To promote their new album, Backspacer, they’re asking fans to talk about their new song “Just Breathe” on Twitter. In exchange for the tweet, fans will receive a code which allows them to download a live version of the song from iTunes for free.

Sound familiar?

Those of you who follow the goings on in the Vertiyoverse will know about a little product we created months ago called TweetPromoBuilder.com. On our site, anyone with a free offer to promote—be it a discount code or a download—can set up a twitter ad asking customers to send a tweet in exchange for the giveaway.

And speaking of followers, Pearl Jam’s free song isn’t completely without its strings. By sending the tweet on the site set up specifically for the band’s Twitter promotion, the Pearl Jam twitter feed will automatically be added to the list of those that you follow. TweetPromoBuilder.com offers that as an option, allowing users to forgo it.

Is this what the future holds for us marketers? Is promotion going to become one big online popularity contest where consumers can use their status as currency and hock it for wares? If so, then may the smartest kids win.

We created Tweet Promo Builder so that anyone could create a customized twitter promotion without writing a single line of code.

Lets say you’re a website owner who often gives away white papers and presentations or you’re an online store owner who likes to offer your customers discount codes. Well rather than just giving those away, or just asking for an email address now you can require your users to send a tweet in order to get what you’re offering. So now instead of just one person getting your promo you are reaching that users followers and enticing them to come to your site, where in turn they will have the same opportunity to send a tweet to gain access to your offer, effectively sending your promotion viral.

How it basically works on a site:

1. A user visits a page or site with your Tweet Promo.
2. They opt-In for your offer and send the tweet you’ve required
3. Automatically, a tweet featuring your promo is posted on their Twitter feed seen by all their followers. Then, using Twitter’s own API, the system immediately confirms that their tweet was sent
4. User instantly gets access to your promo code, a website, or file to download

Normally to create something like this you’d have to hire a programmer familiar with Twitter’s API every time you wanted to run a promotion.

Instead, subscribers to Tweet Promo Builder can simply customize a new promotion from the options available through their control panel. They can offer their viewers a promo code, a web page, or if they’re a premium subscriber- a file.

Our Tweet Promo Builder system instantly generates the necessary code - Then they simply copy and paste the code to their site or blog.

TweetPromoBuilder “Code Generation” Screen

  TweetPromoBuilder “Promo Reports” Screen

Here’s an example - try it and get a code for 20% off the monthly subscription price at TweetPromoBuilder.com

I also created a video walk-through to help illustrate the features and how the whole thing works on any site.

We put to together a two section booth - A Blogging Station and a Video Interview Studio.

The blogging station allows visitors to choose among our family of legal technology blogs and post comments about the LegalTech event. We also added access to two submit forms that will allow them to instantly receive links to our blogs as well as submit a blog post, article or other item directly to the editors.

The live video interview area on the other side of the booth allows us to conduct interviews with key opinion leaders about legal technology topics. Today it began with Monica Bay, Editor-In-Chief of Law Technology News asking guests what they hate about technology. We had about 22 interviews in 2 hours.

Within minutes of completion, the short videos (about 2-3 minutes) were posted to YouTube and then to a standalone video bog site where viewers can continue the conversation by leaving comments after each interview.

The overall idea is not so much the exciting part - it’s how quickly and for limited funds you can get something like this together.

Traditionally a digital video camera would have to have been brought in with an operator, the the video would have to be digitized, edited compressed and posted. You may even need to hire an outside tech or videographer. It could be days before your video even got to you.

Instead we simply used a 20″ iMac with a buil-in iSight camera along with two lapel mics. The iMac instantly digitizes the footage, optimizing for YouTube, and by using the embed code from YouTube we’re able to add it instantly to our own hosted sites.

Using a second monitor we are able to point the iMac camera at the participants while working the software from the other. We used iMovie ‘09 (’08 works just as well) which lets us to go straight from camera, add titles and post to YouTube, almost instantly. You can also use Google’s free application Vidnik.

After the videos are posted to YouTube we feed them over to the standalone Wordpress site we designed and hosted, but you can use any video blog Wordpress theme out there. This was done by simply pasting the embed code.

While the technology is easy and inexpensive - what’s really exciting is that both of these ideas allow for us to use our digital content to enhance our message rapidly.

At the blog station users are able to join the conversation and talk about LegalTech and our other brands, and at the video interview area they are a part of the show, while creating interesting content.

The rapid deployment of the content also allows bloggers and participants to talk about it now, while they are at LegalTech.

By being nimble we allow participants to post the videos on their own sites and blogs, perpetuating our message.

One of our interviewees, Rees Morrison, a legal blogger has already posted his video to his own blog.

You can see all the interviews on the video interview page.

In an Epsilon survey of CMOs conducted in September 2008 79% strongly or somewhat agreed that “During an Economic Downturn the Marketing Budget is the First Thing to Get Cut:” I assume they answered this to mean they agreed with it as a fact of life not an effective business tactic.

The increased budget tightening will most certainly force the emphasis on finding media that is more efficient and easily measurable.

The answer in 2009 won’t be “where”, we know the web, but more likely, “why”.

This lead me to an article written almost three years ago by John Hagel regarding the future of marketing.

Mr. Hagel wrote:

We have to continue to ask  “How much effort and cost did I invest in acquiring information about individual customers and how much value have I been able to generate in return, both for the customer and for me?” In this context, lead-times matter; the more quickly a vendor can turn around and deliver tangible value in return for information from a customer, the more quickly and effectively the vendor will be able to build trust and willingness to provide even more information.

No where has this been more obvious than on the web and in more recent terms in social media. We are seeing more and more marketers realizing social media cannot be part of the equation without a reliable metrics.

Mr. Hagel goes on to make a valuable point regarding our clients:

Old habits and old instincts die hard. While there is a broad recognition among marketers that attention scarcity is becoming a big issue, the response has been increasing desperation to get some of that scarce attention. Intrusive ads are appearing in more and more places

The missed opportunity is how to engage the attention of customers at a more fundamental level in ways that create more value for the customers and for the client.

So if the web is so good at doing all these things easily why are we seeing a projected decrease in online ad spend. When it has consistently trended upwards? I believe it comes down to metrics and and answers.

In 2006 when Mr. Hagel wrote his article clients were still slow to engage and enact true digital and social media attemtps, he said:

Clients continue to develop a narrow focus on new, network-enabled marketing tools like blogs, wikis, virtual communities and social networks, treating them like a checklist to be deployed like artillery in a military campaign – “yes, we’ve set up some blogs.” Few of them systematically ask how these tools might be used to increase return on attention for customers. Even fewer ask who else already has deployed these tools and how they might help their customers find and connect to these resources and perhaps where they might participate in existing environments in ways that provide more return on attention.

But now, in 2009, we are most definitely at the stage where clients are now asking these questions and most of the answers we continue to provide are vague at best. Without these answers the economy and tightening budgets are forcing our hand - to explain something we aren’t totally sure works, but know builds over time.

Clearly the need to quantify and measure all digital media including social should be at the top of our lists this year. Anyone want to tell me where and how?

One comment that struck me to be very interesting is the value Mr. Bird places on “black sheep”— what he calls, “restless contributors with unconventional ideas.”

Often as a Creative on a business team I will find myself “blessed” with this very role.

Bird believes strongly in pushing his teams beyond their comfort zones, and even encourages dissent.

When Bird took on the Director role at Pixar he asked for all the black sheep animators, “I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.”

Bird gave these black sheep a chance to prove their theories, challenging the Pixar “purists” and in turn created cutting edge animation on the thinnest budget Pixar had experienced. Achieving the very thing Pixar had hoped by bringing Bird in, to shake up the status quo.

Having worked in enough corporations, all this leads me to ask, “Are you challenging the purists at your company?” Are you willing, like Bird, when told by animation purists they couldn’t animate a flying saucer in time, threaten to film a pie plate flying across the screen just to get the shot he wanted? That blasphemy got the animation purists thinking, anything to avoid an ugly pie plate zooming through their film. They found Bird’s solution along with countless more.

I can’t help but believe that in this economy black sheep are more important than ever.

Not just for creative but corporate leaders to listen to. Stop taking the “NOs” IT, sales and even marketing purists keep giving you and seek out those talented malcontents and find out what would they do to solve your company’s challenges.

I bet their answers scare the “purists” - and that’s the point.

After refining a working logo and tagline, I’ve spent a few hours today putting together the PSD mock and what we plan to hang the Wordpress MU front end on.

I’ve placed a few of the mockups here:

I struggled for a good hour on whether the two characters with the ladder should be walking in frame or out. Usually in print we like eyes, faces and general motion to bring the reader back in. But for some reason I struggled between having their motion point us toward the action (the buttons) or point us out of the frame.

Lately, in web, I am often driving the viewers eye right, particularly on home pages. I find myself trying to get the user to feel as though they should turn the page. Countering years of print ad design logic. But getting the user to “turn the page” usually means a click not a click off. They’ll want to go inside. And frankly that’s all I really want, all my interior pages should reinforce the same basic message the home page had.

More to come.