Category Archives: Marketing

My Latest Post on American Banker’s BankThink: Bankers, Pay Attention to Google+

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Google just launched a social sharing platform called Google+.

And it doesn’t suck

And over 10 million people are already using it.

What does it mean for your bank and how it should view Google+ and the social media landscape?

View the full post on American Banker’s BankThink.  Link: http://t.co/6bmOmdG

Google Plus Functions

 

Bradley Leimer manages the online service group for Mechanics Bank in Richmond, Calif. The views expressed here are his own. You can follow him on Twitter and find him on LinkedIn. And now Google+.

If you can’t view the full post, please email me directly at: bleimer@me.com or bradley_leimer@mechanicsbank.com

Adding Social Tools to Your Website

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Adding Social Buttons to Your Website

Social share buttons are simply everywhere on the web these days. It’s almost more shocking to see a site without them, as over 3 million websites have a Facebook Like Button. This has prompted a ‘button war’ of sorts, with Google soon jailbreaking their new search +1 button into the mix of Twitter, LinkedIn, and a few hundred other networks.

But what do these buttons really mean for your site?

Before simply adding social sharing to your site, you will need to ask yourself why you are looking to link your content to social sites in the first place. Is it about traffic generation? Is it an ad revenue play? Are you co-opting your brand and marketing plan by adding to the social graph of your clients and prospects? What is your overall social media strategy? What are you gaining? What’s your ROI? Are you measuring the right things? How will you engage your site visitors? What’s in it for them (or for your business/brand)?

While my company has addressed some of these topics (and like most banks is riding a cautious development approach to adding social channels), even the biggest brands are still learning how to really leverage social content and their faithful band of followers. I recommend that you read some of Charlene Li or Brian Solis’s books on social communities and keep an open mind. If you are in banking, run, do not walk to pick up Bank 2.0 by Brett King because social matters. The bottom line is that your developers will certainly be adding social buttons at some point in the future (if you don’t already have them plastered all over your site already).

You don’t want to end up with a corporate website that looks like a Nascar driver plastered with hundreds of other people’s brands. Since you are not adding social sharing just to give your site social cache among your users, you have to think about how many buttons/share options you will add. Work on defining your site’s audience, pour over analytics and define different segments. Ask your clients what social sites they visit. Ask them if they would share your content and why. Then build on this knowledge using a well targeted plan (we use Forrester’s POST method), and map out a strategy that works for the type of site/business you have.

The links shared below are really about adding content sharing buttons, not follow buttons (while equally important, they may not be driving as much of the traffic to your site). Follow buttons for certain networks should be used above or below the navigation, or as a central part of your site design itself (consistency of location and how interesting/engaging they are matters). Shared content buttons (the ‘Like’ ‘Share’ ‘Link’ ‘Tweet’ should be tied to the unique page level content on each page of your site (as appropriate). Keep it subtle, and consider using graphic alternatives (great options are available as icon sets on iStockPhoto – get more ideas at mashable.com). While I used to prefer using an AddThis or ShareThis button covering a plethora of social media links, I see the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter as demanding a separate button each. After these two, consider adding a LinkedIn button for certain type of relationship business sites (the banking industry seems to be undervaluing the connections made through LinkedIn, so by all means a bank or credit union should be leveraging LinkedIn share/follow buttons).

Adding share/follow links doesn’t have to be painful at all.

Developing a social strategy that works behind the button…well, that’s a different story.

If you are starting to add social share buttons to your website or blog, here are some links of interest that will get you started. These lead you to the official development sites for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and are not meant to be a tutorial (there are plenty of great sites for that) but a launching point for research. You can add social plugins at the by editing your site’s page level HTML or adding social classes to your CSS.

* = links of most interest to getting up and running.

Twitter Development

Twitter’s development area can be improved, but they do offer several pages of code options, as well as easy creation of tweet and follow buttons to add to content pages and CSS. Since they reportedly turned down a Google offer rumored at $10B, they might want to learn from Facebook about how to get everyone and their brother’s website to add a Tweet button. This comes from a Twitter FanBoy – watch for updates to their development site – a lot more on its way as they learn how to further monetize their traffic.

twitter logo

Tweet Button FAQ *
Build Your Own Button (Required for https:/SSL sites) *
Development Home

Facebook

Facebook has a pretty amazing development site (which makes sense, given the scope of their 650M+ base of users and the proliferation of Like buttons across the web and what it means to their ad revenue stream). Here are some of more interesting links.

Development Home

Development Document Home
Guide Books
Like Plugins *
Open Graph References
FB Plugins
Like Plugins
Facebook Activity Links
Facebook Comments
Like Box
Live Stream
FB Recommendations
Developer’s Showcase *
Additional Samples *
Facebook Videos (How To’s)

YouTube

While Google has a good amount of content for developers, they have lot to learn from Facebook and other sites on how to display the material (it seems kind of pieced together over time, with less thought about how to market their social content for developers and marketers). It reminds me of their overall spartan design approach to search and app design – kind of like comparing Apple and FlipBoard to Microsoft.

Here are some links.

Custom Player *
YT API Home
Developer Overview
Developer Protocol
Sample HTML
More on the Custom Player *
iFrame Options
Direct YT/API Call *
Subscriptions/API Call *
Channel Subscription *

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has really upped it’s game this month, with the addition new OAuth and API options for developers. I am really impressed with how they have started to add share and display capabilities to their development community. Some people question LinkedIn’s business strategy. I’m not one of them – if you and your company do not have a strategy for LinkedIn, you are missing out.

Here are the links.

LinkedIn Logo

Developer Home *
Community Plugins
Plugins (with count/sample)
Company Profile Example *
App Sign In
Registering

I have a ‘hunch’ this is an important marketing lesson (my recent post on American Banker’s Bank Think)

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Which way do you prefer your roll of toilet paper to hang? Should the paper roll out from the front of the roll, or should it roll from the back? You might wonder what that has to do with banking, but I bet you thought a few seconds about your preference. That’s the genius behind a New York start-up called Hunch, which bills itself as a way to personalize the Internet by making smart recommendations about what you might like based on a series of questions.

Read the full post at American Banker’s Bank Think

Bradley Leimer is a dedicated senior marketer with experience in brand development, online / offline marketing, database marketing, web development, and online banking / mobile financial applications. You can follow him on Twitter and find him on LinkedIn.

Old Spice doubles sales and teaches marketers some new tricks

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Old Spice Doubles Sales

My recent post about Old Spice and their recent marketing campaign’s lessons for the financial service industry led to some great comments through twitter (thanks!). Over the past month, much of the buzz about the campaign itself came from social channel proponents who, like me, were commenting on the great success of the campaign and its unique blend of social interaction to target a key market (younger generations who may not have normally connected with this ‘old’ brand).

Some of the articles and posts I read over the past month took the view that it is unlikely that the buzz will result in sales. Well, the campaign was pretty successful in selling some old spice. And then some.

Quoting the Wired article (link below), “During the four weeks ending June 13, market research firm SymphonyIRI (cited by Ad Age) found that sales of the product were 106 percent higher than during the same period last year.” Additional sources showed the sales increase ranged from 104-107%.

That’s a lot of Old Spice.

It also provides many lessons for those of us that are using, or plan to use, social channels to create buzz, build relationship, and translate that into some sales.

Some of the things we should note about the campaign:

1. Clever works. Clever is engaging. Clever gets clicks.
2. Pick a good spokesperson for your product or service – this choice was one of genius.
3. Starting off in traditional media and pairing with a (hopefully) viral social campaign can translate into big $$$.
4. Engage. Engage. Engage. Social components need to entice users to react, respond, and click/view.
5. Interact with a large number of influencers and everyday people to start the viral waterfall.

What did you learn from the campaign?

Hats off to Wieden + Kennedy and to the folks at Old Spice. Thanks for reminding us that clever and fun can work, even for ‘older’ brands. W + K

Additional References

Wired Story

Mashable Coverage

Tech Dirt
Google Results

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bradley Leimer is a dedicated senior marketer with experience in brand development, online / offline marketing, database marketing, web development, and online banking / mobile financial applications. Connect / Follow via linkedin.com/in/leimer and twitter.com/leimer (@leimer).

What banks and credit unions can learn from Old Spice

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Something happened to an “old” brand over the past week that banks and credit unions might want to pay attention to. An “old” brand got some new life, and in turn generated more buzz than any financial services advertising campaign in recent memory.

Perhaps even ever.

Photo: YouTube Old Spice Campaign

That’s probably an overstatement, but it certainly got my attention. It also demonstrates how marketing audiences have changed, and reinforces the need for banks and credit unions to continue to creatively adapt their marketing efforts to include integrated social strategies.

Old Spice, a men’s cologne first sold in 1934, and an “old” brand by any means, recently launched a TV ad and integrated social media campaign entitled ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’. While the TV ad was funny and somewhat memorable, it was the online social media component on YouTube that is getting all of the buzz. Old Spice YouTube Channel

The principal of the commercial, Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL receiver, takes the ads theme (that your man could smell like me by wearing Old Spice) to a new level by personally responding to questions from several social media channels posed by people from all walks of life.

The 186 responses addresses questions range from helping Obama win back female voters (asked by political pundit George Stephanopoulos) to a very unique marriage proposal (she said ‘yes’ via twitter).

If you heard the related story on NPR, Old Spice’s creative partner for this campaign, W+K, quickly turned this effort viral by posting all 186 video responses within 48 hours of the kick off (each video took about 7 minutes to film, but probably a full night to write). NPR/Listen

Now imagine your bank or credit union approving creative direction at this pace. While marketing financial services isn’t exactly the same as marketing cologne, just look at the results. The campaigns social component has generated over 25,000 questions/social interactions and now over 40 million views. And it helped Proctor and Gamble breathe new life into the Old Spice brand.

The campaign appears to have reached a key demographic – younger, web savvy, Gen Y and Millenials. This certainly demonstrates one of the distinctions of social media marketing – personalized responses from brands get people clicking and sharing. It also reaches a demographic prize that has often eluded financial brands.

What should the financial services industry learn from this campaign? Even an old brand, or an embattled industry like ours, can generate some positive buzz for younger viewers through some creativity and personal interaction through social media. We need more creativity, more personalization, more social interaction from our financial brands. Since most consumers and businesses (the ‘target’ of our marketing efforts) have several banking relationships, this type of marketing effort stands out. It gets attention.

Will the Old Spice campaign translate to sales? Maybe. It’s sure to cause at least a blip of sales activity, but I would bet they would get a nice bump. Or at the very least it would pay for itself. It may not matter, though, because it got a younger demographic to talk about an old school brand. That’s something many of us have been searching for and that’s a win in my book.

Congrats to the creative group Wieden + Kennedy and to the folks at Old Spice. W + K

Related Posts

Jeremy Griffin’s Love Letter to Old Spice Original Post

Join the BrandChannel Debate

Ryan Wiancko’s Post About the Campaign

Wikipedia Already Updated

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bradley Leimer is a dedicated senior marketer with experience in brand development, online / offline marketing, database marketing, web development, and online banking / mobile financial applications. Connect / Follow via linkedin.com/in/leimer and twitter.com/leimer (@leimer).