Let’s start by saying that we’re not comparing labor unions to terrorists. And we’re not making light of the fact that people have died defending our nation from terrorism. But when it comes to the threats American businesses will face over the next few years, you could argue that Osama Bin Laden is less of a threat than big labor.

As a marketing professional, you’re always looking for ways to drive new prospects to your business. But if you drive prospects into a failed business model, no matter how hard you work, it’ll be a waste of your time.

Take a look at the Big Three Automakers. The CEOs from these companies each flew on their respective corporate jets (cost = about $1,000 per hour, even when it’s sitting on the runway) to go to Washington to ask for a bail out. Not only has that created a PR disaster for their companies, it’s also a sign that the CEOs are simply out-of-touch with the challenges most Americans now face.

But that’s only part of the story. The real issue is that American car manufacturers can’t compete with foreign car manufacturers. Why? Because for decades labor unions have forced the U.S. auto industry into contracts that inflate their costs. Do you know that every car built by the Ford, GM or Chrysler is about $300 more expensive than foreign cars because of their labor contracts?

That means if Toyota builds a car for $19,900  and one of the Big 3 builds the exact same car, they have to sell it for $20,200 because of the built-in labor costs. That’s a flawed business model. Who has an extra $300 to blow in today’s economy? It’s difficult for any amount of brand loyalty to overcome that price differential.

And now, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Government might pass a law that will take away American’s right to vote for or against labor unions with a secret ballot. Huh? Isn’t a right to privacy part of what it means to be an American? Not if you’re a supporter of labor unions. If they have their way, when you’re asked to vote for or against labor unions, they’ll be able to look over your shoulder and see how you voted.

What? This is outrageous. And it’s completely un-American. Worse still, it’ll give big labor so much power that it’ll further cripple our ability to compete with foreign products and/or services.

If you’re a marketer, it’s your job to drive prospects to your business. But if that business has its hands tied by inflated labor contracts, then no matter how many prospects you drive to your business, your efforts won’t succeed. For proof of this, just ask GM, Ford and Chrysler.

You may not agree with everything we’ve said here, but we’re sure you’ll agree this — no matter what your point-of-view, you should contact your Senator or Congressman today to let them know where you stand on the Card Check Program that big labor is supporting.

Linda Lindsey has been in the marketing and advertising arena for more than 18 years, and recently served as a Senior Marketing Manager for Ricoh U.S.  She is also President-elect for the Business Marketing Association, Atlanta Chapter.

Linda has taken a deep dive into the social media world and wrote the following article for The 60 Second Marketer. Some of the information is so hot, we wanted to get it out to our growing community as quickly as possible.

Here’s Linda’s guest posting, hot off the press:

LinkedIn is the “Six Degrees of Separation” for the business world.  Its claim to fame is the “Triangle of Trust” networking principle:  People are more likely to do business from a referral by someone they know and trust. This is powerful stuff in today’s fast, buy-on-the-fly, e-commerce driven society.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn has the “now what?” effect.  Well-intentioned users sign up for an account, build their profile, network to a few people and then become lost, unsure of how to maximize the LinkedIn resources.  Here are 5 things you can do today to start using LinkedIn as a way to generate revenue:

1. Be the Face of Your Brand
LinkedIn announced new functionality for companies to create a profile for their company to provide basic information including your website, company description, industry, number of employees and more.  Check out your company profile or add it by visiting www.linkedin.com/companies.

There is a also great way to connect with customers and prospects through an individual in your company.  If you represent a small company, start a LinkedIn account for the owner.  Larger organizations should choose a representative that best represents their customer and prospect base.  For example, a technology company should use their CIO, a consumer company might choose their CMO, and a manufacturer should promote the president or COO.  Choose a spokesperson based on who can offer the best conversations about your brand.

Once you’ve chosen your spokesperson, build your profile with your specific company in mind, not the personal resume of your spokesperson except if your spokesperson’s professional experience is relevant in nature to their current role or gives clout to the spokesperson.

In the “Summary” section list a description of your company’s products and services and complete the “Specialties” section with keywords that encompass your company’s product, service, or value.

2. Think of LinkedIn as a part of your Loyalty Marketing Strategy
Loyalty Marketing is an approach to marketing in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. If you think of LinkedIn as a way to enhance your current customer relationships you can begin and maintain a dialog with people who are engaged in your products, services, or brand.

The first step in LinkedIn loyalty marketing is to start a Group.  In the group section you can give an overview of your company, start dialogs with your customers, share news and updates and begin to build a database of brand advocates.  Offer various incentives that best target your audience such as receiving first notification of any company news, new products or services, or upcoming promotions – you can even offer special deals or incentives only for LinkedIn Group members.  You can use your LinkedIn Group to advertise upcoming events, collect pre-show or post-event feedback, and conduct polls of focus groups to gather customer intelligence.

3. Use Offline Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Customers and Prospects to Join Your LinkedIn Group
Update all current marketing efforts with a tagline encouraging customers and prospects to join your LinkedIn Group: direct mail, email campaigns, employee email signatures, business cards, and, of course, provide a link on your website to the LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn is a great way to generate traffic to your website and support your search engine optimization efforts.  Be sure to ask your company employees to add your website to their personal LinkedIn page – this provides quality, relevant links which organically helps bump you up in search engine rankings.

4. Advertise on LinkedIn
LinkedIn also offers text-based advertising opportunities called “DirectAds” that run for 30 days a pop.  You can target your ad based on two of the following seven criteria: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, or Geography.  Ads start at $25 and guarantee a certain number of impressions (the number of times an ad is shown), but do not guarantee any results (or click-thrus) on your ad. LinkedIn offers a dashboard to track the ad activity including impressions, clickthrus and a calculation of your clickthru rate (CTR). Depending on your product or service, this can be a great way to reach your audience especially if you couple the offer with an incentive such as a free white paper, coupon or other value-add.

5. Get Connected to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is getting ready to launch some really cool functionality for B2B marketing.  Sign up for the RSS feed on the LinkedIn blog http://blog.linkedin.com/ so you can get this news first and be first to market.  This RSS feed only sends out an email if there is new content.  They promise, “No new content, no email for you.”

One final note: Your company may already have a profile on LinkedIn with content generated by LinkedIn.  This profile is populated by public data provided by Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, and may include public information such as your company description, industry, type of company, headquarter address, size, founding date, and website. The differentiator for the LinkedIn company profile is that it uses its own member data to create new information about your company based on the people who have listed your company name in their profiles as current or former employees.  LinkedIn uses this information to determine the average age, gender, and title of employees at your company.  Of course it is skewed, but they make no apologies for the data. However, you can add or change information on these pages, but you must have a valid company email to do so.  In the FAQs, do a search for “Adding or Changing Company Profile Page.” Coming soon is the functionality to post jobs, recruitment videos, information about products and services, company images and more.

Many of our most avid readers will recall a blog posting we had several months ago called “Why Steve Jobs is Both a Genius and a Knucklehead.” In it, we pointed out that any brand that has its entire success wrapped up in one person (i.e. Steve Jobs) is setting itself up for failure.

What happens if the that person gets hit by a bus? Or takes an extended leave of absence? Or decides to become a monk? If anything like that were to happen, the entire company (in this case Apple) would tank.

Well, it’s pretty clear that Steve Jobs not only read our blog post, but he had it framed for his office wall and circulated it to his staff. How do we know this? Because the cover of this week’s edition of Fortune magazine states that Steve Jobs is doing exactly what we suggested to him — that is, to start sharing the spotlight with other people at Apple. We said sharing the spotlight would be good for the company, good for the shareholders and good for America.

Do we really believe Steve Jobs read our blog post, had it framed and circulated it to his staff? Well, no, not really. But we do believe that he’s finally realized that he needed to put his ego aside and start promoting the other geniuses at Apple, too.

It hurts us to say this, but Microsoft has done a fabulous job transferring the image of its brand from Gates to Balmer. Sure, Gates is still seen as the brand icon, but we all know that Balmer has been running the company for years. Hats off to Microsoft for knocking it out of the park on that initiative.

With that in mind, we’re happy to report that Steve Jobs and Apple have started to promote other people within the company. That’s good for Apple and good for America since it means we’ll have more fun, innovative, new products to look forward to in the future.

We know we’re doing our job when we stir things up among the marketing community. After all, part of our desire for The 60 Second Marketer is to create a community of marketing professionals who share ideas, thoughts, comments and innovations with each other.

Our post last week entitled “Three Lessons You Can Learn from State Farm’s Less-Than-Stellar Ad Campaign” generated several interesting responses.

Here are some responses from two readers on the West Coast who love the campaign:

“I really disagree with your article. I was very attracted to this ad because the song is so catchy and I noticed a lot of posts saying that they cannot stop singing it. State Farm is bringing you the game and it is on Sunday and a lot of the products now get off what they are selling. Have you not noticed that?? It has become a hit commercial also and with good reason. Watch it again and it makes you feel happy and everyone I know has commented on that.” — April in California

“I am one of the writers of ‘Feelin’ Kinda Sunday’ that Frank Sinatra and Nancie Sinatra recorded many years ago and is now being used by State Farm for the NFL Football games on Sunday. I read what you wrote about the commercial and I had to give you my opinion. I thought it was so clever and so creative that they picked that title. It is the fun and happy spirit of Sunday the day that those games are being played and at the end of the commercial one of the players says “I’m So There” and then they talk about State Farm. Haven’t you noticed how the new commercials most of them now do something else other than push the commercial and sometimes after a commercial that has nothing to do with the product they just show the name of what they are selling and that is all? I realize that everyone has their opinions but I got the feeling that perhaps you were a bit out of touch with what is happening in the world of commercials. I know I am speaking for my other two co-writers when I say that we were very happy with both of the commercials.” — Annette, Los Angeles, California

What are your thoughts? What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the State Farm campaign?

Last week, The 60 Second Marketer posted a blog entry called “Is Toys R Us the Best Company Name Ever?” It created quite a stir among our loyal reader base. (We love it when that happens.)

One comment came in from Dr. Bob Becker who runs Becker MultiMedia. It was so thought-provoking, we decided to give it the attention it deserves and post it as a guest blog entry.

The essence of our Toys R Us post was that a great brand name has should do three things: 1) It should be clear, 2) It should be memorable, and 3) It should be distinctive.

Here’s what Bob wrote in response to our post:

“A name should be clear. But what does that mean? Clear about what? What you sell? Who you are? How you do business? Why you do business? Seems to me that you haven’t considered these questions. Your first principle is unclear!

A name should be memorable. How does something become memorable? Does a name make it memorable, or the experience one associates with the name? We meet many thousands of people in the course of a lifetime, and we remember the names of only a few. Why is that? Because of the names, or because of what we experienced with the people who went by those names?

A name should be different. From what? From other names? Isn’t that obvious? If Sherlock Holmes and James Bond had the same name, we would be confused. But how does Sherlock being different from James make Holmes or Bond better names? Is James Bond worse because it’s like James Cagney or Campion Bond? Obviously not. These things have nothing to do with a good name.

Is 60 Second Marketer a good name? Well, let’s see. It’s not clear, since most products offered by the 60 Second Marketer are not 60 seconds in length. I don’t know if it’s memorable. I have no trouble recalling it, so that’s a plus. Trouble is, I only recall it when I see it in my Inbox. It doesn’t come to mind when I am browsing books on Amazon or reading the Wall Street Journal. It’s not different, since there are 60 Second [fill in the blank] things all over the place, ever since Pooh-Bah Blanchard made people believe that management occurs in one minute.

I propose replacing your three principles of naming with just one principle: “a name should mean something.”

Examples?

• Ralph Lauren means something. It’s the name of a designer.
• Google means something. It’s the name of huge scale.
• Marathon means something. It’s the energy you get from eating the candy.

There is nothing that these and other great names have in common, other than they mean something and stand for something.

By this measure, Toys r Us is not the best name, or even a great name. It is a name of a retailer that defines itself generically. The name says nothing special about the toys in the stores or how the toys are sold. A far better name in toy retailing is FAO Schwarz. For none of the reasons you cite.”

Bob brings up some great points. Anyone else want to chime in? What are some great brand names that don’t meet any of these criteria? How about Kodak? Or WalMart?

Share your thoughts.

Recently, Forrester Research conducted a study outlining how each Presidential candidate used Social Media during their 2008 campaigns. The chart below highlights the numbers from each candidate’s campaign. It offers great insight into how President-elect Obama leveraged the power of social media to win the election.

Historically, State Farm has done some terrific campaigns. Remember their “And like a good neighbor, State Farm is there?” campaigns? Brilliant, not only from a strategic point-of-view, but from an executional point-of-view, too.

In addition, State Farm is a very sophisticated marketer. You’ll find their campaigns in a number of non-traditional channels (like YouTube) and they even publish some very sophisticated tracking studies that highlight the success of their efforts.

But every so often, no matter how good a marketer you are, a real clunker slips through the cracks. In this case, it’s the State Farm “Feelin’ Kinda Sunday” ads which feature groups of people singing the Frank and Nancy Sinatra song.

What’s wrong with this campaign and what can you learn from State Farm’s mistakes? Here you go:

1. It’s a Feel Good Commercial with Absolutely No Message: There’s nothing wrong with doing a feel good commercial if it sells the brand. McDonald’s and Nike are masters at this. But the difference is that at the end of their commercials, your response is “Ahhhh. I get it. Nike. (Or McDonald’s) That commercial relates to their brand and their product.” But with these “Feeling Kind of Sunday” commercials, you’re simply left scratching your head saying “Huh? What was that about? And what does it have to do with State Farm?”
2. It Ties Into a Campaign Theme, but Each Commercial Doesn’t Stand On Its Own: With long-running campaigns, it’s normal that you’re going to have a series of commercials where your target audience hasn’t seen every single one of them. But when that happens, you need to make sure that each individual commercial can stand on its own. This campaign doesn’t work that way. Again, at the end of the commercial you’re left scratching your head asking, “What the heck?”
3. There’s No Link Between the Theme and the Brand: “Feeling Kind of Sunday” has no relation to the brand or the products and services State Farm provides. You can sometimes get away with this, but in most cases, if you’re selecting a theme (or song) to represent your brand or marketing strategy, you need to make sure there’s a natural link between the two. State Farm misses the mark on this front.

To be sure, State Farm has a long history of doing very solid work. And there isn’t a marketer out there who hasn’t had a clunker slip through the cracks. But these commercials are a big waste of money for State Farm and don’t do anything for the brand or the products and services. If it were up to us, we’d nuke these spots and put the money against some of the other strong ads in the State Farm toolbox.

What are your thoughts? Are there other commercials that are as bad or worse than these?

First and foremost, we’d like to say that it’s hard to believe any journalists would quote the “anonymous” source who claimed Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, those journalists didn’t even bother to double check their sources — a standard requirement for professional journalists.

It’s a shame when major news organizations let their standards dip to the level of the National Enquirer.

But Sarah Palin has an opportunity to use her public relations talents to re-bound from this. So far, she hasn’t quite stepped up to the plate, but we’re pretty confident she’ll be able to once this current flurry of bad press subsides.

Here are three suggestions that may help her, and that may help you, too, as you work on your public relations program:

1. Learn to Block and Bridge: The first thing most PR people teach their clients is how to block and bridge. When you get a question that you a) don’t want to answer or b) can’t answer, you block and bridge. The most common version of this is to say, “That’s a great question and one that we’re working on solving right now (the block), but we believe that most American’s are more concerned with the economy which is something we’re concerned about, too (the bridge).”
2. Avoid Casual Phraseology: Part of the appeal of Sarah Palin is that she’s a smart, professional woman who also has a down-to-earth approachability to her. That said, as a politician, it’s best to avoid casual phrases because they come across as too laid back. Ronald Regan maintained his approachability without ever uttering “Ya know?” and “Yahhhh. That’s the way we dooo it in Alaska.”
3. Stay on Message: Journalists are talented people. And they’re trained to ask the same question a number of different ways until they get the answer they’re after. But your job is to stay on message and to not deviate. Remember blocking and bridging? That’s the best way to make sure you don’t deviate from your message.
4. Answer the Question, Then Stop Talking: Sarah Palin seemed to believe that if she talked long enough, something good would eventually come out. But that’s just a sign that she hadn’t been prepared for the interviews. Answer the question. Then stop. Don’t ramble on in the hopes that you’ll say something smart, because it’ll be surrounded by a thousand words that nearly as smart as you’d like them to be.

It’s very easy to play Hindsight Quarterback on the McCain/Palin campaign, but that’s not our intent. Overall, Sarah Palin stepped into a difficult situation and ended up light years ahead of most people. The main point we’re trying to make is that our loyal readers can learn a great deal by watching someone else’s less-than-perfect attempt at a very challenging job.

Watch. Listen. And learn. It’s a great way to benefit from those who go before you.

If you work in advertising or marketing long enough, sooner or later you’ll be asked to come up with a name for a new product, service or company. In the old days, you’d jot down a lot of possible names, select the ones you thought worked the best and do a quick trademark search.

Today, you’d actually start with a URL search and, since all the good URLs are taken, you’d end up with something strange or quirky like PurpleRinoExtreme or WankoMotorCars.

But before the advent of the world wide web and before the necessity of doing a URL search was even a possibility, there was a small group of people who came up with the best company name ever. Those people had the courage to break every naming convention ever developed and to go with “Toys R Us.” It was a risky move, but one that paid off in spades.

There are three things you should ask yourself if and when you develop a new brand name:

1) Is it clear?

2) Is it memorable?

3) Is it different?

It’s worth mentioning that for every “Toys R Us” that meets all three of these criteria, there’s a “Kodak” or an “Amazon” that meets none of them and is still successful. But if you’re a small, unheard of company, you need every advantage you can get. And coming up with a name that’s clear, different and memorable stacks the cards in your favor.

So, with that in mind, take a look at Toys R Us. Is it clear what they do? Well, gosh, yeah sort of. You’ve got to figure that a store named Toys R Us probably doesn’t sell hardware. Is it memorable? Yes, they’ve knocked it out of the park on that one, too. Finally, is it different?

Before we answer that question, we’d like to point out that if a bunch of Harvard MBAs were sitting in a room together analyzing naming options for a new toy store, the first thing they’d do is to throw out anything targeting children that wasn’t grammatically correct. In the unlikely chance that Toys R Us slipped through their prying eyes, they would’ve tested the heck out of it until it got tossed out because middle America didn’t feel comfortable with it.

But whoever was in the room when they decided to go with Toys R Us had the wisdom and the cajones to stick with a name that was so different, so unusual and so irreverent as to not be forgotten by anyone who drove by the retail location and saw the big, colorful “Toys R Us” sign bellowing out for their attention.

So there you have it. There are three key things to consider when you come up with a new name for a product, service or company: Is it clear? Is it memorable? Is it different? The Toys R Us name is so successful on all three of these fronts, that we believe it’s arguably the best company name ever.

What are your thoughts? What other companies should we add to a Top 10 Best Company Names list? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Recently, The 60 Second Marketer conducted a free webinar on Social Media. In the webinar, we discussed several of the new tools, tips and techniques people are using to help promote their products and/or services.

There are hundreds of different Social Media tools available, so it’s easy to get confused by all of them. One of the key concepts we discussed was how to categorize these tools so that they’re simpler and easier to use and understand.

There are three primary categories of Social Media — tools that help you network, tools that help you promote and tools that help you share content.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we consider to be the top 13 Social Media tools broken down by category:

Networking tools — These are tools that help you connect with customers and prospects:

• MySpace: Think of MySpace as a social media tool that’s a little like a music festival. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of passion and, unfortunately, a lot of noise. It’s great if you’re targeting the youth market.

• Twitter: Think of Twitter as a cocktail party. There are a lot of different conversations going on and you can move from one conversation to another conversation.

• Facebook: Facebook is like a pub. It’s a great place to meet people on a more casual basis and have relaxed, off-the-record conversations with the people you meet there.

• LinkedIn: Think of LinedIn as a trade show. It’s a little more professional than Facebook and you’ll want to meet and connect with people there in a more businesslike manner.

Promotion Tools — These are tools that help you promote content about your product or service:

• Flickr: A great place to upload photos of your most recent company parties, conventions or product launches. Not the most important tool in the world, but worth checking out.

• Podcasting: Don’t make the mistake of doing a podcast that just regurgitates your press releases. Make your podasts fun, interesting and relevant. Don’t waste your time if you’re just going to have the CEO ramble on about your latest new product launch.

• YouTube: What can we say about YouTube that you don’t already know?

• HowCast: Ahhhhh, here’s something that’s interesting. HowCast feeds “How To” videos to a growing community. Perfect if your product requires a video tutorial.

• TubeMogul: Do you have videos you want to share with the world? Then go to Tubemogul, where you can upload your video once and let them send it out to YouTube, MySpace, Vidder and a gazillion other video sharing services.

Sharing tools — These are tools that help you share content that would be helpful to your prospects or customers:

• Google: You already know about Google, but did you know about Google Alerts? Just plug in a keyword and Google will send you an email a day that lists when that keyword was discussed in a blog. Perfect if you’re interested in staying on-top of things. Also great if you’re a big brand and you want to respond to negative comments about your product or service.

• Blogs: We’re going to do an entire webinar on blogs and blogging in the coming weeks, but for now, remember this — don’t do one unless you can write something relevant at least 4 times a week.

• Article Marketer: Do you have articles that you’d like published around the web? Then check out Article Marketer. We haven’t officially used it, but at first glance, it looks like a very useful tool.

• Digg, Del.icio.us and other bookmarking tools: As you know, these tools allow you to tag articles and other content that you think might be useful for others. We’ve found that it’s best not to abuse these tools or to try to milk them. That’s just abusing the system.

Are there important tools that we’ve missed? Which tools do you use? Share your thoughts and comments on them with our readers!