Social media is a relatively new platform from which to communicate for most people. Real-time marketing has transformed the way we shop, eat, date and share information. Many businesses have embraced the opportunity to create 1-1 relationships with new and existing customers. As tax paying citizens, we are all customers of the US government. What can the government do to build “likes” among their customers? Consider the following 7 ideas:

1. Who are you? Every representative throughout the various government branches should have an online presence and personality for their constituents. Keep it professional, but use the social platforms to identify and connect with people. They’ll remember come re-election.

2. Get out critical information! From storm’s barreling down on the Florida coast to local Amber Alerts – be genuine in the flow of information and signify when it’s something to pay attention too.

3. Promote objectives (That’s why you’re in office). Social communication should support the organizational mission and vision of the overall elected office strategy. Social media efforts should be strategically aligned to support those objectives – whether it’s updates on education, healthcare and/or infrastructure.

4. Transparency and collaboration. You have the capacity to control the first message to your followers! Twitter and Facebook are great tools to be proactive, as opposed to reactive. Use the available social media tools to create a more coordinated effort fostering external transparency and internal collaboration. Cover all bases with all tools available including social networks, blogs, micro blogs, image tagging, user comment options and rating options.

5. Engaging the public. This new era of ‘citizen engagement’ is perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of social media in government because it touches on a true dialogue between government entities and citizens. Take advantage and truly engage on all levels, from congestion on I495 to the upcoming Redskins game.

6. Privacy and Security. Everyone is concerned. Period. The need for Open Government is a stated priority. The need to protect data is also a priority.

7. Analytics and Metrics. Get a staffer on board to study the performance analytics. With rapid innovation in big data, social and mobile, it should be more interesting than daunting. Cater your approach toward what your followers ask for and respond to. Establish baseline goals for your initiatives.

The key is not the number of followers, it’s the engaged followers. Thomas Jefferson once said that well informed people can be trusted with their government. Go inform the people – via their Smartphones.

What are your thoughts? What do you want to see the government do from a social media perspective? Stay #TopRight

With a coffee shop, maybe two, on every street corner, coffee has become the ultimate takeout commodity. Yet despite coffee shop proliferation and fierce rivalry between branded chains, British-owned Costa Coffee says it’s building deep emotional connections with its customers through clever use of data.

Increased sales, increased per-customer spending, and increased frequency of visits are just a few of the rewards that have come from Costa Coffee Club, the Whitbread-owned business’s three-year-old U.K. customer loyalty program.

“Four years ago, we conducted research to understand levels of customer loyalty in our marketplace and were surprised at the high level of cross-brand use,” Costa U.K. marketing director Kevin Hydes explains.

“We thought we had a hard-core set of consumers, but the findings showed this was only partly true–5% of our customer base drove 46% of our customer transactions–so we set out to find a way to build loyalty and create active brand preference.”

Launched in spring 2010, Costa Coffee Club, which secured Costa the Grand Prix at the recent Marketing Week Data Strategy Awards in the U.K., is a free card-based reward program enabling customers to earn points with every purchase that they can spend on any product in Costa stores nationwide.

The mechanics are simple: Users get five points for every pound sterling spent. Points can be “spent” on Costa products when the total passes certain thresholds.

This is where the brand’s sophisticated e-CRM strategy kicks in. By combining an understanding of where, what, why, and when registered Costa Coffee Club members buy with personalized e-marketing, Costa is motivating customers to consume more and to engage and interact more intimately with the brand.

These key principles shape the Costa Coffee Club’s plan and contributes to its’ huge success:

• Stay relevant to the product. It’s only and all about Costa’s quality coffee for coffee lovers.

• Keep it simple by not overcomplicating club mechanics or messaging.

• Get personal by sending only relevant and timely e-marketing communications.

• Be democratic. Rather than demanding all club members share personal data, extra points are offered to those who chose to do so.

• Encouraging club members to redeem points is key; if they don’t, interest can lapse.

• Personalization powers engagement and keeps e-communication timely and relevant.

• Get it right and actively engaged customers visit more frequently, spend more per visit, and promote Costa more actively among their peers.

Do you think active brand preference can be achieved–even in the highly competitive takeout coffee market?

There is much viral buzz going on about Kmart’s “Ship My Pants” ad campaign.  The campaign seems to be set up to capture the younger adolescent audience or the slightly sophomoric side of our humorous personalities with a tongue-twisting turn of the phrase “ship my pants.”  What it really does is reflect how desperate Kmart (Sears) is to speak to their audience and compete with brands such as Target and Walmart who have solidified their brands in the marketplace.

The actual message is that what you can’t find in a Kmart store can be easily shipped to your location via online purchase.  Is this a new concept to Kmart?  We all know that the customer owns the channels and they will purchase where and how they prefer.  If I am looking for the ease and convenience of shopping at home, I can go to my retailer’s portal online or via tablet or smartphone and purchase it there, but if I happen to be out with my family or have a retail location close, then I may stop in and purchase it for quicker acquisition.  The problem is that this rarely comes to mind regarding Kmart as their market share has eroded so much that few are purchasing in their stores and even fewer choose to use their online portal purchasing options.

Kmart and its parent, Sears are both in a last-ditch effort to save their brands and make them relevant in their space.   Kmart is not the discount place of choice for customers and it has not been for a long-long time.  Sears, certainly with better brands to offer is still thought of as the place where your grandparent’s shop.  Their image in the public eye is tired, old, and worn and the creation of buzz using humor on the fringe of vulgarity is pathetic and a last-ditch attempt to get the audience they need to survive to recognize them, which will not happen using this method.

What Kmart & Sears needs is an entirely new branding exercise set out to reinvent their brands and focus on their core product offerings in the channels they choose.

Rather than “ship my pants” Kmart and Sears should “shift their brand.”

Governmental agencies have struggled for a long time relating to their consumers and constituencies. How many of us ever feel that we are getting the optimum customer experience when we visit a government website or deal with a large government agency such as the IRS?

This lack of training and customer focus can now be traced back to its source – the methods they use to train, motivate, and prepare their own employees. One clear & glaring example was the recent training video utilized by the IRS to the tune of $60K taxpayer dollars. Many have weighed in this week on the utter waste of taxpayer dollars on this and other videos that the IRS admits “did not reflect the best stewardship of resources.”

The IRS fell into the same trap that many in the government sector fail to grasp – how does my constituent, my consumer, those that utilize my services want to be treated?

It is bad enough that the majority of the public hold the IRS in less than high esteem. We offer that they should be taking a page from the playbook that demands the following:

• Welcome and greet people when they come to you
• Make their experience with you intuitive, easy, and pleasurable
• Capture their preferences and points of information to inform your next experience with them
• Stay in contact with them and follow-up to assess how the relationship is going
• Be open to criticism and improvement, then implement
• Treat them as people, because that is who they are, your business depends upon them, and the benefits of a happy customer experience extend far beyond one transaction or interaction.

With TopRight Federal, our playbook for governmental organizations and those that deal with the government, we are changing the way government and consumers interact and dialogue. We are truly taking the government where it never has been before. Join us.

Have you ever felt that you were getting the optimum customer experience when visiting a government website or dealing with a large government agency?

Coca-Cola has chosen to revamp one of the most essential components of their digital marketing strategy. Coke has launched a new website to replace the aging site that was originally designed in 2005.  The reconstruction of their website follows a digital trend towards feeding users image-heavy options instead of poorly organized text filled ideas. Thus, their new site looks more akin to a digital magazine or YouTube than a typical “corporate brochure” web site. Their content will follow suit with the design- acting more as a consumer driven dialog with “legitimate” news articles spanning across multiple genres. Additionally, the site will contain a variety of opinion based columns, videos, and photo exclusives.

Currently, Coca-Cola’s corporate website traffic sits at approximately 1.2 million monthly unique visitors. The expectation with their new release called, Journey, is to further enhance their brand positioning without shoving the logo in your face. This is appears to be a savvy move for the company as they look to build on the tremendous success they  have enjoyed with their social media investments.  Specifically, their Facebook page has 54.3 million “likes”, and represents best practice for beverage marketers worldwide.

The use of the word “Journey” for their new web page title is a reference to a magazine that was produced internally and not for public viewership from 1987-1997. For Coca-Cola employees, this is a walk down memory lane, bringing a retro idea to the public that has existed only in Coca-Cola internal lore.

The new digital tactics feature editorials and op-ed style topics that serve to reveal the Coca-Cola culture. This move makes the company more accessible to a new generation of consumers. Furthermore, this digital design offers a forum for those looking to defend the brand in modern times that suggest Coca-Cola’s beverages may be unhealthy to drink on a regular basis. With a greater production of writing within digital airspace, Coca-Cola will find that their SEO will increase dramatically, thus helping the brand to grow “organically”.

Will Coca-Cola’s new format change the way corporations structure their websites? Is the redesign going to increase traffic and drive digital growth?

On Monday, Google announced the release of their second tablet, the Nexus 10. This new tablet will finally give Google market share within the 10 inch tablet scene. In an increasingly competitive market of tablets, Google has to find ways of ousting tech giant Apple. One of Apple’s latest innovations, the Retina Display, offers customers the opportunity to view “the death of the pixel”. Finally, a tech company has an answer to Apple’s magnificient, pixel defying tablet. In fact, Google has one-upped Apple with a screen resolution that is considerably larger. Furthermore, their engineers have figured out how to build-out a tablet that also does not sacrifice battery life. This has been the industry crippling problem that until only recently Apple found a solution.

The release of their new tablet, customers will have access to an industry-leading resolution display, superior speakers (questionable how often one would use the speakers though), and competitive storage space. However, there are a couple of questions worth consideration. The first being that Google did not integrate cellular software for 4G and/or LTE. Most tablets on the market are not capable of such features; however, if Google were looking to continue to challenge Apple head-on throughout the holidays, this seems like one of the “make or break” opportunities. As a marketer, this would potentially be a great product point to be making with the release.

Another factor worth contemplating, is the overall lack of apps associated with Android tablets. The new, less expensive Nexus 10 is enticing for “tekkies” due to its Android software user interface, Google integrations, and overall hardware construction. The belief is that with the release of this new tablet, it will appeal to more developers. Theoretically, this would give the Android world a more competitive slate of apps. One would think that with the 13.6% of sales used for R&D, there would be some breakthrough app development.

The partnership between Google and Samsung to create this tablet does offer a parachute for Google’s software team to use. Ultimately, it will be Google who needs to generate greater market share to attract developers; however, their collaboration with Samsung on multiple projects gives us some insight into the future. If you can’t beat Apple and other competitors alone, team up to manufacture a higher quality tablet device. The Android world does not just include Google and Samsung, so if they’re going to survive there needs to be a greater sense of “community” and marketing plans that follow.

Will Google’s tablets emerge as an industry leader, or fall in line with the rest of the pack? What’s the next step of software development for Google’s products?

Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley-based company, specializes in the build, design, manufacture, and distributive processes of unique electric cars. The company was founded in 2003  by five men, of which the most notable is current CEO Elon Musk. Musk is renown for his contributions with PayPal, and more recently his innovative Space-X program. Tesla Motors first vehicle was the Roadster, which has sold over 2,300 models since its release in 2008. The car’s lithium-ion battery cells and range of greater than 200 miles makes it the single most efficient vehicle ever produced. According to Tesla Motors’ environmental analysis, it is twice as energy efficient as the popular Toyota Prius.

Although the Roadster has stopped production, this summer, Tesla unveiled a new car that Elon Musk believes will revolutionize the auto industry. The Model S is an innovative vehicle which will act as the new “flagship” car. Through this vehicle, Tesla will be able to launch a successful future generation of cars. Aside from a multitude of genuine ideas and crafting that completely separates it from every other car made, the company has decided to implement a refreshing way of distributing the car. Obviously Tesla will be the manufacturers, but the unusual part is that Tesla will also handle the sales and distribution side of the game.

Tesla will be offering a unique service - there will be no typical “dealerships”. The company will not be franchising their products. As a result, there will be no pesky salesmen trying to upsell you on cars and options that you don’t require. Thus, your experience at a Tesla store will mirror that of a typical experience at an Apple Store. You will not be pressured to purchase any cars upon a visit; there will be helpful clerks ready to assist you with any questions, but you won’t have to deal with a person who is paid commission to sell the cars. This fundamental difference between Tesla and literally every other car manufacturer will give them a competitive edge and marketing strategy that America has not seen before.

The Model S is designed to be a low maintenance vehicle. There are many features and mechanisms that are typically found in gas and hybrid vehicles that are no longer used in Tesla’s cars. This will significantly lower consumer auto-related problems, customer relations errors, etc. Additionally, it will be saving customers incredible amounts of money on an annual basis. The Model S only requires mechanical servicing every 12,500 miles (already being branded as the “annual check-up”). What’s even more unique behind their servicing, is that Tesla will check and service every aspect of your car with the exception of replacing tires. Thus, any moving part that is uniquely built by Tesla, will also be replaced new by Tesla. This eliminates the need to seek third party vendors for oil changes, washer fluid, new whipper blades, etc. This is an incredible feature that will serve to round out the overall experience with the Model S.

It’s a wonder that a vehicle of this nature has taken so long to come to completion. Moreover, it’s exciting and refreshing as a consumer to see a new experience that will be much more inviting, both inside and outside of the car itself. Finally, an innovative technology firm creates a competitive model that produces a special car, and an unmatched sophistication that will become the standard for its industry.

Is Tesla the car of tomorrow? Will Co-Founder and CEO Elon Musk revolutionize another industry?

Tuesday, Apple announced the debut of several new products. The biggest news was the release of the iPad Mini, which finally propels Apple into a competitive status with several other small tablet manufacturers such as Google (Nexus 7), Amazon (Kindle Fire HD), Barnes & Noble (Nook HD), and Samsung (Galaxy Tab 2). It is expected that Apple will likely take the forefront of this tablet market due to their design, branding, software, and advertising superiority. Consequently, Apple is poised to make a greater push into the classrooms that will broaden their target demographic.

The streamlined release of their new products represents a void in their annual product release cycle. Within the past few months, Apple has updated all of their major products. Now, the company has almost an entire year to surprise the world with their next latest and greatest innovation. How else can Apple change the world? The next phase of development for Apple not only involves changing educational technology, but more importantly the way we view television. Google and Samsung have partnered to release a smart tv which they think will change the industry. However, it would be presumptuous to theorize that Apple has no comeback for this new product. Apple has already released the Apple TV which has been a huge hit.

However, this has not quite reached the clientele that is needed to make an industry-wide change. For Apple to become more successful, they need to invade America’s living rooms with  expanded services, networks, and “a-la-carte” content. Imagine having the ability to pick and choose programming that is specific to your life and not be required to pay for extra channels. For instance, if one likes soccer and movies, the only packages you would pay for are sports, and a premium films bundle that could hypothetically include HBO, Showtime, IFC, etc. Honestly, out of the all the channels received with a standard Comcast contract, the vast majority of those are left untouched. It’s like going to the grocery and being forced to buy items on a monthly basis that you never eat and will only serve a purpose to grow mold and stink up your fridge and pantry.

Lastly, by introducing a TV, Apple will deliver a completely new experience. This will take advertising to an entirely different level as they will have to cater towards Apple’s instructions. No longer will an individual be required to sit through countless hours of commercials in between movie showings and television episodes. Users of Apple TV will likely be able to experience one of two payment plans: higher subscription services for no commercials or lower subscription services which include some commercial programming. Obviously, there will be a great many people who will want the former instead of the latter. To remain competitive, Apple will need to offer lower socioeconomic customers ultra-competitive rates that will drive them from using cable and dish services. This second offering will deliver network television unlike anything previously viewed. Furthermore, it changes the landscape for advertising agencies and corporations who take advantage of the air space we currently view with much disdain.

Will Apple release an iTV this coming spring? What’s next for the technology giant?

General Motor’s Chevrolet Division has been making headlines this Summer with advertising for their new return policy for 2012 and 2013 model year Chevys.

The marketing spin: If you don’t love your new Chevy, you can return it.

Be sure to pay close attention to the fine print in the offer: the return policy only applies to those “Summer Lovers” who purchase a Chevy between July 10th and September 4th, 2012. Buyers must keep the vehicle for at least 30 days before filing a return claim, then have only an additional 30 days to file; once 60 days pass, time’s up, you’re married. To file a claim, heartbroken buyers must provide Chevrolet with the original bill of sale, driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. Strangely, Chevy allows cars to be returned with up to 4000 miles—that’s a lot of driving in a month! And very important to note, the return policy only refunds the purchase price less any rebates, incentives, registration and title costs, and sales tax. If you finance the car, you’re on the hook for those costs too. So, if you’re thinking this is your opportunity to have a consequence-free, “one-night stand” with that Torch-red Corvette ZR-1 you’ve always wanted – think again.

So why is GM doing this? The TopRight view is that Chevy marketers are trying to kill two birds with one promotional stone: depleting 2012 dealer inventory while simultaneously garnering new customers for the 2013s. It’s a clever promotion, and it will be interesting to see how it resonates in the marketplace. One thing is certain: GM’s “Super-Hot” Global Marketing Chief, Joel Ewanick, won’t be around to see how it plays out. GM sacked him earlier this month. As many CMOs know so well: “The hottest love has the coldest end” – Socrates.

Back to the Start

Chipotle hit a home run with their two and a half minute viral video and it’s hard to not love it. They are on target to have over seven million views in a year, which is pretty incredible when you remember that every single one of the people who viewed it– voluntarily elected to watch the ad by choice!

The video hits on so many emotional levels, drawing different emotional cues to engage with the audience throughout the video. The song “The Scientist”, originally by Coldplay but remade by Willie Nelson for this video, is the perfect song for this advertisement. It’s haunting and even more somber with Nelson on the microphone, and he delivers the perfect sound to go along with eye opening visuals as he walks you through the progression of modern day farming.

The video is actionable. As the farmer struggles with the way that he’s currently farming, the music and emotion orchestrate and deliver and empowering and heartfelt explosion as he “breaks down the walls” and goes back to the roots of farming. As the farmer goes through this progression, it’s easy for the reader to feel encouraged to change the way they eat and investigate where their food is really coming from. I don’t know about you guys, but by the end of the video I was happy for the farmer (and the pigs) and obviously correlated this with Chipotles brand proposition and brand differentiation.

Although it’s not quite a phenomenon—just a modest 7 mil a year—this video will be available for years to come and should still be applicable. Their brand message to “Cultivate a Better World” will continue to be delivered, as long as they want to continue to differentiate themselves as an environmentally conscious quick-serve restaurant. Congrats to Chipotle for an awesome marketing vehicle—and to think they didn’t even have to buy any media to advertise!!