Dave Knox over at Hard Knox Life just posted this great slideshow on Content Marketing by Helge Tenno. Although I strongly dislike the addition of “two-dot-oh” to the end of any term, I will admit the Agency2.0 he speaks of at the end of the show sounds pretty appealing!

| View | Upload your own

The first few slides call out the development of online marketing. “2007 was all about rich media and customer participations”…”but 2008 is ..all about a range of different ideas coming together and forming a new kind of marketing changing the way brands connect to their consumers”.

The ideas are the following:

1. Culture
2. Technology
3. Mobility
4. Activity
5. Ineffective
6. Emotional Research

A few statements worth calling out:

Content isn’t king. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

The application itself is not a goal at all - it’s an obstacle between the user and their goal.

we tend to throw out the most meaningful and most revolutionary if we ask people about their preferences.

Content marketing = participating in activities facilitated by the brand.

Slide 13 states that “most products and services are actually developed by users, who then give ideas to manufacturers”. The premise (and this is one I called out in my recent review of Accidental Branding,) is that the best products are designed to address specific problems. If that’s the case, obviously why not give users the empowerment (and the forum) to help drive innovation for you?

As a developer, I probably shouldn’t like the comment that the application is not the goal. For me, though, effective marketing and strategy is not about jumping to implementation. A client shouldn’t want “a widget”. They should want “a means to drive traffic from the social networking space”. A widget is one way to do this. By assessing what the user goals are, we can work to achieve those goals, and they’ll be satisfied. But unless we determine the rationale behind a decision, we have a hard time assessing its success (and risk having an unhappy client in the end). I maintain that the decision of the best technical solution to a business need should be left in the hands of we web geeks, who have been eating, drinking and sleeping this stuff for a loooong time!

This notion of “don’t tell me what you (think you) want” is raised later in the deck as well. I can only attribute the reason that we ‘throw out the most meaningful information if we ask people their preferences’ to a lack of self-awareness or willingness to be honest. My biggest concern with a blanket statement like this is that some organizations may take this as justification not to solicit or incorporate feedback from users at all.

As someone who espouses user-centered design principles, this whole idea of “content marketing” makes sense. People are doing to “do” stuff and talk about it. Why not facilitate these activities by offering something to talk about? I am currently listening to “The Anatomy of Buzz” and Jeep Jamborees are mentioned. There is a certain demographic that buys Jeeps and has a certain lifestyle. Why not support them in their activities? We are an experiential society, and people who go off on a Jeep Jamboree weekend are your best brand advocates. They will converse among themselves, further establishing that brand loyalty, and also tell others about their experiences.

I love the idea that we are looking at establishing relationships with consumers, as well as between them. It’s no longer about focusing inward on creating that ultimate pitch: it’s about a facilitating a personalized experience for each individual based on his own needs and desired level of interaction.

The final session of the day that I attended was on strategies for blogging and social networking marketing. Some of the content was similar to the viral campaign session I’d attended earlier, I liked the use of the one specific case study to frame their work.

Right away speaker Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing laid out the three things you need for success:

1. a compelling hook
2. the right channels
3. identify client goals

In the case study he shared with us (Shizuka New York), the compelling hook was “bird poop facials”.

A good litmus test to whether or not your idea is compelling- would you talk about it at dinner? a new CEO hired from a competitor? Nah. But bird poop facials? Sure!

Bill mentioned four specific channels to consider:

1. SEO Press release
2. Blogger outreach
3. video
4. Social networks

I wasn’t really familiar with the terms “SEO Press release”, but it was quite interesting. Bill mentioned that they will search for specific phrases on search engines to ensure the uniqueness of their phrasing. That way they can be sure that when monitoring buzz or search queries, all the results are directly tied to their efforts. He did acknowledge that the most newsworthy your story, the more likely a journalist will snap up the idea and write about it in their own words. In this case, your carefully chosen phrasing is lost.

Through the presentation, Bill was very diligent at showing us the “before and after”, highlighting the importance of analytics and establishing your measures for success. We looked at google news, which had 2 links to the company in May, and roughly 50 post-campaign.

Blogger outreach is refers yet again to really figuring out the type of influentials to tap.

As for social networking, Bill said that they did not try to build for or leverage all the social networks. He said they actually received the most traffic from StumbleUpon, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize it was such a bg player. He also acknowledged that like it or not, you can’t ignore mySpace.

Supposedly CNN ran this story on the front page one day, but still 46% of the traffic came from social networks. While CNN gave a one-day spike in traffic, the networks were overall more significant.

Someone asked about the time this campaign took, and he said the video shoot was the biggest task, coming in at about 10 hours. The rest of the campaign and marketing was about 40 hours. In the end, the company saw traffic increases from all sources, not just referring sites. People weren’t just clicking on links they had presented to them; bird poop facials at Shizuka had reached a point where people were talking or thinking about them, and motivated to seek them out.

He talked some more about some compelling ideas and hooks, including the work they did for Hatteras networks (the cash cow), or the scantily clad etymologist at HotForWords.com

While I don’t know that this session really offered me many “strategies” for blogging and social media marketing, I did find the session interesting. I appreciated the focus on the results achieved, and how they were managed. I still feel in many ways that analytics is still in its infancy, and I appreciated the approach that was taken to demonstrate the campaign’s success.

The second session I attended was “Igniting Viral Campaigns”, by Jennifer Laycock. Her session was in such high demand that we had to change rooms to accomodate the number of attendees!

Jennifer presented an incredibly comprehensive slide deck on the topic. She started with an introduction to viral marketing itself, the premise being:

1. people distrust ads
2. people trust friends
3. people trust strangers
4. the web connects us

Initially I wasn’t sure I agreed with her “people trust strangers” comment, but as she explained it more, it made sense. She considered strangers to people we don’t know in real life, whereas for me, it’s people with whom we have no relationship at all.

She clearly called out the benefits and challenges related to viral marketing. While for many companies it may seem an obvious tactic given the low budget, but the challenge is in coming up with an idea that is genuinely buzz-worthy. The consumer needs to have some motivation to share it. Once again I’m struck with the idea that good marketing (as well as good design, good client relations, good anything) is just what I’d consider user-centered design. What consumer needs (realized or unrealized) are being met? Indeed, Jennifer referred to the customer reaction effect. That is, by empowering ordinary individuals to share and promote a brand, you are offering them some sense of celebrity and giving people a chance to talk about your product. In turn, the brand benefits from a level of increased credibility, as it is being ‘blessed’ with personal recommendations.
The potential downfall, however, is that you lose control over your brand messaging.

As for any project, it is important to establish goals to be able to measure the success of the project.

There are three questions to be answered when coming up with this idea:

1. what sparks passion?
2. what hasn’t been done before?
3. will they risk their reputation?

For an idea to catch on, it has to address the above questions. The last refers to the idea that a forwarder is basically offering his personal recommendation to whatever he is forwarding, and will need to believe in the message or cause.

Jennifer then did a great job at walking us through specific strategies to developing a campaign. She shared tangible examples to really drive her points home.

I was impressed with her specifics related to the delivery of the campaign. She warned us to be sure to watch out for scalability, inventory, sustainable ROI and backup servers. I suppose the idea is that you should always plan for the worst case (which in this case is the best: your viral campaign takes off!). This actually reminds me of when we helped out Wal-Mart with their holiday campagns last year. Evidently there had been some question about our use of Akamai, and someone had questioned “what if akamai goes down?” At the time, we all laughed. Our thoughts were that if akamai went down, the Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
Guess what, at the height of the campaign, Akamai went down.

She offered us a list of different campaign types: humour, debate, attack and fear. Along with examples, she listed out pros and cons for each campaign type. It was a wonderful overview while also offering us the benefit of her expertise.

The next part of the presentation specifically dealt with pitching bloggers, which is an arena where I’ve only ever been on the other side of the screen. As Jennifer went through her pitching checklist, I reflected on how I’ve been pitched to myself, and determined that I am way too easy-going I guess I don’t yet have any reason to be too picky!

Jennifer’s biggest rule was “respect the blogger’s time”, and many of her recommendations were based on this (for example, read at least 5 posts, write a few contextual comments). I also felt that this was simply good practice to ensure you’re on the right track. If you have identified this blogger as an influential, prove it by opening yourself up to be influenced

At some point during the presentation, Jennifer noticed that we were running behind, and offered to cut the presentation short. The room was unified in their desire to hear her entire presentation. It was truly an incredible session, well worth the price of admission

Jennifer walked us through a project they’d done, through using brainstorming worksheets to assessing capabilities and the actual execution of the plan. It was a great way to really understand their methodology and gave a lot of credibility to their process. While she was great in not using her presentation to pimp out her company, I was definitely interested in learning more about them, as it is obvious they shine in this area.

Afterwards I was following on twitter as Jennifer and the session attendee that was sitting next to me talked about #SBMU and despite the fact I don’t actually have a small business, I’m tempted to attend!

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows, today I attended PodCamp Ohio. PodCamps are “usually free BarCamp-style community UnConferences for new media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media.”

The first session I attended was “Managing Multiple Online Identities”, by Daniel Johnson Jr.. To start off the session, we went around the room and introduced ourselves, and shared what we wanted to get out of the session. This really set the tone for this most interactive of the sessions I attended. I hadn’t been sure what the backgrounds of the other attendees would be, and this gave me some good background. The first person to introduce herself was Lara Kretler, who’d just visited my blog and commented a few days ago!

My own interest in the session was the fact that I do consider myself to have two distinct brands online: my running self and my tech self. Two blogs, two twitter accounts.

The presenter gave us a little background on himself, I thought it was great that he commutes 60 miles one way from Cincy to Dayton, and therefore “has plenty of time to consume new media”. I was doing about 95 miles one way from Columbus to Dayton, so I knew exactly what he meant. I do miss my audiobooks..

As I mentioned, the session was very interactive. After a brief overview of the definitions of marketing vs PR vs advertising and branding, we had a discussion on the personal brand. In this room of early adopters, we discussed strategies about snapping up screen names on new services to ensure the integrity of the brand, versus only signing up for services you would be actively engaging with. (with the announcement today that the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine“, the challenges of retaining a firm hold on a specific word/brand may get a lot harder). I think it’s a personal ‘brand strategy’ decision that individuals must make.

We talked a bit about eliminating old brands or labels, and one individual pointed out that sometimes having a stale account was really just more time-consuming than it was worth. That wasn’t anything I’d really considered before. Thinking about ROI does help to drive home the fact that we really are branding and marketing ourselves online, and it may be worth figuring out the best use of our efforts.

Daniel shared some of his own techniques for managing these various elements. For each service he joins, he uses an email account specifically associated with that service: {servicename}@{domainname}. I thought that was a neat way to assess where traffic is coming from. When I signed up for utterz, I started receiving spammy messages right away, and it soured me on the service immediately. He also showed how he used Netvibes to have a dashboard for multiple twitter accounts. (A funny “small world” moment: he showed a screen capture of his Netvibes page, and some guy in the audience said “that’s my wife!”.) He also mentioned twhirl and digsby. Hurrah!

I will admit that I think I wanted a bit more of a philosophical discussion on why people would have and maintain multiple identities, and how to remain authentic while creating what is essentially a fragmented brand. But I suppose that is something that each ‘personal brand advocate’ needs to figure out for himself.

I just read a review on TinyPaste on Techcrunch. TinyPaste is considered “tinyURL for text”. The idea is an interesting one: just the other day my coworker Jay Donavan (@getdonavan) was musing: Twitter needs an inline thesaurus that automagically finds short synonyms. Words over 10 chars offers suggestions. Wouldn’t that rock?. The 140 character limit may sometimes seem just a little light, which is why often tweets will consist of links to “go read what I have to say that’s longer than 140 characters”.

However, there’s one difference. Often if someone shares a URL via twitter, they also give some description of what they’re sending (at least, I hope they do, or generally I don’t bother following). TinyPaste would effectively do away with that, since the idea would be that it links out to the entire idea.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t assume that everyone who follows me on twitter wants to read EVERYTHING I have to say, to the point where they’ll follow a link to get there. Not to mention the fact that I use twitter extensively on my phone, and won’t follow a link anywhere.

In the end, twitter was intended to be a quick and dirty communication medium. The more we extend it, the less of its essence and purpose is retained..

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.

Twitter is steadily gaining in popularity, despite its lack of stability. I believe that the simplicity of the service is a major contributing factor to this popularity. As opposed to a closed system that users must use “as it was intended”, twitter has been an easy platform for people to leverage to meet their own needs. I’ve collected a decent amount of links to third party apps that build off twitter. Kathy Gill actually drafted up an interesting article on twitter genres. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to tweet.

In an effort to make the service more powerful, some conventions are being established. Most people recognize “@username” to be a reference to a specific user on twitter (and their name will be linked to their account). Something else users may see are hashes (#) before words. My first exposure to this lead me to hashtags.org (another similar service is twemes). Hashtags.org is an opt-in service. A twitterer can follow @hashtags, and then may use hashtags.org to track realtime tweets that reference that specific hashtags. I’ve seen people throw hashes in front of half of the words in their tweets, to try to leverage this tracking.

Except…

Using hashtags.org requires two things:

1. you must opt-in
2. you only access content prefaced by a hash.

There are plenty of services out there that track all the text within tweets on the public timeline, not just of those who opt in. So if you wanted to know about, say, iCitizen, you could go to http://summize.com/search?q=iCitizen. You get the items prefaced with the hash, as well as without.

So why use hashes at all? For me, it’s a good way to give some context around a tweet. I’ve found it particularly useful for events. When I spoke recently at Spring <br />, I had a few contextual tweets:

Just ran into an old coworker from lexis. He better not heckle! #springbr

@ssaldoff - thanks! they’re recording all the presentations so they’ll be available online later #springbr

The tweets would have felt unnatural had I had to write “just ran into an old coworker from lexis at the spring break conference. he better not heckle” or “they’re recording all the presentations here at the spring break conference so they’ll be available online later”. As well, I would have had to be sure I was referencing the conference the same way every time for it to be easily found. The hashtag offers that context without making the tweet too long.

So that’s the deal on hashtags. Adding additional context to 140 character message..

As I mentioned, last week was the iCitizen client symposium, held by my employer, Resource Interactive. We had a social media cafe dedicated to showing attendees the power of social media and in particular, some of the most popular tools and services out there. We had an official live blogger and twitter stream, as well as a host of other delegates participating.
To showcase the power of twitter, we educated people on how to track a topic, and we kept Summize up on a few screens to show people how to monitor buzz. We were ecstatic to see that we reached the #1 trending topic at a few different times through the conference.

As the day wore on, we found we were having more trouble with twitter. Some of us who used the service regularly laughed it off, instructing people that “the first thing you need to learn about using twitter is that it isn’t always reliable.”

Yes, there was no reason for me to suspect this was anything different than any other twitter downtime. But then today I saw a link to what I recently saw referred to as the “twitter excuse blog“, where they shared a graph of the week up until Wednesday (iCitizen was Tuesday and Wednesday).

/>

A curious commenter noted the peaks:

It peaks in the evening time on the 19th, then in the morning on the 20th, then the entire evening again. On the 21st, it peaks in the - morning again? - nope, flat in the morning, peak at mid-afternoon, slammed in the evening again.

Now, I don’t know about the time zone for the graph, but I do find it interesting that the times were entered around our event. Goodness knows we had some hardcore twitterers sharing their thoughts.

Many of us had been tracking the term “icitizen”, and something I read earlier today mentioned that it was potentially this feature that caused some of the problems. I know we had some cases where people were overwhelmed with the volume of messages returned from tracking, and turned to tweetscan on their own:

icitizen tweets coming in too fast and furious to keep up! I’ve switched to tracking them here: http://snurl.com/29xfm #icitizen (from @getshust)

Now we’re all home and recovering from frantic tweeting, and while twitter is still struggling (most recently, suffering from a DB crash), I can’t help but wonder if in the true vein of iCitizenry, if we were all influential in taking twitter down?