Too often I hear “I’m too busy. I need more time. I’m tired of junk,” when friends are describing the Internet and its endless possibilities.

I implore you to simply change the paradigm and let the “power of the Internets” come to you.

With an hour’s worth of work and a valid email address, you web surfers can get experts, tastemakers and style gurus working for you.

Google is SO yesterday. Thanks to brands getting smarter about their offerings, gone are the days I have to go searching the web.

My bevy of smartly written, interesting and well-curated email newsletters provides me all the news and info that’s relevant to my world, in one place.

Today, I don’t have to go in search of content. The information I want comes to me.

News? NYTimes has a PDF of the day’s top headlines in my inbox when I awake, keeping me up to date on current events.

Sports? ESPN will blast you alerts of your favorite team’s final box score as soon as the

Culture? Between a blend of Daily Candy, Urban Daddy, Thrillist and relatively new addition, Very Short List from media mogul Jared Kushner, I’m up to date on what’s happening in town and around the world.

Setup time: 1 hour.

Daily perusal: 5 to 15 minutes.

With a little upfront care to manage my preferences at choice outlets and selecting the right newsletters, I’m armed with enough information everyday for lunch and dinner conversation and perhaps a new book, movie or designer to check out.

All without having to leave the comfort of my inbox.

It may be a cheap shot to kick Maclaren strollers when they’re down, but the amputated finger storm that made it all the way to the Financial Times this week is a textbook example of why an active ongoing social media program is an essential facet of any good PR/marketing strategy.

By participating in the online conversation — having a company blog that is informative on issues important to parents (say, safely transporting children), or by contributing to customer sites, blogs and forums tangentially related to Maclaren products – the company would have been a bit less tone deaf and flat-footed in the face of such sensational news.

The FT does a good job today in “How Not To Take Care of a Brand” by John Gapper of detailing the missteps: ranging from delayed and insufficient reaction to complaints in the US (but not in other markets) to twittering and posting crisis/recall-specific pages that turned out to be dead links.

Know thy customer: “Anything relative to child safety tends to be off-the-charts viral,” says Pete Blackshaw, a brand consultant for Nielsen Online. According to Blackshaw’s data, new mothers are three times more likely than others to use social media and start blogs. “Given the higher order of sensitivity, parents are much more diligent,” says Blackshaw. “They want to talk to friends, family and even strangers about their decisions. They’ll go the extra distance.” Yahoo News

A pervasive product being used by such a connected and impassioned customer-base is usually the Holy Grail for a brand — and a strategic ongoing social media program is certainly essential for getting there. Maclaren shows us one other reason to be engaged and in-touch online: it can also help a brand withstand the riptide popular discontent.

Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

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What kills good innovative marketing campaigns before they even have a chance to go live? Often it’s misguided ideas about control and the place a brand really has in consumers’ lives.

We need to ask ourselves, each and every time we come up with another brilliant concept for social/viral/user-generated content/engagement campaigns — “what’s in it for them?”

“Them” are the consumers, the people who you hope to captivate. And unless your brand is truly an essential part of peoples’ lifestyles (think Apple Computers or Harley Davidson) the hard truth is that consumers really aren’t interested in devoting chunks of their own time to talking about your products, bragging about what they bought from you, playing a flash game centered on your brand, decorating their desktops with your logo, or participating in any other brand-centered activity … unless we provide them with a compelling reason to do so.

Don’t think you can fool consumers with social networking plans that pretend to be meeting places but are really intended to get people talking only about the glories of your product, blogs filled with nothing but company news (and carefully monitored comment systems), or widgets that enable people to interact only with a brand rather than with each other. It’s not going to work and if you build it they will not come.
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A friend – and senior executive at a globally recognized department store – contacted me recently for advice.  In the competitive world of retail, how should we organize and manage our people who market and sell across channels, to develop ideas in concert, to be more creatively effective and cost-efficient?

That conversation came back to me this weekend while I was reading a study from Accenture called “Transformation: Changing Ahead of the Curve.”  In it, I recognized the advice I gave my friend. …Read More…

“Big companies talk the talk when it comes to adapting to the digital age. But do they walk the talk? It’s difficult to reconcile their desire to be nimbler – and more responsive to their customers – with the fact that at big companies budgets are generally scheduled a year in advance.

What’s more, when consumers are increasingly driving the dialogue online about products and services it may be problematic for big companies to be part of the conversation when they deploy a top-down strategy. Arthur Ceria, founder and chief creative officer of CreativeFeed Network, says these sorts of business practices are fast becoming antiquated and may be deterring large enterprises from capitalizing on digital technologies.

Ceria has blogged about the need for big companies to think small if they want success in the digital world. He stresses that, for many large companies, process has started to infringe on creativity.

Big companies grappling with the Internet need to embrace a “sense of discovery,” said Ceria, who has worked with Cisco, Intel and Yahoo, among other major brands. A sense of mission and a sense of awareness are also crucial if big companies want to take advantage of the Web. I recently spoke with Ceria about why bigger is not better in the digital age – and how large enterprises need to change if they want to stay in the game.

I also chatted with Ceria about trends in Web design. Ceria, who has an MFA from Yale University with a focus on graphic design, says far too many companies still treat their Web sites like a “brochure,” rather than a living, breathing “organism” that is part of the company’s DNA.

Enjoy.”

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