Marketers can learn a lot from the global financial crisis, and even more from the US banks and financial groups that fed into this perfect storm of fiscal foolishness. The paradigm shift the US banks, and its global counterparts, enter changed the foundation of lending. Rather than lend to people, and their relative incomes and abilities to service a loan they began to invest in the future equity of the property. In other words they moved from believing in the value of people to believing in value of a property; or perhaps better stated the speculative value of an inanimate object.

For a while it worked. And as we all know if it�??s working and making money it can�??t be wrong. This same philosophy drives Hollywood and why we are subjected to the reality TV phenomena. The problem is that the premise is fundamentally flawed and, well, just plain bad business. Rather than stop it and turn off the profit pipeline, the banks tried to fix it with complex risk mitigation schemes; but as we have learned-- lipstick on pig...

The lesson for marketers is simple; market to people. Whether it�??s a business-to-consumer or business-to-business campaign, marketing communications in all its permutations is about people. A brand is a promise and you cannot make a promise to an inanimate object.

Financial markets enjoy a cyclical nature, what goes down must come up. Marketers do not have the luxury of time. Once we make the wrong investment choice, we lose the business for good. Do it too many times and we are out of business. Choose wisely, invest your brand, and brand communications, in people.

I spend a lot of time on the web, well more than I should, but I like it. One thing I've noticed is web marketing blurs the lines of what is appropriate to broadcast to kids. Pop ups for alcohol, dating sites, herpes cures and penis enlargement schemes are synonymous with web surfing and email accounts. Luckily Ruby Pseudo is on the case. In this post she tells marketers what works with kids and what makes them cringe...take heed.

http://rubypseudochatchat.blogspot.com/2008/10/ruby-digital-rules-or-at-least-passing.html

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating a regulated Internet. The Internet should stay free of regulation and taxation. The very nature of the web makes it a petri dish for regulators hoping to save the millions who turn to it for freedom of expression and community from certain evil. And Lord knows the tax vultures are salivating at an opportunity to levy revenue from the millions of hourly transactions. No, that path is certain to lead to a Big Brother society complete with a revival of McCarthyism.

What needs to happen is we marketers need to be smarter about how we reach our audiences on the web. This means a polar shift in how we decide to market. Gone are the days of one way windowed focus groups, where many show up for reasons other than providing marketing intel, and decision making based on previous behavior. The web is immediate, its communities dynamic and alive in the present. 

Recently I attended a digital strategy brain storming session to determine a web marketing strategy for a brand in a challenging space. Idea after idea popped up only to be shot down as not doable. After all ideas, some brilliant, were dismissed I asked a seemingly stupid question of the group. "How many of us actually spend time on the web, belong to an online community, blog or have a profile somewhere?"

I was the Lone Ranger and Tonto was not in the building. It was quickly established, despite the bright, creative minds present, that we may not have all the sandwiches required for the picnic. From this a rather novel course of action arose. Rather than discuss what we did not know, we would go away and each of us spend time online in communities where our target audience lives to listen and respond with them. This will take time and effort, we will have to engage with many we do not know, we will have to listen and learn on a more personal level. Scary stuff.

The work is on going, but the results will be much more dynamic than traditional planning tools originally leveraged for the project. And there will be a few more brilliant minds wandering the Internet. Not unlike the monkey who throws it's baby in the water to see if it will swim, Web marketing is hard to do unless you're in the water.  

Actress and down-to-earth celebrity Jamie Lee Curtis offers a refreshing insight into our ailing culture with her Huff Post today. She postulates that we are caught in 'bad news days' solidified by our addiction to technology, frail celebrity, political confusion and international embarrassment which keeps us from focusing on what is important; eye-to-eye communications about issues that really matter. She has a point. We are caught in a cultural 'mis-information' campaign, but I don't blame technology, rather the super marketers, i.e. politicians and the media.

Recently I witnessed, first hand, the swift power of a 'mis-information' campaign aimed at leveraging the fears of conservative voters in a rather pathetic attempt of racial profiling. On February 26, 2008 GOP operative and Cincinnati talk radio host Bill Cunningham delivered an inflammatory anti- Obama speech in which he repeatedly referred to the Senator from Illinois as Barrack "Hussein" Obama, with a little extra emphasis on the middle name for good measure. He made other accusations that he couldn't back up due to a lack evidence (obviously) and derided the so called left wing media, especially CBS and NBC, as solely supporting the Clintons; are we beginning to see a pattern here kids? Immediately the cable news media scooped the story and soon Cunningham was on Hannity and Colmes defending his position and denouncing Senator McCain for repudiating him. Of course, the never 'fair and balanced' Fox News quickly gathered a group of questionable experts to debate this nonsense ad nauseum, including the always available for a fee Dick Morris. This went on a few days and further fanned the flames of confusion to leverage America's xenophobia surrounding all things Muslim in an attempt to gain political ground for the Republican party.

The reality is that two-thirds of the world's population is Muslim, many of whom are wealthy, sophisticated and educated. If they wanted to over run the country, they would have by now. But this kind of logic doesn't create controversy, get attention for politicians, and feed the TV producers need for viewer-ship to sell more advertisements to add to Mr. Murdoch's coffers. No, its really not bad news, now is it?

While all of this was happening I was on a ski holiday with dear family friends who are old school conservative Republicans and fine, decent people who were easily swayed by this 'mis information' campaign. Why? Because it came from their leaders and was on the television; two sources of trusted information for them.

The issue of Obama's loyalty due to his Muslim heritage is an ongoing platform of ignorance some members of the Republican party like to stand on. It is a weak and immoral one, but as Hitler, McCarthy, Saddam Hussein and Karl Rove all knew, it's easier to scare people into following you than actually leveraging logic and solving the issues that really matter.

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All living organisms expand and contract as part of their life cycle, and businesses and companies are no exception to this rule. I learned this the hard way, I do that alot, years ago while working at Novell. Despite fulfilling my duties beyond expectations, (I was the senior manager of business media in the PR department and had successfully placed newly appointed CEO Eric Schmidt on the cover of BusinessWeek among other accomplishments), I was laid off when the newly appointed VP of Marketing came aboard and changed the structure of the marketing department. It contracted and I, like many others, was not part of the counter expansion move. It ended up best for all as I entered a more rewarding conversation a few months later.

Valeria Maltoni's insightful post, Revealing Yourself To Others, wrestled this memory from me when she postulated, "Has mutual disclosure through memes, for example, also become a form of PR?" As we know a meme is a theoretical unit of cultural information, and as Valeria also says-- more and more people are using social media. The PR craftsman, and I deliberately use the term craftsman, is faced with the task of knowing when and how to craft a client's 'disclosures.' Much the same way we used to manage lists of journalists to pitch, today's craftsman must know how and where to enter the best conversation possible to disclose his clients 'meme.' And as Valeria goes on to say, "revealing yourself takes time. There are many layers."

Stuart McFaul at Spiralgroup,(disclosure: I perform business development duties for Spiralgroup) puts this very succinctly when he says, "Social Marketing is really about getting the right message to the right person, using the right media at the right time."

And as social media expands the ability to insert memes of disclosure into the conversation will contract until the only way to do so is to always be part of the life cycle.

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I was perusing the latest issue of Fast Company the other day and discovered Robert Scoble is penning a column for them now...very cool. Then I perused his blog this morning and discovered the reason he went with them was their committment to building a strong online/social network experience. So I jump over there and perused Fastcompany.com and, I must say its very impressive and smart. Congrats to Ed Sussman and team for embracing the future.

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