Join us for our next Webinar:

Finding and Choosing Professionals on the Web
(Professional services buyers speak again)

Wednesday, February 17; 2:00–3:00 PM EST

Gather the facts behind executive-level usage of the Internet as a tool to find information and inform choices about professional services providers. This seminar presents Greenfield/Belser’s and The Brand Research Company’s recently completed findings drawn from an online survey of executive-level buyers of accounting, consulting and legal services across the U.S. It covers how, where and what they search for online as they consider firms like yours.

Join Burkey Belser and Sue Stock Allison on February 17th at 2 PM as they share these primary research results and insights about how to adapt your Web site and digital strategies to align with buyer habits. All delivered in a 60-minute Webinar on your own desktop.

You will learn that executive-level buyers are online in droves and…

• Why search engines are critical and which keywords they target
• How online behavior has changed offline habits in the past five years
• Which Internet sources are considered the most important in their searches
• Why the quality of your Web site is critical
• The path buyers take when they reach your site
• How they are using social media, blogs, video and your e-communications
• And more critical information about your buyers online.

Register Now! Reserve your Webinar seat at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/586345346

So I got this mini HD video camera over the holidays, and I’m obsessed. My mind is spinning with ideas for videos as I film clips that I edit later on my desktop. Short movies to post to YouTube and my iPod. Ahh, technology! In this particular video sketch, I decided I would record my walk to work from my apartment in Adams Morgan to my office at Greenfield/Belser near Dupont Circle.

Initially it was a simple experiment in how to actually use the camera. But I found my four-minute walk to work in the morning through a camera lens gave me an entirely new perspective on everything I routinely ignore. Making the familiar fresh is a part of what great design is all about. Not that this even pretends to be great video but what surprised me is that there is actually some suspense in this handheld, very shaky walk. Bottom line: Authentic video that’s personal can match up with high-production video and open inexpensive opportunities for your organization. It can add warmth and personality to an otherwise ordinary corporate day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF6SoGRcNr4

Image Credit: Twentieth Century Fox Corporation

Avatar has been a runaway blockbuster hit of the holiday movie season. Of course it is a film with spectacular visual effects, amazing new technologies and an original story, but we marketers also find it notable for its smart use of social media.

Avatar isn’t the first film to promote itself on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace—far from it. Every movie these days has its own Web site with rich video, Twitter handle, MySpace presence and more. What Avatar did that was unique was use these platforms in ways BETTER than anyone else has and APPLY LEARNINGS from other films.

For example, nearly all films run trailers online—it helps to drive traffic to the site and introduce the content to a broader audience. Avatar, however, did this twice as well: Not only did it roll out three different trailers (including one interactive one), but when fans re-mixed one of its trailers and mashed it up with other movies, the movie house stood by and let the fans have at it. It trusted its fans with the brand and permitted passion to spread and grow.

While service firm sites will never see the kind of adulation and interaction as a movie or consumer brand site, lessons abound for professional services firm CMOs and their events, thought leadership efforts and other promotional efforts:

1. Use your digital presences in concert with one another. Each site/page/link should fit into the larger constellation of the Web presence you currently manage, and you should have a clear strategy for how they play off one another.
2. Even if you are not the first to market in using social media, the opportunity to use it better than anyone else still exists. Professional services firms lag sorely behind in social media use, never mind using it for differentiation. That’s an opportunity.
3. Web 2.0 by definition encourages interaction with your brand. Embrace it. Monitor it, but jump in. Allow—nay, encourage—your employees, clients and prospects to interact with you in the online space, be it through reviews (both good and bad), citations, links, etc. The conversation will happen anyway—you may as well be a part of it.

Lately—well, in the last 20 years or so—we’ve noticed many of the brands we’ve created go astray. All the money, time and effort spent in creating the brand is forgotten, as the brand grows older. Recently—well, in the last year or so—we’ve determined to take a close look at this drift in order to help our clients sustain their brands.

Our entire creative team (strategy and design) sat down to review two or three brands we developed with clients recently. We spread out the creative work in front of us as well as on a nearby monitor. Then, in each case, we promptly disagreed on many details that constituted the “brand.” As the meeting wore on, some light bulbs went on, such as…

Insight #1. Newborn brands share a lot in common with babies.
As brand strategists and designers we believe we know what we have created but, if our brand review was helpful at all, we learned that the only thing we’d created was a baby. We had no fully-formed notion of what the brand would look like when it was six years old, much less a teenager.

Don’t get me wrong. A baby is a miracle but requires lots of care and feeding to help realize its potential. Sure, a brand has your firm’s eyes and complexion, but there’s more unknown than known. So we realized job one is to take lots of pictures. Literally, spread everything out and create a baby album. See what the brand looks like from every conceivable angle. Analyze the font usage, the relative white space, the type of imagery used. Tickle the color palette. Listen to the voice.

And finally, see if it has five toes on each foot. A newborn brand has everything implied in its early shape and form but not every detail has been worked out. For example, imagine the as-yet uncreated small-space charitable ad. How will that future creative application reflect the brand? Your PowerPoint might have the right logo in the corner but does the overall presentation reflect the brand?

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