Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results

#PMABlur Conference Day One Highlights: Mt. Dew's DEWmocracy & Jet Blue's Twitter programs engage customers

Day one of Blur, PMA’s 2010 Integrated Marketing Conference got underway today. I arrived in Chicago this morning a little behind schedule since my plane out of Rochester was delayed because the crew was late! They arrived with breakfast bags in hand and told us once we got settled on the plane that they had a late night.

I just became a new user of Foursquare and used the location-based tool to do my first official check-in at the Fairmont Hotel here in Chicago and got my first points. The only other “friend” that checked in at the Fairmont was David Berkowitz. He’s been using the tool much longer then I have and has been on a multi-city trip around the country the past couple of weeks. So when I caught up with him later I asked for a few tips on how this is supposed to work.

I missed the opening session which was a welcome from Bonnie Carlson, PMA’s president, and then the opening keynote from Univision Communications. I settled in to hear Marc Hanson from Pepsi’s Mt. Dew speaking about their integrated marketing campaign, DEWmocracy. They ran the first part of this campaign in the summer of 2008, tying into the presidential election year. They asked consumers to vote for their next Mt. Dew in which they gave them a choice of a red, white or blue flavor. Voltage, a red raspberry flavor, won with 43% of the votes and Mt. Dew rolled out the new product in 1st quarter ’09.

The ROI Mt. Dew saw was 36 million cases of product sold, 85% which was incremental. They achieved this through off-shelf placements in end caps, coolers and other locations at retail. They claim that the campaign was all about “bringing the voice of consumers and a unique product to store shelves”.

I’m skipping now to my favorite break-out session of the afternoon which was in the Digital track from the marketing team at Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston and Tara Ryan-Carson. They shared with us some of what they’ve learned over the past year as they’ve experimented with social media, mostly Twitter. They started off talking about how they dealt with a crisis situation when one of their jets sat on the tarmac at JFK for hours enraging customers and becoming a PR nightmare. They learned that they needed to listen to the customers' complaints and explain to them as best they could how they were going to fix it for the future.

Labor Day Thoughts: Blogging is a Labor Of Love

By the time many of you will probably read this, Labor Day weekend will be over and the trek back home from the long three-day weekend will be complete along with what unofficially will be remembered as the Summer of '07. I chose to go the leisure route this past weekend and tried to stayed away from the computer up until now which I can tell from lack of email's that the majority of us did the same.

In honor of Labor Day I want to celebrate the fact that as of September 1st this blog, Donna's Promo Talk, is now a whole six months old. I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting into earlier this year when I decided to join the social media network and became a blogger. My background is as a promotional marketer so I decided that this blog would be targeted to marketing professionals, but also of interest to those wanting to know what's happening in today's promotional marketplace. I first did what the experts recommended which was to browse, read and comment on other people’s blogs before starting my own. This helped me to find my “voice” as well to create relationships with other bloggers in my field.

What I didn't realize when I started this is that by blogging I would meet so many other people that I have started to build relationships with. Some I have gotten the opportunity to meet in person by attending some conferences, specifically BlogHer07 held in Chicago this past July which was totally amazing. Also, the Interactive Promotions Summit that I was invited to attend in Las Vegas by ePrize. This one was specific to the interactive promotions industry and the other to blogging, my new second love. Other relationships I have started have been totally online and many of these will probably always be just virtual.

I have learned that social media really is the new form of networking and I have been encouraging everyone to visit some blogs, read them, leave comments and perhaps even start their own. A blogger may choose to focus on their business, spend the time releasing their personal passion or perhaps get a chance to enjoy a little of both. Either way, everyone needs to become familiar with what social media is all about and if you're reading this blog you're well on your way.

Blogs are becoming the voice of the customer and all businesses need to start paying attention to them. All companies can obtain great feedback from some things that people write in their blogs as well as just in the comments section. Traditional market research is changing. Businesses today need research based on consumer behaviors that are gathered and reported quickly and social networks are quickly becoming the best source for this.

So, I'm making a commitment to continue my new labor of love and I'm looking forward to Donna's Promo Talk celebrating it's first year anniversary in 2008. I have been practicing the virtue of patience which has always been one of my greatest weaknesses. I wondered when I first started this blog if anyone really was reading it. It reminded me of that thought provoking question... when a tree falls in the middle of the forest and if no one is there to hear it, did it make any noise?  Well I'm finally starting to see a steady increase in my subscribers and readership. I would now like to see more comments and encourage you all to add to the conversation and write about what you like, don't like, agree with, disagree with or whatever.

It is an exciting time for promotional marketing and I'm very glad to be part of this industry. The Internet has really opened up a whole new media for promotional marketing and it's just going to continue to grow and become more and more important in the marketing mix for everyone, whether a large or a small business. I promise to continue to provide my readers with updates on what's current and hot in interactive promotions that are relevant to the time. This blog is becoming what will be a great time capsule for us to look back on to remember the year. So, please feel free to contribute and thank you very much for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you. 

Welcome to Donna's Promo Talk

Welcome to Donna's Promo Talk where we will blog about current promotions and trends within the promotional marketing arena. I will focus on interactive and mobile phone promotions, such as sweepstakes, games, contests and especially those that include consumer-generated content, as well as other social media programs, but I won't limit our talk just to these areas.