Not the Man You'd Expect

Recently, our creative agency has been getting a lot of visits to our new web site and of course we track this quite regularly and found that a lot of people as of late have reached out site by searching my name on search engines. I thought this was a result of all the great work we've done and all the media attention that we've received the last month.

So, I did a vanity search to see just what people were seeing when they typed my name into various search engines. I had no idea there were so many Kevin Francos out there. There are quite a few.

There is one in particular however, that I think I can attribute all of the extra site traffic to - DEFINITELY NOT ME!. I might also add that in no way am I related to any other Kevin Franco on the web, especially not this clown.

There you go - another way to increase your web site traffic - become infamous, even if it's not you doing it.

Tough Follow Up

With all the recent publicity I have received, its made me think about how difficult it must be for people to be in the spotlight all the time.

I know first hand that the past two years have been especially tough to be an overachiever...

After all, I set the bar pretty high when I was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 2006.

They say no news is good news and that any press is good press - ain't that a contradiction?

Here's my marketing tip - go with the press any time, even if it's not always good news.

What can I say... it's a slow news day.

Media Darlings

For a company that has flown under the radar the past five years, we've sure received a lot of media attention lately.

We have managed to grow our boutique creative agency to a nice size without much self promotion, in fact we have not even been listed in the white pages of the phone book.

We've been unlisted since inception and grew our client base very selectively - we chose our clients the same way that they have chosen us - a creative matchmaking if you will.

Being under the radar meant not having to 'compete' for business, and serving many clients that already have 'official' agencies. Being unnoticed has its advantages and disadvantages.

But alas, our cover has been blown.

It started with the fall issue of the SAIT Alumni Link magazine, which did a full page story on us. Then the October issue of Calgary Inc magazine came out and included us in an article about small business boo boos (where they called me a tightwad!) as well as a photo of me in the social page and then another article in the October issue of Business in Calgary magazine.

The latter two articles both mention our business cards, which are extremely creative and should garner some awards in self-promotion.

We have received numerous comments resulting from the articles as well, which has been nice.

In the summer we worked on a very unique marketing project which we were interviewed about several times over the duration of the project by Calgary Inc magazine - you will be reading about that one soon!

So, it should prove to be another banner year with us getting some press and finally some ink in the phone book - an oversight by adding new phone lines, Francomedia will now be listed in the white pages.