Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’
About Us
Thursday, February 19th, 2009About Us
Our Team | Press | Philosophy | Ethics | Partners | Associations | Jobs
Spring Creek Group is a rapidly growing Social Media Brand Analytics, Strategy, and Marketing Services Agency located in the Emerald City – Seattle Washington. We are comprised of passionate and experienced marketing professionals, and we employ subject matter experts in all of the major categories of the social media Web.
Spring Creek Group attends and speaks at a range of events. Find out more on our press page.
Clay McDaniel,
Managing Director and Founder
Clay brings more than 10 years experience in consumer product and services management, new product development, and technology marketing to the Spring Creek Group team.
Prior to co-founding Spring Creek Group, Clay was the Senior Director of Product Management for RealArcade, the rapidly-growing casual games consumer digital media business at RealNetworks, Inc. Clay joined RealNetworks after 2 years at Microsoft, where he helped launch Windows XP in 2001 and drove national retail and online marketing plans for the company’s flagship operating system software product. Before moving to Seattle in 2001, Clay worked as a Product Manager for enterprise “middleware” software pioneer Vitria Technology; as a Corporate Business Development lead at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and as a technology project Consultant for the retail and telecommunications sectors at Deloitte Consulting.
Clay holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and an AB in Economics from Princeton University.
Clay also speaks at a wide range of social media and marketing events. You can find out about them on our press page.
Our Team
Our team at Spring Creek Group consists of a growing group of Project Leads, Analytics & Measurement Leads, and Engagement Leads. Our titles don’t map to traditional marketing and advertising agencies, because our services and business model are quite a bit different than typical agencies. We are organized from the ground up to focus on our clients’ needs and driving brand insights and awareness in the social media channel.
Projects
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Our Projects and Clients
Spring Creek Group is in Seattle. Our 30 person team of Directors, Project Leads, Analytics Leads, and Engagement Leads are here for one simple reason: to help our clients and partners be more successful. Our client stakeholders know that they can pick up the phone, shoot us an IM or email, or even DM us over Twitter, and we’ll handle it.
We handle work for the largest product groups inside software and services companies, and we support Seattle’s most exciting music festival. We complement giant television buys with custom YouTube brand channels, and we build groundswells with tiny grassroots tweet campaigns. We also give back to the community with pro-bono efforts for worthy Seattle non-profits. It’s our way of saying, “We really like Seattle, and we’ll do our small part to make it better.” But don’t ask us. Instead, check out a few of our projects and clients. And if you’d like to see some detailed case studies, just let us know and we’ll walk you through some campaigns.
Visible Technologies and Spring Creek Group Partner to Deliver Robust Social Media Management and Engagement Solutions to Fortune 100 Clients
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009By BusinessWire
SEATTLE, BUSINESS WIRE –
Visible Technologies:
- Visible Technologies, an industry-leading provider of social media monitoring and engagement solutions, today announced a partnership with Spring Creek Group, an innovative online marketing agency. Spring Creek will offer its customers Visible Technologies’ social media analysis and engagement software platform, TruCast.
- The strategic alliance allows Spring Creek to extend the capabilities of its social media management (SMM) services by enabling clients to more accurately measure their online brand awareness and the effectiveness of their social media marketing programs.
- By deploying proven SMM methodologies and leveraging robust technology tools like TruCast, Spring Creek gives clients such as Microsoft the ability to track relevant brand conversations online, gain actionable marketing intelligence and engage with the social media communities that matter most to their brand.
- Spring Creek Group is an innovative online marketing agency that helps companies of all sizes improve brand awareness and increase site traffic through social media-based online marketing methods. Spring Creek helps brands connect with their customers via innovative social media marketing programs such as branded online communities, blogs and social networks that result in higher brand awareness, increased sales and deeper customer loyalty.
- Visible Technologies provides brands, including Microsoft, Panasonic and Hormel, the ability to bolster brand reputation, build revenue and measure the success of social media engagement. The company’s TruCast2.0 social media monitoring and engagement platform launched in May 2008.
QUOTES
- ‘Engaging with social media is not an option for marketers today ‘ it’s an imperative. Consumers are using social media like blogs, consumer-generated reviews and social networks to compare our products and determine what other people are saying about them. Working with Spring Creek Group and using Visible Technologies’ TruCast platform, we’re able to create social media marketing programs that actively engage customers in a dialogue with one another, and then track and measure the effectiveness of these programs to drive sales and build brand value.’ – Marty Collins, Microsoft Group Marketing Manager, Windows Interactive and Digital Marketing
- ‘Over the past 18 months we have been building our relationship with Spring Creek Group, working in concert with them to help industry-leading clients like Microsoft achieve their marketing objectives through effective social media monitoring, measurement and engagement.We look forward to replicating this success with current and future clients.’ ‘ Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing, Visible Technologies
- ‘Our partnership with Visible Technologies has proven to be a huge success helping companies like Microsoft launch, measure and optimize social marketing programs to achieve real business results. The TruCast software platform strengthens our established social media management methodology by allowing brands to easily monitor and track millions of simultaneous online conversations, articles and posts.’ ‘ Clay McDaniel, co-founder and principal of Spring Creek Group
SUPPORTING RESOURCES
- Listen to Marty Collins, Microsoft Group Marketing Manager, comment on TruCast
- Spring Creek Group
- Spring Creek Group Blog
- Visible Technologies
- TruCast
- VisInsightsBlog
About Visible Technologies
Visible Technologies helps companies listen and learn what consumers are saying about them online, and it enables brands to participate in the right conversations with the right influencers at the right time. With this real-time business insight and response, companies build relationships with customers, bolster their brands and grow revenue. Its innovative TruCast platform is the industry’s first complete solution for social media analysis and participation. Visible Technologies also helps brands and individuals manage and protect their online reputations with the powerful TruView’ search engine solution. For more information, go to http://www.visibletechnologies.com, or follow the blog at http://www.visinsights.com.
About Spring Creek Group
Spring Creek Group is an innovative online marketing agency that helps companies of all sizes improve brand awareness, increase sales, and drive site traffic through social media-based online marketing. Spring Creek Group is made up of experienced, skilled, and results-oriented online marketers with a passion for using the most innovative marketing tactics ‘ including branded communities, interactive content, and next-generation social networking’ to drive measurable business results. Members of Spring Creek Group draw on deep e-commerce and online marketing experience at companies such as RealNetworks, Microsoft, Amazon, Judy’s Book.com, Salton, and Disney Internet Group. The company’s clients include both local growing companies and nationally established industry leaders like Microsoft, Corbis and Paramount Farms. For more information, visit www.springcreekgroup.com www.springcreekgroup.com.
The Free Web Application Syndrome
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008This post was originally entitled “Can Twitter Ever Make Money?” But as we wrote it, we realized the issue is bigger than simply wondering how, when and if companies like Twitter will monetize.
The early days of innovation are truly fantastic for early adopters and consumers who are ahead of the market. VC’s and Private Equity firms pour billions of dollars into cool ideas. Those who are “in the know” early are/were able to get M&M’s brought to them on a Friday night (Kozmo.com), groceries delivered free wherever they lived (Webvan), 100 pounds of pet food without a shipping charge (Pets.com), free music to their PC (Napster), free phone calls across the world (Skype) and more.
The problem is, like your economics teacher told you, there is no free lunch. Someone is paying the bill. And eventually, that person paying the bill, the person paying the salaries of all the people doing things for you, well, he wants to get reimbursed for his efforts.
So look today at what we are getting for free. We can stay in touch with every one of our business contacts no matter how many times they switch jobs, thanks to LinkedIn. And we know the personal lives of all of our friends, thanks to Facebook. And if we want, we can get global updates in real time, 140 characters at a time, thanks to Twitter. All of this for free.
Now the business models that the investors saw said something like this. “We are going to be hugely popular. Everyone will love us. We’ll run some ads. And if we get 1% of the people to click on an ad, we’ll make a gajillion dollars.” It’s the model that has worked since Mr. Marconi showed off his first radio nearly 100 years ago.
But 1% of the people aren’t clicking on Facebook ads, or upgrading to premium LinkedIn accounts. And Twitter hasn’t even come up with any ways to make money. Throw in the fact that the economy is struggling, and that even rich people don’t like losing money. Someone has to start generating profits some day.
Well, that’s the story FastCompany is addressing in this article. Their synopsis – everything cool you get today for free will basically become a lead generation tool for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Apple, etc…. For the Social Media Marketer, that means that these are the days to leverage the creativity and free form activity this medium allows. We all remember how Flickr got destroyed when Yahoo turned it into a way to generate YahooMail accounts. Take these great opportunities available to you today, and grab them before they are simply ways to get you to buy other products. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if we all would just click on a few ads 
Brand Names in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Ads Increase CTR, Recall
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008… so says Microsoft, after a joint research study with Sony conducted using Live Search and the related AdCenter SEM advertising network. Not terribly surprising, after all a search ad is an impression just like any other customer impression, so it stands to reason that including the relevant brand term (presumably not only in the Display URL, but somewhere in the three available lines of ad copy) would increase likelihood of action and subsequent brand recall.
A useful reminder, though, given how many SEM ads don’t utilize a brand or product name anywhere in the 3 lines of copy. There is often a view in SEM ad creative development that says, “we don’t have much copy room – maybe 100 characters total – so we need to speak to the need-state rather than wasting copy on a product or brand name.” However, when you remember that average search ad CTR’s are in the very low single-digit-percentage to fraction-of-a-percentage-point range, it’s not hard to see how you’re wasting 99 impressions out of 100 if you’re not at least delivering a “leave-behind” branded impression in the SERP viewer’s grey matter.
Conversion is king, but branded impressions improve recall… so don’t miss out on the latter being overly focused on the former when you write your three lines of copy. [Full disclosure: we probably need to go do an audit of our Live Search, AdWords, and Yahoo Spring Creek Group agency search ads now, as well...]
Good luck harvesting clicks…. and securing brand recall among all the “99 percenters” whose eyes you’ve momentarily got if not their index fingers.
