Welcome to the latest edition of the Blog Watchdog. I feel the need to say this: I’m a paid freelance marketer for McKinley Marketing.
A little humor can create great marketing. And humor makes the work day fun, don’t you think? Recently it was discovered that there’s a glitch in the video game Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 that allows Tiger to walk onto a lake and hit a shot off the water. It was captured on video, posted to YouTube and went viral – becoming the Internet phenomenon known as The Jesus Shot. An ordinary company might do the safe thing and quietly release a patch to those who bought the game, putting the issue to bed. But not EA Sports. Check out what they did instead.
If you work for a – shall we say – mature organization, you likely have black and white photos of early conventions on the walls of your offices and a bushel full of traditions that your association honors year in and year out. While those rituals sometimes serve as a distraction from your organization’s real purpose, sometimes they provide the link that is sometimes missing to get members truly connected to our associations: emotion. This recent post from Church of the Customer will get you thinking differently about some of the traditions at your association.
Engaging members through social media is clearly a hot topic. Decision to Join shows us that engagement increases the likelihood of renewal and increases net promoter score. Many environmental scans indicate that social media is increasingly an acceptable replacement for, and facilitator of, traditional member engagement. How associations effectively use social media is a little bit art and a little bit science, and fortunately there are more and more associations stepping forward with lessons learned by experience. Here’s a nice summary of things associations have tried that worked, and a few that didn’t go as planned, presented at ASAE & The Center’s Annual Meeting in the Member to Member blog.
Sure, the Blog Watchdog is a great way to keep abreast of what’s being talked about in the blogosphere, but maybe you want to follow some more blogs all on your own. After all, with over 200 million blogs and only a handful of citations per issue of McKinley Matters, it’ll take us 4.2 million years to cover them all. For marketing, advertising and PR blogs, you should definitely know about the Ad Age Power 150. And for a more international flair on the same topics, check out a list of influential blogs compiled by Spotlight Ideas in the UK.As always, if you have feedback or a tip, e-mail bkmcae at gmail dot com.
