Secret Missions for the Blogosphere
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We’ve been up and running here at CI Sense for a few months, and we decided that it was high time that we connected with a few of our fellow bloggers and journalists in the branding and marketing space. We know they’re all busy, so we thought we’d try to connect with them in an offbeat fashion.
We created a little story, about CI Sense being a ‘machine that can predict the future’, and crafted a little path for each person to follow. It began with a letter–a physical letter made to look like a mid-century CIA memo. We sent them in little oblong envelopes, with that little twisty string fastening (for some reason, that seemed crucial). They looked like this:
Each of these letters points to a discrete (and discreet) page on CI Sense’s site. The pages each feature a personalized video, inviting (in a manner of speaking) the letter recipient to check out CI Sense. Here’s an example:
We got the excellent Monica Hamburg to do a kind of Russian Frau Farbissina, complete with accent and bold makeup. The pages also include an introductory screencast about CI Sense, and credentials to get full access to the service.
We like the snail mail option because, obviously, people receive far less physical mail than the electronic stuff. We hope that it catches their attention (assuming, you know, it isn’t counted as a false positive by a human spam filter). Plus, it’s just a lot more fun than sending a plain old email.
These are the folks who we sent letters to:
| Armin Jonah Bloom Laura Ries Mike Wagner David Kiley John Moore Nancy Friedman Jim Thompson |
Mike Bawden Miro Slodki William Lozito Dan McHugh Mitch Betts Dana Vanden Heuvel Kate Trgovac |
Good luck to all the agents!
Trademark Filings & Brand Launches
At CI Sense, we often stress how trademark filings can give you insight into your competitor’s future plans and strategies. There is so much to be gleamed from what your competitor is filing.
For instance, here is an example of a timeline which shows how three trademark filings for a company predated any web mention or official launch.
In this case we also had the luxury of knowing ahead of time about a new slogan and Domain name (microsite) which made it clear what the company was going to push in their next marketing effort.
Had this been your competitor, having this information would have been far, far more beneficial than merely finding out about the new product launch. (Which would have meant, sadly: Game Over.)
Armed with the information above, you would be advised that something big was in the works, you’d have an idea of what that was and you’d be able to plan ahead, react, take action - and compete.
