Throwback Thursday – Spring Swing for the Cure!

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Blast from the past! We would just like to highlight some of the older stuff we’ve done. A project from the past, if you will.

It’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so we want to highlight a project that was involved with breast cancer awareness. This week, we want to talk about Spring Swing For The Cure! This was a golf tournament back in 2008, to raise funding for the fight against breast cancer. We got the chance to design their logo, businesscard and do a booklet as well.

Here, we included a breast cancer awareness ribbon as a base, then played with combining green and pink.

With the businesscard, We kept going with the green and pink colors, by including a shot of a golf course’s grass.

 

The booklet for the event was the best part of this project. We kept the green/pink combo and the close-up of the golf course elements. My favorite part is how the green swoops going up the page seem to be coming from the golfer in the logo’s swing.

Here is a spread of some pages of the book.

 

This was a fun, productive project that went towards a great cause.

 We here at MOS Creative loved this project, and hope to do more just like it.

-The MOS Creative team.

Check out our Tumblr for other fun/cool stuff!

Geo Targeting has come to Twitter: What it means for local business

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twitter-for-businessSocial media giant Twitter has begun offering geo-targeting advertising campaigns, used for mobile advertising based on user location.  Businesses are given the ability alert people to in-store events, promotions, and newly available brands through ads on Twitter tailored to the latitude and longitude of each user.

In practical terms, this means that someone walking down the street toward your store front could be pinged on their Twitter feed that you are offering a special, and to mention Twitter to claim it. This way, a storeowner can drive more foot traffic into their location with a very specific message and promotion already in play.

The idea started with zip code targeting, a method that Facebook has been using for years, to help companies pick local audiences for promoting products and services.  In time, the geo-targeting feature hopes to pinpoint users down to a latitude and longitude, giving companies more power to draw in specific audiences in close range to their business location(s).

How will this technology better serve you?

Companies: Simple.  Highly specific location-based mobile ad targeting is a great way to drive in-store traffic numbers.  The ability to reach out to somebody around the corner from your storefront and tell him/her of a discount or new line of product is powerful; imagine interested customers whith an offer in hand they want to utilize.

Potential customers:  Imagine as a customer you are walking in your favorite shopping area. You love Godiva Chocolate, but do not usually spring for it. You check your Twitter feed and suddenly are presented with a nice discount or a free piece of chocolate from the Godiva shop four stores down. It’s like taking the in the moment, never know what you’re going to get advertising from someone like Groupon and applying it to you locally. It’s great!

 

mobile-shoppingHow much of an audience would the ads be reaching?

Just a few statistics for you:

  • 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide, 1.08 billion of which are smart phones
  • Current trends show that by 2014, mobile internet usage will be higher than that of desktop internet
  • With 165 million active users on Twitter, over 50% of them use Twitter Mobile (Microsoft Tag)
  • 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision
  • 71% of shoppers believe they’ll get a better deal online than in stores. (Nielsen)

With the boom in e-commerce, mobile usage, and growth in people’s reliance on mobile technologies and social media, this new offering from Twitter is perfectly timed.

For both customers and businesses it is a win-win as relationships in digital marketing constantly strive to create more personal connections.  Reaching out to someone who is in your neighborhood and browsing their phone is the next step.

If you have any ideas on what you’d do with this, or have any questions for us, please leave us a message below, or give us a call and we’d be more than happy to discuss!

You can visit us at MOSCreative.com.

AM

Check out our guest blog with Infusion Soft: We discuss the power of managed PPC to control budgets and drive leads.

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We recently had chance to blog on behalf of Infusion Soft, a great provider of inbound marketing management software.

We discussed a PPC campaign we have been working on and how we took a data driven approach to the campaign and were able to reduce their overall cost per acquisition and optimize their campaigns.

Check it out here:

http://bigideasblog.infusionsoft.com/driving-web-traffic/

Video Advertising Comes To Instagram: Our Thoughts.

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Is Instagram two times better than Twitter? Two and a half times better to be precise. Instagram announced yesterday that they will be entering direct competition with Twitter by releasing their new Video function attached to their popular app. This means users can now record and share 15 second videos with a variety of filters and edit. This is in comparison to Twitter’s six second videos. (15/6=2.5 see what we did there?)

Keep reading and we’ll discuss how this is going to help businesses connect with their followers and build engagement.

Inst. Video Img The big question of course is how us creatives and businesses are going to use this.

Think about it this way. TV commercials work, they have always worked, and that’s why people keep paying for them. But, they are expensive, and only on one “device”, the TV.

Instagram, and also Vine have opened us up to do free, opt in TV advertising on people’s social channels.

Think about it this way:

Say you are a restaurant and you got a group of people to like you for a free appetizer. Those people are opted in now. They are going to see your posts (most of them). You have been talking about special deals, event nights etcetera. But, they are not biting and you can not figure out why all this social media talk isn’t giving you what you expected.

With this new avenue you can put teaser videos out, fun videos, behind the scenes videos, and straight up advertising videos. This is the kind of content that gets people talking and sharing and frankly, caring about your brand. The numbers are great, they are actually 100% more engaged  according to the Adobe Digital Video Benchmark.

Expect to see engagement rates and subsequent conversions soar for brands who take advantage of video advertising and content on Instagram and Vine.

TV is expensive, but we just got our hands on free, opt in video advertising where people are spending their time (Social Media). Let’s not waste this opportunity.

Need a professional video done? Get in touch, we would love to help. Now is a perfect time before this new channel is saturated.

MOSCreative.com

JT

 

Things I’ve Learned During My Internship

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Why hello there!

I started my communications internship here at MOS Creative at the beginning of January. When I started, I wasn’t familiar with the term SEO, I had never interviewed a client, my writing skills needed to improve, and I never truly felt like I was a part of a team at any workplace – until I started here.

Even though I have only been here for a couple of months, I’ve learned so much! Here are just a few key tips I’ve acquired so far:

- SEO: Google it, learn about it, embrace it! It is very important to know about certain key terms that can affect the visibility of your site. I believe any traffic is important.

- Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to bother your supervisors when you are given a task you may not understand 100%. Remember: it’s part of their job to help you learn and grow!

- Admit when you’re wrong. Mistakes happen. They’re a part of life, and they’re especially a part of the workplace. If you’ve made a mistake, don’t point fingers or play the blame game. Taking responsibility for your actions in the workplace takes a great amount of courage and bravery.

- Do your research. If you have spare time at work, look up websites that are related to your field of interest. Devour as much information as you can.

Lastly, go with your gut. I know this is something you may here often, but there are going to be many occurrences in which you’ll have to make a big decision on something that is work-related.

These short (but useful!) tips should take you far in the workplace – it has for me!

Laura

Why I Actually Loved My Summer Internship

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Last week, I asked Tony, our animator, if I could “get him coffee or anything” because he looked tired. When he refused, I stood on my chair and yelled:

“Hello? I’m the intern here! I haven’t done any intern-ly tasks all Summer. Where are the papers I should be filing? Why don’t I know your coffee preferences by now!?”

Ok, so I didn’t really stand on my chair, but did I realize that I’ve been interning here for 3 months now, and never had that “internship experience” that my friends complained about. I was immediately treated like a team member, never called an intern, and honestly, I forgot that I wasn’t on staff. I jumped right into projects that went directly to clients, and was never given busy work. Continue reading →

Don’t let the govt control your computer!

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This issue has recently garnered a lot of attention online and in the media because of the far-reaching effects that censorship would have on every internet user, as well as its growth-stunting impact on businesses.

Right now there are two bills in front of congress, Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Millions of people, everyone in our office included, have already signed petitions opposing the extreme regulations that are in these acts.

Our friends at Wiki are blacking out the site today in protest, as is Google, but with less extreme measures of calling attention (can you imagine the uproar if Google went down for an entire day?! Chaos!)

Please take two minutes to sign this petition and preserve the free and open internet. Unless you truly want the government to have more control over your every actions. I choose the right to choose.

5 Mobile Fails You Should Learn From

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As smartphone sales continue to grow like crazy, especially as we enter the jolly holiday season, it’s no surprise that mobile is the new dot.com bubble. And many companies are paving highly effective ways to engage. Actually we’re all just now figuring it out and grasping the question – how do consumers interact with their mobile devices, what roles do they play in their lives, and how can we tap into that?

So as the learning curve goes, and marketing trial and error takes its course, there are bound to be some fails and missteps. Let’s take a look at five of the mobile fails we can all take a lesson from as we plan our strategies for 2012.

  1. The dying trend, check-in apps. Daily deal offering sites like Groupon and Living Social met the same fate earlier this year. It was enticing at first, and then consumers get bored with it. Oldest story in the book. Gowalla and Foursquare were cool a year ago, but as retailers started to catch on to the trend and created their own shopping apps with check-in incentives, the enthusiasm began to ween.
  2. Forgetting that mobile is a whole different animal. In case anyone out there still questions it, you CANNOT just take your web stuff and throw it on a mobile site. No no no. Mobile is a whole new opportunity to interact. There are benefits, challenges and strategies completely separate from your PC web tools. If you avoid the copy and paste trap in re-purposing the web, you can take advantage new capabilities, such as HTML5.
  3. If you’re doing mobile, do it right. A lot of you are experimenting with mobile tools, such as QR codes and social media, without creating a mobile-optimized destination for visitors. So just when you get them right where you want them, your mobile visitors land on your PC site. Ew! I can promise most of these visitors are not coming back. That’s a lot of lost conversions and sales.
  4. Agencies aren’t focusing on the big picture. Mobile web and mobile strategies can’t just be an afterthought in your bigger plan. But for this fail we blame your marketing agency. We can’t emphasize enough the significance of the mobile experience in the focus of your brand, and in driving further mobile growth. A lot of brands are still just missing the boat on this one.
  5. Manufacturers are still playing catch up. RIP feature phones. I can still remember the simple days, when my phone’s buzz alert could only mean a text message. Now it could be an email, Facebook message, tweet, status update, check-in or any of the thousands of other connections. It was a sudden and unexpectedly rapid death that manufacturers were not ready to capitalize on.

(Thanks to our friends at Mobile Marketer, see their original article.)