Relevant Engagement

Pineapple Bubblegum Anyone?

We're finding clients and potential customers are sometimes having trouble understanding how social media can help with their overall marketing strategy.

We decided to be proactive and create a small video highlighting some of the possibilities......ever think about pineapple flavored gum?

Signal Attenuation

Basic marketing tenet: companies need to make money and they need to listen to their customers.  How to make it all work together?

It is about Signal Attenuation: gathering all of the discussions, extracting value, quickly reducing the noise and getting to the valuable discussions.  The faster this information can get back into the the feedback management loop the greater chance the corporation has for extended success.

Social CRM - Harder Than Social Media? Maybe, Maybe Not

Social CRM: How do you plan for something more complex than Social Media?

There is a huge body of opinions today that believe there are still no real viable, clear or tangible at this point in time.

Maybe, maybe not.  I do feel that success starts with a good understanding of the business objective.  From that objective you can build a framework of issues, strategies and tactics.  Basically you develop a direction and start to catalog your options.  Based on the value and need of the business and the customer, your resources and technology investments will start to clearly present themselves.  You mitigate risk when you apply a thoughtful approach to solving a very complex issue. 

Analytical approaches that can help with your efforts:

1. Understanding the “value-to-cost” ratio (also referred to as NPV or ROI) of the project/investment or initiative.
2. Secondly, determine the volatility of the investment: make an assessment of the risk/uncertainty involved in combination with how long you can afford not to make a decision.

Ignite Your Brand Online

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Hybridized Content: Message is the Medium

I read a terrific article today discussing what the new Apple Tablet means to the news industry.

The implications, in my opinion, of the tablet and the introduction of hybridized content will have a larger impact than just the news industry. 

The following was the quote on Gizmodo that prompted the article: "Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines": The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video, interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft's Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static e-ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it'll get its feet wet with more basic re-purposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.

I'd wish I could take credit for the following excerpts from What My Apple Tablet Means for News, I can't.  I can however state that the concepts covered below are concepts discussed with my closest peers for years - the enlightened crew.

Salient Points

• New technology creates new ways to tell stories. That's the exciting thing. Not the tablet itself, but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature. Gasp. Geddit? Is the light going off yet?
• This is what Anton Chekhov meant when he said that the medium is the message. This is why the Tablet is so profound.
• Look what happened when TV was invented. In the early days, they just put radio stars on the TV. They did variety shows. Remember Milton Berle? If you do, that's nice, but you won't need to worry about what's coming next on the Internet. Thing is, at first TV was just radio with a camera. But eventually people came along who invented a new language, a new way of telling stories, one that was unique to the medium. So far with digital media we're about where TV was in 1950. We've basically just taken stuff from the old worlds of TV and print and ported it to a digital delivery mechanism. But now we're at the point where things are going to take off. The Tablet is part of that.

• Content guys are such idiots that they still can't create anything that makes it worth putting the Tablet into the world. It's stunning how few of the big guys in publishing actually understand this. We've invited them in for meetings, and while we're talking we sort of give them a little quiz, in the form of a very simple question: Where do you think publishing is going? Most of them can't see anything other than what they've done in the past. To them this is all just another blip, a little shift in their business, like going from black-and-white newspapers to color, or going from broadsheet to tabloid. But that's not it at all. We're talking about an entirely new way to convey information, one that incorporates dynamic elements (audio, video) with static elements (text, photos) plus the ability for the audience to become content creators, not just content consumers.
• The funny thing is that the publishing guys still refer to themselves the "creative" side of the business -- even though they're probably the least creative people I've ever met. The irony is, they're the ones holding everything back, because they don't have any vision for what the future should look like. Honestly, you should see them sitting there in meetings, their mouths hanging open. Sooo creative. Yeah. Worse yet, they still have loads of attitude. They really think it's unfair that the tech geeks keep reaping most of the rewards from digital media.
• "Content is king," they keep saying, and I'm like, Yeah, but not *your* content. Your content is lame and stale. You're selling a product that hasn't changed since the 1950s. Hell, since the 1850s, really. And what are the old media guys doing, when they should be out there reinventing their business? Why, they're talking to Congress and trying to get a bailout for newspapers. Good Lord! That's like organizing a bailout for black-and-white TV. Friends, we don't need to bail out newspapers. We need to hasten their demise. Let the weak ones die. Let the strong ones go bankrupt and restructure their business.
• The good news is, we're heading toward a period of incredible creativity in news and entertainment, with a new medium that is far superior to ink on paper.
• The bad news, at least from my perspective, is that I'll be selling a piece of hardware whose success depends on whether the content guys can dream up cool new things to do with this piece of hardware. And, as we've already established, most of them are bozos.
• We need to reinvent the way we tell stories. My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It's going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them.

As a marketer I'm beyond words about the concepts and philosophy tossed out within this article.  This is very real and it will absolutely alter our business - client and agency side.  

* I need to go on the record and state I do not read The Huffington Post at all.  This article was sent to me by one of my left wing liberal friends.  In this particular case I'm glad he sent me the article.

Is That a Mole or Google SideWiki?

Mole's can a clutching appendage that is annoying to anyone. 

Last week, Google announced “SideWiki” a new feature of the Firefox and IE browsers (Chrome to come soon) that allows anyone to contribute comments about any webpage. 

To me, this new feature is absolutely incredible to our business.  The scope of this feature is far reaching.  Now every Website and every page on that site becomes a social platform.

I actually had a potential client comment on this yesterday stating, "I'm not sure this activity is going to stick - we don't really pay much attention to these social tools like blogs and twitter."  Yet again, I cannot believe people like this still exist in positions of power in a marketing department.  To this client, social media is a mole.  

I found this impact breakout and thought it did a good job of encapsulating the announcement of this new feature.

Control Over the Corporate Website Is Shifting To The Customers:

1. Customers trust each other more than you –now they can assert their voices “on” your webpage. Every webpage on your corporate website, intranet, and extranet are now social. Anyone who accesses these features can now rely on their friends or those who contribute to get additional information. Competitors can link to their competing product, consumers can rate or discuss the positive and negative experiences with your company or product.
2. Yet, don’t expect everyone to participate –or contribute valuable content. While social technology adoption is on the rise, not everyone writes, rates, and contributes content in every location, likely those who have experienced the product, influential, or competitors will be involved. Secondly, content created in this sidebar may be generally useless. To be successful, Google will need it to look more like Wikipedia than YouTube comments
3. Expect Google to integrate this feature with existing systems. Google recently launched profiles, a feature that is the foundation for extending their social reach. With large social networks like Gmail already in place (That’s right, email is a social network) they can eventually sort content on SideWiki by context of friends, experts, or other sources.  Google’s strategy is to ‘envelope’ the web this is typical of their approach.
4. Although early, expect other social networks to launch competing features. Facebook has already created an ‘inlay’ so you can view links shared in the Facebook newspage in the context of your friends –expect them to grow this feature out shortly.

Reshaping Our Understanding

I've been consulting on strategic approaches for new world trends by utilizing simple steps/strategies and the importance of framing up your brand from the perspective of the customer.  The idea of reshaping our understanding has been a consistent thread throughout my years of consulting.

For this topic (in particular) I've found it best to describe these complex issues in simple ways to get broad acceptance.  As I discussed the changing tide of events with a friend of mine, she shared a great simile that worked well in my mind.

Reshaping our profession is like wanting to make a square ice cube round.  You don't hack away at the corners of the ice cube - you melt the ice cube and pour the water into a new mold.

THAT IS RESHAPING!  Take all of what we know (cause there is good stuff in our experiences) and use new techniques to solve challenges based on the world we live in today. I was very pleased to see a presentation by Clay Shirky that just nailed home some very salient issues facing marketers:

• For years we've been operating on a "lousy understandings of human behavior."
  
• TV is still a popular pastime, but the rise of social media shows people also want to produce and interact with content.
• Previous media channels did not let us engage with the medium - people couldn't interact, produce or share at the depth and speed they can today.
  
• Most instances content creators have intrinsic motivations that aren't, for example, about money.
• "We are living in the middle of the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of media."

Go here to read more: Social Web Reshaping How Media Works