While their assault and commoditization of dumb information containers like MS Office is bad for companies like Microsoft, their push to dominate media and the daily technology experience is good for your business (at least for now).

Information is B2B Interactive Marketing Power, Not the Container

Once upon a time, information was the stuff inside our desktops and servers. We made a big deal about these expensive “containers”, usually at the expense of the information they contained. Information was “ours”. We did the input, we controlled the output, and we used our own containers.

Google shattered the old concept of contained information when we began using it to organize and make sense of the Internet.  Information – organized by Google – led to platform development. What we used to conceive of as containers and connectors – desktops and cell phones – are now facilitators, designed with a Google-organized universe of information in mind. “

Google Business Products Nuked Interactive Marketing Barriers

By marrying the container with the payload and putting information in a business context, Google nuked interactive marketing barriers and opened the door for smaller business. The recent success of Buzz is only one in a long string of free converging Products that work together – Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Voice, Maps, Earth, Documents, Reader, iGoogle, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, Analytics, Android…

By the way, Google TV is coming soon too. Watch out cable and and television networks.



Your Email Has Problems

I don’t mean your email is broken; it probably works fine. Messages go out, messages come in – it works. I don’t mean that it’s a mistake to use email, either.

So What’s the Problem?

The problem is that your email doesn’t know things about your business or your industry. It doesn’t know things about your customers or your suppliers. Email software doesn’t recognize the relationships you have with the people you communicate with. It sends and receives messages, and it tags messages if you set it up, but underneath, your email leaves the hard day-to-day work of forming a picture of your business and your industry to you.

Google Buzz Connects the Dots

The reason your email doesn’t know all that much about your contacts and their roles in your business and in your industry is because your email software doesn’t crawl around the net 24 hours a day associating your contacts with their social network profile. Of course not: email software and search engines do very different things, right?

It’s Called “Google” Buzz for a Reason

The business power of social media all flows from knowing about the contacts in your network. They know about you, and you about them. With Google’s new platform, email itself – your inbox itself – becomes the social network environment. The email flows, and now, status updates, links, videos and other shared features simply appear in the the Gmail interface. These might include information about the sender, the recipient, the company, the industry, the supply chain, you name it. Buzz is email that knows about the e-mailers. It is your very own authentic network. Your DIY online business community. Give it a try.

How About Games?

Gaming is no longer just an escapist outlet for Mountain Dew-guzzling teens spending twilight hours playing Warcraft. It’s a venue for everyone. And Gen Y is the first to grow up with video games from the point of birth. According to video game developer Electronic Arts, video games are a community of one billion worldwide users as of 2009. And it’s not all shoot-em-ups. Some have character roles and don’t even need a virtual world to inhabit.

Mob Wars, for example, is one Facebook’s most popular role-playing games. It’s a simple role-playing game. Players interact with other players, either by sending them messages or by attacking them. Like many Facebook applications, most of the play revolves around having friends join the player’s “mob”.

Gaming for Business

So what does this mean for your businesses? You’ve got some gaming to do. IKEA plays games. The swanky Swedish furniture giant launched a Facebook profile under the profile of its store manager in the newly opened Malmo , Sweden location. The IKEA store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, uploaded pictures of the store’s showrooms to his photo album. “Friends” who tagged the products with their names won those items. Click here for the video.

“Friends” began asking when the page manager was going to upload pictures again so they can have a chance at another item. And then friends told other friends about this game or scavenger hunt, and then the word spread. It didn’t take long for IKEA to have a vast network thanks to this creative brand building campaign. Everyone loves entertainment, contests and prizes. Players love people-to-people interaction. And brands love people.

A Simple Idea for Any Business

Is there a way to tie your business into the gaming world without paying big bucks to create software? Yes! Mid-size businesses can engage prospects and build brands through gaming. Some social network-based games use simple concepts like snapping pictures of others (in a spy-like theme) and posting them to the social board as a way to virtually capture their target. Use your imagination or try a virtual scavenger hunt with simple mobile photos as a word-of-mouth campaign.

The technology has changed the way we interact, but the rules of the game have stayed the same.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Year One Accomplishments:

• We’ve been approached by major ad agencies and a national brand
• Collected a strong portfolio of success stories – which we’ll be sharing as case studies soon
• Appeared at six speaking events, a radio appearance and two industry publications
• Interviewed twice by Medill School journalists
• Earned top 10 organic Google positions for six very competitive keyword phrases
• Reached hundreds of thousands through our website, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Most importantly we helped level the playing field for mid-size businesses historically locked out of meaningful interactive marketing.  As a result, we blew away aggressive revenue goals in 2009 and are on track to quadruple those numbers in 2010. All of this in the worst economy we’ve ever experienced. We couldn’t be more thrilled to share this success with the friends, family and partners who have helped us every step of the way.

Please accept a our sincere and heartfelt “thank you” for an incredible first year. We look forward to a happy and healthy decade.

Either way, you know something is wrong don’t you? You’re not satisfied. You’re embarrassed by your website. And your mid-size business is facing a new, larger and more powerful online world.  You’re surviving the recession, but what about the competition or start-ups nipping at your heals?

Does Google Like Your Website?

Does Google even know you exist?  Is your content being spoon-fed into Google? The robots that come by to collect the information you publish just aren’t very bright. Do you accommodate them so that they don’t drop anything as they run back to Google to index the contents of your site? If you haven’t thought of this, chances are your search results aren’t what they should be. It’s time to work on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site. Well configured sites built on free platforms like WordPress are immediately indexed by WordPress.

Can You Easily Update Content on the Fly, Anytime, for Free?

Most corporate solutions for web publishing are handcuffs in terms of keeping your site current, rich and relevant. If you can’t easily manage content, you need to look into moving your site into a modern Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. Did I mention it’s 100% free?

Does Your Site Invite a Dialogue?

“Brochureware” sites stink of decay and neglect. Brochure sites talk at visitors – announcing: “We don’t get the internet as a business channel.” Modern sites are “marketing platforms”. They invite a dialogue, comments, analysis and debate.  Modern websites are a multimedia content syndication engine.

Is Your Site Networked With Social Media?

Is your site wired into new media? Do you have a blog with shareable content that educates prospects? Is your content shareable? Do you have a subscription service? Do you even have presences on social media sites? Don’t miss out on the single biggest business transformation in years. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook – these are serious commercial opportunities. And your customers know that.

Is Your Website a Measurable Marketing Platform?

Are you measuring how visitors interact with your business online? What are you doing to optimize the experience. Modern business websites measure every aspect. They orchestrate, analyze and adapt with intent and purpose. Modern living breathing sites have a purpose and measure how your market interacts – pages views, traffic patterns, time on site, subscribers, comments, posts, keywords – and yes these tools are free.

Does Your Site Generate Business Leads?

Cost Per Lead or CPL is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from an interested consumer interested in the advertiser. What isn’t well understood is that business websites can be a long term CPL campaigns. Modern marketing websites are purpose built and evolve based on specific lead conversion goals.

Bury that relic and upgrade your business.

Tombstone image adapted from photo by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com

New Media is More Accessible and Efficient

Traditional mass media was no friend to the mid-size business. You had to pony up the money and pay for far more audience than you really needed to reach. You had to get in a long line to use the three megaphones. And too bad if your customers didn’t like to watch “I Love Lucy”. You were stuck talking to the wrong audience and paying through the nose for the privilege.

Social Media Actually Listens

More than clumsiness due to sheer audience size, traditional mass media had a bigger problem: it didn’t listen, it talked. And talked and talked. Like a bad guest at a party, mass media didn’t care if your eyes were glazed over: it was in love with the sound of its own voice.

Clumsy, expensive and hearing-impaired, we put up with mass media because it was big and we had no choice. It had our customers – lumped in with all the other audiences, yes, but it had them.

In Modern “Social Economics”, Mass Media is a Friend to Mid-Size Business

Today, social media is the new mass media – it works with big, big numbers. In the following clip, the facts (and opinions) behind Socialnomics, the 2009 book by Erik Qualman serve to add up the big new realities.

Social media is mass media, but leveraged. You use it to pry your customers out of the mass. And once you find them, you don’t monopolize the conversation. Your spend goes so much farther when you don’t have to worry about your customers “Loving Lucy”.

And if you can’t do it, get someone to help you. Share some advice, stories and topics relevant to your business. Educate your market. But these are generalities. Let’s try making hardware interesting. Can we? Well, the hardware chain TrueValue may have done it. I’ll let their website do some of the explaining.

Do-It-Yourself Interactive Branding

TrueValue teamed up with five bloggers to be a part of the DIY Blog Squad and share their own home improvement experiences and know-how. Check back through the end of December for project ideas, advice and inspiration to help you tackle your own To Do list!
The members of the DIY Blog Squad are:

• Young House Love – We’re 25. Our house is 50. It’s old enough to be our parent, but we treat it like it’s our baby. Here you’ll find our adventures and misadventures in home improvement.
• The Lettered Cottage - I’m Layla, and my “Mr. Right” is Kevin: We’re the Palmers, but around these parts, we’re best known as the Lettered Couple.  We are dream believers.
• Bungalow ‘23 - The restoration and home improvement journal of a 1923 craftsman bungalow in Minneapolis, MN.
• All Bower Power - ABP is devoted to suburban home decor, renovations and the fine art of laughing.
• The Handyguys Podcast – A couple of guys who know a lot and have distinct opinions on the rest with real experience to back it up.

See? Not only are these blog topics interesting and relevant to the company’s mission, they’re highly specific and let people delve into topics most relevant to their lifestyles. And while there’s no shortage of DIY (do-it-yourself) material on the net, TrueValue is creating a meaningful community, educating their market and building brand equity.

Next Generation Marketing Will Begin and End Online

Showing that you care is more than just the sale at the store—though that’s essential too—but the conversation can begin and end on company websites. After all, people are as comfortable as they’ve ever been in front of screens, and it’s beginning to look the next generation of consumers cannot envision a day without sitting in front of one.

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that kids are spending nearly every waking minute in front of a screen. The study observed children ages 8 to 18, and found that they spend over 7.5 hours a day on their cell phones, computers, or TVs. In other words, the new era of marketing means that the dialogue is genuine (remember “di” meaning “two” as opposed to the singular monologue?). Customers have a real voice today and if they can look at your brand as something more than a mouthpiece.

Community Content is King

Does that mean your restaurant can give cooking tips? Or your accounting firm can hash out columns on tax-saving premises? Giving advice is nothing new, but depending on input from readers and outside contributors for free is a relatively new concept. But let’s say, you have no conversation starters that you can think of. There are other opportunities to engage your reader or customers beyond “traditional” blogging, but learning this craft is fundamental to any business today.

Left Behind?

Those that stay behind, will be asking themselves the same question when people did in the mid 1990s: “Maybe we should get a website for our business?” And if TrueValue can make hardware and DIY an escapist and fun activity, imagine what you can do with your business.

Stay tuned for the next post about Game playing: IKEA launched a Facebook campaign that put followers on a virtual scavenger hunt.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

That means, your furniture store or restaurant will yield a query on Google along with starred reviews and your website so people can browse on-the-street and on-the-web. Fact is, the marriage is increasingly part of the retail landscape: browsing on the street, inquiring by the web.

The Power of Customer Reviews

And negative or positive, people really like customer reviews (and they tend to trust them). For example, according to Internet hosting site 1&1, four in 10 UK shoppers rely on independent online reviews or recommendations before buying items. One in four consumers look for customer service commitments on the store’s web sites.

Today’s shopping behavior has changed radically, and local businesses can quickly embrace this trend by enrolling in Google’s program or by even posting both positive and negative reviews on their website or in-store.

Our Pizza Sucks

To think of it another way, Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco handed out staff T-shirts to their employees, donning reviews from Yelp with quotes like “this place sucks” and the pizza was soooo greasy.” It is a way to embrace the negative and turn it into something positive by acknowledge their short-comings. Obviously no business is perfect and by putting that truth in front of others (via T-shirts) we see how there’s opportunity in customer reviews that may have not existed several years ago.

It’s a way to show that a business may have nothing to hide, and realistically, you can’t please everyone so why fight it? Embrace it. The pizza joint, which blasts punk rock music with staff donning throwback sneakers, is the perfect outlet for such playfulness.

But this may not pertain to your particular business, maybe you can’ t hand out edgy T-shirts  with the word “sucks” on them. As one T-Shirt says “We celebrate the good, but not as much as we focus on the bad…It’s a public flogging.”

Make Lemonade out of Lemons

Yet, social networks like Yelp do give business owners a new way to dialogue with their customers—even if it’s negative. Businesses can respond directly to customer reviews on yelp and they also have a forum on Twitter.

It’s obvious that  the business landscape has changed, and while customers are as empowered as they’ve ever been,  and maybe so has small business. And as with Google’s new service, we see that our online reputation is becoming as important as our offline one–and the two will be difficult to differentiate in the coming years.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Prior to working in new media consulting and consumer trends, Mike was a reporter for the Naperville Sun. There he wrote for the features, sports and city government departments but also contributed to Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Southtown, Naperville Sun, Indiana Post-Tribune, and Aurora Beacon. He has contributed to the Chicago Tribune, WGN TV, CLTV in Chicago as well as numerous blogs.
As a reporter, Mike covered the political scene (interviewing personalities such as Barack Obama, Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert and Jenna Bush), and essayed product and behavioral trends.

Mike has a Masters in Science from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, becoming among one of its youngest graduate degree holders at the age of 23, as well as a B.A. in Journalism and minor in Business Administration from Lewis University.

That’s why I don’t represent Twitter follower counts, for example, as an exclusive indicator of success. It’s not easy to build a quality Twitter presence or blog subscribers or website traffic. These are important “results”. But website traffic and followers are not ROI. I like Olivier Blanchard’s classic methods in The Basics of Social Media ROI where important results like Twitter followers or blog subscribers correlate to actual financial performance.

Legitimate Social Media Marketing ROI

Business results should be measurable. New business relationships, or percentage of website traffic are two areas I watch like a hawk for a client, because that’s where ROI lives. We look at new media metrics in traditional media terms. It’s no less legitimate to consider the number of twitter followers than it is to consider a television program’s Neilsen ratings. But reach and frequency is not ROI either. Like Blanchard lays out, ROI requires comparing pre-social media financial performance baselines with positive results and corollary financial performance.

Stephen Baker’s BusinessWeek Critique is  Illegitimate

That said, mainstream business media’s eagerness to beat up on the social media marketing industry merits its own critique. Consider the fear-mongering this piece in venerable old BusinessWeek: Beware Social Media Snake Oil. One of the most telling paragraphs in this piece is when social media marketing is compared to Enterprise 2.0, a trend in business software that Stephen Baker feels business overbought.

Stephen Baker may be right about Enterprise 2.0 and he may be wrong. Who cares? I don’t understand how the comparison to social media marketing makes any sense. Let’s not confuse the use of Web 2.0 collaborating technologies within an enterprise to modern marketing. Let’s be a little more thoughtful about our logic before we go around using words like “snake oil” at a time when mid-size businesses finally have an opportunity to use democratic technologies and level the marketing playing field. Oh, and let’s not compare the costs and risks associated with implementing enterprise software (seat licenses at tens of thousands) with using Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook as a marketing channel.

BusinessWeek’s bias is particularly striking when Baker cites a tragic social media snafu which happens in traditional media over and over. Remember the poor woman who died of water intoxication after taking part in a radio station’s water drinking contest to win a video game system?  Dumb ideas are dumb ideas on the radio, print and the web!

What is a Micro-Blog?

The “micro” part of micro-blogging comes from the fact that each tweet—the messages that Twitter users send—must be no longer than 140 characters (including spaces). This feature—some call it a constraint, others say it’s the best part of Twitter—forces you to compress whatever it is you have to say into only a few words. As an example:

+Beginning after the first plus sign and ending before the second plus sign, this sentence serves to show you exactly how long tweets can be.+

Between those plus signs are exactly 140 characters of content. That’s the longest tweet you’ll ever see. In order to accommodate these parameters, the abbreviations and jargon that most people associate with instant messaging and SMS (i.e. text messaging) have found their way to Twitter:

Its not odd 4 u 2 c thngs writn like this since lots of ppl can stil undrstnd u w/o seein it all spelled out.

Tweets Can Be Professional

Writing in SMS style, though occasionally important in order to fully communicate your message, has it drawbacks: it lacks professionalism, and some users might balk at the seeming incomprehensibility of it. The truth is, most of the people on Twitter are not tech nerds or impatient 12-year-olds who lack basic grammar and spelling skills. Many are older, educated, and just discovering social networking, so catering to their sensibilities is important.

Making it Fit

Another obvious way to fit into the 140-character limit is to eliminate non-essential words like articles, prepositions, and other content-poor words that we use in everyday conversation. If you wanted to tweet about the Copenhagen climate summit happening this month, you could write with proper grammar: “Obama is going to the climate change summit in order to seal the deal on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.” That’s 107 characters. Or, you can communicate the same point with only 62 characters: “Obama going to climate summit to seal deal on Kyoto successor.” Writing in this truncated “headline” style may feel strange at first, but it also enables some of the other features that make Twitter one of the most important websites currently in operation.

@Replies

Replying to a tweet enables you to comment on others’ tweets and hold an open conversation between your networks of followers, depending on each person’s settings in that regard. To reply to someone you merely begin your tweet with “@” followed by their username, and then fill in your content. This conversation style is great for businesses looking to talk directly to customers, partners or prospects.

Retweeting is Currency

Retweeting is a way to spread something you saw in someone else’s tweets while giving credit where credit is due. Depending on the character length of the original tweet, it must be shortened to accommodate “RT @username.” “RT” stands for “retweet,” which is just an indicator to your followers that you’re passing something along. (Important Note -We coach our clients to make it easy for others to retweet their messages by  leaving 20-30 characters for this citation.  Retweeting is the currency of Twitter because your message is broadcast  beyond your own direct followers.  Check out How to Retweet: A Simple Guide.) 

Link Shortening Services

The first time you want to pass on a link, like a news article or something business related, you may notice that the link is too long to fit into a 140-character tweet. This fact has not been lost on Twitter users. A bunch of secondary services have sprung up that will generate mini URLs that fit into your tweet and leave as much room as possible for your comment or message. Among the most popular are bit.ly; TinyURL; and Cligs. They all work on the same principle, though bit.ly and Cligs can also provide analytics about your links, giving you valuable information about how many clicks the link has received.

To use these services, follow the above links to their websites. On bit.ly and TinyURL you can immediately put your long URL into the box and have it shortened. Then, copy the short URL into your tweet. On Cligs you have to navigate to the “Create New Clig” tab, but once there the process is the same: insert the long URL, shorten it, and post the short URL into your tweet.

(Important Note – Sometimes URL shortening like this is used to hide the URL of a malicious website, exposing you to security issues if you click on something corrupt. So always make sure you trust the user who sent you a link before you click on it.)

Photo in this post is by Jeff Turner (respres)