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 Love Boobies Bracelet

I love clever marketing — campaigns that gently walk the line between the clean-cut and cool.  Slogans that have you laughing a bit but remind you of an important issue or problem or opportunity.  I think of the “I ♥ Boobies / (keep a breast)” program as clearly in this category.  Right at the edge; funny; provocative.

However, education administrators see things differently.  School administrations around the country are banning the wristbands which are sold to raise funds to educate young women about the importance of early detection of breast cancer.  Out, out naughty teens and your filthy slogans!

Educators see things differently in South Hadley Massachusetts, as well.  In South Hadley, a remarkably large group of misguided and apparently unobserved punks (nine have been indicted at this writing), hectored, harassed, and hassled young Phoebe Prince with absolute freedom until, tragically, the object of their ridicule took her own life.

Hypocrisy is always worth calling out for scrutiny.  I find it astounding that our culture has reached a point where educators — adults responsible for how we shape and teach our youth — can see fit to ban perfectly harmless slogans in favor of a good cause, while in the very same news cycle they are revealed to be oblivious (and so far free of any retribution or legal responsibility) to the presence of evil in teenage form among them in a small New England high school.

Whither common sense?

Flickr: Swamibu

Sorry, but the iPad announcement was an iDud.  Steve Jobs looked and sounded weak, and I just got the feeling that the iPad was a LARGE TYPE version of the iPod Touch. So much missing. But perhaps he’ll get the sympathy vote and the product will recover.  Just such a yawn — and after all of that uncharacteristic leaking of information and features!

And the State of the Union?  Again, the anticipation preceding any speech from the Great Orator is always high — and I’m not sure even Chris Mathews felt the tingle up his leg after this one.

Are we in a marketing malaise?  A Sargasso Sea of cynicism?

Or just the winter doldrums?

Based on the roaring finish which was calendar Q4 of 2009 (at least for us), I think it’s precisely the wrong time to curl up in ursine slumber.  And marketing must continue to lead — to set the psychological tone months ahead of consumer sentiment broadly.

Let’s be bold, people!

Now, on the other hand, here’s a new web site that has done something extremely bold: GolfTripGenius.com.  Disclaimer: I’ve advised them over the past few months.

They’ve solved several of the most annoying problems facing golf trip captains — and done so with extremely powerful technology made simple.

Whoda thunk the golf industry had much room left for innovation outside club design and fertilizers to keep those desert courses green?

You?

In last week’s post, I asked: What was Coca-Cola’s long-term financial gain from the Coca-Cola Classic marketing debacle?

The answer: Coca-Cola’s long-term financial gain came as a result of recipe legerdemain which saved the company hundreds of millions in costs.

At the time the New Coke was foisted upon us, sugar prices had spiked to historic highs.  The original Coca-Cola product was, of course, made with sugar.

Under the cover of the brand darkness created by the New Coke, the company created a new Coca-Cola recipe, now know as Coca-Cola Classic, which was made with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), not sugar.

The cost to produce the new product, which many consumers believed was “good old Coke,” fell dramatically.

Ironically, prices have equalized to some extent in recent years, and many vendors (notably, Pepsi), have brought sugar-based recipes back to the market.

To obtain Coca-Cola made with sugar, you have to buy the “hecho in Mexico” (made in Mexico) product.

There’s change in the air for “social media,” and even Chris Brogan — whose visibility on this “movement” is perhaps greater than any other’s — has recognized it.  Why?  Because I think too many businesses and revenue or profit-oriented business people just got fed up.

Here’s a recent interview I conducted with one particularly fed up, overhyped, victim of the Snake Oil salesmen, whom I’ll call FU.

TD: You’ve been getting worked up about the social media hype out there… why?

FU: I am getting sick and tired of the entire blogosphere.  It makes me want to stop blogging.

TD: Why’s that?

FU: Because the blogosphere is full of the most painfully self-centered a-holes on earth.  OK, it is not replete with them.  It is, IMHO, engorged with them, which, the more I think about it, is apropos.  But if you use the web’s metrics of the moment, there are hundreds of oft-read bloggers whose subject matter is so blatantly their eponymous greatness that I just find myself wanting to puke.

TD: Steady on, mate!  Why are you so angry about all of this?

FU: Think about these d-bags: thought of themselves as intellectuals back in college.  A liberal arts major, likely.  Had a decent career applying those skills to a field that, well, s*&t, wasn’t all that high minded — like, say, technology marketing.  Before long they refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs” and boast assignments as “executive in residence” with a VC firm in Waltham as though it were a f*&^ing Fulbright scholarship.

TD: Hold your horses, there Fred.  I was a liberal arts major — I’ve been in technology marketing for 20 years — I’ve done OK by this industry and while I admire my friends who followed their dreams… (FU interrupts)

FU: Along comes the web, and blogs.  No barrier to entry, and exploding adoption.  Unlike their high school classmates who sacrificed to be real writers and earn their living as authentic journalists, suddenly they, and the wisdom achieved persuading “senior business executives to optimize their business performance by accelerating innovation,” or some other bucketful of meaningless tripe, feel entitled to share the insight thus gained with the rest of the world.  So these people start sharing with the world their most mundane work habits and productivity secrets.  “What comes up on my iMac when I lift the lid at Oh-Dark-Thirty.”  Ten Twitter Tips, Thirteen Must-Have Plug-ins,  Nine Ways You Too Can Become a Self-Involved Twit.  Soon we’ll start reading these f#$#ing genius’ predictions about the f^%$ing future.

TD: Actually, I see that those have started already — including Chris Brogan’s prediction of the consolidation / rationalization of this whole social media space.

FU: They share all of this with their precious communities, their friends, their followers — for free — because they know that NOW it’s all about giving and if you give enough you’ll get back ten times over.  They use the no cost, no barrier-to-entry platform like a step class at the Boston Sports Club.  They step up to tell the world what a moron an executive at one of the worlds largest manufacturing companies is because he doesn’t watch YouTube videos between calls with his steel and rubber suppliers.  Then they step down, back into their pathetic near-anonymity, and see if the stupid s@#t goes viral.

TD: But it has to be said that sometimes those things do go viral.  And I think it’s a bit unfair to call these people nearly anonymous — big blog sites like ProBlogger get 10s of thousands of visitors per day, my man.

FU: Come on — you know one of these bloggers, don’t you?  Don’t you just hate them?

TD: I envy them, at least at the moment — they’re riding a fairly exciting wave, no?

FU:  Well any way, that’s why I think you should quit reading blogs, including this one.

[TD - post interview: or, share your thoughts about this post below!]

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

Josh Fischel's Cyrano de Christmas Card site

I have never gotten around to holiday cards. Ever. When I was first married (and married first) my wife took care of that task — but since singledom I have been a failure at the annual piece of longhand reflection to bring friends and family back into the every-stretching loop.

Josh Fischel to the rescue!  I know Josh from his days as counselor extraordinaire to my two sons at an anachronistic summer idyll known as Camp Pemigewassett.  An extremely kind and generous young man, he took great interest in my children and has kept in touch with them many years after their youthful sojourns to Northern New Hampshire.

And now he is a niche marketeer with an incredibly well-defined offering and has embraced all of the new social media to promote it!

Now a writer, Josh has found a great and unmet demand in the market: nicely written holiday letters for distribution to those aforementioned friends and family.  For $30 (that’s right — WAY underpriced!) and the time it takes to fill out a simple SurveyMonkey form, Josh will craft that 1-2 page document you just never seem to get around to.  You provide Josh with just enough information about the content (true-to-form, witty, imaginative, purely fanciful), the tone (snarky, sarcastic, straight-on, wildly fanciful), fill in some highlights from your year — and he’s off and writing.

Bravo Josh: and best of luck this season. By the way readers: surveys must be completed (and your shopping) by December 18th!!

I spent the last two days in sales training sessions NOT conducted in my native language.

I work with a company with its headquarters and cultural roots in Geneva. The business was born when I was a teenager (and I am officially old now); their heritage is important and indeed critical to how the company offers value to customers.

Two days in a world where a really great history and track record of creating value is trapped in a language spoken by some, learned by fewer (as time goes by), and yet still the vessel of a rich message.

As we self-medicate on the volume drug of information consumption choice (blogs, reader feeds, micro messages) I am comforted in the knowledge that our opportunity is STILL constrained by barriers of understanding which free Wifi and armies of followers or online community members will not remove.

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?