I salute Abbey Klaassen for posting “Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review” on the Ad Age Digital blog. (Here is the link, but you may have to be a registered user to see it).

She writes “for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there’s another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review. The feedback is altering not just how the marketing department works but also how companies design their products and work with suppliers.”

Unlike the often short, haphazard discussions on social networks, product reviews are typically structured and detailed. By tracking and responding to product reviews, positive and negative, companies are gaining accurate market insights and hopping on specific complaints right away.

You don’t need the fanciest new technology to be responsive to customer needs and concerns. Sure, social media tools may extend your reach and make you more agile, but you’re still doing the same old thing: taking care of the customer.

We’ve all heard that, in tough economic times, first look to your own customer base for revenue growth. They already accept your company and your brand, so the sales process is that much simpler.

There is an instructive seven-step process for marketing to your customer base over on the 1to1 Media blog. Sadly, the article is all about outbound marketing – “reach, attract, engage, keep, monitor, direct, supplement, do it again.” The approach is sound but quite one-sided, as is vividly reflected in this unfortunate phrase in the headline: Wallet Share.

I hate the term. It reinforces the public’s worst image of marketers: weasels who try to brainwash consumers into buying something whether they need it or not. Open your wallets, customers, we want more. Thinking and language like this explains why marketers have such a low “credibility share” in the public’s mind.

I wish the article had some balance on the inbound side of the equation. In fact, the second point should be “listen.” Locate or create a forum for customers to gather. Encourage a frank assessment of your products or services. Find out what your customer’s pain points are now. Enlist them to help you build better products or services that make their jobs easier or more rewarding.

When your customers see that you’re talking with them, and not at them, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining attention, loyalty and repeat business.

Last week, the staff at EE Times collected, in their words, “ten gaffes” by electronics firms over the last year. The authors speculate that the mistakes may be the result of the “tough economy increasing the pressure and forcing acts of desperation.” Without all the facts, it’s hard for us armchair CEOs to know what really went down. But three of the gaffes smack of a basic marketing communications blunder.

• Silence in the face of a very public concern surrounding layoffs.
• Hesitant and evolving disclosures about the health of a senior executive.
• Denial of well-founded reports about misrepresentation of credentials.

These three events demonstrate the importance of appropriate transparency. With an army of analysts, bloggers and stockholder advocates permeating the industry, electronics companies and executives must assume that any event with a material impact on corporate reputation or value will come to light. They need to make a prompt, honest disclosure and take control of the story.

Every organization or individual makes mistakes at some point. Proactive disclosure of a negative event combined with a commitment to a remedy is the only productive response. In the first two cases, moreover, there was no clear mistake to admit. It’s difficult to fault any company for having to reduce its workforce these days, and health issues are certainly out of anyone’s control. It’s just as hard to see how evasion was a good long-term strategy.

In the case of the credential flap, the accused executive’s denial only hurt his company’s reputation and stock price. In contrast, the company’s board did the right thing in publicizing its investigation and resulting penalties. Its prompt and informative disclosure demonstrated integrity and started the process of rebuilding public trust.

Want to get insight into where interactive advertising is headed? Check out the Social Media Best Practices from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iAB). These best practices are the product of the iAB’s User-Generated Content & Social Media Committee, over 150 member companies promoting appropriate ways to market using user-generated content on social media.

The best practices reflect the experiences of B2C companies advertising to consumers on popular vehicles like Facebook and MySpace. This type of advertising is likely to migrate to business-oriented social networks, so the best practices are instructive for McBru’s clients and other deep-tech marketers. these companies are already engaging customers and prospects on business and industry networks, but the nascent breed of interactive ads (“social ads,” you may think of them as widgets or apps) represents a whole different animal. The iAB defines a social ad as follows:

“An online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.”

The iAB Best Practices describes three ingredients in a social ad:

1. Content, which is typically tailored to each viewer by drawing on the individual’s profile data.
2. Targeting, which draws upon the individual’s connections (or “social graph”) on the particular advertising platform (i.e. Facebook).
3. Functionality, which is how the social ad allows the individual to add his or her own content and share it with connections.

The use of an individual’s profile data and social graph is what makes these ads so compelling, but also very different from the online advertising deep-tech marketers are familiar with. Advertisers need to consider a number of practices that are more similar to lead nurturing than to advertising:

• Make it clear to the viewer which profile data the ad will use, and how it will be used.
• Allow the viewer to review the personalized ad before it is shown to connections.
• Make it very easy for a viewer and recipient to select or opt out of any part of the social ad’s functionality.

You’ll find more detailed guidelines and some interesting examples in the iAB Social Media Best Practices.  Use them for good background knowledge and planning for the coming wave of high-tech social advertising.

In the spirit of Friday frivolity. I came across this phenomenally frivolous, yet masterful video from YouTube user bd594, via very short list. He has used a variety of old electronics equipment and computer parts to cover Queen’s classic song.

This is the sort of thing we tend to get all geeked out over at McBru (or at least I do). I’m not sure what it is says about the mind of the engineer (or about me that I like it so much). But anyway, enjoy.

One way we “do more with less” for our clients is to execute integrated, cross-media campaigns. In a previous post we discussed the ways that this strategy can broaden the impact of your budget and give your audience more chances to get your message and respond. To be balanced, we want to discuss the challenges to merging media into one campaign, the “gotchas” that lead to subprime results. To get the big boost discussed in our last post, you’ve got to have the skills and sensitivities to get past these obstacles.

Challenges That Obstruct Cross-Media Campaign Results

• Force-fitting concepts into an execution. Some concepts suit a larger format, others don’t. That busy end-user application photo that says so much in your trade show display won’t fit in an email. Sorry.
• Different media can implement different CTAs. This is pretty obvious, but you need to consider and map out your options early, in the strategy document. If you want viewers of your print ad to check out the video on your blog, start the process of getting a short URL today. In fact, consider using that URL in all your pieces for greater recall.
• Greater difficulty in measuring effectiveness of any one tactic.  If you are driving prospects to the same asset, you need to plan your tracking more carefully, making sure you can discern the impact of each tactic. It’s fairly easy, for example, to insert tracking code into your banner ads so you can tell which visitors came from a specific ad and placement.
• Getting all the skills in one team. You’ll need to make sure that your account and creative teams have the experience and skills not just to make each tactic work individually, but also to spot and take advantage of opportunities to make them work together.  Your new social media experts, for example, may stare at your blankly when you want to tie their efforts into a customer reference program.

Do you have any special secret sauce or horror stories to share on this topic? Please leave us a comment.

Do more with less. What marketer isn’t hearing and feeling that these days? Many companies are unwilling to cut media budgets, because they understand the strategic opportunity of remaining visible in the market. So one technique they look to is reusing the creative product developed for one media channel across other channels.

As a full-service shop, we’re very familiar with integrated, cross-media campaigns. They may broaden the impact of your budget and give your audience more chances to get the message and respond. Still, we bristle when we hear “make that print ad into a banner” or “reprint that article as a white paper.” It’s just a little more complicated than that. So to stimulate discussion, we want to explore some pros and cons of pursuing that option. In this first of a two-part post, here are some of the reasons to integrate multiple media into your campaign.

Reasons Why Multiple Media Boost Campaign Efficiency, Reach and Results

• Efficiency of using one creative strategy and input process. Most campaigns start with similar background materials and drive to a clearly defined outcome. An experienced account and creative team can derive multiple tactics, using different media, from that input.
• Lower cost of re-using assets across multiple media. This often works for images and text, but may be more difficult for video, audio or interactive assets. For example, an article that has appeared in a publication can serve as the basis for a white paper: just add more details, industry perspective and diagrams and set the blender on high.
• Lower total media cost. The tech-industry publishers and media channels we work with are happy to put together innovative packages that combine media at an attractive price. It’s rare for any one publisher to have all the tools you’re looking for, so your agency still needs to have the skills to stitch together and track the whole effort.
• More awareness and opportunities for interaction with audience. If you maintain a cohesive message and promise wherever your audience sees your brand, you create more opportunities for them to get the message and respond when and where it is convenient for them.

In the next post, we’ll explore some of the gotchas that hobble cross-media campaigns.

“Life. Give my creation life!”

Who among us hasn’t screamed that sentiment to the heavens? We’ve labored long into the night, fervent in our belief, undaunted by doubters. We’ve launched our Web site, social media campaign, advertising program or lead nurturing effort. Now, show us signs of life!

I was reminded of that feeling as one of our teams described the activity of a blog we manage for a large IT industry client. They had worked for months to develop the strategy, cajole contributors, prepare the site, coordinate all the moving parts and deliver it to the world.

And now, a pulse!

• Traffic has jumped in the last few weeks.
• We have more contributors, and more people interested in posting.
• Even though the comments are few, the ones we’re getting are substantive.
• We’re starting to see important keywords creep up in the search engines.
• We’re able to track how the blog plays with other marketing programs, such as the email newsletter and Web site (and vice versa).

There is still much work ahead of us to raise this toddler to its full potential in the client’s marketing mix. But oh, those first steps on its own are sweet.

Photo: Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”

We only gave you half of the story on banner advertising in February.

In our post “A Banner Time for High-Tech Advertising” we discussed how a dearth of advertisers has created an opportunity for high-tech marketers. With less competition for technologists’ attention, a well-executed ad banner campaign has a better chance for success. We cited an example of a video banner that pulled 15% click-thru as an example of we can achieve these days.

Well, there’s more to it than that. In an article on the B2B Magazine Web site, Sean Callahan elucidates a few more reasons why banner ads are becoming a stronger marketing tool for you:

1. New formats and better targeting. New formats such as the fixed panel, the XXL box and the pushdown improve your opportunities to attract attention from and share more information with potential customers. Could these formats be too intrusive? Well hopefully not, since technology improvements are making it more likely the viewer actually gives a damn about your offer. For example, Google is now beta testing improved behavioral targeting which takes into account an individual’s Internet browsing history – a concept called “interest-based advertising.”
2. Improved tracking and pricing. The B2B article quotes Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester Research, as saying “Two elements working in online display advertising’s favor are that its tracking capabilities have been improved and its pricing made more reasonable.” We’ve certainly found media companies to be more creative these days in the packages they offer our clients. With improvements in reporting, advertisers are also able to modify placements mid-stream and thereby optimize results more precisely.

The final analysis: banners are getting better for your brand awareness and lead generation campaigns.  The article quotes a report by IBM Corp., “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Consumer,” as saying “Participants that previously focused on delivering either ROI-driven marketing or brand-oriented advertising to the market can now cater to both sets of objectives.”

While that study focused on B2C advertising, its conclusion has certainly been for the story for McBru’s clients as well as other high-tech advertisers.

Many social-media marketing evangelists try to hook late adopters by claiming that one-to-many broadcast promotion is dead. What works today, they say, is making personalized, one-to-one connections with people directly. Instead of just talking about yourself, your company and your products, you should try to help others. Your seemingly self-less displays of expertise will attract customers.

Critics claim that, while a few social media marketers take this high road, it’s human nature to aggressively promote one self, whether in a print ad or a Facebook feed.

These critics argue that spending hours on Twitter giving away free advice on mobile-application development may give way to thinly veiled self-promotional communiques like: “Wow, my eyes hurt from sifting through all the blogs talking about our new iPhone app; someone get me a Sephora eye mask! (disclaimer: They’re a client.).”

Sometimes, if you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em. Social media network MySpace appears to be taking a lead in questioning the humanitarian motives behind social media marketing with its latest ad campaign for myAds.

Who’s next?