SkyView Projects a Santa Barbara boutique marketing firm specializing in brand development and social media

How are you using Pinterest for your business?

Jordan benShea — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:03:37 +0000

How are you using Pinterest for your social media business needs?

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post by Jordan benShea

Established by Jordan benShea, SkyView Projects is a boutique marketing firm based in Santa Barbara, Ca and aims to help brands maximize their potential through strategic direction and utilization of innovative marketing initiatives. SkyView Projects specializes in social media and brand development and has clients near and far. Learn more at SkyViewProjects.com.

Worth a Thousand Words

Jordan benShea — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:13:51 +0000

It has always been said that a picture is worth a thousand words…

If the last month has taught us anything about the truth of this statement, just look at the simply phenomenal success of Pinterest.

Pinterest has taken two very important aspects of social media and mixed them:

Inclusion factor: You can only join by requesting an invitation and being approved.
Images: As anyone in social media will tell you, any post or tweet etc gets tons more traffic when you include an image.

You take both these aspects along with the sheer ease of the platform and before you know it, you have a phenomenon.

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Social Media Bootcamp for Earth Day

Jordan benShea — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:58:17 +0000

Tomorrow we are doing something exciting.

There is no question that social media is being utilized by people across the planet to make a change. We have a post in the works more specifically about this, but… if you live in Santa Barbara and have been interested in the Community Environmental Council now is your opportunity to learn how to share your interest socially.

Tomorrow, Friday the 24th, I will be at the CEC with their Online Marketing Coordinator Michelle Kitson doing a drop-in social media boot camp.

How does this work?

You email Michelle or drop into the CEC offices at 26 West Anapamu Street. Want to know how you invite your friends to Earth Day? Interested in joining our Friends of CEC LinkedIn group? Curious what a hashtag means? From 10am to 4pm we will be there to learn how you can utilize social media to spread the word about CEC initiatives and help our community mobilize for the earth.

See more details here, and I look forward to seeing you there!

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Marketing Analytics, Creepy or Smart?

Jordan benShea — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:34:12 +0000

Since social media began making it’s way into marketing initiatives across brands there have been endless articles on the privacy factor. Facebook is a consistent target for these privacy concerns and many feel for good reason. But let us not forget that marketing analytics and what many might call a breach of privacy has been going on in brand marketing for some time.

Forbes recently ran an article sharing how Target is not only analyzing your shopping habits, but doing so with such accuracy that it very well might know your due date if your pregnant… astounding? Shocking? Disturbing? Possibly all these things, and yet this isn’t even about social media privacy or Facebook sharing. This is about what happens when a business, a brand gets so “skilled” at their analytics that they are able to provide you will the products you are going to purchase long before others in your household may even know they are a necessity:

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff

Target has got you in its aim

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.

Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past:

[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

Target knows before it shows.

Or have a rather nasty infection…

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

And perhaps that it’s a boy based on that rug?

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

(Nice customer service, Target.)

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Target’s Andrew Pole (from LinkedIn)

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

Bold is mine. That’s a quote for our times.

So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o’ coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the “Go the F*** to Bed” book, they more subtly spread them about:

“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.

Duhigg suggests that Target’s gangbusters revenue growth — $44 billion in 2002, when Pole was hired, to $67 billion in 2010 — is attributable to Pole’s helping the retail giant corner the baby-on-board market, citing company president Gregg Steinhafel boasting to investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”

Target was none too happy about Duhigg’s plans to write this story. They refused to let him go to Target headquarters. When he flew out anyway, he discovered he was on a list of prohibited visitors.

I think most readers of the excellent piece will find it both unsettling and unsurprising. With all the talk these days about the data grab most companies are engaged in, Target’s collection and analysis seem as expected as its customers’ babies. But with their analysis moving into areas as sensitive as pregnancy, and so accurately, who knows how else they might start profiling Target shoppers? The store’s bulls-eye logo may now send a little shiver of fear through some, though I can promise you that Target is not the only store doing this. Those people chilled by stores’ tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal — and paying for far more of their purchases in cash.

So creepy or smart? And if we are spending so much time talking about Facebook privacy going off the deep end we might need to pay attention to what is still happening in our offline world as well.

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PUMA’s social media experiment

Jordan benShea — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:51:11 +0000

What does sailing and PUMA have in common? A recent social media integration where the brand took a chance and it paid off.

PUMA Adds Instagram and Tumblr To The Blogger Outreach Mix

by Brian DiFeo on Jan 26, 2012

To what lengths will a brand go in order to be “cool”?

After traveling to Abu Dhabi with PUMA, I’d say the answer is farther than you’d think.

I checked in to the Sheraton Hotel in Abu Dhabi on January 8, 2012, with one other popular Instagram user and 8 other well-known bloggers. We were assembled by PUMA’s marketing team to cover the Volvo Ocean Race from our own perspective.

With a combined total reach in the millions, our interests are decidedly not sports; instead our content ranges from fashion and lifestyle to culture and design.

Needless to say, PUMA was thinking outside the box on this new approach to brand outreach.

PUMA took a chance.

They experimented.

And they did a lot of things right. Below are 3 key lessons learned for brands that might want to explore in order to reach new audiences and markets.

1. Cast a Wide Net

PUMA has most social media channels set up and running, but having 10 non-sports bloggers posting daily anecdotes from the trip touched new audiences they might not have reached.

One example is the tribute to our group by photographer/blogger James Nord, which has over 5,000 Tumblr notes and a direct link to Puma’s Sailing blog. Examples like this demonstrate how PUMA tapped influential voices in areas that would be difficult to penetrate via more traditional strategies.

2. Give Bloggers All Access

PUMA gave us every opportunity to experience the country and the sailing race as VIPs: desert tours in 4×4 trucks; a visit to the world’s largest mall in Dubai; participating in the Pro-Am race next to professional sailors; and access to media boats, private parties, fancy dinners, and behind-the-scenes aspects of the world’s most grueling sailing competition.

As a result, these special moments were shared with our audiences, like Instagram user @takinyerphoto, whose images often received thousands of likes.

Jamie Beck, a photographer and one of the most well-known bloggers on Tumblr, has over 4,400 notes on one incredible cinemagraph from PUMA’s boat, Mar Mostro. With reblogging gaining popularity, this user-generated content is being re-posted by other bloggers, continuing the cycle of influence and outreach. A great example is this post by Darci Bastiaan, who reblogged the same photo and added his own story.

3. Encourage Unique and Universal Tagging

It can be difficult to determine the true reach of a social media campaign, especially one that doesn’t focus on clicks. One way to gauge this reach is by cultivating specific hashtags. The group was encouraged to tag photos and blog posts with #MarMostro (the name of the boat), which can be easily found on Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter.

Especially on a platform such as Instagram, these tags will exist and be searchable forever.

Summary and Predictions

While I am portraying this approach to brand outreach as a success, there is no clear ROI or hard statistics for CTR, etc.

If the marketing team of a forward-thinking brand wants to embrace this type of outreach, they shouldn’t abandon traditional strategies; instead a balance of both approaches are appropriate.

In 2012 we will see an increase in this form of outreach, if only because blogs and apps continue to grow in popularity. By partnering with an influential voice on a platform like Instagram, a brand can drive more traffic to their account on that same platform, which otherwise might take weeks or even months to grow.

Consumers are posting content about brands on social networks every day, so why not support brand evangelists and give them a little special treatment? I know I’ll wear my PUMA clothing with pride, and I’ll be talking about my trip to Abu Dhabi for years to come.

Lead image source: Brian DiFeo Tumblr

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Nike is ensuring that you #makeitcount

Jordan benShea — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:30:00 +0000

Our last post was a teaser about the upcoming Nike product being released on 1.19.12… today the product was launched. This is a game changer for all the recent wristbands that track your activity, as it combines sports, health and social media for the ultimate all encompassing way to measure how you spend your days.

Abraham Lincoln was known to have said “A man is what he thinks about all day,” what does that mean for this new product?

One of our favorite social media maven’s is the fabulous Amy Jo Martin, Founder and CEO of Digital Royalty. She has been front and center at the exclusive Nike event as they unveil… The FuelBand, and of course updating social media at every step, check out her post from just moments ago:

The Scoreboard For Life

JANUARY 19, 2012

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. As most of you know, I’m a big advocate of measurement and innovation. From developing formulas to measuring things that have never been measurable, to establishing my own personal key performance indicators for innovating my life. Recently, I’ve been advocating for all of us to run our lives like a business because we are more accountable, motivated and successful when we measure our performance.

Today, Nike launched a game changer by unveiling their new metric for measuring activity. They invented a universal formula for people to track and count movement. It’s called the Nike Fuel Score. Oxygen kinetics is the main ingredient for this score along with many other ingredients that I don’t really understand. (There are videos on this. Google it.)

Why is this so amazing? Because Nike is merging the worlds of digital, sports and social media with today’s FuelBand launch. It‘s the perfect combo of motivation, inspiration, measurement and innovation for the greater good of allowing us find our true potential and live our best lives. The Nike FuelBand is a scoreboard for your life. The FuelBand tracks calories, steps and your Fuel score. There’s a color system from red to yellow to green that correlates with Fuel performance. The FuelBand will integrate with social media outlets like Facbeook, Foursquare and Path so we can motivate eachother. (Fact: This is like the perfect day for me. Combining all of my favorite things. I’m going to need to simmer down a bit.)

Once again, similar to last time, Nike made a full court press with this event and I told the story virtually via tweet-by-tweet content and photo updates on Facebook. The morning was kicked off by Jimmy Fallon in a dark room filled with buzzing media from all around the globe. Then Nike President and CEO, Mark Parker, explained the goal behind the product: to innovate and inspire athletes. The FuelBand was unveiled and Lance Armstrong, Kevin Durant and Carmelita Jeter took the stage. I get the chance to check out the Nike FuelBand today as I run around NYC. The band will be available May 5^th and it retails for $139 and is available for pre order today at 5pm ET.

Photos from today thus far, I’ll keep posting more.

More official info on Nike FuelBand

I’m off to run around NYC with the FuelBand. More to come later. #MakeItCount

Will you be getting a FuelBand?

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Really digging how Nike engages across media platforms

Jordan benShea — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:39:00 +0000

Really digging how Nike engages across media platforms in this video for an upcoming product launch on 1.19.12. Very cool. Are you going to just do it?

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5 Essential Characteristics Of The Entrepreneurial Mind

Jordan benShea — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:42:05 +0000

It takes a certain type of person to be an entrepreneur. First off you need to be okay taking risks, and those risks can range from not knowing if you can cover the mortgage to putting your name behind a method or product that you know in your heart has a chance. But the risks don’t stop there, and the characteristics you need to succeed are clutch in helping you realize your dream. Here is a recent article from American Express Open Forum on the 5 Essential Characteristics of the Entrepreneurial Mind. Which ones do you have? Which ones do you need?

by Kentin Waits

Inventors, business owners and corporate superstars who reshape and remake companies are some of our strongest cultural heroes. They reflect an essential part of the American story—the story of the average person who sees an opportunity, seizes it and in the process creates something new.

But what do these entrepreneurs share? What qualities or ways of thinking characterize the entrepreneurial mind, and can this type of innovative thinking be cultivated in others? Let’s explore some of hallmarks of entrepreneurial thinking to better understand how it works and how we can challenge and adapt our own thinking to achieve better results.

1. Creativity

The seed of entrepreneurship is the ability to see things differently. Whether it’s with new products or new processes, entrepreneurs are driven by the uncanny knack to see holes in the marketplace and devise innovations to fill them. Though it’s not the only essential quality to success, creativity may be the foundational mental skill. Entrepreneurs ask the “what ifs” that drive inquisitiveness, and they’re able to let go of what they already know to source fresh information and new ways of thinking about a problem.

2. Suspicion of predictors

Entrepreneurs tend not to labor under the assumption that data is the sole predictor of an outcome. Especially in new markets and with new products where data is largely interpretive or extrapolated, entrepreneurs are undaunted by the typical predictors that may put off fainter hearts. One study by Inc. magazine found that nearly 60 percent of Inc. 500 CEOs had not written business plans prior to the launch of their companies, and only 12 percent had done market research. These entrepreneurs realize that creating something new is a heated evolutionary contest, and no one can know the outcome with any amount of certainty. It’s as if their thinking, freed from the “no’s” of the data, can begin to build, test and refine.

3. Comfort with uncertainty

Similarly, a distrust of prediction and analysis creates an atmosphere where uncertainty rules. Indeed, uncertainty is the very essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are comfortable existing in that space between raw idea and successful product, and they tend to thrive in the wide middle ground of experimentation, revision and testing.

4. Openness to experimentation

A comfort with experimentation goes beyond educated trial and error. The ability to experiment with products, processes and outcomes, no matter where the results may lead, is the key element of this quality. It’s difficult to fully appreciate how much of what we call “experimental” is actually quite predictable. Most people are comfortable testing new products or systems with a range of one or two possible outcomes. When the results fall nicely within the range, we move on to the next step. But for entrepreneurs who are bringing something new and novel to the marketplace, experimentation can be truly…experimental. Removing expectations and letting the results lead you in completely new directions is the attribute that marks a truly entrepreneurial mind.

5. Functional humility

Egos can destroy the very best ideas. Entrepreneurs who are committed to solving a business problem or reinventing a product or service display a functional humility. They understand that their egos are only useful in moving the idea forward, not dictating outcomes or wrestling to make results conform to a preconceived notion. The very best entrepreneurs may constantly generate and promote their own ideas, but they think and act collaboratively and are staunchly solutions-focused.

So can everyone have an entrepreneurial mind? Probably not. But with time and practice, we can begin to think more like entrepreneurs. We can start to make subtle shifts in old, reflexive thinking that keeps us from exploring a new idea or taking the leap and launching our own business. Entrepreneurial thinking may be less of a destination and more of a journey as we push our own boundaries and explore exactly what we’re capable of. There are few things more elemental than how we think. What kind of beneficial chaos could we create if we began to think differently?

Kentin Waits is a freelance writer and marketing specialist based in Portland, Ore. His work has been featured in US Airways magazine and top-rated blogs such as Wise Bread, the Consumerist and MSN SmartMoney. When he’s not writing, Kentin runs a small online antiques business.

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Website Development

Jordan benShea — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:04:59 +0000

How your website is laid out determines the ease of usability for your clients. This website was strategically development for real estate agent to increase community with clients and offer an easy resource for client referrals.

SkyView Projects services utilized: Website design, website management, website production, copy writing, brand strategy, and industry analysis.

Non-Profit Social Media Tips

Jordan benShea — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:31:00 +0000

Everyone wants to start a new year on the right foot… so many opportunities for good to happen and a wide range of endless possibilities. What better way to start then to encourage the non-profits that do good for our world how to engage socially? We came across this article from Mashable with 4 social media tips for non-profits, share it, use it and engage for good!

Using social media for your non-profit is a popular way to share your organization’s vision, garner support, fundraise and get volunteers. However, there’s more to it than simply having a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ page, or using some of the many platforms out there. Here are a few tips that will help amplify your cause online.

Focus

Like-minded individuals and groups will feed off each others’ energy and passion for something, and this kind of energy is what leads to promoters. Active promoters of your organization’s goals are what you want, not passive. In good sales organizations, customers are sorted through surveys into promoters, detractors and passives. The goal is to turn everyone into promoters.

Passives are treated the same as detractors, with the goal to better their experience with your company or product. In a non-profit organization, your goal should be similar. Focus on promoters to get the message out, and try to turn passives into promoters.

Enlist Allies

Upon finding promoters, ask for their help. Encourage them to share posts and links in their spheres of influence to get the word out. Cross promote with other, similar organizations or campaigns. A good example of gaining exposure through using allies was the 2008 Blog Action Day to raise poverty awareness. More than 80 organizations were recruited to participate in a day of discussion on poverty. Almost 13,000 blogs worldwide signed up, with 17 of the worlds most popular blogs participating. The result was a reach of more than “13 million people who either followed or participated in the event globally.”

Another ways to enlist your allies is to keep them informed with your updates. Make use of the subscribe feature on Facebook, offer RSS or Atom feeds of your latest events and posts, and come up with surveys, sign-ups, etc. that can be shared by your public promoters.

Make a Loop

Connect not only to your target audience, but to yourself. Have every social site, blog and web page looped together so that it is more than easy for anyone to find you and your different outlets. To achieve this, use links, badges, buttons and cross-site promotion. It is helpful to have a comprehensive profile that is completely filled out and features pictures, bios, goals, past successes and other organizations you are linked to or support. This makes the likelihood of someone taking interest greater.

Let Funds Flow Naturally

As with any business or fund raising activity, the most effective way to solicit funds is to do the right thing first and allow them to flow, not go door to door asking for them. In business, creating a product or service that is highly desired or fills a need will almost automatically draw profits, but to maximize those profits a good marketing campaign or salesperson will explain the benefits and advantages and let the consumer make the decision to purchase because they want or need the product, not because you told them that they do.

In a campaign, explaining the whys of the campaign in an effective, compelling and impactful way is more effective than stating the reason for fundraising and asking for a donation. Always have a donation button available and other information that lets people know how they can get involved through donations, but don’t send out messages asking for the funds.

Give gentle reminders with updates as to where the campaign stands or messages and posts about how, for instance, one group was able to help fundraise through an effort of getting everyone in their workplace to donate one dollar. Many small donations ultimately lead to the most funds over time. Engagement over the long haul will be more effective than acquiring one-time large donations here and there.

The keys are always engage and be genuine. Everything else will naturally follow if you stick to these four simple points.

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post by Jordan benShea