Marketing automation and lead nurturing has replaced old fashioned email marketing
Good news - more relevant, targeted communications. Powerful reporting that let's you talk numbers with confidence.
Bad news - requires excellence in content creation, which is HARD and TIME CONSUMING. So never mind the technology, it's still hard work to engage people and keep them engaged.

Social media has gone from "something we should do" to "something we're doing"
Good news - participation and experimentation are the only way to learn with this, so many brands are actually starting to do something meaningful. See, you never needed the "Social Media Guru". Just a little courage.
Bad news - It's the new shiney corporate thing...everything now has to be "social media". People feel overwhelmed with the volume and frequency of communication. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.

We've gone through the GFC, and as always, marketing budgets get slashed first
Good news - even people who used to have big budgets have started to look at more creative ways of marketing. Including social media. See point one.
Bad news - Well, I know I for one would have loved to have had a little more to spend...

Video is emerging as the killer app
Good news: People were never designed to write and read, we were designed to talk, look and listen. Now that anyone can make and publish video at little or no cost, there is a whole new world of opportunity opening up to generate interest, build a brand and convert prospects. And if I was 20, I would go head first into that business.
Bad news: As with everything online, the barrier to entry is low and so is a lot of the quality. This is not an easy game and requires people with skills to write stories, direct and create interesting stuff. No, I don't subscribe to the idea that all you need is a flip camera...

Have you seen any other trends and changes? What have I missed?

Australia, and Melbourne has had almost nine years of drought, resulting in water restrictions in many parts of the country, (including a prohibition on washing your own car and watering lawns) that have only very recently been lifted. The most important river system on the continent (the Murray-Darling basin) was about to dry up with catastrophic consequences, and it's only now that the federal government has decided to pull a plan together to avert an environmental and economic disaster.

Water has been front page news here for a number of years, and eventhough the drought has broken, it still is. The desalination plant being built here in Victoria, the above mentioned plan that will cut water allocation to farmers and the direct impact people have felt in their day-to-day life had made it an accute topic of discussion.

But we still have drinking water. Here, we may have some inconveniences, but this is the global picture (s0urce Wikipedia):

• Inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 884 million people^[9]
• Inadequate access to water for sanitation and waste disposal for 2.5 billion people^[10]
• Groundwater overdrafting (excessive use) leading to diminished agricultural yields^[11]
• Overuse and pollution of water resources harming biodiversity
• Regional conflicts over scarce water resources sometimes resulting in warfare

In Australia, many of us have never had to consider living with plentifull supply of clean water, but the past few years have given many a wake up call.  Hopefully this will translate into action to help the millions of people around the world who don't have this most basic of human necessities.

Here is one way to do it if you feel inspired.

Here is a little from the Amazon editor's review:

Following the success of the first two editions, Age of Conversation 3: It's Time to Get Busy! again kick-starts the discussion about how the global marketing landscape is changing. With over 170 of the world's leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators contributing chapters, this collaborative work investigates the roles that community, conversation, experimentation, engagement, and collaboration play in shaping the 21st century's economy of ideas.

As with the first and second edition, what makes this book valuable is that you get a great mix of viewpoints from across the globe on set topics. Some of the contributors are already recognised authors, some may well in the future and some are simply smart people. One thing most if not all have in common is that they are all practitioners; people who are doing stuff.
my chapter is called "Influencing people in B2B Marketing"; buy one copy for yourself, and one for a friend. All the money goes to the Make a Wish foundation.
Here is a list of all the contributors.� Check out their blogs; you're certain to find some great ideas and experiences.

We've built relationships, and I've learned more from you, (complete strangers mostly at the other end of the world) than I could have hoped to have learned in ANY other way.

Now here is the thing that bothers me....I've stopped participating the way I used to. I don't read the blogs I used to read. I don't really comment on blogs anymore. My attention switched to Twitter and Facebook rather than an RSS reader; after all, everyone in my network would use these places to promote what they had to say anyway. That was the theory.

I think I'm going back to me RSS reader and here is why. Twitter and Facebook have polluted the stream of information I actually value from the people I follow. Most blog posts are on-topic. Mostly, no more than one a day. Most Twitter post are off-topic and posted many times a day...How am I going to keep up? And why do you make it so hard for me to find the stuff I want to read?

Facebook is even more difficult. Perfect for my personal life, but I don't really want to share my personal life with my blogging friends or work mates. It's not what binds us. It's what binds me to my family and personal friends. I don't really want to read what my colleagues do on their holidays either, or that they rode their bikes this morning... not because I don't care about them, but because it is not what binds us.

Maybe it is because I don't get it. Or maybe our fundamental social make up hasn't changed and we are still made up of different personas; private and public. I'm a father, son and brother. I'm a manager at a company. I'm a participant in a global marketing discussion. I'm (very infrequently) a musician.

But I don't talk to my mother or music buddies about marketing, because it doesn't interest them. I don't talk to my boss about my private life (in any detail) because he's not interested in the detail and possibly likes to have a little distance. We are selective who we share information with, because (among other things) it makes us more interesting and relevant to the people we share the information with.

Relationships are built on the things we have in common, the things that bind us. I can't have personal relationships with the everyone I know. There is no time, for one. Of course work friends can become close friends or even family. (and I should know).

The challenge for all of us was (and is) that there is only so much you can read and create and still do your day job. It's just too much, and I don't think I'm alone.

The information provided by Google on the term Aconex is a summary of the most relevant pages right on the top. In contrast, Bing gives me a list of seemingly unstructured information.

Add to that the "show options" link right above the result and I can't for the life of me think what would make me change from google to Bing...

Anyone have other ideas? Am I missing someting?

This product will help you increase your ROI and decrease your TCO = I have no freaking clue what the REAL business benefits of my product are, and I�m too lazy to figure it out. Source: Cranky Product Manager

Business needs to keep perspective on social media � Corporate Engagement

The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach � they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message

I've read it a few times now, and I'm not sure.
Did the Obama campaign control message? They certainly created it, but did they really "control" it allowing people "lattitude" in the way they helped promote it?

I don't think so. I think the reason it is the "gold standard" is because they created the kind of messages people wanted to share and promote, and then created highly targeted tools and activities to enable these messages to be spread.

In fact, had they made any attempt to control the message (apart from correcting people when they misrepresented the message), the whole thing would have failed.

What do you think? Did I miss something here?

The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

For example. Kraft thought it was a fun idea to engage their customers in naming a new product. They put little jars with Vegemite flavoured cheese spread and decided to crowd source the name for the new product. "Name Me" the little jars of spread shouted off the shelves. So that was the brief. "Name Me".

The result was that thousands sent in their ideas, and the good people at Kraft, (custodians of one of the most iconic brands in Australia, Vegemite) chose one that sounded like something their target audience might like. iSpread 2.0. I won't go into all the reasons why this was a terrible choice, there is plenty of commentary from all sorts of media (social and otherwise) on that. In fact, the Wall Street Journal even reported the fact that the company has decided to pull the name and think of a new one.

What I am more interested in is how they got there. The reason you don't let your 6 year old son design a logo (or a product name) is that he is not likely to be clear on what you're trying to communicate, how you are trying to position the product. That is the difficulty in design and good branding; how to communicate an idea in the simplest, most powerful way.

The sort of thoughts you expect to go through someones mind naming a product (especially for an iconic brand) are:

Without that, how could either the people creating the name, or the people choosing the name know if it was good, bad or indifferent?
It is the difference between advertising thinking and brand positioning, and I think Al Ries should have a field day with this one, in one of his contributions on Branding Strategy Insider.

Get your customers involved is fun, but don't think that you can take a short cut to the hard work of positioning a product.

Dealing with information overload (and sharing around)

• Hootsuite - the most elegant way to manage twitter in a clean, easy to use interface.

• Delicious - one place to bookmark everything I find of interest and want to share with: 1. Everyone, 2. A select group of people.

• Feedly - a really nice little plugin for Firefox that grabs your RSS feeds from Google Reader and makes it easy to digest, share and manage what you read.

• Yahoo Pipes - a bit more techie, this is a very clever tool to combine and filter information from the web.

Getting things done

• Firefox 3.0 - The best web browser, simply because it allows you to customise with all sorts of handy tools, such as the one I am using now to write this blog post offline, but in a browser (Scribefire) or the Delicious plugin that lets me quickly manage bookmarks (without leaving the page). If you're still on Internet Explorer, you should really have a look.

• Xmind - a "mind mapping" tool that helps me organise thoughts and plans rapidly and communicate them with others in a simple, visual way

• Dropbox - so simple. Why store files on your PC? Store them in an online folder by dragging them into a your "dropbox" folder. Access from anywhere, synchronized copies on all your PC's if you install the little app.

• Logmein - Lets you remotely access and control someone else's computer (with their permission of course). I'm talking helpdesk to your Mum, or accessing one of your computers at home from work.

• Jing - a simple screen recording tool that allows you to either grab a screen image, or record a little flash movie (for US$9.95 pa you can get the pro version, which has MP4 recording and no Jing branding at the end of your movie)

• Google, of course.....In particular Gmail, Google Maps and iGoogle if you want to personalise your news and get some RSS feeds (look in the right top hand corner of the Google page) as well as the "forms" function in Google Docs (spreadsheets) that allows you to run simple, free little questionnaires online. Lots, and lots more but these are the ones i use mostly, or see the greatest application for.

• Audacity - a free audio recording and editing tool that's so powerful and easy to use it is almost ridiculous.

So what do you use? Have I missed any great apps you are using? Share!

Than this: "Australian trade minister Simon Crean announced a $20 million plan today as a means to 're-brand' Australia with a new tourism tagline and logo to reboost diminishing interest in the country as a tourist destination"
He admires the New Zealand campaign: "100% Natural".� The CEO of the Tourism and Transport Forum is a little cautious (and rightfully so) about what a new brand might look like and realistically achieve. He says:

We often look to the great success of 100 per cent Pure New Zealand, though New Zealand in a way is almost mono-destinational and mono-product. Everything can be encapsulated in that.

Exactly. They are promoting NZ as a tourist destination. That's it. And that's the problem with this brief, IMHO.�

You can't be all things to all people. What do we want to do? Appeal to tourists? They don't give a rip about the investment opportunity. Do we want to appeal to investors? Why would they care that this is a great place to study? Or fish? Or go to the beach?

You want to do it right? Three audiences. Three dreams, three campaigns. Not one. With that many spin doctors around, is there no one to help the politicians with this?

So why are you reading this instead? Possibly because you've read some other posts I've written and decided to come back, or you know me personally and decided to follow this blog. In either case, the fact that I have your attention is a demonstration of what you can achieve online without spending a dollar.

Just a reminder why you should do this....

Most of all, your competitors do it badly - I can almost guarantee that your competitors don't do half of the things they could be doing online. The vast majority of businesses still see marketing (and therefore their website) as a "set and forget" kind of thing. There's an immediate opportunity. Look at your competitors and see what they do badly.

Top things to do

Invest time in content - the more you've thought about your niche, and how you position yourself away from others, the better. This means that you can use SPECIFIC key words in your content and page titles that will help people understand your differentiation, and search engines find you. Make sure people can find the information they may be looking for FAST. Don't be gimmicky; people are in a hurry.

Invest money in design - create an online presence that makes you look bigger than you are, and is a window to you and your brand. If you do have some money to spend, spend it on someone who can help you with design. Why would you go through all the effort to get someone to your site, to present them with an image of you that is crap? YOUR NOT A DESIGNER, AND THEY'RE NOT THAT EXPENSIVE.

Make a blog a key page of your site, so you have your own media outlet. It is STILL the way to give your prospects and customers value that they won't get from your competitors. If you're looking for ideas for online PR in particular, Read David Meerman Scott's "The New Rules of Marketing and PR".

Get active in social media - If you are in B2B make sure you are on LinkedIn. If networking is the lifeblood of most B2B marketing, than you have to invest time in continuously building your network online. A LinkedIn account with two contacts is useless. A LinkedIn account with 50 or 100 is starting to get pretty powerful.

Start a Twitter account and use it wisely; contrary to popular believe, your customers won't give a toss if you're stuck in an airport, you've just divorced or if you're playing with your kids. (Yes, all of these have come through in my Twitter stream of professional contacts) What you DO want to do is use it to follow your customers, (if you can), post links back to your blog, or to other sites your customers might be interested in. Or to promote a special, only to your web followers. Your Facebook page can be automatically updated with your Twitter update too.

Experiment with Google pay per click advertising, BUT spend the time researching the best possible keywords, the same keywords you have used right throughout your website content. If you have extra cash, use an agency. In Melbourne, I'd use Salsa
Be as local and specific as you can, and use the phrases that describe your specific niche and your local market as much as you can.

It's going to take time -Whatever you do, online or off, it is going to take time and as the saying goes, the best time to start is yesterday, but today is the second best option.So, what are you waiting for?

Did I miss anything?

1. Jen Clark
2. Scott Middleton
3. Mandy

Congratulations, thanks HP for donating your wireless HP officejet pro 8500 a909.
I'll contact you via email to get your delivery addresses.

This was fun.

(Since you're winning this, and not paying for it, it shouldn't matter, but it did get a pretty flattering review here; lots of features, environmentally friendly etc, etc)

Clearly, the good people representing HP believe that there are enough small business/micro business readers of this blog, and that you would value the opportunity to win a free all in one printer, so who am I to argue.

Now for the fun. We're not going to make this complex; write in the comment space below and tell me what the top three topics are that you think I should write more blog posts about, and most importantly tell me why. I'll select the top three and each will get one of these wireless all in one gadgets. Can't be too hard. I'll notify the winners by email and they'll get delivery directly to their doorstep.

Closes in exactly one week - 11 July 09.
Good luck!

The sales force are your story tellers - Individuals, who often work largely autonomously, often hired because they are �hunters�; people with the ability to go out there and with little more than their own drive and skills open doors and meet quota. Their individualism, and ability to get things done with limited support is celebrated.

And there is the dilemma. Managers sweat over the precise wording of the value proposition, positioning the brand away from the competitors, highlighting their leadership in their niche. They carefully craft language to connect with the audience.

Then it is handed over to the sales team, and a game of Chinese whispers starts. The story is often interpreted in as many different ways as there are sales people.

So the questions is does it matter, and if it does, what can you do about it?

Does it matter? - I think it does. In most markets today, differentiation is hard enough to achieve. So whatever that differentiation is, articulating the story effectively can be the difference between success and failure. How complete is the story told, how passionately, how it is made relevant to the customer.

What can you do about it? � make sure there is broad agreement that the story is the best it can be. If there are sales people who don�t buy in to it, deal with it in one way or another. If it is because your story doesn�t stack up, adjust. If it is because someone can�t or won�t get on board, you�ve got another problem. It�s in everyone�s interest to help sales people tell the story in the best possible way. An investment in ongoing, two way communication with the front line will not only help you get the story out, it will also give you the feedback you need to adjust when the market changes.

Why not use the same tools you might use externally, (like the web, video, podcasts) to engage your sales team. If you invest the time to listen, you also have the right to expect people to pay attention when you ask something in return.

In the end, customers will determine what your brand is, and they will determine whether your story stands up. But amplifying your story consistently will have an impact. What else would you do, or have you done?

In Australia the groceries business is largely controlled by two players, Coles and Woolworths. There are many things wrong with that. For example, you can imagine the negotiating power these guys wield over their suppliers. Or their motivation to give you the best products possible.

As a consumer, I care mostly about the quality of what I buy and the price I pay for that quality. Woolworth and Coles are falling over themselves to tell me that they are fresh food people (just like me, the recently told me in an ad). But I don't see it.
Then we discovered (through word of mouth) that there is a crowd called Aussie Farmers Direct, who decided that there may just be an alternative to dancing to the tunes of the big boys.

They believed that there was room in the market for an old fashioned milkman, who delivers not only milk but juice, bread and fresh vegetables. We've started using this service and now get a weekly delivery of all the stuff that you need to get fresh. The only proviso is that they select the fruit and veg that go into the box, but if you like variety, that's ok. At pretty much the same price as the supermarket, but at superior quality.

Who would have thought that while they are taking the last remaining bit of service out of the supermarkets (they now want you to scan your own stuff), there is a good business in home delivering high quality produce?

So what are the magic marketing ingredients?

Good model � cut out the middle man, direct to the consumer

Good positioning -� "Helping the Australian farmer" - "The Milkman is back"

Differentiated offering � home delivery, no more lugging the heaviest part of your groceries

Quality � no more good-looking but crappy tasting fruit and veg..

Word of mouth promotion � as a result of all of the above

Who says you can't differentiate in a commodity market?

My use to date has been to post little video's of my kids. I had a bit of fun and dubbed "Dance little lady, dance" by Tina Charles over a video of my (then) 3 yo dancing. It's had about 3,000 views (because of the title, I presume).

I had a look at it again last night, and I noticed some options to the right of the screen for "video owners" one of which was "insights". I clicked and got to a dashboard of analysis tools:

The next thing I clicked on what the "hotspots" button, which allowed me to see which part of my video people found more interesting than others:

Imagine how this can help you improve your communication over time? It tells you what people like with their actions, without having to provide any feedback. It allows you to continually improve your video, based on what people like and don't like. I must be dreaming. Awesome.

Let's make it a cracking 2009. Merry Christmas.

Good information, but the post was 1,400 words long without sub-headings. So I thought I post a comment, generally supportive but making a point about the importance of being brief in email marketing and effective use of headings.

But I didn't. I unsubscribed. Does that make sense, or was that the right thing to do? Probably not. He made a good point after all and I should have given him the feedback he deserved. Fact is, I don't always do what is logical and right. Nor do our customers.