Ted Rubin

Building Customer Relationships with Branded Story-Telling

Brand-story-300x169There are some new buzzwords in marketing going around, everything from “Collaborative Marketing” to “Relationship Marketing,” and even “Branded Content.” But what do those phrases really mean and how can today’s businesses take advantage of them?

Well, we all know that consumers are becoming more and more contemptuous of push advertising, which has traditional marketers scrambling to find a magic bullet to replace it. But with what? When social came along and marketers mistakenly tried to force push advertising messages there, the failures were huge.

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Who Benefits from Entertaining, Non-Brand Centric, Commercials?

relevanceWhat did this last round of Super Bowl ads do for the brands who created them? In my opinion, not much—when you consider the colossal price tag of the ads compared to brand perception. This past year a 30-second spot cost $4M to air, not counting the costs for an agency to produce it.

According to MediaLife, $1.85 billion was spent on these ads over the past 10 years, and all the while TV viewership has flattened. So who really benefits?

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Some Top Social Hits & Misses of the Past Few Weeks

TedRubin-HeadShot-10.5.11-200x300It’s a wild and crazy social media world out there.  Small businesses, big brands, celebrities and everyone in between continues to struggle to find the right balance of engagement and sharing in social media (some with grace, others… not so much).  So, who knocked it out of the park and who struck out in social media in the past few weeks?

Here are a few notable items that gave me cause for pause:

Missed the Mark (by a mile)

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Social Media has Played a Significant Role in the Rise of Marketing to Women… better keep an eye on the Latinas from #LATISM12

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Social has taken away numerous connection barriers between brand and consumer, giving brands more direct access to not just push information out to consumers, but to actively engage in ongoing conversation with consumers and their networks. Since women, who control 85% of household spending, are the majority of social media users, it makes sense that marketers naturally have turned their focus to marketing to women. They hold the purse strings AND have the highest and most interrelated social media presence.

My New Title, CHO… Shifting Your Mindset by Shifting Your Focus

I recently circulated a Facebook Post where I announced that my corporate title at Collective Bias was soon to change from CSMO (Chief Social Marketing Officer) to CHO. But I didn’t explain further, and it got everyone guessing what CHO stood for.

It was a great exercise. People guessed all KINDS of things, such as:

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Return on Relationship, The Book, is a Reality!

Last year I embarked on a journey with my friend and co-author Kathryn Rose to put into words what Return on Relationship really means. And after months of hard work, I’m very excited that our new book, Return on Relationship: Relationships are the New Currency; Honor Them, Invest in Them, and Start Measuring Your ROR has finally come to fruition, and will be launched January 29th!

Now, you’ve heard me talking about ROR for years, but this is the first time that the concept has been thoroughly discussed from more than just my point of view. Kathryn brings a fresh, practical perspective, and together we explore the depth and breadth of relationship building for businesses.

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The Decline of Machines – Why Social Media is not Technology and Vice Versa

Originally posted at Collective Bias Blog 

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Most of today’s senior business leaders and marketers developed much of their perspective during the dot com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. It is little wonder then that when approaching social marketing the solution for most folks is rooted in technology.  The same with most start-ups that are still pursuing the model of aggregating a huge audience, using “Big Data” to spot patterns of groups and selling ads. People buy more stuff and we get a ridiculous valuation.

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Twitter for Sharing and Syndication

Many misunderstand the current power and relevant scale of Twitter. It is not about how Twitter has scaled to the general public. The most important thing about News, Content, and anything else published via Twitter, is that a great deal of the influencer community “is” utilizing Twitter for news, communication, and discovery. This information then finds its way to other publishing mediums be it Blogs, Traditional News Media, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, the water cooler, or whatever other mediums exist. Twitter is a tool that leads into other forms of social sharing.

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What Are You Doing to Connect Women with Your Brand/Product/Service?

What is happening now, as more women spend more time on more social networking sites for more reasons, is that women’s purchasing power now goes well beyond the purse … into women’s relationships.

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