Tips & Best Practices

2014 Olympics: Winning Marketing for Team USA’s Athletes

April 21, 2014 by Mitch Arnowitz

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia have come and gone. Tuvel Communications was pleased to lend its support to the USA Bobsled & Skeleton team’s marketing efforts. Olympic athletes rely on many forms of sponsorships to fund their dreams, from individual and corporate donations to sponsorships to crowd funding. Prior to the Winter Games, Tuvel worked with the USA Bobsled & Skeleton and Washington, DC-based ad agency ds+f to bolster the team’s online community building efforts, resulting in record sponsorship revenue.

Many lessons were learned on our Olympic marketing journey. Please keep in mind that individual athletic performance has a huge impact on any type of marketing effort, including everything social. The following list includes some of the lessons learned – and reminders that we picked up along the way.

Content <still> rules

As you can see from the following examples, content rules! Reach, engagement and followers are only some of the metrics used to track success. Bobsled athlete Jazmine Fenlator and skeleton athlete John Daly’s Twitter reach was high when compared to the other athletes on the team. (Twitter ‘Star’ Lolo Jones was not included in our study due to her massive – nearly 400,000 – number of followers.)

Example: Jazmine Fenlator and John Daly’s Twitter reach:

Jazmine’s updates during the Olympics include mentions of Hurricane Irene relief efforts and her mom’s health issues. She is also known for her crowdsourcing or Internet fundraising efforts to raise money for training, transportation, and Sochi-related equipment expenses.

John’s updates include lots of humor and pics from the teammate Johnny Quinn’s famous Sochi bathroom door incident. Mr. Daly also gained notoriety when Cosmo asked readers if they thought he was the Ryan Lochte of the Sochi Olympics.

4 Things You Should Do Before Hiring a Social Media Agency

August 23, 2012 by Kari Rippetoe

It seems like every marketing and PR shop out there is “doing” social media – everything from influencer outreach and managing your social media presence to “getting you (insert number here) more followers – guaranteed!”. And yes, Tuvel is also a digital communications shop that offers social media services (and we do some great work, too). But the task of choosing a social media agency to help you out should not be taken lightly.

Before even starting to look at potential social media agencies, there are 4 important steps you need to take (by the way, this will help you tremendously when it comes time to writing up that RFP for agencies to bid on):

Do your research. Just as you would research the online and offline publications your audience is reading, you should also do some preliminary research into their social media habits. Are your customers/members/attendees using social media? If so, where are they? What are they talking about? This is certainly something a social media agency can help you do, but this cursory research will help you gain valuable insights and establish goals. Which is the next thing you should do…

Establish goals. This is where you need to ask yourself WHY your brand should be using social media. Use the insights from your preliminary research, in conjunction with your high-level business goals, to determine specific, trackable and realistic goals for your social media marketing efforts. Examples might be:

Increase awareness of your brand or product.
Establish a customer service channel through social media.
Establish your brand as a thought-leader.
Increase new leads and sales.
Increase traffic.

Evaluate resources. You may have already determined that you need to hire a social media agency to provide your organization with the additional knowledge and people-power to run a successful social media program; however, you should still evaluate the resources you already have in-house who will be assisting with program implementation, or even carrying on the effort after the agency has laid the groundwork.

Set expectations. Make sure that your internal team and management are clear on what to expect from social media. Everyone needs to understand that it will take time to build traction. Social media is also so much more than a set of tools – a well-defined social media strategy will have content, email, PR, sales and customer service elements woven into it – and everyone will need to pitch in time and effort to make it work, in tandem with the agency.

What steps do you take before hiring an outside marketing or communications agency, social media or otherwise?

What’s the Definition of Value?

May 31, 2012 by Mitch Arnowitz

Earlier this week, I participated in a Facebook discussion kicked off by Toby Bloomberg, the Marketing Diva. In addition to Toby, other way bright people in the conversation included B.L. Ochman. If you don’t already know who these fine folks are, make it your business to do so!

Turns out that Toby, an influential blogger, received an email from the PR Director of a major brand asking her to support their latest campaign. The discussion thread covered areas like pay-to-play and bad PR pitches. But, the part of the conversation that caught my eye was the definition of perceived value. Not value to the brand or PR Director sending Toby the note, but how the blogger or person receiving the communication defines value.

We execute influencer outreach campaigns on behalf of clients and sometimes reach out to bloggers. We don’t typically begin a conversation asking someone to support our brand or cause. Rather, we try to find out what turns the reader on, where the value is for them – usually referred to as the Whats In It For Me. Sometimes the value is not a free pass or sample! A free trial download may be valuable to our client, but may not be valuable to the person that they’re trying to impact. Instead, value may be defined as access, education or an audience.

Recognition of community participation on a leaderboard can be an example of value, demonstrated by the rise of social gamification. As these dated (but still on-point) articles detail, value to some customers can be offering product input or even involvement in product creation. Having said all of that, sometimes people do want dollars off!

On the Internet, beauty truly lies in the eyes of the beholder. While the end game may be brand support or sales, experience has taught us that the reception of our campaigns is greater when the focus isn’t solely on the client brand. It has to be about the people.

The other interesting issue discussed in this thread was relationship-building. B.L. Ochman nailed it when she said “we’d like you to support our brand” is like saying “can we pick your brain.” In other words, building relationships by focusing on the other persons needs is a good place to start. You may not always be able to deliver, but listening goes a long way.

But enough about us. How do you define value?