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.

I’m glad I’m not responsible for a big brand.

I lie.  I would love to manage a massive “enduring promise of value” like Coca-Cola.  But the challenge those big brands face is huge and growing — and it is coming from itty-bitty brands.

May I explain?

The disruption to the nice, rigidly structured media world which the web and social media have forced means alot for big brands.  It means that their control over the publishers, represented by their multi-billion dollar budgets, is diminishing.  Why?  Because the barriers to entry, the height of the bar, the cost to gain access to buyers — have been eliminated, lowered, trivialized, respectively.

Publishers used to control access to buyers, and big brands owned the publishers.  Little bitty brands can now become their own publishers — using tools that are free and by gaining access to buyers via channels that are also (essentially) free.

Coca-Cola used to be the dominant soft drink product on store shelves in general.  Now, Coca-Cola distributors have to carry dozens of products “on the truck” in order to keep the overall sell-through volume stable or growing.  The market has been fragmented by dozens of smaller, niche products (energy drinks, water, fruit juices, teas) which have effectively ‘dis-integrated’ the once monolithic soft drinks segment.

The second place I’m glad I don’t live is in the high-end web marketing design agency world.  Just like at the macro-level described above, I believe those guys are going to be disintermediated as well.  Free open source tools (like those used to power this site), crowd-sourcing, and an ever-sophisticated generation of technically savvy young people will put more and more and more pressure on the $100,000 logo design project, the $500,000 web site redesign, and the like.  More people will simply have more access to more tools to do excellent work on their own.  Yes there will be brands that need to (and have the requisite profits to) always pay the highest price to have the Chanel or the Prada or the Coca-Cola of marketing sites and  identity systems.

I just think that buyers will begin to see smaller and less significant differences between those massive investments and the results achieved by the more agile, more savvy, smaller brands.

What do you think?

Extra credit question: What was Coca-Cola’s long term financial gain from the Coca-Cola Classic marketing debacle?

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• Profit Edges Up at Coke, but Sales Stall in North America (nytimes.com)
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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!

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?

Interesting article on the BBC News site regarding Google’s plan to ‘ingest’ or ‘digitize’ every printed book on the planet.  Despite assurances regarding the sale of these works (that Google won’t), it raises interesting issues about copyrights.  What prospect does an author have of continuing to sell his or her work when it has been bought, scanned, and indexed by the runaway leading search engine?

I love Google — Google brings a lot of visitors to this blog (well I guess some work on SEO has helped).  But I haven’t thought much about this issue and am inclined to deepen my study of this one!

What do you think?

America's Newspaper

I keep very busy professionally as a result of rapid change in the world of inbound marketing.  Because buyers, consumers and users are spending so much time communicating and gathering information on their many devices and networks, I have the opportunity to help businesses transform their marketing frame of reference to capitalize on this change.

But the change is not without consequence.  And sometimes the consequences are a bit troubling.  Most parents I know certainly worry about the generational behavior change that is well under way amongst constantly-texting youngsters who can barely keep their attention focused on a conversation through a cup of coffee, never mind a full-blown meal.

In USA Today about four weeks ago, the Olivia Barker wrote of these changes, expanding the lexicon of the brave new world of text messaging, Twitter and  Facebook.

Kenneth Gergen, Swarthmore College professor, uses the term “an absent presence.”  It’s a two-way concept — friends are present via text message or Twitter or Facebook update, if not physically there with you.  On the other hand, my son is definitely only vaguely “there” when he is constantly checking his Blackberry screen to respond to the twice-a-minute messages relating to his evening plans.

We are moving into a “post-human” era, where life becomes more about the abstract world that we have created than about the biological, physical realm we inhabit.  I have certainly been called “sub-human,” and probably deserved it.  But I haven’t spent enough time in church to get very excited about “post-human” life.

Barker writes vividly of “technology’s tether.”  After all of this progress on human and civil rights, now we’re slaves to computers.  Lyndon Johnson is turning over in his grave.

What’s the connection with healthcare reform?  Well, I for one and a proponent of aggressive new TWD statutes.  We all know how thousands are tragically killed each year for DWI — driving while influenced, more and more innocent lives are being lost thanks to texting while driving.  On the occasional four-plus our car trips I take to visit clients and family, I see TWD statute violations at least twice-a-time.  No doubt, IMHO, that TWD drives up healthcare costs.

But the real connection with healthcare is that, with all of these social network-driven interruptions,  I’m going to have to live a lot longer to be able to have all of the conversations I want to have with my children.

Brew Hammerling

Plus Ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose

I’m in tears over “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley.”  I first heard about it through the folks at Version 2.0 Communications, then read a follow-up on PR2.0, Brian Solis’ blog.

This morning I checked the date on the article again to make sure I was here, in the present moment, and not somehow transported back to July 1999.

To summarize: the article is about shifts in the world of public relations, and the leadership being exhibited by Brew Hammerling.

Disclosure: I don’t know Brew Hammerling, I’ve never met Brew Hammerling, but based on the article I’m sure we were at the same industry event on a few occasions, and I think she’s got a great nickname.

Here is an excerpt which reveals how Brew earned this position of leadership:

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

OK: let me get this right.  Brew is rolling out her launch strategy — and to sound au courant, she must of course include outreach to the new media influencers.

Unfortunately for Brew, the client’s CEO has her board chairman in the room to hear the agency pitch.  A nightmare for the marketing team under the best of conditions, but in this case it’s Roger McNamee: to the manor born, Ivy Leaguer, Grateful Dead cover-band leader, chum of all the technology industry’s big names.  No problem for Brew: she knows Roger,  and Larry Ellison and Bono, too, because, according to the article, she dated one of the band members from REM.  Aha!

However busy the social calendar, Brew did not miss the class which advises: “When the chairman challenges your strategy, immediately embrace his point of view.  Make his idea your idea.”  She goes one better, proclaiming her love for the genius.  Can she get any further up McNamee’s nether portal?

The article in question is about Brew’s launch of wordnik.  Wordnik’s results page for the word “integrity” includes the following: “Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.”  To have integrity, you have to have principles.  You have to adhere to them.  If you believe in your ideas and your plans, Brew, you stand up to the chairman and you tell him what you think.  Especially when a New York Times correspondent is in the room recording the conversation.

This whole article brought me back to a time — the late 1990s — when the tether broke.  We were so high on our own fumes we thought it was sustainable that business without customers, revenue, or written plans could enjoy valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars at their hastily executed IPOs.  In those days, you could get away with making ridiculously ambitious statements.  Indeed, the more outrageous the claim, the greater the reward from industry pundits, and, subsequently, the market.

The fun didn’t end, though, before McNamee’s (and many others’) pockets were even more richly lined than they were at birth.  I won’t ever forget how Roger spoke at my Internet Startup’s launch party at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco — saying that the industry had changed forever, and there was no end in sight to how the internet and tech firms would continue to create these enormous pools of wealth.  Roger has been correct about many things, but on this occasion, March 16, 2000, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

The startup was called Bowstreet.  After gathering up nearly $150 million in venture capital, the firm soared, then crashed — unable to make the IPO window as the bubble famously burst.  What was left of the firm was sold to IBM for 10 cents on the dollar in 2005.

Dear readers, I find what’s going on in the media world today fascinating.  But occasionally it is also humorous, as I see us condemning ourselves to repeat the history from which we are supposed to learn.

Or am I naive and idealistic to think that in our professional pursuits we should have principles, integrity, and boundaries?

Oh, that’s right — we’re talking about P.R.

I would love to read your comments on this topic.

The Year the Media Died

An old friend shared this link with me last week — an incredibly ambitious undertaking, extremely well executed: a parody of Don Maclean’s “American Pie,” recast to survey the demise of the old media at the hands of the internet and Google.

The piece is cute. It tests your sensibilities lyrically from time to time, but a tip of the hat to “lmcduff” for writing and producing in a single day!

Now let’s stop crying about the end of print journalism, the end of the big agency team, the end of all the perks (my favorite: tickets to see Bobby Short at The Carlyle). It’s like lamenting the end of the horseless carriage for God’s sake. Last time I checked we still had horses and ponies around and people spending plenty of money to watch them play polo, and take left turns around grass and dirt tracks for big prize money.

The media have changed. How do we protect the message? How do we answer my brother David’s question: “Who’s going to staff a bureau in the dark corners of the world so that we can get reliable news when things start blowing up in the Pashtun provinces?”

We do so by creating value, and choosing to bring that value to markets willing to spend to support it. The mistake failing media outlets are making is this: they believe that their key asset is their readership. Wrong again, Watson! Their key asset is their staff, their writers, and their ability to find and produce the right story at the right time with the right insight. Readers will find the media source with the best writers… and the eyeballs will turn over — and over. Readers will be loyal to you if you are loyal to your bureau chiefs, your editors, your stringers. Find your niche and protect it!