Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, is putting together a list of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers at large enterprises.

In his post asking people to submit their names to the list Jeremiah says; “I’m often asked which companies have one of the two emerging roles, (companies love to benchmark against their peers) so I’ve decided to start a list, not only to back my research, but also for those wanting to show to their companies ‘hey this is starting to happen for real’.”

Jeremiah defines a Social Media Strategist as someone whose job is “to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success”

The Community Manager’s “job is to primarily be a community advocate is a social media user, and is externally focused, they are primarily the face to the online community. As companies scale, I expect to see these types or roles appear often for each product group at larger companies, they often report directly to the strategist or at least have a dotted line.”

There’s another list for those of us, like CreativeFeed, specialize in managing the conversation for our clients.

- Arthur

A few years ago, we helped Dr. Romanelli develop and implement the international marketing program for a co-branded product line he was doing with Jaeger-LeCoultre. The idea was to excite influencers, reach tomorrow’s luxury watch buyers, and get today’s buyers into the shops….around the world. Judging from the amount of global press coverage, traffic to the campaign site, and some spot checks at retailers where the watches sold-out, the project succeeded.

So we were happy to see this week that JLC is continuing with this PR/marketing strategy, making it happen with a fascinating and beautiful production collaboration with Marc Newson. It’s a good roadmap for how an old luxury brand can get the message out that it is fresh and relevant:

• Browsing daily newsletter from CoolHunting.com

• See a blurb on a new Jaeger-LeCoultre/Mark Newson collaboration (via Watchismo)

• Remember that JLC has a history of surprising product collaborations with artists

• Notice that the collaboration seems true to the JLC brand and technology

• Follow a link to the JLC site to see what else they’re doing. …Read More…

Welcome to 27 West 20th St, NYC, NY 10011.

Our Top 10 tips for the fashion and luxury brand CEO on interactive marketing.

1. Interactive marketing is a multiplier for your offline PR and advertising investment. Done well, you can expect to see immediate and quantifiable results.

2. Don’t confuse eCommerce or a lush website with interactive marketing. They are the cart, not the horse. Have a strong horse.

3. Online Media is: niche web sites, a forwarded email, online video, interviews, ads, blogs, search, social, cultural and business networks, etc. The right mix can build your brand and grow your sales in ways you can’t imagine. Have people who can, and give them a budget.

4. Embrace and celebrate those who influence your customers online, just as you would a journalist or editor.

5. Think of a short phrase that extols your product without naming your brand. Google that phrase. If your brand doesn’t lead the results, you have a problem opportunity.

6. Wag your Long Tail. Your brand has a rich, fascinating, and personal story. Tell it online and unexpected customers will show up on your doorstep.

7. Loyal customers are certainly invaluable, and they are online. Have a strategy for maintaining and leveraging their enthusiasm in order to grow market share and sales.

8. Asia is key, of course. And consumers there use the Internet differently than those in the West. Have a distinct online marketing strategy — and the resources to execute it – for Asia.

9. Evolve your website. Keep adding rich product information & functionality, brand news, entertaining or artistic content, all with a clear path to sales (online and/or offline). Measure activity on the site. See what works. Change what doesn’t. Repeat.

10. Don’t silo “interactive marketing”. Champion these concepts across your company, and you will see real gains in overall business performance.

-Michael

Big business better think small if they expect success in the digital world. Corporate bureaucracy drains the life out of marketing campaigns. By the time everyone at the table has had their say, an innovative idea is generally transformed into yet another iteration of the same old safe thing. Then everyone wonders why their “new” blog/widget/forum/flash demo flopped and resolves never to do anything that inventive again.

Rather than dissect each new idea to death, adopt a start-up mentality when launching a new product or service. Since you’re basically starting from scratch, capitalize on this fresh slate. Startups aren’t afraid to be innovative, their mentality is all about risk taking, customer engagement and honestly. One can go after the competition full speed ahead without abandoning logic or taking undue risks. Rather than burn money on trial balloons like big companies, a must startup rely on deep knowledge of and consistent interaction with their market to decide what risks make sense.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and startups understand the power of conversation better than big enterprises. In a startup, senior management personnel talk directly to everyone in the company (and everyone can be forthright with executives), and everyone in a startup interacts directly with the company’s customers. That conversation results in a depth of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain. To get that startup buzz going strip away some organizational layers, connect directly with customers, talk to them not at them, respond to their needs, take some chances, have a little fun, and get passionate about your business again.

-Arthur

I use the New York Times Technology news stories to gauge what services and tech have gone mainstream. The Times doesn’t do a great job of breaking tech news, but they do a wonderful job of telling me what’s become accepted, useful, essential.

Today, David Carr has an interesting piece on Facebook’s value as a work/network tool. There’s nothing new here — even the bit about a senior executive’s assistant managing his/her Facebook profile — but Carr does raise some interesting points about a maturing Facebook and digital networking.

Snipped from the article:

I think of Facebook as a middle ground between business and pleasure, sort of MySpace for post-adolescents or LinkedIn for professional late adopters like me….

As we speak, my Facebook page, a couple of months old, is crawling past 200 friends. There are people on there whom I have known since they wore skinny ties and distressed sport coats, and there are others whom I would not know if they walked up with name tags on the size of sandwich boards. But we have friends in common, and in the parlance of social media, we are connected.

As we speak, my Facebook page, a couple of months old, is crawling past 200 friends. There are people on there whom I have known since they wore skinny ties and distressed sport coats, and there are others whom I would not know if they walked up with name tags on the size of sandwich boards. But we have friends in common, and in the parlance of social media, we are connected.

Although he used to be a reporter, we are not what I would call peers. He wrote one of the greatest sports books ever, and oh, one of the best books about city government ever. “Friday Night Lights” became a movie and then a television series and apart from me being a hopeless fanboy of the show, we have nothing in common. Other than Facebook, of course, where we are “friends,” after he was referred by our mutual friend Vernon Loeb of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Taking that supplied noun as a permission, I sent Mr. Bissinger a message on Facebook and asked for advice. We got on the phone and I found out exactly, precisely what I wanted to know from, as they say in the Web world, a highly trusted source.

-Michael

What if products could talk? What if consumers could interact directly with posters and packaging, if images on paper could provide answers to the questions that people have after viewing an ad?

And if products themselves could act as their own advertisements, how would that change marketing? Would this be the end, once and for all, of interruptive advertising? What happens when a consumer who is in shopping mode suddenly has instant access from anywhere to reviews, cost comparisons, and a wealth of other information about a product? How does that change the conversation?

Now is the time to conjure up answers to these questions as a new disruptive technology that enables products, packaging and ads to communicate via cell phones upon request may soon change everything we thought we knew about marketing.

We all know that old-school advertising is coming to the end of its lifespan and the general drift is towards creating content that consumers want to interact with — which takes time and money when done right. But SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get image recognition-based mobile marketing technology almost instantly mobilizes all existing marketing collateral, turning any image associated with a brand into an engaging connection between that brand and consumers.

…Read More…