Street Sampling Blog

[cricketwireless]

Just in case you’re wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the planet, I haven’t.

I have been super busy all month long with our newest experiential marketing for Cricket, a leading wireless carrier. They, of course, offer affordable wireless phone plans with unlimited minutes and no signed contract (what’s not to love about that!).

As soon as I get a few moments of “spare time” (does anyone have spare time nowadays?), I will be making a much more detailed post.

Coming soon!

[guerilla/buzz marketing Cricket Wireless campaign]

Street Sampling Inc. has announced that it is working with Cricket Wireless, one the ten largest wireless companies to launch service in Philadelphia, Atlantic City and Wilmington, DE.

In addition to the traditional media mix of TV, Billboards and radio, Cricket will be doing some unusual activities to create awareness around their new to market service. In preparation for launch week, Street Sampling is fielding a large street team. The brand ambassadors will utilize scratch & win tickets, perform random acts of consumer kindness and strategically place 50 four-color custom umbrellas on food carts within the footprint.

The umbrella idea came about from seeing the numerous food carts placed around the city in fantastic high traffic locations and noticing that most had a place for or were displaying an umbrella. By producing and placing these branded umbrellas, we are able to provide a constant stream of static messaging for our client, says Scott Thurston, President of Street Sampling. It is a win-win; the food cart vendor gets a terrific looking umbrella at no cost and out client gets high visibility on major street corners.

The project took three weeks to complete after production and really counted on the skills of our local manager. Most of these carts are owner-operated so we needed to quickly establish a partnership with each of them.

Total budget for production and placement of the umbrellas was $15,000.

[experiential/buzz marketing keyword tool]

I’ve been holding onto this website for a while, not because I didn’t want to share it, but because I wanted to make sure when I did, it made sense in the context of what we do… experiential marketing.

The tool I uncovered is called Wordle.com.

One mistake many people make in writing their ad copy or website material is not enough thorough keyword density research. Sure you need to know are they looking for what you think they are looking for, but you also need to know have you used the word(s) consistently enough to even make a difference.

Wordle makes your work a whole lot easier. For example, in our February 18th post, I grabbed one of the paragraphs:

Word-of-mouth communication tends to make people feel that they are being told the truth without any ulterior motives. Honesty is perceived and the receivers of messages are moved to perform the intended call to action at significantly higher rates than when approached by various other communication techniques. This is true because there is no perceived reward for the person that is speaking positively about the product, service or message at hand.

I then head out to Wordle, paste that paragraph into the box for text on the site and presto! up comes a cloud tag clearly showing me the strongest to weakest words within that text.

You can also use this directly with a feed, print the results, randomize your results, open it in a new window and, if you create an account, save it to their gallery.

Keywords are so important, online and offline, when it comes to effectively marketing. Creating buzz about your program or service means weighing, analyzing, evaluating, and adding useful terms. This tool will also help you weed out the useless, space-hogging keywords that do little to further your marketing efforts.

Give Wordle a go for yourself and then be sure to drop me feedback on the tool. I’d love to know what you think.

Let’s get creative!

[experiential word of mouth marketing]

On the 14th, you’ll note my post about holidays in general, and Valentine’s Day in particular. Each holiday is announced well in advance. The idea being to generating upcoming interest by merchants to make sure that during the lead up and the event customers show up at their doors.

Word-of-mouth communication tends to make people feel that they are being told the truth without any ulterior motives. Honesty is perceived and the receivers of messages are moved to perform the intended call to action at significantly higher rates than when approached by various other communication techniques. This is true because there is no perceived reward for the person that is speaking positively about the product, service or message at hand.

If you missed this video, it’s an excellent example of real one-on-one word of mouth marketing. Connecting directly with your intended audience. (Be sure to click “read the rest…” I’ve got more to say and the video to watch).

Read the rest of this entry »