Alleblog

(You’d be surprised how often patience loses)

By Kevin Schluth

“Get me somebody. Anybody. And get me somebody while I’m waiting!”

This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my all time favorite holiday movies, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

“This sucks. Change it!”

This quote is a little more direct and comes from a more non-traditional source, MTV’s Beavis & Butthead.

What do these two quotes have in common?

They both illustrate what is wrong with some brands that get so impatient with the success of their core brand that they quickly start damaging it with things like discounts and line extensions in a desperate attempt to get results now, if not sooner.

Here is an excerpt from the article Slowly But Surely, Line Extensions Will Take Your Brand Off Course* related to Budweiser coming out with Bud Light in response to Miller’s line extension:

“By 1979, the combination of Miller High Life and Miller Lite (34.8 million barrels) outsold Budweiser (30.0 million barrels) by a significant margin. No wonder Anheuser-Busch pushed the panic button. Too bad. If they had had a little more patience they would have realized that line extensions are inherently unstable. A successful line extension almost always damages the core brand…over the long haul. You can’t know whether a marketing move is effective or not until enough time has passed. Yet many companies are driven by short-term thinking - promotions, coupons, special offers and discounts. And line extensions.

Marketing is like steering a ship. If you don’t wait long enough for a marketing effect to run its course, you can draw exactly the wrong conclusion.”

The lesson here is to have more faith in all the planning that went into your marketing initiatives in the first place. There are no guarantees in life except death and taxes, but with a strategic and effective marketing partner at your side, you can afford to be patient with your brand.

I’ll end with some more quotes:

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” -St. Augustine

“Patience is also a form of action” -Auguste Rodin

“Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.” -George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

To learn more about us and what we can do for you as a strategic marketing partner, visit www.allebach.com or call us at 215-721-7693.

*Source: AdAge, Published: September 07, 2009

By Joey Piazza

Okay brand managers and marketing professionals…

Rumor has it that you want to start a social media marketing campaign.

There are only a couple things I am going to need from you to make this campaign a success so I have assembled a checklist:

1. A list of every website, since the inception of the internet, where a conversation about your product took place
2. Links to those conversations
3. A detailed breakdown of how many conversations took place on each site
4. Exact statistics on what “share of voice” your product enjoys relative to it’s rightful product category
5. The sentiment of every conversation that took place (i.e. very positive, positive, neutral, negative or very negative)
6. An extensive list of the words and phrases most commonly used in these conversations, both positive and negative
7. Every inbound link on the internet to your website

I know you’re probably thinking two things.  First, that most or all of the things on this list are impossible to obtain.  Secondly, that if by some miracle you were able to gather all this data, a successful social media campaign would hardly seem like a daunting task.

Introducing Allebach All Access.  The Social media survelliance software that does every single thing on that list and more.

Here at Allebach Communications, we pride ourselves on being out in front of any and all new trends in the marketing world.  Over the past year, we have been working with several partners to develop a comprehensive software tool to help to establish concrete data on exactly what people are saying about any given product and where they are saying it.  Up until now, marketing professionals have used a number of methods to establish their best hypotheses to develop social media strategy.  With Allebach All-Access we can deliver reliable, actionable intelligence.

Some of the highlights and features from our one-of-a-kind “All Access” monitoring software:

1. Comprehensive, exhaustive search and data pull

We search the entire internet.  Other competitors do not.  Some competitors ask you to specify where you want them to look, while other competitors only scan a finite set of sites that they have chosen. Still others use little automated technology and employ a manual process that limits scope and dramatically increases time to get a report.

In general, we show you everything that’s really out there while others (including top search engines) are only showing you a portion and projecting the rest.

2. Professional Analysis

No one else provides this level of analysis. We watch what’s coming in when we do a “dig” - we think about what we see and provide that thinking in conjunction with the data. You get an interpretation of the broadest set of data available.

3. Full, customizable sentiment spectrum

All Access reports show sentiment spectrum ¬ from positive to negative. We can also customize a scale for you (friendly to mean, scary to funny).

4. Vast, searchable verbatim database with unlimited use

We let you search verbatims yourself - as many times as you want, on whatever keywords you want, for as many users as you want.

5. Trainable language engine

Reports get smarter and more accurate over time as the engine has learning capabilities built in to continuously get better at targeting and focusing the results.

6. Post-analysis filtering

We get rid of all of the spam and internet “junk” to let you just see the real conversations.  Others don’t do this and leave a lot of the “nonsense” in.

Also, we begin by (and continue to get better at) filtering content that is not relevant to your analysis. For example ERA is not only a real estate company, but is also a reference to time and is a baseball term ¬ We filter all of that out while competitors do not.

7. Inbound link analysis

We show you who is linking to you within social media ¬ nobody else does this.

8. Geographic dispersion and level of topic expertise

Two new features nobody else offers at this time.

9. Scalability with affordability

We can provide more reports on more topics per client without exponential increases in cost.

10. The rest

The features above are compared to our direct competitors. Many other tools might appear to do similar things but are really different.

An an example, Google Alerts simply keeps an active Google search open for news against a specific keyword. These alerts can vary widely in relevance based on the term ¬ it doesn¹t do filtering and doesn¹t understand context (the ERA example above). Google also doesn’t know what its already told you. Your next All Access report will show you what’s different from the last report and understand what it’s already seen. It also binds new additions to conversations, to ones its already pulled.

Our competitive advantages versus competitors like Radiant 6:

1. Radiant 6 does NOT search the entire Internet – Radiant 6 works off of RSS feeds. Therefore, the only sites it locates and retrieves data from are those that have RSS feeds so smaller blogs and forums are unsearchable. As an example, the top 25 social media sites on the Internet do not have RSS feeds. Therefore, Radiant 6 will not be able to pull this data for you unless you specifically ask the software to find those sites. All Access searches the entire web, regardless of RSS feed and doesn’t have to be told where to go other than what categories of content you want it to find.
2. Radiant 6 will NOT interpret sentiment – It can’t pull out sarcasm and humor. Therefore, it is difficult to tell if the data you are receiving and the analysis provided against that data is genuine (positive and negative feedback). All Access can interpret all sentiment and eliminate those conversations that are not genuine from the analysis.
3. Radiant 6 only spiders the Internet every 9 days or so – They use Google technology to spider content. Therefore, it is only indexed every 9 days or so. All Access can spider content daily.
4. Radiant 6 pulls from open sites propagating information (looks for sites that are broadcasting information) - All Access can find any site that has conversational content and pull in the data including time stamps as to when the conversation occurred (if available). All Access will also soon be able to access what consumers are viewing online (i.e., TV and broadcast media) and report back what shows people are looking at as it relates to your analysis objectives.
5. Digitas preferred – All Access was chosen by Digitas Health (among the world’s largest healthcare interactive agencies) as the best actionable intelligence software tool on the web over Radiant 6 and other similar tools.

To learn more about this software please contact:
Joey Piazza - jpiazza@allebach.com
Director of Interactive Services
117 N. Main Street
Souderton, PA   18964
Office:215.721.7693