Last year, the creative minds here at SiteLab decided to get in touch with our sensitive sides and explore the nostalgia of the holidays with our Share Your Favorite Holiday Memories campaign. In our initial discovery and brainstorming meeting, fond memories and hilarious stories surfaced as each of us dug through our past. That’s when we knew we had something that people could connect with. Now we just needed to create a platform that would allow clients, partners, and friends to share their own favorite memories with each other.

The Details

As part of the campaign, we included a customized 3D View-Master as a gift to our clients and friends. We loved the idea of using an iconic childhood toy (which just so happens to be an original inductee in the National Toy Hall of Fame in case you were wondering) as a means to deliver our holiday wishes.

Our custom View-Master was a hit with SiteLab’s clients & friends.

To complement the retro icon, we crafted each slide in vintage 50′s postcard fashion. Though aged by design, the vintage approach worked because it reminds people of simpler times and evokes a nostalgia that still resonates with modern audiences.

The View-Master slides were designed in vintage 50′s postcard fashion.

Each carefully packaged gift included an invitation for people to share their favorite holiday memory on a landing page decked out with a flying Santa and a Google map that plotted the location of each person’s story on the map. The map clearly illustrates how we are all connected through common ideas and experiences, even more than proximity.

We also invited people to share their memories through an integrated social media and email campaign.

Most importantly, we wanted to give something back. In exchange for each story shared, SiteLab made a charitable donation to Toys for Tots.

Advice for Launching Your Own Integrated Campaign

Agencies are funny. We launch integrated campaigns for our clients all of the time, but rarely for ourselves (it’s a classic case of the cobbler’s kids have no shoes). Here is some important advice to keep in mind for your own campaign:

• Start your campaign with a brainstorm and invite people from different departments. The best ideas can come from unlikely sources.
• You don’t need a huge budget to run an integrated marketing campaign for your business. Low budget campaigns can be highly effective when they are coupled with creativity and a well-defined target audience.
• Add non-digital components to your campaign when possible. This increases impact and the likelihood that your prospects will take action. Set yourself apart by delivering a unique gift for the holidays or delivering a gift for a unique (but relevant) holiday.
• Promotions can also help you research your audience. You’ll be surprised what you learn about your target audience simply by asking.

Need help?

Let SiteLab facilitate a brainstorm and build a campaign based on your budget, and if you need help with execution we can do that too.

Each gift included call to action to visit a landing page to share a memory.

However, for all the capabilities of technology online, the actual adoption of complex attribution models to credit various sources for various consumer actions has been quite low due to resource constraints and the lack of a dominant model or tool.Enterprise tools do exist that attempt to crack this paradigm, but as of yet, these methods have yet to trickle down to the masses. Instead, advertisers generally rely on a “last click” attribution model where the last click a user made before completing a particular conversion event gets credit for the entirety of the event, regardless of user actions taken prior to that last click. This marginalizes the power of the events that led to that last click and creates a situation where different marketing tactics are devalued inaccurately.

We believe that 2012 will be a year where complex analytics attribution becomes a major consideration for clients due to a confluence of factors – increasing availability of complex attribution tools, increasing education about attribution itself, and the increasing need for greater visibility into user motivations as online audiences continue to fragment. Advertisers who dedicate resources towards implementing these attribution tactics will be rewarded with greater insight into not only what marketing tactics best drive consumer action, but also what combination of marketing tactics lead to the greatest result.

– Mike ZeMans, Chief Experience Officer

With the rise of mobile technology has come the availability of vast data resources for better aligning users with their desired content.  Mobile phones contain data on everything from a user’s current location to who their friends are and what kinds of apps they purchase; all of which can be used to better focus marketing on the individual user. Even searchers on desktop computers are experiencing a vastly more personalized search experience with Google’s personalized results and their continued push toward offering incentives for users to utilize Google products such as Google+ and the +1 button.

Simultaneously, this will offer new opportunities for savvy search marketers to capture these newly personalized search result rankings by taking advantage of emerging standards for semantic web information in concert with existing best practices. As monolithic search rankings erode, websites taking advantage of emerging standards will rise to fill these gaps for users, in a highly relevant way.

 - Matt Parisi, Search Marketing Manager

Scrolling these days is a “give in” to just about all digital experiences. And with the rapid proliferation of handheld devices, scrolling is interactive and admittedly fun. Yes, it is wise to make a good first impression, however, we’ve discovered the precious real estate that lies below the 600 pixel fold.
- Drew Vanhecke, Art Director

It all started thanks to Apple’s decision to not allow Flash on iOS. Eventually this hit home when clients began asking if their sites could be iPad friendly. The shift from Flash to HTML 5 has been a long treacherous road, especially here at Sitelab. This year we made a major push to create HTML 5 replacement and backups for our existing sites, but with accessibility comes limitations. HTML 5 does have its own set of challenges like local data storage limitations, compromised security, and browser compatibility. However for us Devs there is no love for Flash. The thrill is gone.

Adobe must also be seeing the writing on the wall. They made two major acquisitions that clearly shows it’s preparing itself for a Post-Flash era. In 2011 Adobe purchased PhoneGap & Typekit. PhoneGap is a platform that allows you to create native mobile applications using HTML 5. Typekit is a subscription service that allows developers to embed custom fonts using the latest CSS attributes. Adobe is jumping on the HTML 5 bandwagon before it’s too late.

As we move away from Flash-based animations, developers are forced to re-think what the most efficient way to utilize HTML 5 is. It turns out an overuse of JavaScript can actually lead to the same problems we have with Flash. Large scripts take significant processing power. On mobile devices this becomes an issue. When it comes to development, efficiency and simplicity is the key. Fortunately, both iOS and Android support the latest and greatest of CSS3. That includes fancy stuff like animations and transitions. In addition, both platforms render CSS significantly faster than JavaScript. When it comes to mobile web development, CSS3 is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Isaac Gonzalez, Web Developer

To make the transition back to work a little easier, last week I asked some of my fellow SiteLabbers to predict what trend they’ve seen, heard or explored in 2011 that will continue to develop in 2012. Every day this week I’ll be unveiling a new trend, starting with mine.

[Monday] Social Media Trend: A Divergence of the Social Media Fatigued
[Tuesday] Web Development Trend: The Rise of CSS
[Wednesday] Design Trend: Life Below 600px
[Thursday] SEO Trend: Search Fragmentation
[Friday] Analytics Trend: Increasingly Complex Attribution

Social Media Trend 2012: A Divergence of the Social Media Fatigued and the Rise of the Niche

Facebook and Twitter have been around so long that it’s a part of our everyday lives, right? For most of us, yes. But recently, I’ve been hearing a couple different schools of thought. The first is “It’s just too much. Facebook. There’s the ticker, and the news feed, and brand updates, and subscriptions. I don’t really use Facebook that much anymore – just for sharing pictures with my family.” The second, more commonly heard one is “Do you use Pinterest/Tumblr/Etsy/Squidoo/Punchfork/insert-niche-social-media-site-name here?”

I predict that Facebook and Twitter with their timelines and profile changes will remain the “commodities” of social media and maintain the furthest reach. However, I think many people will splinter off to Pinterest, Google+ (Ok, maybe not Google+), and other niche social media sites that are not yet “watered-down”, but rather allow them to create and share content they really want and that’s community-specific.

And though these niche social sites will be the origin of the content creation and curation, integration with Facebook and Twitter for administration and sharing will be required for a niche site’s success. It will be important for us brand marketers to keep this in mind as we look for new opportunities to reach our true fans.

Recipes Curator sites like Punchfork.com and Foodgawker.com that pull in recipes from branded sites are sprouting up all over the place. People don’t want to create profiles on multiple brands sites. Rather, they choose 1 or 2 of these sites to create profiles on and then save, organize, and share (with others in the community) all of their recipes there.

Images (and video) will continue to be a focus in 2012. Facebook timeline images are larger and Twitter’s are more prominent. Instagram has reached the masses and Pinterest is basically all images with a little user-generated text. Most people don’t feel they have the time nor do they want to read a lot of text. Along the same lines, the popularity of infographics will continue to increase dramatically. Infographics will be used more and more as strategic marketing tools to share statistical data and visually represent complex topics. – Jenn Barber, Social Media Strategist