See Dana at the 2011 Summit

This week we are featuring Dana Chisnell, who will be speaking at this years 2011 MIMA Summit, October 12th.  She is an inde­pen­dent researcher cur­rently work­ing on usable secu­rity and research meth­ods for social media usabil­ity.  You can find Dana on twitter @danachis.
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What do you think are the most interesting changes happening in usability today?

There are a few interesting developments going on in usability these days. First, more and more organizations are beginning to understand that features only take them so far. They’re starting to see that expectations are higher than lots of features that work adequately. Now, organizations are looking to unify the customer experience across all channels. Toning down the business speak, it’s about having the best possible interaction with the customer at every possible touch point.

To get there, teams are sharing responsibility for doing user research. It is becoming less likely that there will be one person responsible for doing all of the usability testing. Instead, designers and developers get skills for interviewing, moderating, and observing people using designs. I think this is excellent. The more present the user is in the heads of the designers and developers, the better the experiences will be.

In terms of tools and techniques, I see a lot of teams embracing remote usability testing. They want to get a broader view of the user base, which is good. The technology for doing remote usability testing is very good and very inexpensive now. If you haven’t done remote usability testing, the concept is simple. Rather than bringing people into a lab setup, you connect with participants online through a screen sharing tool like GoTo Meeting or WebEx (there are lots of others out there, too), and a voice connection of some kind. This way, you can see what’s going on with the user’s screen and you can get lots of verbal feedback and interaction. You can take it up a notch if you and the participant have web cams. In that case, you can see each other and the screen — not so different from sitting next to each other in the same room.

Now, some teams would like to just let usability testing run itself by doing “remote unmoderated usability tests”. I think this is one of the worst ideas to come along in a while. The whole point of usability testing and user research is to *observe* people using a design. When you conduct unmoderated testing, you have to rely on what participants *tell* you with no opportunity for follow-up questions. There are people who do beautiful unmoderated studies, but a) they do live observation and other data gathering methods as well, b) they spend a lot of time and energy designing the study and piloting it to get out of it what they need, c) they never do unmoderated testing before other methods.

Otherwise, I think we need a Reformation of usability testing. This is what my talk at MIMA will be about in October. The classical model of usability testing — setting up a controlled situation with one participant and one design, where the participant is performing set tasks — is not serving design very well.  Tasks aren’t what they used to be. Testing doesn’t scale: the usability testing methodology was created when user populations were much smaller and were likely to get training. There was no mobile or social. Satisfaction was fine, because the best we could do is eliminate frustration. But users expect much more than not sucking, and there’s enough competition in most sectors that it’s easy for users to go where they have a better experience.

One place we get stuck, is we only know how to test for what we know about. But then designs hit the market and all these apparently unpredictable things happen. We’ve got to figure out how to test for things we don’t know about. We have to create a larger set of techniques taken from other practices that we don’t pay much attention to right now to do a better job with user research and usability testing. I can see a day when we do very little classical summative usability testing and when most of the “testing” that is being done combines pieces of lots of different methods.

From design to launch, what organization do you think does usability really well? and why?

Two of my favorite web-based organizations are Netflix and Zipcar. At every point, the experience is superlative in both cases. I don’t know a lot about the inner workings of Zipcar, but Netflix has always done tons of user research, lots of prototyping, and heaps of testing of designs.

Marriott also gives amazing customer experience, and I know for a fact that the Marriott.com team lives and breathes usability. Most of the hotel reservations on the book for Marriott come through www.marriott.com, so it is crucial to the entire business that there be no obstacles to purchase, of course. But beyond that, Marriott as an organization has a vision and a belief system around what they want the customer experience to be — from the web site to checking out of the hotel (and beyond) — and they work very hard to ensure that the experience is excellent.

What is the most common usability mistake you see over and over?

Not involving everyone who has a stake in the design in the user research and usability testing. Everyone. When everyone involved in a design, from the CEO to the QA testers, know who users are, what they do with designs, and why, the business works better, and the infrastructure can seem less constraining. If you want users to love your design, fall in love with your users. Know them. Be able to tell stories about real people using your designs.

Next, is rushing. Everyone needs to ship. I get that, but there are times when it pays to get the design right (or closer to right) rather than shipping right now. There’s always a cost to rushing and it almost always shows up in the call center when customers start phoning or emailing that something doesn’t work the way they expected to. If that money and time were redirected to user research and usability testing, the organization would be healthier and the customers would be happier.

Ah, but I suppose you want to know about usability mistakes in user interface designs. I guess I’d have to say the biggest usability mistake is copying designs or elements of designs from other products or services without thinking about whether its appropriate or not. Amazon does mega menus, everybody does mega menus. (By the way, they didn’t work for Amazon, so they took them down, but you still see mega menus on other sites all over the place.)  Usability is behavioral. So, you have to know how users behave and how they want to interact with your designs.

What is next in the digital decade?

There’s a lot of talk about designing for delight. Delight is nice, but it’s thin. And, done the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or too much, and it gets annoying. I’m thinking that we all need to look a bit deeper. If you were to personally carry out this transaction with the customer, what would you want that to be like? If you were to design the perfect day for your user, where would your product or service fit into that day — how would that product or service make the day perfect?

I have a theory that the next stage is to be looking at getting beyond eliminating frustration to creating experiences that are truly pleasurable, put users in a state of flow, or emphasize purpose and meaning. And this is part of that Reformation I mentioned above. Designing in the framework I’m thinking of — pleasure, flow, and meaning — will take much different skills and thinking from what you get from the usual psychology, human factors, or human-computer interaction program. We user experience designers are going to have to learn about behavioral economics, linguistics, network theory, anthropology, and sociology, among other disciplines and practices, to do a better job of designing than just creating a satisfactory interaction.

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Hear Dana and other great speakers at the MIMA Summit

Follow Dana on twitter @danachis

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A special thanks to Jill Gutterman, a MIMA board member, for hosting this interview. Jill, is a Director of Interactive Marketing at Rasmussen College and a MIMA Board Director. Jill Gutterman’s philosophy in life is simple: Have passion for what you do and keep learning. It’s this philosophy that has been a driving force behind Jill’s forward-thinking 12 year professional career in digital marketing. Jill graduated magna cum laude from Wright State University, in Dayton, OH with a degree in psychology.

Join us as we mark the 10th Anniversary of the MIMA Summit to discover more trends at the 2011 MIMA Summit, register today!

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A special thanks to Chris Havranek, a MIMA volunteer, for developing this content.  Chris is a User Experience Specialist at Hello Viking.   Chris also has a B.S. in Branding, Marketing and PR from MCAD. He can be found on Twitter at @ChrisHavranek.

Sources:

For ten years, MIMA has gathered the industry’s finest talent to speak at the annual MIMA Summit. 2011 will be no different. This year’s MIMA Summit speakers include Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-Founder of SEOMoz, a leading provider of software tools and industry knowledge to professionals in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. Rand took some time to share his thoughts about where the SEO industry has been and where it’s going.

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Josh Braaten: As a speaker and leader of a well-known SEO software company, you’ve watched the SEO industry grow and mature. What are the biggest mistakes companies have made with SEO and what mistakes do companies continue to make?

Rand Fishkin: There’s a lot of folks who underinvest or fail to invest in SEO at all, either because they’re unaware of the practice or believe it won’t work. That lack of investment leads to a less discoverable website and means they don’t reap the rewards of their branding and marketing efforts on or offline.

For those who do invest, but make mistakes, I see a lot of unfortunate moves, but I think the biggest is a general attitude of pursuing shortcuts and low-value tactics rather than building a solid brand on the web. I was speaking at an affiliate conference in New York City this past weekend and was asked by an audience member whether she could stop writing “all-unique” content when submitting pieces to article directories and article “spinner” sites and could simply make the first and last paragraph unique… There’s just so many problems with that entire approach and attitude, it was hard to even know how to begin answering.

You’ve been active in the SEO industry for coming up on ten years now. How has your understanding of SEO changed over the years? How has your way of explaining the value of SEO to non-believers changed?

I used to start explaining SEO by diving into the tactics of the practice – how you need to do keyword research and build and accessible site and make good content – all that. It wasn’t untrue, but it also didn’t tell a compelling narrative.

Today, if I’m explaining SEO, I start where searchers start – with a need. People want to know things. And they don’t just want to find low quality junk that’s been manipulated to the top of the results — they want amazing resources that answer their every question and more. They want depth, detail, social proof, and content that’s worth sharing.

We all have that primal need for information, and search is the best, fastest way to discover it. Google gets more than 3 billion searches each day! But unless someone is creating great stuff and marketing it well on the web, search becomes a fruitless, frustrating activity. That’s why I love SEO – it’s about making great stuff and getting it in front of the people who need it. What’s not to love?!

Just as interactive marketing has changed dramatically over the last ten years, it will continue to do so over the next ten. If you had to guess, what are some of the biggest changes on the horizon for SEO?

I think we’re going to see a lot more authenticity and passion from marketers in the work they create and in how they market it. The past decade gave us a lot of shortcuts to ranking content, but the last few years have fundamentally changed what it takes to build a successful business on the web. The growth of vertical search (videos, local, images, etc), the rise and subsequent fragmentation of social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, FourSquare, etc) and the growing sophistication of the search engines (Google’s Panda update, Bing’s improvements on webspam, user/usage data in SERPs, social proof through social media connections, etc) are all changing the game.

Along with these shifts come a huge need for greater responsbility among SEOs themselves. You can’t just work on keywords and links anymore and be successful. You’ve got to embrace social and analytics and vertical search and content marketing and conversion rate optimization and… Well, you get the idea.

What’s the most common misconception people have about SEO? How might your session at the 2011 MIMA Summit help to clear up those misconceptions and help people advance their own SEO strategy?

People think SEO is a process. It’s not – it’s become a strategy. It’s bigger than the building blocks of good rankings – SEO today involves nearly everything about building a great business on the web, and that means SEOs need to take a broader view. I’m planning to talk about this strange death and rebirth of SEO, and why I love the new way of doing SEO and inbound marketing as a whole so much more. I think folks will really enjoy it, and I’ll have plenty of very specific, actionable recommendations mixed in there, too.
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Learn more about Rand Fishkin and SEO by visiting the SEOmoz blog. If you want to see Rand Fishkin present live and in person, visit MIMA Summit 2011 and register for this year’s event. Rand joins keynote speakers Avinash Kaushik and Chris Anderson in this year’s special 10-year anniversary MIMA Summit.
Rand at the MIMA Summit
Rand on the SEOmoz Blog
Get your tickets for the Summit
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A special thanks to Josh Braaten, a MIMA volunteer, for hosting this interview. Josh is an Online Marketing Manager at Rasmussen College. He has worked in marketing and on websites for over five years. Josh also has a B.A. in Economics from St. John’s University. Josh loves Internet marketing and blogs about SEO, web analytics and related topics on his Internet marketing blog. Connect with Josh on Twitter, LinkedIn, and +Josh Braaten.

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We begin this series today by featuring, Jason Grigsby (@grigs).  Jason lives and breathes mobile, much to the chagrin of his family and co-workers. He believes mobile may be the most important technology since the printing press.

1)  What is it that got you interested in working in Mobile Web Strategy?

Back in 2000, I purchased my first mobile phone (a low-end feature phone) and first PDA (a Handspring Visor) at nearly same time. It was clear to me that these two devices would eventually become one.

I became consumed with the idea of what could happen if people had information at the finger tips no matter where they were in the world. Could we make capitalism work better if we had informed consumers shopping with the world’s knowledge in their hands?
The walls of my apartment were covered with poster-sized sticky notes with grand schemes for barcode scanners and mobile data. It is still a surprise that the woman who I met at that time didn’t think I was a madman and eventually became my wife.

I soon realized that mobile technology wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. I went to work for a company building web applications until 2007 when the iPhone came out and it was clear the technology was finally ready.

2)  What are a few takeaways a MIMA summit attendee can plan to learn from your presentation:Get Me a Mobile Strategy or You’re Fired: Learn the Do’s and Don’ts of a Successful Mobile Strategy?

I’m focused on is what are the attributes that make mobile unique and how companies that understand those attributes make better decisions about mobile.  We’re going to take a look at what works and what doesn’t work in mobile strategy. I guarantee two things: you’ll learn something and you’ll be entertained.

3)      What is next in the digital decade?

I’m going to take some liberties here and answer the question slightly differently than it was posed. There are two factors that I think are a big deal for the coming decade.

The first is the one that many people are already aware of: the upcoming zombie apocalypse of devices. That’s the way Scott Jenson, formerly of Google Mobile and now with Frog Design, described the fact that it is no longer just mobile phones, but tablets, televisions, automobile systems, and many other devices. This transformation is accelerating.

The second is one that many people haven’t considered. Much of our infrastructure is ill-suited for our multiple device, multiple environment future. Many companies have multiple systems built on desktop web assumptions that are duct-taped together. We have massive work ahead of us to update systems to support the new device diversity.

4)     What would you say is the most unexpected developments in the last 10 years?

The success of the iPhone App Store. I always thought it would be successful, but I didn’t expect it to be as big as it has turned out to be.
First, the App Store’s approach is almost entirely the opposite of Web 2.0—the trend immediately preceding it. Web 2.0 featured:

• Web-based apps were challenging native apps (Google Docs usurping MS Office)
• Services and mashups were the hot trend
• The recurring revenue of software as a service was preferable to traditional software sales
• Cloud computing meant more and more data was moved from local clients to servers

The App Store flipped these trends on their head by emphasizing:

• Native apps are presumed to be superior to web apps
• Few if any APIs between apps. In fact, apps are more isolated due to iOS sandbox.
• No recurring revenue nor even traditional models like charging for upgrades.
• Priority on client-side storage, not on cloud systems.

And despite all of that, the App Store accomplished something else no one thought possible which is to make purchasing apps a common, discretionary expense for a significant number of people.

We take it for granted now but the iPhone App Store was truly revolutionary.

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Stay tuned for next week’s thought leader and check out more on Jason’s session at this year’s MIMA Summit.

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A special thanks to Abbey Tosic, a MIMA volunteer, for hosting this interview.  Abbey, is the eHub Design & Usability Lead at 3M. She has worked in design and online marketing for over 7 years. Abbey graduated magna cum laude from the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, with a BFA degree in Graphic Design.  You can view Abbey’s recent work at www.abbeytosic.com or read her Interactive marketing blog at www.thedotcomgirls.com.

With all that in mind, what might occur after the tenth annual MIMA Summit has passed us by? Here are some random prognostications for the next decade, 2011-2021:

Video Ubiquity

Data storage and transfer costs have been near or at zero for some time now. Camera, screen and encoding technologies get less and less expensive and video capture and editing software gets easier and easier to use. My first prediction is ever-present video, for every computing device and display surface. We will come to prefer our content in motion, often created and always controlled by ourselves. We will walk away from static, inflexible materials and towards moving surfaces and ambient sound. This shift will change the biology of how we interact with each other and with our knowledge. It will often overload us, and stillness will stand out.

Every Surface A Display

Due to innovation in microelectronics, bonding and paint, and fabrication technologies, every wall, tabletop, ceiling, floor, containment material and vehicle exterior will have the capabilities to display digital information. It will be horrible and wonderful all at once. You won’t pick a color for a wall because it can be any color, anytime. Or it can be a video. So, on the one hand, we might not need to carry anything with a screen because everything could be our screen. It also seems possible this technology could capture input as well as display data, meaning you might not need to carry a keyboard or trackpad either.

The New Facebook, By And For The People

I think one of two scenarios might happen with our current most popular network: The first is some form of government presence in the network that is demanded by the people. This might be a reaction to a perceived rise in corporate power, a policy gaffe on Facebook’s part, or a desire to insure rights and protections. Consider this scenario similar to government regulation of broadcast frequencies or air travel. As networks grow more prominent in public life, we will ask where and how they ought to be accessible to all, all the time.

The New Facebook, Isn’t Facebook

Or, if we take the last ten years as any kind of indicator, our society will soon—despite massive, rising adoption—walk away from accounts on facebook.com. We just will, because of what it has become, has not become and because of what isn’t, which is new. This natural evolution is one of any network’s biggest threats. It will spur constant acquisition of perceived threats to leadership. It will someday inspire an actual marketing campaign for Facebook. And yet, another idea might simply take root and do to Facebook as it has done to networks before it.

The New Education

Perhaps the biggest change I see occurring in the next ten years is the beginning of the end of education, as we know it. Too many empowering technologies, the ever-increasing globalization of DIY groups, and the growing sense education should and must change will drive profound effects. Grading will be based on interests, not age. Point systems common to gaming will replace grades. Education will be supplied more and more by a global network of those who are willing to teach versus a mandate of state and local government. Education will not occur in centralized buildings and, perhaps most important, education will not be confined to specific age segments. Graduation day is forever.

I hope you’ll join us this October 11-12 at the tenth annual MIMA Summit when Wired’s Chris Anderson and Google’s Avinash Kaushik keynote along with over 50 session speakers. I’m sure you’ll hear even more (and better) prognostications that inspire useful conversations in the days that follow.

— Tim Brunelle

Back in 2001—before the first dot-com crash, before the app marketplace—our predecessors in the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association produced the very first MIMA Summit. I was working in Boston at the time, and recall the fervor that era required, distinguishing interactive marketing from its sluggish parent. ‘Interactive’ described a new approach to thinking about the practice of marketing. It defined a rejection of bureaucracy, an embrace of entrepreneurial action and much better taste in eyewear.

Working in and creating ‘interactive’ has certainly rewritten my deepest understanding of the role of marketing and how it can best serve the needs of the world. And I believe the inception of ‘interactive’ has changed business, not just marketing, forever. A few examples of how interactive marketing advances have impacted business over the past ten years:

Data

The sheer amount of digital data created in the early days used to numb and crush but now serves to inspire, fuel and sustain. In the past decade we have seen data become the new storytelling device. Yet, as our 2011 morning keynote Avinash Kaushik has noted, the vast majority of marketers still do nothing with the incredible stores of data at their command. Where is the next Nike+, which is already over six-years old?

Empowering Tech, Empowered People

Perhaps the greatest impact of the past decade has been the technical means and avid culture inspiring individuals to produce, curate and promote as they see fit. Marketers are no longer the only ones marketing, nor are they entirely in control anymore. This has re-shaped how creative agencies operate and opened billions in realms of new marketing services.

DIY Revolution

Home Depot’s “You can do it. We can help.” tagline synthesizes the effect of interactive upon marketing over the past ten years. Consumers don’t need brands and marketers the same ways that they needed or utilized them in earlier decades. It’s not about passive consumption anymore. Marketers need to embrace the ability and willingness of people to tinker with the inner workings of the brand.

“Good Enough” Revolution*

The flip side of easily empowering technology is a lessening interest in product quality and craftsmanship. The new enemies are cost and time. The World Wide Web and ubiquitous computing creates a false confidence, that anything can be done faster and cheaper. And the truth is this revolution cuts and challenges agencies and marketers with equality.

“Free” Revolution

We also now have the dramatic reduction in costs of processing, data storage and transmission – what was prohibitively priced is now almost free. Where the “Good Enough” revolution lowered expectations of quality, the “Free” revolution made it okay for anyone to act big. Small agencies now have access to tools and functionality that only big agencies could afford in the past. And ‘pro-sumers’ can effectively act as agencies if they want, which they often do.

There are more, and there will be more of these examples. That is the nature of a rapid re-combining, testing, and mutation of existing systems and rules. This is why I’m convinced all marketing is inherently interactive now, and we probably don’t need the term quite as much as we used to. We’re not over yet, not by a long shot.

Good thing there’s the 2011 MIMA Summit coming up, featuring Wired’s Chris Anderson and Google’s Avinash Kaushik. You’re sure to hear about all of these ideas, and many more. And currently all for the same ticket prices as 2009. Hurry, before time runs out.

*Kudos to our 2011 afternoon keynote, Chris Anderson’s Wired magazine for first coining this term.

— Tim Brunelle

Heath Rudduck is Campbell Mithun’s Chief Creative Officer, a post he started this winter after moving his family west from Boston to the Twin Cities at the end of 2010. I’m not sure which came as a bigger shock: changing residences from his native Australia to the United States or being greeted by four and a half feet of snow upon his arrival in Minneapolis after the blizzards of December 2010.

Barely six months later, Heath seemed right at home with his Minnesota neighbors as he presented Crowdsourcing Creativity at the well-attended MIMA event held at the University of Minnesota’s beautiful McNamara Alumni Center on Wednesday.

The first part of Heath’s presentation examined how complex our marketing and technology landscape has become, a point which was underscored by the event staff’s initial difficulties in projecting the slides from Rudduck’s laptop. Heath cited a plethora of new gadgets and technologies that have made our lives both more convenient and complex.

This complexity has made for an extremely fragmented interactive marketplace, and this fragmentation requires that more thought and collaboration go into new creative and marketing ideas than ever before. Gone are the Mad Men days of copywriter and art director duos. Today’s teams also require new roles such as user experience strategists, media planners, and even search engine optimization professionals to be successful.

Adjusting to all these new touch points and contributors to our efforts can be difficult, but Heath had five suggestions to ease into crowdsourcing creativity within our own teams:

1. Relax to go fast
2. Stop hiring in your own image
3. Embrace the entrepreneur
4. Risk getting it wrong
5. Embrace the under-confident over-achiever

Heath finished with the thought that it takes a village to raise an idea. Good ideas will go bad and will never become great if their originator doesn’t share and grow them with team members of different skill sets, passions and perspectives. This requires a new level of planning for most creative projects, which isn’t always easy or fun. But all this planing pays off when our campaigns are able to capture the attention of today’s consumer and their increasingly complex worlds.

Blog-Only Bonus: After the event, Heath sat down with me to share his ideas on his own creative process and when he considers a good idea to be complete.

Watch the post-event interview on Vimeo.

Crowdsourcing Creativity was an entertaining and insightful look into developing creative ideas. Heath’s presentation added to the list of successful 2011 MIMA events, which are building up to the 10th Anniversary of the MIMA Summit in October. Register now for discounted tickets before it’s too late.

Ten years ago, way back before government officials were tweeting their private parts or anyone could plus one their Google, an intrepid group of Minnesotans inaugurated the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s annual Summit. This was a very complex, new conference from a three-year old association with less than 500 members. This was a dare, a risk, a mammoth outpouring of volunteering love. And it took place right before the first dot-com explosion.

In other words—a brilliant beginning. Because ten years later, the MIMA Summit is the largest annual marketing and technology conference in the Midwest, hosted by the oldest interactive marketing association in the country. A testament, if you will, to the pioneering intent of MIMA’s founders, early sponsors and supporters, and most important—the amazing marketing and interactive talent living and working in Minnesota.

We Made Something Incredible

We – the community of developers, technicians, producers, writers, designers, UXers, content strategists, project managers, film directors, account managers, brand leaders, media planners, investors, lawyers and even the Master Social Media Guru Pundit experts – have created and nurtured an awesome marketplace. The talent in Minnesota that defines, funds, creates and sustains game-changing business ideas is second to none. And throughout this past decade, the MIMA Summit has come around each year to remind us of the strength and vitality of our community.

I’m lucky to be involved in this association at this point in time. I am inspired by our association’s abilities over the past decade to continuously build an annual event now serving over 1,200 people. An event with national appeal, that celebrates the story of Minnesota’s powerful and growing interactive marketing industry.

A Continuing Mission

The tenth annual MIMA Summit, on Tuesday October 11 and Wednesday October 12, promises to continue MIMA’s overarching mission—to elevate talent—by providing an incredible roster of useful insights, focused passion and spirited dialogue. You’ll walk in with an incredible array of over 50 speakers, panels and session to learn from, including keynotes by Wired’s Chris Anderson and Google’s Avinash Kaushik.

You’ll walk out inspired—and not just by the talent elevating your talent. Ticket prices for the 2011 MIMA Summit are still being sold at 2009 prices, easily the best value for any conference of this size and scope. I hope you will spread the word and plan to join us as we celebrate the digital decade: what happened, what’s next and why it matters.

— Tim Brunelle

Seriously though. The classics are memorable, in part, because they so clearly provoke strong emotional connections with the intended audience for the message.

Indeed. Traditionally its the copy writer’s ideas and words that tell us what we can expect. Consider: “Mm, Mm good.”

Or they remind us about what we aspire to be. Such as: “Breakfast of champions.”

Or they promise something new that will change our lives for the better. Who can forget: “Think small.”

Just for context, in case these little gems are not part of your personal experience, they are examples are slogans from 60s-era campaigns for Campbell’s Soup, Wheaties and Volkswagen, respectively. Anyway. The list goes on and on.

As you might have noticed, the media landscape has evolved and grown over the last decade (or two) to include new communication channels that offer more and more and more ways to get the word out about the product or service you want to promote.

At the same time, you may also have noticed that these new channels, while opening new opportunities to marketers, are also changing the way people respond to marketing messages and relate to brands.

Essentially, new technologies like social media, mobile internet, radio frequency identification, geo-location and other “Dick Tracy-like” capabilities are rapidly reshaping the way consumers behave.

The upshot of all this? The role of the writer, ever essential to the creative process and the creative product, is changing. Evolving. Growing. Even maturing?

Teressa Iezzi, editor of Advertising Age’s Creativity magazine wants to help us understand where our industry is headed – and how copy writers will continue to help drive results as the paradigm shifts force marketers to update the way they do their jobs.

This must be a subject on the minds of many creative and marketing leaders these days. Because more than 200 MIMA members and guests, convened for the February monthly presentation to listen to ideas from her recently published book, The Idea Writer: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Era.

(Kudos to the programming committee for bringing her in to speak with us. And a sincere thank you to Teresa for traveling here to share her experience and insights with us.)

The good news is: while technology innovations are driving the changes in how marketers and consumers interact, the fundamentals of human nature remain the same. So while copy writers may have an expanded set of tools to use to communicate ideas, their primary duty – to help create relationships with consumers is pretty much unchanged.

Basically, copy writers simply have more competencies they need to develop. Just like copy writers in the 90s had to learn to expand their range from ideating and writing print ads, direct mail, sales collateral, outdoor and broadcast to also include websites, banner ads and e-mails, copy writers today must continue to expand their repertoire to include social media, “apps” and more. Because developing effective ideas, depends on understanding the underlying technologies.

So the craft of copywriting is not dying. It is simply changing. From being mastery of writing to including mastery of conversation.  And being conversant with technology.

Our industry will always need idea people. Word people. People who can take complex ideas and boil them down into something easy-to-read and easy-to-understand. (Like helping people quickly get the gist of an hour-long presentation that touches on a lot of great ideas.)

If you can do that, you’re golden. Writers who can engage readers will always be in demand. There will always be a need for Mm, Mm good ideas and writing.

Download the podcast (available soon, please check the Resources section next time you visit this website) and listen to the complete conversation for a number of practical insights. And be sure to leave your comments here, to share the key take aways you think are important.

The panel format works well for challenging topics, such as integrated communications, for a number of reasons. You get to hear more than one point-of-view. You get to learn from some of experts we have right here in our local professional community. And you get to participate in the conversation yourself, as was evidenced by the many thoughtful questions and insights offered by the audience.

Moderator Andrew Eklund, CEO and Founding Partner at Ciceron, set up the conversation by showing three charts describing the media environment that underscore the degree of difficulty marketers have with integrated communications.

The first chart showed media channels available in 1975. It featured a dozen or so data points – television, radio, newspaper, outdoor, direct mail, etc. – and corresponding arrows pointing at how they touch the consumer of the media. Very neat, organized and easy to look at.

The second chart showed the media channels available in 2008. With the addition of digital media, the number of data points and delivery arrows mushroomed. Imagine a chaotic web created by a hyperactive spider on mescaline. (That’s a powerful and dangerous mind altering substance, kids; leave it alone.) There were many nods of agreement when this slide was displayed.

The third chart showed the media channels available in 2010. With the addition of social media, the number of data points and deliver arrows was so dense that it was, indeed, a solid black box, with every pixel filled with information. This got a few knowing, and nervous, chuckles.

Eklund then opened the discussion by stating that, with our evolving media environment, integrated communications is like a holy grail to marketers and asking if we have found it.

Paul Ratzky, Interactive Director and Vice President at Olson, observed that the concept of integrated communications keeps changing, because the integrator is shifting from the agency to the consumer, as people select their own channel pathways. Which means marketers need to follow their audience and deliver messages in the audience’s preferred channel, as opposed to trying to move them into the marketer’s channel of choice.

Glenn Karowski, Managing Director, The Business of Ideas, added that effective integrated communications is about conversation and relationships. And the key is to be a good listener.

When asked who is responsible for listening to consumers (marketing? branding? advertising?) Erik Erickson, Owner of Erickson McGee, LLC and former Vice President and Creative Director for Target commented that we are still in the early stages of figuring out how to listen. And that figuring out what to do with what we hear is the next big challenge.

Download the podcast (available soon, please check the Resources section next time you visit this website) and listen to the complete conversation for a number of practical insights. And be sure to leave your comments here, to share the key take aways you think are important.