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.

We are allegedly on the cusp of recovery.  Things are supposed to be improving.  All we need to see is those floodgates of new business open up and… we’ll be all good!

But I find that when I talk to customers and prospects, we are all frustrated.  We all want this recovery to take hold in a real way — real in terms of easier deals, more deals, less stress.

One thing that doesn’t seem to change, whether we are under stress or things are going great, is the self-discipline required to keep the basics of our marketing going.  Certainly I fall victim to this syndrome — I ignore the blog, fail to attend to my SEO hygiene, drift from the beloved Twitterverse for days on end.

An apple a day.  Once in the morning is not enough.  Pablum, but common sense.

Today, I got back to the blog — fixed some bugs, and got this post written.  Not sure what I’ll tend to tomorrow… are you ?

* – today’s blog title attributed to Christine Mann of Randori Partners.

If you were paying attention during the dot com era, there was a lot to be learned. Learned in the sense that George Santayana wanted us to learn from history — or be condemned to repeat it.

Speaking of history, the vaunted authority Wikipedia has this to say about the Gold Rushes of the 19th century:

Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a “free for all” in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly. The significance of gold rushes in history has given a longer life to the term, and it is now applied generally to denote any capitalist economic activity in which the participants aspire to race each other in common pursuit of a new and apparently highly lucrative market, often precipitated by an advance in technology.

Surely the incredible growth in the formation of businesses — complete with CFOs, HR departments, health benefit plans — around very small ideas which took place during the dot com craze was like a gold rush.

Who knew there would be so much investment available to support so much overhead when compared with the technology or product idea at the core of these internet businesses?  Thousands of companies sprang up — each requiring space, phones, furniture, accountants, parking spaces and dental insurance.  Some with ideas so small the founders couldn’t even articulate what it was they were in business to do.

Well we all learned our lessons.  Or did we?

Business Week’s December 14 issue (online December 3)  includes an article by Stephen Baker entitled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil.”  In the article, Baker does the unthinkable: he calls out the self-styled “experts” who are flogging all social media all the time.  “The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.”

Baker gets it.  Go ahead and wade into the social media… just your little toe… and you’ll be awash.  But not in gold dust rushing through the stream caught in your pie-tin pan.  Awash in an amazing volume of offers to help you get your social media mind right… or else!

Social media doctrine? “Engage your community.”  “Listen twice, talk once.”  “Be transparent.”  Don’t worry about troubling prospects for contact information… just give all of your information away.

I really loved Josh Kopelman’s post on Redeye VC that cautioned those who, when the rubber meets the road and they realize they don’t have a proper go-to-market plan, say at the last minute, “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”

After the dot com bubble burst, sales people had to sell, not just stand by the fax machine taking orders.  Lots of sales guys lost their jobs as a result.

Mark my words: we are passing through a marketing gold rush.  There’s gold in them thar hills, at least today.

But in the long run, marketing is about expressing an enduring promise of value, and delivering it.  Though the media may change, that challenge will not.

Photo Credit: flickr/Rossco

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?

Help!

I have several clients (and I get asked for recommendations by prospects all the time) who are trying to make a decision about their social or community infrastructure.  They’ve tried a few things (or in some cases a half-dozen point solutions), and now see that it’s time to pick a more strategic solution.

I’m investigating alternatives on their behalf.  Their sizes vary, but most are mid- to large companies in the tech sector.  They are North American or European companies.

The functionality they generally describe as requiring in a solution includes:

1. Basic web content management with support for workflow / approval
2. User management (profiles, roles, access control)
3. Blogs / wikis / forums
4. Rating / voting; tagging; comments

Almost all are migrating from a hybrid environment using many technologies: some proprietary, some open source, almost all a blend.  All now see the need to consolidate / simplify the management of it all.

The goals are to:

1. Improve engagement with customers and prospects
2. Consolidate technologies, licenses, maintenance fees to control costs
3. Gain administrative control)
4. Preserve flexibility to customize (through services available from vendor or partners)

I’m seeking information like this:

1. Ranges that licensing costs likely fall into based on a small-ish implementation (dev / test / production, but small # of CPUs) vs. a larger implementation at a successful but mid-sized  company?  (i.e., not worried about cost of supporting a massively scaled-out environment like a huge consumer retail site)
2. SaaS or subscription pricing?

Daily services rates to support a project:

1. Architecture / planning – high level pre-implementation services;
2. Implementation – install, tune, integrate
3. Customization
4. Training

Please share any resources you might have access to which can help me help these worthy businesses make sense of the Wild Wild West environment they face out there.

Photo: looking4poetry, Flickr

Yesterday, I conducted a web seminar for a group of about 30 from a small-ish company, to educate them on the state of the media and to update them on how even small brands are flexing their muscle with new media tools to have a disproportionate (i.e. David and Goliath) impact on their addressable markets.

As part of my own learning process, I have been interacting with very small businesses — and I mean very small. What I have been educating them about is that today, as opposed to five or ten years ago, they can look and act like even their most out-of-reach competitors. And that if they move fast, they can get ahead of them via blogging, microblogging, social networks and online communities.

Consumers are using all kinds of tools to find solutions to their problems, and not many brands are taking that sophisticated an approach.

Image search is still wide open for small businesses whose work needs to be seen: landscapers; kitchen designers; architects / builders; designers… just to name a few. I am amazed to see how a well-indexed photo performs — driving dozens of click-throughs to my landscaper’s website. A single photo! What if he posted and indexed 100 (well within Flickr free account limits)?

Word of mouth is one of the most over-analyzed concepts in marketing history. But there is no doubt that the word of mouth that once took place live and in living color at Starbucks or at dinner parties, is taking place on Facebook and Twitter. Spending moments establishing an identity there makes access to buyers thinking about the product or service you offer at the precise moment they are talking and thinking about it — accessible to you. That’s hot.

Watch out Big Brands. The disintegration of the economy continues. And I don’t mean the breakdown perpetrated by our financial geniuses at the Big Banks. I mean the disintegration of big, monolithic brands — and the quiet and inexpensive attack forming amongst the smaller buy unifying tribes.

Let’s hope this is a David / Goliath deal, not a Wallace / Robert the Bruce (Wallace was Braveheart, Robert the Bruce his betrayer).

I would love to have you as a subscriber, if you are not one already.