Nearly two-thirds of small businesses (66%) are spending more time on social media marketing in 2012 than they did last year, according to a survey from VerticalResponse. – Marketing Professors

Although 66% is majority, it’s not 100%. With that, 66% doesn’t mean that they will even participate effectively. Using this ad from “Visit Newport” I have to wonder why more advertisers don’t go for the long-term ROI. Looking at this, I see a pre-social web style of point of contact. I suppose I may type in the web address on my phone and peruse the site later, but I can imagine the phone call conversion rate for this particular billboard to be pretty low. For me, with consumers carrying social super juice, the push needs to go to their preferred platforms, such as social web. But what is glaringly missing in this ad is the social aspect, the potential for connectivity and community creation.

I firmly believe this ad had every possibility to increase interaction for the brand and it wouldn’t even cost more. In fact, the ROI could have been substantially increased if they are measuring based on an awareness campaign.

To capitalize on the pedestrian traffic an incentive could be used to crowdsource content creation for this DMO (Destination Marketing Organization). Using Instagram photography with a branded hashtag and copy that reads vaguely like: “Take your best pic in front of the lighthouse and tag it on Instagram with #VisitNewport to win a weekend vacation for two,” generates more exposure outside the parameters of the billboard. Also, by increasing the scale of the lighthouse you ensure it’s more like a background to the photographer and life like – more Instagram captivating. It kind of becomes a double whammy when you consider that tiny billboard of the Wyoming landmark, Devils Tower (which happens to be nearly a MILE high). After the ad is executed be sure to track your measurements with Statigram and facilitate conversation to keep the ROI alive. The extra cost is in time, not materials and the technology involved isn’t cutting edge. It’s great!

I firmly believe that we are past the url and phone number stage for ads. Connection is key and if it makes sense, use the connectivity to help empower your brand. Use the connectivity to market later.

Taking your offline traffic online delivers more data for use in future advertising. It also allows brands to connect on a deeper level with the already established customers, your community. When you know that they like, you know what resonates with them. Those who feel like they are understood tend to buy more (insert your product here).

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What Is Strava?

A social fitness tool (which is a HUGE market right now with Nike Fuelband, FitBit and more) community established around times tracked via GPS and shared throughout one’s social networks.

How Could Strava Work as a Social Media Marketing Tool for Bike Shops?

As a local shop, you could easily create a club based around your shop. Make it public and encourage your fans on Facebook or any other social site to join your club. This experiential marketing creates a relationship where the customer feels more important based on the experience. When you create a community based around your shop, a deeper connection is felt. Furthermore, your fans are likely to invite their friends own friends that use Strava into the club, thus building exposure for said shop.

Much how a running shop could use Nike+, bike shops can easily use Strava. Another way to use the fitness app is by encouraging employees to use Strava and connect with area cyclists. This proactive stance on socializing your team and cycling delivers more awareness for your shop, but now also opens up the channels of customer relations. Rather than just keeping your customer relationships based on what happens inside your establishment, you are taking it digital. Where the consumer prefers to interact.

Social media is all about the consumer, marketers can now connect with consumers like never before. By participating on their preferred venue you are saying, we are listening to your preferences, your personal interests. Employees of the shop can participate in King/Queen of the Mountain challenges, segment time trials and more. Anything to establish a healthy dose of competition between the shop and the consumer that supports it.

Shops typically have demo days. Encourage the demo riders to use Strava to compare times with the demo bike versus their old bike. A battle of the bikes in digital land.

My Shop Is Busy and Does Not Have a Marketing Budget

Your shop naturally rides. Every employee makes time to ride, it’s why they have jobs at a bike shop – they live for the sport. Get them tapped into the digital realm. Additionally, Strava is FREE! It just takes a few minutes for an optimized setup, then you are good to go. The biggest expense is the personal dedication – but aren’t your customers worth the investment of better customer service? I’d argue they are.

I really like a couple of these projections so I just wanted to share them with you.

Damn! These things just get my mind dreaming and excited…

What kinds of things would you do with 3D projection? For non-profit/social awareness creative scenarios, please check out my friends over at Grafik Intervention.

This one is for Ralph Lauren London Flagship store…

…and this one is for H&M.

Marketing with Turntable.fm

If I had an event, I would use Turntable as the music to build an experience. I could create a room, and name it, “My Event Room.” I would educate my fans and colleagues in the Turntable ways so that they can join the party via their smartphone. After joining, they could all vie for the opportunity to become one of the five djs.

Controlling the music through phones and allowing everyone the chance to be a dj allows for the event’s music to be crowdsourced and also increases engagement. Business owners come to me all the time asking how they can create engagement and content – this is probably one of coolest ways I can think of. Allowing customers to control the music, while piping it through the event says, we believe in what your interests. Build the experience out by projecting the room onto a wall, create the opportunity for the customers to ask – if they ask and they are intrigued, then it’s possible that tweets with pictures will arise, thus embedding your event into feeds that cause more impressions that can sell tickets the following year. Experiential events are huge – why not put yours at the forefront in your region?

With music being able to create emotion connectivity – your event, business or brand would stand to benefit from putting the music into the customer’s hands, because not only will the audio create connection, but the control creates investment, investment in your client!

Now, you have an event that’s fun, interactive and has music constantly being played not by a paid dj, but by the crowd who are already willing to play their own music – afterall, EVERYONE loves to suggest music that they listen to.

Now Dance.

(Inter)Activate Your Consumers!

People prefer an engaging rewarding experience, look at the popularity of touch devices as well as the apps within the environment – people love to drag birds back and then to allow them to launch into pigs. Interactive experiences are appealing. Creating interactive, motion based apps would be very appealing to users.

Create an interactive experience based on hand gestures and incentives for completing a challenge – it’s for the benefit of your work.

Leap Motion isn’t the only one, Kinesis.io, too, does similar stuff – but Kinect finds interactive advertising so worthy that it debuted interactive commercials called NuAds. However, so far the sneak peak featuring Toyota leaves something to be desired as all it did was allow the user to swap out commercials based on the vehicle. In my opinion, that’s not interactive advertising, it’s interruptive advertising that changes – I can get the same solution through Hulu. In fact, I could get the same boring, non-connecting experience in 1977 – I would switch the channel. As a consumer, if you want my engagement, I need to something something very compelling, something fun!

A Community Full of Fun

If your digital community is thriving and they know you are building product for them to interact with – the sharing will inevitably happen. But tapping into someones social graph and creating an experience where multiple users/consumers can invite a friend/friends from their network extends your brands multiplier effect. Rooms where we can play virtual foursquare helps strengthen Foursquare’s name, racing against friends in a silly Mini Cooper, Mariokart-esque type game creates competition, or working together to achieve success via responsive environments in another part of your respective city. Create the interaction to promote the fun.

Motion Based Fun?

I don’t think the fun in this really needs to be the metaphorical dead horse – the entire concept of building apps and tech product that gets your consumers dancing, laughing, swiping and kicking is just that, fun. Now go create some fun in the world – after all, it’s about time someone does.

Uniqlo Truly is Unique

Unfortunately, more awesome businesses (big, small, regional or global) could all be doing this type of interactive marketing, but they won’t. The truth is, chances are your business will never be as unique, or creative, as this. For some reason (probably passed down), most decision makers do not think this way – creative thought is not analytical enough for most, there’s not enough “ROI.” Understandably, people want to know where money is going and why it’s shifting through the hands of this guy and that woman. But here we have Uniqlo saying something to the tune of: “Who gives a shit about the ROI – let’s shoot for ROE (Return on Engagement) and create something the users actually want to use.” Uniqlo, and other companies like them, get it, people don’t take bullshit interruptive advertising to bed with them – unless you consider that Victoria’s Secret ad tucked away in the teen boy’s room as engagement.

The Play

Getting people to interact with your business or brand is terribly difficult these days – excuse, it’s terribly difficult when you refuse to create a collaborative, playful marketing product. It is unfortunate that 99% of the people calling the shots do not have the insight that Uniqlo has. Most would ask “Why on earth would a clothier create an alarm app?” To you, I respond – “Why wouldn’t you?”

I have a saying, “The MFA is the new MBA” and this is because I truly believe that creativity is going to change the world. No longer will brands and businesses annoy people, but will deliver something engaging – something childlike and whimsical. Enjoy the play!

According to Stuart L. Brown, M.D., founder of the National Institute for Play, humans need to play at all ages. And as more people see the power of creativity in the adult world, we are realizing that our future depends upon play — or, as Brown calls it, “our greatest natural resource.”  (Huffington Post – Adults Just Want to Play)

Yesterday, I read a blog post by Evan Bailyn aptly titled: Adults Just Want to Play. In this article it talks about the inspiration drawn from the very viral, Caine’s Arcade – a true story about a boy and a dream and the art of play. Evan talks more about how we, as adults, have sectioned off the idea of play because we act as though it has no place in the day to day world of the adult. Evan is correct – in every way imaginable.

It’s Time For Play

In advertising we buy our own bullshit. In that, I mean we definitely take ourselves way too serious. It’s time to introduce the play. In fact, from the ages of 0 through 12 most of our learning is through playful actions. Our development is built through the process of play thus encouraging learning – like the eyes on an infant’s toys. Have you ever noticed how large they are? This is because a child at that age has very little depth perception or the ability to notice details. However, with large black and white eyes (essentially two circles) the child is able to learn eye contact and focus. Which he/she can use in greater detail when it comes to interacting with trusted individuals like mom and dad. However, we as creatives don’t seem to tap into this ability to create engagement through playful interaction. How many interactive experiences do we come across? Now how much interruptive advertising do we encounter? That’s my point. The current model is based on the principles of disruption rather that stimulation. Business to consumer (B2C) doesn’t have to evoke angst – but instead, can encourage fun, joy and happiness leading to connectivity with the brand.

These connections can stimulate a genuine feeling – doing research on affluent groups the other day I came across data suggesting that this particular demographic follows their favorite brands on the web, not for a discount, but due to a true appreciation/desire for the the company. They are highly engaged and tuned into their favorite companies. Through play (interaction) we create stimulation which leads to tuning in and successfully creates more engagement.

Not completely independent, sometimes the control channel can influence the sensation channel. A person can listen intently to a distant conversation or track a moving object with their eyes. Likewise, a person can try to ignore a pain, avert their eyes, or shut out an annoying sound. We model all control of this sort as “tuning” in or out an eventuality of the world, enabling or preventing it from stimulating the body. To correctly notate the causal predicates of enable and prevent within a first-order framework, it is necessary to reify the eventuality of the stimulation, the tuning in, and the tuning out. Here we adopt the style of ontological promiscuity proposed by Hobbs (1985), creating new primed predicates (stimulate’, tuneIn’, tuneOut’) where the unprimed versions are true exactly in the case that the eventuality (the first argument of each predicate) really exists. Enable and prevent take their standard meanings within a theory of causality, e.g. as causally involved in the causal-complex that produces the effect (Hobbs, 2005).

• The action of “tuning in” to something is a body action that enables stimulation.
• The action of “tuning out” something is a body action that prevents stimulation.

The Play

Interruptive advertising has been tuned out by the consumer, they are disconnected. However, they do tune in through engagement, even if it’s with businesses - don’t believe me? Ask my colleagues Drew Frey (@freydrew), Andrew Nystrom (@adnys) and Connor Lynch (@connorlynch) how much engagement they have created for their respective brands (Vail Resorts, Red Bull and Asics) due to playful content and interactive media.

If you build it, they will come. – Field of Dreams

Nike recently launched the Nike+ Fuelband, used in collaboration with their Nike+ social network for runners. This is one of my favorite networks – I really like running. But what has struck me odd is how I don’t see my local running companies using this experiential platform as an interactive advertising tool. See, the platform is great as a whole, but it gets even more amazing once you look at how it taps into a person’s social graph. Showcasing runs – showcasing their most dominate attributes. Almost like, I dare you to challenge the Steve Prefontaine in me. I. DARE. YOU. They publish this stuff for their entire social graph to see, which then can become this conversation: What shoes are you running in? Response: Saucony/Nike/Brooks. But where is the expert – the local running shoe company?

When business owners think interactive marketing they think large, expensive projects that require tons of time in development along with testing and then the final execution. But I disagree. If business owners understood what tech tools were available to them, as cost efficient marketing tools, I believe they would most certainly get onboard with the technology. But it takes understanding.

This is a map of my community - the orange blobs are values on a heat map for most runners in an area. (See: Running Shoe Consumers)

Experiential Marketing With Nike+

My local running company, Bozeman Running Company, holds a Saturday morning run club. I know this, because they are in my Facebook feed. However, other than announcing this, I feel no connection to the club. Imagine if this run club was extended in a more dynamic fashion, say any of the following ideas:

1. A store rep runs against others in the region
2. An official Bozeman Running Company challenge
3. Hashtagging #BRCRunClub when posting run club runs to Nike+
4. Favorite runs map creation
5. This isn’t Nike+, but creating a playlist in Spotify then sharing

This experience would be bonding, relationship building and is in the every essence of it, interactive advertising with probably the smallest budget I have ever seen.

Build your own challenge.

Why Not Embrace Nike+?

Because most business owners don’t have the time to consider this type of strategy. Another reason, they don’t think of platforms like Nike+ as a way to collaborate with the users – but more of a user exclusive platform. This should not be the case – if you how we learn.

The Play

By playing in the runner’s world (in this case, Nike+) the business is saying, we identify the fact that there is a segmented market that prefers to gamify their runs. This is fun, it’s playful and it’s challenging. You can also foster relationships through some trash talk or sharing favorite running playlists. Nonetheless, you are building a community that’s engaged, interacting and making purchases because you defined Nike+ as a strategical social platform for your business to create content.

PS How great as marketers is to say, yeah I created a piece of content – it was my daily run. #BOOM