The Email Wars

Sure email fosters community and drives traffic, but how can it be used to crowd source creative and content to build out your site? Even your next design, commercial or product have a chance to be grown from a single email drop. (notice I don’t use the word “blast” when I refer to email marketing, as it makes me cringe.) They also used a nice touch of an animated GIF in for the boot (you will need to see the live email and not the image below) to give this email color and life and want me to dig in and participate

We have long used email with campaigns (take a look at Kettle Foods People Choice 4 running as of last week) to drive participation and build buzz. No it is not viral marketing, but the match that can light the fire.

Doc Martens did a good job today in dropping (via one of my favorite shops Summit Projects in Hood River, Oregon) a simple email that is spot on with the See the Campaign Site campaign URL creative. The site is clear, fast, and easy to use and gives you so many options to create your shoe via web tools (and they are SEXY web tools) as well as offline Photoshop templates that you can work on and upload later. The voting engine is the part that stood out to me as we have tried many ways to make voting and rating less cumbersome and not a road block to customer campaign success. I think they nailed it. What do you think?

I am waiting to see what other touches come from this campaign or if it was just a one shot pony.

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We were very excited to work with HBO/Cinemax on a new project for Sin City Diaries that started it’s inaugural run this month. Our partner KickApps brought us to the table to execute a campaign for this new series with just a few weeks to go. We delivered on time and I think, with a stellar social media site.

We have set it up to be it’s own niche social media and contest site and traffic is already climbing daily. We hope to draw some more visibility and viewers into this new series.

Have a look if you need a little Sin today.

That is right folks, only 6 days left till National HIGH FIVE day. Now don’t act like you did not know it, but this is the reason you can justify SLAPPING 5’s all day long throughout the office, at a client meeting, with the damn meter maid leaving you another ticket, your kids, your spouse, heck… just about anyone you see.

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And if they are too far away to cover the distance of the length of 2 arms outstretched, use the site we built last year (and restored to it’s glory last week) to send a HIGH FIVE. With a week’s lead time I say you start sending them today!

It is totally cool. At least you can justify it is cool with a “National Day” right?

Well the votes were cast and the finalists narrowed down for the 2007 American Marketing Association MAX Awards. We are honored to have one of our campaigns up for one of the Awards. It is for the work we did with Kettle Foods and Maxwell PR for the 2007 People Choice Campaign, Passport to Flavor. This has been an ongoing collective effort for 3 years now and this year we really tried to push it past the norm and deliver a full force flash driven campaign site and custom email send to a friend postcards to leverage the viral aspects of the vote. It was nice to have Fast Company write a full page on the campaign this month as well as a featured story on MarketingSherpa.

We will see what comes of it and if nothing else are honored to make the list of finalists.

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I came across this interesting campaign from Brio last week. Seems it has been up for a while. They used it to introduce their new Networking Toys. Really toys for office workers. I am not sure about any of you, but my office is a toy haven. I have found over the years that these little things sprinkled around my office help to drive creativity. Ask any of my co-workers and they can tell you that these type of things keep popping up in my office on a weekly basis.

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Back to Brio… they have a collection of toys centered around the office worker, email, search, video, etc. With a great send to friend feature built in. That is why I actually think that this is relevant to you. Viral email marketing can be a large traffic driver.

Fun ideas, but the flash execution was well done. Just a diversion for you and fellow office workers for today.

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Most of this is common sense, but it is always nice to see it in a chart, and hear others “definitions” of points w/in a campaign.

From a vidcast on http://www.dutchcowboys.nl/

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Content: something that people want to spend time with, and share with others (video game, education, story, etc)

Seeding Angle/ Viral Hook- The teaser to encourage someone to dive into the message

The Seeder: Spreads the marketing material to the desired connection points

Connection point: Areas of distribution to your target market

Initial Spread: To encourage sufficient spread, you have to start “in the middle of the viral pyramid” with as many people as you can. The number of connection points influences this

Viral Levels: Finally the viral aspect has enough umph to do its job.

I read this today wondering what impact this has on the send to a friend implications of many campaigns we see out there. The case below looks as if it was pretty misleading to the user and they then used those S2F email addresses to target with emails that we not “opt in”. Not a good practice in general.

As we have seen lately with the Career Builder Monk E Mail campaign, they send it from the brand “CareerBuilder.com” but the subject line is a dynamically generated one like “Jim Smith as sent you a Monk E Mail”. As long as you are not capturing the email addresses for future targeting and only directing these S2F emails to opt in for the offer you should be follow these best practices guidelines.

What are your thoughts about this and have you used a S2F campaign that is similar to this?

Record Spam Fine by FTC against Jumpstart

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week fined Jumpstart Technologies with a $900,000 civil fine - the largest-ever penalty for violating the CAN-SPAM Act, reports Internet News. The FTC said Jumpstart violated the law by disguising its commercial emails as personal messages: It forged the address in the From line and made it appear as if a friend of the recipient had written the email (it acquired names and email addresses via a promotion). The FTC’s complaint also Jumpstart misled consumers about the terms and conditions of the promotion.

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We are regular contributors on web marketing campaigns for iMediaConnection.com. We get asked to review new campaigns and would like to steer you to these from time to time.

This one focuses on fuse TV and was well done. Read our CEO’s takes.

Hip Humor Reaches Youth
fuse TV targets youth with a website that offers animation, comedy, downloads and music.

My Initial take on this is no. It seems that we are just starting to scratch the surface of understanding what is “viral” and what is media and pr driven events. Just this past week I saw a Carl’s Jr campaign that started to “go viral” and talked to the team behind it. They were actually surprised that it was getting as much attention as it was. Not saying that they weren’t happy, but sometimes you really can’t control what goes viral.

We know that some campaigns we have either done or seen are built with the intent of spreading the word. Humor, animals and sex sell no matter if in email or on TV. (Is there a difference now?)

Take a look at this article and here his take on this issue. My mind tells me that as marketers we have heard the term “viral” too much. How about changing it to well planned media campaings instead. Not as 1999 buzzworthly, but true.