Weekly Roundup: 6/29/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Social Media
Microsoft to Acquire Yammer—This is a big deal because it signals just how important social media is to the enterprise and corporate America. We use Yammer at Projectline and it has been a great tool for keeping in contact as our company grows globally and as a way to unlock the vast amounts of knowledge our employees have in their heads.

Thinking Outside the Inbox—I loved this article. It shows just how powerful social media and social networking can be, especially in a business sense. It was a pretty gutsy move to stop emailing, but it sounds like it paid off. I think we’ll start to see a trend away from email in the coming years.

Content Strategy
Why Your CEO Doesn’t Care About Content Marketing—This is a good article that explains why some people are still trying to understand what content marketing is all about. I’ll admit that it isn’t the most obvious of marketing strategies, but I think it has a lot of potential.

The Content Marketing Checklist for B2B Marketers—I like this checklist because it gets you thinking about some of the basics behind content marketing. Check it out for a quick read.

Projectline Posts
The Marketing of Caine’s Arcade—I wrote this blog post because I kept thinking about the video that brought Caine’s Arcade to the world. In my opinion, it is a shining example of what content marketing is. If you have thoughts or feedback, I’d love to read it in the comments.

The Marketing of Caine’s Arcade

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Marketing Musings

It’s pretty rare these days that I find something truly original, interesting, or fun on the Internet (sorry, I’m just not a cat pictures guy, never have been and never will be). So I watched with a little bit of skepticism—as I do with all Internet videos—the Caine’s Arcade video that people were recently talking about. Turns out it’s a great video and you should spend the 11 minutes to watch the entire thing.

What struck me a few days after I watched it was just how true the old marketing adage really is: “It doesn’t matter how great your product is, if nobody knows about it.” Without the superbly crafted documentary, more than likely, nobody outside of Smart Parts would ever have known about the arcade.

This is a great example of content marketing. The “marketing” material has intrinsic value that is separate from the “product,” which in this case is the arcade. What if the video had been awful? What if the video was shot on a shaky camera phone with a warthog-like laugh track added by the videographer as he exclaimed: ‘this is freaking awesome?’

If the video had been terrible, I don’t think Caine’s Arcade would have gained the success it has had. It validates the importance of thinking about the value that your marketing efforts are adding. It all has an impact on the success of the product. What if the filmmaker had just posted a text message to his social networks? What if he had some great photos, but no video? What if he had good photos and a crappy video? When you think about the concept of content marketing, you need to consider how your audience interacts with content and what value that content brings to them.

Sure you could say that the success of the Caine’s Arcade video comes from the story and from Caine’s passion for his project. I totally agree. The story is absolutely fantastic. It has tension, dedication, passion, ingenuity, and more. But I still think that, without the help of the documentary, the story would be nothing more than a smart boy and his cardboard fun land in East Los Angeles.

Picture of the Week: 6/25/12

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Marketing Musings, Pic of the Week

Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. We post our favorite picture from each week and share its story here.

10:42 June 20, 2012 - Reusable Mug Contest

Heck yes! Geoffrey Sechter is using his new Projectline reusable coffee cup as part of our Green Team’s challenge to ditch disposables. Only employees who have committed to going without disposable coffee cups for a month get one of these.

The Countdown Continues: Running Toward Tanzania

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Marketing Musings

Just a few short months ago, I received notice that my Projectline International Volunteer Travel Grant proposal had won me the opportunity to travel half way around the globe to a small village in northern Tanzania. Check out the article here. Needless to say, I was a little more than excited (flashback to me jumping up and down).

Since then, I’ve been busy with preparations. Preparing to travel half way around the world takes a bit of work. Gathering information for visas, lining up work permits, sorting out program fees and vaccinations, booking a five-stop-34-hour-one-way airline ticket, lining up a home for my obese feline-companion Rainbow (thanks, Dad!), and oh yeah… literally running like a crazy person to raise money and donations while training for my very first full marathon (yes, that’s 26.2 miles)! At over 400 miles of total training, you could say that these adorable kids at the Tamiha Orphanage have definitely inspired me to keep pushing myself along this whole journey.

With the marathon quickly approaching—this weekend, June 23rd—one journey will come to an end (hopefully with smiles across a finish line) just as another begins (with a trip to the other side of the globe) at the beginning of July! It’s not too late to make an impact yourself! Here are three quick things you can do to impact the lives of these children and women in need:

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The Influence of Social Media on the Sales Process

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Marketing Musings

I recently presented at the International Customer Reference Program Conference in Boston. It was really interesting to speak with the marketers in charge of harnessing the voice of customers to make an impact on their business. Attendees ranged from those who were looking to start a customer engagement program from scratch to those who sought to improve upon and evolve solidly established and successful programs.

My presentation focused on how to plan and package customer evidence in a way that capitalizes on the increasing convergence of social media, search, and content. Turns out I was delivering my presentation just a week after Google’s “Penguin” update, which introduced yet another hurdle for marketers attempting to impact their target audience’s online experience without investing in really great content. So my talk was even more topical than originally expected.

Projecline Services: Nick Martin on Unlocking The Value of Search and Social

Impacting The Right Conversations Means Influencing The Bottom Line
After I got home, I realized something that I wish would have occurred to me BEFORE my presentation: more than anything esle, the audience was interested in how to use social media and search to influence purchase decisions and shorten the sales cycle. This is a common theme across all marketing and especially with social media and digital. The days of putting a smile on your boss’s face by reporting things like impressions, views, visits, and even clicks are behind us. Now, more than ever, marketers have to show a direct link between activity and revenue.

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It’s news: Seattle Business Magazine thinks Projectline is a great place to work.

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News

Projectline has been named one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For by Seattle Business Magazine in the Large Company Category.

Seattle Business Magazine uses thousands of in-depth employee questionnaires and a distinguished panel of judges to form its results and rankings. The criteria include leadership, communications, training, company culture, and benefits, and the rankings are divided into large, medium, small, and nonprofit companies.

“Every day I am amazed by the great team we have here. To have our company recognized this way is an honor, but the real reward is that I get to work with such remarkable people.” – David Jones, COO and Co-Owner

Projectline provides employees with financial support for professional development, myriad opportunities to play and socialize, an intense focus for quality of work, ways to give back to the community, and a leadership mentoring program. But those benefits aren’t what give Projectline its reputation as a highly desired work place—the people who work at Projectline are the main attractor. Employees are also the engine that drives most of the company programs, including the newest offering of international volunteer grants.

“To me, the great people are what make Projectline the best company I’ve ever worked for. I am thankful every day for the incredibly smart, witty, and fun group that I get to spend my time with.” – Malone Eldridge, Marketing Consultant

Projectline is no stranger to awards. In 2011, the company was named one of Washington’s Best Workplaces by the Puget Sound Business Journal. Projectline was also named one of the nation’s top workplaces in Inc. Magazine and Winning Workplaces.

Seattle Business Magazine is a major publication in the Pacific Northwest that identifies and shares key industry developments.

Weekly Roundup: 6/15/12

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Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Customer Engagement
Case Study: Should You Listen to the Customer?—How much should you listen to your customer? What expectations does the customer have after they tell you what they think? Check out this article to see an interesting discussion of these questions. The reader comments also provide some great insights.

Why Companies Think Twice About Building a Customer Community in Facebook—This post examines some of the challenges and pitfalls of customer community building on Facebook. Granted the company that wrote it has their own community software to plug, but I still think it highlights some of the things to consider.

Social Media
Sweden Stands By Twitter Strategy Despite Controversy—Great post from the Wall Street Journal blog. A reminder to be careful in how you choose your social media tactics. This time, instead of a social media gaffe affecting a company or brand, it involves an entire country.

Projectline Posts
Mastering Failure—Norm Bowler, a member of the Projectline BI team, writes about the upside of failing.