In China, for example, the e-commerce industry is forecast to be worth $370 billion by 2015 – up from $74 billion in 2010. Over in Latin America, Forrester  predicts that Brazil’s online retail sales will reach more than $25 billion by 2017, and eMarketer projects Mexican e-commerce sales will reach $7.98 billion this year and continue growing into 2016, when annual sales could reach $13 billion.

Meanwhile, in an interview with PandoDaily about the future of retail, American entrepreneur and web veteran Marc Andreessen didn’t sugar-coat his assessment of the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry: “Retail guys are going to go out of business and e-commerce will become the place everyone buys. You are not going to have a choice.”

The rise and fall (and rise again) of group buying

There are plenty of e-commerce business models to choose from, including group buying and daily deals, subscription e-commerce, social e-commerce and more. One of the most popular business models is “flash sales” (also known as private sales clubs).

The success of this model can be attributed to the sense of urgency triggered by limited quantities of the desired item combined with the limited time customers have to decide whether to purchase the product.

Not only that, but flash sales sites also tend to benefit from the enthusiasm of the shoppers, who become brand advocates and help grow the popularity of the sites by sharing sales and links via their personal social networks.

One of the first successful flash sales models was launched by Groupon. After remarkable initial success, however, the startup encountered a problem that, in my opinion, had nothing to do with the model itself.

Despite growing competition, Groupon remains one of the more popular social buying sites.

The success of Groupon’s business model depended on the company’s ability to grow a substantial client-base and drive purchase repetition: Groupon needed a huge audience that would be happy with their purchases and return repeatedly to the site.

But price alone does not guarantee repeat customers; a great service or product experience is equally crucial. Unfortunately for Groupon, it had no control over the companies selling goods and services through its platform, which created serious problems for Groupon when customers’ expectations were not met.

Among the noteworthy companies to have successfully executed this model are Gilt (which in two years grew from no-name startup to e-commerce powerhouse worth almost $400 million), Rue La La (whose parent company was acquired by eBay in March 2011 for $2.4 billion), and Fab.com (which recorded more than $100 million in sales last year and is set to more than double revenue in 2013).

One of the giants of the e-commerce scene, Wayfair, is also throwing its hat in the ring with this year’s launch of its flash sales site, Daily Fair. Last year alone, Wayfair received two million weekly visitors and rang up $600 million in sales.

As one of the biggest privately held e-commerce properties on the web, its support of the flash sales model is proof that this e-commerce trend is here to stay.

Sites like Fab.com are jumping on the flash sales trend and are growing fast.

Crowd commerce

SouthWinston LLC (an investment holding and technology incubator company) announced recently that it has developed, incubated and led an investment round in Join’em, the world’s first crowd-commerce marketplace (currently in beta testing). That’s right, crowd-commerce.

Join’em turns the existing group-buying model on its head by allowing customers to initiate flash sales: Shoppers select the products, pick the price range, launch the deals and promote them through their networks. Reputable merchants and suppliers then compete in a “reverse auction” to fulfill those deals at or below the maximum price set by the shoppers.

According to Chief Marketing and Development Officer Darren Waxman, the platform offers retailers, manufacturers and consumers a next-generation e-commerce marketplace where massive crowd-sourced demand meets reverse-auction efficiency.

The Join’em model is just one of many exciting changes coming to the e-commerce industry. As companies look to meet new challenges and figure out where e-retail is going, I look forward to watching the e-retail revolution unfold.

Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams appearing in a viral Vine video.

Odds are you’ve seen a Vine video even if you haven’t heard of Twitter’s six-second video app. After the shocking penultimate episode of the recent season of HBO’s Games of Thrones the Twittersphere blew up with reactions from devastated viewers.

One of the best posts came from series star Maisie Williams, who posted a funny Vine video in reaction to the events in the episode. Millions watched it, including many who’d never heard of the social media platform.

Vine is the number one free app in North American iTunes stores and last week it was launched on Android. The app is also making headlines by surpassing Instagram in daily Twitter shares, with more than five Vine videos shared every second.

But what makes Vine different from other social media platforms? Creative brands have discovered that Vine’s six-second video format is perfect for educating customers about their products and services.

Here are some of the best examples of educational Vine posts that are earning brands real results:

Lowes

Lowes, the home improvement store, has consistently released attention-grabbing Vine videos using the hashtag #lowesfixinsix.

The videos showcase helpful ways to do common home improvement tasks more efficiently and they’ve been getting hundreds of likes each (which by Vine standards, is pretty high).

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters sells clothing, accessories and nifty items to trendy types (okay, hipsters) and has more than 40,000 followers on Vine. The brand regularly posts videos showcasing the company and its products and behind-the-scenes videos from events.

One of the brand’s most popular posts is a how-to video explaining what in the world “hair chalk” is and how it works. The video garnered an impressive 1746 likes.

Oreo

The iconic cookie brand is currently using Vine to post clips from its #wonderfilled campaign events in New York. Those videos haven’t been too popular, earning fewer  than 50 likes each.

On the other hand, Oreo’s earlier Vines showcased what the brand called #OreaSnackHacks – unique ways to eat the cookies. Those videos pulled in hundreds of likes because they taught viewers something interesting and tasty.

Cadbury

The British chocolate brand Cadbury also shares snack tips with its #CadburyKitchen recipes hashtag. For example, fans can learn how to make “Brooksters,” which are half brownie, half cookie, and fully delicious.

Etsy

Etsy is an online shop for handmade items, specializing in fashion and accessories. One of its most popular Vines shows followers how to create unique DIY projects with erasers, fabric and paint.

Lucky Magazine

Lucky Magazine has created numerous educational videos on Vine with the hashtag #lessonsinlayering. These videos have made the New York fashion publication one of the most popular brands on Vine, with more than 8,000 followers.

Lucky is an example of a brand that seems to have found its social media sweet spot on Vine. Contrast the magazine with Oreo, which has a respectable 3,000 or so Vine followers, but more than 33 million Facebook likes. Lucky Magazine has only 248,000 or so Facebook likes but more than 8,000 people following their helpful and entertaining Vines.

Major League Baseball

The MLB has a large Vine following of 57,000 and rising. They regularly post clips of games and practices and stop-motion videos featuring MLB-related products.

Their most successful video, however, is a purely educational one that shows fans what a baseball is made of and more than 3,000 people have liked what they learned.

Peanut Butter Co.

Perhaps the most tangible Vine success story so far comes from Peanut Butter Co., a small American peanut butter company with 12 employees. The brand shared a video on National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day (April 2, look it up!), showing fans how to make a great PB&J sandwich.

The six-second clip, which ends with a frame of a downloadable coupon, went viral with more than 300,000 views.

As a result of the campaign, more than 6,000 coupons were downloaded, demonstrating that educational brand Vines – even if they simply show people how to make a sandwich – can lead to some real return on investment.

Image via wholefoodsmarket.com.

You’ve said that you think companies today ought to be “purpose-driven.” Do you think there’s a difference between a purpose and a brand?

Brand is just an abstraction. I use that word sometimes but I’m not a big fan of the word because sometimes when people talk about managing their brand they move away from authenticity.

Your brand is just the way people think about the company or the product, so I don’t think the brand is more important than the purpose or the values of the organization.

I sometimes think businesses get that confused. If you want to have a good reputation sometimes you try to manipulate people into thinking better about your brand, and then you’re off track.

Do you see an opportunity to extend the Whole Foods mission beyond produce, to other products and services?

We continue to evolve and our higher purposes are continuing to evolve.

One thing we’ve done in the last couple of years is start the Whole Kids Foundation. We’ve already given away over 2000 salad bars to schools and over 1000 garden grants, and this is only in a couple of years.

This could help our children have a different connection to food and gardening, and a different connection to their health by eating fresher foods. This could end up evolving into one of our higher purposes.

Through Whole Kids Foundation, children are given the opportunity to grow their own food. Image via Whole Kids Foundation’s Facebook Page.

One advantage of being a purpose-driven brand is that you tend to attract like-minded people. Do you see an opportunity to create a community around Whole Foods, particularly online?

Yeah, we are the first- or second-largest company on Twitter and we just had a social media video we produced – “Dark Rye” – win a James Beard award.

We’re very conscious of this. You’ve identified one of the things we want to do but I think we’ve barely gotten started on it. We haven’t yet integrated those higher purposes into our online communities to the extent we could and should.

As my co-CEO says, we’re not retailers with a mission, we’re missionaries who retail.

You represent Whole Foods as co-CEO but you’re also a thought leader in your own right with a book, a blog and regular speaking gigs. Is there ever a tension between what you think as an individual versus what you can say as founder of Whole Foods?

Those are different things. My book is about “conscious capitalism” and that’s part of what Whole Foods has been doing for a long time and other companies as well. But I made a distinction a long time ago and I use an analogy to get people to see it.

When parents have children they love their children but as the children grow up, a healthy parent understands that the child is not themselves. You see all kinds of television shows where the father wants the son to be just like him – that’s a type of narcissism.

An entrepreneur is like a parent who creates a business but at some point the business has its own destiny apart from the entrepreneur. I do not see Whole Foods as an extension of myself. I see it as 34 years old, it’s grown up now, and I’m serving it.

I’m trying to help it flourish just like a good parent would help their child flourish.

The interior of a Whole Foods in New York. Photo by David Shankbone via Flickr.

I’ve noticed that when you talk about journalists or “the media” you don’t seem particularly fond of us. Am I reading into things?

No, you’re not reading into it. I feel like I’ve been misrepresented by the media frequently. I don’t trust the media.

Sometimes I talk about journalists having a higher purpose, which should be to uncover the truth, and I think many journalists have gotten too deep into postmodern thinking that “it’s all narrative” and there’s no “right” narrative.

When you don’t believe there’s any kind of objective truth then you can come up with any narrative you want to. So they’ve moved away from what I think the higher purpose of journalism is.

We may not know the truth in any absolute sense but the journalist looks and digs to unveil the complexity of truth. The journalist with integrity is always seeking to throw more light on things.

So when I’ve felt slandered by journalists it’s because they made no attempt to represent what I said and they made no attempt to really discover what I believed and felt. They already had a story written and they just wanted to get a couple of sensationalist quotes to fill out their story.

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy in conversation with John Mackey at C2-MTL.

In his own words

John Mackey on Whole Foods’ four “higher purposes”:

A crowd of Cannes revelers gathers in one of the festival’s many tents.

The Cannes Film Festival attracts nearly 5,000 media guests from around the world to the South of France each year to report on the film industry and its stars. But in recent years, Hollywood has had to share the spotlight with the luxury industry, as global brands have dominated the festival with sponsorship programs, VIP events and high-profile marketing activations.

As Le Monde reported, “l’enjeu de l’image” – the strategic importance of being seen amidst the festival’s in-crowd – has become an obsession for many luxury brands because of its impact on brand recognition, popularity and ultimately, sales.

Cannes-mania extended across a range of lifestyle product categories this year, from Chopard jewels and Dessange chignons, to L’Oréal lipsticks and Renault’s fleet of private cars (not to mention, their sea of strategically logoed umbrellas that infiltrated the red carpet during storms).

Every aspect of the Cannes experience was branded and trumpeted to reporters worldwide via a flurry of press releases after each nightly “montée des marches,” when stars and their teams made their grand entrance into the festival’s main screening room.

For one luxury product category, however, this tactic was off-limits. Alcohol brands, while omnipresent at a festival where lavish nightlife is a main attraction, can’t engage in direct product placement or endorsement because of France’s Loi Évin, a strict policy that regulates communication and advertising for alcoholic beverages.

In the most basic terms, brands can promote the drink, but not the drinker.

As a result, alcohol brands that have official sponsorships or partnerships at Cannes are required to adopt innovative marketing strategies that showcase their products through a wider and more subtle lens by associating their brands with a lifestyle, philosophy or emotional experience (as opposed to creating an explicit link with an individual persona).

Among the various alcohol brand activities at this year’s festival, three main trends emerged.

Leveraging a cinematic legacy

A 120-year-old bottle of Moët Champagne being displayed. Image courtesy of Moët & Chandon.

Showcasing a legitimate connection to the festival’s main event – cinema – lends significance and credibility to a brand’s presence at Cannes, appeasing the tension between artistic integrity and abrasive commerciality.

Champagne brands, in particular, played up their historic support of the film industry via a variety of tactics, including limited-edition packaging (Piper-Heidsieck’s VIP bottles featured a bracelet of golden film coil wrapped around the neck, in celebration of the brand’s 20th year as Cannes’ Official Champagne Supplier), as well as sponsorships of the festival’s most talked-about film events.

Moët & Chandon drew much envy as an Official Partner of The Great Gatsby, the festival’s opening film. The vintage Moët champagne and many of the house’s signature symbols – oversized Balthazar bottles and champagne-coupe pyramids – dominate the film’s party scenes, although the film’s production team maintains that the choice was driven by “historical accuracy,” and not product placement.

To celebrate this apparently felicitous fact, Moët spared no expense at the extravagant after-party, where nearly 700 guests toasted to the same 1921 vintage as seen throughout the film.

Curating creative pop-up spaces

Ephemeral “it-spots” are a long-standing tradition at Cannes, with new bars, nightclubs, cafés and restaurants popping up each year along the beachside Croisette boulevard.

This year, alcohol brands marked a change in tone by channeling an eclectic underground vibe.  From Belvedere’s “Chambre Noire # Factory” (an atelier for photo shoots, concerts and cocktails inspired by Warhol’s 1960s New York studio) to Grey Goose’s “Carré Bleu” (an elegant open-walled concert space outside the Grand Hotel, which hosted up-and-coming French musical talent), brands showed off their artistic inspiration and creative energy.

Chivas Regal, a long-time partner of the festival known for its elite brand positioning and its omnipresence at the luxurious Hotel Martinez, also adopted a more relaxed approach, partnering with American apparel brand Eastpak to host a surf-inspired photo studio and artistic workshops at the brand’s private bar space on the neighbouring Chérie Cheri beach.

Victorine and Mattia Mimoun perform at Carré Bleu. Image by Caroline Deloffre.

Cultivating an A-List attitude

Exclusivity is the name of the game at Cannes, and several brands adopted a VVIP-only approach. The Mouton Cadet wine bar on the terrace of the Palais des Festivals catered to A-listers on-the-go, providing “beauty rooms” for stars to freshen up between interviews and hosting exclusive soirées.

Marion Cotillard, Sofia Coppola and James Franco are reported to have been regulars this year.

Martini, similarly, leveraged its 150-year history and long-standing relationships with film industry insiders (including brand ambassadors Sharon Stone, Charlize Theron and Monica Bellucci) at the “Terrazza Martini,” an ultra-selective private bar which returned to Cannes for its eighth consecutive year with an army of discerning bouncers.

The Hollywood elite convenes at a party hosted by Martini. Image courtesy of the brand.

The most effective strategies, however, are sometimes the ones that leave the least room to the imagination.

Cointreau proved this point with an electric performance by burlesque icon Dita Von Teese, whose bold routine (concluding with Von Teese immersed, fully naked, in a giant Swarovski martini glass) perfectly embodied the brand’s sly mantra: “Be Cointreauversial.”

Budweiser used a hashtag campaign to name the newest edition to its herd of Clydesdales.

A hashtag is a simple way for people to follow a specific topic or trend on Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus and soon Facebook. For brands, hashtags can be a fun way to get exposure, engage with fans and allow customers to share and promote the brand’s message.

But not every hashtag has legs. To create a successful hashtag campaign, brands first have to come up with a catchy, unique tag – preferably something short – and they need to share it across platforms so it can start trending. Here are some trends and campaigns that have been successful.

#Humour

Kmart recently revived its brand with a campaign that centered on the hashtags #shipmypants and #biggassavings. Kmart used the campaign to promote its new free home shipping option and its gas savings promotion.

The videos have each received millions of views on YouTube and thousands of likes and shares, but while the promotions themselves are innovative and exciting, it’s their juvenile humour that has made people fall in love with the brand.

I love the “ship my pants” commercials from Kmart. They make me wanna shop there. #advertising

— Navy MilSO⚓ (@NavyLoveMILSO)

May 26, 2013

I laugh out loud every time I watch @Kmart commercials #shipmypants #biggassavings awesome advertising �

— Sydney Enlow (@seenlow25)

June 5, 2013

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song and dance was impossible to escape last year. The nut brand Wonderful Pistachios, piggybacked off the song’s success with an ad featuring Psy, which aired during last year’s Super Bowl.

The ad featured the hashtag #crackinstyle, which thousands of people shared on Twitter during the game and which was part of a multiplatform campaign that also involved 50,000 life-size cardboard cutouts of Psy in grocery stores, flash mobs on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street on Super Bowl weekend and contests where applicants submitted #crackinstyle photos for the chance to win $10,000.

Months after the campaign, people are still tweeting about the popular ad.

Whoopem “crackin style” #GetCrackin #GangnamStyle lol

OMG the PSY pistachio commercial is PERFECT #crackinstyle

— Brittanie ✨ (@britty_boooo)

June 2, 2013

#Incentives

Budweiser, the American beer brand, joined the Twittersphere last Super Bowl season with their #clydesdales hashtag campaign.

One of the best ways to get people to share your hashtag is to offer them some sort of incentive, and it doesn’t have to be cash.

Budweiser created a television commercial and encouraged people to submit suggestions via twitter, using the hashtag #clydesdales to help the brand come up with a name for the Clydesdale foal shown in their ad.

Thousands tweeted name suggestions and praise for the commercial and the brand. There continues to be a consistent flow of tweets despite the fact that the ad aired over four months ago. And in case you’re curious, the baby Clydesdale has been christened “Hope.”

I can’t get over that adorable Budweiser commercial #clydesdales

— Mary Turney (@MDTurns)

June 4, 2013

I tear up at this Budweiser commercial every time. #clydesdales

— Brittany Kolve (@britt_kol)

June 3, 2013

Tugging at people’s heartstrings with cute animals worked for Budweiser. Head & Shoulders and Old Spice, meanwhile, have teamed up to create a new 2-in-1 dandruff shampoo, and they’ve taken a slightly different approach. For their hashtag campaign, #whiff, the brands partnered with Major League Baseball.

For every strikeout the brands will donate $1 to Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), an initiative with the mission to promote baseball among underprivileged youth. The MLB club that sends out the most #whiff tweets each month will get an additional $10,000 donated to the RBI league in their city.

Villarreal’s first big league pitch…strike 1 #whiff

#Mystery

There’s a recurring theme here. Brands are using sporting events to reach a mass audience – but it doesn’t always work out. In Canada, Visa teamed up with the National Hockey League for its new campaign #smallenfreuden.

The campaign has had an interesting life cycle. It started off with the tag #smallenfreuden being used and promoted on Twitter with no explanation or brand association. Then a video was released that cryptically explained the made-up history of the word to generate more interest.

Finally, Visa revealed itself, sending out this tweet:

#smallenfreuden means using your Visa card for the small purchases you’d make anyway. Learn more: youtu.be/ckWUlRITWnw

— Smallenfreuden (@smallenfreuden)

May 24, 2013

Initially, people weren’t too pleased with the campaign, which aired during NHL games.

Eventually, Visa introduced a contest where viewers voted on their favorite hockey plays for a chance to win prizes. Now the meaning of #smallenfreuden has been lost, and today it means more for hockey fans than it does for Visa users.

I think #smallenfreuden is German for terrible commercial

— Wab Kinew (@WabKinew)

May 13, 2013

#smallenfreuden that was a thrilling game

— 1⃣7⃣Josh Scratch1⃣7⃣ (@JoshScratch17) June 6, 2013

I just voted for Krejci’s push as #smallenfreuden Small Play of the Game! Smart play to keep puck alive. Vote here: bit.ly/12pza9b

— Kevin Bieksa (@kbieksa3)

June 3, 2013

This raises an important content marketing question: If your hashtag catches on but nobody knows your brand is behind it, can you really call it a success?

NYC-based entrepreneur Niamh Hughes.

Editor’s note: Sparksheet is proud to be the official content partner for the International Startup Festival, which will be taking place from July 10 to 13 in Montreal. The theme of this year’s festival is Startup Stories and this piece was written as part of  a series on the world’s top startup ecosystems. 

Niamh Hughes headed to work one recent day, and on a busy New York City sidewalk bumped into 3-D printing guru Bre Pettis of MakerBot Industries.

They grabbed a quick coffee and chatted about Hughes’ business development efforts at General Assembly, an educational campus and co-working space that’s considered an international model for startup community building. More than 26,000 entrepreneurs, developers and designers have sharpened their skills there since 2010.

The conversation then turned to Sandbox Network, the growing community of high-achieving under-30s that Hughes manages in New York City.

“It reminded me that the serendipity of living in the city is second to none,” Hughes says.

The density and vibrancy that has for decades drawn aspiring fashion designers, actors, musicians, marketers and investment bankers to New York is now the pull of visionaries and hackers who want to transform the city’s iconic industries through technology.

Some are inspired by the success stories of last decade’s New York-based tech pioneers: Meetup, Foursquare, Gilt Groupe, Tumblr and Etsy. Others left once-cushy corporate jobs after the 2008 recession rocked Wall Street and sent Lehman Brothers crumbling.

Some (like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who said on 60 Minutes he wants to run for New York City mayor some day) may be lured by the passion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has said he hopes his legacy is the $1.5 billion Cornell NYC technology and engineering campus to be built over the next 23 years on Roosevelt Island. He expects 600 new startups to be created there, and thousands of capable technologists to be trained.

Still other entrepreneurs are vacating the isolated office parks of Silicon Valley. New York’s “Silicon Alley,” they believe, is the place to build a business.

“It’s the craziest and most varied environment in the world, and that helps companies a lot,” New York angel investor David Tisch is quoted in the new book Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community, by Alessandro Piol and Maria Teresa Cornetto.

“People come here striving to be the best at whatever it is they’re doing (…). I think that creates a drive in companies here to really win.”

President Obama types his first tweet while Twitter founder Jack Dorsey looks on. Image by Geoff Livingston via Flickr.

Keeping up with the Valley

Not all is rosy in the Big Apple. The Startup Ecosystem Report, released in October 2012, found New York somewhat overhyped. There are still half as many startups in New York as in Silicon Valley and they haven’t performed as well as those in the Valley, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Despite the proximity to Wall Street, still too few resources exist to help eager entrepreneurs. New York City startups get 70 percent less venture capital than companies in Silicon Valley. For talent, the city ranks 12th among the top 20 startup ecosystems in the world, behind Boston, Seattle and Los Angeles.

There are also too few incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators to meet the growing demand, says Bjoern Herrmann, founder of Startup Compass and author of the ecosystem report. But important efforts are under way in almost every one of the categories measured.

“The velocity of change is so much faster than it was back in 2006 when I got into it,” says John Wiseman, head of marketing and partnerships at Skillshare, an online education startup. “The number of companies trying to change things for the better and create new businesses that actually help people is 100 times bigger.”

The World’s top startup ecosystems, ordered by average throughput, according to Startup Compass’s Genome Report.

Solving problems and disrupting industries

Many of the people interviewed for this story agreed that most New York startups aren’t simply creating another nice-to-have social media tool. They’re trying to solve real problems.

What makes New York different from Silicon Valley is that most people who launch their own businesses come from finance, advertising, media or business backgrounds and are looking to disrupt those industries.

“Brilliant technologists believe ‘If I build it, they will come.’ That’s the DNA of Silicon Valley,” says Erik Jansen, a New York Angels member who has invested in U.S. startups since the early 1990s. “On the East Coast, particularly New York, it’s ‘What does the customer need? Let’s build that.’”

The Startup Ecosystem Report found that New York startups generate revenue faster than those in Silicon Valley. Many are selling into the major corporations in the city, companies that recognize the innovation happening outside their walls in the wake of layoffs and budget restraints.

Many New York founders also believe in bootstrapping and proving the concept before raising outside funds, Wiseman says.

Considering the very public troubles of venture-backed startups like Groupon and Zynga and Facebook, where stock prices plummeted after initial public offerings, that mindset is proving a draw for investors.

The top Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz recently recruited the New York angel investor and serial entrepreneur Chris Dixon. According to Tech and the City, he’s New York’s most active investor, with 40 investments including shares of Kickstarter and Foursquare.

The project wall at Kickstarter HQ in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Image by Scott Beale via Flickr.

Lightbank of Chicago, First Round Capital and Accel Partners of California, and Flybridge of Boston have opened New York offices in recent years.

Crunchbase released angel investing data in April that showed New York City startups grabbing 20 percent of the nation’s angel deals in 2013, up from 12 percent in 2008. It was the only region to earn additional share over the period.

Accelerator programs like 500 Startups and TechStars have also helped to fill the gap in funding. The Boulder-based network of accelerators held its first class in the city in 2011. Applications topped 1,700, a TechStars record, in spring 2013, according to founder and CEO David Cohen.

A majority of the chosen companies were already based in the city. Cohen calls that trend “a good sign.”

So many startups, too few mentors

Kevin Ryan at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in 2011. Image by TechCrunch via Flickr.

The TechStars application boom points to the glaring need for more organizations that support entrepreneurs beyond happy hours and networking events.

Accelerators and incubators often form when startups are successful and their founders become mentors, funders or operators of new startups, says Jansen, whose dozens of investments include Herrmann’s Startup Compass and Rewind Me, a recent TechStars NYC accelerator graduate.

A key example is Kevin Ryan, who founded the online advertising giant DoubleClick in the 1990s, which sold to Google for $3.1 billion in 2007. He’s since launched three fast-growing New York startups – Gilt Groupe, Business Insider and 10gen – and promises one or two more this fall. He also invests and mentors startups and serves on the board of the NYC Investment Fund.

But according to the ecosystem report, there are 34 percent fewer serial entrepreneurs in New York than Silicon Valley. And startups in the city have 16 percent fewer mentors.

Enter General Assembly and Sandbox, Niamh Hughes’ two NYC passions. They helped the young Irish woman get acclimated to the city in 2010 and plugged into its once intimate startup community.

Members of General Assembly participaing in a Foursquare Global Hackathon. Image via General Assembly’s Facebook Page.

Hughes has since planned 200 Sandbox events around the world, including the Global Summit in Lisbon. Along with the president of Kiva and two others, she co-founded So What’s On Your Plate, a networking organization for women leaders that now has branches in Paris, San Francisco and Phoenix.

Today, Hughes says she has any number of activities to attend on a given night, between meetups like the 30,000-member New York Tech Meetup, the dozens of classes at General Assembly and happy hours with her Sandbox crew.

“The top of the funnel is wider now, because so many people are in the community and moved to New York,” she says. “It just means we have to be more careful about the events we go to, who we talk to and where we should be moving forward. Everybody has a lot of choice.”

 This piece originally appeared on the International Startup Festival blog. To find out more about Startupfest or to register for the event, click here. 

Image by Ian Lamont via Flickr.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 mobile device users found that for the first time ever, email is the primary reason people are using smartphones.

According to the report from Adobe, 79 percent of people said they use their phone for email, compared to 78 percent who identified making and receiving calls as the primary use for their mobile devices.

The same Adobe report includes a statistic that is even more relevant to marketers: 59 percent of smartphone users say they’re likely to make a purchase directly from their handset during the next year.

What’s more, emails from brands are second only to personal recommendations when it comes to influencing purchasing decisions on mobile devices. In the survey, 69 percent of smartphone users and 71 percent of tablet owners indicated that direct emails from businesses influence their buying behaviour.

What does that mean for marketers? It means that despite the rise of social media, augmented reality and SMS, email may be the best way to reach consumers on the go.

But there is more to successful email marketing than simply delivering a message to a handset. You need to ensure that your message will be opened, and that your call to action will be followed – be that visiting your website, taking advantage of a special offer, or whatever else.

Here are a few key factors to keep in mind:

Relevance

Your emails must be relevant to your reader. Usually this will be controlled by their own contact preferences when they signed up to your mailing list. However, it is essential that you segment your mailing list to create more targeted campaigns based around other ancillary data, such as purchase history, abandoned shopping carts, or wish lists.

Timing

Image via The Noun Project.

In the U.K., 55 percent of 18-34 year olds read their email on mobile devices, but research from digital specialist Steel shows that one-third of them simply screen their messages for reading later.

The best chance of converting the reader into a customer is to get them to take action immediately and the best way of making this happen is to get the email to their inbox at the right time.

The question “When is the best day to send emails?” is a matter of hot debate. This report says users are more likely to open messages received on a Friday than on any other day of the week while others say that midweek marketing can be successful, particularly in the early morning and evening commutes.

Test, test, test

Luis Prado via The Noun Project.

The frustrating fact is that it really “depends” and what works for one brand’s audience might not work for another’s.

Each email campaign is a learning experience. Marketers will need to record what works well, what could be improved, and what needs to be dropped altogether.

As such, mobile email campaigns should be viewed as long-term projects with many “versions”, and which seek to improve with each cycle.

Into the future

Image by Antonis Makriyannis via The Noun Project.

As the quest for increasingly relevant messages continues, context will become even more important. Some of the most interesting opportunities lie at the intersection of data and retail.

For instance, a loyal customer could be emailed a special offer on the day he or she would normally visit a store. By creating email campaigns that address specific preferences based on a customer’s previous shopping history, marketers can craft messages that customers actually want to receive.

Over time, brands may be able to leverage GPS or proximity services, which can create even timelier messaging for greater success.

Whether these messages would be delivered via email is debatable, but there are a number of  ethical and privacy issues at play here that make email an ideal platform. After all, customers are already used to “opting in” for email marketing; retailers will need to find a way of securing the same assent for proximity marketing.

Despite reports to the contrary, email is not dead. So long as people are using their mobile phones for email and choosing to receive relevant messages from brands, it will remain an important tool in the marketer’s kit.

Arrested Development character Lucile Bluth in a promotional poster for season 4 of the show, released by Netflix.

This month, the U.S. broadcast networks unveiled their fall TV lineups. The “upfronts” are an annual tradition where the networks present their new comedy, drama and reality series via splashy presentations that are meant to woo advertisers and secure their portion of advertising commitments.

Every year, the upfronts are a guessing game of which shows will be hits, which will fail, and which show will be the first to get the axe. This year, there are high hopes for Crazy Ones, the new Robin Williams comedy series on CBS and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D from Joss Whedon, which will air on ABC.

The broadcast networks have struggled with declining viewership for years, but now they are facing more pressure than ever from non-traditional television services. And Netflix, which just a few years ago was a harmless mail-order DVD service, may be their biggest threat yet.

House of Cards

The broadcast networks are competing against cable and streaming services not just for viewers, but for actors, producers and directors as well.

In February, Netflix unveiled House of Cards, a $100 million production starring Kevin Spacey and produced by The Social Network’s David Fincher, who also directed the first two episodes. In order to take advantage of the current trend of “binge” viewing, Netflix made the unprecedented move of releasing all 13 episodes at once.

House of Cards, whose second season is set to premiere next year, was not Netflix’s first foray into original programming, but it had more star power and critical acclaim than Lilyhammer, which premiered in 2012.

The network has also resurrected the beloved comedy series Arrested Development, whose fourth season was released last Sunday – after the show was cancelled by Fox more than seven years ago.

House of Cards and Arrested Development are the centrepieces of Netflix’s new strategy of luring and retaining viewers via exclusive original programming. Chief content officer Ted Sarandos told GQ that “the goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

Building loyalty

Netflix has refused to provide viewing statistics for its original shows, since the company does not rely on advertising dollars and therefore does not directly compete with the networks for eyeballs.

But it’s clear that the company is on a roll. Last month, the company’s stock soared above $200 per share for the first time since 2011. For the first quarter of this year Netflix posted a profit of $3 million. Last year it lost $5 million in the same quarter.

Most importantly, according to a recent survey, 86 percent of Netflix subscribers indicated that original series such as House of Cards make them less likely to cancel the service.

With the release of Arrested Development, the success of recent horror program Hemlock Grove (which is expected to be renewed for a second season) and an upcoming series from Weeds creator Jenji Kohan based on Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, Netflix is poised to continue challenging the networks – including during awards season.

Amazon Studios is creating original series like Alpha House, featuring John Goodman.

Blurring the line between traditional and web TV

Netflix isn’t the only digital-era company taking on the networks with original content. Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is jumping into the fray with eight new sitcom pilots, including Alpha House, starring John Goodman, and an adaptation of the cult film Zombieland.

Amazon has posted its pilots online to create buzz and measure viewer statistics, ratings and reviews, effectively crowdsourcing the process of choosing which pilots get picked up.

Of course, web series have been around for years, but by producing high-budget, full-length series with A-list producers and actors, Amazon and Netflix are blurring the line between web series and traditional television.

In fact, some series that are available exclusively online in North America will appear on traditional broadcast or cable networks in other parts of the world. House of Cards, for example, will air on Foxtel in Australia (available on its on-demand service as well) and OSN in the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, the broadcast and cable networks are scrambling to catch up and establish their own online streaming platforms. Reed Hastings himself has praised ESPN and HBO in particular for offering apps that allow subscribers to consume the networks’ content across devices.

At its upfront presentation, ABC became the first network to unveil a live-streaming television app, which will be tested in New York and Philadelphia this spring.

ABC’s live streaming app allows users to watch television from their mobile devices.

ABC is also offering advertisers a plan for unified advertising across all platforms where ad buyers can schedule a commercial for TV, pre-roll ads on mobile viewing platforms and even on Hulu, the online TV platform it co-owns with Fox and NBC (though ABC will also begin limiting its content on Hulu in order to encourage usage of its new app).

It’s clear that with increased usage of personal video recorders and marathon series viewing on DVD and online, viewers are becoming less concerned about where and when they get their content – as long as it’s available everywhere, always.

As Hastings put it, “over the coming decades and across the world, internet TV will replace linear TV. Apps will replace channels, remote controls will disappear, and screens will proliferate.”

C2-MTL 2013 took place in an old shipyard built in 1846 at the foot of Montreal’s Lachine Canal. Photo by Kristina Velan.

C2-MTL is a hard event to write about. As we explained last year, the event strives to “reinvent the business conference” by emphasizing interaction as much as information, experience as much as education and aesthetics as much as content.

Between formal sessions with big-name speakers such as Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, makeup mogul Bobbi Brown and Whole Foods founder John Mackey, C2′s well-heeled attendees – tickets cost upwards of $3,600 – could take in a show by Cirque du Soleil (a major sponsor), participate in a hands-on workshop, or even do a little yoga.

Cirque du Soleil’s opening performance. Photo by Kristina Velan.

A Big Data workshop at C2-MTL. Photo by Kristina Velan.

Why not a yoga class between sessions? Photo by Kristina Velan.

As with any eclectic event, every attendee’s experience of C2-MTL was different. Still, we noticed some recurring themes and ideas emerging from the stream of tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related social media activity.

Empowering women

At the first C2-MTL conference last year, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was the only female speaker of note. This year, creative and successful women including Bobbi Brown, Diane von Furstenberg and MIT media lab director Neri Oxman drew some of the largest crowds and the role of women in business, design and culture was celebrated throughout the three-day event.

.@richardbranson thinks governments should enforce gender quotas on corporate boards #women #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

.@FastCompany’s @rsafian presents 100 most creative people in biz – chatted w/ #52 (Sandra Richter) earlier #C2MTL http://t.co/qBVUXA7DLW

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Now on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtlNow on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtl

— SID LEE (@SidLee)

May 21, 2013

Data versus intuition

Big Data was a major buzzword at C2-MTL 2013, with Intel’s Steve Brown and Bitly’s Hilary Mason both building their talks around the subject.

But it seems the Big Data backlash has begun as several speakers, including Branson and veteran Hollywood producer Barry Diller (also von Furstenberg’s husband), emphasized that  experience, intuition and gut instinct can’t be overestimated when it comes to making business decisions.

Big data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTLBig data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“It’s important to be hyper-aware of what your data is saying about the world.” – Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at #bitly #C2MTL

— Ariane Laezza (@arianelaezza)

May 23, 2013

Today’s marketers have to be more data-driven, but also more intuitive – Jim Farley. Yay intuition! #c2mtl

— Geoff Thomas (@the_gmt)

May 23, 2013

“I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL”I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL

— BobbiBrown Cosmetics (@BobbiBrown)

May 22, 2013

“I never get accountants in to look at our business ideas … You need an instinct based on experience.” – Sir Richard Branson #C2MTL
— Emma Jane McKay (@emmajanemckay)

May 23, 2013

Barry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTLBarry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Rebels with a cause

C2-MTL bills itself as “a business conference, only different” and that spirit of disruption and rebellion permeated the event.

Just for Laughs founder Andy Nulman brashly delivered an “improvised dissertation on creativity,” using slides he’d never seen before, after having criticized last year’s C2 speakers for being too conventional. Legendary industrial designer Philippe Starck, controversial former BMW designer Chris Bangle and, of course, Branson also brandished their roguish credentials.

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL”I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL

— Francis Gosselin (@monsieurgustave)

May 21, 2013

Here’s that pic of @richardbranson in drag dressed as flight attendant #C2MTL http://t.co/surkk2PRn1

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

— (@null)

May 23, 2013

Nicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTLNicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“Sometimes we just have to take the risk without knowing the outcome.” – Chris Bangle #c2mtl #brand”Sometimes we just have to take the risk without knowing the outcome.” – Chris Bangle #c2mtl #brand

— Commerce+Creativity (@C2MTL)

May 21, 2013

If you’re not doing damage, you’re not doing anything interesting -Barry Diller #C2MTLIf you’re not doing damage, you’re not doing anything interesting -Barry Diller #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Politics, subversion – always be a a rebel. its a duty, always fight, always bring in a surprise. @Starckofficial #c2mtl #creativity #design — Aline Massouh (@alinemassouh)

May 21, 2013

‘There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL’There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Another recurring theme at C2-MTL was the notion that creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. This means keeping your eyes open and engaging with the world around you or, as Nulman put it, getting “off the floor and out the door.” In his talk, Ideo’s Fred Dust assured the crowd that they shouldn’t hesitate to steal ideas – so long as they made them better.

Philippe Starck explaining how he taps into everyone’s collective unconscious when designing products, shapes. #c2mtlPhilippe Starck explaining how he taps into everyone’s collective unconscious when designing products, shapes. #c2mtl

— Gary Singh (@gary_singh)

May 21, 2013

‘Not much point creating something if it’s not better than what came before’ -@richardbranson #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“Build #empathy…Fall in love with the people you’re designing for” – Fred Dust @f_dust @ideo #C2MTL #inspiration #designer”Build #empathy…Fall in love with the people you’re designing for” – Fred Dust @f_dust @ideo #C2MTL #inspiration #designer

— Commerce+Creativity (@C2MTL)

May 21, 2013

‘I didn’t invent makeup, I reinvent makeup – how can I make it better?’ -@BobbiBrown #creativity #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Image by c2mtl via Instagram

Defining creativity

C2-MTL is all about the intersection of commerce and creativity and so the question of what creativity means – particularly in a business context – came up a lot. Even “data is a creativity industry,” Bitly chief scientist Hilary Mason proclaimed.

Creativity is not room of nerf balls – it’s pressure, deliverables #C2MTL #Innovation

— Robert Yau (@RobertYau)

May 23, 2013

— (@null)

May 23, 2013

“We are responsible (for) our creativity. It’s a duty.” -Philippe Starck #C2MTL”We are responsible (for) our creativity. It’s a duty.” -Philippe Starck #C2MTL

— Susan Krashinsky (@susinsky)

May 21, 2013

— (@null)

May 21, 2013

#C2MTL: “Scientists can’t do storytelling? Bullshit!” Hilary Mason, chief scientist, bitly. And boy does she prove it!

— diane_berard (@diane_berard)

May 23, 2013

Arkadi Kuhlmann: ‘Information and how we share ideas is the glue that holds society together’ #C2MTLArkadi Kuhlmann: ‘Information and how we share ideas is the glue that holds society together’ #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Toms shoes founder Blake Mycoskie at #c2mtl taking about his moment of truth: seeing the joy shoes could bring. pic.twitter.com/Cn5UdUatlvToms shoes founder Blake Mycoskie at #c2mtl taking about his moment of truth: seeing the joy shoes could bring. pic.twitter.com/Cn5UdUatlv

— Rahul Raj (@rwr3peat)

May 21, 2013

Embracing the arts

Just as C2-MTL celebrated the role of creativity in business, it welcomed the art world into the conversation with opera and dance performances, a fashion show, an evolving photography exhibit (featuring C2 attendees as subjects) and even a live house band jamming between speakers.

At times the performances inadvertently served to underscore the difference between the attendees and the artists by framing creativity as “entertainment” rather than something intrinsic to the business world (the inclusion of artist-entrepreneurs like Starck and von Furstenberg was much more effective in bridging commerce and creativity), but they certainly kept C2-MTL from feeling like any other business conference.

Image by sanzservin via Instagram.

Image by sanzservin via Instagram.

Image by c2mtl via Instagram.

— (@null)

May 22, 2013

Opera de Montreal’s opening performance. Photo by Kristina Velan.

The walkway to C2-MTL’s outdoor plaza was made out of a shipping container. Photo by Kristina Velan.

Check out our C2-MTL gallery on Facebook for more photos of the event. You can see our complete C2-MTL notebook on Spundge, the content curation tool we used to create this story.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass. Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr.

Just over one year ago, the video “Google Glass: One Day” went viral, with more than 21 million viewers ogling the prospect of a new wearable computer.

Well, “one day” is quickly approaching and even though Google has yet to reveal the release date, the new gadget is getting a lot of attention.

The majority of people who have gotten their hands on Google Glass already – including a number of influencers, Google employees and the winners of the Twitter #ifIhadGlass contest – have liked it.

Google Glass is activated by voice and touch commands and the display appears in your field of vision just above your direct line of sight. Essentially it’s the next generation Smartphone, for your face.

With Google Glass you have access to maps, weather, texts through voice conversion, camera features with a tap or a wink, web searches through simple voice commands, translations that speak directly into your ear, facial recognition that can be linked to reminders, and of course video recording and video calling, which allow others to see life through your eyes.

Brands on Google Glass

With 10 percent of Americans already interested in buying a pair of the high-tech glasses, according to mobile application specialist BiTE interactive, Google Glass is poised to be yet another platform for brands to engage with users – and vice versa.

Google has said that it wants Google Glass to be free from clutter and intrusive advertising but playgroundlabs, a mobile software company, has created a video that shows how brands might be able to leverage the platform effectively.

Of course, brands will have to change the way they create and design content to fill Google Glass’s field of vision, just as they had to learn (and are still learning) how to craft Facebook status updates or mobile-friendly content.  Soon 140 character tweets will be reduced to headlines and photos since that’s all Glass wearers can see at first glance.

Elle, Evernote, CNN, Facebook, The New York Times, Tumblr and Twitter are among the first wave of third-party brands working with Google to create apps – known as Glasswear – for the device.

Google Glass on brands

Google Glass is also set to disrupt the way brands interact with customers face-to-face, particularly in the healthcare, retail and hospitality industries. Healthcare workers are excited about the possibility of Google Glass becoming a regular feature in hospitals and see the device’s potential to reduce medical errors.

Doctors can use Glass to access chart information, surgeons could live stream operations for students and residents and ambulance workers could use the device’s web browser as a diagnostic reference.

In the hospital and retail sectors, Google Glass would help brands monitor customer relationships through the eyes of their employees in the field. Facial recognition can be used to identify customers in order to access their history, preferences and offer promotions. Google Glass can also be used to quickly scan and take stock of inventory.

Overcoming the creepy factor

Of course, many of Google Glass’s functions make people uneasy.

Privacy concerns are at the root of many critics’ resistance toward the device, especially because it’s difficult to tell when the device is filming or taking a picture. Google Glass would undoubtedly be banned in movie theatres and performance venues. Even though Google Glass hasn’t hit the market yet, a bar in Seattle has already instituted a “No Google Glass” policy.

Others are concerned about the social implications of Google Glass. Putting aside the issue that the glasses make people look they’re on the set of some low-budget sci-fi movie, some fear that Google Glass will make people even more disconnected from their physical environment, despite Google senior developer Timothy Jordan’s assertion that “by bringing technology closer, we could get it further away.”

Image by Jerry Bauer via The Huffington Post.

A lot of us think of sales as sleazy and slimy and manipulative because for a long time, most of what we knew about sales came from an age of information asymmetry.

The seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information, the seller can rip you off. This is why we have the principle of “buyer beware.”

I think that’s changed. We’ve gone from a world of information asymmetry to one closer to information parity.

This transition – from buyers who don’t have much information, not many choices and no way to talk back, to [buyers who] have lots of information, lots of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back – has changed the game, moving us from a world of “buyer beware” to one of “seller beware.”

And this all happened in the last ten years, thanks to the internet and social media?

That’s been a big force. I think sales has changed more in the last decade than it did in the previous five decades combined. The shift in the information balance between buyer and seller is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

You focus on two industries in the book that aren’t usually front of mind when you hear talk about sales: education and health care. Why is that?

I was trying to explain why people are reporting that they’re spending a lot of time moving, persuading and influencing people. You’d get this pretty high number in the U.S. at least, 41 percent [of workers surveyed].

One of the things that really jumped out at me was where the jobs were. If you look at the U.S. labour market data, the jobs are coming from education and health care services.

Talk to any teacher and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s what I’m doing. I’m selling the idea of paying attention in class, I’m selling the idea of doing your homework.” And in some ways, medicine is, “I’m selling you on the idea of quitting smoking, I’m selling you on the idea of exercising more,” and so forth.

One word we hear about a lot in the digital content world these days is “curation.” You suggest that curation is the key to being a successful salesperson or brand as well. Can you unpack that?

I actually resisted using it because it’s so prominent in the world of content. Folks in online businesses have heard that word a gazillion times but most civilians have not.

The idea is this: It used to be that having access to information was some kind of advantage, but now everybody has access to information. If I want to know the GDP of Sweden, I can find it in ten seconds. So having access to information doesn’t matter. What matters more is being able to take that information and make sense of it, not only on your own behalf but also on behalf of other people.

Is that related to your idea of “problem finding” versus “problem solving”?

Frederic March in the 1951 film, Death of a Salesman

Yes, it’s an important concept, too. If you know exactly what your problem is, then you can find a solution without a salesperson, without anyone else. If I know my problem is that all I need to do is find the GDP of Sweden, I don’t need any help.

Where I need help is if I’m asking the wrong question, or if I’m wrong about my problem. There has been a move from problem solving to problem finding, from solving existing problems to identifying problems people don’t realize they have.

In the sales context, if you know exactly what your problem is, you don’t need a salesperson. So problem solving still matters, but it matters relatively less. Problem finding is a more valuable skill.

Are we seeing the roles of what’s traditionally seen as a consultant versus a salesperson blurring?

Yeah, and that’s been happening for a while. There’s a whole move towards what’s called consultative sales. I think what’s really going on is something that others have written about as well, which is this move from selling products and event services to selling insights.

It’s particularly true in business-to-business sales. One of the things that comes out with all the interviews with B2B salespeople is how much you need to understand the customer’s or prospect’s business, and so it is tiptoeing a little away from peddling products and a bit towards management consulting and generating insights.

Have you got any pushback from actual professional salespeople when you say that we’re all in sales? Should they be worried about their industry being disrupted by amateurs?

It’s a great question. There’s been a little bit of that, but less than I would have thought. Where I’ve gotten some distressed emails is from salespeople who say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that people have such a dim view of sales!”

Part of the argument of the book is that we should take sales more seriously – that sales isn’t the glad-handing, slick, somewhat duplicitous profession it’s stereotyped as, but that it requires a great degree of intellectual sophistication and insight.

So for everyone who says, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re allowing people to say sales is so grim,” I have a couple more who say, “Wow, I’m glad you’re taking sales seriously.”

With a speaker roster that includes Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Diane von Furstenberg, and an elite group of c-suite attendees (tickets cost upwards of $3,600), the event is sure to generate plenty of online buzz.

This is our notebook of interesting and inspiring blogs, tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related content from around the web, powered by our friends at Spundge.

C2-MTL

The Sparksheet team curates the most interesting and insightful content around C2-MTL 2013.

c2-mtl, #c2mtl, c2mtl, @sparksheet

View “C2-MTL” on Spundge ]]> http://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/feed/ 13 http://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sparksheet/~3/H_5JG0n1Ebk/ http://sparksheet.com/five-journalism-habits-brands-should-avoid/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 12:07:46 +0000 Craig Silverman http://sparksheet.com/?p=17150

Wilford Brimley plays Asst. U.S. Atty. Gen. James A. Wells in the 1980 journalism drama, Absence of Malice.

As a longtime journalist, I’m happy to see so many of my colleagues finding work at brands and agencies as content marketers, brand journalists and all the other new roles and titles beginning to emerge. (Me? I’m a Director of Content!)

At its best, marrying communications and marketing with a journalistic approach can result in quality content that’s of value to the public, as opposed to purely self-interested promotional copy.

One unintended consequence, however, may be that some bad habits of newsrooms will be ported to these new roles.

Here are five things about journalism that a new generation of content creators should be careful not to emulate.

Circling the wagons

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, the New York Post splashed two innocent men on its front page and painted them as possible terrorists.

So what did the Post have to say for itself after the cover went down in infamy?

“We stand by our story,” said New York Post editor Col Allen when he finally offered a statement.

Those five words have been the standard reply from newsrooms when the worst happens within journalistic ranks, such as plagiarism or fabrication.

Circling the wagons means refusing to acknowledge obvious failures or to otherwise engage in a discussion about your journalistic practices.

This destroys public trust. It’s been a habit inside newsrooms for a long time, but fortunately I think it’s starting to fade.

So if you’re a brand that publishes content, you need to engage with critical comments and respond to requests for corrections openly and publicly. You need to be willing to engage in a conversation about your work, even if that seems like a distraction from your ultimate goal.

View this as an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to quality content and accountability, rather than a nuisance.

The echo chamber

Journalists get caught in an echo chamber when we spend too much time with the same colleagues covering the same beat in the same way. Views and perspectives begin to coalesce and we fall victim to groupthink.

The echo chamber is the enemy of fresh ideas. It also leads to blind spots that prevent us from identifying important developments or oncoming trouble.

How do you escape the echo chamber? Make a conscious effort to read and engage outside of your role and industry. Seek out non-traditional sources.

Attend a conference that’s outside of the norm for you. What can you learn from sociology, cognitive psychology, political science?

Echo chambers are dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Image by Denis Gobo via Flickr.

Skimping on training

Training budgets were one of the first things to be cut at newspapers when classifieds, display ads and reader revenue started cratering.

The decline occurred because of fundamental shifts in media and technology. The internet and its disruptive effects began taking hold and haven’t let go.

Media brands needed to invest in training in order to adapt and thrive in a digital world. But with budgets cut and the pace of technological change accelerating, many newsrooms found themselves with outdated skillsets, workflows and technology.

Budgets will rise and fall and content marketers inside and outside of organizations will feel the effects.

It’s up to you to ensure that you’re always learning and to instill a culture within your organization that’s focused on keeping skills and processes up to date.

Creating silos

One legacy media habit that seems to have been replicated in the content marketing world is the separation of writers and editors from technology, product and business people.

Within newsrooms this created a culture that was hostile to collaboration and prevented people from coming together to solve problems and develop innovative business models. (I’m not saying that journalists and ad sales people should break down ethical boundaries. Those are critical to credibility.)

Tearing down walls internally helps blow up echo chambers and gives life to fresh ideas.

Want to know what’s possible when you tear down walls and put a new mix of people in a room?

Have a look at the tremendous, Pulitzer-winning New York Times Snow Fall interactive that was the result of collaboration between a writer, sports editors, graphics editors, a multimedia producer/designer, a digital designer, a video journalist and a photographer. All within an organization that has a lot of moving parts, people, departments and procedures.

If the Grey Lady can break down walls, you can too.

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek is New York Times’ multimedia storytelling effort that bridged departments within the brand.

Ignoring the competition

Companies do a lot of competitive intelligence and tracking. Journalists read and watch their competitors, too. But historically they prefer to not acknowledge their existence.

This is a horrible, venal tradition in media that’s thankfully starting to go away. It goes like this: If your competitor gets a scoop, you do everything you can to not credit them for the work.

That’s why you’ll still sometimes read a news story that refers to “a report today” or “media reports,” without naming the source. The standard operating procedure in newsrooms was to re-report the story just so you could run it without having to note that the crosstown rival got there first.

This tradition carried into the online world to the point where some large news outlets only recently began linking to competitors.

Will you link to it?

Now, imagine one of your competitors writes a great blog post. Not something that promotes their product, but a piece about your industry that’s insightful and valuable to your audience. Will you link to it?

I’ll say this: If your relationship with your customers or clients is so tenuous that sending them to a useful link on a competitor’s website will damage your standing, then maybe linking out is the least of your troubles.

His daring five-year plan was to leverage the distinct style of seven New York rappers to help the group reach number one on the Billboard charts and change the face of the music scene.

This successful brandscape was called the Wu-Tang Clan.

Creating a supergroup

In a recent NPR story celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut on the music scene, RZA recalled how the group developed unique personas designed to attract different sub-categories of the rap music audience:

I recall telling GZA, ‘You’ll get the college crowd,’ “because he’s the intellectual. Raekwon and Ghost, all the gangstas” – their metaphors read like a police blotter – “Meth will get the women and children – and he didn’t want to do women and children. He didn’t know that, though. Method Man is a rough, rugged street dude, but all the girls love him.” Method Man is playful. “Myself, I was looking more like that I bring in rock ’n’ roll.

There you have it:

• The college crowd was assigned to GZA;
• The gangstas were given to Raekwon and Ghost (that is, Ghostface Killah);
• Method Man was recruited to reach the single ladies;
• RZA’s role was to attract crossovers from the rock music crowd.

Wu-Tang Clan performing in 2010. Image by NRK P3 via Flickr.

Who’s your Method Man?

Let’s assume you’ve already created a series of personas to help with your content marketing efforts.

Maybe you’re already creating content designed to engage each of the market segments represented by your personas in a relevant and compelling way.

Have you assigned an individual to act as the brand ambassador to that persona? Who’s your Method Man to the women in your audience?

Over the next five years RZA leveraged the individual personas he’d created to sign separate record deals for each member of the group.

Ghostface Killah became a breakout success after RZA ensured each member was given a record deal with a separate label. Image by thecomeupshow via Flickr.

Instead of signing all five artists to one record label (which wouldn’t maximize their reach), RZA insisted on getting five of the six major record labels at the time to invest in the individual artists.

This simple strategy (leveraging five separate record labels to grow each artist’s fan base) turned artists like Ghostface Killah into stars in their own right. Ghost’s first solo album in 1996, for example, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart.

By building each individual artist’s audience first, RZA guaranteed that the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album would be a huge success.

Sure enough, five years after Wu-Tang Clan first assembled in a Staten Island basement, their album Wu-Tang Forever hit number one on the Billboard charts.

The Wu-Tang Clan demonstrated that pooling their distinct audiences would not only produce a mega-hit but one of the most influential rap albums of the decade.

What if…

What if you created your own ‘Wu-Tang Clan’ of internal experts assigned to attract and build specific segments of your market?

What if you leveraged the audiences they built on their own to create a powerhouse when you brought those experts and their communities together?

Ask yourself…

What’s your five-year Wu-Tang plan?

Blogger, podcaster and Twist Image president Mitch Joel calls this state “purgatory” and in his new book, CTRL ALT Delete, he argues that it’s time for businesses and individuals to “reboot.”

Mitch has been a friend of Sparksheet since the beginning and he joined us for a Google+ Hangout to talk about his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which comes out on May 21.

Our conversation covers everything from screen shifting and mobile marketing, to how to have “safe sex with data” and why the world should be a little more “squiggly.”

What does that mean? Watch the Hangout below:

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, shoppers began filling their grocery carts with Western brands, such as Henkel’s Persil, rather than the state-owned equivalents. And in less than three years, those Western products weren’t just appearing on store shelves; they were being manufactured in places like Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. So began Central and Eastern Europe’s wobbly road to liberal democracy.

Two decades later, the budding tech scene in countries across the region known as CEE seems to be following a parallel trajectory. Silicon Valley is the brightest star in the tech universe, but Eastern Europe is starting to form a solar system of its own. Support networks, investors and an emerging culture of optimism are taking hold and quietly reviving the region’s international brand along the way.

Renewing an old image

Place branding hasn’t been around long. In 2003, Simon Anholt, considered a pioneer in the field, launched his company, Placebrands, and his earliest clients included Germany, Croatia and Slovenia.

Rok Klancnik, the director of communications of Slovenia’s tourism board at the time, told The New York Times that investing in the country’s brand was “not only useful, it’s necessary.” And that was 17 years after the publication of Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical guidebook Why Come to Slaka? about a fictional Eastern European country.

To be sure, the dozen and a half countries that make up CEE each face unique circumstances and challenges. But “Eastern Europe” is a brand in itself – and a controversial one. Economist correspondent Edward Lucas thinks the term belongs in the dustbin of history because it lacks accuracy – Prague, after all, lies farther west than Vienna – and because it’s a needless throwback to the Soviet era.

Inaccurate and outdated as the term may be, hop on a plane to Silicon Valley or London and the attitude toward Central and Eastern Europe pivots. To tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who have the region on their radar, CEE is synonymous with a burgeoning startup ecosystem teeming with promise. And that’s great news for the region’s brand – and its people.

The view from the Skype office in Tallinn, Estonia. Image by Steve Jurvetson via Flickr.

The Skype effect

Latvia’s capital, Riga, is “the new hotbed of Baltic-based startups,” says Mike Butcher, European editor for TechCrunch and co-founder of co-working space Tech Hub. He says the mid-sized European country is “full of engineers who are all champing at the bit.”

Many of these engineers serve overseas companies who outsource their development, but they’re starting to found companies of their own. Take Uldis Leiterts, who works out of Tech Hub and is the founder of infogr.am, an award-winning infographics app.

After five years of working for a large news corporation, Leiterts decided to take the leap into the startup universe. When he arrived at Tech Hub less than a year ago the place was almost empty, but since then it has filled to near capacity.

Leiterts thinks the origins of the Baltics’ thriving startup culture can be traced back to the launch of Skype. The voice-over-IP software was developed by Estonians, and the company’s largest headquarters is located in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital.

“What Skype taught people working in the IT sector in the Baltics is that having equity in something small and ambitious is actually pretty good.” That, he explained (over Skype), was a novel idea in those days.

International recognition

The past few years have seen a string of startup successes across CEE, including Czech Republic’s AVG and Avast, Latvia’s Ask.fm, Serbia’s Nordeus, Poland’s Filestube and Romania’s BitDefender and Soft32.

And of course there is Berlin, which was ranked as the world’s 15th most developed startup city in last year’s Startup Ecosystem Report (the second-highest ranking in Europe, after London).

The region is also attracting the attention of international brands and advertisers looking to connect with emerging markets. Speaking at a conference in Poland in April, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell proclaimed, “At a time when Western Continental Europe is under considerable economic pressure and likely to continue to be so, the opportunities presented by Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Germany, Poland and Russia, are extraordinary.”

Meanwhile, Futurebrand’s latest country brand index ranked Estonia among the top 25 countries considered “good for business” and marked it as a “future 15 country on the rise.” The report highlights Estonia’s tech success as the magic ingredient.

How To Web founder Bogdon Iordache speaking to the press at How To Web 2012. Image by Alin Dobrin via Facebook.

Moving forward, looking back

The explanations I was given for the rapid growth of the region’s startup communities were numerous, varied and often contradictory. For TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, it’s all about the Soviet regime’s emphasis on math and engineering.

“When Lenin said, ‘Chess is the gymnastics for the mind,’ little did he know he’d be setting the touchpaper on a whole generation of engineers who are now reaping the benefits of that wise principle,” Butcher says.

For Uldis Leiterts, entrepreneurship in the region is a matter of necessity. Living standards in many Central and Eastern European countries lag behind the West. Young people who grew up on the web see tech startups as a means of improving the status quo.

Romanian entrepreneur Bogdan Iordache is part of that cohort. “I was born in a world where you had two hours a day of TV programs, a strict ration of bread and not enough electricity to go through a full day,” says the 34-year-old. Today, he organizes How to Web, one of CEE’s most important tech conferences.

Forbes’ Croatia editor Ivo Spigel, on the other hand, thinks the effect communism has had on entrepreneurial culture is less straightforward.

“In some cases, you have people who have been so frustrated by socialism that they are much more motivated and devoted to building something new,” he says, “but in other cases, you can still see those echoes of the-State-will-take-care-of–everybody mentality.”

Eleven is one of the two accelerators in Sophia, Bulgaria that have between them attracted 21 million Euros. Image via Facebook.

A long way to go

Whatever the reason for CEE’s tech renaissance, the region still faces its share of obstacles. Mike Butcher says the East lacks maturity in the “softer” sectors. Despite improvements, “product marketing, user interface, design, media and communications still have some way to go.”

For Spigel, the biggest drawback is a lack of infrastructure for startups – including local investors. But even that’s starting to change.

Sofia, Bulgaria, for example, has recently become home to two accelerator programs that between them have attracted €21 million of EU investment capital. It’s investments like these that are drawing the world’s attention.

“I remember my grandparents watching the World Cup in Mexico on TV back in 1986 – not to see the matches, but to find out what the cities and people looked like,” says Bogdan Iordache when I ask him about the changes he’s seen in his home country of Romania over his lifetime.

“Now I live in a country where we have all the goods we want, we can travel wherever we want, whenever we want, and we can find information about anything. To say the two worlds are different is just not enough.”

Image by Metro Library and Archive via Flickr.

During a crisis, everyone is riveted. We keep watching the news or scrolling through our Twitter feeds, desperate for a new morsel of information.

Has the oil spill been contained? The cause of the crash determined? The source of tainted meat identified?

If we were on a television show, new developments would break every couple of minutes, ensuring a steady stream of thrills. But in real life, it’s murkier; progress comes slowly, and initial information may be unclear or inaccurate.

Innuendo swirls and serious mistakes are made, including (in the wake of the recent Boston Marathon bombings) websites such as Reddit erroneously fingering the wrong suspect.

If you find your brand in the throes of a crisis, how do you “fill the gap” in coverage to ensure reporters and the public are getting enough information to satisfy their insatiable curiosity – while steering clear of risky, unsubstantiated nuggets?

Here are a few strategies that I’ve found useful:

Communicate on a regular schedule

The media thrive on predictability; even though they’re on a 24/7 schedule, it’s important for them to know they’ll receive updates at particular times so they can plan for “live shots” (in the case of TV) or count down to updates (“only four minutes until the company president shares the latest information with us”).

Of course, if relevant new information comes to light, you should share it immediately. But even if you don’t have new information, journalists and the public will appreciate knowing that you’ll be checking in with them every hour or so (whether it’s through updates on your website, a press conference or a tweet).

The BBC’s newsroom in Central London. Image via Graham Holliday, via Flickr.

Be clear on what you know – and what you don’t

Don’t make optimistic guesses or speculate. And never shade the truth. Save yourself a lot of trouble and explain clearly what you know, what you don’t, and your plan for getting to the bottom of the situation.

Go behind the scenes

When there’s no new information to share, you can often fill airtime in a positive way by “going behind the scenes.”

Depending on the nature of the problem, you may be able to provide facility tours to the media to show them how operations are run and the procedures you have in place.

Or you can provide access to people who are working hard on the job (for instance, an interview with a competent worker who is an expert at cleaning up oil spills).

The key is to provide context and show that you’re hard at work on addressing the situation.

In 2012, the headquarters of Spirit AeroSystems, an a aviation manufacturing company, was hit by a tornado. The company posted photos of the cleanup on its Flickr stream. Image by Spirit AeroSystems via Flickr.

Provide your own experts

When political candidates release a new policy initiative, they’ll often provide reporters with a list of experts who can speak knowledgeably about it (often people who have been consulted on the plan beforehand).

This can be an invaluable help for journalists who may struggle to locate an expert on the minutiae of a particular issue. It’s also great for getting your brand’s message out.

Making it easy for the media to talk to a favourable (or at least neutral) expert is far better than rolling the dice and seeing who they come up with from a cursory Google search.

You can prepare for many potential crises by asking “What’s the worst case scenario?” and identifying experts on that subject who are smart and rational.

Prior to a crisis, you can tap them for advice and guidance; during a crisis, they may be voices of reason the media can interview.

Know when to keep quiet

It’s also important to keep in mind that if a media crisis is swirling and you’re not involved, it may be best to say nothing at all. It’s not possible (and may not be desirable) to shut down all social media activity during every single crisis; things happen around the globe all the time.

But if something major occurs and the world is riveted, even a banal and normally innocuous tweet (such as notifying customers about a sale) may seem insensitive. So when news breaks, think through your upcoming mix of social media posts; you may want to hold off on some or all.

Communicating in the midst of a crisis is never easy. But if you recognize the insatiable demand for information, emanating both from the media and the public, and try to fill that void with relevant information, you’re more likely to drown out harmful rumours and speculation.

“Feeding the beast” in the midst of a crisis may not seem like a priority – but if you want to keep the public calm and emerge with your reputation intact once the situation is resolved, it’s essential.

Jeremy Piven stars in British television series, Mr. Selfridge. Image via imdb.com.

We are going to show the world how to make shopping thrilling.
- Mr. Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) in the first episode of ITV’s Mr. Selfridge

If television had to go back to the 1960s to revisit the heyday of modern advertising, it had to go back even further to recapture the excitement of the department store.

Harry Gordon Selfridge, the brash American entrepreneur who bulldozed his way into the hearts of conservative British shoppers in 1909, is now the unlikely hero of a new show on the U.K.’s ITV. Mr. Selfridge’s key insight was to put everything on display and let people touch, experience and, most importantly, dream.

Until recently, many believed that Ron Johnson, the silver-maned merchant behind two of our generation’s most successful retail concepts – Target and Apple – would be the Mr. Selfridge of our generation.

Johnson was hired by the 110-year-old JCPenney in the fall of 2011, and heralded by some as a messiah whose magic touch could not only save the flailing brand from obscurity, but also reimagine what a department store could be.

Just over 500 days later, on April 8 2013, JCPenney’s board summarily fired Johnson. In their eyes, the man failed to deliver on their fundamental metrics: traffic, sales and revenue.

But the legacy of Johnson’s tenure at JCPenney – both his successes and monumental missteps – holds key insights for marketers, many of which would not have surprised Mr. Selfridge more than a century ago.

Ron Johnson was fired from JCPenney after shoppers reacted negatively to the changes he implemented. Image via thebigstock.com

Change takes time

Once they see what we have done here, there will be no turning back.
- TV’s Mr. Selfridge

Ron Johnson’s tactics at JCPenney were revolutionary and controversial. He almost immediately dismantled all major couponing and discounting, seen by many as the cornerstone of the modern American department store. In what was dubbed “Fair and Square Pricing,” he eschewed “marking up” the original price to discount later.

Instead, he simply reduced all prices by roughly 40 percent and held them there. He also flatly refused the “.99” denomination, delivering prices in rounded-off dollars.

While many of these tactics were considered innovative, critics immediately questioned the brand’s ability to implement them and the suburban customer’s willingness to fundamentally change their approach to shopping.

Historians will look back on Johnson’s tumultuous tenure and likely blame hubris. They will say he wanted too much, too quickly. His belief that high-end brands would not come on board if only some of JCPenney’s 1,100 stores were transformed, led him to rip off the Band-Aid in one single stroke.

The old logo and name (top) has been replaced by the longer and more prestigious title, Hudston’s Bay Company.

In contrast, when former Lane Crawford president Bonnie Brooks was brought in to revolutionize another storied department store, Canada’s Hudson’s Bay (famous for being the oldest incorporated merchandising company in the English-speaking world) in 2008, she saw it as a marathon, not a sprint.

Admittedly, Brooks had the luxury of time, given that her main changes occurred prior to the company’s IPO – so unlike Johnson, she avoided the monthly wrath of impatient shareholders.

But five years later, Hudson’s Bay is still very much in transition. For instance, it only just changed its moniker from the abbreviated “The Bay” back to the more prestigious “Hudson’s Bay.”

Brooks focused her initial innovations on one flagship Toronto location, adding a Canadian Olympic Store, a heritage department and $8,000 handbags, while making subtle changes to the rest of the fleet.

Her slow-building success and her ruthlessness at culling over 900 stale and underperforming brands in favour of smart partnerships with coveted names like TopShop, Ralph Lauren and Burberry have won her the support of the board, who recently entrusted her with overseeing sister company Lord and Taylor in the U.S. as well.

Know the people – inside and out

I want merchandise that people will desire! I want merchandise that people don’t even know they will desire until they see it, right in front of their eyes!
- TV’s Mr. Selfridge

Harry Gordon Selfridge. Image via wikipedia.org.

Like many of the great merchants, Ron Johnson moved on instinct. But in our age of customer analytics and targeted advertising, some of Johnson’s gut feelings were not aligned with what JCPenney’s customers actually wanted – and some testing may have pointed this out.

There is often a huge disconnect between what a customer says they want and what their behaviour shows. While the idea of ‘everyday low prices’ is great in theory, customers, especially American customers, have been trained for generations to love a bargain (in many European countries, where sales and discounts are state-mandated, customers might have been more prepared to embrace Mr. Johnson’s bold vision).

Moreover, given the way retail cycles work, when Johnson ‘killed the coupon’ and enacted his ‘fair and square pricing’, much of the merchandise in question was already in store. So while the final marked price may have been lower under the new scheme, a loyal customer would have seen the same T-shirt under a “40 percent off” sign the previous week.

But perhaps the biggest problem with Johnson’s approach was that he did not inspire an army to help him enact and communicate his vision. The average JCPenney employee likely had trouble explaining their CEO’s vision to customers, especially given the extreme pace at which changes were implemented.

Johnson didn’t have it easy, but he didn’t make it easy on himself either.

Second acts and legacies

The customer is always right.
- A quote credited to the real Mr. Selfridge

It was recently announced that Mr. Selfridge, the television program, was awarded a second season. What might make the real Mr. Selfridge even happier, if he were around today, is that more than 100 years later, his department store continues to build on its founder’s original mantra of “retail as theatre.”

Selfridge’s has launched the largest women’s shoe department in the world (and recently done the same for men). The brand also created a store exterior in Birmingham so architecturally unsettling and alien-like that it has become a tourist destination in its own right.

The super modern Selfridges in Birmingham. Image by Wojtek Gurak via Flickr.

I hope Mr. Johnson’s vision for the department store of the future gets a second chance as well. He might have to start smaller, with one shop or a few, but Ron Johnson’s ideas, as difficult as they were to implement on a grand scale, do have the potential to “show the world how to make shopping thrilling” once again.

Image by pixagraphic via Flickr.

Over the last several years, digital marketing has become fragmented, with silos sprouting up around SEO, ad sales, PR, social media, inbound marketing and other areas of the industry. The phrase “content marketing” has become so hot so quickly because it seems to make sense of it all.

Content marketing is the glue that holds all these interconnected elements together. But its rise has sent many companies scrambling to rethink and redefine their marketing strategies.

International brands in particular are struggling with how to effectively execute content marketing strategies across multiple regions. Content marketing on a global level requires far-flung regions and departments to collaborate more closely than ever before.

Here are three key considerations for global brands and agencies looking to adapt to the content marketing era.

Understand local differences

Just because something worked in one country, does not mean it will work globally. Content creation should be coordinated and developed in collaboration with multiple regions. This ensures global alignment, with due consideration of regional variance.

HSBC’s “Think global, act local” campaign is a perfect encapsulation of this philosophy.

MasterCard also localizes its marketing for different regions and countries.

“Priceless” is a global strap line, yet the stories the MasterCard brand uses to engage audiences and the promotional incentives it offers vary locally, from NBA basketball experiences in North America and European Football Championship games in Europe, to fashion shows and music concerts across China.

Localize channels and keywords

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not market leaders in all countries. Baidu has more than 70 percent of the search market in China, Yandex has two-thirds of search in Russia and Orkut is the social networking leader in India, with 40 percent of the market. International brands who don’t localize their marketing channels do so at their own peril.

Because we live in a world where search ranking can still make or break a brand, content can’t just be translated: It must be localized. Keywords need to consist of terms that a native speaker may actually search for.

Even within English the process of localization is critical. Compare the U.K. terms “auto,” “shopping centre” and “holiday” with their U.S. counterparts “car,” “mall” and “vacation.”

This Google Trends graph shows the popularity of the term “shopping centre” (blue) over the word “mall” (red) in the U.K.

They have the same meaning, but widely different search volumes in different countries. Likewise in Spanish, “coche” is the preferred term for car, yet in Latin America the word can refer to a child’s push chair (or “buggy” or “stroller” depending on where you come from).

Central control, local motivation

The final point is that content does not have to be developed by a single team and then pushed to other regions. Effective content marketing on a global scale empowers local execution and taps into regional market knowledge.

Smart global brands understand this. They have a corporate and brand value, along with a creative idea that resonates globally. But they allow the flexibility for regional marketing teams to create messages and use channels that resonate deeply with local audiences.

On the set of Downton Abbey.

American TV has entered the post-Downton era. The popularity of Downton Abbey, the British period drama, is unmistakable: The recent third season finale attracted 12.3 million U.S. viewers, beating all the network and cable competition in its timeslot.

But Downton isn’t just a critical and ratings success for PBS, the American public broadcaster that airs the show as part of its long-running Masterpiece series. It appears to have ushered in a new era for British programming on U.S. television, characterized by savvy marketing campaigns for content once considered too niche for American audiences.

The Downton effect

PBS has been airing period dramas on Masterpiece since 1971, bringing hit British series to smaller U.S. audiences. Masterpiece was the American home for Upstairs, Downstairs, Prime Suspect and The Forsyte Saga, all of which became modest hits in the United States, mostly among older viewers.

In the summer of 2010, with the launch of the first seasons of Downton Abbey and Sherlock, PBS began an aggressive new programming and marketing strategy in an attempt to lure younger viewers from basic and premium cable television.

The strategy included ad buys on BBC America and CNN, live roundtable discussions with actors and producers and a Twitter campaign involving Downton actors sending tweets about the show.

Hugh Bonneville plays Robert, Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey and tweets regularly about the show.

With Downton on hiatus until January 2014, PBS is trying to keep the momentum going with Mr. Selfridge, a co-production with London’s ITV studios about the flamboyant American founder of the British department store Selfridges.

Taking a page from the Downton marketing playbook, PBS is making a big splash with Mr. Selfridge, hosting live Twitter events to lure younger viewers and parading series star Jeremy Piven around the Hollywood promotional circuit.

Remakes and resurgences

HBO, the premium cable network, also has a history of bringing British series to the U.S, including Rome and Five Days, co-produced with the BBC, an ITV rival when it comes to period dramas.

This year HBO used a new approach when launching Parade’s End, which stars Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch as an aristocrat trapped in a marriage to an unfaithful wife. HBO’s strategy included online featurettes, interviews with the cast and a set tour in Architectural Digest.

The success of British content on U.S. airwaves also seems to have renewed the American networks’ appetites for American remakes of popular British series.

Until recently, for every hit remake such as The Office, there were multiple failures such as Coupling and The IT Crowd.

But some of this year’s most critically acclaimed American programs are adaptations of British series, including HBO’s Veep (from the creator of the British sitcom The Thick of It), Showtime’s Shameless, Syfy’s Being Human and Netflix’s House of Cards.

Actor Jeremy Piven stars as Mr. Selfridge in the acclaimed British series of the same name.

Another show that seems to have found its footing with American audiences is Doctor Who, the iconic British sci-fi series. The show, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, is one of the most popular shows on Twitter, and has even been credited with rising sales of bow ties.

While Doctor Who had a loyal following in the U.S. long before Julian Fellowes introduced us to the Crawleys, its resurgence raises the question: Would a cult British sci-fi series have made the cover of Entertainment Weekly in the pre-Downton era of American television?

Wondereur is a retail and magazine app created for the tablet and desktop. Each month Wondereur publishes a photo essay featuring an an artist and his or her works. The featured art is made available to purchase directly through the app.

There are plenty of online art galleries out there. What drove you to launch Wondereur?

Co-founder Angelica Fox.

Angelica: One of the first things you learn in art history class is that there’s a difference between the work itself and the reproduction. Of course what’s changed and what’s been changing for a hundred years is that it’s reproduction everywhere.

We looked at how art is being sold and presented and saw that there was this gap between the way the world is now, the way we understand it to be, and the way art was being sold.

We found that art was either being sold in the old-fashioned way in a white cube gallery, or it was being sold online like shoes. “Well,” we thought, “there are people out there with money, who are interested in buying art and where do they go?”

The web has made it easy for everyone to curate their own collections of pretty much anything. Of course, the word “curation” was lifted from the art world! Does that make it a challenge to convince people they need tastemakers?

Co-founder Olivier Berger.

Olivier: Our tastemakers are helping you to find artists that you didn’t know existed and are worth the investment. It goes way beyond the tastemaker, it goes to having someone who has the knowledge of what’s going on in the mainstream market share a tip with you.

Angelica: The sharing part is really important. It’s what we feel we are doing more than anything else. We’re sharing in the same way that everyone else is sharing these days. Everyone else is sharing what they think is interesting, worthwhile, notable and we’re doing exactly the same thing.

We’re not setting ourselves up as the last word in contemporary art, we’re setting ourselves up as people who have the ability to share discoveries.

Why did you choose to optimize Wondereur for the tablet?

Olivier: We wanted to start with the tablet because there’s something magical about it. The first thing is the screen. The quality of the pictures is stunning. The other thing is that it’s a touch device.

Usually when you enter an art gallery or an exhibit, nobody talks to you. It’s a very cold place. At a museum you always see people who want to touch the artwork but they aren’t allowed to do it. We wanted to do the exact opposite – create intimacy – and there’s nothing more intimate than touching.

Wondereur might pass as an online magazine with an e-retail store, or it could be seen as a content marketing platform for artists. How do you classify yourselves?

Olivier: Content marketing is not real content to me. It’s real content that’s connected to something else or it’s just marketing, but it’s hard to marry the two.

Angelica: It’s something we have talked about a lot internally. We’re really aware that many people want to pigeonhole us. People want to know, “Are you producing content like a magazine? Or are you marketing a product like a retailer?”

We want to break down the Chinese wall completely. We want to say it’s a false distinction. We want to say that it’s possible to do both in a way that is honest, that is authentic, that is true to the production of content and that is not driven by the need to put spin on something.

We want to tell the truth as we see it, in a way that journalists do. We want to make it as beautiful as we can and as engaging as we can, in a way that designers do, and we want to be able to sell art.

In the end that’s exactly what we’re doing and we’re making no bones about it. This is all about finding a market for a group of people who don’t find support easily and who don’t get the market they deserve.

The cover page of a Wondereur photo essay.

Olivier: It’s kind of breaking the business model of the magazine because we’re not subscription based and our business model is centred on commission earned through the sales of the artwork.

So it’s like you’re an online art magazine crossed with an online art gallery?

Olivier: Yes, but it’s a struggle to exist in two worlds.

Angelica: It’s been a struggle. I think when what you’re doing is creating a new model, taking something from here and something from there and saying, “If we put these things together then we can make something new, then we can make something of value,” there are going to be questions.

We’re aware of that. It’s an inherent difficulty. It feels like schizophrenia sometimes. But we embrace it.

A photo of artist Josée Pedneault appears in issue 20 of the app.

Do you have plans to expand the platform beyond the art world?

Olivier: Every time an object has a story, has depth – it could be fashion, it could be jewellery, or whatever – when a product has a craftsman or craftswoman behind it, I think the Wondereur concept would apply.

Angelica: It’s exciting for us to think about those potentials. Obviously the idea of brand journalism is very current and this is something that is analogous in some ways to some of those efforts, except that we are not starting from the brand message. We’re turning it on its head. The stories create the brand.

In the past 20 years, truth has increasingly validated hype, with technological advances yielding more antiperspirant efficacy with a sheerer –and therefore more invisible – application.

But throughout its history, advertising has frequently employed slice-of-life narratives getting to the consumer’s confidence. With Secret, you can be active, get nervous, wear silk, lift your arms and generally live your life without fear of god-awful embarrassment over the fact that like everyone else on earth, you sweat.

Product efficacy and consumer confidence. Not a bad combination. Yet Procter began losing confidence in the relevance of the positioning. “It was always about key issues of the day and inspiring women to be fearless,” says Kevin Hochman, brand manager for skin care and personal care at Procter & Gamble North America.

But somehow, around late 2004, the brand stewards sensed that the theme was getting dated. “We walked away,” Hochman says. “We thought, women are empowered and maybe this isn’t so relevant. That was a mistake.”

Marketing shame

The shift was especially ill timed, as the all-natural trend left some younger women gravitating away from aluminum-based antiperspirants and toward body sprays and body washes. As Secret’s growth flattened, the marketer focused ever more on the product’s attributes and ever less on the underlying brand promise of underarm empowerment.

One 2006 campaign asked women to divulge secrets on the web (“My fiancé thinks I’m eight years younger than I actually am”). And even when “confidence” was the theme of a typical Procter & Gamble slice-of-life commercial – as it was when the “clinical-strength” line extension was launched in 2007 – the confidence was juxtaposed against shame.

Yeah, the happy bride is dancing uninhibitedly at her wedding, her arms raised above her. But the poor bridesmaids are afraid to even reach for the tossed bridal bouquet, lest their soggy pits be exposed. This ad wasn’t made in 1966. It aired in 2007. (The breakthrough, such that it was, came with the first images in American advertising of actual underarm sweat. Somehow the republic survived.)

A vintage Secret antiperspirant ad. Image by Christian Montone via Flickr.

Purpose-driven marketing

Through 2008, the novelty of “clinical-strength” Secret helped boost the brand, but within a year or so that effect eventually waned. The new segment was very expensive and the economy was getting very bad. But in two other respects, the timing was most propitious.

For one thing, top management were beginning to loudly voice confidence in the power and inevitability of purpose-driven marketing. “We expect every one of our brands to be guided by a purpose that defines how it uniquely touches and improves lives,” Marc Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer, declared to the Association of National Advertisers. “We think of it as the soul of the brand.”

Pritchard’s thinking bears more than a passing mention here, because his is not a privately held business populated entirely by true believers fresh out of a Save Our Rainforests protest or Burning Man. It is the largest advertiser in the world with a market cap of $175 billion and 24 $1 billion-plus brands. It is conservative in all it does.

Operating from purpose, Prichard told his colleagues:

means changing from marketing to people (so we get them to do what we want them to do, which is buy our products) to serving people with our brands to make their lives better. And that can take many forms. Of course, it’s better products, but it’s also non- product services. It’s entertainment that brings people together and it’s acts of kindness and generosity that [make] them part of the larger community [...] when we focus on serving people, we uncover human insights – not product insights. Deep human insights that define the essence of human behavior. They represent universal human truths, motivations and tensions that must be solved by the benefits of our brands.

“And from these insights,” he added, very significantly, “we create big ideas.”

This excerpt, adapted for Sparksheet, is from Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results. Published by Portfolio/Penguin. Copyright (c) Bob Garfield and Doug Levy, 2013.

Nyan Cat is one of the most successful cat memes on the internet and has been adopted for marketing purposes by brands like Sprint (see YouTube video below).

With the rise of banner blindness, ad-blocking technology, and streaming services that allow any savvy internet user or television viewer to decide when, where and whether they are served up an ad, it’s more difficult for brands to reach the public than ever before.

For modern marketers, it’s no longer about forcing a promotional message in front of an audience, but rather about finding effective ways to convince consumers to allow them an audience at all.

Achieving this feat requires embracing humour, new platforms, and the evolving logic of “internet culture” to build better, more compelling and more interesting advertising.

That’s where memes come in.

What is memevertising?

At their core, internet memes are the embodiment of everything good advertising should be: clever, memorable, easily communicated and absurdly contagious.

So it’s no wonder that more and more brands have been leaping at the opportunity to incorporate memes into their marketing.

The first thing to note about memevertising (aside from its inherent risks and potential rewards), is that it is not all alike. The most common approach is called memejacking and involves a brand or agency piggybacking on a popular meme in progress.

This can take the form of a commercial, a display ad or an adaptation of an already successful image macro (image superimposed with text).

The key to this approach is identifying an appropriate (and potentially relevant) meme or viral event before it becomes passé or irrelevant. As the recent Harlem Shake phenomenon demonstrated, memes can be fleeting. This requires having employees in your organization (or agency) who have a finger on the pulse of internet culture and social media.

Another form of memevertising is known as “memescaping” and involves a brand creating an entire meme from scratch.

It’s not always intentional (indeed many attempts to create branded memes fail spectacularly), but when it succeeds it can inspire thousands of user-made tributes, adaptations and unique creations that generate brand impressions for years.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at a few successful examples of memevertising:

Four examples of meme marketing

1. Chuck Norris, World of Warcraft

Chuck Norris jokes were as popular offline as online, but game development company Blizzard Entertainment appropriated them to promote an expansion of its smash hit online game World of Warcraft.

The result was a memejacked video commercial that went viral, received extensive media coverage and aligned perfectly with the company’s core demographic of gamers.

2. Most Interesting Man in the World 

One of thousands of user-created image macros of Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign.

In 2006, Euro RSCG Worldwide devised an advertising campaign for the beer brand Dos Equis. The ads featured actor Jonathan Goldsmith as “the most interesting man in the world.”

It was a smash success and a good example of accidental memescaping. By 2013, the ad has inspired tens of thousands of user-created image macros that prominently feature the brand’s dashing spokesman next to a bottle of Dos Equis.

3.  “Let’s Go!” Shell 

In order to protest the multinational gas and oil company’s controversial plan to drill in the arctic, Greenpeace created ArcticReady.com, a satirical website filled with fictional mission statements, damning statistics and scathing image parodies of Shell’s “Let’s Go” campaign.

It also invited visitors to create their own crowdsourced meme submissions. The result was a staggeringly effective hoax (and memescaping example) that generated significant media coverage and no small number of user-generated contributions.

Fortunately for Greenpeace, Shell (wisely) decided not to pursue legal action.

4. Sesame Street’s “Call Me Maybe”

When Carly Rae Jepsen released her hit single “Call Me Maybe” in 2011, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would have predicted how much of a viral phenomenon it would become.

But a Twitter endorsement by teen idol Justin Bieber led to an explosion of covers, parodies and tribute videos à la Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and Psy’s “Gagnam Style.”

What was particularly remarkable in the case of “Call Me Maybe” was how quickly some iconic brands (like the Miami Dolphins and Abercrombie & Fitch) were able to leap into the fray with tribute videos of their own in order to make the most of the song’s incredible viral energy.

Sesame Street was one such brand and 13 million views later, the video is a fantastic example of how memejacking done well can work brilliantly.

The responsively designed “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign website. Users enter their question, which is answered by McDonald’s staff. Question length is limited to 140 characters to facilitate sharing across social networks.

“Our Food. Your Questions.” is all about transparency. Thousands of questions appear on the campaign’s webpage about health, quality and ethics, and many of them are pretty cynical. How do you convince a brand like McDonald’s to engage with those issues out in the open?

McDonald’s Canada was acutely aware that these myths were already out there and had run quality TV spots and created website content to address them.

While they had seen positive results, they were not having a sustaining effect and thus were open to pursuing a more direct and provocative approach to engaging with their consumers.

Our team illustrated how the solution was ‘hidden in plain sight’: buried within the FAQs section of McDonalds.ca.  The truth just needed to be socialized and amplified to reach more people in a more compelling way.

The key is in understanding the digital behaviour of McDonald’s consumers and the simplicity of the idea.

We conceived a transparency platform that taps into consumer skepticism and responds to their questions directly, yet in a creative way (text, images and video) across various platforms (web, mobile, social networks and out-of-home).

One of the major challenges for any brand – especially B2C brands – is to control the message. In this case, McDonald’s isn’t controlling it so much as it is steering it towards a specific place on the web. What do you think other brands can learn from this strategy?

The days of controlling your brand message are over with. Consumers steer the dialogue; McDonald’s simply jumped in to become a part of the conversation and were rewarded by its transparent approach. So, just be human, be honest and reap the rewards.

To make this shift, it’s important that brands are prepared – by researching the conversation thoroughly, understanding the dynamic and developing strong insight into the dialogue before diving in.

A screenshot of a video response to the question, “why does your food look different in the advertising than what is in the store?”.

McDonald’s recognized that paramount to being authentic was in how it presented the food (and ultimately our brand) to consumers. It makes it a lot easier that the food looks pretty delicious in an unpolished photograph.

It’s impossible to control how content spreads online, so even though this initiative was designed for a Canadian audience, it has made a splash in the international media. How do you think global brands should deal with this new reality?

Global brands can address this reality by creating a framework for regions to participate in. We were sensitive of the possibility of spillover into the United States and created a geo-fenced platform that only enables direct engagement with Canadian consumers.

This measure didn’t stop the video responses from being shared around the world, so all content was labeled with “McDonald’s Canada” and was explicit in describing the content as being specific to McDonald’s Canada’s supply chain.

The campaign aims to stamp out rumours about the brand. Why be responsive instead of proactive? It seems counterintuitive.

By being responsive to consumers, by listening versus talking, brands gain a stronger perspective of how to communicate with all of [their] constituents. McDonald’s purposefully took a non-promotional approach and tone, simply inviting consumers to engage with the platform.

The company did employ paid advertising that featured consumers’ questions several months after the initial launch of the program. This tactic was used to stimulate even more questions and generated a robust conversation among millions of people.

Image by Emily van den Heever via thenounproject.com.

There’s a global secret society of agency executives. It’s an organization that flies under the radar of ad clubs, marketing associations and agency roundtables.

This association has been around since 1936. It’s the Skull and Bones of the advertising world. It’s called TAAN Worldwide and today it’s run by Peter Gerritsen (yes, THAT Gerritsen – from Allen & Gerritsen).

One of this year’s global events was held in a remote Austrian hamlet called Saalbach-Hinterglemm. (All good, cryptic fraternities meet in out-of-the-way European ski villages – haven’t you ever seen a Bond movie?)

Having run an agency for eleven years, I was never invited to join this secret society. But after writing a book read by one of the executive organizers, I was asked to attend and even present to this illustrious group.

At the event, I was introduced to Hinterglemmer Tea (tea, schnapps and rum), nighttime sledding and Bachforellenfillet (an Austrian brook trout). I was also introduced to the agency of the future.

The secret conference was held in the tiny Austrian hamlet, Saalbach-Hinterglemm. Image by Andrew Davis.

The agency of the future revealed

TAAN Worldwide members are required to reveal the secrets to their success (and the challenges they face) in the marketplace.

Every attendee signs a confidentiality agreement threatening legal action should they violate the terms of their membership and reveal another member’s secrets. This guarantees the kind of open, honest discussion that made it one of the most valuable events I’ve ever attended.

Early on the first day, one agency (we’ll call it FutureX) revealed an unbelievably powerful growth strategy that’s building its business. FutureX has started building the agency of the future.

While I’m unable to reveal the specifics of its new structure, I have been granted permission to reveal the three keys to its growth:

Own an audience

FutureX leverages the audiences (customers) of its collective client base to market the products and services of each individual client.

Essentially, FutureX offers each client the ability to use the Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Instagrammers and Youtubers of other brands in its portfolio to drive new business.

The content the agency promotes across brands must be relevant to the audience they’re serving, it must be valuable to the brand who owns the audience, and it must drive engagement for both partners.

FutureX has bypassed media buyers and traditional media to drive value, engagement and new business through its aggregate audience. (The agency is also seeing a tidy profit generated from selling access to its brandscaped audience.)

Agencies of the future will act more like media companies to create and own audiences. Image via Flickr.

Be a talent agent

Not only is FutureX leveraging the audiences of its existing clients, but it’s targeting and recruiting online content creators (talent) who authentically embrace multiple brands in its portfolio.

The team at FutureX understands that the future of branding is human and that leveraging content creators with an existing audience benefits the clients it serves.

Think like a media company

Instead of buying access to an audience through traditional media brands or purchasing inauthentic celebrity endorsements, FutureX is actually building its own media company, except it’s building it backwards.

It’s only a matter of time before FutureX (and the other agencies of the future) starts leveraging the talent it has assembled, the content that talent is creating, and the brands the agency represents to build self-sustaining media brands that attract an audience all its own.

The agency of the future will compete directly with the media brands it once worked closely with.

Without getting into specifics, I can tell you that FutureX is even publishing custom magazines (yes, print magazines) and delivering them to consumers in niche markets to drive deep brand engagement and increase consumer spending in specific categories.

International agencies and the leapfrog opportunity

I can tell you that agencies from Brazil, Romania, Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands and Singapore (just to name a few) contributed some of the most interesting ideas and insight to the event. FutureX is from one of those nations.

Here’s the thing: All of these agencies thought they were lagging behind North American agencies. They were wrong. While most of these agencies are currently executing strategies North Americans invested in five years ago, the strategies they’re building today are much more sophisticated than those in North America.

These agencies are leapfrogging all the problems American agencies wrestled with in the past and they’re building the agency of the future. Are you?

As Sparksheet’s editorial intern, you’ll work with our content and design teams to create and curate content across our award-winning platforms. You’ll also be involved in day-to-day editorial stuff like researching images, navigating our CMS, and coming up with story ideas.

Because we’re a small team, you’ll be encouraged to bring your own unique skills, talents and interests to the table. Journalism students, recent graduates, and anyone with relevant writing and editorial experience will be considered. Design skills and social media chops are always a plus.

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Check out the details and apply now (Deadline: April 15).

We are exponentially growing our computing power and we’re filling it up with our videos, texts and tweets. All of our digital lifestyles have a physical presence out there and that physical presence has to be powered by non-renewable energy resources.

The paradox is that the more efficient you make it to communicate with people and to send things, the more you’re going to do it. So instead of consuming less you actually consume more.

A key part of this is something called “the rebound effect,” whereby you have a lower carbon technology but you actually have a higher C02 output, simply because you’re using it more.

An email is 1/60th the carbon footprint of a letter, but when was the last time you sent a letter?

The prevailing wisdom is that because digital doesn’t kill trees and because content is stored in the intangible “cloud,” our environmental footprint is lighter than it was in the print age. Are you saying that because we’re actually producing and consuming more, it ultimately evens out?

I think the cloud actually is a more “environmentally friendly” way of communicating, we’re just doing it on a massive scale. One of the big questions is, after five, ten or 30 years, what do you do with all this data? Do you let it gracefully decompose over time? That’s why things like snapchat are pretty interesting.

Facebook has built five data centres in the last two and a half years and people are sharing 300 million photos a day on Facebook. A year ago, it was 200 million. This boggles the mind. And that’s just Facebook.

You’ve called data centres the “factories of the information age.” Can you describe them?

Think of a massive warehouse. That’s basically what they are. They’re just a giant room with columns and columns of servers. The other half of them are made up of cooling towers and cooling pipes in order to draw away all the heat from those servers.

They are basically the size of three Walmarts and they can have a draw power of anywhere upwards of 40 to 50 megawatts, which is basically the amount of power needed to run a small town.

Large data centres tend to be situated in rural areas where energy is cheaper. This Facebook data centre is located in Prineville, Oregon in the U.S.

They are sited at places where land is cheap and energy is cheap. They tend to be former industrial areas, or economically depressed areas, or farmland out in Western North Carolina, Oregon, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Dublin has become a giant European hub, and it’s because they have cheap energy – 84 percent of their electrical grid is from fossil fuels. Microsoft has got centres over there, HP, Dell, and a few other cloud servers are over there too. Amazon’s got a data centre in Dublin as well.

Globally, it’s been estimated that there are 500,000 data centres and obviously they’re not all these warehouse-sized ones. It’s mixed, Google has been estimated to have about 36.

Why the lack of information and transparency about how many data centres are out there?

The basic lack of transparency is from the competitive-edge standpoint.

If you were to divulge your amount of C02 and I know where you get your power from, then I know how much power you’re drawing in, and from that I can estimate how many servers you’re running, and how big your business is.

Some technology companies are making an effort to harness renewable energy sources like solar to power their data centres. Which companies are at the forefront of that?

Google is on the forefront as far as sourcing and renewable energy for data centres goes. They’ve been a huge investor in sustainable energy projects. They say they’ve invested over a billion dollars into it.

What they’ve done is purchased two 20-year power purchase agreements from two Iowa wind farms. It’s good for the wind farms because they’ve got that baseline purchase agreement for the next 20 years, which stabilizes the price.

Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, located in Oregon, is one of the largest in the world and was opened in September 2012. Google invested $100 million in the project. Image via wikipedia.org

There was a lot of backlash against Apple in mid-2012 from Greenpeace over a giant billion-dollar data centre in North Carolina. Since then, they’ve built two 20-megawatt solar panel farms, each the size of 76 football fields, or 100 acres.

HP is doing it as well. GreenQloud is in Iceland and Iceland’s electricity grid is powered 100 percent by green energy.

I think there’s a certain advantage in purchasing renewable energy as opposed to non-renewable energy. The amount of data out there is growing so fast that they have to build these huge facilities and green energy is a stable energy source.

With natural gas and coal you’re going to get more fluctuation in the price over time. You’re going to have a land grab, basically, for this power, so it’s more of a stable energy source for the very long term.

Do you think there’s just too much content, too much data, being generated? Is the problem one of production or consumption?

I think what’s really curious is that we used to express ourselves through consumption, in the clothes we wear and the things we buy.

Now I think we’re in an age where we self-actualize through the likes and through producing content. I put something out there and then in order for me to get affirmation from it, people also have to produce a like.

So basically that content now is literally the history of people’s communication. It’s the cataloguing of that. And it just grows and grows and grows.

Image via David Bellona.

We’re so used to hearing all this “engagement” and “interaction” by what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience” framed as a positive thing. But it’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

It’s a paradox on many levels. The Information Diet by Clay Johnson came out last year and he writes about how the information you get from sources like OK! Magazine or content farms is fast-food garbage, as opposed to carefully curated, edited content.

We’re becoming content fiends. But what point do you stop? You snack here, you snack there, and before you know it, an hour is left. What are you getting out of it?

You’ve created a site called Tweet Farts, which tracks the carbon footprint of hashtags, and you’ve also created the concept app, Canary, that lets people monitor and compare their digital carbon footprints. How can design help us move forward?

Canary is a conceptual app created by Bellona that lets users compare with their friends the amount of CO2 they are generating on social networks.

There a lot of behavioural concepts we use, and a lot of it has to do with psychology tricks, things like defaults. As a designer you can take some of these “tricks” and you can bake that into a design or a user experience to nudge a user in a certain direction.

With Canary, the idea is to raise awareness of the problem and then give people a tool that enables them to either increase or decrease their online interactions and set benchmarks.

So users can personally offset their carbon footprint by supporting renewable energy projects or limit their interactions with cloud-based services that are sourcing their energy from non-renewable resources.

In the physical world, whether we choose to recycle something or throw it away, we’re typically so far removed from the process that we don’t see the consequences of our actions.

There’s something very unique about being able to see the immediate consequence of a digital interaction, no matter how small.

Title image adapted from bigstockphoto.com

In his own words

David Bellona on the mysterious global fleet of data centers:

Don Draper relaxes next to a bottle of Canadian Club Whisky. Image by Erik Renko via Flickr.

Traditionally, the American television industry has two key time periods.

The first is in September, with the launch of the new fall seasons. The resolution of cliffhangers from returning series and the launch of new shows make this the most wonderful time of the year for TV fanatics.

The second comes in the spring with pilot season, and the networks’ upfront presentations announcing their new and returning series.

This is the time for advertisers to target viewers and for couch potatoes to mark their calendars and plot out their DVR schedules.

But while the network cycle of a television season stretching from September to May was a longstanding constant for advertisers and viewers, the tides have changed.

With the rise of cable networks, there are more opportunities than ever for brands to reach viewers throughout the year. The key is finding content that’s the right fit for the brand and, more importantly, its desired audience.

After The Sopranos

After premium cable network HBO won record ratings and began racking up the awards in the late 1990s and early 2000s with series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City, the basic cable networks took note and began producing their own original programming.

While HBO is subscription based, basic cable networks like TNT, TBS and FX are advertiser supported, so they were forced to look for alternative ways to generate revenue.

While HBO is a subscription based network, product placement does occur. Here a Maserati is prominently displayed, and discussed, in a scene from The Sopranos.

These networks followed the HBO model of having shorter seasons with fewer episodes than a standard network series, allowing writers to craft tighter storylines. And instead of launching them all in September, the shows would be staggered throughout the year.

Because basic cable networks have smaller expected audiences than the broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), they can greenlight series that aren’t as broad in concept or as wide-reaching in terms of audience demographics, allowing more creative flexibility.

That means series can be aimed at more sophisticated, affluent and influential viewers. The kind of audience that’s particularly attractive to advertisers.

The Mad Men effect

One of the most successful basic cable series, Mad Men, premiered in July, 2007. The unconventional timing allowed AMC to sync the show’s first season finale with the beginning of the traditional fall TV season, a move that got Mad Men attention just as the series was finding its voice.

Mad Men’s success in ratings, in critical acclaim, and in reaching a highly valued demographic led to several unique advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

For its second season, AMC signed BMW on as Mad Men’s exclusive premiere sponsor and series partner. AMC highlighted BMW through its multiplatform marketing initiatives, on air and online, and BMW received enhanced exposure throughout the first episode.

To create buzz for the following season, Vanity Fair published an editorial package featuring series stars Jon Hamm and January Jones, including a five-page pictorial featuring BMW cars.

A BMW ad in the style of Mad Men.

In season four, when the fictional Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency landed the Pond’s cold cream account, parent company Unilever signed on for a season-long sponsorship and we got to see Don Draper and crew crafting commercials for the iconic brand.

And with Mad Men’s sixth and penultimate season beginning next week, Banana Republic has launched its fifth Mad Men collection of 1960s-inspired clothing.

Unilever has partnered with Mad Men for a season-long sponsorship. The brand has created ads, including the Dove ad pictured above, that align with the Mad Men brand.

The never-ending ad season

The Walking Dead used the new season scheduling to beat out its competitors.

With basic cable reaching broadcast network numbers but breaking the traditional cycle, advertisers need to rethink their television buying strategies.

In 2010, just three years after the premiere of Mad Men, AMC launched The Walking Dead, a zombie drama series based on a series of graphic novels. Reaching 5.35 million viewers, it was the most-watched basic cable premiere of all time.

This year, the ratings for Dead’s third season have done the unthinkable by surpassing network powerhouses such as The Big Bang Theory, American Idol and The Voice among viewers 18 to 49.

Even more distressing for the broadcast networks is that a new episode of The Talking Dead, AMC’s spinoff chat show about The Walking Dead, drew 2.8 million viewers in February – beating NBC not just for that night, but for all of February.

With upfront season starting early and broadcast networks following cable’s lead and launching more new shows in winter and summer, life has gotten a lot more complicated for TV ad buyers. But viewers can rejoice that there will almost always be something new to watch on television.

Behind the scenes at a company meeting at Zappos’ headquarters. Image by Robert Scoble via Flickr.

It is no secret that marketing is out of step with today’s consumer.

The empowered status of the consumer, the migration away from interruptive messages, and the technologies and platforms that make listening more important than talking are disrupting traditional business models and making the jobs of CMOs tougher.

Traditional marketing used to be about controlled messaging, defined brand territory and the unilaterally and overwhelming representation of just one stakeholder in the conversation – The Brand.

But in a newly complicated world it is the consumer who is in control of the conversation.

For marketers, this means that transparency is crucial for engagement and brand love.

Patagonia’s interactive map pulls back the veil on its supply chain.

The age of transparency

Transparency is the essence of the new business model. A great example of this is Patagonia, the outdoor apparel brand. Instead of producing slick fashion ads to communicate with its customers, Patagonia has laid bare the environmental and social footprint of its product line and marketing supply chain.

Its website, The Footprint Chronicles, features an interactive world map that pinpoints every textile mill and factory in Patagonia’s supply chain.

The map includes detailed profiles of key suppliers, along with video and photo tours of how Patagonia’s different products are made.

There are many other examples of companies that have evolved their business model to reflect the emergence of the Age of Transparency.

Zappos, the online retailer, is a model for a new way to build and run a business based on exceptionally accommodating customer service.

This philosophy – “Delivering Happiness” – is wired into their hiring practices, their corporate values and their customer interactions in a totally transparent way.

They even live-stream all employee quarterly meetings, including presentations by the CEO and other executives and Q&As with associates.

Dismantling the silos

For brands that believe in transparency, the business model itself is becoming the cornerstone of brand communication and the most critical step toward customer engagement.

We are entering a communications era in which consumers are developing a vested interest in what a brand stands for and demanding greater access to brand information than ever before.

It will be up to the CMOs to decide which firewalls to lift and which new ones to erect. In a connected world, it’s no longer possible to leave a gap between what a brand says and what the brand does.

Everything, from the distribution, to the call centre, to R&D, and to communications, will become more transparent.

That means that the CMO, the pre-eminent voice of the marketplace within the corporation, will have to become the catalyst for internal change: dismantling silos and evangelizing a consumer-centric, transparent business model to all in the organization, even those who don’t deal directly with consumers.

CEOs need to give marketers permission to change not only the brand but the organization, and with it, the business model itself.

You’ve called Coca-Cola Journey the biggest rethink of the company’s online presence since you launched your website in 1995. Your last major redesign was in 2005. How has Coca-Cola’s approach to content evolved over the years?

Prior to Journey, we viewed our corporate website as a static information point. It was designed to connect people to corporate information as quickly as possible, and we never deviated from that.

Today, with Journey, our focus is on storytelling. You can still find investors information or job postings easily, but we’re putting the core of Coca-Cola – our brands and their connection to our consumers – front and centre.

The New York Times referred to Coca-Cola Journey as an example of corporate storytelling, as opposed to brand storytelling, with its emphasis on the company’s history. Do you see a difference?

I think they are the same. The Coca-Cola Company is inextricably linked to our brands, and our brands – like the company – have rich histories.

And while we are absolutely committed to telling our brand stories, we’re telling some terrific company stories too.

The Coca-Cola Journey home page is image heavy, with links to stories about the company’s corporate culture in addition to its various brands.

How does Coca-Cola’s online voice differ from the one we’ve been hearing for decades on TV and billboards? One of the buzzwords folks throw around when talking about digital communications is “humanization.”Is that a big part of it?

Every day, Journey is written, laid out, and produced by some pretty terrific humans. I hope our voice and passion is coming through.

Journey seeks to reach a digitally-savvy, globally-aware, and socially-connected reader, and we hope we’re communicating in a way that smart, fun, and even a bit fearless. We haven’t figured everything out yet, but we’re getting closer and better at it every day.

The revamped website includes posts that don’t reference Coca-Cola’s brands.

You’ve said you want Journey to be a “credible source” of information and most of the content on the site refers directly to Coca-Cola brands or partnerships, though you occasionally run general interest pieces. How do you strike a balance between promoting your products and simply providing customers with relevant content?  

We are finding the right balance between covering Coca-Cola, which is our job, with providing shared value to our readers, which is also our job.  I’m not sure we’ve found the sweet spot yet, but we’re working on it.

We definitely intend to produce more pieces like “Hire Power,” and our goal is to always provide something valuable back to the readers who elect to spend some time with us.

You told the Times that your digital communications and social media team has been re-formed in the last year to look more like an editorial team at a long-lead magazine.” How so?

Coca-Cola Journey aggregates posts from multiple networks into a tumble-style blog for each brand.

We are 100% focused on creating great stories (editorial, art, etc.) and syndicating those stories to the widest possible audience.

We believe that great social media work has great content at its core, and someone has to create that content. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “there has to be a there there.”

When Coca-Cola Journey was launched, you wrote on the site that “more than 1.8 billion times a day, every day, people express their love for our brands by purchasing one of our products.” Do you really believe that buying one of your products and expressing love for your brands are the same thing?

Yes, because I don’t believe that many folks buy products from brands they don’t like. Every touch point with the consumer is an opportunity for engagement.

There will always be critics who contend that at the end of the day, Coca-Cola is selling different versions of what Steve Jobs famously called “sugar water” (referring to Pepsi), and that any sort of content marketing is an attempt to, well, sugarcoat the public health implications of that. How would you respond?

They should get in touch with us. If a critic wants to author an opinion piece for us, and be open to a counterpoint from Coca-Cola, we will publish it.

Coca-Cola’s Ashley Callahan will be speaking at the sixth annual Custom Content Conference, which takes place April 9-11 in Chicago. The focus this year will be on results, ROIs and upcoming trends. Sparksheet is an official media partner.

Starbucks Coffee. Image via bigstockphoto.com.

At first I used to enjoy giving myself fanciful names, because there’s nothing quite like listening to someone yell, “flat white for Nebuchadnezzar,” in a crowded Starbucks.

But the fun fell out of it when the staff began to recognize me, so they’d just ask, “and who are you today?”

This was last April, when Starbucks decided to encourage their staff to request the names of customers when taking orders and then announce them when the drinks were ready.

It was an attempt to manufacture authenticity – to artificially create the social bond that might naturally grow between a vendor and customer in a bygone era when local customers patronized local shops staffed by local employees and everybody was on a first-name basis.

Bringing back the “good old days”

This familiarity and sense of community is a powerful force. It’s one of the nostalgic aspects of the past that causes some people to believe that the “good old days” were a better time to be alive, having conveniently forgotten that the same past was also generally more racist, sexist and homophobic.

But as a person who viewed Starbucks’ move with cynicism, you can imagine my surprise when I came to the realization that it had worked.

A few weeks after the new policy was in place, I had forgotten how clunky and forced it had felt initially. My local branch was suddenly staffed by people whose names I knew and who (to varying degrees) knew mine as well.

Written versions of my name on the cup varied wildly from Ken to Trent, Kenneth and Clint, but there was definitely a connection there.

As time progressed, our connection grew and I realized that we now had a relationship that felt authentic. I cared about them and they cared about me, at least more than we had before the name game started; Starbucks had successfully manufactured authenticity.

Service vs. quality

Starbucks launched its naming policy in the U.K. in April 2012. Image by Kayes via Flickr.

Unfortunately for Starbucks’ shareholders, a superior – and genuinely local – coffee shop opened up just down the road a little while later.

These new kids on the block didn’t give two hoots about my name. In fact, they were almost indifferent to my patronage, but damn, could they make a good coffee.

There was no sense of community, but the warm fuzzy feeling of an excellent flat white trumped the warm fuzzy feeling of a mediocre flat white made by someone who thinks my name is Trent. So I defected to the new shop where I’ve gone ever since.

Then, in the aftermath of the December break, I returned to work and was shocked to find my new coffee dealer was still closed for the holidays. I sheepishly returned to Starbucks, expecting to be welcomed back to the store by teary staff, overjoyed at my return.

But not only did no one recognize me at the big green mermaid, no one’s name was being requested or announced.

The staff were the same, some of them even sporting the old name badges, but gone was the familiarity, the camaraderie and the community.

I haven’t been back since and this was only one store, so I wouldn’t consider this a rigorous, scientific appraisal of Starbucks’ customer service policy. But it did teach me a couple of things:

• You can manufacture authenticity, but it takes effort, focus and consistency;

and

• Even if you create a better experience, you’ll occasionally lose out to a superior product.

My regular coffee shop is back open now and they seem to have come back from the holidays even more caustic and unwelcoming than they were when they left.

They could certainly teach Starbucks about how to make an absolutely banging flat white, but they can learn a thing or two from Starbucks as well, namely:

• Focusing on your customers is never a waste of time, but you have to keep at it;

and

• Anyone who calls himself Nebuchadnezzar is nothing but trouble.

Nobel Laureate, Dr. John Mather and Northrop Grumman engineer Scott Willoughby speak to a crowd, backed by a model of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Image by NASA Webb Telescope via Flickr.

Any comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive ought to begin with the caveat that it is impossible to deliver a comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive.

With hundreds of sessions, exhibits and networking events (read: parties) happening simultaneously throughout Austin over five days, SXSW Interactive is an entirely unique experience for every one of its 25,000-plus participants.

That said, every year a handful of themes and memes manage to rise above the noise – at least for me. Here are my five key takeaways from this year’s event:

It’s not the platform, but how you use it

In last year’s SXSW roundup I noted how there didn’t seem to be any buzzworthy new app or social media platform to break out at the event the way Twitter famously did in 2007.

This year I hardly even heard anybody talk about Twitter – or Facebook or Instagram for that matter. SXSW 2013 may have been the first SXSW to coincide with a papal conclave, but it seems like the interactive industry has officially become platform agnostic.

Or, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti put it in his keynote, “The railroad tracks have been built – now the question is, “What’s worth sharing on them?”

One of the most telling moments occurred after Google senior developer Timothy Jordan demoed the much-hyped Google Glass prototype, revealing how partner brands like Evernote, Path and the New York Times are already designing apps tailored to the wearable, headmounted device.

Jordan passionately argued that “by bringing technology closer, we could get it further away.” The device seemed to work flawlessly and the use cases Jordan presented were compelling, but the SXSW crowd was mostly unimpressed.

During the Q&A, someone brusquely announced that although the device’s hardware is impressive, there doesn’t seem to be a single thing he could do with the device that he can’t already do on his iPhone. The crowd burst into applause.

On one hand, the crowd’s cynicism made me think of comedian Louis C.K.’s famous rant that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” On the other, I was heartened to see that people no longer seem to be blinded by the “bright shiny object” syndrome.

The lesson for me is that it’s not about the platform anymore; it’s about what you can do with it. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the platforms people did talk up this year are utilitarian – workflow apps like Evernote and TeuxDeux (designed by keynoter Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA Swiss Miss) and Nextdoor, a platform for community organizing.

Digital is physical

I’ve written before about the “click to brick” phenomenon: Location-sharing app Foursquare driving retail purchases, online eyewear purveyor Warby Parker opening real-world “showrooms.”

Well, the line between physical and digital is even blurrier now with the rise of 3D printing, which was the subject of at least 10 SXSW sessions and the focal point of a sub-event called SXSW Create.

A 3D printing exhibit at SXSW sub-event Create. Image by John Biehler via Flickr.

There’s also a growing awareness that our ever-increasing production and consumption of digital content has (geo)physical implications. At least that’s the message David Bellona, a designer at Twitter, is hoping to get across.

Bellona gave a talk on “The Paradox of the Cloud,” noting that our ever-increasing online activity is powered by gigantic data centers, which he calls the “factories of the Information Age.” There’s estimated to be as many as 500,000 of them around the world.

Some tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Google, are making efforts to source renewable energy to power their operations, but most data centers are run on fossil fuels.

Chalk it up as yet another reason why, when it comes to content, we should be aiming for quality instead of quantity.

The next generation of media brands has taken over

For the first time in three years at SXSW I didn’t come across any panels about paywalls, newspapers or “how to save journalism.” In fact, many of the usual new media pundits and legacy media apologists were conspicuously absent. No one talked about print being dead or alive.

Instead, two of the major keynotes were delivered by web-native content publishers who have figured out how to create massively popular – not to mention free – content and get paid for it: Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman.

A slide from Matthew Inman’s presentation.

Peretti revealed Buzzfeed’s secret sauce for creating shamelessly sticky and shareable content. Ingredients may include: cute animals, nostalgia, timeliness and humour, churned by an algorithm that relentlessly promotes content that resonates quickly, and ruthlessly “starves” content that doesn’t.

Buzzfeed makes money by lending that recipe to brands in the form of so-called native advertising, or as Peretti called it, “social content marketing,” which he said accounts for 100 percent of Buzzfeed’s revenue.

For example, check out the “The 20 Coolest Hybrid Animals,” a sponsored post that was completely on-brand for both Buzzfeed and Toyota Prius, the hybrid car it was promoting. Silly as it is, this may just be the future of content marketing.

For The Oatmeal cartoonist Inman, the key to success is authenticity (he only publishes when he is inspired to – again, quality over quantity), crowdfunding and profitable brand extensions like books, t-shirts and other swag that allow him to keep his core content free.

Looking outward, ahead and beyond

There was lots of talk about the future at this year’s SXSW. And not in the ubiquitous “Future of X” kind of way. The actual future when none of us will be around, never mind the startup du jour. (Al Gore even wrote a book called “The Future,” which he was interviewed about on stage).

This may go down as the year SXSW Interactive attendees quit naval-gazing – stopped looking at themselves as the be-all and end-all and started looking outward. Sometimes way out.

One of my favourite sessions featured astronaut Mae Jemison, astronomer Jill Tarter (who Jodie Foster’s character in Contact was based on), and Star Trek actor LeVar Burton discussing the 100 Year Starship project, which boldly seeks to enable interstellar space travel within the next century.

NASA was also in Austin to showcase its next-generation telescope, while SpaceX (and Tesla) CEO Elon Musk discussed private space exploration in a Q&A with former Wired editor Chris Anderson.

Elon Musk delivering his keynote address at SXSW 2013. Image by Digitas Photos via Flickr.

The Space contingent represented a profoundly optimistic view of The Future at SXSW, while sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling brought us back down to earth with his apocalyptic closing remarks, reminding us that “these are not boom times” and “just because technology advances doesn’t mean things are getting better.”

I didn’t make it to any of the sessions but the healthcare stream was beefed up considerably this year, indicating that if we’re going to make it to Al Gore’s future, we better start taking care of ourselves – and each other.

Seeing sessions about autism, Alzheimer’s and accessibility on the schedule was a sobering reminder that despite what the dot-com millionaires turned self-help gurus lead us to believe, the sky isn’t the limit for everyone.

Maybe that’s what happens when you bundle an interactive conference with a music festival. Everyone starts to believe they’re Bono saving the world with a mobile app (my colleague calls this delusion “the elevation of purpose”).

So here’s the question: How do we remain optimistic and idealistic and moral (to borrow a term from RJ Owen, who led a great session on “moral design”) without becoming trite and sanctimonious?  How do we prevent healthy skepticism from sliding into cynicism?

Perhaps we need the Jill Tarters fearlessly leading us toward a Gene Roddenberry future alongside the Bruce Sterlings crankily calling BS. The fact that both were given a platform in Austin is a sign that as big and noisy as SXSW has become, it still gets it, and is therefore still worth going to.

But those expecting to see Twitter used to its full interactive potential came away disappointed. The “global” conference amounted to 20 tweets and received scant coverage in India’s news.

For journalists at The Hindu, the Chennai-based English-language daily with the third-largest circulation in India, this came as no surprise.

In the West, social media has arrived at a time of crisis for traditional newspapers. In India, newspaper circulation and advertising revenue are growing.

Lacking a sense of urgency and saddled with a variety of cultural, political and organizational challenges, Indian journalists are still searching for a meaningful role for social media.

Social media is “soft”

Reading the morning newspaper is still a common ritual in much of India. Image by Rajesh_India via Flickr.

We spent time recently talking to journalists at The Hindu about their attitudes toward social media.

One of the few people willing to go on the record was assistant editor Karthik Subramanian, who suggested that Indian journalists view social networks like Facebook and Twitter as serious tools for reporting.

Subramanian said that reporters at The Hindu use social media to find stories and identify sources, but only for “soft features” as opposed to “hard news.”

“When it comes to hard news, I don’t think journalists take social media too seriously,” Subramanian said. “We have not yet reached a stage where we get some specific breaking news information – for hard news – that we verify and follow up.”

But Sam Pitroda’s press conference was hard news. So why did The Hindu and other news organizations give it only minor coverage?

Subramanian explained that “in the traditional news houses in India, Twitter is considered as a tool for self-promotion. It is yet to become an important tool for hard news verification and dialogue.”

Part of the reluctance to employ social media tools for “serious” news stories stems from a lack of trust. The internet is a fount of information, but it’s also filled with misinformation.

Subramanian pointed to the example of Vilasrao Deshmukh, a senior government minister who had recently been hospitalized in Chennai, and was mistakenly pronounced dead by one online publication.

“The story started trending in no time,” said Subramanian. “Hard news verification that is done by journalists, who cannot afford to get it wrong, cannot be done by social media at this moment, at least in India.”

When print is thriving, why go digital?

Indian newspapers have a “problem” many media outlets would love to have: In India, the success of print removes much of the incentive for papers to prioritize their digital presence.

It is a curious feature of India that at the same time as its consumers seek the latest mobile phones, they are also opting for the “old” technology of printed newspapers.

While Western newspapers struggle with declining revenues and high fixed costs, these are heady times for India’s press barons. India sells more newspapers than any other country in the world, and print circulation rises each year.

Economics tells part of the story. Indian newspapers are very cheap. The average per-issue cost of a major daily newspaper is less than 10 U.S. cents, only slightly more than the price 15 years ago.

By keeping prices so low, India’s major dailies have created large audiences for print advertising. And unlike in much of the West, where searchable websites have replaced the classified ads newspapers once printed, in India newspaper ads remain popular among advertisers and profitable for papers.

Audience size also affects how much time journalists give to social media. Today, with 1.2 billion people, India has fewer than 15 million Twitter accounts, many of which sit inactive.

This means that even on a good day, India’s Twitter population is less than that of Chennai, the southern city where The Hindu is based.

For these reasons, India’s major news organizations are content to wait before making significant investments in social media, according to Lata Ganapathy, The Hindu’s assistant editor on the internet desk.

“For a newspaper that does so well offline, recognition of social media as a ‘thing of the future’ can be delayed, resulting in playing catch-up later on when it could be too late,” Ganapathy, told us. “This curbs our online potential.”

“India’s major news organizations are content to wait before making significant investments in social media.” Image by Carol Mitchell, via Flickr.

Digital immigrants

A number of cultural and structural challenges also play a role in the reluctance of Indian newspapers to embrace social media, says Karthik Subramanian, The Hindu’s assistant editor.

As with most other newspapers in India, The Hindu’s digital operation remains physically separate from the traditional newsroom, meaning that the paper’s veteran print journalists have little interaction – and little regard for – the digital side of things.

“Siddharth Varadarajan, who took over as editor less than a year back, has been asking all young journalists to actively take to Twitter,” Subramanian said.

“But it is a mindset change, to ask digital immigrants – traditional journalists who are just taking to Twitter – to be very open about the information they possess. It is a professional reflex to be a bit closed.”

From political dissent to dialogue

The journalists we spoke with at The Hindu emphasized their desire to forge a stronger dialogue with readers, but several challenges stand in the way.

Old battles have found a new stage on Twitter. For instance, opponents of the paper’s editorial position on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue have criticized articles, columnists and editors.

One reporter told us that The Hindu is genuine in its desire to discuss the Tamil issue and other controversial editorial positions, but that the paper’s critics see social media as a way to distract and discredit the paper’s editors.

“Since dissent is the biggest motivator on social media,” the reporter told us, “it has been difficult for us to engage in a dialogue online.”

This is not the only politically related deterrent to social media use by journalists.

In recent years, the Indian government has limited social media use in troubled regions, as it did during last summer’s riots in the northeastern state of Assam. It has also blocked individual Twitter accounts.

Going local

“Even on a good day, India’s Twitter population is less than that of Chennai, the southern city where The Hindu is based.”

Ganapathy, for her part, says she hopes to make The Hindu a pioneer in online Indian journalism by “bypassing the ‘catch-up’ phase and moving directly into the next version of the web.”

This means “more planned interaction, richer multimedia content and greater coordination between the print and online editions.”

She also said The Hindu, which considers itself a national paper, plans to focus its social media efforts on local coverage; the paper maintains Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts called “Chennai Central” devoted to “soft news” in the city where the paper is based.

“Any new experiments with social media are being conducted at and through Chennai Central,” she said.

These experiments already include a monthly photography contest, a monthly architectural tour of the city, a daily podcast and a monthly e-newsletter.

The conversation awaits

In recent years, century-old Western papers have faced questions of how to embrace new, more interactive technologies and retain their identities. That conversation still awaits the 130-year old Hindu and many other Indian dailies.

For now, if you want to read about the latest pronouncements from the prime minister’s technology adviser, you’ll need to pick up a newspaper.

A version of this story was first published by Neiman Journalism Lab. 

We started in 1994 and as context, music started in 1987. In 1994, the title of the event was Multimedia and it was actually part of the film festival.

Then in year two, 1995, we split that off into two events, SXSW film and SXSW multimedia. And then eventually the name transformed from multimedia to interactive in the late 90s.

Interactive was traditionally the smallest portion of the event and would not have survived some very lean years if not for music supporting us and paying the bills.

We started to notice some strong growth in 2003 and 2004. If you’re looking for a tipping point, it was probably 2007, which was when Twitter essentially launched here. That was a big milestone in terms of our overall growth.

Do you see that success story as the reason why startups keep coming back? As in, it gives them the hope that they may be the next Twitter?

That’s a tough question. We’re all looking for easy, understandable marketing bites and hooks, and that’s a pretty nice hook to rely on. The event was fortunate enough to be growing even without the Twitter launch. The growth probably wouldn’t have been as sharp as it has been in recent years, though.

One of the things that Twitter really helped us with is that it caused a lot more startups and entrepreneurs to be here, and because of that, it got a lot more VCs to come.

That startup stuff is so sexy at this point that it gets a lot of attention.

So how do you account for SXSW’s growth? There are a lot of tech conferences out there that are trying to be what you guys are.

I would love to say the reason why we grew is because we have superior management that knows exactly what we’re doing, period, exclamation point! But that is probably not true. We have made every mistake at least five or 10 or 15 times.

Ultimately, the secret – if there is a secret to our growth – is that we have this very strong, very passionate, very creative community that comes to the event, and as much as we do all kinds of brochures or websites or emails, they’re the ones whose word of mouth publicity has created so much interest in this event and they’re the reasons why more people want to come.

Do you ever worry that SXSW Interactive is becoming too big or too noisy and about so many different things that the value is going to be drowned out?

Sure, that’s always a concern. But as much as it’s grown, I think we’re still very dedicated to these ideals of creativity and innovation and inspiration, which we were dedicated to 15 years ago.

It may be a little bit harder to find the kind of people you want to meet at the event as it’s grown, but that said, there’s a lot more of those kinds of people.

Beyond that, I think SXSW is in many ways very much a reflection of Austin. Austin grows a whole lot and one of the things you always see is that people who moved here 10 years ago say, “Yeah, that’s great, but you should have been here ten years ago, it was even better then!”

So there’s that kind of mythology about SXSW, that thing of, “Yeah, it’s fun but it was even better five years ago when you didn’t know about it but I did!”

SXSW generates a huge amount of content over the  days of the festival, but its online presence the rest of the year is pretty scant by comparison. Beyond your quarterly print magazine, have you thought of creating a platform for people to engage with the brand throughout the year?

I think that’s one of the areas where we have tremendous room for growth in. We haven’t even scratched our potential.

Certainly the gold standard for the high tech industry is what TED has done with their online content and how much that has expanded their brand. It’s absolutely amazing.

I would love to be able to get our content out in the same kind of way.

We do a lot of audio recording of SXSW sessions and release those as podcasts but, as much as some of us love audio, I just don’t think it has quite the same power as a video. So I think we have lots and lots of room to grow there.

So you see SXSW Interactive becoming not just an event brand, but a year- round media brand?

Yes, I think that’s an ongoing goal, and part of that refers back to the question you asked about the event: Is it getting too big?

As the physical space in Austin becomes more and more limited, if we’re able to showcase more of the content online, either during the event or year-round, then that allows us to get the content from SXSW to more people without them having to physically be here.

The trade show floor at SXSW Interactive 2012. Photo by nickmickolas via Flickr.

Is the new SXSW event taking place this summer in Las Vegas, V2V, a step toward branching outside of Austin?

A little bit. V2V will be a much smaller event to begin with. It has a lot of room to grow. Las Vegas has a lot of room to grow. We picture this as a very small event in year one and hopefully it can grow organically into the much larger event that SXSW has become.

But again, it took us 10 or 15 years to really understand what we were doing on the Interactive side.

I hope it doesn’t take us quite that long with V2V, but I imagine that in a couple years we’ll probably understand we were on the completely wrong model and will be doing something different, as these things pivot.

It always seems like there’s a few big ideas that permeate the event each year. Any expectations for 2013?

One of the strange, interesting memes that has emerged this year in terms of our programming is space. We’ve got 10 or 15 panels on either NASA’s continuing efforts in space or private exploration. Who would have thought that in 2013 space would be hot again?

Another big trend for this year’s event is 3D printing, on its own and as an extension of the ongoing DIY / Craft movement. The 3D printing trend is reflected in the fact that Bre Pettis is doing the opening remarks. And the DIY / Craft movement stuff is reflected in SXSW Create

Predicting what the big trends will be outside of SXSW is always a difficult game. If you think of Twitter, it was a cool thing at the event but I don’t think anyone would have thought that it would change the world. It takes two or three years for anything to make that kind of an impact.

There will be lots of things breaking out that will get buzz, some of which will never get buzz beyond March 15th, others of which won’t get a whole lot of buzz but may end up having a whole lot of long-term impact.

Note: We’ll be tweeting live from SXSW from March 8 to March 12. You can follow us here. 

• I will be speaking along with Sparksheet’s Design Director, Charles Lim, about the “55 Things You Have to Know About Content Marketing.” Actually, we were asked to talk about five things, but we thought 55 would be a lot more fun!
• Sparksheet has a booth on the trade show floor (#201) where we’ll be showing off our content creation chops through live visual storytelling. Let us turn you into content!
• Over the past few months we’ve published a series of exclusive Q&As with digital thought leaders (Canadian and otherwise) on the Dx3 Digest. Stay tuned for our very candid interview with Kim Kelleher, former worldwide publisher at Time magazine and current President of Say Media (Dx3′s gold sponsor).

If you’re in the neighbourhood, come say hello. We’d love to meet you. If not, we’ll be doing lots of live-tweeting over the next two days, so stay tuned!

There is a growing sense that Content Marketing is getting to be “too much.” That is, there’s too much “content” and too much “marketing” in the world. There’s even talk of a backlash.

Much of this feeling is really a young(ish) industry growing from childhood to adolescence. As the father of a 13-year old, I hear a lot of complaining.

But let’s admit something: the content industry has created a lot of content about itself. A lot of the content being generated is self-referential, about how the industry can get bigger, how content is “everything,” how to create content and what not to do. (I will acknowledge here that this is exactly what I’m doing but there’s no way around it).

The elevation of purpose

Image by Silas Reeves via thenounproject.com.

For years I’ve been speaking about the content marketing echo chamber. It’s a serious problem. The industry has its stars (as all industries do) and they go around and preach to the converted and then some of the converted start preaching as well.

It’s a circle. The last few conferences I’ve attended have felt very very meta. I’m talking about you and you’re talking about me and around and around we go.

There is another thing happening here as well. It’s what a colleague calls the “perils of brand journalism” and I call “the elevation of purpose.” What is the elevation of purpose? It’s that feeling that the more entrenched you get in your field, the more self-important you become.

And self-importance is something every content marketer needs to fear. When the content is not about the end user, or even the client, but about what you, the marketer, can do, we have a big problem.

As the content industry grows larger and larger, we see more and more content for content’s sake. As marketers, we start to take ourselves too seriously and stop thinking about, well, the world.

We stop thinking about how practical our work needs to be, that content is a service and nothing more. Last fall in London at the International Content Summit, I talked about the world having too much stuff. The great Dave Trott spoke about how the vast majority of messaging was useless, and worse, ignored.

The biggest mistake I see from content people is to start making their content about themselves. It’s not. All content needs to serve an objective. A business objective. But more than that, it needs to serve a purpose. Because there is such a thing as too much content.

Content fatigue

Real people are suffering from content fatigue. It’s why we’re hearing more and more about “context.” Suddenly Content Marketing has become Context Marketing.
Meaning all content is a function of the context in which it is consumed.

Imagine that! This is just creating new words and phrases for things that already exist (a practice the content industry has been spectacularly good at), for articulating long held truths in new and fresh and shiny and “100% improved” ways. Kind of like the idea of Columbus “discovering” America.

But words don’t solve problems. Or penetrate bubbles.

Quick: what is the ultimate definition of luxury? For many, it is freedom. Freedom from you and me and the world itself. Not just unplugging oneself but getting away from the noise of the world. All of it. From “everything.”

Now, who keeps saying that “everything is content”? Content marketers. If these same marketers don’t step out of their bubbles once in a while, they might never notice the fatigue, and their elevation of purpose will continue to drift higher and higher, until they have lost sight of the earth and reality.

Or, at the very least, of why they got into the content game in the first place.

Author, marketer and entrepreneur, Seth Godin.

The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.

In the industrial economy, the stuff we made (literally stuff — widgets, devices, and O-rings) comprised the best assets we could build. Fortunes belonged to men who built railroads, lightbulbs, and buildings. Today we’re seeking something a revolution apart from that sort of productivity.

The connection economy rewards the leader, the initiator, and the rebel. The internet wasn’t built to make it easy for you to watch Lady Gaga videos. The internet is a connection machine, and anyone with a laptop or a smartphone is now connected to just about everyone else.

And it turns out that those connections are changing the world. If your factory burns down but you have loyal customers, you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if you lose your customers, even your factory isn’t going to help you – Detroit is filled with empty factories.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you’ll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

If you use your money to buy advertising to promote the average products you produce for average people, soon you’ll run out of money. But if you use your money to make exceptional products and services, you won’t need to spend it on advertising, because your customers will connect to one another and bring you more.

The connection economy has changed how you get a job and what you do when you get to that job. It has changed how we make and listen to music, write and read books, and discover where to eat, what to eat, and whom to eat with.

It has destroyed the mediocre middle of average products for average people who have few choices, and it has enabled the weird edges, where people who care find others who care and they all end up caring about something even more than they did before they met.

The connection economy enables endless choice and endless shelf space and puts a premium on attention and on trust, neither of which is endless.

Most of all, the connection economy has made competence not particularly valuable and has replaced it with an insatiable desire for things that are new, real, and important.

The achieving society

In 1959, psychologist and sociologist David McClelland published a breakthrough treatise on why some moments in history are filled with rapid growth while others are not. He studied why some cultures miss out on advancement while others succeed.

It turns out that it’s not race or climate or even the power of charismatic leadership that leads to boom times. The Renaissance, Silicon Valley, or the explosion of culture in France in the late 1800s are all cultural and technical breakthroughs that we’d like to repeat.

While technology might be a contributing factor, more than anything else, achievement comes from a culture that celebrates the achievement motive.

In countries and regions and moments of time when there is a cultural imperative to make art and to move forward, things change for the better. It seems obvious as I write this, but the correlated element of success always seems to be that there are many individuals who care enough to want to succeed.

Using a series of clever tests, McClelland and his colleagues tested thousands of subjects, asking them to describe their daydreams and to tell stories about what they hoped to do in the future.

What they found was that the n achievement score (a simple count of how often these stories indicated a need for achievement) gave extraordinary insight into a host of decisions that people made in their work lives.

A high n Achievement score, for example, meant that you were far more likely to have “better memory,” be “more apt to volunteer as subjects for psychological experiments,” and even be “more resistant to social pressure.” It also meant that you’d do better at scrambled word puzzles.

The question, as we move from an industrial economy that cherishes compliance to a connected economy that prizes achievement, is this: Are we supporting this shift with a culture that encourages us to dream important dreams?

What do we challenge our achievers to do? When do we encourage or demand that they move from standardized tests and Dummies guides to work that actually matters?

This excerpt, adapted for Sparksheet, is from THE ICARUS DECEPTION: HOW HIGH WILL YOU FLY?. Published by Portfolio/Penguin. Copyright (c) Do You Zoom, Inc., 2012. Used by permission.

Image via maximumfun.org.

You currently host three podcasts and produce several others through your Maximum Fun network. It seemed as though podcasts were a big deal in 2004, then people stopped talking about them, and now they’re hot again. How would you characterize the state of podcasts as a medium?

In 2004/2005 when podcasting was new, people were hoping for a hockey stick growth curve and obviously that didn’t take place. The technology wasn’t there to support it in terms of making it very easy and superfunctional for users.

To some extent the technology has gotten easier, to some extent there was an accrual of people who are comfortable with it and to some extent, around 2010 you had more big-name stars entering the field and dragging their fans with them.

Also, a lot more devices are internet-enabled and I think that helps, too.

Do you think brands and marketers should be paying more attention to podcasts?

My experience is that brand-driven podcasts suck and if you’re going to launch a podcast that sucks, it’s not worth doing. The truth is that the skills involved in podcasting are skills that you don’t learn when you’re getting a marketing degree.

Jesse Thorn is the host and creator of the NPR radio show and podcast Bullseye.

The opportunity that I see, frankly, is paid sponsorship of podcasts. I am shocked that I still interact with media buyers who don’t know what a podcast is. I was talking to my friend Jeff Ulrich, who runs the Earwolf network, and he said he’s given up on convincing media buyers to buy podcasts.

The truth is that podcasts, more than any other platform, are intimate and trusted, which makes them a really valuable venue for advertising. I think a lot of people are leaving fruit on the tree in terms of building partnerships with podcasts, more than just radio-style spots. It’s a great opportunity that’s being missed.

A buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days is “brand humanization” and podcasts are one of the most human platforms out there. Maybe they’re too human for most brands?

I have heard from people who say that buyers are partly nervous – especially with comedy – that something is going to happen that is “off brand” over the course of a show.

I think that’s more a CYA situation with the fact that there’s separation between the brand and the buy. But it’s like that with social media, too.

I mean, it’s 2013. It’s not like there’s only 12 hours of television programming that you can advertise on and that’s been made for every person in America.

Can you tell us about Maximum Fun’s business model?

The whole operation is donor-supported, though we have other streams of revenue as well. There are a couple reasons that we did that.

The first is that the advertising market for podcasts still isn’t mature. The second is that I generally prefer non-commercial media to commercial media, and while I’m running a for-profit business, I want to reflect those values.

Ultimately I like having the ability to only use advertisers that I’m very comfortable with.

I like the idea of being in a business where my primary goal is to make something the audience loves rather than simply making something that gathers the most audience. I don’t want any part of making Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Maximum Fun is Jesse Thorn’s podcast production company. The podcasts are funded almost exclusively by listener donations.

It’s funny, people like to talk about metrics and data, but perhaps the best metric for content is whether people will voluntarily pay for it.

Exactly. My father has worked in non-profits his entire life and he’s still amazed that people will donate to a for-profit operation.

The internet has helped people realize that they can support things they like and that will allow those things to continue. Eighty or ninety percent of our audience don’t donate, but the ones that do give us a really solid revenue base. They are the ones who are most engaged in what we’re doing.

Another buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in social media circles is “community,” but public radio has been powered by communities for decades in the States. Does this make people like you particularly well equipped for the current media landscape?

I think so. I’ve always thought about what I do in terms of community and in terms of building an audience of people who actually care, and less about building the largest audience.

That’s not just public media values, it’s also non-profit values. With anything donor-supported, your goal is to engage your audience in that conversation, because otherwise they won’t give.

You’ve been a big proponent of the so-called New Sincerity movement. I’m wondering what the implications of that are from a commercial perspective, since your show relies on underwriting and sponsorships. At the risk of sounding cynical, what sort of brand is attracted to this particular tribe – and vice versa?

Tonx coffee subscription service is one of Thorn’s few brand sponsors.

I think the brands that are most attracted to what we do are people who make something really cool. There’s this company that’s been a sponsor of ours called Tonx. And they essentially operate a coffee subscription service.

You tell them how much coffee you drink and they send you the world’s best coffee that they pick themselves. This is a four- or five-person company. They roast it themselves, they pack it up and send it out once a week, twice a month.

And for people who care about coffee it’s something that’s really amazing and life-changing because no matter where you live you can get the absolute best coffee and you get to hear the story of it and the whole nine yards.

Another sponsor of ours right now is MailChimp. And the thing about MailChimp is they looked at this world of email lists and said, “God, all of these things suck, what if we did just a really good job of this?”

They’re about making something really wonderful that will actually make people’s lives better and I think those kinds of services fit great with the spirit of what we do.

They love that we’re irreverent, that we’re having fun and all of that and they love that our audience actually cares about things.

In his own words

Jesse Thorn on Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise and the surprisingly sincere Brony movement:

But Weinstein’s effort was so effective it led to a ban by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on private cocktail parties, exclusive post-screening Q&As and other flashy events during Oscar season.

Because of the restrictions, Hollywood studios now have to rely on more subtle techniques to push their films and stars into the spotlight.

The blockbuster and the sleeper

This year, in an ironic twist, Weinstein blames his subtle marketing strategy around Django Unchained for Quentin Tarantino’s failure to garner a Best Director nomination.

The Weinstein Company decided not to send screener DVDs of the film to Academy members in December in order to encourage members to see it on the big screen.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in a still from Django Unchained. Image via unchainedmovie.com.

Django Unchained still earned five nominations, including Best Picture, so it’s difficult to determine if the lack of screeners actually hurt Tarantino’s chances, or if there simply wasn’t enough room in the Best Director category for everyone.

One of the most surprising inclusions in this year’s nomination pool is the indie film Beasts of the Southern Wild, which earned four Oscar nods, including a Best Director nomination for Benh Zeitlin.

Quvenzhané Wallis stars in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Image via imdb.com.

Beasts’ long journey to Oscar contender began a year ago when it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Strong word of mouth and success at prestigious film festivals (including winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes) helped build buzz and critical acclaim.

Beasts is Zeitlin’s first feature film. He was under 30 when he made it with a budget of only $1.8 million, proving that sometimes a grassroots campaign can catch the Academy’s attention.

As Richard Brody pointed out in The New Yorker, the movie’s “anti-political, by-the-bootstraps view of essentially political matters” –  in this case, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – led to a “sentimental consensus that won it an audience and a batch of nominations.”

Lincoln’s silence and Affleck’s snub

In contrast to Django’s unconventional approach and Beasts’ organic one, the studio behind Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln decided to let the film speak for itself. The film’s director and producers have refused to campaign for it.

Stacey Snider of Dreamworks explained that “energy is finite. There is only so much you can do. These filmmakers gave it all to the film.” She added that she is confident that Oscar voters ultimately judge films on their merits, not the amount of glad-handing done by their makers.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln. Image via thelincolnmovie.com.

But while Daniel Day-Lewis is considered a shoo-in for the Best Actor prize on February 24, the film seems to have lost its momentum having failed to win any of the other major awards for “best picture” since its leading 12 nominations were announced.

On the other hand, Argo seems to have benefited from the perceived “snub” of Ben Affleck being left out of the Best Director category.

At the beginning of awards season, Argo was considered an underdog, but Affleck has won the Golden Globe and the Directors Guild Award for Best Director, and the film won the Golden Globe, Producers Guild and multiple critics associations’ awards for Best Picture.

Although a Best Director Oscar remains out of reach for Affleck, the Academy may be encouraged to compensate by rewarding Argo in other categories.

Ben Affleck directs and stars in the film, Argo. Image via argothemovie.warnerbros.com.

Oscar campaigns go negative

Marketing efforts for Oscar-nominated films run the gamut from print ads and television commercials to Twitter campaigns, but one of the biggest trends this Oscar season is negative campaigning against other nominees.

As Gregg Kilday points out in the Hollywood Reporter, negative campaigners need to criticize competing films subtly, never publicly or in writing, at the risk of alienating Oscar voters.

In 2010, The Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier was banned from the Oscar ceremony after emailing a friend and urging them to vote for his movie rather than “the $500 million film” –  a not-so-subtle reference to Avatar.

If Oscar campaigns are in many ways similar to political ones, a key difference is that it’s better for candidates to keep a sense of humility and humour about themselves and their films, rather than publicly knocking the competition.

Ben Affleck is a master at this. Speaking in the press room after the Golden Globes about his perceived Oscar snub, he joked, “I also didn’t get the acting nomination. And no one’s saying I got snubbed there!”

Image by Alan Levine via Flickr.

“Audio and photography are the redheaded stepchildren [of social media],” well-known marketer C.C. Chapman told me in an interview at the recent New Media Expo. “They get forgotten about, but they’re both powerful.”

Chapman has built his brand by leveraging both, taking photos he uses to spice up the rest of his content  – people are more likely to click on a blog post with a nice thumbnail image – and hosting a popular podcast, Managing the Gray.

It can be hard psychologically to resist the allure of new platforms. Frankly, they can be an easy way to justify your budget or your livelihood. If everyone has to be on Pinterest, that opens up a great market for Pinterest consultants.

Adapted image by Oriol Carbonell via thenounproject.org

You might not make the cover of Fast Company with your groundbreaking e-newsletter, but – depending on your business – it’s quite possible the best way to actually capture your customers’ attention and win sales is through an unsexy but effective medium like email.

“To me, the hottest and sexiest social network right now is your inbox,” popular blogger Chris Brogan wrote last summer. I think he’s absolutely right. It’s all too easy for marketers to jump on the latest trends and abandon the tried-and-true methods.

But there are three powerful reasons to embrace “old school” 2000s style marketing (even if e-newsletters and podcasts were considered pretty high-tech and fancy even five years ago).

You’re evading the competition

If others are chasing the newest fad, they won’t have the bandwidth to truly excel at “older” forms of marketing, whether it’s crafting an amazing e-newsletter or a thoughtful blog.

You’re reducing friction

Image by Stanislav Levin via thenounproject.org.

Video editing can be tricky, but almost anyone can touch up a photo on her smartphone.

“The barriers to entry are lower for photography,” says Chapman. “Anyone can pick up a camera and point and shoot.”

Since a recent HubSpot study showed that photos on Facebook generate 53 percent more “likes” than the average post, that’s a powerful incentive.

You know it works

No, podcasting hasn’t taken over the world. But it’s proven itself for nearly a decade as a reliable way to share ideas and reach a targeted audience.

Thought leaders like Mitch Joel (whom I interviewed for a session at the New Media Expo) have established powerful brands through podcasting; Mitch has done more than 300 episodes of “Six Pixels of Separation.”

Adapted image by Khadijah Roussi via thenounproject.com

Similarly, Jay Baer’s Social Pros Podcast allows him to curate some of the best thinking in the marketing and social media field. Jumping on the latest and greatest social media platform could be a win if it becomes the next Twitter – or you might fail miserably if it’s the next Friendster.

If you want to reduce risk, sticking to the classics (like podcasting) is one way to do it.

What’s your take on the value of blogging, podcasting, digital photos and other “oh-so 2003” platforms? Are they an undervalued opportunity or just old news?

Among “the world’s most innovative and distinguished executives, authors, and academicians” included in Kurtzman’s book, Thought Leaders: Insights on the Future of Business, were Warren Bennis, John T. Chambers, Charles Handy, Minoru Makihara and C.K. Prahalad.

Since then the concept of “thought leadership” has broadened. Many consultants began adopting the term, believing it was synonymous with calling themselves trusted advisors, subject matter experts or even futurists. But “thought leader” is not a position you choose to adopt, it is bestowed on you by others.

Thought leaders advance the marketplace of ideas by positing actionable, commercially relevant, research-backed, new points of view. They engage in “blue ocean strategy” thinking on behalf of themselves and their clients, as opposed to simply churning out product-focused, brand-centric white papers or curated content that shares or mimics others’ ideas.

While individual thought leaders are in plentiful supply, organizations continue to struggle to establish their thought leadership. In today’s uncertain, ever-changing environment, we need to listen more, understand better, and re-energize our relationships with increasingly discerning, demanding and skeptical customers and clients.

This means that you need to differentiate your organization with compelling points of view that are intriguing, innovative, inspiring – and wholly relevant to your audience.

We’re not talking about PR, advertising or product marketing here. Many organizations are squandering time, money and effort on thought leadership initiatives that do not move the needle in terms of establishing a differentiated brand identity, deep trust and a loyal following.

Truly powerful thought leadership campaigns are embedded into the culture of the organization; they’re not simply communication “add-ons.” The most effective thought leadership initiatives empower all employees by inspiring and supporting them to become campaign ambassadors.

They also contribute a depth of insight into internal and external conversations that your competitors can only dream of achieving.

Here are seven of the “140 tweets” that appear in the book. Each tweet is designed to lead to an effective and robust thought leadership platform:

#1: What is your organization’s definition of thought leadership? How does that differ from being trusted advisors or subject matter experts?

#8: A hallmark of true thought leadership is the confidence to take the route that 99.9 percent of industry experts don’t even see. Will you?

#31: Thought leaders imagine a desired outcome then ask what has to happen to achieve it. They play “what if?” backwards. Do you?

#85: Thought leaders ask “why?” a lot more than “what?” or “how?” Are you asking the right questions at the start?

#101: The creators of your thought leadership aren’t necessarily the right ones to communicate it. How will you handle this?

#137: How has your thought leadership campaign gone so far? What has it done for your brand? What measures support the anecdotal evidence?

#140: Thought leaders are brave; explore areas others don’t, raise questions others won’t, and provide insights others can’t.   

This excerpt, adapted for Sparksheet, is from #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign by Liz Alexander and Craig Badings.

The unintended consequence of Facebook’s constant tinkering may be that more marketers and communicators are embracing the idea that they need a Facebook strategy. Because developing a strategy for any single platform is a waste of resources.

New lessons from old media

Adapted from image by Matthieu via thenounproject.org

Advertisers used to know better. Many still do. Nobody had an ABC or New York Times or Redbook strategy. Brands had strategies for TV, newspaper and magazine advertising.

They selected the platforms for those ads based on demographics and other criteria. If audiences stopped watching one show and started watching another, they didn’t wring their hands and lament the hours spent strategizing around that program.

If a magazine changed its focus, nobody directed ire at the publisher, complaining that all that energy spent on crafting content for the magazine had been wasted.

The mentality that leads to a full-blown strategy for Facebook is the same one that causes angst among communicators whenever a new platform emerges that gains popularity.

I’ve actually heard professionals say they have enough bandwidth only for three platforms (like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter); if a Pinterest or Instagram becomes a hot social channel, they just can’t make time for it.

Platforms are ephemeral

None of this would be an issue if marketers had communication and content strategies and viewed platforms as the channels for deploying content. Platforms come and go. They change.

The audiences that embrace them are fickle and abandon them easily for something that better suits them. (Recent research, for example, shows that teens are gravitating toward Tumblr and away from Facebook.)

For communicators with a content strategy, adjusting to these changes is simple, just like a Mad Men-era advertiser sliding content into a new or newly popular TV series or publication. Pity the poor marketer who once poured time and energy into a MySpace strategy!

Tactics vs. strategy

The Graph Search announcement has sparked a flurry of blog posts about how brands can optimize their content for the new service. (There’s no agreement yet on what to call it—Facebook Graph Search Optimization (FGSO) or Facebook Search Engine Optimization (FSEO) or some other jargon.)

The fact that people are thinking about this is great but I worry that marketers will be distracted from their overarching content strategies and begin investing unreasonable amounts of time on this single opportunity.

Optimizing content for Facebook’s new search should be factored into your general SEO effort, which should be part of a larger content strategy.

For communicators, stellar outcomes begin with understanding what a strategy is and how it differs from objectives and tactics. Strategies define overarching approaches to achieving business goals.

Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and every other platform on the planet are tactics selected to meet the measurable objectives you identify in support of your strategy.

So if changes at Facebook have you pulling your hair out because of the disruption to your strategy, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Will Ferrell plays IRS official Harold Crick in Stranger than Fiction. Image via imdb.com

For professional services firms, a brand is a combination of reputation and visibility.

Most of the firms I’ve worked with have sound reputations, resulting from years of experience and a loyal client base. It’s the visibility piece that’s holding firms back from growing their brands.

A service company is different from a product company in that it’s tough to create mass exposure overnight. How can architects, engineers and accountants “go viral” like a new tech startup or an iPhone app? In most cases, they can’t.

The best approach for professional services firms is to draw an audience in with free educational expertise. Over time, the market will begin to trust your firm.

Below are three examples of how professional services firms are leveraging digital media outlets to prove their expertise, attract attention and proactively create visibility. 

The manageable blog

GHT Limited’s blog focuses on providing useful, rather than promotional, information and features posts by the CEO.

GHT is a Washington-based mechanical, electrical and plumbing firm that has invested significant time in its company blog (full disclosure: it is a client of mine). Posts come from 15 different contributors who are experts in a variety of areas, from metered faucets to temporary transformers.

Some writers are from the marketing team, but the majority are hands-on engineers looking to share what they know. Leading the charge is the firm’s CEO, Paul O’Brien.

Examples of post titles include, “Greening the District’s Construction Code,” “The Path to Energy Efficiency for Existing Buildings,” and “How Efficient is Your Data Center?”

Construction codes and energy efficiency may not sound interesting to you, but to the market they serve they’re hot topics.

GHT’s strategy works because it’s manageable. The firm knew it couldn’t over-commit to content marketing with so much other work on its plate so it made no sense to dive into webinars or e-books.

Monthly blog posting is a realistic goal – one that has helped establish GHT as one of the top MEP firms in the D.C. area.

The results can be seen in web analytics. As the company continues to post, the number of search engine keywords that generate traffic increases. The firm ranks in the top three on Google for crucial phrases such as ‘BIM services DC’ and ‘MEP engineering.’

Switching it up with podcasts

The Architecture Happy Hour Podcast sets a casual tone and provides helpful information for those in the industry.

HPD is a small architecture firm based in Dallas, Texas. Although it does have a blog, the main channel for this firm’s thought leadership is a podcast called “The Architecture Happy Hour.”

The podcast covers simple but helpful topics such as choosing the right architect, planning for new projects, modernizing your house and how to prepare for hailstorms.

One of the reasons these podcasts work well for HPD is their casual, relaxed tone. When the hosts introduce episodes with, “It’s a two-drink minimum so grab your glass and let’s get started!” listeners feel comfortable and engaged from the start.

Content creation at HPD is led by Laura Davis, the director of marketing and Larry Paschall, the vice president. At smaller companies like this one, top executives are typically taking charge of thought leadership responsibilities.

The firm also hosts a live Happy Hour that brings together a network of architecture, design, real estate and construction professionals.

Between the podcasts and live events, HPD has found a creative formula for generating buzz and elevating its visibility.

From content marketing to content networking

Freed Maxick is a large CPA firm headquartered in Buffalo, New York. The firm leverages its marketing resources to share knowledge via newsletters, blog posts, educational guides, webinars and more.

The amount of great content this firm generates is impressive in itself. But what really sets it apart is its ability to go out and deliver this content across the web.

Instead of sitting back and waiting for people to find them, members of the marketing team take visibility into their own hands. They scour LinkedIn and Twitter for conversations related to Freed Maxick’s areas of expertise. They then join the conversation, armed with relevant content.

For example, a Freed Maxick team member will search for major company mergers using keywords in Twitter search. When relevant conversations appear, Freed Maxick chimes in, offering a white paper that addresses the tax needs of the company involved. They do similar “content networking” in LinkedIn groups, taking care not to seem too salesy.

Finding targeted communities and conversations online and offering their expertise along the way has helped Freed Maxick become a trusted, visible thought leader across the country.

As you can see from these examples, becoming more visible in your market is not easy. Unlike product-oriented brands, professional services firms must establish visibility over time.

But with a foundation of expertise and a few creative outlets, firms can find the spotlight they’re looking for.

I think Kickstarter is a perfect example of this. It’s not just about raising money, it’s also about creating a community around the products. The customers are fundamentally not just passive buyers, they have a part in the design of the product and are cheerleading from the sidelines as the team builds it.

They tend to be evangelists for it and use their own social media channels to promote it. When it comes down to it, they’re the most effective word-of-mouth engines because they felt they were part of something rather than just buying something.

The content, in that sense, [is] the updates. As the creator there’s this implicit contract that once you have pre-sold your product, you’re going to entertain. You’re going to inform your users with a stream of content for the duration of the adventure.

A lot of the maker companies you profile are based on open source technology. You say that the only intellectual property your own company protects is its trademarks. Does that mean branding is going to become more important than ever?

Basically, the old ways of protecting your products were patents, trade secrets,
copyrights, trademarks, ownership of distribution channel, sheer purchasing or selling power and things like that.

Those are all less important in this era. Those are the old industrial models of brand protection. The new brands are the ones we know so well from social media – the bottom-up brands.

The brands that are associated less with advertising and more with people’s personal experiences and how they pass their feelings about that experience through social media and beyond.

Maker products follow that same path. To the extent that “brand” represents a distinctive name, style and characteristics that are associated with your company, yourself or your community, it is more important than ever.

Image by Makerbot Industries via wikipedia.org.

1) 3-D Printer: A 3-D printer and the paper printer on your desktop play similar roles. The traditional laser (or inkjet) printer is a 2-D printer: it takes pixels on a screen and turns them into dots of ink or toner on a 2-D medium, usually paper. A 3-D printer takes “geometries” onscreen (3-D objects that are created with the same sorts of tools that Hollywood uses to make CG movies) and turns them into objects that you can pick up and use. Some 3-D printers extrude molten plastic in layers to make these objects, while others use a laser to harden layers of liquid or powder resin so the product emerges from a bath of the raw material. Yet others can make objects out of any material from glass, steel, and bronze to gold, titanium, or even cake frosting. You can print a flute or you can print a meal. You can even print human organs out of living cells, by squirting a fluid with suspended stem cells onto a support matrix, much as your inkjet printer squirts ink onto paper.

You say the maker model works best for “small batch” or niche products, leading a “long tail of things.” Do you think consumer appetites for quality and customization will grow as the technology gets better?

My first book, The Long Tail, was based on what we learned from the era of unlimited choice: the digital media era. What we discovered was that we are a lot more unique than the broadcast marketplace revealed.

Extend that to a parallel movement going on in some of the hipper spots of the world toward things like artisanal food. If you’re into wine, you understood that the more sophisticated your taste gets, the more you deviate from the mainstream.

If you’re into fashion, you know that couture and boutique are in a sense niche and yet they have the most influence.

The presumption is that the maker movement now extends that long tail to physical goods that were previously constrained by the limits of mass production.

But there are limits. There are things we don’t care that much about. I’m very happy to have mainstream milk. When it comes to silverware, I’m happy to go to Ikea.

And then there are other things I care hugely about. For some people it might be clothes, for some people it might be a bike and other people it might be their furnishings. That’s where you decide to live down in the tail.

You decide, “That’s going to be something that defines me. That’s going to be something where I’m really going to exercise my new power of choice.” It’s not the end of the mainstream, it’s the end of the monopoly of the mainstream.

Image via kickstarter.com.

2) CNC Machine: While a 3-D printer uses an “additive” technology to make things (it builds them up layer by layer), a CNC (computer numerical control) router or mill can take the same file and make similar products with a “subtractive” technology, which is a fancy way of saying that it uses a drill bit to cut a product out of a block of plastic, wood, or metal. There are countless other specialty CNC machines: CNC quilters and embroidery machines, CNC sign and vinyl cutters (for silk-screening), and CNC paper and fabric cutters for crafters, to name a few. Some CNC machines are the same size of a large table and are designed to make furniture out of wood. Industrial CNC machines can be as big as a warehouse and can serve out objects as big as an airplane fuselage.

Over the last 15 years we’ve seen both the music and publishing industries disrupted by digital technology. How can current retail and manufacturing brands avoid the same fate as record companies and newspapers? Are there ways they can prepare for the “new industrial revolution”?

I think these brands are fine for a couple reasons. First of all, we’re still talking about physical goods, which could not be distributed as easily as digital products could. So one way or another you’ve got to move atoms around and there are some barriers to entry there.

Twenty years after Amazon was created only a tiny share of retail is e-commerce and the stuff that isn’t goes through traditional distribution channels. The Kickstarters of the world are great, but those products aren’t going to make it to the shelves of Walmart any time soon.

The second reason is that mass production is really good at mass production. What mass production has never been good at is niche production. These are markets of ten thousand, which is a really interesting number.

Ten thousand is too small for a Foxconn, too small for a mass production company, they just don’t operate at that scale. It’s not efficient for them, and it’s too large for the individual or even a little local manufacturing business.

And yet what we learned with long tail digital content was that ten thousand was the sweet spot. That’s where music and film established their appeal.

Ten thousand is enough to build a business on but a few of those ten thousands will be able to catapult into the mainstream to become ten millions.

Image via epiloglaser.com.

3) Laser Cutter: One of the most popular of the new desktop tools is the laser cutter, which is mostly a 2-D device. It uses a powerful laser to cut a precise pattern of any complexity into sheets of whatever material you feed it, from plastics and woods to thin metal. Many CAD programs can break a 3-D object into 2-D parts so they can be fabricated with a laser cutter, and then neatly slotted together like one of those plywood dinosaur kits.

You wrote the book on “free” but conclude in your book that the maker movement is unlikely to go the same route, where people expect their stuff – like their content – to be free. What’s the difference?

They’re physical goods. The expectation with digital goods is that they were free because everyone knew the marginal costs were close to zero. Everyone knows the marginal cost of physical goods is not close to zero.

What’s easy in digital is adoption because barriers to entry are so low. What’s hard is making money. It’s the inverse with physical stuff. What’s hard is physical adoption, what’s easy is making money.

Image via 3d-images.net.

4) 3-D Scanner: This device, which can be as small as a breadbox, allows you to do “reality capture.” Rather than having to draw an object from scratch, you can put an existing object in the scanner. It uses lasers or other light sources and a camera to image the object from all sides, and then turns it into a 3-D image made up of tens or hundreds of thousands of polygons, just like a video-game character or CG movie set. The software can simplify it and let you modify any part you want. A common first experiment is to scan your head, then exaggerate your features and 3-D print a bobble-head of yourself.

One thing you don’t mention in the book is the implications of “the long tail of things” on the environment. On one hand, we may have shorter supply chains. On the other, more stuff. Is that really a good thing?

In general, shorter supply chains are more sustainable. But I think you have to be realistic about shorter supply chains. It’s one thing if you’re assembling locally but all your components are shipped around the world.

Are we just going to get more stuff? Traditionally that’s not been the model. It’s not that we buy more stuff or make more stuff, it’s that we make maybe the same or less but we value it more.

You pay more for it but you use it, you love it, you keep it and you treasure it. You treat it less as a disposable commodity and more as an heirloom or something that defines you.

The four excerpts above are from the book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Copyright 2012 by Chris Anderson. Published by arrangement with Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.

In his own words

Chris Anderson on his transition from editor-in-chief of Wired to CEO of 3D Robotics:

Doritos’ “Crash The Super Bowl” ad campaign. Image via Doritos’ Facebook Page.

More than a hundred million American sports fans will be glued to their TVs this Sunday for Super Bowl XLVII. The rest of the world will be paying attention to the ads. And for good reason: This year could turn out to be the high-water mark for crowdsourced commercials.

The trend of crowdsourcing, or bringing fans into the ad’s creative process, can be traced back to 2007, when Doritos debuted its massively popular “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. Brands haven’t stopped experimenting since.

Here is a taste of crowdsourcing strategies brands are deploying for Super Bowl 2013.

Crowdsource the script

Super Bowl ad rookie Lincoln (the car company, not the U.S. president or Oscar-nominated film) will be airing a commercial based on tweets from its #SteertheScript promotion. The car brand teamed up with comedian Jimmy Fallon, who chose his favourite tweets as inspiration for the ad. The brand has been dropping occasional teasers for months now, building anticipation for the main event.

Crowdsource the ad

While Doritos is the only brand to put the entire creative process in the hands of its contestants, other brands are starting to head in that direction. Coca-Cola and Audi are each running separate ‘choose your own adventure’ style campaigns, where fans get to vote online for which ending will appear on TV.

Be explosive

Sometimes it’s not the crowd that decides the fate of an ad, but the network. That’s what happened to Sodastream, a home carbonation product.

The Israel-based brand had intended to break into the American market with a Super Bowl ad mocking Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but CBS (the network airing the game) disapproved of the spot.

Turns out people love controversy. The original commercial went viral on YouTube before being replaced by a toned down version, which is scheduled to run on Sunday.

Even if this social media tie-in was accidental, Sodastream has made a far bigger splash because of it.

Hashtag it

It’s almost certain that every ad will be accompanied by a hashtag. The only question is how integrated into the campaign that hashtag will be. Toyota encouraged people to upload images of themselves on Instagram and Twitter with the #wishgranted hashtag for a chance to appear in the ad.

In the same vein, users who upload selfies with the #PepsiHalftime might appear on screen during the Pepsi-sponsored Beyonce halftime show.

Send your fans to space

Hashtags and user-generated content are likely to make an impact, but they won’t necessarily send a brand into orbit.

That’s why Axe is using their first-ever Super Bowl spot to promote the Axe Apollo Space Academy contest, in which participants compete for a chance to get flown into space. The sheer boldness of the contest has been enough to generate lots of buzz.

Gaming the crowds

It’s easy to see why brands are so committed to crowdsourcing and social media tie-ins. As Jason Therrien, President of social media marketing agency Thunder Tech explains, “If you have an emotional attachment to a commercial, you’re more likely to sit through it.”

And if brands can nurture that attachment by crafting a contest around the ad, or build anticipation through sharable teasers, then all the better.

Super Bowl ads are expensive. This year brands paid an average of $3.7 million for the privilege. For perspective, the cost of a 30-second spot a decade ago was $1.9 million.

So it’s no wonder that ad agencies and brands are pulling out all the stops to earn as many impressions as possible. Bringing campaigns online is a surefire way to do that. As Mashable reports, those ads shown before the game get 600 percent more YouTube views.

Brands love to rise above the noise, but sometimes it’s better to stick to the crowd.

BlackBerry fans celebrate the launch of Blackberry 10 in Paris. Photo by Official BlackBerry Images via Flickr.

Remember RIM  – Research In Motion – the company that used to be a smartphone juggernaut? They just introduced their long-delayed BlackBerry 10.

In days gone by we probably would have called it “their long-awaited BlackBerry 10,” but given the numerous development problems and introduction postponements, there were fewer and fewer consumers out there awaiting this launch.

The other big announcement was that RIM is officially changing the company name to BlackBerry. It’s a move reminiscent of General Motors when, after reporting a $1.1 billion loss eight years ago, their remedy was to put the GM “Mark of Excellence” logo on all models in an effort to link the corporation to its various brands.

The BlackBerry 10 launch is critical to the brand’s attempt to re-enter the marketplace. Once the darling of employer-issued smartphones, owning nearly a quarter of the marketplace in the U.S., they currently have about a 4 percent share.

Companies aren’t as sure as they used to be about supporting the BlackBerry, with many having moved to a BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) policy for employees, who in turn have moved to the new smartphone juggernauts, Samsung and Apple.

With BlackBerry 10, the brand is looking to position BlackBerry as the smartphone that allows you to shift from work mode to personal play with something they call “BlackBerry Balance,” which lets users keep business and personal information entirely separate.

The new phones also a boast an improved operating system and some innovative features such as one-swipe email access from any app.

Last year BlackBerry was ranked last by consumers on our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index assessments and we don’t think their position is likely to change much.

The new models aren’t due to show up in the United States until March, and if past performance is anything to go by, consumers are not likely to hold their breadth for the new Blackberry smartphones.

The reality is that this could be the brand’s last chance to remain a player in the category.

If you are among the shrinking number of consumers who can’t wait until March, BlackBerry announced that the new model will appear in its first-ever Super Bowl commercial next Sunday.

You know what they say? If you can’t engage them, at least entertain them!

Pitching session at Brooklyn Dodgers Spring Training. Image by State Library and Archives of Florida via Flickr.

The current agency search process is too slow for a marketing world that runs at the speed of light, and it is too expensive for brands – and agencies – that need to prevent waste.

It can take five or six months or even a year for a brand to choose an agency, at the cost of diverted attention from the company’s business and executive time.

With an improved protocol, a well-managed agency search can be concluded infive to six weeks, without hurting the quality of results. In fact, a revised process will lead to a more informed pick and a stable, long-term relationship with the agency.

Different times, different goals

Part of the problem with today’s commonly practised agency search process is that agencies and marketers have different objectives from the get-go.

Marketers are looking for a long-term relationship with an agency. Agencies, on the other hand, are more mercenary. Initially, they are looking for a transaction, not a deep relationship. They are simply looking to win the pitch.

The traditional approach to selecting an agency has been around since the early 1970s and is completely out-of-date. It is complex and selection is determined by a superficial context.

This leads to growing instability in client-agency relationships, and accelerates turnover in agency rosters and eventually hurts brands and their equities. Relationships that used to last 15 or 20 years now break down in less than three years, on average.

A contemporary process needs to be streamlined and optimize interaction between brand marketers and the agencies under consideration.

Here are some ideas for how to redesign the agency selection process, drawn from my personal experience in agency search over the last 30 years:

Do away with the RFP

Most consultants start by contacting 15 or 20 agencies and sending them an RFP. But RFPs are generic and provide very little useful information. The first two or three months of the search process, perhaps more, are wasted sorting through redundant responses from the agencies.

Instead, an independent consultant who has in-depth knowledge of agencies and their capabilities should be able to shortlist the best four or five contenders based on the brand’s brief.

Workshops instead of a pitch

The traditional agency search process is more of a beauty contest that revolves around the “pitch meeting.” The problem with these beauty contests is that agencies are much better at them than marketers.

Agencies pitch all the time and are very good at presenting and showmanship.

Instead, facilitating a number of workshops with each of the contenders gives the brand an opportunity to evaluate how the agencies develop strategy and creative work, how they think, how fast they work, and just how passionate the agency team is.

Unlike a traditional pitch process, this approach mirrors how marketers and agencies work in real life and paints a much clearer picture of the competing agencies’ strengths and weaknesses.

Why pitch when you can workshop? Image by Joey Tanny

Hire an agency’s future, not its past

Did the agency adjust to the new communications model, which shifted away from interruptive messages? Did it adopt new technologies and platforms that make listening more important than messaging?

An agency’s future, while somewhat informed by its past, is a better reflection of the agency’s vision and its willingness to embrace what’s coming rather than preserve what’s been.

Hire their criteria for hiring people

Talent rules. Nothing is more important than people. You certainly want collaborative people working on your business, but you may also want to know what qualities the agency looks for when hiring – curiosity? courage? optimism? persistence?

Hire for all screens

Advertising is no longer about just the 30-second spot, although many agencies are still stuck in the old model.

One of the most critical things to find out during the workshops is the agency’s ability to work across all platforms and channels, from mobile, to social, to branded content.

Hire for culture and ethics

Marketers often look at culture in terms of the agency’s creative standards. But its core values, work ethic and commitment to partnership will foretell the kind of relationship you are likely to have.

Marketing is one of the biggest expenses for most companies and hiring the right agency is one of the most important decisions a CMO can make.

It is time for brands to rethink a failing, four-decade-old agency selection process and adapt it to 21st century needs.

A version of this article previously appeared on Forbes.com

Image by Nationaal Archief via Flickr.

In December 2009, Forrester defined what it called the three new media options for interactive marketers: “paid, earned and owned.” Earned media had traditionally been the responsibility of public relations, while paid and owned media had been part of the marketing mandate.

In the meantime, the rise of shared or social media complicated things further. Was it a function of PR? Marketing? Customer service?

Now, more than three years later, it’s clear that PR, advertising and marketing have changed forever and that working together is the best tool these disciplines have in getting their brand’s message heard above the noise.

From converged media to content marketing

B2B brands plan to spend more on content marketing in 2013.

In response to the Altimeter group’s white paper on “converged media” last summer, Jeremiah Owyang took a stab on his blog at defining the new workflow for paid, earned, owned and shared media. “Today, advertising, corporate content, and social content is often separated,” Owyang wrote, “but tomorrow, we expect these circles to converge and overlap, with little or no separation.”

Meanwhile, as The New York Times recently reported, the popularity of online pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords has driven up the cost of a visit to a brand’s website. Keywords that once cost $1 per click now can cost as much as $20 per click.

All these factors have prompted brands to turn toward content marketing as a way to supplement traditional online advertising (if that’s not an oxymoron) – at a much lower price point. In fact, a study by the Content Marketing Institute claims that 25 percent of B2B marketing budgets are now spent on content marketing and that more than 50 percent of those marketers plan to increase their spend in 2013.

However, that same CMI study shows that the biggest challenge for marketers is producing enough content.

The new story marketing cycle

With social media, marketers have more (and cheaper) access to their communities and customers than ever, but it’s hard to keep up with the demand for quality content.

That’s why PR, marketing, communications and customer service have to work together to achieve their goals through a new story marketing cycle that involves content curation, creation, optimization and amplification:

Curating content allows brands to develop story ideas, stay on top of industry trends and establish an authoritative voice that resonates with their communities. The trick is to develop a group of content creators across functions that consistently shares interesting articles, posts, videos and more with each other – and then your clients or customers.

Creating content involves everything from traditional marketing content like white papers, collateral and ads to owned media content like blog posts, infographics and videos. Marketing and PR teams will need to work together to create compelling content that serves customers across all platforms and channels.

Optimizing content both for search (basic keyword SEO and linking strategies) and social (ensuring content is easy to re-tweet, post to Facebook or Pinterest) makes finding, sharing and digesting content as easy as possible for your audience. All the content that PR and marketing teams produce can be optimized. The key is to share strategies, tips and keywords across the silos.

Amplifying content through organic social sharing, traditional media relations outreach and online paid opportunities is the key to ensuring that your message isn’t getting lost in the noise. PR is typically responsible for social sharing and media outreach, but marketing can power that content through paid opportunities and e-mail marketing.

This isn’t an easy process and the best way for a brand to achieve success is for the professionals that manage paid, earned, owned and social media communications to work together to develop an integrated – and effective – content strategy.

You begin your book Content Strategy for Mobile by saying that there’s no such thing as a content strategy for mobile. Really?  

It’s funny, I gave one of my colleagues a copy of the book and he read the first page, put down the book, looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve neatly addressed all of my concerns with your book in the first sentence.”

What I’m trying to emphasize in the book is the idea that if you’re thinking you can treat mobile as this separate problem that’s sandboxed off from everything else, you’re making a huge mistake.

The problem is not about writing something different that will appear on a smartphone or tablet, it’s about ensuring that I’m delivering the right content or the best experience to all of my users regardless of what platforms on which they choose to consume content.

Really, this is about having a publishing process that allows you to treat all of the channels and devices that you need to get your messages out, as equal.

In your book you call out the notion of “designing for context,” suggesting that we can’t make assumptions about a user just because she’s using a smaller screen. Do you mean that people don’t consume content differently in certain contexts, or is it just that we don’t have enough information to make those assumptions?

This is probably one of the most hotly debated and contested points in the industry right now. Are we designing for the “mobile context” and what does that mean?

Anybody who’s ever used their phone while they’re sitting on their couch or when they had a laptop available to them recognizes that “mobile” doesn’t always mean that you’re on the move.

I think it’s perfectly appropriate to talk about optimizing for the local case, but don’t spin that to cover all the mobile use cases out there because, frankly, then you’re leaving out all the people who aren’t using their phone while standing on a street corner.

In fact, I would say for most organizations the goal is to achieve a sense of parity between the desktop and mobile.

In cases where you might say to yourself, “I don’t know if this content really needs to be on mobile, I don’t know if it’s worth it,” the answer is that it probably doesn’t need to be on the desktop either.

McGrane’s new book, Content Strategy for Mobile, published by A Book Apart.

You cite NPR as an example of a media brand that has embraced the adaptive content approach. Are any magazines doing it successfully? I assume that it’s harder for a print publication to make the transition than a radio network like NPR, where the raw audio content is already digital.

Right now the legacy process for most publishers is that they think print first. That model is going to break down as you start to realize it’s not just going to be web, it’s going to be mobile web, native apps and tablets, and who knows what’s next?

What if we stopped thinking of this as a sequential process and we start thinking about having one universal structure that would be designed from the start to cover the full range of cases, including print?

Having that flexible package of content that you can work with means that when you get to web or mobile or tablet or whatever, you have more pieces to play with.

Is the biggest obstacle to adaptive content technological – as you say in the book, most content management systems just aren’t equipped for it – or is it cultural, in that legacy media organizations are attached to the way they’ve always done things?

This is a user experience problem. Let’s treat the users, the content authors and the people who are going to use the CMS like they’re users of any other enterprise system.

It’s not an uncommon problem in UX, to say, “Oh right, you’re dealing with two very different sets of users with two very different needs, how do you prioritize their competing needs and design a system that gives you the best shot at meeting all of them?”

I’m really fond of telling publishers that the money they spend on improving their CMS, making it easier for their internal staff to navigate these screens, making it easier for them, for example, to post to social channels, is going to get them way more business value than yet another redesign of their homepage.

You suggest that mobile may be the key to reach under-served audiences and markets. How so?

I have pretty solid data from the U.S. that shows that 31 percent of people who use their mobile phones to use the internet say that’s the only way or mostly the way they access the internet.

This is astonishing! I mean, it’s a third of people who access the internet on their phones.

This has huge implications for all types of industries. If you have any sort of civic responsibility for communicating with the public and you don’t have a content strategy for mobile, you are dramatically underserving a population of people.

I also think it reflects a growing trend of people who do have access to a broadband connection or desktop computer who prefer to get their information through mobile.

There’s a huge underserved population today who are consuming content on their phones and we’re giving them a crappy experience. We’re telling them, “Here’s how the web works for you: You have to pinch and zoom your way through sites that were designed for a much larger monitor, you’re going to get errors and the fonts are going to be really tiny.”

We’ve all kind of collectively thrown up our hands and gone, “Well! That’s good enough!” No, it’s not good enough.

In her own words

Karen McGrane on getting writers to think about adaptive content:

Contestants competing on the Let’s Make a Deal game show.  Image by ABC Television via Wikipedia.

Never dangle a deal that you can’t or won’t make good on. I’d just left a meeting with two clients who were attempting to renegotiate their partnership agreement when I made my first notes about this.

They had been working together for years. They were both major contributors to the success of their business. They were very comfortable with each other, collaborating on all kinds of issues and learning from each other’s perspective and experience.

Although they have entirely different personalities and leadership styles, both are highly respected by staff and clients alike.

Admittedly, this was personal. It potentially put numbers on their individual contributions to the business. So self-worth and respect would be reflected in the outcome.

But they had dealt with these deeply personal issues in years past and reached mutually agreeable solutions.

So what was the problem?

Four years earlier the senior partner had said that he’d allow the minority partner to become equal to him in share ownership when their current agreement expired.

Now, in spite of the minority partner’s outstanding performance, the majority partner was saying no to equal shares.

“I must be the sole final decision maker. I’ve worked 20 years building this business and I will not sign a deal that gives anyone an equal say.”

The minority partner replied, “Robert, I must work with you, not for you, in building this business. That’s what I’ve been working towards these last four years.”

If equal shares had not been dangled, if the minority partner had not felt misled, this dangerous and uncomfortable situation would have never happened.

I say dangerous because this issue, if left unresolved, had the potential to completely undermine their relationship and, worse, divide the firm.

I’m sure that some readers will think, “This is obvious. Of course you shouldn’t dangle a valued partner or employee with an ownership deal you can’t or won’t honour when the time comes.”

But I’ve seen variations on this story time and again, often with devastating consequences.

Not all deals turn out as expected. A model reveals the “Zonk” prize on Let’s Make a Deal. Image via wikipedia.org

Unhappy endings

It usually ends with the offended party leaving, often taking staff and accounts and setting up a competing firm.

A competing firm not only fueled by a desperate need for survival but also with a deep desire for revenge and retribution.

Consider for a moment the individuals who are offered deals like this. In my experience they are the top performers: sales and account directors who have deep, rich client relationships; creative directors who’ve received major acclaim for their work and drive business to the firm as a result; chief operating officers who run and manage offices or regions.

So why would an intelligent, thoughtful leader dangle a deal that they know they will not make good on when the time comes?

The day will come

Image by Jake Nelson via thenounproject.com

Because they fear that the person will leave if they don’t offer such a deal.

Offering it in the future seems to ensure a bit more productive time before the day of reckoning. Perhaps they think they can wiggle out of it down the line.

Or perhaps they just haven’t thought through their own feelings on it. Maybe they have a self-destructive streak.

But in any case, when the day comes you can bet on the fact that unless they fulfill their promise in a manner that meets the other party’s expectations there will be, at best, a difficult discussion and, at worst, the demise of their firm as they know it.

Happily, Robert and his minority partner did reach an agreement. Robert apologized for misleading his partner and his partner graciously said, “I understand why you dangled me.”

He went on to say, in essence, “I forgive you.” In this case their relationship was strong enough to weather the storm. But it easily could have gone the other way.