Christin Goetz, project manager in Bozell’s Brand Navigation practice, has been selected as Ad Rookie of the Year by the Omaha Federation of Advertising (OFA). Goetz was recognized at the OFA Meet the Pros Keynote Luncheon on February 10.

The Ad Rookie of the Year recognizes an OFA member with five or fewer years in advertising who demonstrates outstanding work both professionally and in the community. Goetz manages the Right at Home, Inc., and Market to Market Relay accounts and provides primary account support for Alegent Health, the College World Series, Inc., and United Way of the Midlands. Prior to working at Bozell, Goetz held internships with the communications department at Metropolitan Utilities District and the marketing department at Alegent Health. She graduated from Creighton University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

“Christin gives her best, day in and day out. She’s an outstanding young woman who’s dedicated and flexible, and we are so pleased to have her as a part of our team,” said Angel Carl, Vice President, Marketing at Right At Home.

Goetz chairs the Omaha Federation of Advertising’s education committee, and over the past two years, has established a seminar for professors at Meet the Pros and the “Smart Spending. Big Profits.” small business symposium. She is also a member of Moxie Paper Press, a young independent publisher in Omaha and is a contributing writer for Food & Spirits magazine.

“Christin is a rising star in the Omaha advertising community. This award is an acknowledgement of her outstanding professional achievements – and those yet to come. She has a tenacious spirit, is forward thinking and is a persistent student of marketing,” said Kevin Hutchison, Partner in Charge, Brand Navigation at Bozell. “She is devoted to our industry and to our community. We are thrilled to have her on the Bozell team and I believe that we will be hearing more about her in the future!”

About Bozell
Bozell is an integrated marketing communications company with offices in Omaha and Kansas City. Bozell combines qualitative and quantitative methodology to get close to its clients’ customers. Bozell then uses advertising, digital marketing, dialogue relations, technology and innovative creative to provide targeted solutions for local, regional and national clients. For more information, visit www.bozell.com.

Anyone get it? What about Chocolate Rain? Or how about Hampster Dance? Techno Viking? Monkey Sniffs Finger? LOLCATS? Mentos & Diet Coke? Peanut Butter Jelly Time? Star Wars Kid? I really could go on for days. I will save you the pain (and time) and end it now.

Anyone who has been online for a while is surely familiar with at least one of the above internet memes. There was even a South Park episode that made fun of the phenomenon.

What is it that makes any one of these breakout sensations so overwhelmingly popular? How does a Rick Astley video turn into something you can’t afford NOT to see? It’s really hard to say, but people are chasing that very goal every day. Companies and individuals are out there trying very hard to forcefully become the Next Big Thing online. Who wouldn’t drool at the opportunity to have hundreds of thousands of people forwarding your link to their friends?

The trick, however, is that these things can’t be forced. It’s like making friends. Walk around on the street and tell every person you see that they should be your friend. And that they should tell their friends to be your friend, too. Not going to happen.

You’ve got to be original. Unique. Provide something people want. Whether it’s information, entertainment, efficiency or something else – these internet sensations did something that made them stand out from the other millions of things like them online. Some of them were the first of their kind. Some of them took a new approach to the same old thing. Some were simply better than the others.

Look at your business and brand. Where do you fit in? How are you trying to stand out in the crowd? Now more than ever, it’s essential that you evaluate your approach and make sure you’re not out there asking everyone to be your friend. Be the company that everyone wants to do business with. Be sincere, interesting and valuable. Tell the truth. If you just happen to be the next big breakout sensation, then you’re all the more prepared to take it on because you’ve built a good foundation in the first place.

OK – so much for the rant. Here’s some more fun:

GREG RUTTER’S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING

About this blog post’s title, which holds a special place in my heart because of actually having played that game. And the full video »

Just for emphasis.

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, blogs receive 77.7 million unique visits a month. Technorati also states that 184 million people worldwide have started a blog. It is no secret that businesses have the opportunity to connect with a lot of potential customers via blogging.

One question that I hear a lot, goes a little like this: I want to get our company blogging, but how can I convince the c-suite that this is a valuable source of their time and money during these tough economic times?

First, I would try to sell them with successful blogging case studies from similar size businesses. Second, I would refer to this list of benefits that blogging can provide to your company.

1. Increased Exposure: Reach millions for no pay-for-play cost.
2. Sales Leads: Connect with buyers searching for your keywords online.
3. Make Yourself an Expert: Let the world know that you are an authority on your category. Become a resource for the media and consumers hungry for information.
4. Build Business Connections: You never know what connection could lead to a new business partnership or referral.
5. Build Search Engine Ranking: Google loves content and links, blogs let you develop a lot of both in a quick and easy way.
6. Beta Test Marketing Strategies or New Offers: find out if consumers like your new marketing or price offer before you pay to advertise it.
7. Respond to Controversy on Your Own Turf: Respond to online criticism in the safe and controllable environment of your own blog.
8. Recruitment: Publish a lot of positive information on the work/life balance at your company. The best candidates will be do online research into your company before they accept a position.
9. Media Relations: The media use the blogosphere as a source of story ideas, expert information and contacts. Take advantage of this opportunity to promote your business.

I hope that this short list of blogging benefits will help you convince your company to get out there. Remember the golden rule though: blogs are a conversation tool, not a publication tool.

Best of Luck,

Bill Flavell

I have nothing really amazing or brilliant to say about these products. The design speaks for itself. The fact that we all might be frustrated at the current situation of our world was reason enough for me to pass on these nuggets of love. Enter the room: Zuny! If a product was ever designed to feel like it was giving you instant smiles and hugs, this is the one.

“Zuny” – a simple, genial and creative design of leather-made home accessories, which is made out of the designers’ creativity and imagination. Zuny enriches the peoples’ life and provides a perfect gateway for releasing annoyances and pressures from work and frustration. This motivates Zuny to achieve its goal – “Make your life funny and easy“.   http://www.zuny.info/

There we have it. Just more proof that good design can make you happy and more optimistic. Which is something that all of us should carry with us each and every day.

As a firm believer of recycling and being as green as possible in every aspect of living, I loved this posting on one of my favorite package design websites:http://lovelypackage.com/ . Cleveland College of Art & Design Surface Design department created mini portfolios out of existing screen printing materials.

“Robert Page has had the pleasure of working alongside Cleveland College of Art & Design’s prestigious Surface Design department, to create a promotional document which would enable the department to promote 36 students and two course, and create a ‘wow’ factor amongst its recipients.

The process involved a number of complex sourcing and research methods which led to a unique and tactile product to distribute to selected key industry figures at at the high profile Indigo event in Paris.”

The final result consisted of 420 different designs on the outer folders, due to an inclusive process where all 36 students actively took part to form a large production line creating the final folders, recycling and using the existing studios screens that had been created throughout the courses final year.

I love how they used existing screens and variations on the patterns to create truly original work for all 36 portfolios. YUMMY!

http://lovelypackage.com/cleveland-college-of-art-design/

IDEO, a global design consultancy creating impact through design, took their experiment known as Free Time to the streets in San Francisco. They created a “free time” ticket dispenser that hands out 10-minute increments of free time in the form of printed tickets. This is a study of basic prototyping and why it is so important to test out products or services on the real world before taking them out into the market, if at all possible. An interesting viral characteristic of the Free Time study, was that once a few passengers on the train witnessed other’s taking free time tickets, they couldn’t resist the opportunity to play. In some cases, those who initially snubbed their noses to it and did not want to be involved, changed their minds after seeing others warm up to it.

Here is what happened when they took the dispenser onto the Caltrain ride back to San Francisco.

http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=175#content

In this challenging economic environment, some corporations will struggle to survive and others will grow to be even stronger. In the recent Wall Street Journal, Accenture did a magnificent job on their Tiger Wood’s ad campaign. This print ad is very relevant to the feeling and emotions that a lot of us are currently going through during economic hardship. Accenture used a very visible, trustworthy celebrity to convey their message in a tactful and unique way. I have to agree with Darren Rovell’s recent Blog post in SportsBiz. He said “They made the most of Tiger’s struggles by calling attention to it and drawing the correlation to the struggles of the country and Accenture’s potential clients in this economic environment. Real ads like this, that are both sensitive and relevant, are the only ones that are going to draw the eyes of the consumer these days.”

A report released this week by Forrester Research talking up sponsored conversations (i.e. paid blog posts) set off a firestorm of online debate.

Forrester’s report states that it makes sense for some marketers to pay bloggers to write about their experience with the brand. It lumps sponsored conversations as a subset of general marketing practices like advertising and PR activities. The author of the report, Sean Corcoran, said in his blog post explaining the report, “For these low buzz brands sponsored conversation is another way to increase discussion about your products.”

Corcoran said as a matter of market forces, there was no turning back with paid posts: there’s a demand and there’s a supply. Bloggers want to be paid and marketers want to pay them. Indeed, the paid blogging market is real and vibrant. Many major brands already engage in the practice. And given that the number of people reading blogs has grown 50% in the past year and continues to grow – one in three Americans online read a blog at least once a month, more marketers are considering the tactic.

Whether you agree or disagree with the concept (I admit I’m waffling on the issue because I know how hard it is for some “non sexy” type of companies to get anyone to even give them the time of day, but also worry about credibility), the release of the report sparked a quick reaction from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. Cutts reminds everyone that paid posts with sponsors behind them not only need to be disclosed as such but also must also bear “no follow” tags so as to not fool the Google spider that crawls the Web for ranking purposes. Google is pretty religious about its guidelines and has and will penalize violators because, as Cutts puts it, they “pollute the ecology of the web.”

The premise behind “no follow” tags is to tell the spider that a post shouldn’t count toward a site’s search ranking on Google, because that would constitute buying links as a way to try to increase ranking — something not tolerated by Google.

According to a story on AdAge.com, “Forrester’s Sean Corcoran, who authored the report that set off Mr. Cutts’ finger-wagging, said he would follow up with a blog post that deals with Google’s demands, including spelling out the need to include no-follow tags in paid blog entries.”

Here’s some advice for marketers who may be considering this approach as part of their blogger outreach programs:

• Follow the “no follow” guidelines to the letter and understand the paid post won’t help your search rankings
• Be completely transparent and disclose all financial relationships and understand that any blogger worth his/her salt will follow guidelines to the letter
• Just because you pay doesn’t mean you control. It’s not like advertising. Bloggers need to speak in their own genuine voice, not yours. They are not your mouthpiece and they are free to say something unflattering about you if that’s what they think or feel
• Learn about the blogger first and make sure his voice and audience is relevant to your company/product. Just because a blogger has a big audience doesn’t make him/her a good fit for your company. It needs to be a good fit for both parties.
• Listen before you act

Photo: voxeros on Flickr.

A lot of attention gets paid around here to web/interactive design. It’s a different beast than print design. It’s got to be usable. It can be dynamic. It has to be programmed, coded, laid out, and implemented in some way that displays properly in a bunch of different web browsers and even mobile devices. And let’s not even get started on keeping up with the latest rendering engines, CSS techniques, and all the other things that end up making the web design job a lot more than making pretty pictures.

Now I am by NO MEANS implying that any designer simply makes pretty pictures! I’m simply talking about what goes into good web design in addition to a great concept and aesthetics. That’s why it feels great to get recognized for doing some good design from time to time.

The January/February issue of Layers Magazine features a website redesign concept by our own Ryan Sorensen. Ryan’s concept, along with two others, were selected to appear in the magazine’s Design Makeover column. If you are trying to design your website then you need to get one of the UK servers.

The “client” is Mikee, a specialty-sauce maker that has a line of award-winning kosher specialty sauces. We were excited to be able to participate in the project, and even more excited to see our concept be selected and featured first in the design makeover lineup.

Since this was just a concept that would appear in a magazine, we took a few liberties with the design that we may have skipped if we were going to implement it for an actual online store. The basic principles are the same, though – give the visitor an easy-to-navigate site that showcases the product and gets them to buy.

Website redesigns are also an interesting thing. You’re presented with reinventing something while maintaining some sort of coherent consistency with a brand at the same time. There’s other considerations as well, like the status of the current site’s placement in the search engines. Nobody wants to lose any good ranking. It’s like conducting an orchestra when executing a successful website redesign. Get a good conductor and some great musicians and you’ll hear beautiful music. Just don’t let that piccolo on the third row screw it up for everybody.

It would have been great to be able to see the project all the way through. The business owner actually contacted me to see if we would be able to work something out for a full site redesign, but their current budget restrictions have changed their ability to move forward right now.

Look, I like Twitter. I am logged into Twitter right now. I love that it is mobile. I love that it is fast, free and open to freedom of expression. I love that it is open API and there are already hundreds, if not thousands, of supplementary Twitter tools. I love that it lets you be super snarky. What I don’t like about Twitter is how important everyone seems to think it is.

In these rough economic times, it is easy for marketers to put their faith in quick rising new tools (Twitter is currently the fastest growing social media tool according to Wired). But the truth is that it is no magic bullet. The truth is that great customer service, a good product offering and interesting content will lead to good word of mouth recognition. There are some great tools in the social space to spread your content. But unless you have good content based on strategic planning, you will not succeed with any of the social tools. A big part of that strategic planning is knowing your audience and addressing their relevant concerns online, providing them a wanted service.

But, you say there are some companies out there who have been very successful with their Twitter accounts:
Dunkin Donut, Dell, Comcast… Yes, but this is because they have embraced the tool and used it in a natural way. And all three use Twitter as one small part of the marketing presence or for one small part of their business. The big reason for their success is that they used Twitter to address an existing customer need/concern.

It seems like everyday there is another article published online feeding the belief that Twitter is the new cure all. Below are two very interesting articles on the pervasiveness of Twitter. Please use them for good, not as an excuse to sell the cure-all.

Twitter First Real Threat to Google

11% of Americans Read or Post Status Updates