Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

This week's On The Media (NPR Show) has an interesting look at the net's "mid-life crisis" - discussing outmoded routers, anonymity, and viruses, among other things. I found it most fascinating that in all of the discussion of where the net's at currently, where it's been and where it's headed that there was no mention of the single-most used application used when dealing with the internet - the web browser.

Yes, of all the tools that need to be standardized on the web, browsers have had the most attempts at regulation via the W3C but, yet, still prove the most irksome. Likewise, they exemplify the problems that OTM focuses on - they're outmoded (IE6 still proves to be a major player though it's not two versions behind) and they open up users to Trojans and other malware via their poor coding (again, IE6). I wonder if OTM requires some kind of metaphor to make this point clear. For me, I describe the difference in web browsers as if looking out four windows and seeing four completely different versions of the same view. (though others have more colorful methods of describing this troublesome topic)

Listen to OTM's story here:http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/03/13/06.

Mike White

In 1969, Paul McCartney made what seemed to be a random decision to call the Beatles album "Abbey Road" and put this picture on the cover.

40 years later, Abbey Road is still a tourist destination.

Above is a recent Youtube time-lapse video of the famous zebra-crossing. (Video is a promotional piece for http://www.blameringo.com).

I'm sure the drivers in St John's Wood curse the day that McCartney made that decision. I know I did when I used to drive through this very exclusive leafy suburb in North West London.

David Feldt @davidfeldt

Blow your cool offline and it's probably forgotten about in 24 hours. Have it out with someone online and there's not only a record you can't erase, but it could spread past the 15 feet your voice would normally carry.

Do online communication tools make it easier to tell someone what's really on your mind? You think you may be hiding behind your twitter alias, but you're really putting yourself out there.

You can't really take back your words when there's a trail of them in cyberspace. I reckon it to having a fight with your spouse in Best Buy. It's just between the two of you, but you have all these onlookers -- customers and workers -- who will only ever know you that way. The big difference is the onlookers. What may have been strangers in the store could become colleagues, potential clients, bosses, friends and even more strangers online.

Such was the case when a national reporter picked a fight with a marketing consultant on twitter. His offline demeanor annoyed her enough to tweet about, though not naming names. He took offense and thus the bashing began.

Strangers retweeted the story. Some looked up the antagonist's twitter page and even read some of his old posts, searching for a trend in his crude behavior.

The up side is when you're in the heat of an argument and the other person says, "listen to yourself," you can truly go back and reread how irrational (they think) you are being. Could be a new behavioral training technique. It just might make you think twice about how, where and who you pick a fight with next.

Have you ever regretted something you "said" online while drunk, angry or fervently upset? Did it spread to people it was not intended for?

Sarah Jo Sautter

Most of us would say money. And yet money alone does not motivate better work or increase job satisfaction. Do we work for money because there is an underlying premise that people don't like to work and must be bribed to do it?

That may have been true for the industrial revolution, but a key difference between the industrial economy and the digital economy is that the role of the worker has shifted from brawn to brain. Knowledge is now a key differentiator, so is it also time to revisit this most fundamental value equation?

A year ago, Seth Godin wrote about the passionate worker:

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.
The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation... because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour.

A recent Businessweek article, "Will Work for Praise" describes how web entrepreneurs are making money through armies of volunteers willing to work for free to build their own personal brands. In a web 2.0 world, there is an implicit symbiotic relationship in place around resource exchange: entrepreneur(s) with money provide(s) platform and technology, volunteers with time provide relevant content to build a personal brand and help others.

Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the father of modern economics, lived and wrote during a similarly challenging transition from an agrarian to industrial society. Before he published The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a classic treatment of ethics that laid the foundation for his free-enterprise classic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed that beyond economic pursuits, there are moral pre-requisites to capitalism. Human nature isn't just about self-interest but it also includes important motivators: sympathy, empathy, friendship, love and the desire for social approval.

The Wealth of Nations draws on situations where man's morality is likely to play a smaller role -- such as the laborer involved in pin-making -- whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments focuses on situations where man's morality is likely to play a dominant role among more personal exchanges.

If people want to work and are willing to do it for free or some other value exchange in the digital economy, should businesses adapt to this new sensibility?

Lori Laurent Smith

As Barack Obama's inaugural address has had a day to sink in, there is a passage that has inspired me to think about how progress sometimes mean going back as much as forward:

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true."

This inauguration and indeed this new administration has used new technology in fascinating ways. But as much as it has been forward-thinking, using all the newest in social media goodness, it struck me that this is also a return to the times of tribal councils and of campfire conversations. Technology is enabling conversational intimacy for the masses in ways we haven't experienced in a long time.

It's not just government of course, and it's not just what has been happening recently. Just look at where we have gone with storytelling in the past thousand years. It turned from the oral history of many to the written history of few. Slowly but surely the power to read and write came to the masses, and then with the internet we were able to share our stories. With Wikipedia and citizens journalism, we are writing history as a collective as it happens.

And it's not just our behavior, but it is also our technology. In a great post at ReadWriteWeb, Alex Iskold talks about how in a world that is increasingly becoming more digital, we are actually making a return the physical. Interfaces are becoming more natural and reacting to a familiar and yet new style of physics. Things bounce and slide, they fall and zoom, only no friction... it's effortless, it's better.

We are progressing and we are returning. And hopefully that will mean the best of both worlds.

Marta Strickland

On ThreeMinds we often post about interesting home page takeovers and online advertising. Just this week, in fact, there was mention of the Ford takeover on ESPN. However, we often forget to mention the original platform: the actual "billboard". Modern billboards continue to stretch the envelope in innovative ways, using physical space and perspective to intrigue and inspire:

Clever and Creative Billboard Advertising

It's important to keep a watchful eye on this medium for two reasons...

1. With online advertising slumping, people are less and less interested in the expected. Online billboards that play with the digital space, much like real billboards play with physical space, are going to break through the noise.

2. With the increase in smartphone sales and mobile web usage, our physical space is becoming our digital space. Real life billboards have the potential to become a gateway into digital with things like QR codes and touch screen interfaces.

Thanks to Tony Jankiewicz for the link!

Marta Strickland

image credit: factoryjoe [Flickr]

For digital marketers, it pays to be opportunistic. Wherever there is a jarring or unsatisfactory experience, just as in the real world, there is often a chance to build in a message that suits a brand mission. Take 404 errors for example. Sooner or later someone is going to either click on a broken link from an email, mistype a URL, or a developer will write bad code that somehow makes it through QA. The user experience sucks, but sometimes a bit of good clean fun can come from a common moment of frustration.

We have to give a nod to whoever came up with this display advertising campaign for The Alliance for Climate Protection and their purchase of the Washington Post's 404 error pages. Here, an environmental lobbying group seeking to call out opposing the energy sector's efforts to promote "clean coal" as just so much hot air.

It redirected an otherwise bad experience into a memorable point.

More fun 404 pages here. (Organic did the Geek Squad one, BTW).

Michael Beavers

There is this fascinating book called The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, who takes a look at how the clustering together of like-minded individuals is homogenizing America. Sandy Marsh wrote an excellent post on ThreeMinds about the dangers of homogenization in our culture, where in her frustration she cried out:

"It makes me want to sew my own clothes and burn the patterns. Create my own desserts and wash them down with a glass of milk and the recipes. Develop my own language and only share the decoder ring with my closest friends and family. Start traditions and keep secrets."

So here is my question of the day... Is the same destined to be true for social media as it has been for the real-world? Are we destined for a big online sort?

I don't have an answer. On one hand I want to embrace the niche as a way to find relevance in the noise. On the other hand, I don't want to isolate myself in a homogenized world of wine snobs and social media junkies, never to discover that my true passion might be for football (yikes!).

I don't have an answer, but here is some food for thought. It seems in fashion these days to be divisive. As one person writes a blog post exclaiming Twitter is going to save the world, another declares Twitter is dead.

We work in black and whites, pulling towards biased news outlets and online groups that support our opinions. At any given moment, you can find your PRO this and ANTI this groups on Facebook waging war. But where is the Facebook group for "I can see both sides of the story" or "Let's find common ground"?

And what will this homogenization mean for marketers, who are just starting to hop onto the social media train? With their enthusiasts in one corner and their haters in another, they are bound to get a very biased viewpoint depending on which conversation they join. Which is a shame, because the real magic happens when those conversations come together.

Marta Strickland

For many, the act of archival is about remaining true to the original source, maintain authenticity and fidelity. Maybe at most, we remaster in attempt to boost the sounds or images that were already there. But with the incredible tools of modern video and web, there is the opportunity to allow us to do something more... to reimagine, to dream, and to build upon the original in a way that extends the experience to more senses and more audiences.

"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message."

Nick Sternberg

image credit: toothpaste for dinner

The online world is saturated with content. There are more expert opinions, user-generated content, and brand messages than one could ever consume in a lifetime of internet surfing. Why then, in an overloaded world, should brands still consider blogging (or micro-blogging) a worthy investment?

Three simple reasons...
1. It Humanizes
2. It's Fast
3. It's Two-Way

Humanizing Your Brand
Good corporate blogs can be seen as the face of the brand without makeup. In a time where consumers trust each other far more than they trust brand communication, blogs offer the opportunity to make brand communication more personal. Some brands will elect an internal evangelist with a passion for the brand to become an author for the blog. Others will make sure that all posts are written in a conversational tone. Blogs are a place where brands can talk without much filtering, and help regain consumer trust through transparency.

Getting Your Message Out FAST
Not bogged down with the time intensive needs of media buys, production schedules, creative concepting, etc, blogs offer one of the quickest ways to get a message out to consumers. This increases the relevance of messaging, which hits subscribers RSS readers and Google Blog Search in a time where consumers are actively searching for information. Because of this, blogs are often used as one of the first tools during a brand crisis to get the corporate side of the story out to the masses and clear up any misinformation.

Joining The Conversation
Finally, blogs are a place for brands to have two-way conversations with their enthusiasts, skeptics, and consumers looking to actively reach out. Many poorly executed corporate blogs are used merely as another PR platform, a one-way channel to push messaging. Consumers flock to corporate blogs in the hopes of a humanized, relevant message, and are open to engaging in conversation if given the opportunity. Great corporate blogs use this channel as a way to gather influencers and help change consumer opinion by making it not just a place to talk, but a place to listen.

Marta Strickland (editor at ThreeMinds)
Mike Hudson (editor at AllHands)