The Daily Push

We love projects that we can sink our teeth into – especially when they benefit our community. That’s why we were ecstatic when we learned about Lafayette Place Lofts, the latest (by 30 years) and largest (nearly $20 million) construction investment in Downtown Pontiac.  The über-hip Lafayette Place Lofts, will serve the community with great places to live, great fresh food at the Lafayette Market and fitness at a new Anytime Fitness facility.

With so much to be excited about, we jumped right into the project with our creative hats on and produced a multifaceted marketing campaign to introduce the project to the public. With such a wonderful investment in our community and local economy, we could barely harness our excitement and we believe the campaign success is a demonstration of our feelings for Lafayette Place Lofts.

We began with the brand.

The Lafayette Place identity was inspired by the historic nature of the building and designed to fit with the architectural cues and overall feeling that the property possesses. The circular marks and vintage art deco-style typography harken back to the period of the building’s original development but also takes a modern spin with the contemporarily crafted ligature letterforms. It is a good balance of old and new that provides a timeless look with both urban appeal and historic charm. The colors were chosen to reflect the fresh and vibrant downtown attitude and natural colors associated with market produce.

Then we moved on to the message.

For such an important investment in Downtown Pontiac, it was imperative that the key messages in support of the project hit strategic notes to; communicate the public impact, address the need for such investments in the community, and discuss the history of the building. With these priorities in place, we developed a successful PR campaign which encompassed all facets of local and regional media, including 19 stories to date and significant key message pick up. Click on the below logos to view a sampling of the Lafayette Place Lofts media coverage.

With the initial public push behind us, we look forward to further supporting Lafayette Place Lofts through 2012. For more information about the project, visit (the pushtwentytwo designed and developed) www.lafayetteplacelofts.com.

Click on a news outlet below to view coverage:

Everybody’s talking apps these days and with good reason – the market for apps is exploding and companies are looking to make sure they don’t miss out. For marketers, the temptation is also great and the rush to produce branded apps is on because just having an app right can provide some novelty value.

But before committing to an app, take a step back and ask yourself whether it’s really worth it.  At this point, app development is …

1) Fairly Expensive – experienced app developers (and agencies with app developers) are in high-demand so you’ll be paying a premium.

2) Not Cross-platform – unless you build versions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry, you’re ignoring a heck of a lot of users.

Those are two pretty big considerations and an expensive-to-develop app that plays to a limited audience isn’t necessarily a great marketing investment.

So before you decide to invest in an app, ask yourself a simple question: is this an “app” I’m thinking about or is it really just a mobile website?

You’ll likely get way more bang for your buck with a mobile website and be inclusive of a much larger audience. And in some cases, a website can be made “mobile-friendly” with relatively little work.

The mobile version of robotwhisperers.com we created for Dassault Systèmes is a great example. It includes all of the content from the desktop version of the site but has been optimized for mobile devices. It looks and performs like an app and works well whether it’s on running iOS, Android, Windows Phone or Blackberry mobile device.

Another good example is Gabriel’s mobile part search. Rather than spend a ton of time and money developing an app-based search tool, we leveraged all of the hard work that went into developing Gabriel.com’s part search and developed an optimized version for mobile devices. You can check it out at m.gabriel.com.

Of course, there are times when apps make sense. And apps allow us to utilize the cool technology that’s built into your mobile device (like GPS) – a mobile website can’t do that.

So the real question is: which option makes sense for you? If you need help deciding, shoot me or any other member of the push team an email. We’d be happy to talk through your options and help you decide whether you really need an app for that.

Rob Wilkie is the creative director at pushtwentytwo, an integrated marketing and communications agency supporting leading and emerging companies.

Strategy. Strategic. Strategery. Definition: A: a careful plan or method: a clever stratagem, or B: the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.

Okay we admit, strategery isn’t really a word, but it is commonly used amongst marketers when figuring out how to be smart and make the best decisions when it comes to promoting their clients’ businesses. These days one of the largest pieces of the marketing pie is social media – it’s also one of the newest aspects of the profession with constantly evolving best-practices.

A question we commonly hear when discussing social media planning is timing – when to post messages, how often and how to know if your target audience is seeing them – particularly when it involves Facebook. There’s no single strategy that will work for every organization, but there are a few ideas that you can take into consideration when figuring out what works best for you.

• There’s a method to posting messages – success is more calculated than you think.
• Try posting all sorts of content at different times through the day – questions, photos, polls, etc. See where you get the most impressions.
• Understand the basics of Facebook’s algorithm. Check out EdgeRank for some tips.
• Take advantage of free monitoring and analytics tools such as Facebook’s built in  analytics tool.
• Play! Experiment! Try new things! It’s the only way you’ll find what works for your organization.

For more advice on Facebook planning strategies, check out a Mashable post by analytics expert, Jeff Widman, which sheds some light on this commonly puzzling aspect of social media planning.

Corinne Petras is the public relations director at pushtwentytwo, an integrated marketing and communications agency supporting leading and emerging companies.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about our experience at this year’s TedX Detroit and how the idea of “play” was a thread running through many of my favorite presentations.

This morning I came across a great presentation by games researcher, Aaron Dignan, called “How to Use Games to Excel at Life and Work.” that asks the question: How can we integrate game concepts into our work lives to help us push ideas forward?

Well worth a watch.

Rob Wilkie is the creative director at pushtwentytwo, an integrated marketing and communications agency supporting leading and emerging companies. 

TED's X Games was a hit.

For those of you who didn’t make it to this year’s TEDxDetroit conference, you missed a really great event. Not least of all because you missed the chance to pick up a free “TED’s X Games” t-shirt courtesy of your friends at pushtwentytwo. So what exactly was “TED’s X Games”?

As a sponsor, we were given a 10×10 booth and with two days to go, we decided that the right thing to do would be to put a vintage Atari 2600 and an old TV out on the table and just let people play. Frogger. Pac-Man. River Raid. Whatever they wanted.

As we set up at 8 a.m. that morning, I wasn’t 100% sure it was going to work. But when I sat back at the end of the day and reflected on everything I’d seen and heard at the conference, I realized that creating a place at TEDx for people to just play, made so much sense.

Because play is an “idea worth spreading.” And I think that’s why our booth was such a hit.

Play can be a real game changer. And some of my favorite presenters at the conference helped reinforce that idea for me:

• Bob Sutherland revealed how playing every aspect of his business – from his products to his signage to his staff – has helped him build Cherry Republic – a multi-million dollar business built on the humble Michigan Cherry.
• Rob Bliss explained how playful events like the an enormous pillow fight and the launch of 100,000 paper airplanes on downtown Grand Rapids managed to slide past the usual red tape at city hall – with amazing results.
• Bobby Smith of En Garde! Detroit talked about using play to change the lives of youth in Detroit; teaching kids how to hone their skills as a fencer, while sharpening their minds with valuable life skills.
• And Dr. Anthony DeBenedet talked about the role that parent-child play (specifically roughhousing) has in the healthy development of children – turns out it’s absolutely critical.

There were plenty of other great speakers on plenty of other topics, but the play theme really resonated with me because it’s something that, as an agency, pushtwentytwo thrives on.

When we play, we loosen up. When we loosen up, we’re much more open to new ideas.

And isn’t that really what great advertising is really all about?

BTW if you didn’t make it to booth, we did manage to save a few t-shirts. If you’d like one, drop us a message via our Facebook page and we’ll see if we can find one in your size.

Rob Wilkie is the creative director at pushtwentytwo, an integrated marketing and communications agency supporting leading and emerging companies.