Meeting of the New Marketing Minds, Part 2

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This is Part 2 of my series of takeaways from the 2008 New Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium. Part 1 focused on the importance of listening. Today I’ll share some of the ideas mentioned around becoming a content creator.

Content Creation – Be the publisher!
Content Creation

During a panel moderated by Paul Gillin, William Cava (Ektron), Darren Guarnaccia (Sitecore), John Munsel (Bizzuka) and Peter Nieforth (Documetrics) defined content marketing as “using content to drive behavior and action.” In today’s environment, ultimately everyone has the opportunity to be a marketer.

Another point they discussed was unlocking your content. Take down those web forms because you are losing 95% of your potential readership. Try looking for different ways to engage with the reader and give THEM the option to give out their information in return – you will see a greater success rate with this open mentality.

Cava stressed that organizations should not underestimate the power of fresh content, and it should be treated like a living, breathing thing. Avoid “Content Rot” explained Gillin. A steady schedule of new content will keep your site fresh and will help drive SEO.

Some suggestions discussed during the panel for getting more mileage out of existing content include:

  • Post a video. Tape simple events your company might be involved with. The company BBQ, a re-enactment of the scene from “Office Space” that involves the office printer and a bat. This type of content creation is easy to develop, free, and it works to drive visitors.
  • Viral videos. Ok, everyone knows you can’t “make” a video go viral – you can just post it, promote it and hope for the best, but again, it is another avenue for attracting eyeballs and getting people to interact with your company/brand.
  • Press release – yes, they said press releases. As more people are doing away with the press release, there is not as much noise.

During Gillin’s own keynote presentation “Why Content is the New Currency of Marketing” he stressed that while marketers no longer have control over what customers are saying about them, they can and should participate in the conversations. Using the same tools as customers, marketers no longer need the media to help influence public opinion, they can do it themselves!

Stay tuned for the third and final part of this wrap-up series coming up tomorrow.

Meeting of the New Marketing Minds, Part 1

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Last week I was fortunate to have attended the New Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. There was certainly no shortage of information and knowledge sharing going on during the two day event. A wide-variety of non-stop sessions and panels filled each day, while keynotes from hosts Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin and David Meerman Scott sweetened the experience even more. Our very own Christine Perkett spoke on a panel that discussed “PR 2.0” with Tony Sapienza (Topaz Partners) and Bobbie Carlton (Beacon Street Girls) towards the end of day two. And if the sessions weren’t enough there was always plenty to learn from the 300+ attendees who made the journey to the conference.

New Marketing Summit 2008Photo Credit: Steve Garfield

After reflecting on the experience and all the information absorbed during the two days, I’ve selected three common themes that resonated throughout.

  • Listen, Listen, Listen
  • Content Creation – Be the Publisher
  • Don’t Be Afraid to Lose Control

In order to keep the size of this recap in check, I’ll be breaking each of the take-aways into separate (“snackable”) posts.

Your Customers Are Talking About You – LISTEN!

Mike Lewis, President of the Business Marketing Association of Boston kicked off the conference with a video of him at Quincy Market in Boston asking random people what they thought “New Marketing” was. Surprisingly, what he found was that most people actually got it. The old form of marketing, according to Lewis, was to talk “at” people – one way communication. New Marketing is about listening and engaging with your customers.

The “Listening in a Blizzard – Social Media Monitoring, and the Future” panel with David Alston (Radian6), Candace Fleming (Crimson Hexagon), Todd Parsons (BuzzLogic), Tony Priore (Biz360) and Mike Spartaro (Visible Technologies) continued the discussion on the importance of listening. They really hit the nail on the head when they said “…your customers are out there talking about you on the Web. They are blogging, commenting, making videos, etc. about the brands they either love or they hate (probably more about the ones they hate).”

Alston, during another discussion he presented at the Social Media Breakfast (#smb9) on October 16th expanded on the theme by asking the question “if someone was outside your place of business shouting about how much your company sucked, how long would it take for someone to run out to them to get them to fix the situation?” The same philosophy applies to relationships online.

When people are talking about you, take the time to listen and engage with them. If it is a positive comment, take the time to thank them and be sure to save that comment, retweet it (if you are using Twitter) and favorite it! If the comment is negative, reach out to that person directly and help them. Taking that extra step can turn a bad situation into a very positive one.

At PerkettPR we work with several of our clients on their social media initiatives to help them listen and engage in online discussions. The results have been incredible, and customers that might have, at one time, left the company, are now happy again and talking about their positive experiences with their social media spheres.

New Marketing means using today’s many social media resources to better listen, understand the issues, and get directly involved with your customers to make a positive difference in their experience with your brand.

Stay tuned for the next part of the New Marketing wrap-up series coming up tomorrow.

PR, Social Media, Transparency & Good News

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I’ve been having a very lively discussion on Twitter today about PR, social media and where the lines of transparency fall. We asked if a PR firm should run social media entities in social communities. If they do, should they identify themselves in these communities – like Twitter, Facebook, etc. – as the PR firm or as part of the company’s marketing team, or is simply having a company entity sufficient enough to imply that you’re probably talking to the marketing folks (which could include an agency). How transparent is transparent enough? I received a lot of lively – and differing – answers:

PR Company Transparency

My favorite answer, however, was from @tgruber. She said:

@tgruber Transparency Reply

It’s my favorite answer because for me, if I’m interacting with a company’s brand online, it seems obvious that the marketing team would be behind it unless otherwise noted (as in the case of @zappos which is clearly identified as the CEO, Tony Hsieh; or in our case @PerkettPR – where we identify who is behind the Twittering of the brand right in our bio).

But I’m in marketing and PR – so I wanted other viewpoints. If you are interacting with @Lotame (client), for example, do you assume you are talking to the CEO or a marketing executive, or someone else? If a PR firm maintains the account should they say in their bio, for example, “We’re PerkettPR Twittering on behalf of Client.”? If you follow @TJMaxx, @Starbucks, @JetBlue, @LuckyShops or others, does it matter to you who’s behind the social media curtain – as long as they aren’t claiming to be the CEO when they are not?

We’re excited to announce several new clients today and as we continue planning and launching many social media campaigns for them in the coming months, we continue to value and learn from the collective communities and their opinions. That includes you – so what do you think?

What is New Marketing? PR 2.0? Join us at The New Marketing Summit Today

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Today I am speaking on a panel for “PR 2.0” at The New Marketing Summit in Foxboro, MA. I’m proud to be involved in this project and presenting among many other industry luminaries – Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin and David Meerman Scott pulled it together – who are elevating the roles that marketing and PR play in business.

New marketing means a lot of different things – or nothing at all – to people today. Some don’t believe much has changed, while others call the changes “radical.” Sign up for today or tomorrow’s sessions to learn more about how companies from many different industries – in both B2B and B2C – are embracing new technologies, methodologies and techniques to keep their brands top of mind.

I’ll be chatting about how PR has changed in light of new marketing – I believe it’s become more thought-provoking, integrated and important than ever – with a few industry peers. What’s going on with PR today? Is it dead? How does social media help or hinder the process? Do traditional skills matter anymore? Is PR even necessary in light of the open conversations facilitated by social media? Can’t anyone do PR now?

If we can answer specific questions for you, please post them here or join us at the conference today. You can also follow our Twitter updates on my stream or PerkettPR’s.

I’ll share more of my thoughts after the panel this afternoon. I hope to see you there!

Interactive video campaigns begin to emerge

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Back in September Jeremiah Owyang created a post entitled “YouTube Videos Get Interactive: Choose Your Own Adventure” that featured an example of a video that makes use of YouTube’s new annotation functionality. This functionality allows content creators to embed notes, speech bubbles and clickable hotspots into their videos after they have been uploaded to YouTube. While this type of interactivity has been possible with other technologies like Adobe Flash, YouTube is making it extremely easy and accessible for all “YouTuber’s” to integrate into their projects.

Being a social media guy and new media creator, I naturally saw some great potential for using these new features as part of a future client campaign. Coincidentally, the opportunity to do just that came about a few days later for our client TeleMessage and their TeamText campaign – geared toward educating consumers (specifically teens and tweens) about the ability to send text to landline.

The result is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style video dubbed “Jenny’s Dilemma,” in which the viewer can choose from one of three different endings to the main story. The correct outcome features a call to action that directs the viewer to a landing site for additional information related to the campaign.

Other examples that use the new annotation functionality include a trivia question from Val’s Art Diary (as featured in Jeremiah’s post) and a racy (mildly NSFW) “choose your own adventure” campaign for the Samsung Instinct mobile device called “Follow Your Instinct.”

It should be interesting to see how marketers integrate this new YouTube functionality into their campaigns moving forward. We hope that you’ll take a look at our submission to the interactive video genre, and let us know what you think!

Users gripe, Adobe listens

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Have you ever had an experience using a product that motivated you to tell the world about it? Web designers Erik Frick and Adam Meisel did. Their professional use of Adobe products spawned the creation of a small site called Dear Adobe that could be used as a sounding board to vent their frustrations.

Once launched, news of the site traveled fast, and almost a thousand entries (mostly rants) were posted to the site in the first 24 hours. Inside of 48 hours, Adobe began to take notice with John Nack, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop writing about the site on his blog and actually crafting responses to several of the Dear Adobe rants. In just two weeks time the site exploded to over a million page views and hundreds of new submissions were being added daily.

Dear Adobe

Sites like these are a continued reminder to companies that consumers can have a significant impact on your brand in the online space. Fortunately, Adobe was listening and is now getting involved in responding to the gripes. This was a good first step for them to make, but what else could they do to leverage the situation? Hopefully, Adobe executives are able to see this as an opportunity to take a lesson from Dell’s Ideastorm community and purchase the site to integrate it into Adobe.com. It would be a bold move that would show the Adobe community that they really do care.

Ultimately, what Adobe does with all the rants (aka, valuable information) still remains to be seen. Their product suite has been around for a very long time and has grown to mammoth proportions. The cost of implementing some of the most popular changes might be next to impossible without major re-writes, while others like adjusting their prices (currently the #2 most popular gripe) might be easier to implement.

Takeaways

Put yourself in Adobe’s shoes and reflect on how your own company currently interacts with the online space. What online monitoring processes does your company have in place? Are you prepared to get involved and respond to your customer community when a “Dear YourCompanyName” site suddenly pops up? What is stopping you from boldly implementing your own Dear Adobe?

Persuasive Picks for the week of 09/01/08

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Podcastin TrendsPodcasting dead or alive? TrendsSpotting marketing indicators
Taly Weiss from Trendspotting.com dives head first into a well researched post about podcasting trends and whether podcasts still provide value as a new media tool.

A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
Peter Kim launched an extremely valuable list of brands that are currently using social media. He invites readers to contribute to this ongoing list via the comments section where he’ll integrate submissions into the main post on a periodic basis.

Making the case for social media in PR
Shannon Paul knocks another one out of the park with this great post on stepping back from the hype of social media tools and getting back to basic communication.

Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature
Every once in a while Community Managers need to deal with “troublemakers” within their online communities. Jeremiah Owyang approaches the subject by suggesting the “Bozo” feature as potential solution. Be sure to dive into the comments section for a good discussion on the topic.

A fresh take on the browser
One of the most blogged about topics this week was the release of Chrome, Google’s new web browser. This post on the Google blog started the avalanche. Continue the reading from these Techmeme links.

Social Media + New York City + Fashion Week = Inside the Tents

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We’ve been having a great time with our client Gift Girl – and we haven’t even launched yet! In addition to some fun pre-launch video interviews, Gift Girl has now teamed with My It Things to create Inside The Tents – an aggregated inside look from fashionista bloggers and reporters covering Mercedes Benz Fashion week in New York City, which kicks off tomorrow.

Combining social media technologies and fashion, Inside The Tents “was born to provide a fresh look into the very exclusive Bryant Park Tents during Mercedes Benz Fashion week. As more and more independent new media journalists are getting access into behind the scenes of the most fabulous fashion event of the season, they share with the world news and observations usually left to selected group of magazine editors.”

This unique effort aggregates feeds from various social media communities and applications such as Twitter, Flickr, live blogging and video streaming, “sometimes getting ahead of the traditional media to bring the latest trends to the fashion aficionados around the web.”

If you can’t be there live for this to-die-for fashion event, be sure to follow Inside the Tents for everything fashion coming out of Bryant Park in this coming week. Tecchies may find it of interest as well – it should be fun to see social media in action outside of the traditional business world.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 08/25/08

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The Best Practices In Social Media Marketing Writing Project
Mitch Joel from Twist Image has launched a writing project that encourages marketers to share their best tips for Social Media Marketing, and hopes to build contributions to the project into an ongoing organic resource for marketers to reference in the future. Mitch’s own best practice contribution revolves around consistency.

Before Consistency in Social Media Marketing
Bryan Eisenberg from the FutureNow blog contributes his Social Media Marketing best practices to Mitch Joel’s writing project – in the form of transparency, being social and communicating values. Make the jump to read more!

Three tips for “company blogging”
Google’s Matt Cutts shares three tips for those who blog for their company. Be sure to read through the 60+ comments for additional tips and points of view.

Community Manager Salary Report
Community Strategist Connie Bensen has touched on the subject of Community Manager salaries for almost a year now. This post is her latest entry on the subject and is a great starting point for companies looking to fill such a role in their organization.

Use Ning to Build a Community Around Your Personal Brand
Personal Branding expert Dan Schawbel expands on the power of using Ning to build an online community around your personal brand – and backs it up by highlighting two “big name personal brands” who are doing it successfully.

PerkettPR is now on Alltop

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alltop_badge.jpgAs of this morning we’ve officially been added to the PR section of Alltop.com! For the unfamiliar, here is how they describe their site:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

Thanks to Guy and the Alltop Team for including us!