’re including the “interactive” moniker with them. This communication potential is also the compelling nature behind Facebook and Twitter, and the fans and followers of brands. Information is powerful, and to give it freely, openly and early (as in making your fans the first to know when news is happening) stands to create a powerful connection.

So, I agree that if you’re only focused on getting customers, you’re missing the boat. You need to look at the entire customer relation process to make sure the methods are in place to make sure the relationship can grow.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: brand thunder, browser theme, Customer Management, Facebook, marketing, Social network, Twitter | No Comments »