Mar122010
Melea Mauldin
In the advertising, marketing and PR world, there are so many words flying around. There is content for a Web site, content written for ads and advertorials, product write-ups, brand summaries and on and on.
How often do we go back and review completed writing to make sure it’s accomplishes our goals and strategic direction? How many times have you re-read something and thought “this doesn’t even make sense”? Well I have found a few tips on Brian Clark’s (@copyblogger) blog. He has great insight on intentional writing and one of his co-bloggers, Steve Errey, outlines writing with confidence. I think this post is worth reading.
How to Write With Confidence.
What other tips have you found for your writing skills?
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Feb262010
Melea Mauldin
With the recent melodrama on the US Women’s Ski team, I started thinking about competition and drive. It sounds as though everyone expects Vonn and Mancuso to be best friends and sacrifice for one another. Yes, they are teammates, but they are also competitors. They are individually striving for Gold because they know when they go home at night, it’s their medal, not the team’s.
This individual drive needs to bleed into the marketing and PR world. An industry, like a ski team, strives for the greater good, but is also looking out for their own interests. If everyone on the ski team practiced the same techniques and got the same times, no one person would advance, just as competitors in an industry. A little healthy competition can be good for the whole.
For example, Client A and Client M are working in the shoe industry, both striving to make a non-slip tennis shoe. Client A hires a world-famous engineer, and in an effort to keep up, Client M wants the same engineer, the same materials, the same everything. This isn’t going to get either shoe company a breakthrough, just a lot of the same thing in the market place. A company needs to foster a proactive and not reactive mentality by striving to try new things to break that ‘world record’ in the industry. From what I’ve read, Vonn and Mancuso are very different individuals who go about skiing in two very different ways—one learns by the book, while the other has natural skill; one uses commercial endorsements to further her career, while the other relies on excelling her sport; and so on… Yet each lady has medaled this year.
Instead of worrying about competitor initiatives and copycatting, be bold and be proactive. Strive for Gold every time, because someone has to get Silver and you don’t want to be it.
Jan192010
Kipp Bodnar
Karlie comes to us from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, where she led the social media activities for the Department as well as the North Carolina State Fair. She handled public affairs and media relations efforts for the Department, and worked directly with the North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture. Before joining the Department of Agriculture, Karlie was an intern at HM&P — so she may be a familiar face to some of you.
An NC State grad, Karlie will be working on BASF Plant Science, along with the Baseball Factory.
You can Follow Karlie on Twitter: @KarlieJ
Please join me in welcoming Karlie to HM&P!
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Jan132010
Kipp Bodnar
On Monday I had the pleasure to speak at Social Fresh Nashville, a conference focused on educating business professionals on the marketing and communications impacts of social media. I was a panelist on the B2B Social Media panel, which was the first panel of the day (see end of this post for full video of the panel).
Through presentations and hallway conversations at Social Fresh I have come up with three key lessons that I kept hearing throughout the day.
1. Social Media Will Continue To Be Tied To Search – Using a search engine is one of the most common actions on the Internet. Even if consumers are not participating in social networks, it is likely that they are using search engines to discover new information. Jason Falls during the key note panel pointed out this behavior. Social media acts as a key driver of search engine marketing. In the coming years many companies wil be working to determine how search and social can work better together.
2. More Education Is Needed Regarding Web Data – Return on investment was a major issue during the entire day at Social Fresh. It is clear businesses want to know how to invest correctly in social media marketing. However, it was also clear that many marketing and communications professionals need more education when it comes to understanding online data and measurement. Web analytics and other sources of online data are key for determining the ROI of social media. Until more education of online data is done, social media ROI will remain an uncertain issue.
3. E-mail Is Far From Dead – While a few people we talking about future collaboration platforms like Google Wave, it was clear that e-mail is still fully entrenched in daily communication and will continue to be. As mentioned in a presentation at Social Fresh, e-mail is the glue that holds the social web together. A person can’t do anything on the social web without an e-mail address. Try signing up for Twitter or Facebook without an e-mail address, it won’t happen. While social media marketing is a hot topic, e-mail marketing is going to stay a key component of the marketing mix.
While this list could keep going with other lessons from Social Fresh, I will stop for today and save those for future posts.
B2B Social Media Panel Video:
http://www.vimeo.com/8685640
Jan112010
Sarah Findle
The Raleigh City Museum’s “Art of Business” exhibit opened Friday with a reception including live music, food and drinks. The exhibit features commercial art including signage, print collateral, packaging and advertising from some historic Raleigh-based businesses.
Howard Merrell & Partner’s own Senior Art Director, John Moore, the grandson of our agency’s founder, Jack Howard, helped complete the exhibit with several original ad pieces and copy from J.T. Howard Advertising Agency (our agency’s founding name). Early clients included Pine State Creamery, the State of North Carolina and Durham Life Insurance.
Several HM&P employees attended the event and enjoyed learning about our agency’s place in Raleigh’s history.
Jan42010
Stephanie Styons
Need a New Year’s Resolution? How about being a better communicator? Here are Four Essentials that can help:
1. Be Prepared
Your audience needs to know that you:
- Have confidence in your subject
- Know more about the subject than they do
- Have analyzed the audience and are talking in their terms
- Have a purpose for your message – to inform, to entertain or to inspire
2. Make others comfortable
- Maintain your sense of humor
- Focus on empathizing
3. Be Committed
- Know what you are saying, and why you are saying it
- Care about what you are saying and you will say it well
- Control the space – how and where you move and gesture
- Control the time – your rate of speech, length of remarks, pauses and silence
4. Be Interesting
- Use analogies and help your audience remember key points
- Project optimism and enthusiasm; Others will respond to you
Dec162009
Kipp Bodnar
News broke this week that Google, the search giant, is entering the smart phone market with its own device. The phone made by HTC, has the potential to greatly impact mobile marketing in 2010. The phone is poised for wide adoption because it is back by Google, but more importantly is the fact that it is being sold without a contract to be used with the customers choice of carrier. It will also use Google Voice, a VOIP service to make and receive voice call over the web. This means that for Internet and unlimited call users would pay around $30 a month and have no contract.
This price point drastically undercuts current cell phone pricing and could see the phone and its operating system Android reach mainstream adoption. This potentially changes the way many companies and web services view Android. Until now it has been seen as niche player in the mobile software space. With this new device companies may be forced to move up development priorities for Android applications in order to meet consumer demand.
Dec22009
Kipp Bodnar
Time, Inc. is in the process of developing a digital touch screen magazine format. It is clear that the magazine industry understands the need to move to digital and the need for a great experience.
The obvious first questions are will people read them and more importantly pay to read them. Once we get past those questions, it seems like the true opportunities begin. If a digital magazine experience can be created, it will open new opportunity for advertisers to leverage magazine style creative with the analytics provided by the digital medium. Additionally, this would enable magazine ads to become truly interactive and offer new execution options.
Nov242009
Elizabeth Romero
Everyone loves to have the opportunity to hob knob! Well yesterday, several members from Howard, Merrell & Partners’ Public Relations team got to mingle with this week’s Super Star – his name is “Courage” and he will be pardoned by President Obama on the White House lawn this week. This year’s National Thanksgiving Turkey was raised by one of our very own client’s Butterball, LLC in partnership with Goldsboro Milling Company, Inc.
The event, held on the Worley Family Farm, was much fun! Guests included NC Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler and other elected officials and VIPs from Butterball, LLC, Maxwell Farms, LLC/Goldsboro Milling Company and Smithfield Foods, Inc. The Worley family, which raised the bird, were also present and were recognized for their vital role in raising the bird.
All local TV affiliates attended as well as several print and radio, and the team is now busy at work collecting information on the media coverage resulting from the event.
Team members photographed with Courage, include: Claire Howell, Emily Packard and Elizabeth Romero
Nov62009
Kipp Bodnar
Yesterday the second Internet Summit conference was held in Downtown Raleigh. The event brought together about 1200 attendees to listen to local and national speakers discuss social media, online advertising, design, cloud computing as well as other related online topics. The day was filled with a lot of content and discussion, more than could be put into a bog post.
So I wanted to share five facts/takeaways from yesterday’s event that I thought were important.
1. ESPN has more traffic to scoreboards via mobile devices than ESPN.com – Translated that mobile is becoming a critical “screen” for consumer data and advertising.
2. Matt Van Horn from Digg said that FourSquare and GroupOn are two applications that are starting to gain traction – This shows location-based services and crowdsourcing applications have growth potential if executed correctly.
3. Pandora has 9 million users on the iPhone and only 10-15K on the BlackBerry – Blackberry continues to out sell the iPhone, but stats like this show that the user experience is more engaging on the iPhone than on the BlackBerry.
4. Twitter panel: Panel concludes that 2009 was year of Twitter, 2010 will be year of Twitter-like services – This lesson from the Twitter panel shows that APIs and the ability to develop third party applications will continue to drive application adoption and usage.
5. According to the E-commerce panel ” Amazon took Circuit City’s market share more so than Best Buy” – This insight helps to underscore that more retail dollars are shifting to online. Advertising and marketing have to shift online and mobile to help drive support for E-commerce.
