Friday Find: Warming my Cold New England Cockles

It's no secret around here that I'm originally from New England. This means I'm contractually obliged to be a New England sports fan. And by contractually, I mean there's a blood oath which, I assume, breaking is punishable by death. At the very least, definitely by disownment.

If you're also from New England and you are on Facebook, I'm sure you've already seen the video below.

If you're not, you might appreciate it anyway. Not that I care if you do. (Oops, sorry, my Bostonian popped out.)

The pride of our city, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, got together with the other pride of our city, Tom Brady, to raise money for three causes by promising every New Englander's dream: drinking beer and eating pizza with the three of them.

Omaze is running this fundraiser, and from what I can tell they're doing a bang-up job of it. They buried the lede a bit, in my opinion, but then again maybe they didn't. (It was not intuitive for me to find information on the charities it benefits. I had to Google them, but could only find out about two of them, because I couldn't decipher the logo of the third one. The charities were not linked on the fundraiser page. Is this somehow by design, or is it a horrible oversight?)

To find the video, I Googled "tom ben matt boston" [sic] [lazy] and look what I got back. That is one smart Google Ad: they know their audience.

The more you donate, the more prize entries you get. And look at what's up for grabs, besides the beer and pizza thing:

Again I say: SMAHT. They do indeed know their audience.

Anyway, you should watch this video, and you should also check out the fundraiser here.

Marketing Monday: Brilliant Ad Copy

If you've watched any amount of TV lately and not fast-forwarded through all the commercials, you've likely seen some of these State Farm TV spots. They've ingeniously written ad scripts where the meaning changes completely depending on how the lines are delivered by the actors. The scripts & delivery serve to illustrate both the good and bad in life, and how State Farm has what you need in both cases. Or as they put it, "State Farm knows that for every one of those moments, there's one of these moments."

This is some seriously brilliant copywriting. As any copywriter knows, the smallest, punchiest lines can be the most difficult to write, and when I watch these ads I often imagine the struggle. I've no idea whether this is remotely accurate, but I picture a round table of writers yanking their hair out as they test lines in various voices until they all start to feel like they're going crazy. These are the kind of lines that I imagine were tested out on family, friends, and around the water cooler. "But if they say it like this does it sound more exasperated?" "Would a thief say this? Is this believable? What if he says it like this?"

I'm curious about the process here. If it were me, I think I'd start by writing the 'good' side of the ad first, then test it out in the 'uh oh' voice. The comedic element might be more natural that way, exactly as it's delivered in the videos. How would you approach it?

Video descriptions on YouTube continue to perfectly capture both the individual videos, and the services offered. 

1) "State Farm is always there, with car insurance, for when things go wrong. But also here with car loans, to help life go right." 

2) "State Farm is always there, with renters insurance, for when things go wrong. But also here, with a rewards credit card, to help life go right."

3) "State Farm is always there, with car insurance, for when things go wrong. But also here with car loans, to help life go right."

Marketing Monday: Snoozefest (Twitterlytics!)

Today I'm digging this article from Hootsuite, on how not to bore your readers.

Frankly, I think not boring your readers is a large combination of smarts, current marketing wisdom, and that just-right mix of magic and mojo that's hard to put a finger on. One thing I really like about this article is that it goes into Twitter analytics a bit. I'm a big fan of analytics. Huge. Numbers tell stories we'd be foolish to ignore.

If you're not paying attention to your Twitter analytics, get on that.

From your home page, click on your avatar in the upper right corner. Scroll down and click on analytics.

Woo! Look at all that data. Hootsuite advises in this article (and I tend to agree) that your engagement rate can give you a good snapshot of where you are. They describe the engagement rate as "a number calculated based on the number of impressions (i.e. how many people saw the Tweet) and the number of engagements (link clicks, favorites, retweets, etc.) with your Tweets. Obviously, the higher the engagement rate, the better you’re doing." Access the engagement rate from the analytics, by going to the "Tweets" tab at the top of the page. Once you're on the "Tweets" page in analytics, the engagements metric is to the right, and looks like this:

Screenshot from hootsuite.com.

On that same page, you can click on 'Top Tweets' to see which of your tweets got the most engagement. The results just might surprise you.

There are some other gems in this article, but it's a good opportunity to walk you through how to use Twitter analytics. Twitter is a good platform to experiment a bit, depending on your brand and your voice, and being able to see the results of those experiments are what make it worth it. Again, you might be surprised by what your top tweets are: they aren't always the ones that you get you the most RTs or replies.