Friday, October 30, 2009

Powerful uses of viral video

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a San Diego American Marketing Association event covering businesses using viral video to raise awareness and build their brands. The keynote speaker was Dan Novak, VP Global Marketing, Communications and PR at Qualcomm. Dan was an entertaining and influential advocate of his company’s use of viral video. He was also modest and quick to give his marketing team and agencies credit for the ultra creative work. Dan presented what has become an incredibly successful series of viral videos for Qualcomm that were released around April Fool’s Day for the past two years and just before one of Qualcomm’s biggest industry conferences. The two viral videos proved to be paradigm shifting for what you’d think Qualcomm might produce. Viral videos Handsolo and Convergence break down any preconceived notions of stodginess from a Fortune 500 leader like Qualcomm.


The results of releasing these award-winning viral videos have been tremendous, including:

1) Enormous Industry Buzz – As they say with social media “you don’t communicate to your audience, you communicate through your audience.” These videos passed like wildfire through exactly the stakeholders Qualcomm would like most to reach – all the bright technical people in their ecosystem.

2) Household Name Recognition – These videos were also picked-up by bloggers and trackers of April Fool’s Day videos and extended to a still wider audience who may know little about Qualcomm.

3) Employee Pride – Staffers were able to wallow in the “cool” factor of their company. This was especially true for the Convergence video which used real employees.

4) Recruiting New Talent – Aside from being fun introduction videos any Sales Person would kill to show as an icebreaker, these videos do volumes for Qualcomm efforts to recruit the brightest talent coming out of today’s colleges and universities.

5) Creating Pent-up Demand for the 2010 Video – Awareness has moved to expectation; Qualcomm’s stakeholders are pining to know what kind of video this April will bring.

These and other Qualcomm videos are available on the Qualcomm website “video wall” which is very reminiscent of the brightly lit Qualcomm “Patent Wall” that glows like a beacon at night from their headquarters.



ROI sticklers in the audience wanted to know the revenue payback measures of these viral videos for Qualcomm. Dan responded with statistics surrounding the explosive number of views and visits to their site and even the less specific brand awareness improvements coming from efforts like these and everything else Qualcomm does to support their brand. In the end, it is hard to put a $ value on efforts like these to know if they work. But based upon the positive response of everyone in Qualcomm’s eco-system, Qualcomm executives can rest easy at night knowing their brand is thriving from programs like the viral videos.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Cure JM recognized for fundraising success at the Chicago Marathon http://ping.fm/oBEOz

Friday, October 16, 2009

Persistence and the Payoff

One of my very favorite quotes is from Calvin Coolidge who said...


“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”


Time and again this quote has proven to be so true in my career and personal life. So it is no surprise that last weekend persistence paid off, yet again, in the Hume family. Shari, my beautiful, intelligent and always running (literally) wife, was racing in yet another marathon. It was the Chicago Marathon and she was running for Team Cure JM. This was the second time she ran Chicago for the Cure JM Foundation and it was her 10th marathon to date. Count them, 10! Several years ago (probably around her 4th marathon), Shari decided if she was going to inflict this much pain on her body anyway, then she would try to qualify for the Boston Marathon. For the non-marathoners reading this, the Boston Marathon is the Holy Grail of marathons because to qualify for Boston you have to not only run marathons, but you have to run them FAST. The qualifying times are very challenging and for Shari they were alway elusive. One year, she ran 3 marathons trying to hit the qualifying time needed. In one of those marathons, she missed qualifying for Boston by only 5 minutes! Heartbreaking for all of us, but especially Shari. So at Chicago last weekend she went in as a dark horse; no one expected her to have a good race. She just ran a marathon in January (the Carlsbad Marathon for Cure JM) and spent much of the summer nursing injuries. The longest training run she did for Chicago was 10 miles. So while her body was not up for the task of running the Chicago Marathon, Shari was secretly putting her mind in gear to qualify for Boston. When a doubt arose in her mind that she did not train enough, she squashed the doubt by telling herself “yeah, so by not practicing long training runs, my body has less injuries and more strength.” She also thought of all of the children battling juvenile dermatomyositis and the marathons they battle everyday just leading normal lives.


Through shear mental fortitude and the experience of her 9 previous “training marathons,” Shari crossed the finish line with a whole three minutes to spare toward her Boston Marathon qualifying time. Impressively, Shari finished in the top 25% of the 45,000 runners registered for the Chicago Marathon. Over her past 15 years of marathon running, Shari never took her eyes off the prize and last weekend, she reached this monumental goal. Now she is already talking about her next big goal.


My three boys are very proud their Mom qualifyied for Boston. Equally, I am very proud of her qualifying time, but I’m even more proud of the example she sets for her sons to pursue your dreams and never give up.


Never, never, never give up. - Winston Churchill



Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The New Marketer’s Toolbox – insights from Duct Tape Marketing

In John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing Post from Wed Aug 26, 2009, John gave a list of 16 sites and/or tools to better manage your social media marketing activity and even general productivity. The list included:

Google Alerts
Central Desktop
Google Reader
TweetDeck
Firefox
Flickr
Snapz Pro X

Adium
ScreenFlow Pro
su.pr
Email Center Pro
Jott
SimpleNote
WordPress
Google Analytics
InfusionSoft

I’ve referred so many people to this list via tweets, emails, and (dare I say it) hard copies, that it was time for me to reference it here. For the full article and detailed descriptions of the tools above, go to the Duct Tape Marketing Blog.

Enjoy!

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Location, Location, Location: Google Place Pages: Big Deal You May Have Missed


Location, Location, Location: Google Place Pages: Big Deal You May Have Missed

All small businesses need to capture their physical location on the internet. Sources like Yahoo Directories and Google Maps have allowed business to not only show where they are but to give a little more detail about who they are and why a customer should care.

Now Google Place Pages pulls brick and mortar businesses online whether they like it or not. They now all have a web page which in many cases may be quite simple information, but all the better reason to engage with Google to claim that listing and potentially turn into an AdWords client.

If you have not captured or edited the sites pointing to your location from the web, do it today. Most of these sites are free.