Blog

Feb 22 2015

What IS Area 224?

Believe it or not, we get the question all the time. As we near the anniversary (ahem, 02.24.09) of the firm’s founding, maybe we should explain how we got the name?

Simply, 224 is an area code here in the North Suburbs of Chicago. It’s an overlay area code – but it’s not just for mobile phones. The story goes that this part of town ran out of numbers quickly when 847 – which equates to “VIP” on the letters on the phone, look it up – was created. So 224 was launched, but not used all that often.

More to the point here, we made a call once to a neighbor, from our own 224 number, and they asked if we were in Texas on business. No…

This got me thinking that part of my job – at the intersection of digital and traditional communications, social and mobile, PR and marketing – is to demystify concepts. “Area 224” sounds mysterious. Reality: not that mysterious.

Same with communicating your message. Don’t overthink it.

We’ve launched and relaunched a couple times, had a few changes to the website, had to deal with a tech issue here and there. And we don’t blog like we used to…but that’s okay, since we’re working.

What IS Area 224?

So yeah, here we are – Area 224 is an integrated marketing communications firm that can work with you to help you better connect to stakeholders, better get your messages across, and better impact the bottom line.

Thanks for stopping by. Spin through the blog posts and let us know if we can help.

Jan 06 2015

In Defense of the People Who Don’t Know Who Paul McCartney Is

I was going to call this “an open letter to…” but then I realized that I hate “open letters.” Anyway, let’s calm down for half a second.

First, the background on this little Internet kerfuffle. Kanye West recorded a song with Paul McCartney. To be fair to both, and to you, our readers, I have decided to link to their Wikipedia entries. (If you don’t know what “Wikipedia” is, please Google it. If you don’t know what Google is…)

For a snapshot of what happened next, venture over to the webpage of Perez Hilton, who curated the tweets as only he could. Fabulous!

(The Atlantic has their take on the story over here.)

Next came the weeping and gnashing of teeth – Kanye does call himself “Yeezus” so that sort of Biblical behavior is to be expected – from those who “fear for the future of our country” and “don’t know what this world is coming to.” And, Moses himself, who publishes Rolling Stone magazine (there’s no other way to explain the fact that U2 was feted with the honor of “#1 Album of 2014” by the magazine), decreed that “All Young Hebrew Men Shall Learn of the Ways of Young Paul.” Or, more accurately, it looked like this:

Paul McCartney and Why Mindset Is Everything

Every Fall, Beloit College publishes its Mindset List. It makes news not just because it’s smart, but because it also serves as a bit of a time capsule whipsaw thing. Tupac Shakur has never been alive during the lifetime of a student who started college this past fall? That’s illuminating as heck – and probably brings us back to our original point here, eh?

I did a flashback of my own when this Kanye/Sir Paul story broke – to when I heard that John Lennon was murdered. TBH (shorthand for “to be honest”), I had no clue who he was and, since there wasn’t a CNN screen crawl back then, my first guess was that he had something to do with the Communists. I was nine at the time and was stuck in the world of what pop music was being crammed down my throat on the Top 40 station, or what sports event was on one of the four channels of TV we had. The Beatles hadn’t done anything to make me know they existed – and the 8-Track tapes in the van DID expose me to cool stuff, but it was Simon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder and the Guess Who.

So, December 1980 – could you blame me? January 2015 – can you blame someone who is in their late teens, or even early 20s?

We’re a much, MUCH more fractured, narrowcasted world than we were in 1980, or 1990, or even 2010.

My Annual Exercise in Cluelessness

Name the industry, name the genre, name the thing – it’ll pass you by in an instant. In my lifetime, the Beatles didn’t exist – they broke up before I was born, all went off to their own solo projects, rock and roll continued to evolve. Bringing me to one of my annual highlights – and, hopefully, bringing us full-circle. Each year, I pick up (virtually, no one READS PAPER MAGAZINES ANYMORE) SPIN Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of the year. Since I consider Rolling Stone’s list so laughable – really, U2 and Bruce Springsteen as 1-2 on the list? REALLY? – I won’t even link to it, I’m looking for something legitimate. Plus, the writing is outstanding. (As Elaine told us on “Seinfeld,” “People love interesting writing.”)

This year, of the 50 artists, I had heard of – HEARD OF – five.

I consider myself to be somewhat pop-culture literate.

Kanye’s Advantage

So really, can you blame all the people who asked whether Paul McCartney’s career would now catch fire because Kanye West recorded a song with him? Consider the fact that Kanye is married to a woman who is famous for being famous, everyone not only carries a computer in their pocket but uses it all the time to talk about Kanye and his wife, AND we’re living in a world with thousands of channels not just on television but on computers and phones and all sorts of internet-of-things devices. There’s no off button, it seems, and no way of escaping Kanye – and no way of hearing about every single exploit of a septuagenarian musician.

Then again, maybe that’s Paul’s advantage.

Sep 06 2014

Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Hi, Gentle Readers. We’re busy working on a couple other sites here at HQ. And, on one of them, we dig deep – really deep – on the “Should I Advertise on Facebook?” question. This originally appeared over at 10Kayear.com. We thought it might be more a propos for the readership here, so we’re sharing.

We’ve told you that we’re striving for radical transparency here – we want to show you what works and what doesn’t. And one of the things we’ve had asked of us countless times: Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Time, then, to go Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes. Specifically, if you were to do a campaign, and do one with a limited budget, what are the expectations? And can you actually get anything other than just Facebook Likes?

That’s actually a complex question, and the answers depend on a few factors – not just how much you’re spending on Facebook. For instance:

Do you have content that you can point people to, or are you still building your audience?
Is there a quid pro quo – well, as much of a quid pro quo as is allowed with this new “Like Gate” stuff going on? (Learn more over at Tabfoundry – from the ever-cool Francisco at Social Mouths.)
And what does your content strategy look like in the days and weeks to come?

Again, we don’t have all the answers. But here are a couple experiments from the “test and learn” school of Facebook Marketing.

Experiment A: Metasip “Boost Post” Campaign

If you don’t know about our Metasip site, (1) where have you BEEN? and (2) you can learn more over at Metasip.co – where we’d love it if you signed up for the email list. Seriously, we’d love that.

Put simply, we’re building a tool that is “Yelp for Alcoholic Beverages.” We’ve had some success early on, at least with getting content out there and rating things in a variety of categories. (We know – there are countless wine apps, and a beer thing called Untappd, and there are whisky (and whiskey) and spirits sites and blogs and everything else. Our aim is a little of that, but a whole lot of ratings. Stay tuned.)

Without a doubt, our most successful post – to the tune of 300 visits on a Thursday in July and 600 visits the next day – was one about Buying Booze at Costco. So we thought we’d use the “Boost Post” capability and see what that would get us. Here are the results:

You’ll see that…well…$20 may not have been the best use of dollars here.

If you want to slice and dice the numbers to score a few metrics to make yourself happy, you COULD say that your paid reach divided by your budget meant a “CPM” – or “Cost Per Thousand” in the ad world – of $13.31.

Careful, Young Jedi. Using that sort of calculation this early in the game, and when you’re not dealing with a large budget, is actually a little dangerous, we think. There’s just simply not enough to go on – and, in the fullness of time, you will have a much better picture of your TRUE Marketing Cost. But we digress…

Those 57 “Actions” did not yield ONE additional email subscriber. They DID give us ONE additional Page Like, so our numbers are…a little better. Again, it’s early.

However…we didn’t set this up as a “like” campaign, we set it up to “Boost This Post.” So we did drive traffic to the page as a result – if you want to use Facebook’s “Reach” numbers (1502) and consider the actual link clicks as a “Conversion” (14), we got a conversion rate of 0.9% – less than 1/10 of one percent.

Before you ask – we micro-targeted who we were reaching out to. US-only, and those who are already interested in alcohol brands.

Stay tuned for further developments on this front.

Experiment B: 10KaYear Like Campaign

I think I liked this one best, specifically because of one number in the photo below:

Facebook Like Campaign — The 10KaYear FB Like Campaign

In case you missed it, we circled that number. It’s the Avg. Cost Per Page Like.

We were tracking this the whole time – as you’ll see up there, we ran a ten-day, $100 campaign – and that number was pretty consistent, not moving much above 60 cents, nor below 50. It netted out pretty well – and, while not in “big brand” spend territory, we think it gives us a nice little benchmark for future campaigns.

ALSO: Do not overlook mobile. At ALL. Of the traffic referred to our site by Facebook in the past 30 days, 79% of it was mobile.

Experiment C: 10KaYear Boost Post Campaign

This one was earlier in the month of August, and we decided to share it because there’s an opportunity to learn something from it. Right?

As you see, “actions” appeared lower than Experiment A above, but we’re actually going to have to study the numbers from that first experiment…they don’t add up.

Our big takeaway here is the CPM number. Math tells us that it’s $8.56 as a CPM figure ($40 divided by 4672 to give you the cost per, then multiplied by 1000 to give you the CPM).

$8.56 CPM is nothing to sneeze at. Right?

Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes: the Takeaways…

If you’re here for Personal Financial Advice – which this site does some of – you’re starting to catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

And if you’re here for Business Launch Advice – which this post and the “Behind the Curtain” page are both meant to help with – you might catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

Another theme for both: “Test and Learn.”

As we keep these Side Hustles of ours moving forward, we’re keen to keep learning from these types of tests. And we haven’t even begun that “ENGAGEMENT” process that all the marketing gurus talk about. Get people on board with your cause, then get them to do something with you – talk, share, ask questions, build communities. ENGAGE.

The takeaways: None of this happens overnight. Immediate results are for the extremely lucky. You do have to spend a little to build an audience. And you need an engagement strategy, a content marketing strategy, and a communications strategy behind it all. AND DON’T IGNORE MOBILE.

More to come on the rest of that down the road.

Sep 01 2014

How to Write a “What [EVENT] Can Teach Us About [DISCIPLINE]” Blog Post

In a past life, I was a blogger. I mean, a regular blogger who would write all sorts of posts and hope to get page views and, in turn, sell something. I still do that sort of work, with a bit of a different spin these days, but have decided to let others take the wheel.

Friendly Faceless LinkedIn Logo Guy

Why? Because it’s so easy these days to write a blog post on some current event and turn it into advice. It must work, too – these are the only types of blog posts I seem to see.

Please make it stop.

What the #IceBucketChallenge can teach us about #Marketing.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s easy, and FUN! to make your own blog post using something that’s trending and whatever line of work you’re in. You should try it sometime – just add a hashtag and you’re all set.

What the Start of the #CollegeFootball season can teach us about #SocialMedia

In fact, we’ve eliminated the need for any sort of current events calendar, right? Just newsjack your way into whatever story is out there, then Bob’s Your Uncle and the world will beat a path to your blog’s door.

What #LaborDay can teach us about #GivingBirth to #Quadruplets

Also, you now don’t even need to THINK. Crap, anything on the calendar can be turned into something that can teach us about engaging with our target audience on Pinterest.

What my recent #SpeedingTicket can teach us about #Engagement

I didn’t actually get a speeding ticket – but this is the sort of thing I’m seeing throughout the universe. Take a topic, any topic, and apply it to something seemingly unrelated. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING!

Please make it stop. And here’s the takeaway…

At some point, take a break and do some actual original thinking.

There’s always an agenda to these posts – and maybe that’s one reason I stay away from them, and from blogging, and especially from LinkedIn Publisher posts. These are always solutions to problems that you may not currently have. They’re running around your head, trying to insert themselves into some process where they may not belong. It’s lazy thinking and it’s getting old and…

My advice is this.

Pick up a book – not a tactical marketing advice book, but a real book. I don’t care what it is, but make it something that forces you to rethink something, or visit a series of problems in a completely different way. Heck, even a crime novel might get you escaping from these insipid blog posts.

I’m currently reading “Forever Fluent” and I love it and now I HAVE to learn (or relearn) a language. But that may not be your bag – fine. Just make sure you’re not reading, or writing, the same old blog post.

What learning #French can teach us about #Twitter.

Aug 13 2014

What Are You Working On?

A dangerous question, right? Especially if you’re working “IN” your business, instead of “ON” it.

Greetings. Area 224 is back here in the blogosphere. So that answers the question, right? You ask us “What are you working on?” and we say “We’re working ON our blog.” If only it were that simple.

It’s not. In fact, I’d offer that most people who are working on a blog end up spending most of their time either (1) navel-gazing, (2) trying to link to popular friends or (3) offering advice that will fall upon deaf ears.

We have done all three. None of it works.

Well, it can sorta work – you can admire others in business and talk about what they’re doing right. You can link to those with high Google Page Rank on their blog – that can help you a little bit. And you can share advice – advice that will likely be ignored (even if everyone piles on and says how great it is).

Plumbers Have Clients — Photo by plumberluton, used with Creative Commons license

To Celebrate Our Return, Here’s What We’re Working On. Really.

Dave from Area 224 just finished an embedded contract role. (What does that mean? I was on the team at a Fortune 100 organization, helping them solve communications challenges, and adding value by actually rolling up my sleeves and doing stuff.)

I don’t mean to dis those of you who are actively blogging about what people should be doing online, but it was very refreshing to avoid advice from the blogosphere, talk to business leaders inside and outside of the organization, and tie their strategy to their objectives. Plus, I couldn’t really access Facebook during the day, so that was a major plus as well.

During this hiatus from the Awesomeness Generation and the Internet Cliques, I heard quite a few things that have impacted my world view. And given me a chance to answer the question…

What Are You Working On? Well, three areas, really, along with some links to show you where it’s all headed.

1. Category Disruption

I’ll tell you this much, folks: there’s room out here for everyone. Categories are being disrupted overnight – partly because there are so many inefficiencies.

Case in point: Health care. (Or: “Healthcare.” Depends on whether you follow the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual. Or neither.)

The Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – taught us a few things about disruption. Whether or not you agree with the law, you can say this much: the actual signing of the ACA was disruptive. And the follow-on hue and cry from everywhere is disruptive. And the tons of tools, sites, platforms, portals, apps and whatnots being built to help everyone and anyone figure out What The Heck Is Going On…That’s Disruption.

Heck, I should start a business just categorizing the business niches that need disruption, or are in the middle of being disrupted, or could use something disruptive to come along.

And how will Area 224 practice Category Disruption?

Thanks for asking. I’ll give you a hint: Metasip.

We launched the site a year ago and worked on the background to review a bunch of alcohol. While it’s still in Beta, and we know there are other sites out there that are involved in the beverage marketing category, we think the twist we offer – “It’s like Yelp, but for Alcohol” – gives us a unique selling proposition. It doesn’t hurt that there’s no shortage of people who are willing to share their views on their favorite wine, beer, or spirit. And that there are brands large and small that need to get their stuff out in front of new markets.

[SHAMELESS PLUG #1: Go see us over on the site, spin through, even sign up for the emails. We think you’ll like it all.]

2. Content Monetization

If I hear “Content Marketing” one more time, I will scream. It’s the new “Thought Leadership,” and that was old ten years ago.

So Area 224’s approach is Content ~~Marketing~~ Monetization.

We’ve been there with “Content Marketing” – talk about things, get businesses to notice you, sell them your services. It’s a new wrapper on an old thing, and it’s one of those buzzwords you can say when you want to sound important in a meeting. Just don’t do it around me, because I’ll throw up on my shoes.

And how will Area 224 practice Content Monetization?

Thanks for asking. I’ll give you a hint: 10KaYear.

We told you here awhile back that we wrote a book. It’s still doing okay over on Amazon, but it got us thinking that there’s more to it than just writing a book. A content marketing plan has been replaced by a Content Monetization Plan. So yeah, we want you to visit the site as we try to make it a little Dave Ramsey, a little Suze Orman – and a lot REAL WORLD.

Don’t get me wrong – we’re fans of both of them and we find a lot of truth in what they talk about. But we’ve also witnessed many MANY more real-world examples of what is really going on.

Darnell's Credit Score — Someone shared their credit score with us.

Yes, we’re talking warts and all – living paycheck to paycheck, avoiding bankruptcy, scrimping, saving, looking for side gigs to make ends meet. Dave and Suze are both smart – but how realistic are they? That’s what we plan on talking about on the site – and the Content Monetization Plan involves more ebooks, toolkits, workbooks, and links to trusted partners that can provide affordable solutions to pesky financial challenges.

[SHAMELESS PLUG #2: Visit 10KaYear.com and look at what’s there. And sign up for the emails so you can see what’s coming next.]

3. Quality and Transparency

Here’s what bothers us about the modern marketing world: there’s too much content, a lot of it is crap, and there’s very little transparency.

Some of this is unavoidable; everyone has an unlimited supply of virtual ink, content can be whipped up for pennies offshore, and native advertising and content marketing have both blurred the lines between journalism and blather.

Plus, blather sells.

So we’re not going to do a shameless plug here, instead, a promise:

We’re only going to share quality stuff here on Area 224, on Metasip, and on 10KaYear. And we’re going to be as transparent as we possibly can.

The quality thing? We haven’t blogged here since last September, partly because we didn’t have anything that we thought was worth saying.

Transparency: well, we’ve been really up front on this post as to what we’re doing. On the front of the site, you can sign up to get a sneak peek of one of our upcoming books. We’re NOT planning on running affiliate links on the front of Area 224 right now. BUT WE ARE planning on borrowing from the playbook of the Smart Passive Income guy. Here’s what we mean.

Follow our process on 10KaYear.com. While we may not share all of the revenue nuts and bolts, we do plan on showing you as much of the behind-the-curtains stuff as we can.

Hey, thanks for listening. We know it’s a longer post than what we’re used to sharing. And we know your time is valuable.

And, in the comments, feel free to answer the question…