Carrot Blog » Marketing

Get Global

Kathryn Farwell — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:15:24 +0000

Carrot Blog

We all have those moments when we realize, however small the world can seem, that it really is a very big place. And though we are all very similar at the core, how we operate and do business on a daily basis varies drastically.

For me, that moment was in between my freshman and sophomore year in college while studying abroad in Spain. I had just arrived to my host family’s apartment in Madrid, and was anxious to meet them. As it turns out, my family wasn’t so much of a “family” as it was a 75-year-old grandmother named Manuela. When the door opened, I extended my hand out with a big smile on my face to meet her with a proper hand shake. She then proceeded to stare at me with the most confused expression on her face, shook her head, and reached out and embraced me with a huge hug. I quickly learned an important culture lesson: social customs are not always, if ever, universal.

In today’s globalized world you will no doubt find yourself working on an international project. Social media has rapidly expanded to all regions of the world, and if seeing its impact on the Arab Spring isn’t enough, then take a look at the shift in global economies over the next 10 years. China is predicted to be the largest global economy in 2016. There will undoubtably be a global demand for work, and these opportunities shouldn’t be turned down. However, breaking into and succeeding in a foreign market is extremely difficult, and even the most successful international and global companies have failed at times. Here’s some tips on how you can get it right:

Know when to adapt: are you a global, international, transnational, or multinational company? They’re easy to confuse, but knowing the difference between them and knowing where your company falls will set the tone for all business decisions you make. This will help you decide how much to adapt and change your product to the local market. Companies like McDonald’s have used global localization as a means of breaking into a foreign market in a way that says “Hey, we’re here, we understand your culture, and here’s how our product can benefit you”.

A Meatless McDonald’s Menu in India

Utilize Hofstede’s Four Dimensions: This is a really useful tool I use when trying to get a basic grasp of another country’s culture. Invented by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede, it essentially gives you a broad look into how a country’s culture operates by comparing it to one or more countries. And remember, rankings are all relative to which countries you’re using, so just looking at one country’s score won’t do you any good. Let’s break it down:

Power Distance Index (PDI): This basically tells you how a culture perceives and accepts unequal distribution within their society.
Individualism vs. Collectivism (IND): This one is pretty self-explainable, although, it is important to note that this has nothing to do with politics, but instead, the state as a whole.
Quantity of Life vs. Quality of Life (MAS): Cultures that fall in the quantity of life category value competition, monetary success, etc. over the quality of life ideals of modesty and caring.
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI): How comfortable is a society with the unknown? An in depth analysis of this could tell you a lot about their purchasing behavior and adoption rates.

Here’s a graph comparing the countries with the three largest GDP’s. By default, the Hofstede’s site shows five dimensions when you plug in your countries, but the four listed above are the essential ones.

Research local customs: If you want to truly succeed in a foreign country, then you’ll no doubt want to research their local customs and social norms. Kellogg’s failed to do this when they launched Corn Flakes in India. The idea seemed simple enough, but they failed to realize that their eating preferences differed. Indians prefer warm breakfasts over the traditional American breakfast of cereal and milk. Their assumption was ethnocentric and caused them valuable time and money.

Use a human translator: Many brands have made embarrassing mistakes here. Your team has put a lot of thought into developing a concept, and creating the copy. Simply plugging your text into freetranslations.com won’t be doing you or your agency any justice. Often with automated translation, the essence of what you’re trying to convey gets lost in translation. Back translating your text to your native language is always a valuable thing to do. It makes you aware of how ridiculous you can sometimes sound. Read this list of infamously translated slogans and learn from their costly mistakes instead of committing your own. On the other hand, brands like Kit Kat flourished in Japan primarily because the name is similar to the Japanese saying “Kittu Katsu” which means “surely win.” It is now the #1 confectionary brand in Japan with over 19 varieties, in part to its coincidental connection to luck.

But really, knowing your audience, their likes, their dislikes, their preferences isn’t any new marketing concept, is it? These are the core elements of marketing, and the same tools you’re already utilizing. And now that Carrot is global, we will be taking these elements and applying them to all our projects in the Middle East.

Year Of The Programmer

Bob Whitney — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:54:22 +0000

Carrot Blog

San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives

Recently a friend was telling me that the marketing people at his office were often asking the developers for different data sets they needed to conduct their research. It was hard for them to get to those requests quickly though, because the developers were busy as it was. It was what he told me next that really got my attention, however: instead of waiting on the Dev team to solve the problem for them, the marketing team made up for the gap by teaching themselves SQL. How exciting! Imagine the dividends that’s going to pay them and the company. It saves time, and it exposes them to a whole new way of thinking about what they do. It frees them up to explore the data to their hearts content, they spend less time trying to think of what to explore, and more time mining for valuable data.

“Why would I want my marketing people wasting their time on those kinds of problems? That’s what I hire programmers for.”

It’s funny where people make their investments. In many businesses you tend to find very formalized departments. Segregated specialization is one way to keep responsibility organized, and on paper it seems efficient, but if you’ve worked at that kind of place you probably feel otherwise. How many ten-person meetings must you sit in? How many emails do you wait for the right people to reply to? How many requests for work that you are not supposed to do must you send before it gets done? Do you really want your employees thinking about what they do as “my part” and “their part?” Does one hand do anything if it’s always asking the other hand what it’s doing?

The Carrot Way

One thing I’m always really pleasantly surprised about is how many people at the office dabble in, or have an interest in code. I’ve even caught our Director of Client Relations, Kaitlin, doing a tutorial on Ruby Monk after 6pm on a Tuesday night. I don’t really think I should find that surprising, as impressive as it is. This business runs on code, and I work with some really smart people. If anything, it has made me surprised that businesses don’t do more to encourage their employees to learn to code.

There are many reasons I think this is the case. The first is that people tend to have a really consumer software oriented view of programming. You expect people who code to be focused on writing programs that sell, but one of the best things about programming is making annoying tasks easier for yourself. A language like Ruby is a great productivity tool. The ability to automate away simple tasks is not that difficult of a level to achieve, and the knowledge gained in learning to do something like that will most certainly grow into a whole new skill set. Instead of manually updating 100 file names, wouldn’t it be more productive to just write a script to do it automatically, and then use that script the next time? That’s fun and cool! We should think of having this kind of skill more like knowing Excel, and less like a dark art.

A second reason in my opinion is that people have a bit of trouble gauging competency. What people do assume is that anyone who can write code must be a genius. This is a myth propagated by the idea of the valiant hacker who, infused with caffeine and pizza, swoops in to save the day, rescuing the common folks with his or her magnificent brain. Don’t believe it. You’re smart, you can learn to code. Even if you’re not smart- you can learn to code, and what’s more, you can probably find someone to pay you to do it. It’s crazy how high the demand is right now.

Always Be Working Yourself Out Of A Job

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was “always be trying to work yourself out of a job.” The truth is, if you don’t, someone else is going to. It might not be today, but it will be in your lifetime. An entire generation is growing up right now in a world that understands the value of being able to write code. A whole economy is being created around using technology to make us better at what we do. Computers give us a way to redefine the rules of our world, and that’s what makes them so compelling. You can take part in that or not, but it’s not likely that you can avoid it. Stop planning to sneak by, and start learning. Take steps now to gain competitive advantage by equipping yourself for the future that is already upon you.

A number of companies lately have started unique paid internship programs, and a handful of great new tutorial sites like Ruby Monk and Code Academy are popping up. More people are self-taught than you suspect, so don’t feel inferior if you go that route. I think you’ll find getting started easier than you expected, and be pleasantly surprised that your existing experience with computers has equipped you with skills you didn’t even know you had. If you get stuck: Google it, Google it, Google it. It takes some time to get comfortable, but luckily it is only a matter of time, so don’t give up. You can do anything, ignore the haters. Go forth.

Solid Strategy Behind GE’s Instagram Campaign

Nick Perold — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:23:40 +0000

Carrot Blog

GE recently launched their new Instagram campaign #GEInspiresMe… and I love everything about it! I give kudos to any major brand that adopts Instagram, but GE has beaten my expectations by demonstrating a solid understanding of how to structure a rewarding experience on the social platform.

Here’s what works about GE’s approach: the campaign…

legitimately brands crowd sourced content without alienating the audience
rewards participants cyclically for their participation, with multiple stages to the contest
engages the Facebook fan base to judge the content produced on Instagram, creating earned reach

This campaign optimally integrates TV, mobile, user generated content, and Facebook. I’m sure it will be a huge success.

Read The Next Web article here or see other brands that are using Instagram here.

The New Graph

Will Hutson — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:56:59 +0000

Carrot Blog

Last week a contingent from Carrot Creative flew out to San Francisco and attended Facebook’s f8 conference. We laughed when Andy Samberg impersonated Zuck and we cheered when the app we built for The Daily was featured as the first media app released on the new Graph API.

We went into all the breakout sessions and meetings with Facebook as well as conversations with other developers on the platform with the typical questions and concerns. Nearly each person in attendance all had the same answer:

With this recent update, Facebook has given the entire web the ability to become social. Each object, piece of data and destination can be fully connected with the social graph. On the open web Facebook’s reach started with Connect, moved onto the Like button and Comments, and now with the new Open Graph API, they’re taking objects like songs, movies and articles, and creating social stories for your ticker feed by adding verbs such as listen, watch, and read. In doing this, Facebook has laid the foundation to enter their most substantial phase of growth in becoming a platform.

At each phase, they’ve increased their reach, improved the product they’re delivering users, and empowered the developer community. To take this final step however, they’ve got to turn many basic tenets of advertising on its head, moving an entire industry that’s built on buying nouns to hopefully buying verbs.

Newton’s Third law of motion is: (T)o every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

While this may appear nebulous on the surface of this argument, it’s one of the core principles that plays out everyday in advertising:

I show you an advertisement for X and you recall this ad and hopefully one day purchase X when you need something X was created to fulfill.

Social ads managed to take this a step beyond, helping to drive engagement and audience ownership. We’ve gotten lucky because social ads inherently have more variables and more points for engagement than typical ads, and moreover, they’re based on the subject of the ad, being inherently social.

E.g. Your friend X likes page X, you should like it too!

While we all know the root of actions are verbs, what advertising at large hasn’t embraced is the fact that verbs are fundamental to marketing because they create transactions. Outside of the ‘Cost Per Click’ product, modern agency based advertising–in large part–has abandoned the fundamental aspects of conversion or performance based advertising and in doing so abandoned verbs. Carrot Creative believes this is fundamentally wrong.

Why?

Because actions are generally associated with service based companies and modern advertising was born into an industrialized world, where widgets and not services were a highly sought after metric, easy to measure and objectively defined. Widgets are nouns, and within advertising, these nouns represent objects such as CPM’s or impressions and rating points and subscribers. These are the current industry standard and are all highly scalable in their respective industries. However, these scalable ad products can no longer accurately represent the greatest and most accurate value social platforms hold.

This is why we’re fundamentally abandoning traditional forms of media buying and from here forward building our Social Activation platform off of conversion based metrics exclusively.

Facebook’s Updated Insights

William Gruger — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:33:42 +0000

Carrot Blog

Facebook announced a plethora of impressive updates during F8 last month. However, did you know that Facebook also silently rolled out a massive update to their Insights dashboard? This updated dashboard now allows brands to improve their measurement of not just their Facebook Page, but of the social plug-ins on their websites as well.

With the new update, a Page admin that has claimed Insights for a particular domain will be able to collect granular data for that domain’s subsequent sub-domains. Essentially, domain users will now be able to see Facebook demographic information that encapsulates gender, age, country, city, and language breakdowns.

Facebook is now putting a much greater emphasis on actions and objects than ever before. Page admins are able to see impressions in much greater depth — what types of stories triggered those impressions (Like, share, and comment stories) and where those impressions were seen (the Newsfeed, Timeline, or the Ticker).

What’s remarkable about the addition of web page metrics to Facebook Insights is that for the first time, Page admins will be able to gain insights into the life cycle of an object right from the Facebook Dashboard.

In the example above, filters are used to boil down application data into a specific set of actions and objects. Page admins are able to see metrics tied to their complete life cycle, from insights on the particular published action to the way to traffic referrals are caused by those actions.This updated Facebook Insights dashboard will give marketers specific understanding into exactly how their promotion initiatives on Facebook are performing.

(shows breakdown by channel)

Let’s take a sample scenario for example. Client A wants to allocate a budget towards a Facebook campaign; however, they are unsure if that budget should be allocated towards building out an application concept whose goal is to have users generate share stories, or put it towards building a robust and interactive application to be featured in a user’s Timeline. If referral traffic to their website from the Timeline happens to be lower in this case, budget spent on features for other users to interact with on the user’s Timeline probably produce the referral traffic Client A is looking for. This is a simple example of how Facebook’s updated insights will bring brands closer to determining a campaign’s ROI — eliminating the guessing game played by many marketers and brands utilizing applications for campaigns. Rather then saying “our app will drive traffic to your site”, Page owners will actually be able to see how this happens and whether it is from users liking, commenting, or sharing their content. This allows brands to initiate strategy-driven campaigns around a particular user action, an insight that is clear through understanding what type of execution will help them reach their goals.

Insights like this are also extremely valuable for community management. By seeing which type of action draws the largest amount of referral traffic, community managers can better tailor their updates in order to garner more Likes, shares, or comments. With Facebook’s newly added exporting feature, community managers will also be able to figure out what times and days are best to post.

This seems to be just the beginning of what will hopefully be many updates that will improve the robustness of Facebook Insights. Just this week we saw yet another new feature — the “People Talking About” metric — designed to give Page admins an idea of how compelling the content they are posting on their page is based on how much people are talking about it (see the article in Mashable.) With these updates it seems obvious that Facebook has vested a much greater interest in helping brands and companies who market through Facebook to prove the results of their campaigns while understanding the true impact and returns that social media marketing on Facebook can have.

Platlas: the video

Darryl Ohrt — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:00:58 +0000

Carrot Blog

Introducing: Platlas from Carrot Creative on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick look at the people and thinking behind Platlas, the first ever social media platform atlas. Meet the engineers, managers and research analysts that made Platlas for Facebook come to life. And see for yourself exactly what all the fuss about, and how you can use Platlas to better understand the countless interactions and connections that are possible on Facebook.

Social Media’s Unspoken “No Booty Dancing” Policy Still In Effect

Billy Custer — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:32:48 +0000

Carrot Blog

Exhibit A: Current landscape of fan-to-brand interaction on Facebook.

Someone has got to make the first move. If brands and fans are ever going to get down to business, social networking venues need to call off the chaperones and get more booty dance friendly. So much of brand interaction on Facebook revolves around making initial eye contact (getting “Likes”). But then what? And why? Fans say “Yes” to “Do you want to dance?” They’re willing to hold each other at arm’s length and sway back and forth in front of ALL THEIR FRIENDS, but as soon as the song is over, brands let them shyly walk back to the punch bowl, never to take it any further. Well, I’m ready to take it further. I’m ready for this jelly.

What’s been happening the past couple years is once the song starts, brands seem to resort back to one of three dance moves: contests, content or charity. Even with all the talk around social channels connecting people through networks and communities and fan-to-brand interaction, I’ve yet to see brands loosen up and teach me, teach me how to Dougie.

A valid question is to wonder if consumers even WANT to Pop & Lock with brands? Which leads to more questions—do brands even know how to Pop & Lock? Who pops? Who locks?

One good perspective is to approach the Facebook Page like it’s the fans’ page, not the brand’s. Is there an opportunity to foster a community in the same way that forums have been doing for years? Is there an opportunity to let the fans have a small voice in what the brand is doing? Like voting on clothing designs or new menu items? Can you create content WITH them, instead of AT them? I think consumers are willing to justify their social interactions with foot traffic and purchases. Wouldn’t you want to stop in and see the item you helped get on the menu or the design you helped get voted #1?

As of now, Facebook user behavior doesn’t lend itself to going to a brand’s page, interacting with the left side navigation and exploring apps within that page.

Is that because people don’t want to? Or is it because too few brands have offered an experience or utility worth coming back for? Instead, brands seem to offer one short term promo/contest after another that eventually succeed in chasing away the very brand advocates they covet so much.

WHY?!

Facebook is a network that brilliantly connects 500 million people. Yet there’s no smart place for me to efficiently share or find information on a brand’s page. Right now there’s just a wall of linear, soon to disappear shout outs that have no hierarchy or filtering system that allow for me to quickly get the ‘best of’ a conversation or find topics that are helpful or interesting.

Brands that would have the easiest time taking advantage of this would be phone companies, clothing lines, sports teams, or any brand that’s innovating products and could find use in collaborating with or crowdsourcing ideas and content from the people.

Interestingly, one of the best examples of this to date, Skittles’ Mob the Rainbow campaign, doesn’t even have a utilitarian need for it. They just made up a reason to have a community (i.e. send someone to bowling college), and it worked.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m done catching candy at the parade. My dance game is tight. Now it’s time to grab some brands and hit the club.

Comic Con 2010 Recap – Her Universe and Beyond

Mike Pratt — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:29:15 +0000

Carrot Blog

… Another world

I had the privilege of representing Carrot Creative at Comic Con 2010 at the launch of Her Universe (you can read more about Her Universe in this previous writeup). This year’s convention was the largest ever. Floor space was at a premium and I had my credentials checked more frequently than at Terminal A in LaGuardia. Several themes were overwhelmed the convention center (much to the chagrin, no doubt, of Comic Con purists): Big Name Studios, Gaming and more Big Name Studios. Here are a few of my observations and a shameless plug for our ultra-cool client.

Her Universe

A pre-requisite for employment at Carrot is that you must be a Star Wars fanboy/girl to some degree. So, the first thing I did upon entering the convention was head straight to the Star wars “wing”. There’s really no way to describe just how much space Star Wars took up this year – they owned CC2010! A stroke of good fortune had the Her Universe booth right in the middle of it all, the most heavily trafficked area of the entire show. Awesome. Fangirls of all shapes, sizes and ages were lined up grabbing as much girly schwag as they could get their hands on. This will be a spark, for sure, of all sorts of fangirl-inspired, female-focused clothing lines. I caught up with Her Universe creator (and voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: The Clones Wars) Ashley Eckstein:

A testament to the power of the fangirl phenom can be seen in this young lady’s devotion to Ahsoka/Ashley:

Attack of the Monster Studios

While Star Wars was everywhere, new title launches by major studios really dominated buzz generation. Leading the way was TRON: Legacy, the sequel to the awesome original. The line just to get a picture of the epic life-size Light Cycle was absurd. Granted, it was uber-cool. Yes, it was all very sexy and exciting but, to be fair, the major studios so overwhelmed the convention it seemed to detract from the underground feel of the show’s roots. Comic books were literally and figuratively relegated to the corner unless, of course, they were Marvel or DC titles.

Just a Game?

Video games were a constant draw all around the center. They often had the biggest mega-booths (see Red Faction: Armageddon pic) The difference with the game pavilions was an obvious and concerted effort to get fans to explore and (hopefully) endorse the new title. It was almost like a gaming convention with massive console set-ups and contests. It was all very player focused (in contrast to the movie studios which took a more drool-at-us-from-a-distance approach).

Takeaways

The fan’s social graph made an entrance in this year’s Comic Con. I don’t feel it had a big impact yet, as the really clever strategies have yet to be devised. Warner Bros., for example, gave away exclusive schwag bags just to Foursquare check-ins but they ran out fast and it was a short lived phenomenon. Social Media was, therefore, just a tool to get the word out. The next wave of social graph interactive engagement has yet to hit. When it does, you’d better believe Carrot will be ready for it.

@relevance

Maury Postal — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:19:11 +0000

Carrot Blog

In what was first viewed as a breakthrough moment in tech, then almost instantaneously derided as a yawn-fest, Twitter’s Chief Executive Evan Williams, unveiled an unexpected, yet virtually extensible marketing platform @anywhere. A tool aimed squarely at placing the Twitter ecosystem in a more contextual environment—right at the source for most discussion on the Internet—original content sites. Most users on the service were up in arms at the less-than stimulating presentation, however, now that the dust has settled I think it’s time to take a more holistic view of @anywhere’s relevance. At its core it’s more of a robust, contextual, directory service. After all, it’s become nearly impossible to sift through all the noise on Twitter to find the relevant commentary and content most casual users are after. The only relevant method in the past was to stumble upon a breadcrumb somewhere in the social void.

My prediction is that there is much more to come for this type of “ionospheric” implementation of the Twitter platform. Ideally Twitter will become the de-facto standard for sending a “personal” note to anyone, anywhere. Users can easily and actively vet incoming communications in a separate space from their traditional, and practically sacred, inboxes.

@anywhere will push relevant users to the forefront and allow Twitter accounts to become a more mainstream tool for interpersonal communication. Judging by the early screenshots, I’d say the Twitter team is still catering to power-users and not doing enough to make the service accessible to the masses. Case-in-point—to re-tweet, reply, or view a users profile page they seem to only use icons. While this is accepted iconography within the Twitter community, it will not open up the platform to casual observers—an absolute must if they continue to organically grow their user-base.

The bigger-picture implications of @anywhere come in the simple fact that the future of communication will come not from impersonal phone numbers, but from personalized “usernames” that will make exchanging quick messages with friends seem like a world away from the numerical strings that made up the majority of email addresses until the launch of the mainstream version of AOL in the early ‘90s. Instead of limiting ourselves to simple text transactions, I can see the Twitter ecosystem opening up to include a wide-swath of communications options—voice and long-form messaging, along with the short bursts of text we’re currently using it for.

It could become a switchboard for the modern era, nicely sidestepping and/or complementing everything Google has rolled out over the past six months.

As soon as we get our hands on the platform we’ll be able to post a more robust commentary on whether the future value of this tool is in the sheer number of sites its placed within (a potential advertising platform), or whether it serves as a launchpad for future structural changes for the service (communications switchboard).

"PR Advanced: Brand Yourself", PRSSA Conference Wrap-Up

Jacob Cass — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:39:30 +0000

Carrot 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.

Entitled “The Art of Online Self Promotion: Branding, Blogging & Social Media“, my talk gave insight on how to create a strong personal brand identity, how to set up a blog & run it as a self promotional tool and how to build relationships across social media platforms… and then some.

It all turned out a huge success, considering the fact that all of the Carrot Creative business cards & stickers had evaporated by the end of the talk. Student and teacher feedback was also another great indicator, as well as a few more offers to talk elsewhere, including an offer for regular weekly lectures.

A few attendees of the conference wrote about what they learned from me and the conference as a whole. A select few are linked below:

Branding Yourself ‘PR Advanced’ Wrap Up by Ginny Rose
‘PR Advanced’ Conference Wrap Up by Emily Forrest
Branding Myself by Ellie Botelho
Takeaways from PR Advanced 2010 by Emilie Toole

There are also a few pictures up of the PR Advanced event, with more to follow.

The #PRAdvanced hashtag turned into a trending topic on Twitter, which was made possible by the Q&A that was set up via Tweetdeck (such a great idea). There are a lot of great tips to pick up from that stream, so be sure to check it out.

Overall it was an extremely pleasurable experience, supported by awesome event coordination (great job Chelsea n co!), a plethora of talented speakers and most importantly, the extremely passionate students & teachers that gave up a Saturday up to attend. Carrot Creative and myself thank you all for the support.

Oh, and thanks once again for the shiny thank you certificate.