Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

“Spin doesn’t work anymore…. the Internet has a built-in BS detector.” - Chris Pirillo

My friends Johnny Hartman and Rod Pitman sent me a great little four minute video that they produced featuring people like Chris and Joshua Green from MIT talking about “transmedia; (define)” and how companies (and each of us as individuals) need to take a completely holistic approach to what constitutes new “media” entry points for effective storytelling and reputation monitoring in this brave new world.

Even though I agree with Chris about the BS detector, it’s incumbent on each of us to carefully manage our reputations online. It’s no secret that anyone has the ability to write about anyone’s brand, person, or product.

Spin isn’t really dead, it’s just been plopped in the hands any consumer, partner, competitor or detractor who wants to take it… marketers have lost control before they even release their carefully crafted messages.

But that shouldn’t make us hopeless. Once educated, we can manage this fundamental shift….

How?

Learning What Kids Already Know

Business is just learning about new media entry points. Kids have been learning about them for years.

Joshua Green heads up MIT’s “Transmedia Convergence Culture Consortium (C3);” set up specifically to advise media and entertainment (among other) businesses how to navigate the waters of brand and reputation management as media becomes more accessible to the masses.

From their site: “C3 explores the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media…”

Two years ago this spring I spoke at a conference at the University of Washington on Media Literacy - where educators, social services professionals and media literacy advocates from around the world gathered to share information about teaching media literacy to kids. In short, (define:) media literacy helps kids know what’s real, what’s not real, what to expect online and in other forms of media they’re inundated with on a daily basis: television, movies, etc…

It seems business is just now catching up with the kids in knowing what’s real, what’s not real, and what to expect online with regard to their brands.

What’s real/not real?

The first thing we need to do is track exactly who’s saying what about us… in real time.

The Law of Large Numbers and the Personal Web

The thing is, you don’t have to be a big entertainment consortium to produce amazingly effective, entertaining stories - true or not - about pretty much anything.

Today, anyone can be a content producer and generate interest and awareness from millions of people. Look at dooce.com - a very entertaining blog (that I enjoy every day) by Heather B. Armstrong. The word dooce has become synonymous with being fired for blogging, as Heather was

“fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace.”

In 2005 her website (a suite of blogs) started pulling in enough ad revenue to support her family, as it continues to do today.

It’s the law of large numbers, as my learned friend Paul Kedrosky would say.

With 1.3B people currently connected to the web, there are a plethora of us producing personal, public content. We’re spending time updating our Twitter posts, managing our LinkedIN profiles, chatting with friends on Facebook and trying out Plaxo’s Pulse; it’s only a matter of my content coming up in search results that will connect me with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people around the globe.

Consider these (smaller, but still significant) numbers:

• LinkedIN counts more than 17M members - mostly business people
• Facebook has more than 43M members - businesses are pouring in
• Technorati is tracking more than 112M blogs - businesses are beginning to blog (the spigot isn’t turned on far yet)

Tracking conversations about my products, my company, my personal reputation is critical in this more complex, transmedia world.

Online Reputation Monitoring - Essential to Your Brand

I talk about monitoring online conversations a lot in this space (dare I say, My Space?) because it’s a critical component of marketing and brand management. And it’s simple to do - using managed RSS technology tools.

RSS readers are free. And there are excellent, free RSS readers with a reach far beyond Google, including those from (my favorite, my client) Attensa.

How do I monitor my brand?

1. Download Attensa (or other RSS reader of choice). It’s free, and your results can be sent to your inbox or a web site specifically set up to track your feeds. Go to www.attensa.com/get-it and just do it (to borrow heavily from a great brand tagline).
2. Go into the Attensa application and set up a persistent search. All you have to do is put in your company name, your product’s name, your own name, and tell Attensa to keep a watch out online for ANY mention of your name(s); and it’ll do so automatically, persistently scanning 18 different search engines (way beyond Google - although if that’s all you do, good for you!) for instances of [your name(s)].
3. Any time something is said about [your name(s)], you’ll get it in your inbox or on your web-based reader.
4. When it happens, follow the link, see what you think, engage in conversation, drive to closure.

I’ve told audiences for years - in answer to the ubiquitous question, “What if someone says something bad about me?” - if they do, wouldn’t you rather:

• Know who’s saying what?
• Be able to address what’s real, what’s not real, and
• Provide your point of view?

… than not know they’re saying such things?

After all, you can’t please a million/thousand/hundred/all of the people all of the time.

But you can listen, learn and interact - using your own finely-honed BS detector.

And that, my marketing friends, is what brand awareness and engagement are all about.

Cool new tool I heard of this week to upload videos to a bunch of different web-based video sites at once - TubeMogul.

This from Susan Reid, Internet Marketing Manager at UAB Health System, glowed about the free tool. She showed a slide that had relative numbers of video views from YouTube, Yahoo!, MetaCafe, Revver, and Daily Motion.

Interestingly, she also shared these stats about the different sites (source: Quantcast, a free internet rating service) and how they appeal to different viewers:

• YouTube - 50M visitors monthly, primary demographic - Asian, little education
• Revver - 5M visitors monthly, primary demographic - Well-rounded mix of races, educated
• Metacafe - 10M visitors monthly, primary demographic - Well-rounded mix of races, some education
• Yahoo! - 129M visitors monthly, primary demographic - Hispanic, little education
• Dailty Motion - 5M visitors monthly, primary demographic - Hispanic, little education

I got fair warning from my URL vendor of choice, dotster, that the .asia cyber land rush begins this week, on Feb. 20. I found it especially timely and interesting, having just attended a “Doing Business in China” breakfast on Friday. I was pretty impressed by the speakers and the opportunity…

China: The Law of Large Numbers

In Oregon, China is our 2nd largest export market (Canada is number one). And exports to China have grown at a 9x rate in the northwest (vs. 5x in the US as a whole). In fact, in 2006 Oregon’s exports to China grew 76% over 2005.

I’m guilty (as most who haven’t been there) of thinking of China in some pretty antiquated terms - streets teeming with bicycles, lots of street markets, etc. Governor Gary Locke, a Chinese-American and former governor of Washington state (my home state, voted the “most digital state government” under his reign), described the reality of China today:

• There are so many cars they’ve built eight-lane aerial freeways in most major cities to move people
• Tall buildings abound. One Hyatt Hotel there is 100+ stories high, with the lobby on the 60th floor… and I have always been irritated at the 3rd floor lobby at the Marriott Marquis in NY.
• There are 550M cell phone subscribers today; and predicted to be 800M (out of 1.3B people) in two years.
• Factories in China are much more modern than those in the US.

Last year, according to Alan Homer, Special US Envoy to China, the US and China accounted for almost 50% of all economic growth. While there are highly charged issues in China (16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China, and 90% of the rivers there are polluted); the US and China are taking an approach of “goodwill and economic understanding” to our discussions, called the Strategic Economic Dialogue, or SED.

(sed.asia… not a bad URL to reserve…)

According to Locke, engineering, health and safety issues and expertise in the environment are key issues the Chinese are looking to solve. And they’re gearing up to do so themselves, that’s for sure. Even though 60% of the people are living in what we would call primitive conditions, Chinese protectionism is growing, and parents are highly focused on the education of their children.

One of the most shocking stats I heard in the whole presentation:

Intel hosts an international science and technology fair for high school students each year. Last year in the US, 65,000 students participated. In China (with only 4x the population of the US) more than 6,000,000 students participated. That’s Six Million vs. Sixty Thousand, folks.

So smart businesses should be thinking about their .asia cyber strategies… and looking hard at the opportunity that China might hold.

Just when I needed it most, my friend Kim Dushinski (mobile marketing maven) let me know of a little service, HelloTxt, that will instantly update my Twitter, Facebook and Pounce microblogs simultaneously. Nice.

I have just finished driving that crazy stretch of I-5 south of Portland that makes me wonder:

What people are thinking when they’re driving a long, straight road like that?? That they can just exit in front of 18-wheelers going 80 without wreaking havoc?

I swear I witnessed the potential of three very scary accidents barely missed, I sincerely wonder how truckers do it!

And I’m so glad to be home.

I am happy to have made the trip, though, traffic and idiot drivers notwithstanding. The audience of Oregon Wine makers at this morning’s panel presentation was very attentive, asked excellent questions, and it made me realize how truly far we’ve come in technology in just a few short years.

Most of these people run small, family businesses. They were thrilled to hear the could buy shopping cart software for $300. That’s a far cry less than $5000 - which was the number that several people kept throwing out - having researched it just a few years back. I can see shopping carts popping up on wine sites all over the state now, which will be great for them (better margins) and great for us (supporting the direct growers).

Most are concerned about immigration rights, and the changes afoot here in Oregon. One man stood in front of a group of probably 300 people at a morning session, and said, “People don’t realize where their food comes from.”

I pointed out in our session (to about 100 people) that the web is a great forum to discuss the issues, educate the public and generate understanding. I hope to see blogs (or at least comments) popping up from wine growers all over the web now, which will be great for consumers (they’ll know where their food comes from) and great for the debate to be held in a very public (and very big - potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of people) forum.

It’s a wonderful time to be alive - to watch lightbulbs go off en mass over people’s brains, and to participate in the understanding gained through education.