From Stina Stockholm, Flickr

When I became a corporate “outsider,” almost three years ago, I felt that marketing as a business function was changing fundamentally.  I plunged into research mode to learn how the “old media” (print publications, radio, network & cable TV, with staff writers employed by giant media companies) were giving way to the “new” (citizen publishers producing content on the web for free).

I launched my consulting business by exploiting social networks, this blog, and free content (see Resources) in order to stimulate my network and tease out interest in project work ranging from part-time-CMO to white papers.  It worked.

I also witnessed “tulip mania” as self-styled (and genuine) experts emerged and captured the attention of almost everyone on a marketing career path.  For a time during 2009 old media events (conferences) were popping up left right and center headlined by new media gurus extolling one of the movement’s foundation principles: Give, give, give… listen, listen, listen… engage… and in the end you will be rewarded a hundredfold with opportunity (and, presumably, filthy lucre).  Become known as a source of quality content, and customers will beat a path to your door.

A couple of months ago, I spotted an ad on Facebook which quoted social media beacon Chris Brogan’s daily rate at something in excess of $20,000.  The offer was to gain all of that wisdom by joining a new community featuring Chris, Darren Rowse, and Brian Clarke — known as Third Tribe Marketing — for a mere $97 initial payment, followed by $47 per month.  As their blogs, collectively, have over 300,000 readers, even using the old school marketing yield on direct mail of 2%, that’s a neat $3 million (with an M) per annum!  Now that’s capitalism for you.  My guess is they timed that initiative just right.

Go for the promotional material on the website if you wish (after all, they’re amongst the best at web copy writing), but let’s be clear: as well as these guys have been doing living off the “give it away for free” model, these leading lights have clearly seen an opportunity to do business one $500-per-year subscription at a time.  Perhaps, like Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — it’s not about their ego or the money — they just want to win the new media world championship.  Time will tell.

Another recent observation: though the new media mantra of “inbound marketing” (nowhere more religiously observed than at Hubspot) poo poos the old-school outbound tactics of telemarketing and direct mail, I know many of us with marketing in our online profiles were bombarded with offers to sign up for the April Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco — notably as the conference’s dates were drawing perilously near.

So should this mini-bubble burst, should the petals drop from the precious tulips (and I believe it/they will), what can we take away?

First, it is true that the media have irreversibly changed. The problem is, the changes are not that dramatic, nor are the implications that difficult to understand.  There isn’t a huge amount of magic; no need for wizards; no new secret handshakes and shibboleths for the elite of this new marketing paradigm.  Brands are their own publishers, and they are largely in control of their own media.  A capability once outsourced to one or more agencies has moved in house, and media costs are heading toward zero.  That’s about it.  I speak to groups of young entrepreneurs from time to time… and after two hours of very high level teaching, they are off and running and becoming their own content foundries.

Psst… guess what… it’s not really that hard to figure this stuff out!

Second, brands (and marketing professionals in particular) need to take much more seriously the content responsibility with which they are now saddled.  We used to talk about a people to programs ratio of 40:60.  Leverage in marketing meant distributing costs 40% in human resource costs, and 60% in media and external programs designed to “drive the fish to the nets.”  Today companies need to invest much more heavily in the creation, curation, and distribution of content — using human beings to do so.  Marketing departments will be moving discretionary spend (which is easy to cut in case of a revenue shortfall) to personnel expense (which is difficult to cut, at least for most sentient humans).

Finally, marketing needs to attack with every fiber in its being the “signal-to-noise ratio” problem which all of this new media and social networking technology has created.  Zero barriers to entry for publishing and vastly expanding user-generated content volume conspire to create a polluted information environment which makes the BP Deepwater Horizon mess look like “On Golden Pond.”  In addition to relentless promotion of our own messages and achievements, we are going to have to exhibit leadership in filtering the extremely high volume of extremely low value information, and continuously enhance our web sites to make them more like museums, libraries, and exhibits — destinations for quality, creativity, and clarity — and less like cheesy storefronts.  Content curation solutions, like the one just launched by HiveFire, may be extremely valuable in attacking this enormous challenge.

What do you think?

I had the great pleasure and distinct honor to give a talk to about 200 students of photography a couple of weeks ago — out in Turner’s Falls at the Hallmark Institute of Photography.

I was invited by an old friend, John Nordell, who is an artist and photojournalist, and also an instructor at Hallmark.  He writes a great blog on the creative process, called Create Look Enjoy, and you can see a great variety of his work at JohnNordell.com.

My purpose was to impress upon these budding entrepreneurs (most will be going into business on their own, others joining established pros as assistants) why the outbound marketing era is over; the importance of embracing the techniques of inbound marketing; and to get “unbound” — to begin NOW to get their brand-building efforts going.

What a great time… and what an amazingly gratifying set of responses from the students!

During my talk (a link to the slides is below), I told some stories from my own experience with social media.  How I got my first really big consulting gig through my blog and Facebook within about ten days, how one of my amateur photos is on exhibit at Arizona State University thanks to Flickr.  I wonder if  Woody Allen knew how much marketing and the media would change when he wrote, “80 percent of success is showing up.”

What a thrill to hear from Tanisha Stephens, who shared the following on Facebook after my talk:

Yesterday @ school we had a guest lecturer by the name of Tim Dempsey, who talked about the importance of social media and the positive impact it can have on your business. Today we had a class(w/ John Nordell) on social media in relation to gaining business exposure through sites like FaceBook, Twitter, & Flickr. Because I believed every word of what they said, I now have this FaceBook account !

Tanisha started her Facebook page… Tanisha Stephens Photography… the very next day.

But she didn’t stop there.  She started reaching out to build her network, and posted an offer to kick start her business when she graduates this Spring:  Here’s her promotion piece, which was featured only on her Facebook page:

Tanisha's Promo Piece

Hi Tim, I didn’t get a chance to speak to you personally after you spoke, but I want to say thank you. Since you were here, I have really taken advantage of the benefits of social media. I’ve planned a photo shoot in my hometown in Alabama for the end of this month & without any advertising other than facebook and I booked all 32 of the appointments I had available in less than a week. I printed flyers that my parents were supposed to put around town for people who aren’t on facebook, but at this point there is no need for that, because I already have a waiting list. I went from about 200 friends when you were here to over 700 friends today. I started a fan page and have 400+ fans. You were 100% on point and I thank you so much for coming and sharing this knowledge.

There’s not much more rewarding than having this kind of impact on a young entrepreneur!

Here are the slides… and don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like me to speak to YOUR group of budding businesspeople.

Merry Christmas.  Whatever your celebration at this time of year may be — may each of you enjoy a warm and restful holiday break.  I most certainly intend to!

2009 has been one of those “Best of Times, Worst of Times” years.

In what ways was it “Best?”

• My consulting business not only survived, but thrived.  I added several new accounts, including Acquia, GolfTripGenius, and Rosen Law Offices.
• My most significant piece of marketing advisory business, RSD, remains a strong account for me.
• I added Presence Engineering, or interactive website design and delivery to our offerings, launching several small business sites including Olde Thyme Home, Dana Landscaping, and Todd Michel Construction.
• I added photography services, bridging my lifelong hobby with my business, via my ‘affiliate’ Synopshots.

In what ways was it worst?

• Many friends and former colleagues experienced varying degrees or financial or professional hardship.
• The markets are seeing signs of recovery, but somehow no one believes we are in a dynamic recovery just yet.
• Our domestic political atmosphere is as partisan and replete with hypocrisy as I have ever observed.

So looking forward to 2010, here’s a few things I foresee:

1. Glacially, buyers will be authorized and funded to invest… and well-positioned businesses will begin winning and growing once again.
2. The businesses that are in position to win have the following characteristics:
   1. Rather than reinventing themselves under the stress of the last 18 months of economic uncertainty, they further refined and in many cases narrowed their “addressable market” scope.  Did you?
   2. They pulled back, perhaps both in overall spend and in staff levels, but are poised to reinvest in calendar Q1 as the number of indicators of recovery, however soft, begin to build.   Are you?
   3. They have built strategic reinvestment strategies and tactical plans, which are not radical in their love embrace of social media, but aware of the need to earn a loyal prospect / buyer community.  Is yours?
3. Small and growing businesses (most of the companies I work with) will clearly see that in the online world, they can stretch their brand to have every bit of the presence, authority, and reputation that far larger businesses possess.  And because they can act with more agility, they can disrupt those larger competitors with decisive strikes and aggressive tactical actions.  In other words — it’s going to get fun again!

And that’s what I miss most… the fun.  Let’s raise a virtual glass to seeing the fun return to our business lives in 2010!

I really feel for startups or small businesses trying to figure out where to start in understanding the new media which their customers and prospects are using to get information about products and services they’d like to buy.

Dana Landscaping goes online...

If you look around on any of the search engines, you are overwhelmed with tips, tools and techniques to get going in social media.  Once you start investigating them, weeks have passed and you have been up until all hours trying to figure out which of the thousands will help you weed out the massive volume of noise and focus on the signal — the valuable information about how to start and where to go.

There are three things you can do easily, and you can do today — which will get the ball rolling.  The nice thing about these three things is that they start rolling fast — and so do the results.

First: Move your website from that cheesy template-based site your host sold you to WordPress.

The key to gaining visibility in the noisy world of web media today is to become a publisher of interesting content based on your expertise.  That static site you are paying $4.95 a month for (or whatever) is not fresh, it’s not changing… and as a result it is probably NOT driving great search engine results for you.

With WordPress, you have incredible options for customization and design — to give your site a branded look.  If you don’t think that’s your strength, there are armies or WordPress professionals out there ready to help you out with design services.  It’s a competitive market, and rates are reasonable — you can get going for hundreds, not thousands, of $s.

But most importantly, WordPress is a blog platform.  In addition to the core, and infrequently changing information you want for your website, blogging allows you to write a professional diary.  As often as you like, you can publish snippets of insight, experience, a story from a day in your life… which communicate to readers a little something about you.  Your personality comes through and prospects begin to develop a sense of who you are and how you think.  You can blog from your mobile phone, your browser, at home or on the road… and WordPress makes it really easy.

Second: Establish a fan page on Facebook.

Add your logo, use your business description from your web site (to be consistent and clear… one of the keys to building your brand), and post a few images to give your page some character.  You can host discussions on topics of your choosing, encourage your Facebook friends (and theirs…) to become fans of your business page, and before long you have a little Facebook community ready to receive updates in their feeds about your business.

Search for “Dana Landscaping” on Facebook… and become a fan!  Every page needs 100 fans to be able to obtain a more attractive and useful custom URL for their Facebook business page.  Thanks in advance!

Third, establish a Twitter account for your business.

Use your logo for the picture, provide your web site address in the account settings panel… and begin exploring this medium as well.  Dana Landscaping has set up standard hashtag searches for #landscaping and a few other terms, to find out like-minded Tweeters.  Tom follows those guys, and is rapidly building out his Dana Landscaping following.  You can follow Tom and Dana Landscaping here.

These are the key first steps.  If you make these moves, and set aside 30 minutes to an hour, three times a week, to nurture the community you are building, write new posts, respond to comments and feedback, you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Tom Busta of Dana Landscaping, a family-owned and operated landscape design and build company based in the Merrimack Valley, in Andover, Massachusetts, recently dove in and took these first three steps.  He is developing a great online personality (though he is almost completely new to this new media world), and is building following.  And most importantly, within the first few weeks he already started receiving requests for designs and price quote for new jobs.  And in a slower economy, that makes all the effort worthwhile!

And the cost to Dana Landscaping to develop and launch these new marketing activities?  Zero.

You may find the technology intimidating, and so firms like Elastic Brands are here to help you get going… but the point is the barriers to entry are low.  It’s just hard to figure out where to start, and for me these three things are the must-do first steps.

What do you think?  Are you ready?

Michael Calienes is a blogger and marketer I stumbled across as one does about a year ago.  I clicked through a link recently to a fine piece of guidance for marketers planning their next communication program — whatever the media and however narrow or broad the goal.

It’s called the “three-step strategy statement,” is available readily at his site, and represents the kind of simple but planful thinking we should all do to keep our communication programs on the same path as our broader business strategy.  An excellent tool.

Thanks, Michael!

Happy customer!

About a year ago, I had the good fortune to work with an aggressive and entrepreneurial team at a company known as FirstDIBZ, based in Chicago. They are a very interesting and innovative group — having taken on the challenge of inventing a new type of market: forward rights to highly desirable events.

All That

Mashable had a nice write-up on the company back in September.

The FirstDIBZ founder had nice words to say about our work together, which made me blush:

Tim Dempsey came into our shop, an established corporate entity with 5 years of serious revenue generation under our belts, and quickly showed us how much character our overall marketing personality was lacking – no real authority, no real presence and zero reputation. We were stunned into silence and then into change. Tim’s honest and pointed prodding of our goals truly opened us up to his methodology, which continues to inform our marketing efforts to this day. In a simple and clear manner, with his enormous marketing intelligence, deep experiences and razor instincts, he led us through 2 days of focused and well planned marketing work. We learned more about our company in those two days than we had in the previous 365!
Richard Harmon
CEO, Founder, Ticket Reserve -dba FirstDIBZ
Chicago, Il.

There are many definitions of the marketing term “brand.”  There are brand managers.  We speak of the brand experience.

Companies craft and shape their brand image.

Loads of lucre is spent to preserve, protect and defend brands.

The definition I most like?  An

Enduring

Buyers believe that value will remain consistent.  Coca-cola conjures a shapely bottle, bright red cans.  Mouths salivate in anticipation of that unique taste.

Promise

I lace up my Nike shoes and suddenly I can “Just do it.”
of

Value.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”  “Volvo.  For Life.”

We just know these things about these mega-brands.  But we should be asking, and answering, these questions about our own brands.

If that’s what a brand is – then how can a brand be elastic?  Why should a brand be elastic?

Because this notion of a “brand” was established when the world was r_ouⁿd.

And as we know from Tom Friedman, the world is now flat.

Technological advances have not just leveled the competitive playing field.  They have redefined the cultural and commercial structures of the global economy.  The “flat world” has created both enormous threats to well-established businesses (think of the phenomenon of outsourcing to India in the 90’s), and laid the groundwork for the emergence and rapid growth of a whole new generation of businesses, business models, and – yes, brands (dare I mention Goog… nah).

And what it means to be and to manage a brand must change as well.

I suggest that along with these great technological advances and planet-flattening changes, there has been a fundamental change in the power balance between buyers and sellers.

There was a time when brands could control what information buyers had about their products.  Those days are over.

There was a time when the owners of newspapers and magazines, billboards, television and radio stations, owned the only communication vehicles consumers could consult for information about products and services.  Vendors financed those businesses through advertising, and thus had great influence over what information reached subscribers, viewers, or listeners.  Those days are over, too.

Brands, or vendors, have lost control over what information buyers have access to, and how they get it.

Thanks a lot, Vice President Gore!  Your internet has taken our flat world, and turned it upside down!

Semester in Australia

I have written about my childhood friend Steve Brown before — he runs the continent’s largest single day off-road bicycle race, The Iceman Cometh Challenge.

This spring, his son Camden spent the semester abroad — in Australia.  He’s been involved in school sports and class leadership his whole life — so he’s got a problem.  He’s in Australia, and Student Senate elections at Michigan State are taking place in Michigan.

So his basketball team is going to the NCAA Final Four, the elections are being held, and he’s half a world away.

So what does he do?  Well he does what he needs to to keep his presence front and center at this time full of potential distractions at State: sets up the Facebook page and starts his campaign in that online community.

Elections are next week; will keep you “posted.”

Crosswinds, cross currents

[Disclosure: this story, in part, recounts a client engagement to bring appropriate new media tools to a B2B software business]

There are at least two interesting currents out there, as I work with clients and speak with colleagues and friends in my network.

One has to do with the disproportionate volume of information about how to use new media, social networks, Twitter, etc.: I believe I’ve received tweets encouraging me to uncover 246 essential tools, 78 ways to get productive, 92 techniques to grow my following — and that’s just today.

The other has to do with a persistent question coming from those responsible for generating real revenue for real businesses with real customers and real employees: what are the relevant and practical ways to use the new media that will realistically have an impact on my business in my lifetime — which is getting shorter with each passing day during the economic crisis.

In essence, enterprise marketing leaders (CMOs, VPs of marketing) want to embrace new techniques, but can’t afford to appear to be investing in trendy activities with limited near-term impact.

Here’s my “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” advice for businesses from really small to really large:

Find something buyer-worthy to communicate.

You may be thrilled beyond belief that version 3.0.6 of your enterprise cloud infrastructure platform has finally made it out of development and QA.

But buyers ask themselves one question: will my life the day after I buy something from a vendor be improved in ways that far exceed what I paid?

Stories that convey that messages tend to be less often about a product and its zippy new feature set, and more often about a real return on investment achieved through the intelligent use of the product.  Less like this, and more like this.

Tease the story with a post or two on your company blog.

The blog platform, which is more reactive, opinion and judgment-oriented, and less formal, is a perfect place to begin to set the stage for the announcement itself.

Pick a fact or two from the bigger story and begin to tease your regular readers with the news.

Cross-post a microblog on Twitter.

If you haven’t already, get a corporate Twitter account and start building the search queries that will help you identify potential buyers NOW.

The hype about Twitter will thrill you with tales of how big news broke about Lance’s crash in the Vuelta Castilla y Leon in Spain today.  And as interesting as that is, I’m not now nor do I expect soon to be either a Tour de France cyclist nor a journalist or press photographer.  I just can’t do much with that information except be a bit sad about the pain he must be in.

However, if I construct an intelligent search string, I can find dozens, if not hundreds, of potential buyers who are thinking about the problem my company solves right at this very instant.  Now that I can get excited about, and you should too.  Tweet a link to your blog post.

Go for an old-school press release.

The traditional (print) press, PR firms, and the wire services are taking a hit these days, but for my money (namely less than $400), a sure-fire way to get lots of ‘impressions’ is to get a news release out on one of the wire services.

Despite my recent editorializing, PRWeb does a great job of this at a great price, as long as you can bear with their occasionally misleading user interface!

Make sure there’s a highlight of the story in an extremely prominent location on your website.

This one shold be obvious.  What’s the expression? “If it goes without saying,…”

Notify your social and professional networks.

Even if you don’t have a Facebook presence for your business, many social networkers ‘blend’ their Facebook presence with professional updates to great effect. LinkedIn, too, now provides many ways for you to engage that community. More on both of these at greater length and in greater detail in future posts!

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Each day I read another story or have another conversation about the paralysis that has set in at another organization regarding the appropriate first step, then second step, then third… to take in the use of new media within the company’s marketing strategy.

This weekend I had the good fortune to reconnect with an old colleague from the Lotus days, Paul Eric Davis. We were sequential commenters on a blog post — talk about needle in a haystack! He shared this view which I hear expressed more and more and more:

I think everyone — PR, marketing, execs — is trying to figure out which way is up and how best to leverage new media. Naturally, as is typical in our industry, marketers OF new media are creating a lot of over-hype that I feel is adding to the paralysis. It will take some time for the dust to settle and for companies to figure out how/when to infuse new media into their marketing mix — and to recognize that new media isn’t a panacea for every marketing objective.

I do find the air getting quite thin amongst the new media elite. I have been following, and subscribing, and in general lurking, listening and judging long enough to say with conviction that someone better show up with a useful and actionable treasure map for folks who are NOT in consumer businesses, and therefore NOT going to be looking to engineer “flashmobs.” They want to know how to get their ideas to spread to the right community — which may be defined in the hundreds or thousands, not in the squillions as some feel one needs to in order to earn new media “cred.”

I’m proposing the title “Two Hands and a Flashlight: Finding Order in the Chaos — a practical guide to finding your community niche with new media.” Or something like that. What do you think?

Thanks in advance.