Zer0 to 5ive

Image courtesy of OraSure Technologies

Before you clear the last thing off your desk, attend the holiday party and hop on the plane to Barbados, remember to add that one last item to your December check list: employee holiday donations. Despite the tough economy, millions of people are planning to donate during the holiday season and many of them could be employees sitting right under your firm’s roof. It only takes a few quick steps to recognize these altruistic individuals within your company.

I recently worked with a client that had several employees actively involved in a local community event. We quickly discovered that spreading the “good word’ about holiday donations is a fantastic way to strengthen corporate morale, improve your firm’s reputation within the local community and help some truly deserving individuals during the holiday season. And it is fun for your employees! Here are five tips for spreading the good word about your employees’ holiday donations:

1. Ask around the office – Find out if your employees are planning
to participate in any holiday drives. If nothing is planned, suggest a local organization for your company to participate in. There are a myriad of deserving holiday charities to choose from. A quick Google search can help provide some options. The local United Way chapter and other volunteer organizations usually post the details of their holiday drives to their websites.

2. Draft a media alert and pitch to the local press – Draft a media alert with an event summary and send to local reporters. Writing an alert is a great exercise for creating content to later share with your company and stakeholders. Here is a sample media alert from a recent client’s employee involvement that summarizes the details in a “who, what, when, where, why” format. Offer up a time for interview and photo opportunities with your employees and local volunteer organization reps.

3. Take photos and videos – Go to the event and take photos or conduct video interviews to capture all the details. All this can be done now with a basic digital camera! It’s a good idea to label photos with names of employees when sending to the media. Be sure to add your photos to your company’s website or social media pages later on.

4. Write a summary email – The summary email is important for building corporate morale within your organization. Pull a summary from the media alert (attaching photos of employees who participated) and send in an email to members of your organization. Take a shot at sending a few summary bullets and photos to reporters for their newspaper’s community section or briefs.

5. Post a recap to your company site – Create a wrap-up summary and post to your corporate website. Include any relevant media coverage in your news section. Recap the event in your next company newsletter and be sure to share your holiday story by posting to your company blog, twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

These are some of the fun and easy ways to show the holiday spirit of your employees and solidify your company’s connection within the community. Follow the tips above and ensure your employee volunteers are recognized this holiday season!

Post by Mike Levey, Zer0 to 5ive Senior Strategist

Along with pumpkins and early thoughts of turkeys and treats, it’s time to think about 2010 planning. Too often, strategic planning is pushed off –becoming a rush job at the end of the year when budgets are due. The result is lackluster first quarter sales and another year off to a slow start.

Planning takes time – time to evaluate what went right and wrong during the year, time to conduct customer or prospect research, and time to develop the strategies that will make a difference in the coming year.

A good marketing plan takes into account business goals, the environment, budget and resources. Our plans follow a tried-and-true outline:

• Objectives
• SWOT
• Audience
• Positioning and messaging
• Strategy
• Tactics
• Timeline
• Budget

With all of the options for communicating, plans also need to be built holistically with awareness, lead generation, customer engagement and brand impact all considered through a single lens.

There’s a saying in marketing: nothing is worse than a bad plan well executed!! Take the time you need. Click through our Planning Kick Start presentation (below) and take advantage of our Kick Start session.

When used correctly, email marketing can be a powerful part of an integrated communications campaign and an effective tool for reaching your customers and prospects with offers or information. However, current CAN-SPAM laws and poor planning can trip up your campaign if you’re not careful.

At 0 to 5, we’ve created and deployed hundreds of email marketing campaigns on behalf of our clients. And while the success of a campaign depends on many different factors, we use the following checklist to ensure that these emails elicit action – not annoyance – from the customer.

1. Get Permission – First and foremost, always ensure you have your target’s permission to send them an email – otherwise it is spam. If you are using an in-house list, keep your unsubscribe list up to date. If you are using a rented list, make sure you are working with a reputable company that has strict anti-spam policies. Most list rental companies require a “permission” email be sent in advance of your campaign, to enable people to opt out. If the company is willing to give you the list without restrictions on its use – be wary!
2. Time it Right – Plan the delivery of your email to maximize its effectiveness. Send your emails mid-week and mid-day to get the most emails read by your targeted audience. Space out your emails so that you are not emailing your audience more than once a week.
3. Design Smartly – A visually pleasing HTML email is more likely to be read than a plain text email – but you should always include both options, as some people block HTML emails from their inbox. When designing an HTML email, always maintain a balance of copy to HTML images, and be careful to limit the amount of images in the email. Also, keep the width of the email to 600 pixels or less to ensure that the entire email gets seen on your recipient’s screen.
4. Make it Mobile-Friendly – Chances are a significant number of your emails will be read on a mobile device. You can make your message more mobile-friendly by putting key copy in plain or HTML text, and stripping out any top menus, large logos or banners at the top of the design. Be sure to keep your emails short and include all important information and links near the top of your email.
5. Grab Attention with the Subject Line – This is the most important part of your email, and will have the biggest impact on the results of your campaign. As such, make the subject line short and to the point, while communicating something of value to the target audience. Some experts recommend keeping the subject line to 50 characters or less. Also, be sure to avoid common “spam” words and symbols.
6. Include a Clear Call to Action – The content of your email should include a clear call to action matching the objective of your campaign: “Click here to learn more,” “Register now,” “Sign up for our newsletter.” Make it easy for the recipient to take action with links that take them directly to the form or page where they can access the specific information in which they are interested.
7. Keep it Short and Sweet – Keep your copy short and benefits-oriented. Many consumers view their emails from the preview pane, or if opened, may spend only seconds with each email, so keep this in mind when writing your copy and make those seconds count.
8. Avoid Spam Words – Use of certain words and symbols are likely to land your email in the spam filter. Avoid using symbols such as exclamation points and dollar symbols, or the words “free,” “sale” or “discount” in the subject line or the body of your email if possible.
9. Easy Unsubscribe – Always include an unsubscribe link in every email. This is required by the CAN-SPAM Act. Make sure to honor any requests to unsubscribe immediately and be sure to remove unsubscribers’ names/emails on all the databases you use.
10. Test, Test, Test – Always do a seed test of your email to see how it looks as deployed – on a computer as well as a mobile device. Test the links to make sure they are all working, proof one last time, and make any other adjustments necessary before the full deployment.

With every email marketing campaign you deploy, you will learn more about how to fine-tune your emails to maximize their effectiveness with your target audience. Keep these tips in mind and it should give you a good start to a successful campaign.

Posted by Zer0 to 5ive managing principal Jennifer Moritz

The New York City Marathon is November 1, 2009. It’s always a big day here in the City but I never know when it is until the very day is upon me and I hear the traffic report citing multiple street closures. I most certainly had no idea who pays for the whole thing. For all I know, the City foots the bill.

But that all changed a few days ago when I walked into the Dunkin Donuts on 14th and 6th undecided about the type of donut I wanted for breakfast. Should I go seasonal with a Pumpkin Donut or traditional with an Old-Fashioned? To my great surprise there was a new donut featured prominently in the center of the bakery rack. It was a traditional, glazed donut with orange icing and blue sprinkles. I knew it most certainly was not in honor of the Mets (and their very disappointing season), so I inquired further. Apparently it was the ING NYC Marathon Donut. I was intrigued and ordered it. Now I know that the marathon is coming up and that ING is a sponsor.

Nice work ING – for using a creative cross-promotion to leverage your sponsorship of the Marathon and generate awareness among a broader consumer audience.

Posted by Zer0 to 5ive’s Marybeth Sheppard. Image via Flickr/Creative Commons courtesy of Salim Virji.

Emailing the media is easy. You draft your pitch, email the reporter and wait to hear back. On a good day, the reporter writes back that he or she wants to interview your client. On a bad day, you don’t hear back. On an average day, you probably still don’t hear back. So I ask, how can you rely solely on email when the top journalists are getting 100+ pitches a day and juggling deadlines, meetings and special requests from their managing editors?

I’ve found that using the phone is a complementary tool for pitching the media. The phone is not always appropriate when the reporter is on deadline, says “no” through email or you have not researched his or her recent stories and publication, but what follows are 7 ways to use the phone to your advantage:

1. Time sensitive release: Just as football is a game of inches, PR is a game of minutes. Sometimes there’s just no time to wait to hear back from a reporter if the big event is the next morning or your client just launched the hottest medical device. Follow up by phone if you don’t hear back through email on important and timely announcements.
2. Holiday weeks: Don’t underestimate the holidays. Some journalists will certainly plan vacations around the holidays, but the bottom line is that news marches forward and most journalists who are staffed around the holidays have quiet schedules and could be waiting to take your call.
3. The “generic” email: Often magazines and newspapers will list an “info@” email for following up with key contacts. Calling these outlets directly and asking to speak with your intended contact insures that the right person hears your pitch.
4. Reporter only responds to your first email: When a reporter initially emails back with interest but later becomes idle on follow-up emails, give them a quick call, assuming that you’ve given the reporter a reasonable amount of time to respond. Most journalists are actually ok with follow-up calls if you do your research.
5. Voicemail: Don’t underestimate the power of voicemail. It’s non-invasive, and as I mentioned above, your contact could simply be swarmed with too many emails to ever open your pitch. Earlier this year, I pitched an event to the Los Angeles Times and couldn’t reach the right person by email or phone. I left a couple of quick and to-the-point voicemails and the next morning I found out that the morning assignment editor received my voicemail and sent to a reporter who attended my client’s event and wrote an influential article.
6. Finding the appropriate contact: Usually a media database or publication’s website list the appropriate editors and beats. However, if you cannot quickly identify the appropriate contact at a publication, take a stab at calling the publication’s editorial desk for the most appropriate contact. Sometimes by calling you might even reach an editor who asks you to pitch them and with the proper research and good PR pitching they might encourage you to follow up with a specific reporter that will want to write a story.
7. 100% belief in your pitch: I left this last because I feel that this overrides all situations in media relations. If you truly believe that the reporter is an extraordinary fit, you’ve done your research on the journalist and you just don’t hear back from emailing, try calling. At worst, if the journalist is not interested you can use this as an opportunity to find out how you can make your next pitch better or bring closure by crossing the contact off your list.

At the end of the day, our clients judge us by the amount of quality media coverage we can bring to the table. And the phone becomes another way to get out your story. I can tell you first-hand that adding the phone into the PR toolkit has led to additional media coverage that ultimately has increased client leadership and generated additional customers and revenue.

Post by Mike Levey, Zer0 to 5ive senior strategist
Image courtesy of Aussiegall via Creative Commons BY 2.0 license

What does it take to become inspired? Where do you go? What do you see? What is it that gets your wheels spinning? To me, inspiration is unique and comes to each of us in different ways. For some, it’s visiting an art gallery, paging through design books, or browsing the internet. For my college design professor, it was showering. He once told our class that his greatest ideas come to him in the shower. But for me, I don’t have one particular source for inspiration – I have many.

Often times I use the internet for inspiration because of it’s convenience. However, I love the design annuals from PRINT Magazine and GD USA. Each year these magazines release issues composed of winning designs in each different design category. Basically, it’s about 300 some pages of inspiring art, from Annual Reports, Invitations, and Collateral to Identity Design, Multimedia, and Package Design. I never leave for the office in the morning without at least one of these magazines in my bag. If my co-workers have ever seen me paging through magazines while at work and wondered what I was doing, now you know – I’m getting inspired!

Sometimes you will see me waiting in the lobby of a doctor’s office flipping through magazines to pass the time. If I see something I like, whether it’s an interesting typography treatment or a simple tiny graphic in a call out box, I will sneakily rip the page out of the magazine, tuck it into my bag and add it to my collection of inspiring art (I do this while at the gym too).

Sometimes you will see me driving with my camera phone in the air trying to snap a photo of an interesting billboard design or advertisement. Now I know this isn’t always the safest option, but I do my best not to cause any accidents.

For me, shopping can be a great source for inspiration too. Last Christmas, I walked the entire mall with my camera, flashing pictures of the different displays and window art. There were a lot of fun color combinations and type treatments that immediately caught my eye. Target and AC Moore are great stores to get inspired in. My camera is always handy and you will see me taking pictures of whatever catches my eye. Whether it’s a Hallmark card with an interesting graphic on the front, a cool pattern on a piece of clothing, or a scrap book page example pasted to the bulletin board in the paper isle, there I am, camera in hand, snapping away.

So, while some people have one particular thing they do or see to get inspired, that is not the case for me. My ideas come from so many different places ¬– magazines, books, nature, clothes, wallpaper, paint books, websites, blogs, wrapping paper, gift bags, greeting cards, stores, outdoor displays, and the list could go on. Henry David Thoreau once said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

Posted by Nicole Maziarz, Zer0 to 5ive

Implementing rounded corners has always been somewhat of a chore. With the current CSS1 and CSS2 specifications, you’re forced to slice up rounded corner images, and add all sorts of bulky, most times un-semantic code, just to achieve a rounded corner effect. With the introduction of CSS3, rounded corners is easy work. This technique won’t work in every single web browser today, but users in older browsers will still have a pleasant experience on your site.
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Is it possible to put together a pitch template that will work for any pitch? I believe that 99% of the time, the answer is yes. Below is a sample pitch format that I’ve found has worked time and again. Have a look:

Reporters want an organized and compelling pitch that is easy to read, includes numbers and offers thought into the bigger trends and issues around a company or product. Here are the 1, 2, 3s that I believe will work for crafting a great pitch:

1. Here’s the story: This section gives the reporter company/product background and explains why he or she should cover. I try to keep this to 2-4 sentences at most. It’s easy to ramble on about the company and product. For example, the SmartSponge System can easily be described in five sentences, but this format helps me offer a condensed background, top-line product description, and tie it to an industry trend that the reporter will know.

2. Here are the numbers: I’ve found that reporters find numbers, facts and statistics helpful when building credibility for the importance of the story you are pitching. For example, hospital infections adding $30.5 billion to the nation’s hospital costs helps quantify the pain point in the market. The bottom line – reporters love numbers!

3. Here are the discussion points: I like to show the reporter how the pitch applies to his or her particular outlet. For example, in the sample pitch I target a business TV show that interviews CEOs of exciting businesses. Sometimes I will substitute this section with an “interview opportunities” section when relevant and offer industry experts and clients in addition to the company executive.

Some might argue that the sample pitch is too long, but for a new reporter that does not know much about a company or product, I think it’s important to keep the pitch a bit longer to help them see the big picture. Use these three easy steps and you will be ‘moon walking’ with your reporters.

Posted by Michael Levey, Zer0 to 5ive senior account strategist

It’s said that you are judged by the company you keep…and we keep some pretty hot company.

This morning, Datamation announced its list of 85 cloud computing vendors shaping the emerging cloud. Two Zer0 to 5ive clients — Appistry and Mashery — made the list (and rightly so…text below is from the Datamation article):

72) Mashery
A core concept in cloud computing is the Application Programming Interface, or API. Companies that allow access to their Web applications – say, for instance, to developers or clients – do so through an API, which is a portal to the infrastructure.

Mashery, founded in 2006, has built its business on the centrality of the API. The San Francisco-based company provides a SaaS infrastructure for supporting a firm’s API. Its management and monitoring tool allows a company to control details like who has access to its data via an API. Among other advantages, this enables businesses to form Web-based partnership with other online businesses – which is the core of cloud computing.

Mashery has garnered an impressive customer list, including Alcatel-Lucent, Hoovers, Netflix and Best Buy.

Notable: Mashery’s management team – here’s their blog – includes Oren Michels, CEO, who was president of Colt HR and Winebid.com; and Ajay Arora, VP of strategy and services, who held executive positions at newScale and Centrata. Mashery has so far raised $2 million in venture funding.

80) Appistry
Appistry’s flagship product is the CloudIQ Platform, which aims to make it easier for companies to use both public and private clouds. CloudIQ Platform incorporates the CloudIQ Manager, which was released earlier this year and makes it possible for enterprises to migrate existing applications to public and private clouds.

In July 2009, Appistry won an American Business Award as the ‘Most Innovative Company of the Year in Computer Software and Services Industries,’ and Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini has called their solutions ‘fresh, radical, and powerful technology.’

Notable: In 2008, Appistry reported 200 percent year over year growth and expanded its list of Fortune 500 clients, which includes FedEx, Lockheed Martin, General Electric and Northrop Grumman.”

We just completed another ChalkTalk for a new client yesterday where we went through our competitive positioning process.  Once again, having your client really think about their differentiators, market challenges and market opportunities crystallizes a competitive difference that has legs.  In this case, we identified a simple approach the client was using that was almost a give-away, not only as a differentiator, but as a new revenue stream and a “trojan horse” for sales.  You could feel the electricity in the air as the sales and marketing teams absorbed the impact of what we were doing and the potential it held.

Whether you call it positioning, competitive positioning, re-positioning, de-positioning, you-name-it positioning — at the end of the day it’s all about owning and differentiating your offering — and making everyone else’s offerings look less desirable.  If you haven’t done this for your company in a while, do it.  Who knows what you’ll find!

(Posted by Michelle Pujadas; image via Creative Commons courtesy of Jesus Solana)