I prefer Yoshi.

Gaming... I will confess. I loved playing my Nintendo 64... Mario Cart (I was undefeated and always chose Yoshi, he was the best duh!), 007 Golden Eye (on DK mode you all know what I'm talking about. Don't deny it.). These days it's all about the Xbox and Wii. I do play Xbox with my little sister all the time. Call it, our "bonding time."


Any ways. I don't know exactly how I would pertain gaming to Good Sign. I don't think that involving gaming would be much of a good idea, to be completely honest. It kind of goes against our "Get out there and be involved with the community" movement, deal. Too bad my subject wasn't Jack Daniels Honey! Hello drinking games. Super easy.


Good Sign isn't about gaming. It's about spreading good vibes and inspiration. Gaming kind of secludes you a bit. Depending on what kind of gaming you're talking about. In my case, any kind of gaming just wouldn't work. But, now that I think about it... is an app consider gaming? If so. I think an app would be a great idea for Good Sign. We're trying to incorporate quotes from people who are involved with the Good Sign Community within the website. I'm thinking an app that has inspirational quotes, events, and pictures of Team Good Sign, etc. would be something to think about. More so in the future than now. We need to have our website up and running before we start doing anything extra.

 

Only 2 more weeks of this Summer Quarter guys!! We can do it! Until next time... get your learn on. 

Let them... Get involved!

So for some reason it was difficult for me to wrap my head around what exactly Communal Marketing is. It took Amber to make up some nice examples for me. Thanks, Amber!! Life saverrrr!

So communal marketing is all about getting the public involved and shape your company or current marketing/advertising campaign. I guess I would say that Good Sign is all about the communal marketing. We've basically created a community, the Good Sign Community, take pictures wherever they are with the Good Sign in them. They've made our guerilla marketing campaign happen and have kept it going.

So it seems like communal marketing wont be that much of a challenge for Team Good Sign. But I think that we could try to take it a step further, as usual. How? Instead of the Good Sign Community simply taking pictures with the Good Sign sign, we will start a new campaign, or contest have you, where the people of Good Sign Community start taking pictures with the sign in the most ridiculous places. Kind of like how people started this planking deal in odd places, we would apply that, but with the Good Sign sign.

Crazy right? Except, we would expect even more extreme pictures from our Good Sign kids. Here's to being an extreme... err Good Sign photo taker?? Until next time... Get your learn on.

META what?

S.E.O. Search Engine Optimization. I'm not going to talk too long about it because it really just bores me to death. Why does it bore me to death? S.E.O. used to run my life! From 2009 to 2010 I worked for an S.E.O. marketing agency. It was an internship that turned into a part-time job. Awesome company and loved working for them... S.E.O. just wasn't for me. I basically sat on my butt all day in front of a computer screen and came up with different ways to say things for meta keywords, meta tags, meta titles, meta everything. I used to get tunnel vision and dizzy because I would literally stare at a screen for hours on end without looking away.

It's pretty cool that you can optimize your website to gain a better ranking on Google or other search engines. So when you enter some kind of search into Google, someone's page is either at the top or not even searchable. Funny thing is that S.E.O. is fairly new. People are still learning about it and don't think that it's that important to have. Thank God the big businesses see the importance in page rank. The Internet is a fairly new thing people. I remember when we got our first at home computer. It was a HUGE deal. I was the first of my friends to get one and an AOL name. O yeah, I remember it. LuckyRossetti. Why? Because I was obsessed with 101 Dalmatians at the time.  Yeah, don't deny it... you remember Pongo and the crew. If not, I have your little visual. 

Any ways. Being the first website to pop up after a search is a great thing. People tend to not even click "next page" on Google searches. If they didn't find what they were looking for within the first page, they're going to re-word their keyword search. So where does this fit in with Good Sign? Well, we lucked up. You type in "good sign" and we're the first to pop up. 

Looks like we've got the S.E.O. covered... Not really. Yeah, we pop up first when you type in "good sign." But that doesn't mean that we can't target other keywords. It's better that way. Getting creative with keywords is the key to great S.E.O. Meta titles, meta descriptions, and other meta things is how you're going to get an even better search engine rating. Time to dig a bit deeper kids. 


There is also a thing called Black Hat S.E.O. and White Hat S.E.O. Clearly Black Hat is bad and White Hat is good. So what is Black Hat all about? Well people, back in the day, used to hide keywords in their backgrounds. Which, in turn, would help them rank first, such as some kids MySpace page. Crazy right? Well Google and other search engines caught on. People would get their pages taken down, and some would never be able to be accessed again. Here's to White Hat S.E.O. You've got to be careful when creating decent S.E.O. work, you can accidentally make what you think White Hate, into Black Hat and eventually get your domain name taken away from you. Until next time... Get your learn on.

Jump on the band wagon!

So last week I was supposed to teach the class about Experiential Marketing AND On-Demand Viewing. Being the wonderful teacher that I am, I forgot to talk about On-Demand Viewing (I'm going to call this ODV). Of course, story of my life. There goes 2 points off of my grade. Nice, Shae... real nice.


At first I really had no idea what on demand viewing was... I thought it had something to do with the whole Dish Network "On-Demand" deal. Well turns out, I was sort of right. Have you ever been watching tv (during a commercial) and a little pop up banner comes up, either on the top or bottom of the screen, saying something like, "To watch National Geographic, press the select key on your remote." Or something along those lines. That's basically ODV. 


If you ask me, I think it's pretty smart. People aren't watching tv these days. They have Tivo or Dish On-Demand, so they're fast forwarding through all of those obnoxious commercials. How are we (advertisers) supposed to get the message out to the masses? We WANT them to want what we're selling! Ooo what up ODV?!  

I'm a huge outdoor junkie, for those who know me, and all of my ad/marketing projects have always involved an outdoor company or some kind of outdoor product (building up the portfolio). So, let's say that Backcountry Outdoors has less than a 30 second spot on TV and they're having this massive gear sale. Clearly it's a bit difficult to say/show everything that they have in such a short amount of time. Here's when ODV comes into play. Backcountry's main commercial throws the general idea, "Hey we're having a gear sale and everything we have is kind of awesome so check it out," kind of thing. During this commercial the little pop up banner will come into play, telling the viewer to press "select" on their remote control to learn more about the sale. When the viewer presses select, they will be taken to a new screen, where they could interact with the page and see everything that's in the sale. Pretty simple and a great, new way for viewers to get involved.


Enough of the boring talk. Let's get to something that's more interesting... at least to me. Experiential marketing. Like I said in the previous post it's about getting consumers involved in the brand and/or product. There are sooo many things you can do with it. It's kind of amazing, if you ask me. Any ways. I'll leave you with some nice visuals:

Until next time... Get your learn on.