SXSW in Twitter conversations, March 2009

While it’s fashionable to decry the actual panels, there was some interesting conversation at this year’s SXSW that didn’t take place at the Salt Lick. The best formal panel I attended described the integrated marketing effort behind Electronic Arts’ Dead Space. EA overcame an internal bureaucracy to put together a content-driven marketing approach that included both an interactive web experience and a comic book illustrated by Ben Templesmith. EA incurred tremendous cost in content creation and orchestration with so many moving parts (and plot lines), but the user engagement more than paid off with over a million games sold in 2008.

A prevalent conference theme was that social is an undisputed growth area for traditional brands, as Monday’s Forrester report Social Media Playtime Is Over (account required) points out. Brands like Walmart and Pepsi were out in force at SXSW, capitalizing on the authenticity, reach, and mindshare that influential bloggers like 11 Moms and Chris Brogan bring to bear. While the dollar spend is still comparatively low, Forrester is counseling brands to move beyond the experimentation stage and develop management strategies for social in the long term.  The next step in social for the enterprise is to develop the listening capability and social marketing metrics that demonstrate how social efforts convert to consumer preference and purchases.

Tags: brand, events, social web by admin
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Interesting to see how the words used to describe the event changed as the recaps came in over the next  24 hours. In this version, the true social media star of the event, Henry the Boston terrier, gets a mention.

Tags: events by admin
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As part of Social Media Week, Crimson Hexagon sponsored a Social Media Breakfast on online branding. Here’s a quick recap:

• Brad McCormick talked about different ways Porter Novelli delivers brand and business insights from social media to B2C behemoths
• Shiv Singh of Razorfish gave us some meaningful ways to think about successful online branding (think: authenticity, transformation, freshness—for a better summary, check out Daniel Tunkelang’s post)
• Melanie Notkin wowed the crowd with the passion and energy she uses to build her one-aunt brand, Savvy Auntie

No social media event is complete without the attendees having the last word, so here’s this morning’s wordle of the Tweets with the hashtag #smbnyc4:

Tags: brand, events by admin
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Last week, I attended the CMO Summit in San Francisco, and this week my colleague Cesar Brea and I presented at CMO Club in Boston. Our focus was a framework for engagement — defining “structured collaboration” as a sort of a brandprint for identifying and filtering

In both venues, questions arose about the changing role of marketing in the Web 2.0 environment. CMOs today face huge challenges: rapidly shifting channels, ever shorter tenures, interaction with IT as technology becomes core, and managing relationships with legal (which are captured beautifully here by David Armano). In addition, some cultural barriers remain in transitioning from brand command-and-control to a brand experience shaped by the ever-widening concentric circles of social media.

Tags: events, marketing by admin
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There were some great presentations at the ARF Industry Leader Forum in NY this week. One of the themes of interest to me in several ways was one that Joel Rubinson set up in the intro.  Social media, he said, allows companies to “observe consumers in the wild”, in their natural habitat for how they use and talk about products.

I believe his point was a good one that free of the Hawthorne effect, you can get a more unbiased view of consumer opinions when they don’t explicitly know that you are observing them.  It’s the idea that just by the nature of your asking a question or showing interest in something, you might change how another person acts or responds.  I’ve often heard Gary King use an analogy to make a similar point: If I asked you what your opinion is of the National Helium Reserve, you might very well state an opinion, even though prior to being asked you may never have known that such a thing exists (a giant gas station for blimps! My next business plan will clearly be for personal dirigibles). However, online, you aren’t going to express an opinion when you don’t have one (That’s different than expressing an uninformed opinion, which is still an opinion).

That said, the whole reason people write opinions online is so that other people DO read them. They want to be heard, to help, to share. Do peacocks always have their tail feathers fanned? Is that how they naturally look? Do you behave differently if someone might be watching?

I don’t believe this at all discounts the value of listening to online opinion — in fact, I argue that it’s the best possible way (though the Lily Tomlin switchboard operator might disagree) to hear what people really think. Online consumer opinion is far more pervasive, far more representative, and far more influential than any other source of feedback.

My last thought on the analogy is that it seems to reflect an attitude toward consumers that they are another species. It’s Jane Goodall with the gorillas. Yes, we need to listen and watch and understand, and yes, they are in control, and yes, they are using those little stick tools in new ways we never thought possible but in this case, it’s not they. It’s we. The wonderful thing about the web is it’s like a one-way mirror that you can instantly dissolve. You can reach out. Have a conversation, far beyond Koko and her sign language. You can follow up, engage, and make each other better.

Tags: brand monitoring, research by Candace Fleming
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An interview with Candace Fleming from the New Marketing Summit earlier this month:

and a second interview with Candace and the inimitable (and ubiquitous!) Chris Brogan:

Tags: brand monitoring, events by admin
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My colleague Melyssa and I are listening and learning at the Forrester Consumer Forum down in Dallas. So far we’ve checked out a Tweetup (photos available courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang) and caught up with many former colleagues in marketing on both the client and vendor sides.

The theme is “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customer” and I’d argue that there’s an air of: how the heck do we even keep up. While tried and true marketing tactics remain important, understanding how to reach today’s consumer is a developing digital competency. Cameron Death of NBC Universal was compelling on this point — realize the value of branded communities, but be aware and partner to understand all the places consumers are gathering and influencing.

To follow this conference, you can view the keynotes streamed by Forrester. If you’re interested in a Twitterstream of all the <140 character updates from attendees (aka, the firehose), you can follow the #FCF08 hashtag on Twitter search.

Tags: customer voice, events, marketing by admin
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Last week I had the chance to hear Bill Gates speak at the Harvard Business School Centennial, and he had some insightful comments about the economy. Granted, he has some pretty good sources … like a phone call the night before with Warren Buffett. 

From Gates’ perspective, we in the US ran an “interesting experiment”, where the economy as a whole was still fairly solid and in some ways separate from the recent credit crisis. What really caused the downward spiral, however (and according to his comments), was the three consecutive weeks of front pages and websites showing graphs of the Depression. In his mind, the downtown in consumer sentiment, inspired by the graphs/voices of a relatively small number of influencers, is where things really went awry.

What would happen if we paid a million workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to post more positive graphs all over the internet? It might be less expensive than the bailout, and help avoid creating what the WSJ today called one giant panic-transmission machine.

Tags: events by Candace Fleming
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Next week our CEO Candace Fleming is sneaking down to Foxboro to take part in the New Marketing Summit. She’ll be participating in a panel called Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring and the Future. Chris Brogan and CrossTech have lined up some terrific speakers, including Don Peppers keynoting on  Dancing Shoes for Honeybees — which apparently relates to personal mobile technology, and not entomology.

If you want to get spend some time in Gillette Stadium and away from obsessively clicking refresh on Google Finance, go on and register here.

Tags: events, product by admin
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Our CEO Candace Fleming will be speaking at the New Marketing Summit on October 14 in Foxboro.  Chris Brogan has put together a terrific agenda, including Don Peppers who should have some interesting insights on 1to1 media meeting social media — feels more like a continuum than a sea change to me.

Candace’s panel is Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring, and the Future. We’re hoping she’ll get the chance to dive in with some concrete examples of where tuning in to opinion made an actionable difference.

Tags: events, product by admin
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