Rebel needs a community manager. If you love social media and can be engaging and persuasive in both English and French, we want you down with the team.

Extra credit if you love cars and / or have experience with automotive marketing.

This is a contract position. We don’t care where you live. Just be smart, reliable, and organized, and able to work independently.

You can apply here: http://bit.ly/workatrebel

Oftentimes I’ll get an email from some company’s list for which the sender’s address is noreply@____.com.

I’m sure there’s an email marketing expert out there who thinks this makes perfect sense. It’s not coming from a person, so don’t pretend it’s coming from a person, and don’t let people think they can reply to the email or they’ll be disappointed. Great reasoning.

Except that I don’t want an email that’s not from a person. There’s a good chance I don’t want an email that is from a person, either, but you telling me that I can’t reply if I want to isn’t going to make me more receptive to your marketing message. Subtly, or perhaps not so subtly, you’re sending me the message that you don’t care about what I have to say, you only care about what you have to say.

And if that’s the case, why would I want to give you my money?

In our quest to revolutionize marketing by turning major brands into grassroots marketers, Rebel Industries needs help. If the opportunity below suits your skills and passions, please contact us. If it makes you think of a friend, please forward it.

Position: Account Executive
Location: Los Angeles
Freelance and full-time applicants will be considered

If I have to explain what an Account Executive does, this job isn’t for you. If you really want to look at a description, you can find one at Monster or Wikipedia.

I believe that the most important factor in successfully achieving our mission is building long-term, mutually valuable relationships with our clients. In order to do that, we have to provide exceptional client experiences. That’s where you come in.

You are accountable for the health and growth of our client relationships. You will serve as a trusted advisor to clients and communicate client needs and priorities to Rebel’s team. You will work with clients and Rebel’s strategy and operations teams to develop and activate marketing initiatives. You will create proposals, statements of work, and reports, manage budgets, present qualitative and quantitative data and build case studies.

You need to be smarter than I am, and smarter than our clients, but not make us feel that way. Make us laugh, make us smile, and most importantly enable us to be excellent at what we do. You have to be extremely resourceful and networked. Clients come to Rebel to do things they’ve never done before, or tried before and failed. In some cases, they ask us to do things we’ve never done before. You have to help us figure out how to do these things successfully, and keep clients comfortable throughout the process.

In order to succeed in this role, you need to be:

 
You should also be comfortable with compensation that grows with the position. It’s not about how much experience you have — if you can deliver value to Rebel and our clients, you will be compensated well for that.

Interested? You can apply here.

In a recent Advertising Age article, “Coca-Cola Lays Out Its Vision for the Future,” Coke CEO Muhtar Kent talked about how his company has gotten back on track, after saying “There was a period when our company did lose its way,” he said. “We were too internally focused and not focused enough on the changes taking place with our consumers and customers. In essence, we were too busy looking at the dashboard and were not sufficiently paying attention to the world outside of our windshield.”

Think about it. If the world’s largest brand, with all of its resources, can lose track of consumers, can’t this happen to your brand as well?

Now think about this. If the world’s largest brand, with all of its bureaucracy, can find its way back on track, learn how to leverage technology, and change, “from purely mass marketing to one-on-one marketing,” can’t your brand do the same?

Red Bull Stash was a Facebook-powered scavenger hunt that enables fans to find Red Bull Energy Shots hidden around the country.

It seems like brands are launching social media campaigns every day, so why is this one “Down With Us” and not a Worst Practice?

Simple. Red Bull Stash is a give back to the community of loyal fans, over one million of whom have “friended” the brand on Facebook. Now, we don’t generally give too much weight to friend counts, but in Red Bull’s case, we happen to know that they have real fans all over the world who really love the brand. And part of the reason they do is that Red Bull has always taken giving back very seriously.

It seems that building community isn’t just about getting a lot of people to watch your ads. It’s about treating them like real people you want to have relationships with. Give back early and often, and carry that spirit into all of your communications. The payoff is significant.

All of our clients are thinking and talking about cause marketing. Some of them are taking action. We saw a bit of research recently confirming that Gen Y is more willing to support a brand who associates with a cause. And especially since the Haiti earthquake, corporate helpfulness is on everyone’s mind…

…So, I’m at the Larder at Tavern last weekend ordering lunch to go. I notice next to the register a sign that says something to the effect of Tavern supports the people of Haiti. Their gesture: buy a sandwich, bag of chips, cookie, and an apple for $16, and $3 of that goes to Haiti.

You’ll have to forgive my math, but if calculations are correct, this means they want 13 bucks for a bag lunch. This is not cause marketing, this is bullshit. In fact, look at their website and the same combo is $15, so they’re throwing on an extra dollar and only losing two on the deal.

Forget about the prices of the food. Tavern is expensive but we go there anyway because the food is very good. Or not. That’s not the point here, and this is not an anti-Tavern post. The point is that they made two major mistakes that can teach us a valuable lesson.

First, we want you to give until it hurts. How about the whole $16 goes to the earthquake victims? At the very least, tell us how much the food costs and then give the rest to the cause. Don’t want to be that transparent about your profit margins, fine, then give the whole thing. The point is that we feel bad for the people who are in pain, and we want to support brands who will share some of that pain. Put up or shut up.

Second, you have to be more specific about where the money is going. Don’t tell us it’s going to Haiti. Name the organization, or the particular program. Partly because we may not believe you without specifics, and partly because we want to know that you’ve invested time and energy into caring, not just our money.

What do you think? Have you done any cause marketing? And how well has it worked? Post a comment.

A common marketing tool is to offer free trials. The thinking goes that if I give you 30 days to start using my product, you’ll discover how much you like it and want to pay. Or in the case of software, it’s that once you get all of your data in, the switching costs will be higher than the cost I want to charge you.

These companies need to learn from Twitter.

You may remember a time — say 6 months ago — when most people you spoke to thought Twitter was completely worthless and didn’t understand why anyone would waste their time. I’m sure some people still feel that way, but over time Twitter’s usefulness has increased exponentially as more people are using it and figuring out better ways to leverage the technology.

If you’re giving me a 30-day free trial, chances are you’re not allowing me enough time to get past the phase of not fully understanding how it will benefit me. We’re all pretty busy, and 30 days passes in what seems like about 5 minutes. When I consider things like CRM or project-management solutions, I know it’s going to take me at least that long to even get up to speed.

This doesn’t mean free trials should never be used, but creative marketers may need to think beyond the obvious. I’d probably not recommend using it for software — from my experience the free level that can be upgraded to premium is far more effective.

The LA Auto Show kicked off last week. After spending two days there for the press conferences, including the reveal of the 2011 Mazda2, I went back on Sunday to see what the consumer show looked like. Here’s what I noticed:

Attendance looked really light. A casual guess would be about half of what I expected on a weekend day. But I could be wrong about that. I wonder if the pricetag scared people off (although tickets were only $12, once you add in parking and refreshments, it’s a $50+ outing. Kind of a lot to go window-shopping). More importantly, Gen Y and Latino and black audiences were especially under-represented. Overall, the show skewed white, Asian, and Boomer/Gen X.

Aside from a couple well-designed booths (Audi comes first to mind), most of the exhibits were pretty boring. Like a parking lot with carpet. Mazda and Scion both made interesting use of augmented reality technology, but that was about it.

What does this mean?

1. Auto shows may not be as important as they used to be. If you’re selling to young people or multi-cultural buyers, you may not be reaching enough of them at these shows.

2. Auto companies still don’t fully get experiential marketing. Why not program the experience a bit and increase your chances of engagement?

If I were CMO at an automaker, I’d make it mandatory for employees to attend the auto shows. In fact, I’d probably have our full-time employees staff the shows, instead of or along with the usual promo models. You need your people to be interacting with consumers face to face, learning what the market is about and what people want. Get them out there pressing the flesh.

Rebel has the inside track on a new gig. Our client, Mazda is hiring and we’re trying to help them find the right person.

The title is Social Media Marketing Manager, and the job, as you might guess, is to develop and implement marketing strategies that leverage the things Mazda has to offer into a variety of social media environments.

An important position, you’ll notice the job description calls for 5 years of interactive marketing experience, with some automotive experience preferred. And you need to know more than just how to design a cool Twitter background. You’ll need real knowledge of SEO / SEM, various analytics tools, apps, video editing, among other things.

See the full job description here.

You can apply directly to them or send me your resume.

What we’re reading right now (besides baby books)…

When Silence Can Be Golden - Adweek
Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group gives a great opinion piece on reminding us that brands should think about what social media really is and what it really provides, before just jumping in and setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts. “I can’t help but feel that while we’re in a phase where our industry is looking at social media as a new marketing platform, what we should be thinking is that it’s just the newest place our audience goes to talk about us when we do something worth talking about.”

The Concept of Free – Open Forum
Check out Chris Anderson’s (editor of Wired and author of Free) presentation on providing free content. “The key point is that what customers are willing to buy is far more important than what you’re willing to sell.”

Content Curator – Influential Marketing Blog
Loving this take on the future of online content and what it means for brands and content producers in terms of a staffing strategy. Start getting your HR dept ready to write a job description for a Content Curator.

Understanding Users of Social Media – Harvard Business School
Interesting article, almost a primer, on the history of social media – the who, what, where and why’s of it, explained by a Harvard professor. Sometimes it’s good to get back to basics.