StrayNick

Be hungry for knowledge. Be open-minded. Be silly. Be you.

[straynick]

[straynick]

[straynick]

Acquiring a Competitor’s Fans...

Trying to target your competitor's fans might not be the best route to take with buying likes/running sweepstakes/inactive accounts in mind. The better route would be to build a persona (using FB custom audiences tool) for your competitor and advertising to that persona.

If the persona you build for your competitor is different than the one you build for your company, evaluate why they're different and if it's still a good idea to try and acquire their fans.

On the topic of building a persona, it's immensely beneficial to create a "anti-persona" and use that custom audience as an exclusion in your targeting. With an anti-persona, you're considering who your product/service is NOT for, as this gives a greater context as to WHY it is attractive to those intended.

If there is a defining factor between your company and your competitor's - that causes some people to always choose the competitor over you - you'd want to include that in another anti-persona custom audience as well.

[enddaysofadvertising]

Day 54: Biggest Client schedules Saturday meeting on Christmas Eve just for the power trip. Afterwards, Creative Director’s passive-aggressive parting salutation of “See you next Tuesday” goes entirely unnoticed.

[straynick]

The digital marketing agency I work for is going through a bit of a rebranding. Check it out! I'm really proud of the work that we do there.

[straynick]

Who are you scared to fail in front of?

gary

[straynick]

Humans a.k.a. Brands

Social media has holistically changed a brand's stance in the marketplace. In the past, businesses, products, and brands existed as separate communicator - one that was seen taking our money and not providing value beyond the product or service being sold. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others social media platforms, a brand's existence on that platform comes with the obligation to act similarly to the other users of that platform, a.k.a. real people.

The existence of an "unfollow" button has given the consumer immense control over the information served to them, and with advertising going towards targeting-focused, the days of being shown ads for something irrelevant are coming closer and closer to being over.

Consumers now have much more power in the marketplace, and it's not necessarily bad for brands. It does a much better job of weeding out the bad products and services and highlighting the good ones.

Consumer's WANT to see targeted, relevant ads because they like buying things. Immense amounts of research go into defining the qualities and attributes of the perfect consumer for a product, and that's good! If it's the time of the year and the right time in my purchase cycle for a new winter coat, I WANT to see the best and newest winter coat that's perfect for me. If there's a certain type of game I like, I WANT to see what the newest and best games of that type shown to me.

Thinking of advertising as noise is going away with social media since businesses don't want to pay money with no return, and I am embracing it with open arms.

[straynick]

Valuing Learning Over Grades

I was instilled at an early age that learning was one of the most valuable things a person could do in their life. That and pass it on to someone else. Once you give up the motivation to learn new things, you cease growing. I, for one, never want to stop growing.

[straynick]

[straynick]

My Most Impressive Accomplishment

I wish I could say I became an expert at Excel as I'd really like to learn VBA and Macros. Then I realized if I really needed to learn that for a job, I'd learn it no problem. I wish could also say I became an expert at database creation and maintenance, but then I realized my real goal was data visualization and storytelling from that data - I'll just use Access and connect to that.

If I really have to decide what others should think of as most impressive, it's that all I really care about is being able to tell a story from a source otherwise without a voice.

The questions I care about are:

How can a SEM Campaign tell that brand's story?

How can we derive human behavior from clicks on a website?

How can you provide a client with readable and relate-able insights with no credibility beside the hard numbers?

The answer I want?

Let me teach you.

I will learn.

[straynick]

There's a death of the traditional "brand"

Ubiquitous brands like Twizzler & Coke have saturated the market. Their ebb and flow in popularity as well as ocean-like existence provide for sufficient inhibitance for emerging brands to enter. This leaves a feeling that only a small and "brick-and-mortar" brand could ever be viable monetarily. There definitely is room for another "Coke" or "Twizzler," the opportunity just hasn't been taken.

[straynick]

We tell stories to entertain, to educate, to express, and to remember.

[straynick]

The Anti-Persona

Always consider who your product is not for, as this gives a greater context as to why it is attractive to those intended.

[straynick]

Bright colors mixed and laid by an artist's hand on canvas might not tell at the close of another century of the work of our generation. Glowing words of description by gifted writers might not mean all the interpretation we give it in our time. But cold, enduring Arabic characters will remain through the ages to come, as truthful as of old. They are the fitting and never-changing symbols by which to tell the story of our present state, so that, when the age we live in becomes the past of successive generations, the story and the picture shall be found to exist in all the just proportions in which it has been set by ourselves

Dr. Carroll Write, 1908, referring to statistics published by the Bureau of Industrial labor Statistics

[straynick]

#CareerGoals

I aim to achieve a deep understanding of how Marketers can best-utilize SMM Analytics Software not only to provide actionable insights but also to suggest well-founded feature requests to those tools' developers.

[straynick]

[straynick]

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Ray Bradbury; Fahrenheit 451