Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Last November I switched from PC to Mac - because of my iPhone. At the time, my PC was acting up, and I had been futzing with trying to connect my Blackberry to my Outlook (without IT help) calendar for months. I love my Mac, and the seamless integration with my iPhone. But now that iPhone has a hope to connect to the Blackberry enterprise server, I have to say I’d advocate for the iPhone as the tool I’d choose to call essential.

Tool #4: The smartest PDA - iPhone

Before I got one, I wondered what all the fuss was about. But once I started using it, I immediately got it. Elegant usability.

Seriously, the UI was so beautifully developed, every single tool was intuitive, and once I tried the controls - setting times for appointments, for example - I wondered why everyone’s phone didn’t work that way?

How is it a great marketing tool? I have the intelligence of the web, the immediacy of text, the connectedness of email, the logistic satisfaction of context-sensitive maps and the joy of a camera built right into my phone.

I will never be lost again, I can Google answers to any questions, respond to email, and snap photos to share with others (and send them right to recipients from the camera application).

It was worth the money AND worth the $200 cancellation fee I had to pay. (That’s another story altogether…)

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“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.

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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.

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If you’re in technology or telecommunications, you’ve been thinking about/hearing about convergence (define) for more than 10 years. The vision of watching TV and making voice calls on your PC became a reality at the turn of the millennium. But the world of convergence is just now starting to get fun.

In a ClickZ report from this week’s CES, Ian Shafer gives us a glimpse of tomorrow’s convergence reality: convergence comes into our homes (and yes, cars - the big splashy headlines from CES were all about cars). Ian noted (emphasis mine):

“The set-top box was pretty absent from many CES exhibits, replaced by LCDs and plasmas with their own CMSs (define) and Internet access. LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and other TV manufacturers had on-screen displays featuring RSS feeds, programming guides, and promises of “no cable box needed” viewing. These will present valuable advertising opportunities, and both manufacturers and advertisers and their agencies should start talking now….

….Another fascinating development at CES was the frequent use of the word “share.” Every new feature of every device seemed to enable not only content sharing but discovery of new content and connections to “friends” as well. This all but confirms that social media is here to stay, and all media may be social in the very near future. This puts added pressure on advertisers to figure this social media “thing” out.”

Roll Your Own Coverage
In a world where I can watch YouTube videos on my TV; and where I can set up persistent RSS searches for topics and subjects that interest me, I will be producing my own TV channels. Can you imagine the 2010 Olympics coverage we’ll be able to see and interact with when unfettered from network television, and in the hands of actual attendees with global perspectives?

Suddenly the writers’ strike is both more meaningful and more irrelevant when content and the ability to publish to the masses is within virtually everyone’s grasp.

Simultaneously we’re witnessing improved access to content (available any time, anywhere); and we’re witnessing the loss of control (I can create, edit, publish and share) of content and brands into the hands of consumers.

RSS and CMS - Coming to a Home Theatre Near You
Marketers have generally known that content has always been king. But there are other conceptual issues they’ve not been as quick to grasp. What does their information look like beyond their web site and glossy brochures? Does it speak to today’s audience? The world is a noisy place! And (as my friend Paul says) “You’re either watching the screen or on the screen, baby!”

Getting your content on their screens:

1. Proper tagging - if you don’t know how people search for products you offer, imagine how hard it will be for folks to find your content in this brave new world. Marketers will be forced to create, tag and publish content that speaks the way their consumers search - so they will be able to find your products easily. I can see a need for folksonomy (define) expertise in the marcom group.
2. Social channels of distribution - if you’re not working on a YouTube strategy and content for your company today, you’re missing an opportunity to get in (relatively) early and establish thought leadership for your company and products. And, as you can see, you’ll miss a channel (soon to be a literal TV channel) for distribution.
3. RSS fluency - every marketer should be using RSS to track and deliver news, information, and conversations. But it’s not enough to distribute RSS feeds. If you’re not yet familiar with how RSS works from a consumer’s perspective, get engaged and consume. Download an RSS Reader (I use Attensa’s - they’re a client of mine) and start consuming the information you’re delivering. You’ll be able to see quickly whether the information you’re putting out there is properly branded, interesting, relevant and (therefore) consumed. And (as I’ve beaten to death in this blog) you’ll be way more productive as you use RSS as a key information tool.
4. Fresh information - think of your marketing group as a publishing empire. Fresh content is the only way you’ll stay in front of your consumer’s attention. Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming cheaper and easier to control. The sooner you can implement one for your organization, the better. Your productivity will go through the roof.

Get ready now - within two years we’ll be facing a whole new world of marketing challenges. These are today’s… they’re converging right now, and coming soon to a home theatre near you.

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Wow, Janet, what a headline! Trust me, I didn’t make it up.

I’m excited for my smart friend Steve Gehlen. He’s producing the first of what I believe will be many inVerge conferences in Portland that focuses on the invergence of media platforms, of online + offline, content + advertising, and corporate content + consumer-generated content.

“inVerge 2007 is a multi-disciplinary conference designed for thought leaders, executives, strategists, influencers, mavericks and cultural creatives from a variety of creative industries and disciplines.”

I’m signed up. The list of speakers is impressive, and Steve had the foresight to link inVerge to a couple of other ‘happenings’ the first week of September -

“In order to create a unique experience for attendees, this conference starts on the same day as, and is integrated with, three other cultural events happening in Portland:
+ Time-Based Art Festival (performance : dance : music : new media : visual arts)
+ MusicFestNW (over 125 indie bands)
+ First Thursday Gallery Walk (an evening of art, wine and music)”

Steve was involved in the original Portland Creative Conference, so he knows how to throw an incredibly creative event.

Please check it out. I’ll be there, blogging the conference, you can bet. But I’m pretty sure reading about it will pale in comparison to living it.

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