Another resource for info and ideas

Finally, here is the link to the company blog I am helping with:

www.refineandfocus.wordpress.com

There you’ll find some great tips on how to use interactive media to get the best results, as well as lots of links to resources, great blogs and experts and more.

I’ll still be posting here, only less often, so please come back and check it out!

A new source for interactive media info and Twitter marketing

Hello everyone!

Sorry there haven’t been any updates here lately. I’ve been a bit preoccupied with other things and also, working on launching a blog for the company I work for. Since it is an interctive media company, many of the posts on that blog will overlap a lot with what I would write about here. Although I will continue to keep this blog, my updates here will be a bit less frequent. However, our company blog will have a lot of great information and resources as well and as soon as we have it set up (probably sometime next week) I’ll post a link to it here so you guys can check it out.

Meanwhile, check out great this video about how Twitter can be used for marketing. And as always, please keep checking and leaving comments as I love to hear from you!

Conference Podcasts - almost like being there!

I always wish I could go to some the great conferences that occur all over the world about the most fascinating topics. Fortunately for me, some of those conferences are innovative and kind enough to offer recordings of their keynotes and panels in free podcast form! One of these conferences, that I wish I can someday attend personally, is ad:tech. From the website:

ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference dedicated to connecting all sides of today’s brand marketing landscape. Worldwide shows blend keynote speakers, topic driven panels and interactive workshops to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world.

It looks like it would be a very exciting, and extremely useful and informative opportunity, but until I am near enough to Paris, Hamburg, London, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Miami, Beijing, Sydney or Singapore at the time of a conference (and have enough background to be able to engage in meaningful conversation with the many highly experienced attendees) I will have to stick with the podcasts, which you can get here.

Yesterday I listened to the one-hour panel discussion called “Social Networks and Consumer Generated Media: Re-examining the Value Proposition”. It had representatives from social networking sites and the library of Congress talking about the best ways to monetize  these types of CGM and networking sites. It was all very interesting and gave an insider’s perspective on what these companies are thinking.

My next one will be I think “New Media Universe, New Consumer Behavior”. I’ll give you a bit more info on the social networks one and this one later. Hope you find the podcasts useful!

The Power of Conversation

A while back I wrote about how I think that interactive media is great for the advertising and marketing industries because it helps to add value to products and services. When customers have the opportunity to express what they really feel, want and need, companies can provide it more efficiently, and marketers can communicate their value more efficiently to the people who matter to them. With all kinds of forums, sites and blogs like Consumerist, customers now have unprecedented power to effect companies, both positively and negatively, so companies better learn how to deal with and leverage this power.

The website “Conversational Media” is great for those of us who want to keep track of the millions of conversations going on every day, aggregating relevant blog entries and news stories. Four days ago they posted a blog entry from Paul Gillin’s blog speculating about AT&T’s response to the bad press it’s getting from bloggers and other channels for charging a couple in California $300 for not rescuing their receiver while fleeing for their lives when their house got engulfed in the wildfire flames. The story on Consumerist has all kinds of comments, there is a YouTube video of the news story and like Paul Gillin’s post there are probably a great many other people talking about this on the web, offline and in the media.

If companies care more about making money than keeping customers, they aren’t understanding something pretty elementary about business. Customers are the money. As one of the comments on the consumerist post pointed out, how does $300 and tons of bad PR compare to losing a customer, especially when, with a little common sense (aside from the conspicuously lacking compassion), AT&T’s attitude at a time like this could easily have transformed that customer into loyal, lifetime business or even an evangelist for their company! The Social Media Club event I wrote about in June is a great example of how it is becoming more and more obvious how important it is for businesses to pay attention to what is happening. Nowadays companies need to spend more time than ever considering what really matters to them and figuring out how to differentiate themselves not by just providing a good service or product, but by exceeding expectations whenever they can. That’s the power of conversation.

Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - Berlin

If any of you happen to be in Berlin next week, be sure to stop by the Web 2.0 Expo, and then tell me about it! It starts next Monday, November 5 and goes until Friday, November 8. Produced by O’Reilly Media and CMP Technology (the companies that coined the term “Web 2.0″) and sponsored by Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, iStockphoto and others, the event promised to be pretty fascinating.

The conference will move to Tokyo November 15 and 16, then San Francisco in April 2008 and apparently New York sometime as well. I would absolutely love to go to one of these, but if you’re like me and can’t make it, head to the website for some good information, resources and updates in the blog (which happens to have the same Dilbert cartoon I posted a while ago in “Beginner’s Resources for Interactive Media“!).

Hopefully they’ll record the presentations and have podcasts of them available soon!

Will it blend? - The success of viral videos for business

Ever wonder exactly how viral videos could impact sales? Just ask Blendtec. Their viral video marketing strategy is pretty genius and according to a September article on Information Week, “Online sales of Blendtec blenders have increased five-fold over the company’s old record revenue prior to the videos…”. Pretty amazing right? With the videos being watched constantly on both YouTube and Blendtec’s WillItBlend.com, Blendtec not only helped make their super-power blenders top-of-mind for home kitchen blenders, but it managed to increase its commercial sales and deliver a brand new demographic as well. This is a great example of how to use interactive media for extremely effective marketing that costs close to nothing, especially compared to traditional marketing campaigns.

But this was viral marketing done on purpose and it was a great success. I wonder what the grassroots Coke & Mentos videos by EepyBird (some of the most-watched viral videos ever, appearing on numerous shows, that won a Webby and was nominated for an Emmy award) actually did for the sales and brand recognition of those two products!

Everything a beginner needs to know about social media

I found this fantastic blog post a while ago filled with resources about social media. Arun Rajagopal challenged himself to a 10-hour investigation of the blogosphere to find as much information as he could that would be useful to those who are beginners in the subject. The result is a really, really long post overflowing with definitions, summaries and many, many links to a whole bunch of other posts explaining different takes on and aspects of social media. It will take you a while to get through all of the resources, but there is some great information there.

I’ll also add the link to Arun’s post in the Beginner’s resources for interactive media post, where you will find a lot of stuff as well, and hopefully the list will keep growing. Check it out!

UPDATE 11/25/2007: Arun also directed me to yet another excellent guide to social media, on CK’s Blog which you should definitely check out! It is absolutely filled with great resources.

UPDATE 12/12/2007: Check out Chris Brogan’s Social Media 100,  a series of posts (he started Dec. 4, only 6 posts so far) that are meant to “help you grow the value of your social media and social networking efforts.”

Also check out the following blogs and posts. They are loaded with fantastic information:

The Social Media Marketing Blog

Marketing Pilgrim: The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing

SEOmoz: Social Media Marketing, eh? Let’s See What’s in Our Bag o’ Goodies.

SEOmoz: How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message

Influential Marketing: 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Marketing category on “Ben Willis - New Media Marketer”

Image credit: The Elusive Fish Creative Services

Influential Marketing and Rohit Bhargava’s upcoming book

One of the blogs in my blogroll is “Influential Marketing Blog” by Rohit Bhargava, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations, and is probably my favorite online read. The posts on this award-winning blog are always very interesting, well written, useful and relevant and if you haven’t checked it out yet, do it!

So you can imagine my delight when I discovered that the author is writing a marketing book! And better yet, he is also launching a series of elements to go along with the book, since, of course in this day and age, a book can’t be just a book anymore.

If anyone has read “The Long Tail“, by Chris Anderson, you probably read the introduction, where he talks about posting concepts, ideas and even chapters of the book online so that others could comment and contribute ideas that helped him craft the book into what it became. I think this is fantastic, since no matter how brilliant you are in your field, there are probably people out there who can help you explain things better or look at something in a way you hadn’t considered yet, and these kinds of insights have the potential to help make your already great book even better. Well, it appears that Rohit Bhargava is taking a similar approach and inviting readers of his blog and members of his Facebook group to throw out their comments on the title, the cover the premise and whatever else you can think of.

Below is a description of the book, taken from Rohit Bhargava’s blog post about it:

Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Companies Get it Back
Faceless companies don’t work anymore. In a world where consumers have more access to information than ever, and more power to share their voice … a brand’s identity is no longer controlled through marketing and advertising. In this new era, what you say your brand stands for is no longer good enough. What you demonstrate to your customers matters most. This is the power of your personality. Personality Not Included is an essential guide for brands on putting back the missing ingredient in their marketing to build loyal customers, foster consumer (and employee) evangelists, and create a connection that goes beyond profit. The future of business requires new authenticity. Personality is the secret weapon that brings authentic brands to life.

So in addition to the book, there will also be: “The Personality Project” (landing page coming soon), which will be a group blog with contributions from various people in various industries talking about what their personality is; an Amazon Book page; a group on Facebook; and future efforts with a variety of different social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr.

I’m pretty excited about this book and the projects associated with it. And as soon as I get it (coming out Spring 200 and finish it, I’ll be sure to review it here.

More engaging media

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has a great microsite that highlights some of the important aspect of the changing nature of media in order for those in the media and marketing/advertising industries to better understand and take advantage of them. It contains advice on how to “Reach the Right Audience”, “Create a Great Experience” and “Measure Effectiveness” as well as how-to sections on display advertising, online video, email, gaming, lead generation, mobile and local aspects of interactive. This is a great overview of interactive and well worth the read and even the pdf download!

Bring the love back - the new age of advertising

Microsoft made this great, really funny movie about how the relationship between advertisers and consumers is changing in this new “Age of Conversation“, where the consumers are having more and more say in how, when and why they are reached. As I have mentioned before, now that consumers finally have an opportunity to openly discuss their opinions and experiences with different brands and communicate what it is that they really need or want, companies have a much better chance of adjusting their products and services or creating new products to fill a void, and advertisers can communicate the value of the products much more effectively to those people that show an interest, then the value for all parties is heightened and the entire process becomes much more efficient! This is one of the things that excites me most about the direction the industry is going. What do you think?