Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

The Red Roof Inn website was recently named a Best in Class winner in the Hotel & Resort category in the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition, which honors excellence in web design and development. Red Roof Inn partnered with 360i on the extensive site redesign earlier this year, which aimed to refresh the creative, usability and functionality of the brand’s online hub.

360i approached the redesign project with Red Roof Inn’s long-term strategic goals top of mind. In order to more fully understand the brand vision – and the persona of their customer base – we worked closely with the internal Red Roof Inn staff and utilized market research to ensure an optimal customer experience on the new site.

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SMS was a mobile marketing and communications channel long before anyone ever heard of an iPhone, and usage continues to grow even as sophisticated smartphones swarm the market. In this third POV of our summer-long mobile series, we dive into SMS marketing and outline several best practices for brands looking to engage consumers via text.

360i POV on SMS (Text Messaging)

>>Download 360i’s report on Mobile Search (PDF).

Key Takeaways

• SMS usage is ubiquitous. Text messaging is by far the most popular mobile activity after talking, and it’s one of the most proven mobile marketing channels. It’s also one of the most universal, as SMS is available on nearly every device – from feature phones to smartphones.
• There are several ways to engage in SMS marketing. Some options for marketers include branded shortcodes, shared shortcodes and in-text advertising. Through SMS marketers can deliver a variety of content such as information, coupons, links or multimedia.
• Some best practices for marketers to keep in mind include staying relevant, presenting a strong call to action, offering value and integrating SMS with other media.

What are the goals of your marketing program? If they can be achieved through reach, offline integration, and ongoing communication with consumers, SMS should be strongly considered. On its own, it’s not the flashiest form of marketing and it doesn’t deliver the richest creative experience, but it can tie together a wide variety of marketing channels and create a richer consumer experience in the process.

Read the blog and follow us on Twitter all summer to learn how you can make the most of the increasingly mobile-centric marketing future.

Imagine customizing your own meal at a restaurant, sharing the creation with your entire social network, and earning points whenever someone orders it – points that can then be used toward future purchases at that same restaurant.

This is the social ordering strategy at the heart of 4food, a socially networked quick service restaurant poised to take New York by storm on July 6. On this date the first of 11 planned 4food locations will open for business. Appropriately, the first 4food restaurant will set up shop on Madison Avenue (at 40^th) – a street that has bred some of the most innovative marketing and advertising campaigns of modern times.

We caught up with Adam Kidron, Managing Partner at 4food, to learn more about how 4food works, where social fits within its corporate strategy and how the idea of the W(hole)burger™ (an innovative twist on the classic dish) was born.

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[360i]: How does your social ordering strategy work? Where do social check-ins fit in?

[AK]: Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Build a burger (there are over 141 million combinations).
• Step 2: Make Your Burger Famous, by naming it and then marketing it to your friends using our suite of social marketing tools.
• Step 3: Your burger is entered into our product database and given a unique SKU.
• Step 4: Every time your burger is purchased you receive a 4food quarter in your 4food account.
• Step 5: Hit burgers are featured in-store and online on the Buildboard Chart.
• Step 6: Come back to 4food to order build more custom burgers or spend your earnings.

Customers can check-in X times a week to earn a 4foodie Merit Patch and double the value of the intelligent coupons on their smart receipts.

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Welcome to another edition of our Digital News Roundup. This week, Twitter began making moves on its much-anticipated ad model, mobile search gained buzz thanks to two new reports (one from RBC, one from us) and SearchIgnite released a study proving the value of cross-channel attribution.  Check out all these stories and more in our recap below — and follow us on Twitter all week long for daily digital updates.

Finally, the Ad Model: Trending Topics Now for Sale on Twitter

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Twitter has begun featuring sponsored keywords within its trending topics list. Users who click on a promoted trending topic will be brought to the usual search results page – but at that page they will encounter a promoted tweet from the advertiser.

Disney Pixar appears to be one of the first to test this out, with Toy Story 3 ads appearing atop the search results page for ‘Toy Story 3’ (image via RWW).

ReadWriteWeb points out the deep differences between this ad model and traditional advertising, as the user is sent to a “live and uncensored conversation” instead of a marketer-controlled landing page. Following Twitter’s announcement regarding its promoted Tweets program earlier this year (for more you can check out 360i’s report on Promoted Tweets), the new trending topics feature is one of the earliest in the ad model.

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If, decades from now, I lie on my deathbed having flashbacks of some of the more humiliating moments of my life, then last week’s encounter at a 7-Eleven will be one of them. It was at such an establishment on East 23rd Street in Manhattan where a young, amiable staff member saw me working the Slurpee machine and asked, “Do you need help with that?”

The fact was, I did. I didn’t know how to get the Coke Slurpee to come out, nor did I know how to order an Oscar Mayer hot dog. I was juggling a handful of store-brand products as well, while surreptitiously reaching for my iPhone to document it all (see photos and screenshots on Flickr).

You might ask why I was playing the part of a convenience store anthropologist. No, I wasn’t trying to be the Jane Goodall of the Slurpee kingdom. Instead, I was there, still in my sport jacket following an Internet Week event, to arm my mafia. This mafia consists of nearly 300 friends and virtual associates in Mafia Wars, one of three of Zynga’s social games (along with FarmVille and YoVille) participating in a cross-promotional deal with 7-Eleven.

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Search has become the starting point for both consumers and marketers finding their way around the web, and it’s undergoing a rebirth as mobile devices proliferate. Marketers now have more opportunities to meet consumers’ needs exactly when and where their search is conducted. In the second POV of our summer-long mobile series, we take a closer look at the burgeoning opportunities in mobile search.

360i POV: Mobile Search

>>Download 360i’s report on Mobile Search (PDF).

Key Takeaways

• Mobile search is on the rise. Search engine marketing and optimization continue to matter across mobile devices, and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are jockeying to serve as the default engines across mobile handsets. Key players are making big moves in the space – signaling even bigger moves on the horizon.
• Search is evolving with mobile devices in a variety of a ways – for example, queries are typically shorter (no matter how much better mobile keypads get) and more local. Further, Google Android devices feature a built-in search button, and the results pages themselves continue to evolve to showcase more mobile-specific content.
• Our POV also lists several mobile search best practices, such as grouping mobile campaigns separately, broadening your scope to encompass more high volume keywords and geo-targeting your campaigns.

For marketers looking to reach consumers wherever they are, mobile search is a great starting point. To get the most out of it, marketers should plan holistically, tying mobile search into their broader search marketing programs.

Read the blog and follow us on Twitter all summer to learn how you can make the most of the increasingly mobile-centric marketing future.

It’s been a year since Microsoft unveiled its new “Decision Engine,” Bing, amid a flurry of hype and speculation. Microsoft said the new engine was developed to help searchers navigate more easily through information online – an objective perhaps most vividly captured in the company’s slew of commercials poking fun at “search overload.”

Bing, which was fully rolled out on June 3, 2009, claimed to take a new approach to search through three simple goals (as articulated in the official release): deliver great results, deliver a more organized experience and facilitate fast, more confident decisions through search. Beyond that, Microsoft’s new engine sported a sleek design, with large, vibrant visuals extending across the homepage. Both inside and out, Bing was striving to be different.

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