Handling a Crisis, and About Webinars

Posted by John Wall on 11 Apr 2007 at 09:16 pm | Tagged as: Podcast

In this Week’s Marketing Over Coffe: Podcamp NYC wrapup, Dealing with an industry-wide PR Crisis, Podcamp as Email, Using Webinars

Send in your questions or comments - john at themshow.com or financialaidpodcast at gmail.com (please include Marketing Over Coffee in the Subject line).

Direct Mail and Premium Mailings, Giving out CDs at Trade Shows. kunaki.com for making CDs - 4color and jewel case for $1.60ea.

Direct Link to File

Ted Demopoulos

Coffee - I like! listening now and enjoying . . .

john blue

Some show good topics. I have some data for the premium give away topic.

We have participated in two premium give aways programs as part of a customer campaign.

In the first campaign, iPod videos were packaged in custom created boxes with custom loaded visual content and insert print material. The iPods were given away to about 250 people invited to participate in a three day program at a nice warm local south of the boarder.

The marketing goal was to increase / maintain the brand awareness of the customer products with the invited guests.
- Did it work for customer? No way to know. Truffle does not get this data.

Truffle's part was to supply several print insert items to increase awareness of Truffle's SwineCast show.
- Did it work for Truffle? No good way to know. The show's audience levels were increasing already at that time point and no identifiable spikes occurred.
- Was this worth the cost for Truffle? Our costs were about $500 for insert items and 10 hours of time. Low cost and easy to do the experiment.
- Part of the original idea was to have the iPod recipients' contact info be supplied back to Truffle for further campaign actions. This action was not done because the customer decided not to do this for internal reasons.
- End result: interaction with this select group of people was limited, not very traceable. Lesson learned: get solid commitment on follow-up campaign actions, put in some quick capture interaction points outside normal stream of show data collection to tap this specific campaign actions.

In second campaign (currently now in middle of campaign) is a 55 iPod Nano give away (customer is picking up tab on iPods) to select invites. The iPods will be given out by customer sales reps in the course of sales calls.
- Marketing goal of customer is to increase / maintain brand. Truffle goal is to increase audience for specific show in niche market.
- The names of the recipients are known upfront and provided back to Truffle.
- The iPods are branded with custom click wheels (iFrogz).
- the iPod boxes are branded with stickers and print card inserts.
- The iPods are preloaded with audio content plus instructions to plug in ear buds first!
- Truffle follow-up actions include planned email campaign (subscription to show links, sample show links, survey opportunity, etc all traceable).
- Lessons learned to date: managing the logistics of iPod give aways is time consuming and labor intensive. While idea is compelling (who would not want an iPod), it is not clear yet if the recipients will actually plug in ear buds to listen first. The customer brand awareness measures are not well defined. I'll let you know as this moves forward.

Why share this? I think people sit back and say "hey let's give away something" and the detailed, analytic requirements are not fully considered. The only way for people to learn are from resources like this podcast or the expensive route of doing the campaigns themselves. Or, watch The Apprentice :)

julien

guys, i love this show. thanks for the work you put into it (and the love on this episode)!

John

Ted and Julien, thanks for the love. John Blue - interesting stats, it seems like this is the kind of thing to be reserved for Fortune 100 clients...

jwall

Are you going to do some follow up with the second group? You could do some calls - what did you think of the Nano, did you listen to the stuff?

Now that I think of it you could have a secret phrase in the audio program "Hey if you've listened to this call xxx-xxxx and we'll upgrade your headphones (or whatever)".

I'll be interested to hear how it goes...

Parker

Brilliant work on the podcast, boys. Short and sweet, just the way I like my coffee.

jwall

Thanks Parker, you should be interested in tomorrow's too, we got on the subject of social media and politics....
J

john blue

Part two on iPod campaign

This a Fortune 500 company doing the campaign.

We have assembled and shipped out the 55 iPods.
- We still do not have the end iPod recipient lists. Got to be diligent in this!
- The customer received the branded iPod packages. The customer sales force will be delivering these iPods in the next two weeks to end recipients. We will then launch the follow-up of email and US mail.

What is happening is the the customer sales force is now wanting additional branded iPod packages. They are seeing the give away and don't want to leave out any of their favorite customers. Unfortunately, 55 iPods are all we planned to produce and all the customer is willing to pay for:) The sales team will just have to buy unbranded (ok, semi branded with an engraving) iPods.

More in part three.