Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

If you don’t believe that marketing is all about LOVE, INC magazine has a great read on how popular retailer Zappos has embraced the notion of LOVE to create one of the most unique corporate cultures. As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has found out, true competitive advantage comes from making your employees happy which will then make your customers happy:

But Hsieh has a hard time getting excited about any of this. What he really cares about is making Zappos’s employees and customers feel really, really good. This is not because Hsieh is a nice guy (though he is a very nice guy), but because he has decided that his entire business revolves around one thing: happiness. Everything at Zappos serves that single end. Other business innovators work with software code or circuit boards or molecular formulas. Hsieh prefers to work with something altogether more complex and volatile: human beings themselves.

What are YOU doing to make your customers and employees happy? What activities would make your employees and customers happy?

Come on then, go and make people happy!

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Frankly ‘Love’ is what it’s all about in marketing. People either love you or your brand doesn’t exist in their minds. Here’s an interview with word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz where he talks about why ‘Love’ is important in marketing and how asking yourself Would anyone tell a friend about this? will change your company!

>> Your competitive advantage is very simple: make people happy!

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We humans are a curious bunch (some more than others) and anything that piques our curiosity will get our attention.

What would you think of a guy that arrives at a Late Show with only his boxers on? Most likely that he’s crazy but at the same time it would make you curious enough to watch right?

You might not know who Ron Artest is but after watching the videos below you’ll remember him because that’s exactly what he did.

A person’s personality is it’s best form of advertising

As a brand you might think he’s out of his mind but frankly I like the guy because he doesn’t play it safe, he pushes boundaries most people wouldn’t even think about and is rewarded with free advertising. Most people like having him around because he shakes things up and changes the dynamic of a situation, case in point when Kimmel asks him if could come to the show at least once a week. Enough said!

Get out of your comfort zone and shake things up

The ability to act ‘out of the ordinary’ gives you tremendous power because most people are always expecting normal and in the rapid world we live in where everyday people are bombarded by messages, videos, blog posts, audio, pictures, the ability to keep people’s attention is very important and it’s the difference between being relevant and irrelevant. 

Here are a few ideas on what you can do to get people’s attention:

> Do the unexpected.

> Push some boundaries.

> Have fun and exercise your creative thought.

> Be original.

This is isn’t anything new, but if you add some of these ideas to your daily branding activities you’re more likely to be seen a lot more interesting to your audience.

Remember >> Normal is boring. Be interesting, people remember interesting people.

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A new tool released by Edelman called Tweet Level can tell you how popular you are on Twitter. What this tool does is it scans your tweets and measures your influence based on 3 key factors: popularity, engagement and trust.

It’s important to note that the number of followers you have is completely irrelevant, what really matters to you is your trust factor or more specifically how many times you are retweeted. Remember that on Twitter you are entering a vast network where there a lot of people broadcasting their stuff, building trust is THE most important thing you should be thinking about before you put your stuff out there. That’s why a good rule of thumb before entering Twitter is to start by listening to what people are saying and then slowly join in on the conversation and start making some friends.

Then if you post credible and interesting stuff for your fellow tweeps, they may ‘like’ it enough to retweet it.

As you can see from our analysis, we have a low trust factor. This might be because we’ve only been using our Twitter account for the past few months or because we might have to do a better job of engaging in conversation with our tweeps to build credibility and help our chances of being retweeted.

Either way we all start from zero and it’s important to understand that building a brand on Twitter takes time, you just don’t go and buy twitter followers.

Also don’t get discouraged when you see the top Twitter user list, most of these have built their brand way before Twitter was popular. For example accounts such as Mashable’s that has a low engagement score but still scores high on popularity, this is because their content is the most retweeted out there and the main way people engage with them is through their website.

We recommend you read Edelman’s tips on how to be more influential on Twitter.

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Want people to talk about you? Learn from Lady Gaga.

I’m not the biggest Lady Gaga fan but I do enjoy seeing a very creative artist at work, she takes a book from some of her contemporaries such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Marilyn Manson and even Britney Spears in her new music video for Bad Romance.

The dance, the shock and the style makes it hard to forget and it has driven it to be seen over 10 million times on YouTube in the last 6 days.

So what makes it worth talking about? A few things:

• A memorable line. “Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!”
• It’s novel. You want to see it again and again to see if there’s something else you didn’t catch the first time around.
• Shocking ending. Gaga on a burnt bed next to the charbroiled remains of his buyer. Brilliant!
• Everything in between. Great choreography with some eye catching effects.
• Sticky song. You’ll like the song more if you watch the video.

If you want your brand experience to grab people’s attention, take a page from Lady Gaga. Think about a meme, an idea and present it in an uncommon way and then think about a finishing move because how you end is sometimes more important than how you start.

Whatever you might think of Lady Gaga there’s no denying she’s got MAJOR talent and in her newest video it’s on full display. Shock when well used has it’s value!

Remember to ask yourself: Would anyone tell a friend about this?

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