As a run-up to Integrated Marketing Week in New York, my friends at Econsultancy have stood up a series of Google+ Hangouts to preview how marketers are joining up marketings digital elements to create integrated customer experiences. The event is at 9am Pacific / noon Eastern time today — no registration is needed, just come by the G+ Hangout.

I’ll be joined by Liz Miller of the CMO Council which is an association of 35,000 marketing leaders and Murray Izenwasser of Biztegra which helps companies succeed on the social web.

The discussion will look at how you align thought processes to get your teams working together in a smart way. One of the most challenging parts of moving toward an integrated approach, this session will look at examples of how channels have been integrated and how effective this approach to marketing is.

Themes to be explored include:

• Causes of channel conflict.
• Solutions to channel conflict.
• Working with agencies.
• Role of tools in integrated marketing.

Come on by the hangout at Noon Eastern time today — or better, put this link in your calender and set a reminder to come join us.

I’ll be in Philadelphia Wednesday morning to share a session on how companies of all sizes are changing their businesses and finding greater opportunities though digital experience design. The gathering,the J.Boye Conference is focused on web and intranet strategy.

I’ve recorded a two minute preview below on Slideshare, which gives a preview of the talk. I’ll be sharing tools and techniques from my work including:

1. One customer metric which can be your firm’s revenue North Star.
2. Seven factors companies need to manage to make meaningful change.
3. Four questions you can use to test if your digital experience strategy is ready for action.

The preview also mentions ISITE Design’s Delight.us blog, which is both an online community and conference for people who want to create digital experiences that help them build great customer experiences.

Temujin Doran is a filmmaker and illustrator based in Cornwall, UK.  I’m fond of his gorgeous short videos (just a minute or so) that meditate on skipping stones and rope swings. He’s an artist, and a digital enjoyment I’m glad to recommend.

But I bring him to your attention for his rather remarkable video interpretation of the book The Death of the Liberal Class  by cultural critic and correspondent Chris Hedges. The video is made completely of clips found on the web. Its a tribute to Doran’s editing and manipulation of image, voice and music to turn out a cinema-graphic rendering that distills Hedge’s criticism.

Obey from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

It uses rhythm and visual image to buttress Hedges’ criticism of unfettered capitalism, globalization, staggering inequality and environmental change.

As civic dialog and its consumption is increasingly centered on multimedia images, we need to make people literate in ways that go beyond words words, and god willing far beyond PowerPoint. “A populace that can no longer find the words to articulate what is happening to it is cut off from rational discourse.” But increasingly our social discourse goes beyond words, and so we must equip our children with more than writing.

Doran’s video says that hope has two beautiful daughters, anger & courage. Anger at the way things are, and the courage to change them. Likewise, changing how people think takes verbal hammers and visual nails. The medium isn’t the message, but it can amplify it and make it compelling to a wider audience. Hedges’ words are the intellectual nails, pounded home with Doran’s visual hammer.

This is a wonderfully rich example of curation, resulting in a artistic experience that extends the utility of its elements in a new way. And a reminder that the experience of our words goes beyond their reading, and that they live in minds of audience members that reinterpret them for their own ends, not ours.

Big Brother Tries to Sell to Two Markets, Badly.
Comcast is in two businesses – selling to consumers, and then selling their attention to business.
I can’t imagine this ad’s designer ever considered consumers would see this, even though most B2B buyers are also consumers.

My impression is that this ad suggests that Comcast thinks of its home customers about the same way Soylent Green thinks of its ingredients. ;>

Hey Comcast, eyeballs are attached to people.

Dan Slagen is possibly the best acquisition marketer in the World. (evil laugh.) No, really. As head of Global Partnerships at Hubspot, SVP at Nanagans….as a PPC expert, he is one of the few best marketers I know.

We’re teaming up as part of the AMA Boston’s Connector Series for a night of networking and 10 minute shots on our best business thinking next week, right after work on Tuesday, May 7th, at Microsoft’s NERD center in Cambridge.

I’ll focus on why B2B and B2C marketers often miss opportunties at the bottom of the funnel, you know, where customers and money accumulate. Dan will talk about ways we can be much smarter about how we acquire and invest in the leads and relationships that grows business. Rather than creating a false choice, I hope that Dan and I will make everyone consider their mix of attention between prospects and customers, and suggest ways to play both ends of the funnel with greater success.

AMA Boston’s format is based on networking and conversation, with lightening fast presentations that are about 10 minutes long. That’s the ultimate sign of respect to the audience — giving them at least as much time to connect and  converse as they spend listening speakers. Come meet some people, join the discussion and say hi.

I’m trilled to be with hometown marketers — and to have the chance to hear about and discuss your work.

If you like, please join us….registration is this way.

Every year the Electronic Frontier Foundation reads the privacy policies of the data plans and social networks many of us deal with, they ask their lawyers questions about how the policies are enacted, and then they give them stars.

My preferred wireless carrier, Verizon, earns no stars – giving it the same standing as MySpace as a voracious protector of my privacy.  The old phone companies (RBOCS) are so highly regulated, it is very hard for them to stand up to government requests not just to sniff through their data, but to just go ahead and grab as much of it as they like.

See the EFF’s full study here — and please help put some power behind the findings by sharing them widely.

Last year the Facebook IPO was a story that spanned the Spring course I teach in digital business. This year the spanning theme very well may be from China.

Why? Because Alibaba (China’s equivalent to Ebay) has grown to an annual revenue of 140 Billion a year, employing 24,000 workers. This means its revenue has already exceeded Ebay and Amazon combined, and doubled. Its a big deal, and its already a weekly subject of focus in our class, which has Chinese students who have friends who work for it.

Alibaba made headlines again as its founder Jack Ma announced it would buy an 18% share of Sina, owner of Weibo. This is the equivalent of early EBay buying a chunk of early Twitter. The deal comes with an option for Alibaba to increase its share to near one-third over time. 

This adds to the standing of Alibaba as the preeminent online IPO candidate in China. Its building its story, forming a key alliance, and raising its profile to potential become a very big story in the second half of the year. And as Weibo and Alibaba head, so too will an ecosystem of digital innovation in China.

I was in Washington that day, but the blasts exploding three blocks away from my old neighborhood looked immense. And so the questions began. How could only three people have died? Why did it happen? What do we do now?  And did it make sense that two guys were pursued by thousands of police, as hundreds of thousands hunkered down even miles away?

These bombings were a personal attack, executed against as benevolent an event as there is, one which welcomes the world to Boston.  Boston is perhaps the world’s smallest world city. 8 year old Martin Richard was one of the few who died at the finish line, an every first responder on the fire truck who came to his aid had a family connection to him. He was also  in a ski class with one of the developers in my firm. In the age of Facebook, no fatality is as distant as it seems, especially in Boston.

Having this attack at the finish line of the Marathon meant a huge number of first responders were already on-site to attend to the annual mass casualty of thousands of runners finishing their races. Several years ago, Boston issued tourniquet kits and training to first responders. Of the hundreds of survivors reached by first responders that Monday, none…zero would die. But just as improved medical care leaves more soldiers maimed bur fewer dead in our wars, the scale of injury increased even as deaths were limited.

In the community of agencies I admire,  Small Army is a shop of great story tellers. Christian Williams is an art director there, and he and his girlfriend Caroline ran the race last year to raise money for cancer victims. They were in the finish line crowd this year. Their legs were shredded, and the skin was blown off most of Chirstian’s right hand. The hearts of everyone in our industry go out to them and the others who were injured or killed that day.

The charitable outpouring of friends, civic organizations, and individuals like Nick Reynolds and Chris Dobens, college students who have raised a half million to help victims through the ad hoc sale of shirts are huge bright spots. And what of the huge law enforcement response which followed?

Boston has had a series of disappointing high profile cases. The Gardner Heist, the Charles Stewart case, and our role as the origin of flights on 9/11. Deserved or not, this region carries a stain for having had a chance to prevent a portion of the failure and agony that was September 11th. Why such a muscular response two two guys and some homemade bombs? In part, an intense desire to get it right this time. And as we’ve learned in recent days, the attackers had started their trip from Boston to New York to continue bombing. It was as if the Hub had one more shot at getting Ground Hog Day right — and from aiding the wounded to pursuing the bombers, the Bostonians cowboyed-up.

I”m not sure that outsiders get this. Consider Nate Bell, a State Rep. in Arkansas made public remarks politicizing the situation as the largest manhunt in Boston history unfolded. I believe the quote was “Boston Liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi capacity magazine“. He then issued a fake apology noting that his timing was in opportune, but not apologizing for having been wrong in every resonate layer of the word.

Several of my friends were at least momentarily cowering in Watertown. Coworkers, and one of my guest lecturers in class this week all kept in touch by Facebook and Twitter as SWAT teams searched their yards, and in some cases their homes. “Was it overkill?”, I asked?  “No way”, said one of my friends. “They were busy finding a guy who threw bombs in our neighborhood. We were being protected, and having heard the explosions, we were glad for it. A thousand more cops would have fit right in”

I doubt that any criminal process will satisfy our need to make sense of this, or to find a way for it to make us better and smarter. So, that leaves us each to make a personal response based on the our own perceptions and filters. In my case, I’m inclined to organize some first responder trainings. There is no more torturous feeling than being useless in a tragedy. And our decision to helpful rather than useless is onc we make daily, for weeks or years before a tragedy. The only good outcome I can imagine is that we can somehow become better, more empathetic, and ready to emulate the best of what we saw on April 15, 2013.

From tragedy, strength. There, someone say that in Latin, this could be the motto of our year.