Carrot Creative Blog

The New York Snowpocalypse couldn’t stop me from getting to Boston to speak at the PRSSA “PR Advanced: Brand Yourself” conference at Boston University this weekend… a canceled bus just meant I had to get the by train, a minor inconvenience for what turned out to be a great event.

Speakers at the PR Advanced event included representatives from JetBlue, the Boston Red Sox, Dunkin’ Donuts, Wholefoods and myself, representing Carrot Creative and my personal brand, Just Creative Design.

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a groundbreaking social media study underwritten by Cisco, spearheaded by one of my mentors, Dr. Neil Hair and sponsored by my Alma Mater,  Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Navarra. The comprehensive global study sought to better understand how consumer-based social media tools effect both interpersonal collaboration within a corporate setting and external communication with key stakeholders.

The direct impact of this study is not only a greater understanding of what sort of best practices have arisen in the advertising/PR industry but also how many firms actually have such policies. It’s fascinating to see how firms of different sizes and specialties leverage either embrace or choose to ignore the power of conversational messaging.

At Carrot Creative, we choose to work with brands we truly believe in, creating the absolute best digital representation of our clients products and of ourselves. Brands need to understand how powerful it is to have these “brand evangelists” reppin’ them (aside from the agency partnerships). More importantly, they need to know how to reach these consumers who can build a more visceral connection to the brand using social media.

One way is the “free stuff” method. You may have noticed the influx of brands offering contests or free samples on Twitter. They’re interacting with people on Twitter to use/engage with their products. Here are some examples:

One of the greatest parts about seeing a Broadway show is the immediate connection that you feel to the cast. Look at how many young fans wait eagerly outside the stage door of their favorite show hoping to catch a glimpse of the leading lady or actor or grab a quick photo and autograph of the Playbill.

I received this email from Johnnie Walker (I’m a member of “The Striding Man Society” that offers some really great events for tastings of the brand-if you get the chance, go!) I get emails from them ever so often about new events or promotions and click on them at leisure to see if anything fun is coming up.  This email today was different. They were letting me know that Johnnie Walker has created a Facebook Fan Page and offered an easy click to become a fan right from the email.

I was lucky enough to be invited to keynote yesterday’s IDI Marketers Forum International Conference at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The conference is intended to provide valuable, up-to-date information from top internationally recognized experts to the direct marketing community. With an experience working mostly in online marketing, one might think that a direct marketing approach needed an entirely new perspective on social media.

But, when you think about it, there’s a basic theme every industry needs to think about when entering this space— just get in it. Get in it now and learn quickly, you’re already behind.

There’s an old saying that “No Press is Bad Press”— I don’t think this is from a PR person because honestly, bad press is a PAIN. It adds additional effort to fixing the problem and long hours of figuring out how to attack the crisis. But, with social media enabling a message to travel far and wide, add comments that are sometimes not moderated, how do we look at bad “press” when it ends up driving awareness?

Whoa. What a game. And while the heart pumping last minutes were getting us here at Carrot Creative screaming at the top of our lungs (well, most of us) we obviously had our two cents to add on the advertisements.

What was really interesting was the amount of times I wondered if people were clicking on the site of the brand right after they ad appeared. I watched the Super Bowl with my MacBook on my lap. A lot of my friends (and many of you) were live tweeting the game from your iPhone or Blackberry. When GoDaddy said go to their site, I did-did you? When Denny’s offered free breakfast, I went-did you? (It crashed—but hey. Good thinking)