Whether you’re an Apple fan boy or not, you have to respect the way Steve Jobs – and by extension Apple – is not afraid to be decisive with how they offer technology. With selecting carriers for the iPhone, creating operating systems, or accepting new programs into the App Store they dictate how things are going to work, and they don’t shy away from upsetting people who don’t like how Apple does things.

It’s a great business model because everyone can be safe and boring. While everyone technically can pick an edge, very few actually do it.

So ask yourself, “Would I like to be a little more like Apple?”

Topics Covered:

• Trying to appeal to everyone is going to result in stale, boring marketing that doesn’t resonate with anybody
• Understand the difference between picking an edge and engaging in controversy marketing

Resources Mentioned:

• ShipIt is out-of-print, but you can still get Seth Godin’s Linchpin, for which ShipIt was a companion workbook
• Crispy Frickin’ Chicken campaign by Sheetz that caused such a hubbub (this is admittedly pretty mild as far as controversy goes, but it illustrates the concept behind controversy marketing)

Silver Square is placing a lot of emphasis this year on storytelling. Good stories are the foundation of our approach to marketing, and we believe using stories to engage your audience is the future of marketing as a whole. Raquel has written a downloadable guide on the subject, and in this episode of the podcast we talk about the ideas that shaped both the guide and our approach to storytelling.

On a related note, we talk about the recent incarnation of our monthly newsletter. In keeping the with the idea of good storytelling, we’ve revamped our monthly emails to better communicate valuable content to our audience.

Topics Covered:

• The process of storytelling and how we use it to consistently achieve great results for our clients
• When and how to give away your secret sauce
• Why content is not king – and what the other half of the story is

Resources Mentioned:

• Five Steps to Telling Your Most Engaging Stories – the free downloadable guide where we give away our secrets on great storytelling
• Silver Square newsletter – you can subscribe to our newsletter from (literally) every page of our website, head to the home page (or any other) and add your email address in the bottom left corner

May is the month where large groups of mostly young people cast off the moniker of student and assume a new role as working professionals. As a few of these graduates are the Squares of Tomorrow™, we have a vested interest in making sure they get the best possible advice on being successful, productive, and happy.

We get into some specific advice from each Square in the episode, but there are a few common threads that appear over and over. Don’t take whatever job falls in your lap. Think about what you want to be doing with your days, and pursue a career that lets you do that. If you aren’t sure what you want to do, then discovering that is your top priority. You can interview professionals, take assessments, ask friends, or do some old fashioned trial and error – but do not wait to be struck with inspiration. Figure out what area you want to work in and go get a job that lets you do the meatiest parts of that process each day.

If your dream job hasn’t walked up and smooched you on the face yet, it’s probably not going to. You need to go seek it out.

Topics Covered:

• The importance of writing in a professional environment – every professional environment
• The unique opportunity you have to network right now
• Being intentional with the decisions you make from this point on
• Keep continually learning – especially from sources that are outside of your wheelhouse
• How employers think about your generation in terms of loyalty and entitlement

Resources Mentioned:

• Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech – given June 12, 2011 to the graduates of Dartmouth College
• Stranger Dreams – the mystery point-and-click video game that Dean created for his capstone project
• Getting Real – ostensibly about web development, this book is packed with tips and insight on running a lean, effective business
• Success Principles – the staple of the Silver Square bookshelf with timeless principles for personal and professional success

Spoiler: No, blogging is not dead. Didn’t mean to ruin the surprise, but there’s no good way to introduce this topic that doesn’t include pointing out that blogging is alive and kicking. The blogs of 2012 are dramatically different than the blogs of just a few years ago, though. The strategies, content, and audience have all matured recently – meaning the way you use blogging in your marketing mix needs to mature, too.

Topics Covered:

• How has the emergence of social media changed the role that blogs play in the web-sphere?
• Originally the antithesis of traditional journalism, the independent blogger doesn’t look so different from big media anymore
• The role of blogs in content marketing and SEO
• What will blogging look like in 5 years?
• Bonus: hear what the Squares thought of Clay in the local production of 12 Angry Men

Resources Mentioned:

• The Web is Dead – an article appearing in Wired discussing the rapid changes to how we use the Internet
• Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter – NY Times article from the beginning of 2011 citing the Pew Research Center’s study on (among other things) blog use
• Huffington Post – an online news source that began as a small niche blog and grew to a Pulitzer Prize winning news giant

When we listened to this episode after recording it, we realized that you can occasionally here Matt’s voice in the background as he was on the phone with Apple support. (Macs don’t always just work, by the way.) Ultimately we decided to publish this recording in spite of those infrequent and very quite murmurings because we crammed so much great information into a scant 19 minutes of auditory wisdom.

In this episode we talk about the message your are sending to your employees with your internal marketing. (And, yes, doing zero internal marketing sends a message, too.) Without some form of internal marketing you are practically guaranteeing that you will leave some employees confused and unmotivated.

In the podcast we mention that Zappos offers new employees $1,000 to quit after they complete their initial orientation – after recording we discovered that our information is out of date, Zappos now offers $4,000 for people to quit. What does that say to employees both old and new?

Internal marketing is one of your most powerful tools for communicating with your team. It gets everyone on the same page about the direction the business is going, which is a key to creating consistently effective brand experiences like what Apple achieves in their Apple Stores.

Topics covered:

• The way internal marketing influences employee morale and a consistent brand experience for customers.
• Should you segment your internal audience?
• How do you determine how transparent to be with what you tell employees?
• Is internal marketing best delivered through formal or informal channels?

Resources mentioned:

• Content Marketing World – an annual conference where content marketing experts share new ideas, best practices, and thoughts on the industry
• 8 Things Your Employees Need Most – Jeff Haden shares the things you need to provide your employees for them to perform above and beyond (pay is not one of the 8 items listed)
• Office Space – 1999 cult classic about life in corporate America

The title of this episode of the podcast is taken from a post that Casey wrote back in 2010. This is a fundamental idea in how we approach marketing for our clients. All of your tactics and messaging are going to spring from this idea that you have a story that your ideal customers love to hear and be a part of. We talk a little more about what the means and how it works in this episode.

Topics Covered:

• What to do if your story is boring. (spoiler: find the right audience)
• How to get started framing your story
• Creative thought exercises that can help spark your brain to shape your story
• There is no such thing as anonymity for businesses anymore
• The two critical questions to ask yourself when creating  your story
• Raquel makes up words

Resources Mentioned:

• Marketing, Journalism, and Truth as Competitive Advantage – an article that talks about how marketing can take a page from journalism to deliver a competitive edge

Bonus: We didn’t mention this article in the podcast, but we do briefly mention negative feedback. Here’s an article from a few years back from Ask Silver Square (a site we are looking at rebooting in 2012): What do I do when someone leaves a negative comment on my blog?

When we record the Marketing Brainpower podcasts, we are not reading from a script. That’s by design, and while we do plan ahead points that we want to address on a given topic, when it’s time to record we just talk. The organic narrative structure makes the podcast more fun to record, and hopefully more fun to listen to.

But that means sometimes in the process of discussing building personas for your brand, we end up on a tangent about astrological signs. Surprisingly we were able to create a segue (albeit a loose one) back to marketing.

Topics Covered:

• What’s a persona and how does it help you understand your customers?
• How to create personas from your existing clients
• What attributes are helpful to define in your personas
• How many personas can/should you have?

Resources Mentioned:

• Masters of Business Online – annual conference for marketing and tech where we ran a workshop on content marketing last year
• Harley Davidson – example of a company with a clearly established brand persona that permeates everything they do as a company

Whether you makes this fact obvious in your marketing or not, one of the most important components of your business is your people. Systems, intellectual property, and physical assets are all very important, but they aren’t enough to run a successful business. Don’t believe me? How much do you spend on payroll and HR? Would you be spending that much money if you didn’t need to?

So don’t hide your light under a bushel. If you’ve had any kind of success as a business, you’ve probably have a couple of remarkable people working for you. And what makes prospects feel comfortable signing on the dotted line? Knowing that they are going to be in the hands of rock star ninjas that have the skills and experience to handle whatever problem comes up.

Or instead you could always try assuring them that no problem could possibly come up so they’ll be just fine in the hands of mediocre technicians. That might work.

Topics Covered:

• marketing something your competitors can’t copy
• the challenges you face when a key employee (and key part of your marketing) leaves
• how to use your team in your marketing
• will your competitors try to steal your key people?

Resources Mentioned:

• 37signals – the SaaS company out of Chicago that has a reputation for unconventional business tactics like rotating job positions so everyone has a chance to hear customer feedback (read: complaints)
• Cute and funny – Raquel’s husband is cute and funny. Definitely not a nerd. Seriously. She just wanted to make sure you knew.

Don’t forget that April Fool’s is right around the corner. We have a history of respecting this special day, and 2012 will be no exception.

Last year at one of the Social Media Breakfasts here in Indy, an interesting point was brought up by our speaker Jay Baer. It wasn’t too many years ago that typing was considered a skill. You included your words-per-minute on your resume, and it was something that employers cared about.

Today it is assumed that you are proficient at typing. No one asks you about it. Being able to type reasonably quickly and accurately is just the price of admission for a professional position. You don’t assign typing to someone. Everyone must be able to type in order to do their jobs.

Social media is on track to become an assumed skill just like typing. There is every reason to believe that in a relatively short time everyone will need to be able to competently use social media in order to function in a professional environment.

Topics covered:

• Facebook’s new timeline pages and what that means for a business
• Which social media platforms do you need to participate on?
• What does it mean to “do” social media?
• Is Google+ worth your time?
• What to do if you don’t have a social media policy in place

Resources mentioned:

• Personal Branding for Hermits – a blog post about social media leveling the playing field for all the wallflowers out there
• The Feltron Annual Report – we failed to mention it by name in the episode, but this dude summarizes his activity for the year in an annual report
• Coke’s Facebook timeline – if you’re curious what can be accomplished with Facebook’s new timeline format, look at a brief history of Coca-Cola

Videos of cats making people laugh conquered the Internet years ago. Soon after videos with a business purpose started popping up online, and while they may never depose cats as the most popular subjects of web videos, they are closing the gap.

In this episode of Marketing Brainpower we bring Matt “The Kief” Kiefer aboard to share his thoughts and expertise on using video.

Topics covered:

• Searching for videos + how putting videos online affects your SEO
• Are video annotations a good thing?
• Do you need a lot of equipment to get started? (spoiler: no)
• What’s B-roll, and why do you need it?

Resources mentioned:

• 5 DLSR Filmmaking Tips – this blog post has a few simple insight to help a beginner shoot video with their DSLR camera like they’ve been doing it for years
• Will it Blend? – iPhone – the video that helped Blendtec show the iPhone who’s boss
• Double Rainbow – a popular viral video that Skittles has mysteriously not yet co-opted into a marketing campaign
• Where Good Ideas Come From – this is a good example of the type of the illustrated speech that Raquel mentions
• Client Curling – arguably the least formal videos Silver Square has ever shared online, this is one of the first things we did when we moved into our new office
• Tell City Pretzels – shot and edited by our special guest Matt, this video shows what you can do with a camera and a good story

Before we dive into this week’s topic, we have some fun events that Silver Square is involved with to announce. The first is Blue Breakfast on March 22, a benefit for Coburn Place. Check them out if you are looking to get involved with a great local nonprofit. The other event, also on March 22, is Legends IN Design, a lunch hosted by the Indiana Interior Design Coalition. This event brings together people from all design backgrounds including architects, landscape architects and designers. Indianapolis architect, Jonathan Hess, will be honored.

Alright, now that you know where you will be on March 22, let’s talk about Case Studies.

If you have been pondering Case Studies, but are not quite sure if they are for you, perhaps you have asked yourself the some of the following questions (Raquel and Clay answer these questions and more):

• How do I know if case studies are right for my marketing?
• What kind of information should I provide?
• How do I prevent my Case Study from being dry and boring?
• What other forms may be a Case Study appear in marketing?
• How do Case Studies affect my SEO?

To help you follow along, here are the links to some of what else Raquel and Clay talked about in episode 9.

• SlideShare
• Scribd

Thank you for listening to Marketing Brainpower. Be sure to leave any questions for us in the comment section, we will be sure to cover them in future podcasts.

Web strategy is so much more than just making a website and sending out some tweets or posting pictures on Facebook. This week Raquel and Clay help you tackle your web strategy and analyze what yours should include.

But first, the big Silver Square news of the week is that Clay is in another play! He was cast in 12 Angry Men at the Belfry Theatre. For more information or to get a ticket to see Clay perform in person, check out the Belfry Theatre website.

Now, back to this week’s topic. Clay and Raquel answer these important questions you may be asking yourself about Web Strategy:

• What components are included in a web strategy?
• What message do you want to send your client?
• What action would you like your customer/potential customer to take?
• If I already have a website, should I worry about my strategy? What can I gain?
• Does incorporating a defined web strategy mean I will have to redo my website?

Thank you for listening to this week’s Marketing Brainpower. Be sure to listen next week when we discuss Case Studies.

At Silver Square, Raquel initially created a blog post about how to write a fun bio. From there, she recreated the post as a PowerPoint with Slide Share. She then posted it on Facebook and LinkedIn and…ta da! Almost a year later, an “old” blog post became new content and Raquel became the featured post on LinkedIn and Slide Share.

For a fun little game, Raquel and Clay asked each other what they would do to repurpose the following content, play along and see how your ideas compare:

1) A ten-page-guide on how to train your dog?
2) Four years worth of tweets about movie trivia?
3) A weekly blog about the best restaurants in Tampa?

If you need further help with story ideas for blogs or other content, be sure to listen to last week’s podcast for some helpful tips from Casey.

Update: In this podcast we mention Web Camp 2012. Because of certain logistic problems, that event has been canceled. If you’d like to be notified of future Web Camp’s, head over to BitWise, the company that runs Web Camp, and ask them to keep you posted.

As always, be sure to leave us a message if there are any topics or questions you would like us to cover on Marketing Brainpower. Thank you for listening.

Listen for answers to all your questions, such as:

How long should my blog be?
How often should I blog?
Who from my company should be blogging?

And for further inspiration about blogging, check out some of the Squares’ favorite blogs about blogging:

• Copyblogger.com
• Social Media Examiner
• ProBlogger

And our favorite blogs about other stuff:

• The abundance blog 
• Lists of Note blog
• Clay’s single sentence movie review blog
• Lulu Lemon blog
• Never Eat Alone blog

And lastly, if you want to see what some of the Silver Square clients are blogging about, check out:

• Brenneco Fire Protection
• Bingham Greenebaum Doll

For a fun game, listen to the episode and tell us how many times we say the word, or any form of the word blog! And like always, please feel free to leave us a comment with suggestions for upcoming podcasts. Thanks for listening!

For this week’s podcast, Clay and Raquel tackle the oftentimes overwhelming e-newsletter. Sometimes called email blasts or digital newsletters, it doesn’t matter what you call it, only that your business is trying to disseminate interesting content to your customers and clients.

• What Raquel is reading: Make Space: The Book (link will send you the D School at Stanford University)
• Three of Raquel’s top e-newsletters:  Women’s Fund, Content Marketing Institute and Indy Spectator
• Digging deeper: how to write a great headline and email segmenting

And don’t forget, if there are ever any topics you wish we would discuss during the Marketing Brainpower podcast, leave us a comment below!

In episode 4, enjoy as Raquel and Clay reminisce about their favorite Super Bowl commercials and campaigns. The question is, what do you think of the E Trade babies?

Thousands of people have worked together to help market the Super Bowl, which got us thinking: When should your business ask for outside help?

And in Silver Square news, we were thrilled with the success of the recent blog post, “22 Indianapolis Businesses You Should Know.” The post was a great way to get community involvement and we received so much feedback that we are already planning a follow up.

The big Silver Square news for the week was that our new and improved website is live, but you already knew that didn’t you? Welcome! Be sure to listen to the podcast for some sage advice about how you can determine if you should update your website.

To further help guide you through this episode, check out these links to some our favorite content marketing:

• David Meerman Scott: Don’t buy, beg or bug!
• Wholefoodsmarket.com: great demonstration of using content to attract loyal customers
• Arch City Blog: a local St. Louis real estate website that informs home buyers about the market
• Lulu Lemon Blog: the store that is so much more than just clothing

Thank you for listening and check back often for all the latest Silver Square news and wisdom.

To help you follow along during the discussion, check out the following links to articles that they talk about during the podcast.

Adage: Is Branding the New Marketing?
Say Goodbye to Kodak
Forbes Top Loyalty Brands for 2011

Other resources for you to check out that were discussed include:

• Silver Square’s top 10 blog posts of the year
• Vision Boards
• Our glossary, or Marketing Lexicon
• Branding in Action – Brenneco Fire Protection Sprinky Award and Bingham Greenebaum Doll merger and rebranding

This episode we talked about Transparency in Business and how important it is for both your company and your marketing. We started the show with a lighthearted, though much needed debate regarding our show’s tagline. We need your help picking one, but more about that later!

For your convenience, here are some links to the blog posts and articles we discussed in the podcast:

• Clay’s Blog: Marketing is easier when you mean what you say.
• Domino’s Pizza: Campaign admitting that they knew product had been lacking and explaining why people should come back.
• Zappos Letter: Internal letter explaining to all employees about the sale to Amazon. Really great FAQ.
• Also, check out David Meerman Scott and keep up with what Raquel’s reading!

And lastly, we need your help picking a tagline for our podcast! Here are the ones we have come up so far. Please use the comment section below to vote for your favorite, or add your own.

1) We bring the marketing thunder

2) Dividing the smorgasbord of marketing into 20 minutes snacks

3) If Hannibal Lecter ate our brains, he would be much better at marketing

4) The best ideas from experienced professionals that will help you grow your business

5) 20 minutes each week dedicated to getting your brand in front of the perfect customer

6) Where we share what is happening in the world of marketing, and how you can use it to grow

7) Bite-sized nuggets of marketing brilliance delivered straight to your ear holes

8) What experienced marketing professionals say you need to know to grow your business today

Thank you for listening to our first podcast. Stay tuned for more to come. Next up we are tackling branding.