The Chameleon - Adaptive Marketing Ideas For Your Business

If you’ve followed me through LinkedIn, you may notice I find inspiration for some of my posts listening to the priest during his homily. While I promise I am paying attention, my mind always seems to make great connections in the peaceful envelopment of Father’s words. The Sunday before last proved no different and even though I was visiting a different church, the lightening still struck! The homily focused on the difference between the day worker, the shepherd, and their commitment to the sheep.

If, like me, you grew up before the days of balance bikes, you remember the sheer joy and elation felt when you finally graduated to a big girl/boy bike and the training wheels went into storage. You spent days or weeks practicing on the carpet or in the grass, so you had a soft place to land if you fell, then you took it to the streets.  At this point, you were still not alone for you had those all important training wheels, as well as the loving and patient hand of a parent jogging behind you shouting promises to never let go!  Once you succeeded in building this foundation of comfort on the road and on the bike, the training wheels came off, but mom or dad was still jogging behind. Then, the day came when you turned around in a panic and realized Mom was down the road and Dad was jogging alongside with the video camera.  Of course, realizing you were alone, you teetered, tottered, then splat…your first bike-related road rash!  

For those of you who didn’t grow up with my father, the golden rule simply states, “do onto others as you would have done onto you”. As I look around at companies today, all I see is the cracked foundation of the pedestal upon which the standard of client treatment once perched proudly. Sure, there are places you see patches where someone attempted to fix it and hold it together, but in the end the core continues to crumble as companies forget their clients are actual people, not cogs or numbers in a spreadsheet.

Recently, I find myself having a very similar conversation with many of our clients surrounding the topic of blogs so I figured, what better place to discuss the how-to’s of blogging, than in a blog!

There are multiple social media platforms popping up every day and entering our vernacular, from Snap Chat to Vine to Secret, and I am sure just typing this a new one came onto the scene, so how do you know if you are successful in this new landscape? For the purpose of leveraging social for business, I am going to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and define what success looks like in each, as well as provide one key tip!

Since posting this morning, GoDaddy pulled their puppy commercial from Sunday's rotation.  Click here for the full story.

If you’ve been living under a rock trying to recover from the chaos of the holidays, or if “Deflategate” is the only thing filling up your news feed these days, then let me bring you up to speed.  This weekend marks one of the biggest showdowns all year…the fight to see who reigns supreme until this time next year.  I am, of course, talking about the competition for best Super Bowl Commercial, which let’s be honest, is the only reason some people even tune in Sunday. This year, I am eagerly anticipating the debut of GoDaddy’s Puppy commercial, but not for reasons you may think.

Imagine this…you arrive at the airport, with just enough incredibly productive time before your next flight. You head off to your gate, only to receive a call from the airline letting you know your gate moved, so you keep on trekking.  You sit down, plug-in, and hone in on your to-do list.  Fingers flying across the keys, head softly nodding to the ever-present music in your headphones, when BOOM…everything around you goes dark and the dreaded battery low indicator starts flashing again! 

If you are like me, all you see flashing across your TV during commercial time, splashing through your various news feeds, or inundating your inbox is advertisements for gym memberships, top-of-the-line juicers, and a multitude of other items targeted at all those resolving to get healthy and lose weight this year.  These companies are brilliant because they know each January 1^st the gym fills up with well-intentioned first-timers.  By February 1^st, however, when the free personal training sessions end, or that top-of-the line juicer begins to collect dust, all the energy those companies spent on marketing is for not.