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The Marketing Edge, one of the longest running marketing and public relations podcasts.
Host Albert Maruggi weaves his 25 years of marketing and PR experience across business, technology and national public affairs in interviews with newsmakers, authors and business leaders.
Maruggi is a frequent speaker and conducts workshop sessions on new media. For more information or to discuss your business challenges and goals, e-mail him.
I know it’s early, but can you imagine a political convention without a known nominee going in? Hot damn, that’s the best reality TV that can be. So get this, the last convention that was somewhat in doubt was 32 years ago with Reagan and Ford, however most pundits say the last true brokered convention was 56 years ago. Let’s not quibble, the fact is this year both the Democratic and Republican conventions have a chance of being decided in real time. They resemble sporting events and not coronations.
They would be the first brokered convention with mini DV cameras, live blogging, Twitter, Utterz… yipes!
Obama, Clinton, Edwards for the Democrats and McCain, Romney neck and neck with one more heavy Giuliani still poised to win a couple of big states on the Republican side.
Look I just can’t get too excited thinking about it because the chances are still slim, but indulge me for just for a moment.
Delegates will become citizen journalists and spin doctors will all of a sudden wish they had a Twitter or Utterz account. (Twitter and Utterz training available here act now!).
Sure those folks are wired with text messages and crackberries, but they will need to reach out to people that may not be in their distribution lists. They may have to reach out to someone that was the opposition just 10 minutes earlier. They may want to try and drive web users to online polls or engage them to show which candidate can motivate outside the walls of the convention hall because that’s the ultimate victory. Eegadds!
Will journalists be plugged into twitter profiles for the candidates or the candidates’ spokespeople (that is a separate conversation whether to have surrogate profiles to float trial balloons)?
Yes social media friends, a brokered convention is one part crisis, two parts breaking news, and all of it adds up to an interesting scenario for microblogging platforms. Stay tuned.
Here is some background on the convention process and brokered conventions
Marketers, here is a social media recipe with some zing. You can build an opt-in network of followers for just about any objective you want: new product launch, latest bargains, thought leadership, consumer engagement. The ingredients are all here if used with healthy amounts of honesty, transparency, and interaction. Let’s take a comprehensive look at a handful of technologies that will make a succulent dish and we’ll use one of my favorite places to shop: the outdoor recreation retailer REI. Disclaimer: I’m also an REI member, but so are thousands of other people. I don’t own stock and they don’t pay me for anything. Here’s a recipe I’d love them to try:
1) Create a Twitter profile for REI Outlet and build a following. Dell Outlet did it (http://twitter.com/delloutlet) and received an award from the Society for Ne w Communications Research. REI can build a larger following in 2008 across its wide variety of constituents: campers, cyclists, kayakers and on and on.
2) The Twitter piece can tie into a microsite with a combination REI expert- and user-generated content for REI Adventure. Right now, www.rei.com has nice photos and text, but I’m at a loss as to why they are not taking advantage of a variety of media to embrace the visitor. Give us more: more personality, more views, more experience. REI is all about outdoors — take us there.
3) Then REI Adventures (their travel packages division) can use Utterz and Flicker to create instant posts of audio, video or pictures from hikers on its Zion National Park trip, with its unique hoodoos rock formations, or other campers photographing a grizzly in Denali National Park – from a safe distance of course. Bring the trip to life for customers’ family and friends, those researching on REI.com and those following REIcamping or REIcanoeing or REIhiking on Twitter, Utterz or any other site built for easy content creation. I bet some of REI Adventures customers have twittered from a trip already. Some have posted on YouTube like this REI Costa Rica cycling trip.
4) Then, enhance the Web and in-store experience by creating “buying guide” podcasts and/or vidcasts (with RSS feeds, of course) by area of the store. These could be downloaded to portable devices or played on the Web site. I realize the REI Web site is full of great information, but are you asking the customer to print stuff and bring it in? That’s not very green. Instead, post audio and video to download, which will add even more “green” to the REI marketing effort.
5) Lastly, bring all of these aspects of REI together with a social network, either on the REI site or another location like Facebook, Ning or MySpace. At the very least, by using blogs on the REI site, enthusiasts can share their experiences together under the REI banner.
As an REI enthusiast, I’d love to see part or all of this implemented. The interesting part of social media is that people can do this themselves without REI’s blessing, but I believe the store and brand are such a strong presence, that it is missing an opportunity by not participating in social media. Now what do you think about that?
The technology dilemma: New technologies are developed quickly and less costly today than even 10 years ago. New technology implementation requires the precise work of three groups: path finders, bridge builders and commoditizers.
1) Path finders: They forge a wild river. They develop for the joy of a challenge and/or the dream of wealth. Many times they traverse to unknown places. They prudently cut a path with precision moving toward a desired destination. They may not know exactly where they are going, but they are learning and discovering with every step.
2) Bridge builders: These are the ones who help the masses on the populated side of the river come across. They painstakingly educate those fearful of going over the bridge and in some cases hope they don’t loose sight of the path finders.
3) Commoditizers come along with the masses and build different uses for technologies that have become common. They help drive the price down, expand usage and, with it, less risk in implementing that technology in a typical business.
The issue that Jeremiah Owyang of the Web Strategist Blog raises in his Utterz post from Nov. 29 is whether the technologists are moving too fast. In my parlance, are the path finders rushing ahead so fast that they are in danger of being alone in the wild?
The pace of what technologists can do is outracing how significant portions of the population can use it or can pay for it. The question technologists and consumers should answer jointly is: Can the new technologies be applied to provide sufficient value that it is worth changing from what we do now?
Social media and different issues than the 90s:
A more fragmented market, which could mean less total revenue per technology
Less costs, which potentially mean higher profits per technology
Insanely short product life-cycles, putting all technologies in danger of being overtaken
Potentially misunderstood brand power of technology, when the real asset is the communities
The Bar Syndrome
What would make me the most nervous as an investor? Understanding exactly what the asset is and how will that asset sustain itself and grow. I believe a good metaphor is that many of these social media technologies are like investing in a bar or restaurant. If that establishment can be replicated to attract enough people, then you’ve got a winning franchise. If, however, the people are fickle or a new bar opens down the street with better looking, livelier people, then what is left?
The accessories
We are to the point of application accessories; widgets is the accepted term. The issue is how these accessories are going to be paid for. An interesting question formed in the negative, just to make it more painful: What two technologies can you give up today?
A typical business with an abundance of meetings, limited budgets and cautious management needs time just to understand how these technologies are going to add value to the company. Patience is a virtue. Will the marketplace reward patience?
I worked at a venture capital firm in the 90s. There were companies working on 360-degree images of shopping malls, med-tech applications for desktop radiological reading, and video-on-the-Web capabilities. It was just a question of timing more than applications. Those ideas are well in place today and profitable.
History does help predict the future; we just need the patience for the future to catch up with us.
The panel from BlogWorld on “Tracking Reputation in the Blogsphere” provided excellent insight into how corporate skeptics can make sense of new-media junkies’ hype about online conversations. More importantly, determining in a methodical analysis whether those conversations are something for corporate execs to be concerned about or join.
The ability to listen to the conversations taking place online is of the greatest value to companies. The reason is that they don’t need to be told about losing control of their brand, which can drive brand managers and CEOs insane. They don’t need to come up with frequent content that makes people happy or to write responses to blog posts, which can drive marketers to drink (more than they currently do).
No, the ability to listen to the conversation plays to the corporate desire and history for research. The corporate structure appreciates research of markets, research of competitors, and research of potentially new product demands.
It is also a way to validate whether there are conversations going on that company leaders should care about. An example would be if a brand manager, VP of a line of business, or product development manager was handed a report that said, “In the month of April, there were 25,000 mentions of your product on 250 blogs and user review sections. Twenty-five percent of those mentions were negative, 50 percent positive and 25 percent neutral.”
Take that the to the next level of detail by highlighting the context of those conversations.
One of the presenters on the panel was Howard Kaushansky, president of Umbria, who highlighted how conversations can be ascertained though sophisticated language processing and searching of blogs and other social networks, such as MySpace and, soon, Facebook.
Excellent presentation, as you can see the level of detail available with some of these tools. Companies need to understand the wealth of information that will increase enormously during the next 2 years and can be analyzed, if corporate executives looks at the blogsphere as a research resource and not just a play thing for MySpacers.
This interview with Howard, called “Listen to Conversations,” has a case in point about how consumers purchasing a pair of jeans labeled themselves. For example, Gen Xers have moved into the “fit” category as opposed those who label themselves as caring about the labels they wear. Another example in this conversation with Howard is how you can pick out mentions within the body of a blog. So, for example, if a blog about parenting mentions that the mom or dad had a great pumpkin latte at Starbucks, Umbria brings that mention to light and gives it some context.
Click on the Utterz player at the right or click here to listen to that interview.
What is your take on whether companies can gain value from just listening to the conversations, especially if they are skeptical of participating?
This is a neat little tool that we are testing to post audio files on the fly. Utterz allows me to call a number record, then post the file privately or like we did here publicly. There is also a profile of all your Utterz at the Utterz site www.utterz.com – Here is my profile.
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