On April 30, Ford Motor Company debuted a commercial unlike any other from their rich portfolio. Rather than prominently featuring their iconic blue logo, Ford kept the ad anonymous, only showing unbranded (and beautiful) shots of their cars and close-ups of features. Aside from a small line of mouse type at the end, there was no audio or visual mention of Ford. The spot simply closes with the introduction of their new tagline and microsite, “Go Further.com.” This prompts curious viewers to visit Ford’s new microsite, where they are greeted with a full-screen image of a Ford automobile and its blue oval logo on the hood, placed above the word “Surprised?”

Hooked by the commercial, GoFurther.com engages the consumer and continues the conversation with web copy explaining, “The best ideas often come from real people. Stories, photos, suggestions—the conversation goes both ways. We invite you to join us. See what people are saying.” The site is rich with interactive content, including areas to share your story and your ideas.

So why launch this new tagline with a no-name commercial? Jim Farley, Ford’s global chief marketing officer, said on the company’s blog, “We’re aiming these ads directly at the skeptics. These consumers have blinders up when they see a Ford logo, so we have to do something that’s disruptive and unexpected from a car company if we expect to get noticed by them.”

And, people did take notice. TV and online viewers propelled the ad to the top of Advertising Age magazine’s Viral Video chart, a weekly measure of views of millions of videos across hundreds of online video destinations. The Ford commercial has over 1,237,000 views on YouTube.

So, it seems this study in anonymity can be deemed a success. First and foremost, it got people talking. Ford’s social hub explains the new tagline, “Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective to see what’s right in front of you. As Alan Mullaly, President and CEO, Ford Motor Company said ‘Go Further is what Henry Ford meant when he promised that Ford would open the highways to all mankind.’”

This commercial accomplishes two things. It grabs the attention of naysayers and promotes participation from Ford enthusiasts. The skeptics are blindly led to an arena ripe with pro-Ford material that just may do the (near) impossible: change their minds.

What are your thoughts on Ford’s new campaign?

-Joy Wagner

Strother Communications Group (SCG) celebrated its 20^th anniversary this week. On Monday I wrote a blog about the historical milestones of the agency.

Today I would like to share five especially memorable experiences over the past 20 years.

1. 1998 World Figure Skating Championships. SCG, in partnership with Riedell Skates, the City of Minneapolis and other businesses, built and managed a giant tent on Block E for a community experience around the World Figure Skating Championships held at Target Center from March 27 through April 5, 1998. We helped manage a 60-foot indoor rink where Riedell rented out skates. The tent survived near tornado-like winds and successfully provided an opportunity for the community to affordably experience the World Championships being held across the street, on large screen TVs. We continue to have the great privilege of serving Riedell Skates, the world’s best figure skate and figure skate blade manufacturer.

2. The Visa Cash Card launch at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. It’s hard to believe cash cards have not always been around. But on behalf of Front Row Companies and NationsBank we provided the publicity behind the launch of the first co-branded Visa Cash card. The cards were introduced at kiosks located at various Olympic Venues in Atlanta. The assignment included an open pass to every event at the summer games in Atlanta.

3. Jesse Ventura’s Inauguration and Inaugural Celebration. When Jesse Ventura somewhat unexpectedly won the Governorship and caught the attention of the world on November 4, 1998, we were tasked with executing a portion of the inaugural celebration plan. We had developed this plan for Norm Coleman, who was a client of SCG through our work with the City of St. Paul where he had been mayor, prior to losing to Jesse. We assisted with Family Fitness Fun day and a number of other high profile activities, such as the swearing in ceremony, which included Arnold Schwarzenegger and reporters from all over the world. Jesse’s campaign subsequently stiffed us on the bill, but we have come to expect that when we reluctantly do political work.

4. Covering the Metrodome Collapse and Inflation from our office on the 41^st Floor of the Campbell Mithun Tower. SCG had a perfect perch from which to witness both the collapsed roof and the much later inflation of the Metrodome. This coverage on our blog had hits from all over the world culminating in the inflation of the Dome on Wednesday July 13, 2011. Jeron Udean, SCG’s Director of Media Relations and Account Manager, provided most of the coverage and also was the source of the idea. We will now switch our coverage to the building of the new Vikings Stadium.

5. Winning the PRSA Classics Award in Research for Five Consecutive Years. After 9/11, SCG’s in-house research became increasingly important to our business model. With our in-house call center, we developed a proprietary approach to B2B research, which we branded IPQ™. To prove how good we had gotten, we entered and won the PRSA Classics award in research five years in a row from 2003 to 2007, including beating Gallop one year. We have since added focus groups and other analytical best practices such as the SCG Message Matrix. We conduct research for most of our clients, especially those undertaking a branding initiative.

Those are just a few highlights.

What has really been the most rewarding experience over the past 20 years is helping a wide and diverse mix of clients build and strengthen their businesses so they can retain, hire and promote employees and better serve their own customers.

We’ve also had the honor of helping clients acknowledge their own milestones. Here are a few:

IWCO Direct: 40 years
Riedell Skates: 65 Years
Yale Mechanical: 70 Years
Tisco: 75 Years
Smead: 100 Years

Here’s to 20 more great years.

-Patrick Strother

The Path to Readiness

Taking the audience from unaware to aware was the culmination of years of planning by Marvel Studios, who began releasing individual superhero movies such as the Iron Man duopoly, “Thor” and “Captain America” four years ago. As each movie was released, movie trailers or “teasers” for the Avengers preceded the main feature, successfully arousing the appetite of the audience. As the release date drew near, television advertisements and movie posters began cropping up which helped to inform the audience, building interest to the point of readiness.

The most successful lead generation programs employ similar tactics to help create awareness and inform the prospect. The use of direct mail helps to create awareness and follow up calls serve to inform prospects of key benefits to generate interest. Prospects who are informed and interested but not ready to purchase your service can be nurtured through additional content sent on a permission basis via email or through social media outlets such as Twitter, LinkedIn or blogs.

Smashing Records through Nurturing

Sales from the opening weekend of “The Avengers” brought in more than the initial four movies combined through their entire run. This would not have been possible without the nurturing that began from the previous four movies. Kudos to Marvel Studios for following a time tested approach.  If you would like to triple your response rates consider incorporating these techniques into your lead generation program. You can be a superhero too.

Have you seen “The Avengers” yet?

-Randy West

Pre-Digital Age

When the agency was founded very modestly in a spare bedroom with a $200 IBM computer and a black and white printer, there was no commercially available Internet, although the fax machine was already well established as something of a key breakthrough for improving efficiency for reviewing and approving print ads and other documents. The fax machine wasn’t the killer app that e-mail became, but it foreshadowed the use of technology as a way to be more efficient, which is generally almost as important as being effective – our real goal.

Technology has played an important role in SCG’s evolving business model. From the very beginning our agency was based on the belief that it was the synergy of the integrated strategy, and not the individual tactics specifically, that made the real difference in client success over time. The agency model that initiated the motivation to start a new business on May 7, 1992 is still fundamentally the same as it was 20 years ago. The difference is that integration has been both enhanced and streamlined by the Web.

Today, Nearly all of Our Work Has a Digital Component

Over the past 10 years we have seen our execution shift gradually year by year to the point where nearly all of it is now implemented online.

We were the first Minnesota PR firm to have a full time Webmaster, and now our entire creative department has shifted to Web related programming and design as well as building custom applications including support this year for an online, cloud-based app for the iPhone.

Adding In-House Research

While our work has shifted to digital, our brand-oriented approach remains primarily concerned with always getting the strategy and messaging right. To this end, we added in-house research more than 10 years ago and now include primary, proprietary research in almost all of our client relationships. It seems that the more you hear people on the Web say messaging is no longer important, the less true it is. Today it is more important than ever to not only get the messaging exactly right, but to understand very clearly how those messages connect in importance to the audience as well as how they compete with the overall noise in the marketplace. If you get the message wrong it really doesn’t matter where or how you deliver it.  It won’t work.

Shifting much of our work to the Web has enabled us to provide customized and useful content to our clients’ customers and prospects, especially in the B2B space. We also use digital for our consumer and public policy relationships, but especially prefer the scalability of digital in the marketing mix for B2B.

Adversity Made the Agency Much Stronger and More Resilient

There have been two uniquely challenging periods for SCG since the company began in 1992.

The first was 9/11. We had an investor conference planned for a client in Minneapolis on the 12th of September. As we cancelled the conference the morning of 9/11 all of our e-mails to the World Trade Center bounced back. Several lives were saved, however, because many of the conference attendees were on a plane or already in Minneapolis, instead of in their World Trade Center office on 9/11.

One of the experiences from 9/11 that changed us most was a client who suffered nearly crippling immediate revenue losses as a result of the 9/11 attack. They asked us to help them get their business back, so we developed a comprehensive marketing strategy to steal share from a weakly positioned competitor. After we presented the campaign and branding strategy they said, “OK, we’re betting the company on this.” It turned out to be a good bet because the strategy worked, but it also made our agency more serious about results. We developed our own branded, propriety research approach called IPQ™ (Importance/Performance Query) and won the PRSA Classic award in research for five years in a row due to the many lessons we learned in the situations following the horror of 9/11. While I don’t think about 9/11 every day like I did the first five years after it, it left a permanent impact on our agency.

The other event that changed SCG was the nearly complete collapse of the economy and banking system in October of 2008. Because the economic collapse was so severe, we expected it to last at least a couple of years. One of our goals was to avoid layoffs and the subsequent harm to the culture that layoffs would inevitably create. So we all worked very hard, together, to find ways to create value in every possible way for our clients. It has been literally a day-to-day priority the past three and a half years.

We are a much stronger agency with better teamwork as a result of these two exogenous shocks we have faced and survived as a team over the past decade.

Unique Space is a Component of Our Brand

For the past 15 years SCG has had a very cool and inspiring space to work in. We recently signed a five-year renewal on our wonderful space we have enjoyed for the past five years on the top floor of the Campbell Mithun Tower.  There’s a special SCG branded shuttle elevator that takes you from 40^th to our floor, 41, which has a spectacular panoramic view of the entire Twin Cities. We moved here after we were essentially kicked out of the Foshay Tower after 10 years, because they were converting it into the W Hotel that it is today. We occupied the 27^th floor in the Foshay Tower and enjoyed a balcony on all four sides. It was Wilbur Foshay’s original office and board room, and we all loved it. But we love our new space even more.

Our current space is much more conducive to the efficiency we need to run a now nearly entirely digital agency. I am hopeful we will celebrate our 30^th anniversary in the Campbell Mithun Tower together with many of the talented people that currently work here.

From the agency’s humble start 20 years ago, we have now served more than 125 companies across 5 continents, 17 languages, 5 alphabets and nearly every category.  Many of the blessings we have experienced are the results of overcoming adversity together and getting stronger, better and faster as a result.

The Agency’s Shared Values Drive Us and Always Will

When people ask me what I attribute the agency’s success to over the past 20 years, I think it boils down to three simple things that have always driven SCG:

1. Knowledge

2. Creativity

3. Putting Others First.

Those are the three foundational values of our agency and always will be.

Transforming an Idea into Reality

I can’t think of anything I would rather have done the past 20 years than help build SCG. It has been a remarkably interesting and challenging journey.  It has also been deeply rewarding on so many more levels than I ever anticipated that Thursday morning 20 years ago when I drove to Saint Paul and filled out the articles of incorporation with the Minnesota Secretary of State. The name of the company hasn’t changed even though I had to quickly think of one on the spot to complete the paperwork. I added the word “Group” to the name thinking it would help me sound more substantial and also because I have always been an optimist.

Look for Part 2 of our 20^th Anniversary blog on Saturday morning.

-Patrick Strother

Storage
Dropbox allows 2GB for free, 50GB for $9.99/month and 100GB for $19.99/month.
Google Drive allows 5GB for free, 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month and 200GB for $9.99/month.

When it comes to storage size and pricing, Google wins. But another thing to mention is Dropbox’s referral program – get someone to sign up using your invite and receive an extra 1 GB of storage. If you convince three people to join, you’ll have the same amount of free space as Drive. Another thing to consider: How much space do you really need? And what will you use that storage for?

Features
Dropbox is simple and easy to use. Installation is a breeze and users can share files across multiple platforms. It has enhanced media-streaming capabilities and no limits on individual file size. If you’re looking for a simple, private and open-source file-sharing platform, Dropbox is your choice.
Google Drive is a nice addition to Google Docs – it works great for those who use Google services on a daily basis. But Drive’s main selling point is online editing. Multiple users can edit documents on the fly, making collaboration easier than ever. The option to share among non-Google users is there, but it’s a bit clunky. Users who are familiar with Google’s UI will feel right at home, but even I had some trouble finding certain features within its over-simplified design.
Both Dropbox and Drive are great at storing and sharing files across devices, including mobile platforms. They allow users to access and download multiple file types online, including images and documents from Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Photoshop.

Conclusion
Google Drive isn’t a game-changer. It’s a great step up from Google Docs, and I can see more collaboration with other Google services in the future. It’s also great for sharing documents and personal files among Google users. But the one thing Dropbox has that Drive doesn’t? Simplicity. So for now I’m using both, but just like other Google services, Drive might eventually take over my file-sharing habits—and the world.

Let us know your thoughts.

-Trevor Nolte

Over the past several months, I have devoted much of my spare time examining and analyzing CEO engagement on Twitter, specifically, as the basis of my final thesis for graduate school. I conducted a comparison of CEO Twitter use between Fortune 500 (the largest, wealthiest companies) and Inc. 500 (fastest-growing private U.S. companies) leaders. My assumption was that leaders of these companies would serve as good points of reference. Here are some of my key findings:

• Only 3.2% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a Twitter account compared with 17% of Inc. 500 CEOs
• While more Inc. 500 CEOs have Twitter accounts, 34.5% have not tweeted since before January 2012, compared with 31.25% of Fortune 500 CEOs
• Fortune 500 CEOs were more likely to focus a majority of their tweets on company news, the latest company blog posts and employee recognition (75% vs. 50% of Inc. 500 CEOs)
• Trending news topics that were mentioned among all CEOs from  January to March included the Super Bowl, March Madness, Linsanity and the Grammys

Even though there is not an astounding number of Fortune 500 and Inc. 500 CEOs on Twitter, the simple fact that these influential CEOs are making the effort to engage with current and potential customers, employees, investors and other key stakeholders in the space they prefer to be communicated with, sets them apart from their peers. These social CEOs are building trust, enhancing their company’s brand image and fostering relationships with their followers, creating brand ambassadors.

As more CEOs begin to retire, the younger leaders of tomorrow will set the standard for being social. This infographic from CEO.com best illustrates the future social CEO:

Do you follow any CEOs on Twitter?

-Mary Nhotsavang

I, on the other hand, have had several parakeets as pets when I was younger and I wanted to share my love of birds with my daughter. She’s now old enough to understand how delicate a parakeet is and how you must be very gentle with such a small pet. Having her care for the little bird is great learning experience and will help to teach her the responsibility and nurturing that goes along with caring for an animal.

Of course my daughter loved the parakeet instantly. She settled on the name of Lollipop for the little bird since her color is light blue—and calls her Lolli for short. It has been wonderful to see how my daughter interacts with her new pet. She is so careful when handling Lolli. She sings to the bird, holds her, kisses her and covers the cage every night to put her to sleep.

We have had a lot of fun handling and playing with Lollipop. Even my husband has warmed up to the little bird! It is amazing how much personality is bundled up in such a small creature. I have her wings clipped so she spends a lot of her time sitting on her cage-top play set when we are home. She loves to look in her mirrors and will jabber and chirp at her reflection. Lolli is very friendly and will hop on your shoulder if you pass by her cage. The sweetest thing about the little bird, however, is to see how my daughter interacts with Lolli—she gives her little kisses directly on her beak and the bird kisses her back.

If you are looking for a small-sized pet with a big personality, a parakeet might just be the answer you’re looking for. But make sure to do some research on parakeets as they do require a lot of attention and can be quite noisy and messy. Of course, as with any pet comes responsibility, but in my eyes, the rewards of pet ownership outweigh the effort.

Lollipop has been a wonderful addition to our family and a great experience for my daughter. I was able to pass on my love of birds to my daughter and help her learn to take some responsibility in ownership of the little pet.

What kinds of pets do you own?

- Jane Tomassetti

As the unstoppable onslaught of digital content continues, it’s important to examine trends in how consumers are reaching the latest digital headlines. Primary sources include direct access to a news website or app (36%), search engines (32%) and news-organizing services like Pulse or Feedly (29%).

But the head-turning trend of 2011 (and so far in 2012) has been the emergence of social media as a news driver and prominent digital news source—27.8% of people say they get news from social media, an increase of 57% since 2009. The infographic below illustrates how social circles have burst onto the news scene.

Courtesy of: Schools.com

But is social media’s impact on news really that staggering? A closer look at Pew’s research would suggest otherwise due to the following three reasons (keep in mind the study only examines Facebook and Twitter due to their dominance as social news drivers):

1. Social media isn’t a consistent source of news for a vast majoity of digital users. Only 9% of digital news consumers get news from Facebook and Twitter very often on their computer, tablet or smartphone. While 52% say they get some news from either Facebook or Twitter, that total trails direct access (92%) and search engines (85%) by a large margin.

2. Social media has become a supplement to traditional news sources rather than a replacement. 71% of people who get news from Facebook also go directly to a news website or app compared with 76% of people who get news from Twitter.

3. News found on social media is replaceable. The research shows that 56% of Facebook news followers and 43% of Twitterers believe they would have gotten that news elsewhere.

Social’s impact on news is undeniable. It has changed the game by breaking and sharing stories instantly while traditonal news sources struggle to keep up. But reporting news via social media does have its downsides. Misinformation and a lack of credibilty have been known problems in the social sphere. So can Facebook and Twitter really replace or redefine traditional journalism? It doesn’t seem likely – for now.

How do you get news? Is social media a part of your daily news routine? Let us know by commenting below.

-Dan Bonebright

While I haven’t commuted to work on my bike yet, I enjoy taking my hybrid out as often as possible and biking around the Chain of Lakes—so easy to get to from my apartment in Uptown—or heading downtown and then riding along the Mississippi. The paths along the Mississippi River are kept up nicely and there are many places to stop to take in the remarkable scenery. As this will be my first full summer living in Minneapolis (I moved from Wisconsin last August), I’m looking forward to using my bike a lot more than my car while the weather is nice. The mild winter and early warm weather has had a huge impact on the city’s many avid bicyclers.

In fact, Minneapolis was named Bicycle Magazine’s #1 Most Bike-Friendly City of 2010. The magazine praises the city’s segregated bike lanes, public bike racks, bike boulevards, bike carriers on buses and bike-only routes, such as the Grand Rounds and the Midtown Greenway. The magazine attributes these features to cyclists being involved in the local government. It is easy to see that Minneapolis has a vibrant bike culture—it is home to 85 miles of dedicated bike paths and 81 miles of designated on-street bikeways, with even more in the works. In 2010, it was estimated that an average of 3.5% of Minneapolis residents commuted to work via bicycle on a regular basis.

But the increasing popularity of cycling is not just unique to Minneapolis—it’s become a national trend. Studies show that in recent years, more and more young adults are opting for bikes and buses instead of cars. In fact, the average miles driven annually by people ages 16 to 35 (commonly called Generation Y) has dropped 23% between 2001 and 2009. College students and working professionals know about the brands and maintenance of bicycles like many previous generations knew about cars. No doubt the high cost of gas, the greater interest in personal fitness and the increase of environmental stewardship have largely influenced this biking boom. The studies also discovered that people are choosing to reside closer to work and amenities like bars and restaurants—making it more likely they will hop on their bikes or onto a bus rather than behind the wheel.

What better time to reduce our carbon footprints by getting on our bikes than on Earth Day 2012, approaching Sunday, April 22? In fact, Google is encouraging people to do just that by using Google Maps, where cyclists can discover safe, new routes by using the Biking Directions tab. I use Google Maps because it allows you to manipulate the default directions to avoid hills and choose scenic routes over busy roads. Additionally, May is National Bike Month, with Bike to Work Day landing on May 18.

Don’t have your own bike? Check out a Nice Ride near you. The Nice Ride bicycle rental program began three years ago in Minneapolis and has since sparked similar programs nationwide.

Lastly, I’d like to throw in a friendly reminder: safety first—wear your helmet when perusing around on your bike. Do you bike to work or for fun? Share with us below!

-Jodi Osmond

1. Take Title Tags Seriously:  If there’s one single thing you can do to help your site’s search engine visibility, it’s writing quality title tags (<title> tag in the HTML code) for every page of your site. Title tag content is what shows up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as the big blue links we all click on after performing a search. Here’s a great place to learn more about writing title tags.
2. Meta Descriptions Make a Difference: While title tags are more important, a well-written meta description tag (<meta name=”description” content=”description goes here”>) is the title tag’s close companion. It’s helpful to think of search engine results as advertisements to that specific page on your site: the title is the headline and the meta description is the related copy. While meta descriptions won’t help your search engine ranking, persuasive writing will help to get searchers to click.
   Side Note: Ignore the meta keywords tag and remove it if it’s on any page of your site. In some cases it can actually do you harm and SEOs recommend no longer using it at all. Meta keyword tags have long gone the way of the dodo bird. RIP sweet dodo.
3. Provide Relevant, Unique and Useful Content: It is equally important for content to be directly relevant to the title tag of the web page. Think RUU (relevant, unique and useful). You’ll see the term relevancy a lot in the world of SEO and there’s good reason for it. Relevancy is really what it’s all about. Google strives hard to provide searchers with content as relevant as possible to the search queries they use.
4. Keyword Research Counts: Before all of the above, do some homework on what search terms or “keywords” people are actually using. Keyword research is an entirely different topic in SEO altogether and way beyond the scope of this blog article. However, it needs to be done—even if it’s done quickly or just before writing. You can perform this research by using the Google Keyword Tool—it’s used to drive keyword selection for Adwords advertisers (and it’s free).
5. Use Links and FURLs: First, using keywords and phrases in your actual URLs (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/my-well-researched-keywords.html) is something called FURLs (Friendly URLs). If at all possible, use FURLs on your site and use relevant (there’s that word again) keywords. In some cases FURLs can be tricky to implement so you’ll want talk to your web people about it first and learn about 301 redirects.

   Secondly, your on-page links should use keywords in the link text (the text that actually makes up the link the user clicks on, referred to as “anchor text”) whenever possible. Avoid the “click here” syndrome as much as you can. Use internal links (links to other pages on your website) as well as external links (links to other websites) to quality content where appropriate. Both are beneficial to the user and in the eyes of the search engines.

I’ve merely scratched the surface of the immensely confusing world of SEO, but I hope you find these tips useful. For more information, I recommend checking out SEOmoz’s awesome beginner’s guide to SEO and, of course, picking the brains of your web team. Please share any questions with us below in the comment section or contact me (your friendly web nerd) at brianl@scgpr.com.

-Brian Larson

P.S. Bonus points go to anyone who noticed that I used SEO’d link text in this blog post.