Evok Orlando Advertising Agency | Orlando Marketing

With many social media resources at today’s society’s fingertips, people are getting connected with others across the world with just one click. We all do it to maintain relationships, start new ones, catch up on old ones and probably the most important one in today’s economy – networking. Everywhere you go you are
networking, making connections. This is especially true for alumni who want to stay connected to fellow classmates and keep updated with news that are relevant to their university.

However, universities have noticed that if they don’t take initiative to connect to their graduates first, the students or alumni themselves start their own groups. Now, universities are quickly moving away from the traditional mailing outlets and migrating towards Facebook and Twitter as a means to re-connect to their
graduates. These social networks help institutions to quickly and efficiently maintain and deliver news/updates to their groups or followers. Vadim Lavrusik, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has helped to pin down the top ways that universities are engaging their alumni via social media.

Helping Alumni Find Jobs
According to media specialist, Keidra Chaney at DePaul University, LinkedIn is the school’s biggest success with 5,500 current members and about 100 new members joining weekly. Group leaders can post or tweet about new job positions and alumni themselves post job openings/share job leads they know about to the
advantage of fellow colleagues.

Collaboration and Connecting with Students
This includes transitioning advice from student life to alumni/career life posted everywhere from the University’s website to Facebook ‘notes’. This approach helps to build more brand affinity with relevant and helpful information to the group members.

Fundraising Purposes
Encouraging alumni to donate to specific causes, which could end up as a domino effect if one alumnus donates and tweets about it reminding their friends or followers to do the same.

Training New Alumni to use Social Media
For those alumni that are not completely involved with the social media world, universities are placing resources and tutorials for those newbies on how to stay connected with people and their University via social media.

Alumni-Generated Content
Schools are attracting alumni by allowing them to produce their own content and share information, like photos, via different networks, groups or by building their own sites.

Mobile Websites
With 9.3 million daily mobile users for social networking and information retrieval, having your website be mobile-accessible is vital in today’s world.

Use Google Maps
People enjoy interaction; seeing where their classmates currently are, and Google Maps can help with pinpointing where on Earth their classmates are or have traveled/lived in the past.

There are endless possibilities with social media. Bottom line: people just love staying connected and socializing with others. It’s human nature to do so. Lucky for us, current top social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter help make the reach and connections easy and possible with just the click of a mouse. Some universities have even gone to the point of building their own social media site closed to allow only their institution’s alumni, but it has proved to become burdensome for most alumni to check and stay updated with multiple social sites, so it’s suggested to just use the known, mainstream ones like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to their full potential.

EVOK’s advice to Universities and companies everywhere: gather—or re-member—your people. Today’s technology makes it easy for us.

Just like brands, there are thousands of comedians. Also just like brands, a very privileged few achieve stardom. But the manner in which Kathy Griffin created her own brand identity to reach to top of the industry holds some lessons that can be learned by others.

Griffin had enjoyed recognition for her stand-up act, which consisted of irreverent, gossipy observations of celebrities she’d come in contact with through such various gigs as game show contestant and awards show hostess. Given the high degree of interest in (or obsession with) celebrities in America, Griffin found herself in increasing demand to share these stories with an ever-growing audience.

Most other comedians (or products) with such an enthusiastic market may have been content to keep delivering more of what made them popular. But Griffin took it up a notch to create a true niche for herself: that of the D-List celebrity. Griffin immediately changed public perception of herself by declaring a new class of celebrity, then defining what a “D-List” celebrity is all about.

Positioning herself in this manner has enabled Griffin to star in her own reality show chronicling her encounters with A-Listers and a variety of “D-List” gigs, plus a successful series of televised stand-up concerts on the theme. There may be other comedians doing guest bits on game shows, but the D-List is Griffin’s category, and she alone owns it.

The take-home message: Any distinctive feature of your product or company can be used as the basis of a successful brand identity that defines its category. Before Starbucks, most American establishments that mainly served coffee didn’t even think to define themselves as a coffee shop, much less decide to become an international brand. As with Griffin, there are other coffee houses, but Starbucks still defines the category. Find the way to define and market your individual claim to fame, and you’ll make your way to the A-List in sales.

Brands that don’t keep up with changes in the market fall behind. This is an obvious observation, yet one that you should say out loud to yourself, your R & D department, marketing department and any other relevant people in your company on a regular basis. Coming off of 2008 International CES, we saw brands that didn’t exist five years ago attract hoards of buyers and TV crews to their booth, while some long-established brands generated little excitement for this year’s offerings.

Remember the Sony Walkman? Once considered the only portable audio player worth owning, it lost the hearts of consumers upon Apple’s introduction of the iPod. Originally a portable cassette player, the product became an immediate success when it debuted in 1979 – so much so that the name “Walkman” was in danger of passing from a brand name to generic term. Other portable cassette players were on the market, but no one who was anyone had anything other than the Walkman attached to their earbuds.

The 1980s saw the Walkman’s transition from cassette to CD player. Keeping its new design sleek, lightweight and hip, Sony continued the brand’s category dominance. But Sony evidently wasn’t paying attention at the advent of the digital audio era, when Apple seized upon its opportunity to change the way consumers experience music (and now other downloadable media).

The Walkman eventually morphed into an MP3 player, but Apple’s ownership of the market is – so far – absolute, despite such challengers as Microsoft’s Zune. Sony Ericsson debuted the Walkman W810i – a nifty cell phone with plenty of impressive features – But guess what product came along to steal its thunder (not to mention practically upstage the entire show)? That’s right, Apple and the iPhone.

The take-home lesson from our cautionary tale? If you’re not creating a culture, and therefore a market for your brand like Apple does (although you should be), make sure that you’re hyper-alert to technological advances, anticipate their impact on consumers and immediately adapt accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll be left in the dead center of the mushy middle with other brands that were slow on the uptake, while the brand with the vision and passion redefined the category.

You may be introducing a breakthrough product at your industry’s major trade show – a product that represents an industry and/or technological “first” destined to change the face of the industry. But be sure your advertising and marketing effectively positions your product so that its significance is clear, or it could get lost among the tens of thousands of other products being unveiled.

At the shows:

• Give the product prominent booth real estate. Place it at the focal point of the booth, providing enough “space” around the display so it stands apart. A separate stand with signage behind and/or above will draw additional attention.
• Instruct booth personnel to steer visitors to the product, describe it and supply sell sheets and other collateral.
• Schedule a press conference to introduce the product. You’ll have most of the industry’s major reporters in one place at the same time – an advantage in conveying the product’s importance and ensuring that those who want products for review will receive them quickly.

In print ads:

• Introduce the product with its own campaign – if it has the same look as your usual branding ad, your target audience may not realize it’s a breakthrough product.
• Describe what makes the product a breakthrough in straightforward terms. What problem does it solve? What does it make possible that no previous product has made possible?

On your website:

• Put the product on the Home page and treat it like the major event that it is – big picture, big headline and big excitement. Include links to media coverage. Hold a contest to take consumer buzz and demand to the next level.