Blog o' RAMA

Tom Golisano to speak on Turning the Brand Around: The Sabres' Story

Local entrepreneur and esteemed business professional, Tom Golisano, will be presenting at our next  RAMA event, to be held at the Riverside Convention Center.

Golisano is best known for his outstanding success founding and building Paychex, the "second largest payroll processor in the United States (thanks to wikipedia)". He is also the owner of the Sabres hockey team, out of Buffalo, NY. It's hard, these days, to decide which he's best known for - but, known he is. And respected.

Regardless of your feelings about hockey, you'll want to attend this event and hear Golisano talk about the turnaround of this brand and how the Sabres jumpstarted their brand - almost overnight. I hear one lucky attendee could walk away with a Sabres' jersey!

Blueline sponsor is Golisano's Children's Hospital. 

The charity RAMA has chosen for this event is Camp Onseyawa.

"The mission of Rotary Camp Onseyawa is to provide a camping experience for 9-16 year old children with disabilities from the 4 county area, and to foster independence and acceptance of others through social, recreational and educational aspects of life."

Please visit the events page for more info.

Ready to register now? Click this link...

Do You TWITTER?

One of my BBFFs (best blogging friends forever) has been Twittering for months now. I can remember when she started using this new tool, thinking, "Why is she doing that? I know she has more than enough to do in her regular life as a Mom, a marketing professional, and a blogger." But, she's more forward thinking than I and today she is a great twitterer... if that's word.

Now, I've got the bug. I started Twittering a week or so ago... just little notes in my Twitter account, then... as more and more of my online connections started "following" me, and as I started "following" them...I got Twitter religion.

For those not in the know, Twitter is another social networking tool. It's similar to IM, except that it opens you to a whole group of people, twittering away. The conversations range from mundane "gotta go eat my waffles now," to, "how can *insert political figure here* say whatever he or she said."

Until I began Twittering - really following conversations and contributing my comments - I thought this was another silly platform for wasting time. But...it's not. Much like the other social media tools we  use, today, it's a peek inside the hearts and minds of friends, relatives, and members of your overall social community. Twitter lets you 'talk' to whole groups, as opposed to having Instant Messenger open and communicating with several friends all at once, each in its own little IM window. (today I started following John Edwards, and...got an email saying he's now following me, too! 'Following' just means he's watching what I write, and vice-versa.)

Twitter is still new, still evolving, as are many of the social media tools out there, like Facebook, Myspace, and half a dozen others (seems like I get an invite to a new social networking tool, weekly). With Twitter, you control the flow of your conversation. You can 'eavesdrop' by just reading what everyone else is writing but not replying. That's not a bad way to get information - your network is very well aware that anyone they are connected to, and some people they aren't, might be watching. Not a lot different than standing in a crowded coffee shop and carrying on a conversation. No wonder John Edwards is twittering.

I'll keep twittering and see what else I can find out about it, uncover the hidden secrets, if there are any. For now, I'm having fun talking - to all my Facebook friends, my blogger friends, and some new people I just met. Hey, come on board! You never know if we're talking about you... or about your company. Unless you tune in.

Steal a Base, Steal a Taco World Series Promotion

Since I'm a huge Boston Red Sox Fan I was eagerly awaiting the start of Game 1 of the World Series last night. To all you other baseball fans you must know that Boston overpowered the Colorado Rockies with a 13-1 win. So I just had to write about it today in my blog, Donna's Promo Talk along with an overview of Taco Bell's Steal a Base, Steal a Taco Promotion. Everyone in America will be entitled to free tacos from Taco Bell. So if you're interested to hear how the marketers at Taco Bell are really leveraging their sponsorship of Major League Baseball with this promotion read more here. Let's go Red Sox!

Howie Jacobson at Tastings -Mmmm! Good!

October 29th, sponsored by Grand Central Hosting, RAMA will host our Super Hero Marketing Series, focused on A Taste of Tavern on the Green: Launching a world-renowned brand into retail for a cause.

Hear the supercalifragilistic Howie Jacobson of Dixon Schwabl Advertising speak on how two powerful brands are joining forces for the good of our children. Tavern on the Green and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children are working together on behalf of the children of the U.S. This is cause marketing at its best.

Click over to our events page and get all the information. Or, just click here to register - you know you want to be there!

Brand Jamming and PROMO Live

I too concur that Marc Gobe's Brand Jam luncheon held last week here in Rochester by RAMA was indeed marvelous! It took me a little while to get used to Marc's French accent to fully understand all he was saying but once I did I loved listening to him. He says that's it's "time to be audacious with our brands" and make them more "people centric" since it's the people, not corporations, that the brands really belong to.

The week before last I was invited to Chicago to be a guest blogger at an event called PROMO Live, sponsored by PROMO Magazine. I've been writing quite a bit on my blog, DonnasPromoTalk, about this event and noticed some similarities between what Marc was saying at the Brand Jam event and from what Jim McCafferty, President of JMP Creative, was saying at his "Powering Up Your Creative" session.

Jim shared with us some great examples to help increase creativity including some of the many images he's collected that he uses to get his team's creative juices going. He advised us to really look at projects in a totally different way in order to get people talking about them and he said that "sometimes you don't have to look outside the box but instead look in someone else's".

Marc also shared with us some of  ways in which he gets his team's creativity going, or brand jamming as he calls it. Marc uses the sense of smell since people see colors through smell. His team did a survey and asked what color came to mind when smelling a new fragrance Ralph Polo was planning to launch. The overwhelming majority answered blue, therefore, they named the fragrance Blue and designed the packaging blue.

Jim gave us some tools to use to help with our creativity such as IdeaFisher which is a software program designed to speed up the creative process by working on principles of association and memory retrieval. Marc gave us all a copy of his book, Brand Jam, which outlines his process of crafting brand emotions through narratives and images.

You can find out more about Brand Jam at Marc's website Brandjam.net. And please hope over to my blog and read more about some of the other speakers that were at PROMO Live. Between all this advice it should spark some creativity in us all for awhile.