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Jun 19 2013
By: Caroline Helper  |   Follow me on Twitter: @forgetburgundy  |  
June 19, 2013 – 10:59 am

BOOZE BIN

By Caroline Helper (@forgetburgundy)

image via http://whatshouldwecallmepitt.tumblr.com/

 

Just last week I attended an exciting wine event – a tasting of “Top 100” wines that were chosen for their 90+ point ratings from all the top scoring publications. The high caliber of all the wines served combined with the venue, one of Puerto Rico’s top luxury resorts, made for a very luxurious evening.

One interesting aspect of the event was the presence of Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky. The brand was promoting two of its newer and higher-end offerings, including a yet-to-be-released (at least Stateside) 18-year-aged blend Platinum Label.

The competition between wines can be fierce – with regions and producers battling it out for recognition and breeding tension. It seems a little odd that wine and spirit brands can play nice. After all, both wine and spirits are, at the end of the day, vehicles for delivering alcohol. Why the camaraderie?

image via www.footage.shutterstock.com

As I viewed the attractive women shimmying in gold-sequined dresses and impossibly high heels entreating consumers to taste Johnnie Walker’s offerings, I tried to imagine a wine brand employing the same tactics. And therein lies the key to wine and spirit brands along so swimmingly.

While both wines and spirits court the same publications, rely on the same measure of good scores and often employ the same poetics in their tasting notes, the context in which the two products are marketed are quite different.

Wine has become something that is sanctioned as a healthy part of an everyday routine – something equally appropriate to sip through dinner as on the couch with girlfriends. There are wines to drink on p

icnics, at the beach, on the couch and at the dinner table. Wine has assumed a casual place in the American home. However, I can’t think of a spirit that has succeeded in establishing itself as a sip-anywhere-anytime brand.

Spirits are something glitzier, sexier and perhaps even still a bit taboo. While a gin and tonic might pair just as well with a picnic as a glass of Pinot Grigio, there’s something about the idea of drinking spirits before a

image via www.sodahead.com

certain hour that still raises eyebrows. Something a little too reminiscent of Don Draper.

When it comes to restaurants, though, there are some notable exceptions – The Cat Bird Seat in Nasville or

Alinea in Chicago – spirits and cocktails still cede their place to wine when it comes to drinking during a meal.

Spirits and cocktails are still associated with the glitz and glamour of parties and clubs. You take a shot of tequila when you want to let your hair down, not sip a Chardonnay. But if you’re serving a beautiful roast chicken, you’ll probably reach for a bottle of wine before you go for the Scotch. And the marketers of these products wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Caroline Helper | Posted in The Booze Bin, Wine, Food & Nutrition | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jun 18 2013
By: Brian Ellis  |   Follow me on Twitter: @onegator  |  
June 18, 2013 – 9:22 am

Last week I started my series of mastering media interviews with the first step – start with the questions. The key in that phase is quantity, not quality. The reason is quite simple, the more questions you develop, the less likely you will be hit with a question you didn’t prepare for. Now we focus on your answers, and the beauty of this step is you only have three.

Step 2: Develop 3 Key Messages (per subject area) That Answer Every Question

Deliver Key Messages

This is the rule that seems to stir the most doubt in the minds of my students. How can three answers possibly address every single question? It’s simple if you understand the Laws of Memory.

Memory Law #1: No matter how brilliant you may be when you open your mouth, your audience is likely to walk away with only one or two things.

As humans, most of us are incapable of remembering much more. That is why an advertisement has to run hundreds of times in order to be effective. Keep in mind an ad usually carries a single message and, according to studies, has to be seen or read at least six times for that message to sink in.

So, let me see if I can make that light bulb in your head go off with just a few key bullets:

  • If my audience is unlikely to remember more than two or three things, and…
  • I have to repeat my key points multiple times in order for them to remember it, and…
  • In most media interviews, I’m likely to get only eight to 12 questions, then…
  • It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I need to reduce the number of answers that I deliver in order to create the repetition necessary to be successful.

Brilliant, right? So, how do I develop three key messages that answer every single question? The key is to look at the issue from a 50,000-foot perspective. Most people tend to get into the weeds and believe that a specific point is a message. The details are nothing more than supporting statements for a much broader message. To uncover the higher level key messages, you must use the “why” question. If you keep asking “why is that important,” you usually uncover the higher level message.

Now that you have your high level message, you simply line up your key messages to each question. If you discover you have a question that your messages don’t answer, you don’t have the right key messages. Review your messages with the why question and the answer usually emerges.

Now comes the killer part that will contradict everything I just said. In reality, the reporter’s questions don’t matter. If you doubt that, pick up a newspaper and tell me how many questions you see. The answer is almost always none. All that really matters is how you answer the question. That is what winds up in the story. If you want to simplify your life, stick with the three key messages that answer every single question.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Brian Ellis | Posted in PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jun 17 2013
By: Jason Poulos  |   Follow me on Twitter: @TheSaganaki  |  
June 17, 2013 – 3:47 pm

A couple of months ago I featured our first sweet case study for Pure Canadian Maple Syrup. We now have another sweet client on our hands that needed some help in the digital frontier.We just wrapped up our campaign for the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange and here is what we did for them.

About the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange

  • The Florida Sweet Corn Exchange is a collective of family farmers growing super sweet varieties of fresh corn in Palm Beach County Florida
  • Bred naturally and entirely without GMO’s
  • Florida Sweet Corn produces fresh sweet corn November – May but has a peak season between April 1 – June 1

Unique Challenges

  • We are marketing fresh sweet corn in the spring, rather than summer – when it is typically thought of as “in season”
  • Because our campaign is only active during the peak season of April – June, traditional social media such as Facebook and Twitter are inactive 9 months of the year, rendering them largely ineffective.

Objective & Goals

  • To drive traffic to the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange website (sunshinesweetcorn.com) so that visitors can learn how to cook sweet corn and find delicious corn recipes.
  • To raise awareness of spring sweet corn
  • Generate impressions in April and May for the Florida Sweet Corn brand
  • Increase sales of sweet corn East of the Mississippi River

Strategy & Execution

  • Pinterest Contest – Pinterest has become very popular for recipes and food images are some of the most pinned and repinned images. We designed developed and implemented a Pinterest contest to help leverage select sweet corn recipes. We wanted pinners to pin from the sunshinesweetcorn.com website so we created a contest landing page with customized pins. (A more in-depth Pinterest strategy post will be coming soon!)
  • Organic Search– We wanted to make sure our site was ranking in Google for sweet corn related content so that searchers could experience our brand and content
    • Conducted keyword research
    • Developed keyword rich content
    • On-site optimization
    • Deployed a link building strategy in order to increase our popularity signal to Google
  • Paid Search – Having our website optimized for “sweet corn” corn content didn’t really give us the opportunity to rank for more general “corn” searches. We wanted to get traffic to our site for searches that didn’t include “sweet corn” in the query as a searcher could easily use sweet corn in place of regular corn.
    • Only targeted searches that originated in geographic locations East of the Mississippi River
    • Campaigns created around recipes, tips, cooking techniques, meal types and growing corn
    • Keyword match types were set to target searches that used “corn” or “sweet corn” in the search query
    • Top 5 traffic driving keywords: Corn chowder, Microwave corn, Corn salad, Freeze corn, Vegetarian recipes
    • Ran a Cicno de Mayo campaign that drove traffic to our Mexican inspired recipes landing page
  • Display Advertising – Promotion for our Pinterest contest and grilling recipes
  • Blogger Outreach – Networking and promoting our Pinterest contest through select bloggers

Results by Tactic

  • Pinterest Results
  • Organic Search Results
    • Visits to the site via organic search grew by 129% compared to last year
    • Built 16 high quality, relevant, organic links around 10 pages on site
    • Outreached to 46 different sites 106 times
    • Published 11 articles
    • “Fresh Sweet corn” ranks #1 in Google
    • “Sweet corn” ranking went from 17 and now averages about 3rd in Google
    • “How to cook sweet corn” ranking went from 15 and now averages about 4th in Google
    • 10 pages rank on page one of Google – 6 of which refer to cooking techniques
    • 500 different search terms drove traffic to the site
    • sunshinesweetcorn.com received over 35,000 impressions in Google
  • Paid Search Results
    • Google Adwords generated 6,400 visits to the site and 215,000 impressions in Google
    • 70% of our Adwords traffic to the site came from searches that didn’t include “sweet corn” in the query
    • Avg. Ad position was 1.3
    • Avg. Click through rate was 3%
    • Avg. Cost per click was $.78
    • Cinco de Mayo ad campaign received 195 clicks/4500 impressions/4.3% CTR
  • Advertising & Outreach Results
    • Blogger outreach drove approx. 200 visits
    • Kitchn HTML e-mail banner ad drove 400 visits
    • Website banner ads drove 5,524 visits to the site

Campaign Results

In two short months:

  • Visits to the site grew by 1,000% (April-May of 2013 compared to April-May of 2012)
  • Pageviews grew by 496% (April-May of 2013 compared to April-May of 2012)
  • Traffic from a search engine grew by 675%
  • 250,000 Search impressions from Google
  • Our client, the Florida Sweet Corn Exchange reported record-breaking sales figures for May 2013

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jason Poulos | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jun 14 2013
By: Christian Munson  |   Follow me on Twitter: @munson_711  |  
June 14, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Soy SauceThe BuzzLine would like to thank our fearless summer intern, account coordinator Tommy McPhail, for today’s guest post! Thank you Tommy!

Congratulations to Week 7 winner Scott Davila for his entry “Alec Baldwin made me do it.” Want to know what Alec Baldwin made him do? Check out last week’s BuzzLine.

For Week 8, we’re foraying into the wild world of condiments with a challenge of Man vs. Food proportions!

Virginia made buzzworthy headlines this week when one daring 19-year-old attempted to stomach an entire quart of soy sauce in just one sitting on a dare.

 

Though he’s since made a full recovery after a hospital stay, high salt intake can lead to some serious health issues, which is why we want to know:

If a ‘soy shots’ trend caused the Surgeon General to roll out new warning labels for high sodium products, what six-word advisory would you recommend to caution daredevils?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Christian Munson | Posted in BuzzLine | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19)
By: Alyson Campbell  |   Follow me on Twitter: @acampfashion  |  
June 14, 2013 – 9:04 am

How can bloggers best work with PR agencies? As PR professionals, the question we receive is usually posed the other way around, right? However, it was a question that was brought up throughout my recent experience at Camp Blogaway, “the original bootcamp for food and recipe bloggers.”  Bootcamp might be a strong word as it was held in the most peaceful setting I could have imagined in Angelus Oaks, California in the heart of the San Bernardino mountains, but it was certainly full of learning opportunities so “bootcamp” was accurate in that sense.

Camp Blogaway 2013

Camp Blogaway 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Alyson Campbell | Posted in PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)
Jun 13 2013
By: Rachael Seda  |   Follow me on Twitter: @rachaelseda  |  
June 13, 2013 – 10:31 am

Guest post by Janine E. Payne, MPH, a health care communication professional, mom, wife and singer. With more than 20 years of experience in health communication, Janine’s career spans almost every sector, including non-profit, government and agency work, to name a few. Follow Janine on Twitter @Janine_Payne or check out her Tumblr, Before and After 50. 

Aging is what we do. We think about it all the time: whether we’re anxiously awaiting 18 or 21 years-old, or to get our hands on an AARP card – we’re always counting up or down – I guess it depends how you look at it.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Rachael Seda | Posted in Healthcare | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (11)
Jun 12 2013
By: Laura Petrosky  |   Follow me on Twitter: @chronic_ally  |  
June 12, 2013 – 9:40 am

THE BOOZE BIN

By Laura Petrosky (@chronic_ally)

Pinterest has turned into a social hotspot for home, food and fashion brands since its launch three years ago. Roughly 48 million users strong (that’s over 340 times the size of Napa), wine professionals would be fools not to look into the potential of this fertile social terroir.

Yet, it still is mainly untapped. While Twitter is still the best platform to build following as an individual (think sommeliers and wine critics), the potential for brands, regions, wine festivals and media outlets is almost unlimited.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Laura Petrosky | Posted in The Booze Bin | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jun 11 2013
By: Ryan Lamont  |   Follow me on Twitter: @rylamont  |  
June 11, 2013 – 9:38 am

Lebron James Press ConferenceAs we approach game three of the 2013 NBA finals, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but he did it. I never thought NBA superstar Lebron James would repair his image. I never thought he could overcome what many consider to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) public relations blunders in professional sports history. But here I am rooting for him.

Let’s back up a minute.  In 2010, as the greatest free agent prize available on the NBA market, James opted not to re-sign with his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and instead decided to form a “super team” alongside fellow superstar athletes Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. It wasn’t so much the decision not to resign with the Cavs that upset the world. It was the way he made the decision. Literally.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Ryan Lamont | Posted in Branding | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jun 10 2013
By: Rosalie Morton  |   Follow me on Twitter: @rosaliemo  |  
June 10, 2013 – 7:57 am

Like many millennials, I’m obsessed with Disney. I grew up during the golden age, and I easily can sing the soundtracks of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King… from start to finish… from memory.

As I’ve embarked on my PR career, I’ve started to appreciate Disney from a different perspective – for its innovation, unparalleled customer experience and content marketing. I was reading this past month’s issue of Fast Company, and I was struck by an old content marketing map from Walt Disney himself, dating back to 1957, and what we still can learn from it today.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Rosalie Morton | Posted in Branding, Digital Marketing, PR Industry Trends, Product Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)
Jun 7 2013
By: Christian Munson  |   Follow me on Twitter: @munson_711  |  
June 7, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Congratulations to Week 6 winner Mark Raper! Enjoy your coffee (or tea) at Starbucks and thanks for participating. See you at the quarterly playoffs later this month!

All the great Week 6 responses are here and Week 7 is clear for takeoff.

Did you hear about the nearly 100 rowdy high school seniors AirTran kicked off its flight from New York to Atlanta earlier this week?

Apparently, the students didn’t obey repeated requests from flight attendants to sit down, quiet down and power down all electronic devices before departure.

The seniors and their chaperones were on their way to the Six Flags amusement park and a rafting excursion in Georgia until the captain lost patience and sent them back up the jet way.

Captain’s mad. Teens are mad. You? Cool your jets and buzz off on this:

If you found yourself kicked off a flight to Six Flags because of the unruly behavior of 99 friends, what six words would you use with the gate agent to talk your way back aboard?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Christian Munson | Posted in BuzzLine | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19)