I have decided that every Friday I am going to dedicate this space to my favorite thing that week. It could be a movie, a television show, an ad, a toy, even a person. The options are endless! This week’s favorite thing is the Ad Council’s PSA for Feeding America involving famous actors portraying real-life Americans who have to use food shelves for their families. Watch below as Matt Damon and Taye Diggs show you they aren’t just pretty faces (a … Read More
First of all, I love SlideShare.net. When I’m searching for information, I often find something really cool (aka relevant and recent) on this site. It’s a great place to find out what companies are writing about now.
In preparation for my Winter section of Promotional Communications, I ran across a slideshow from this great Australian branding company, Memery. They call themselves a “conversation agency” because they get people to talk about your brand. Clever!
IT’S A SNOW DAY!!! Brave the Blizzard special from 11am to 4pm. Today, and at all of our restaurants, tell us you like us on facebook and get 50% off!!!
So I skied there for lunch and joined a few other snow shoe fans and cross country skiers. I can’t remember the last time I cross country skied in 2 feet of powder. Quite a workout to say the least.
One of my family’s favorite local activities is the annual meander along Grand Avenue in St. Paul — sipping hot cocoa, visiting reindeer and getting a start on holiday shopping.
As charming as Chapel Hill, North Carolina was, it just didn’t boast a shopping district as energetic and unique as Grand Avenue in St. Paul. Franklin Street in Chapel Hill is home to one of my favorite Pizza restaurants — IP 3 aka Italian Pizzeria III and it does lead to another favorite haunt — the Weaver Street Market lawn. But there are a lot of closed store fronts and the annual events don’t seem to support new business.
On the other hand, Grand Avenue on Saturday was bustling with families and shoppers. We made glittery snowflakes at Creative Kidstuff out of craft sticks and a lot of glue, ogled cakes at Wuollet’s bakery, and munched on cookies at the UPS store. Everywhere we went there were smiling kids and full shopping bags. I don’t think I ever saw Franklin Street so full of shoppers.
I think what makes Grand Avenue so popular is that you can find everything there from practical goods like milk and cheese at Kowalski’s grocery store and new laces at George’s Shoe Repair to the fanciful such as Cafe Latte’s desserts, Irish on Grand’s vast music selection, or performances by the St. Paul City Ballet. I don’t think any local homeowner could go more than a few months (weeks?) without needing something from one of the Frattallone’s Ace Hardware Stores.
Too much, as usual, to write about, so here’s my random list of interesting stuff.
The Jayhawks new website— either it’s new or I missed it. Either way it’s incredible. It is perfectly branded with incredible photos from Steven Cohen to set the mood. I’m also impressed with their current PR campaign of Facebook and recent press in Rolling Stone.
The Minnesota Governor’s Race. Minnesotans believe Emmer should concede. And the Economist bestowed upon us a new season: Recount (to go with Winter and Road Construction, in case you are not from Minnesota).
Web Advertising and internet tracking. While I definitely see the correlation between an internet tracking opt-out and the do-not-call telephone registry, a better parallel is how advertising funds commercial television. Yes, we can purchase cable or satellite television, but at least we have the option of not.
Last night, I went to First Avenue for the Tribute to the Replacements show celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tim. The ‘mats, disbanded in 1991. I saw them a few times growing up and collected all their LPs like most avid Twin City fans. Last night’s show (an annual event) was a lot like the shows I remember – loud, disorderly, and pretty undecipherable.
Actually, the lyrics were pretty clear — no drink induced slurring — and passionate. I just wish I knew who the bands were. They all announced themselves when the took the stage, but the only band I could understand was the Honey Dogs. And I had already recognized Adam Levy, anyway.
The crowd looked a lot like me — people who had been to a lot of shows and now wisely wore ear plugs. Ear plugs are great to protect your ears from pounding base beats emanating 3 feet in front of you, but they make mumbles all the harder to understand.
Being totally out of touch with current bands — I seem to hit a lot of old favorites (the Jayhawks, Semisonic, Trip Shakespeare etc) now that I’m back in town– I thought I was hearing Babes in Toyland, only to discover this morning it was Pink Mink I enjoyed so much.
So what to do? First Ave already does a great job of marketing themselves virtually (Twitter, Facebook, and a super-robust website) and in the club with multiple screens publishing related Twitter feeds (sorry, I keep forgetting to take a photo of that). But the bands? Many have great websites, but that doesn’t help in the Main Room.
UPDATE: Here is the link to the City Pages review if you want to read about how awesome the music was and see the set list!
When I blog, I always include links to things I like. When I read blogs, I almost always click on the embedded links. My pet peeve are links that don’t open to a new page, but instead open in the current page.
In WordPress, my blogging, tool, this is pretty easy to do.
Here’s a step-by-step list of how to insert links:
Write your blog in the “visual” vs. “HTML” mode for ease.
Type in the title of your link just as you would write anything in your blog.
Go back and highlight the text you want for the title.
Click on the “infinity looking symbol” in your blog tool bar. You will then see the following:
Paste into the URL field the web address of your link
Check the box that says “Open link in new window/tab”
Click the “Save Link” blue button at the bottom.
How to edit links so that they open in a new window/tab:
Go to Edit mode from your dashboard for the post
Highlight the link
Once again click on the “infinity looking symbol” in your blog tool bar.
The same window will open up, as above.
Just click on the box that says “Open link in new window/tab”
I’m going to simply reprint the list here because it makes me laugh. I need to laugh. Thanksgiving was freezing. I have to relearn what 9 degrees means when going outside after 4 years down south.
Check it out and add your own:
1. Craig Kilborn, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland, Winona Ryder, and the guy who started Pitchfork all left, so we have the place practically to ourselves.
2. You can hide your neglected, doughy body in comfy clothes for 75% of the year.
20. If you get pulled over in Wisconsin (which really isn’t an “if”), you drive away with the consolation that at least you live in the Twin Cities, thank god.
21. Minneapolis mayor RT Rybak can be seen riding a Nice Ride through the downtown city streets on a summer day.
22. However passive-aggressive Minnesota Nice may be, it remains, nonetheless, passive.
23. Every goddamn band on the planet stops here on their way to Chicago, and you can see them in tiny venues.
24. Recipes that call for Jell-O and mini-marshmallows are filed under “S” for salad.
26. You’re never more than a block and a half away from coffee shops and a healthy array of cafes that don’t actually serve you your food–but still expect tips.
27. Not paying to ride the lightrail.
28. We celebrate May Day with a parade of giant puppets.
29. We have a thriving independent comic book community.
30. Target Field is the nation’s greenest stadium.
31. After 25 years of near extinction, river otters have returned to the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis.
32. There are more than a few people here who are crazy enough to bike all year round, something that will never cease to terrify and amaze us.
Photo: beret claire — It really is the greatest ballpark in the country.
33. We might drive aimlessly like we have nowhere to go in our cars, but biking is another story. Screw that “on your left” business and watch the eff out.
34. Because of a rivarly with Wisconsin, all serial killers stay on their side of the border.
35. Dive bars are more hip than posh bars, and you can get drunk in the middle of the day and use the fact that it’s 30-below-zero as an excuse.
36. We’ve definitely become a foodie town, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find some fancy way to serve you tater tots.
37. You know at least ten people who work at Target or Best Buy, which means job security ain’t no thang.
38. There is no cozier feeling than sipping a hot drink safely inside during a snowstorm.
43. Our state fair is one of the highest attended fairs in the nation.
44. We’ve been to the set of Purple Rain countless times and totally get the Lake Minnetonka reference.
45. 10,000 lakes and at least four are in Minneapolis proper, making urban lake swimming a fundamental human right.
Times change. People move along.
46. St. Paul is the only 9-to-5 metropolis in the nation while Minneapolis stays open late, meaning the Twin Cities is like an awesome giant mullet: Business in the front, party in the back.
47. The Walker Art Center is considered a heavy-hitter nationally on the modern art scene.
48. National music mags recognize that there is/was such a thing as “the Minneapolis sound”.
Any we missed? Let us know below (as you usually do, which is just one more thing we mostly love about Minneapolis/St. Paul: While we’re diplomatic to your face, we’ll definitely give you an earful online).
Today’s INDI 2090 Promotional Communications class discussed how we could reach our “buyers” with news of our social media plan.
Again, this was a hypothetical discussion using our university as the tool to facilitate my students’ mastery of one of their text books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. From a teaching and learning perspective, it’s much easier to apply a new idea to something you already know well. For my students and me, our common knowledge base is St. Catherine University.
But first, I should define what I mean by “buyer.” From a marketing point of view, a buyer is anyone whose problems are solved by your product or service. That problem, in our case, could be anything from just wanting to catch up with your alma mater (alumnae), checking in what’s happening on campus (current students, faculty, and staff), or trying to decide on which college to attend (potential students and their families).
When you try to solve a buyer’s problem, you need to speak like your buyer — use their language, their phrasing, their style. We ran into this last week in class when searching for St. Kate’s in various social media.
The problem is that most people — all of my students, in any case — refer to our school as “St. Kate’s.” Our official name is Saint Catherine University. Our former name is the College of St. Catherine. On June 1, 2009 the school changed names to better ‘reflect its comprehensive nature.’ It makes complete sense to me. However, being known by multiple names to multiple buyers means people seek information differently.
Last week we couldn’t find the Flickr stream because we searched for “St. Kate’s.” This week we had trouble finding the YouTube channel because it’s listed as “StCatherineU.” However, when we searched for St. Kate’s on YouTube, we found some great videos, although many had nothing to do with us. When we searched for “St. Catherine University” having learned with our Flickr error, we found some really interesting videos from random Katies and university departments.
It’s funny. It’s real. It’s unprofessional. It’s about patient safety — another interest of mine. It’s the kind of media that would make someone want to be a nurse and study at St. Kate’s. But it’s nowhere on the official St. Kate’s website (that we could find).
Our discussion today began as a way to get people talking and seeing our (hypothetical) work from last week. How could we use news releases — frequently, with content all our buyers wanted, on our website, and distributed through a newswire service — to tell people what we were doing if our work didn’t naturally go viral?
Our first step was to focus our website for our buyers vs. by categories (athletics, student life, outreach, admissions etc.) Our buyers are probably interested in all those things, but maybe not every part of each category. What if, instead, we had a prominent section labeled “Potential Students?” But, oops that’s probably not the best wording, it’s what a marketing instructor would call current high schools students. We’d be better off asking them what they look for on a website. Or at the very least, we could scout around (secondary research) other college websites to see if they are buyer or category focused.
A site I really like is Duke University’s. It’s photography vs. text heavy. The main picture changes every 2 to 3 seconds. In the large blue box in the bottom right hand corner is the tagline “Watch the videos. Read the stories.” The topic featured in that blue box changes along with the main photo, from things like “Outrageous Ambitions” to “Research Changes Lives.” Click on one of those and you jump to a brief, professional slideshow narrated by a current student obviously passionate about their subject. It’s brilliant–the students tell and show you why they are there.
Another great example of reaching out to “potential students” is Macalester College’s “Life at Mac” section of their website. Like Duke’s, it relies heavily on video and student voices. It’s very current as well, with photos of snowball fights from 3 days ago.
This week, my students will blog about marketing St. Kate’s. I can’t wait to see and hear what they have to say.
Taking a cue from one of my students, Miss Angeleen, I’m just going to make a list of what I’d like to be writing about…
MNSCU’s efforts to reach out to under represented students via a F & F campaign and a new website: Yes You Can from Franke+Fiorella, you can read more about the project on their case studies page. This made me think of the creative work my students did last week in class applying St. Kate’s Mission to reaching students.
My evening class of Promotional Communications had the brilliant of idea of utilizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to link St. Catherine University and the search term “Social Justice” via a social media plan and Google Ad Words.
Sara Kerr 