Influential Marketing Blog

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

5 Tips For Getting More Press Coverage

One question that many small business owners often wonder is how to get more media attention for their small business. Just because you are a modest sized business, though, doesn’t mean that you should only aim for small localized coverage.  There is nothing wrong with branching out beyond your immediate market and aiming bigger as well.

The truth is that while there is no real substitute for getting a smart and dedicated PR professional to focus on helping you to promote your small business – you can still do a remarkable amount on your own by starting with a few simple techniques that the pros use:

1. Watch the editorial calendars.  Larger publications and those with a longer lead time (like magazines) are typically put together weeks or even months in advance. Most of them will publish what is called an editorial calendar, that shares what they will be writing about in upcoming issues. Think of it as a sneak peek into what stories will get published … and also a way for you to position your business as a potential part of one or more of those upcoming stories.
2. Create an influencer/reporter watch list. Reporters are assigned “beats” to cover, which generally refers to which topics they will write about.  Try to create a short list of 5-10 journalists who often write about topics that are relevant to your business or your region if the majority of your customers are local to a particular area.  A good place to start is a website called www.muckrack.com which lists all the journalists who are using social media tools actively – offering an easy way to watch what they write about an eventually reach out to them as well.
3. Build personal connections.  In the world of media, the old cliché of “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” really applies. The more personal connections you can have with journalists, either through meeting in person if you happen to be at the same events, or virtually if you are able to connect over email or social media … the more likely you are to be considered as a source for an upcoming story.
4. Pitch with headlines and impact.  When it comes to “the pitch,” as an email or phone call to a journalist trying to convince them to talk about your small business is often called, think in terms of headlines.  What is the macro trend or story that you are trying to be a part of?  Ideally, it is bigger than just your business and something new and relevant.  This is the one step where you can get the most benefit from professional help (along with hiring someone with the right media connections, of course).
5. Make your own coverage.  Getting mentioned in a piece that a journalist writes can be great media exposure, but we also live in a world where you can make your own coverage. This means starting to use tools like blogs and Twitter to share a strong point of view and expertise. If social media isn’t your cup of tea, consider penning a guest article or opinion piece to be published in a relevant media source.  All of these can be excellent ways of getting the message about your business out without relying on a journalist to include you in a story.

How Oprah Became Oprah (And What It Should Teach You About Marketing)

In 1986, there were certain rules of television that pretty much everyone followed. You expected news anchors to be buttoned up and serious when presenting the evening news. Television programs (as they often still do) presented a distorted view of reality that only slightly resembled real life, but still allowed you to escape into other worlds. And whether you looked at television as a source of information or one of entertainment - you certainly didn't expect it to openly and honestly mirror real life.

That same year, Oprah Winfrey's talk show was nationally syndicated and on air she broke the taboos and shared openly her story of having been sexually abused at age 9 by a relative. It was an honesty that no one expected to come on television, and certainly not from a talk show host. It set the pattern for what came to become one of the most honest and open shows on television for the next 25 years as Oprah not only asked celebrity guests to share truths about themselves, but also managed to continually find and openly share her own with a live studio audience.

The atmosphere she created was one of openness because she wasn't afraid to be vulnerable and share the deepest secrets about herself. How many people do you know like that? How many brands? As Oprah airs her final episode today, the lesson any of us in marketing should take from her is the unbelievable power that comes from being open and honest about the toughest things. Brands screw up, make bad decisions or bad products, implement the wrong strategy, or treat customers unfairly.

Those aren't the things that drive brands to lose trust and fail. The failure comes from not admitting those mistakes, letting employees be human, and building a deeper connection with customers. Oprah may have been the most believable personality in the history of television. As she signs off today, consider asking yourself one simple question: how could being more honest make your brand more believable?

A Promising Future For Branded Entertainment

If there is one sign of hope for the marketing industry as a whole, it is that no one really wants boring, one-way, shout-oriented interruptive marketing to survive. Social media is a natural ally in this fight, given its focus on fostering conversations and creating content, but what about the role of marketing as entertainment? It isn't necessarily the first word anyone might choose to describe effective marketing, but this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas it was the featured topic in a panel I moderated at an event focused on the intersection of broadcast, marketing, social media and entertainment.

What Is Branded Entertainment?

The focus on the panel was on branded entertainment through online video - though on several occasions it was raised that this content can increasingly find its way onto other platforms as well such as broadcast TV or mobile. There were three core models of branded entertainment being used by brands today that panelists shared:

1. Product Placement - The most simplistic form, some would argue that this barely qualifies to be called branded entertainment ... yet it is increasingly popular for brands to use as a way of inserting their brand or products into existing content.
2. Brand Sponsorship/Integration - This category had the most varying descriptions, incorporating everything from a brand simply adding a "sponsored by" slate to a video to inserting a pre-roll or post-roll ad.
3. Branded Content Creation - The "purest" form of branded entertainment, this area was clearly the focus of the panel. Included in this category were examples like Royal Carribean's recent Ocean Views campaign, as well as Lexus' popular LStudio online video channel that spawned the popular series Web Therapy with Lisa Kudrow which was recently picked up by Showtime as a pilot.

What Will The Future Of Branded Entertainment Look Like?

Ultimately, the premise behind branded entertainment is that great content will provide an entertainment value and there is a role of marketing to play in trying to create or support more of that type of content. The ongoing challenge will be one of setting the boundaries between what is reasonable underwriting or brand sponsorship of a message, and what is over the top. This is the real question at the heart of the growth of branded entertainment - and one that several filmmakers have recently tackled - including The Joneses (a film about a fictional family planted in the surburbs to create demand for new products by flaunting them to neighbors) and Morgan Spurlock's new documentary - "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" or as it is "officially" meant to be called "POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."

Despite these cautionary notes, however, the powerful premise of branded entertainment is that brands need to get better at telling a story instead of merely hawking product benefits or service descriptions. People engage with entertainment, and they tend to share it if they like it. In a world where consumers have more ways to ignore and filter out brand messages than ever before, engagement is the new and necessary metric because it means more than empty measures of reach or frequency.

Branded entertainment today is still a strategy for marketers and organizations who are ahead of the curve. It won't be long, however, before the followers and later adopters in the mainstream start to join the party.  After all, no one wants to miss out on a good show.

How Entrepreneurial Journalism Will Change Our World

Think about the best article you read last year. The hard hitting, excellently researched, insightfully written article that you just couldn't put down. Now think about how much money you spent to read it. Was it in a magazine you subscribe to? Or perhaps a website that you accessed and read for free? For every conversation anyone starts about the future of journalism, the question that seems to follow closely behind is: what does the new business model for journalism needs to be in a world where the average citizen is increasingly expecting journalism to be a service provided for free (or at least, subsidized by someone else).

Over the past few years, every time I spoke at a gathering of local newspaper professionals at the American Press Institute (API) or participated in a journalist-centric event from an organization like the South Asian Journalism Association (SAJA), the signs of worry in the industry were clear. A solution has started to emerge that is not only making waves in the field of journalism today - but also has the potential to reinvent the way that we consume and share media with one another.

Entrepreneurial Journalism describes a field of media where journalism is the underlying discipline upon which to create content-based businesses and services that can make money. Rather than the popular view of journalism as a type of objective professional public service to be provided to the citizenry of the world - entrepreneurial journalism offers the chance to think of content creation in business terms. As it gains popularity, this field also has the potential to change the way that we find and consume information, and change our world in the process. Here are a few ways it is already happening:

1. A New Generation Of Entrepreneurial Journalists. Predictably, the idea of entrepreneurial journalism found a rapid home among forward thinking Professors of Journalism who have started to incorporate this into their coursework at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Last year, CUNY announced the first 4-semester dedicated Entrepreneurial Journalism program as part of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Author and Professor Jeff Jarvis* leads that program, and also founded a wiki where other educators teaching similar programs could gather to collaborate and share curriculum or ideas. This combined with visionary educators like Columbia School of Journalism's Sree Sreenivasan who has been teaching journalism students social media skills for years will lead to a new generation of voices in journalism who are trained to think entrepreneurially and embrace social media.
2. New Ideas Influencing Older Media Entities To Evolve. In the middle of 2010, a brilliant experimental journalism site called True/Slant was purchased by Forbes. In his final blog post after the sale, founder Michael Roston shared that what made the site unique was the arrangement they created with 300 writers who were incentivized to create content directly for their audience instead of pandering to an editorial filter. This new editorial model thrived on the site and demonstrated to the world that there was a valid place for this type of journalism - and a place that a "traditional" media organization like Forbes saw great value in.
3. Startups Create Excitement And Pioneer New Forms Of Media. The Poynter Promise Prize was one of the first of what will likely be several competition style idea gathering efforts to bring some of the most pioneering ideas in entrepreneurial journalism to the attention of many. As more of these startup-style ideas enter into the discussions about the future of journalism, they will unlock new forms of content creation and new business models that the entire industry will eventually look towards.
4. Overlaps With Big Social Media Trends Such As Content Curation. One of the biggest trends that is already shaping the future of marketing is the focus on content curation as a way to provide value to consumers and share an expertise without necessarily creating content. Aside from creating content as parts of new stand alone organizations, more and more individuals with journalism backgrounds will be sought after by companies to create and organize content on their behalf. "Journalists-In-Residence" will become a part of large companies, opening up yet another entrepreneurial career path for those with journalism training.

This is a link to an interesting panel discussion from the Carnegie Journalism Educators Summit last year about the future of Entrepreneurial Journalism as well, for those who are seeking more context and information.

*Image Credit: http://practicumpioneers.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/entrepreneurial-journalism-defined/

*Note: Best wishes to Jeff for a speedy recovery, as he recently shared on his blog that he is now once again fighting cancer. His work and thinking have been a big inspiration for me and many others, so I wish him the best in his new battle and am sure he'll emerge on top as he has before.

9 Fatal Flaws of Doing PR With Social Media: Exclusive Webinar!

When it comes to social media, it sometimes seems the only thing more plentiful than free advice is bad advice. Anyone with a newly minted blog and a Twitter account with a couple thousand followers seems ready to self-describe themselves as "social media guru" (which I feel like I should find offensive both as a social media pro AND an Indian). But the point is, there is no shortage of people that are willing to charge you for half baked advice.

Several weeks ago I spoke with the team at Bulldog Reporter about putting together a webinar that would stand out. One that would share real insightful tips that people haven't heard before. I'm happy to share that I will be conducting that webinar THIS FRIDAY AT 1PM EST focused on the 9 "fatal flaws" of doing PR with social media and real advice on how to really put together a social media plan that will stand out, get results, and make you look GREAT to your boss and rest of your company in the process.

In this session, you'll learn why giving up control is a bad idea, why only amateurs allow comments on YouTube videos and a new idea for using Twitter as part of your pitch process without resorting to fitting every pitch into 140 characters or less. More importantly, unlike many of my other sessions - I have agreed with the organizers to not post the lessons and content from this one online, so the only place you'll be able to get this is through signing up for this webinar. Here's how to get a much more detailed description:

DOWNLOAD 2 PAGE PDF DESCRIPTION OF "9 FATAL FLAWS WEBINAR" >>

Finally, as a special offer - the first 50 groups to register for this webinar will receive a FREE signed copy of Personality Not Included. Visit Bulldog Reporter online to register ...

REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR ON 10/16 AT 1PM AND GET A FREE COPY OF PNI >>

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever

Last month an unlikely underdog stunned the marketing world at the International Cannes Advertising Festival. At the show, a single marketing campaign took home a Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously--direct, cyber and PR-- something that had never happened before in the 50+ year history of the show. Contrary to what you might expect, the unanimous winner of this unprecedented victory was not a Fortune50 brand with an advertising budget of millions, but a small Tourism board promoting a little known island off the Great Barrier Reef.

The winning campaign was called the "Best Job in the World" and was essentially a big online job search conducted through social media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. Done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just $1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.

Just two weeks ago on July 1, the winner of the competition--a 34-year-old British man named Ben Southall started blogging and touring around Queensland, finally bringing the competition to a close. For the next six months, he will be touring around Queensland, sharing his adventures through a video blog, writing, Twitter account and Flickr photos-- generating even more interest in Hamilton Island and all of Queensland in the process. The tangible results for the island are rolling in as well: Amway Australia chose it as the site of their upcoming annual conference, and domestic Aussie airline Virgin Blue just started flying a direct flight between Sydney and Hamilton Island, due to the rise in demand from travelers wanting to get to the island.

I realize that tourism and the travel industry may seem far removed from your business. Unfortunately, we don't all have the natural beauty of Hamilton Island to fall back on when starting our marketing campaigns. Still, a big part of the reason for the amazing success of this campaign was not what they were marketing, but how they used social media to do it. In that, there are some lessons anyone trying to promote a product or service could use:

1. Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.
2. It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.
3. Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.
4. Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.
5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.
6. Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

NOTE: This entry is republished from my guest blog post on FastCompany.com today.

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

6 Ways Ford Is Finding Its Own Voice

Yesterday evening I co-hosted a tweetup in New York City where Ford was unveiling the new Ford Fiesta and a brilliantly conceived social media program to get 100 influencers to take the car on an extended test drive for 6 months as part of the Ford Fiesta Movement. The event was a gathering designed to help put a more human face on Ford and talk about a new Ford car that many of the 20 and 30 somethings who showed up (and are the target market for the Fiesta) may not have known about.

The effort is just one example of a greater shift that has been taking place at Ford over the past year as the company has worked to not only reshape its image in the eyes of the American public, but also to change the way that they tell the story of Ford. It is a rich story to tell, one that is linked to the history of America in a way that few companies can authentically claim. And despite being in the maligned automotive industry that seems a permanent fixture in the negative news cycle, things are changing at Ford. How are they managing to do it? Here are six elements to consider:

1. Having a strong story to tell. In the midst of all the scrutiny, Ford is (and has been) shifting their image from stodgy truck maker to a more forward thinking company making cars that the American public actually want to drive. The relaunched Taurus was a hit, winning top safety ratings - the Flex has had rave reviews, and other cars like the Fusion and Focus are winning many fans.
2. Tapping the passion of employees. Ford has always described itself as a family, and employees often demonstrate a stunning loyalty to the company ... even describing themselves in terms of the cars they have always driven. The old mode of communications would be to keep all these voices silent, and instead only authorize a small group of people to speak on behalf of Ford. Today many of these voices are being encouraged to speak and share their thoughts and experiences online.
3. Making a commitment to social media. Social media has played a big part in this evolution to using the voices of "accidental spokespeople." Scott Monty was hired nearly a year ago as the Head of Social Media for Ford and has actively been offering a voice to the brand and adding social media as a core element of all their communications.
4. Getting out of Detroit. One of the most powerful effects of this shift has been a willingness for even the most senior members of the management team at Ford to get out of Detroit and meet customers. Ford's President of the Americas, Mark Fields and Ray Day (the VP of Communications) even came to the Tweetup last night. Alan Mullaly, CEO of Ford showed up to a blogger event during the Consumer Electronics Show (in a sweatshirt instead of a suit and tie!) and stayed graciously for nearly an hour answering questions and doing podcast interviews.
5. Capitalizing on being Ford. There are not many companies that are as visibly at the epicenter of the American economy as Ford is. Like it or not, the success or failure of Ford is seen by many as a symbol of the success or failure of America. From a communications point of view, this is a major positive ... for the simple reason that the fate of Ford matters to people in a way that AIG or Enron just don't (unless you're a shareholder, of course)
6. Overcoming the American ego. One of the most interesting things for me has been Ford's recent willingness to take cars that have been huge commercial successes overseas and introduce them to the United States market (like the Fiesta and the Transit Connect). For many years, most of Detroit would never have considered taking these foreign cars and allowing them to be revised and sold in America. Finally ego and turf wars are taking a back seat to solid business decisions and introducing cars best suited to succeed.

Any other lessons you think Ford has learned which are contributing to their growing reputation?  Or if you think one (or all) of my points are completely off base, leave a comment and share that point of view too.

Disclaimer: I currently work for Ogilvy and Ford is a client of our team. The Ford Fiesta Tweetup was an official party organized as part of our efforts with Ford and I was on the team that helped organize these events. I have NOT been paid or compensated by Ford to write this blog post, though - and the opinions I share in this post are my personal views only and don't represent what Ogilvy, WPP or Team Detroit thinks about Ford.

What Journalists Should Know About PR People

Yesterday I wrote a post about what all PR people should know about journalists.  One of the most frequent comments to that post was a request from many readers that I take the opposite approach and share what journalists and the media should know about PR people. So here's a starting list of what media should know about PR people:

1. Our own client's time isn't always ours. Often we would like nothing more than to have our client's entire rolodex at our disposal so we can accomodate any window you give us ... but sometimes it doesn't work that way.  Often, the person you most want to talk to for your story is also the busiest and hardest person to schedule. So give us a break if we can't always make it happen for you.
2. Sometimes we have to dump you for a better offer too. Admit it, if you found a better and more on point quote or source for your story, you'd dump us and our client to use it in a second. Just remember that sometimes we have the same situation. If a bigger or more relevant media outlet comes along and wants to do a story, we have to take it. Remember, we're all professionals trying to do the best job we can.
3. Cancellations are worse for us than for you. We hate to cancel a meeting or phone interview as much as you. Actually, we probably hate it even more than you ... because we know that not only are we reducing our credibility with you, but we're also making it harder for us to get future media for that client and it means we'll have to do twice the work.
4. The angle you're looking for isn't obvious. You may have a very clear idea of the story you want to write and feel that you have been forthcoming with it, but sometimes we don't get that picture as clearly as you think we do. So when we pitch a client or a story angle, sometimes it's not because we're trying to spam you, but because we are not quite sure how you'll write your story and think that we're on target.
5. Your promises become our promises. We know we shouldn't do this, but in a world of tight deadlines and clients demanding constant updates, often what you promise to us becomes our promise to the client. So if you don't follow through or decide to take a different angle, we're the ones that look bad. The best thing you can do is either avoid making a promise, or follow through.
6. Remember all the great stuff we do for you. We offer you writing that you can lift and claim as your own. We share new story ideas with you to make your job easier. We invite you to great press events, give you bags of schwag and treat you like royalty. In return, we have our ideas taken and used with no credit, are often treated poorly by clients and media alike and blasted as being "masters of spin" or "flacks." It's no wonder the PR industry as a whole has an inferiority complex. Just remember that it is often PR people that offer the infrastructure to let you do what you do. We don't need hugs or anything, but at least remember that the next time you want to "out" a PR person on your blog for sending you something that wasn't exactly on target.

NOTE: This post is a response to comments from many readers on my last post about "What PR People Should Know About Journalists." Before I was able to post this, Thomas Lee at 451 Marketing also wrote a similar response post worth checking out.