Meeting of the New Marketing Minds, Part 1

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Christine Major
Filed Under Marketing | 2 Comments

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 2008 Photo 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.

Tags: Biz360, BuzzLogic, Candace Fleming, Chris Brogan, Christine Perkett, Crimson Hexagon, David Alston, David Meerman Scott, Gillette Stadium, Marketing, Mike Spartaro, new marketing, New Marketing Summit, Paul Gillin, Radian6, SMB9, Social Media Breakfast, Todd Parsons, Tony Priore, Visible Technologies

PR, Social Media, Transparency & Good News

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Christine Perkett
Filed Under Best Practices, Public Relations, Social Media & Networking | 10 Comments

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:

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?

Tags: Best Practices, new marketing, PR 2.0, social communities, Social Media, Social Media & Networking, transparency

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

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Christine Perkett
Filed Under Events, Public Relations | Leave a Comment

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 Broga n, 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!

Tags: New Marketing Summit; Chris Brogan, Paul Gillin; David Meerman Scott; PR 2.0, Web 2.0 PR

Interactive video campaigns begin to emerge

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Jeff Glasson
Filed Under Social Media & Networking | 2 Comments

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!

Tags: Choose your own adventure, Jeremiah Owyang, Samsung, Social Media & Networking, TeamText, TeleMessage, text to landline, Val's Art Diary, viral video, YouTube

Users gripe, Adobe listens

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Jeff Glasson
Filed Under Social Media & Networking | Leave a Comment

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?

Tags: Adam Meisel, Adobe, DearAdobe.com, Dell Ideastorm, Eric Frick, John Nack, Social Media & Networking