“Note to agencies: you are competing with publishers now.”
—Rebecca Lieb, The Decline of Advertising and the Creative Renaissance

“There’s too much competition between women. We need more collaboration.”
— Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilker, Wired Women

“Digital is a mindset, not a medium.”
—Andrian Ho and Christian Erickson, Creativity: Bridging Traditional to Digital

“The challenge has always been getting signoff on an artifact you can’t deliver.”
—Jill Hewitt and Chris Bernard, Schematic and Microsoft: All Access Olympics

“Web properties today: 1) stagnant content 2) no interaction 3) about the company, not the customer”
—Valeria Maltoni, Corporate Blogger: Angel or Demon?

“The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”
—William Gibson, quoted by Chris Bernard, Schematic and Microsoft: All Access Olympics

“This is the best market for interactive in the country today.”
—Matt Wilson, MIMA President, Welcome Remarks

“Dance like an idiot and don’t sell anything.”
— Ze Frank, What Conversation?

What did you hear? Please share.

The theme of this year’s Summit is the Feed.   When we think about the Feed as consumers, we think about what we want to hear about.  Companies, on the other hand, think about making a profit, finding customers and building their brand.  Corporate blogs, if approached correctly, connect companies with their consumers by providing content that speaks to consumer needs while indirectly fulfilling on company objectives.

It seems obvious that a company’s online content should speak to their target audience’s needs, but think about most corporate websites.  They have stagnant content and are about the company, not the consumer.  A blog is a great way for companies to start responding to what their audience really wants to hear.

There is an increasing demand for businesses to start leveraging social media.  According to Maltoni, 85% of people believe that companies should have a social media presence online and 53% of people say they would interact with companies with that presence.  A corporate blog is a way for companies to turn the tables on the traditional one-way marketing model by providing refreshed content and creating interaction.

Corporate blogging is a good opportunity to listen and become more in tune with the ongoing needs of customers.  The result is the creation of an online brand identity for your company that puts you in control of the conversation.  As consumers start to recognize your company’s persona/voice (reputation building), there’s also an increase in trust.  The more people feel they know you, the more affinity they will feel for your brand.

Creating a corporate blog is not an easy task though.  Corporate bloggers need to possess very specific qualities and characteristics because they are, in essence, the face of your brand.  They need to be communicators (editors), facilitators (community builders) and negotiators (marketers), as well as being active listeners, advocates and ambassadors.  These qualities all promote trust between company and consumer.

There is, of course, a great sense of responsibility associated with becoming a corporate blogger, especially within heavily regulated companies.  Everything you say is associated with the company.  There’s no such thing as being “just an employee”.  Corporate bloggers are the company.  Maltoni’s advice is to be open, truthful and sure of what you want to communicate because “once you open the door, there is no turning back.”

One of the biggest business challenges we face when launching a new product is how to go to market with it?  How and where do you spend your marketing budget?  This was the focus of the “Marketing Mix Challenge” session at today’s MIMA Summit.

The following panelists were asked to share their thoughts on an appropriate marketing mix for launching a new yoghurt-based sports drink (Edgy-Y) in one market over a three month period.

• Luba Smulka, General Mills
• Eric Boyles, Medtronic
• Ron Corbisier, Cadria
• Patty Henderson, Colle+McVoy

The panelists agreed that point of purchase is key, that is, reaching the target audience at the moment of most relevance.  So what are those key moments? 

• First thing in the morning while eating breakfast.  Smulka suggested leveraging newspaper wraps and print coupons. 
• In the grocery store. Boyle and Henderson recommended offering free trials of the product to shoppers.
• Online.  Contextual placements and paid search can all be leveraged to reach consumers that are performing relevant searches.

Couponing was a recurring suggestion from the panelists because of the importance of trial.  You have to prove the viability of the product and trial is the best way to do it.  In addition to in-store promotion, the panelists suggested providing e-coupons on the product’s micro site for consumers to print and take into the store.  Linked to couponing is providing other incentives.  You have to find a way to engage consumers and provide them with a real reason to try the product.

With product viability and transparency being key to this product launch, there has to be a PR element to the marketing mix.  What is the value proposition?  Why is this yoghurt sports drink different?

Many of the panelists recommended leveraging social media, which in essence ties together the tactics listed above.  There are many opportunities for exposure via social media sites which, coupled with e-couponing and links to the product micro site, can be very effective from a viral marketing standpoint.  Henderson had a long list of ways to use social media for this product launch: Twitter, blog posts with details of how to obtain the e-coupon, collecting testimonials on the micro site and asking consumers to vote for their favorite flavor.  The opportunities are endless.�

On behalf of MIMA, welcome to the Feed!  We kicked off the 2008 MIMA Summit this morning with a keynote presentation from Rebecca Lieb, former Editor-in-Chief for ClickZ, who promised to tell us a story about consumer adoption of digital media and the subsequent decline of traditional media consumption.

“Once upon a time, advertising was an exchange of content for time spent and exposure to advertiser messages.”  This is no longer the case.  Today, consumers create content and advertisers can too.  Advertising agencies are now switching to a more marketing-focused model that depends upon viral content.

Lieb provided an excellent example of an advertiser creating content.  The Great Schlep is an advetisement for Barack Obama presented as an extremely entertaining and viral video.  The creator of this content knows how to reach her target audience; she presents her content in her audience’s voice.  This example fits all three of the content criteria that Lieb focused on during her presentation:

• Educates and informs audience
• Amuses, engages, entertains
• Creates a story that consumers can spread (viral marketing)

Another example of content being used for advertising purposes is Pet Charts, a consumer-focused website that aggregates pet-focused content from other sources and invites consumers to vote for their favorite content (stories, photos, videos, etc).  The beauty about content driven sites, such as this one, is that they also support organic search engine ranking.  Search engines look favorably upon websites that constantly add fresh relevant content and raise rankings accordingly.  

Lieb dubs this approach (advertising with little-to-no significant media buying) as the “Jerry Seinfeld” school of advertising.  The recent Seinfeld and Gates commercials are successful in humanizing products to create viral momentum.  Consumers are so engaged by these commercials that they voluntarily go online to subscribe to subsequent commercials.  Note that the mention of the product in these ads is minimal.  Instead, the ads focus on entertaining and engaging the audience rather than hitting them over the head with product mentions.

Brands are now dedicating their budget not to media buying, but to creative and spokespeople.  Advertising is no longer about buying media placements that overtly promote products, but about finding a way to engage consumers via compelling content that gets consumers talking and only subtedly promotes a product.  As Lieb concludes, advertisers are becoming “storytellers”.  If you want to sell a product, you need a story.  What’s your story?

This is a tough question. But as a person getting paid to think about this sort of thing, I had to respond to this question from Rebecca Lieb, one of the MIMA Summit keynote speakers.

Because there tends to be confusion on exactly what “content” is, this chiken-and-egg questions always bubbles up. So first, let’s get that out of the way:

Content isn’t just headlines and paragraphs — but rather, all the stuff that fills up a website (e.g., error messages, metadata, video, audio, imagery, link text, form fields, etc.). So just like when you’re shopping, the CONTENTs of your cart include everything contained in that rolling plastic basket.

So following this logic, content (a website) IS what you market.

What’s interesting, though, is that to really create effective content, marketing considerations must be addressed. For example:

• How are you listening to your customers? What are they saying?
• How can you be credible (trust, authenticity, transparency, listening, responsiveness, affirmation) with your customers?
• How do you define engagement, and what are the related metrics of success you use to define it?
• How can you stay authentic and meaningful (while still achieving brand guidelines and objectives)?
• What verticals within your company do you work most closely with? What are their deliverables to / from you?
• How can you nurture customer advocacy? What information and tools could be given to customers to do so? What are the drivers for customers to become advocates?

Backing up to think about questions like this needs to happen long before content development development begins. It’s questions like these that help shape a site’s content strategy, which then informs a site’s editorial strategy, which finally puts the pieces together for beginning to develop content — that can be marketed.

Let’s face it, we were pretty sure that the 2007 Summit was a hit; it was sold out after all. But what did people really think? The results are now in from both our online survey and the surveys that were handed out for each breakout session at the Summit.

Here are some key highlights:

• 650 attendees (an 82% increase from 2006!)
• 9 national and 12 local speakers
• 94% of attendees thought the Summit was good to excellent
• Mini sessions were a hit
• Attendees gave high marks across the board for both keynote and breakout speakers
• Most popular speaker and presentation was Google’s Jim Lecinski
• 91% thought The Depot as a venue was good to excellent
• Ideas for 2008 include:
• Specialized breakout sessions by discipline
• Specialized breakout sessions by level of experience
• Bigger variety of topics for the breakout sessions

Bring on 2008!

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Google’s Jim Lecinski closed the MIMA Summit with an excellent session on the 10 Trends Shaping the Digital Landscape.

#1 Be always on
Since your consumer can be online 24/7, so should you.

#2 Be ready online for what’s happening offline
Offline is driving online searches so you need to anticipate the type of information that your prospect is going to be looking for. Today, when consumers want information, they go online.

#3 Don’t build it and hope they come
Think about how people will get to your web site and the types of promotions you can leverage.

#4 Don’t discount niche sites for advertising
People’s favorite sites tend to be niche sites. For example, a site like seatguru.com tells you about any seat on a given airplane. Due to the nature of niche sites, the deeper you go in the site, the more engaged the user.

#5 Make video the centerpiece of your online strategy
YouTube is the 8th largest site on the Internet. Enough said.

#6 Give the consumer the opportunity to choose you
In addition to effective search engine marketing, make sure your content is available via RSS so that your consumers can keep coming back to your site when they want to.

#7 Tap into the “Wisdom of the Crowds”
User-generated content is becoming more and more prevalent. Invite users to submit content in a creative way. For example, Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign asked users to submit their “priceless” moments online.

#8 Be where consumers are at the moment of relevance
Leverage computer and contextual targeting tools to automatically place your ad at the moment of most relevance for your consumer.

#9 Keep an eye on how computer architecture is changing
Once upon a time, data was stored on computer hard drives and floppy disks. Nowadays, there is a tendency to email files to yourself to store them in that “cloud” that lives somewhere on the Web. Photo sites such as Picasa are taking advantage of this trend.

#10 Digital is no longer a sideshow
There were over 600 attendees at this year’s MIMA Summit. Digital is definitely not a sideshow.

Jim Lecinski is a Director for Google, leading the advertising business for Google’s Midwest clients and media agency partners.

Are you sitting in meetings, your BlackBerry partially hidden, texting, emailing, and Web browsing? Are you enjoying lunch with a colleague while managing your calendar? Are you on a conference call, but finessing a spreadsheet and muting the speaker to confer with colleagues?

C’mon, admit it.

You and thousands of other “digital natives” have a new moniker thanks to Lee Rainie, the 2007 MIMA Summit Keynote speaker and Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project.

You’re an “absent presence.” And quite possibly proud of it.

Raine’s oxymoron describes your essential multitasking self. Like the oxymorons “deafening silence” or “darkness visible,” Rainie’s term is a marriage of contradictions: you’re physically present, but mentally absent. Or, more charitably, mentally distracted.

This is not always a bad thing. As Jason Fried, another MIMA Summit speaker and founder of 37signals, quipped, “the email you don’t even know you’re getting is more interesting than the meeting you’re in.”

Mind you, Fried takes a hard line on meetings, calling them “toxic, costly time wasters that convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute.” He’d probably give you permission to be an “absent presence.”

So now that your species has been identified, let’s examine your traits. One, Rainie says, is that you “pay continuous partial attention.” You want to vigilant about, well, everything Web 2.0, but the volume of information is simply too great.

Another is that you engage in both “horizontal and vertical reading.” Horizontal reading is not what you do in bed. It’s what you do when you skim through 20 emails by scanning the subject lines and the preview text, scroll through your Google Reader for blog posts that catch your attention, or scan the abstracts on Forrester for relevant articles.

In horizontal reading, you’re skipping like a stone across a vast lake of information.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just horizontal reading.” Try that next time you’re taken to task for multitasking during a meeting.

“Vertical reading” is the proverbial deep dive, when you — gasp — actually read an entire article or book or series of posts related to your topic of interest.

“Today, attention is both truncated and elongated,” explained Rainie.

Because I’m sensing that your attention to this post will soon be truncated, I’ll wrap up with a few suggestions. (And please add your own.)

When you find yourself behaving as an “absent presence”… politely ask that the meeting be shortened. Or grant the meeting organizer the courtesy of your attention. Eye contact and focused attention are powerful — to give and to get.

When it’s your (important!) meeting and people are becoming “absent presences”… speed up your delivery, distill your content, jump to deadlines and deliverables, ask for better behavior, or just end the meeting.

The digital natives will thank you.

Did you know that 62% of Internet users do not look any further than the first page of search engine results?

Lance Loveday’s breakout session on SEO reconfirmed the need for high search engine rankings and provided tips on how to get there.

Traditional SEO (keyword research, on-site optimization and link building) is still as important as ever, but with the evolution of the digital landscape, there is an increasing need to think about search engine optimization in terms of video, images, blogs and RSS Feeds.

Video Optimization

In today’s YouTube age, optimizing video is crucial. Here are some tips.

• Keyword optimize video meta data
• Include the word “video” in the file name so that search engines recognize that the file is a video
• Make sure you allocate one URL per video

Image Optimization

• Embed keywords in the file name, directory and alt text
• Make sure images are not blocked by the robots.txt file

Blog Optimization

Just like optimizing a web site, blogs need to have keyword optimized meta data and on-page content.

• Make sure your blog has tags and categories created with keywords in mind
• Set up your blog to notify (ping) search engines when you add new content. You can use services such as pingomatic. Note: You still have to ping Google separately.
• “Claim your blog” in Technorati, the leading blog search engine

From a usability standpoint:

• Make sure users can easily subscribe to your RSS Feed by adding popular feed reader chiclets
• Offer email-based subscriptions as well as RSS
• Add links to popular social bookmarking sites

RSS Feed Optimization

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to maximize distribution of content and subsequently, also maximize your online visibility.

• Optimize your RSS Feeds with unique titles
• Use a full text feed for the best user experience
• Validate your feed using a service such as feedvalidator.org
• Enable “auto-discovery” so that the user can see that an RSS Feed is available (indicated by the presence of the orange RSS chiclet in the web address bar)

Lance Loveday is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, an online marketing company that helps companies maximize return on their web investments.