Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Happy New Year

Steve Hall at Adrants nicely sums up my own year-end feelings about the way the  digital world is moving:  "The next few years certainly do feel as though they will be filled with vast sea changes in the world of media with major companies ceding a lot of their customers/viewers to shows like Rocketboom. The rise of blogging and the so-called Web 2.0 type tools have made it ridiculously easy for the average Joe to produce content other people actually enjoy consuming, even over content from major media companies."  Or in other words, '06 is where the fun starts.  Happy New Year to modern marketeers everywhere.

Open The Soda

Jones Soda Co. is making a stir in the US by taking an open source approach to its market.  The founder Peter van Stolk addresses one aspect of the control debate in a FC article:  "The customer's not always right. F -- - that. If you're always trying to cater to everyone, you have no soul."  But Stolk also succintly describes the advantages of openess: "If you're able to listen to customers from their perspective," he says, "not everything they say will make sense. Not everything they do will be right. But you'll know more about what you have to do because of it."  The article also offers a professional-speak definition of the Jones story from strat-guru C.K.Prahalad who refers to it as the, "co-creation of unique value". 

Chewing Digital Fat

I met up with Alex Barnett, Aaron Savage and James Governor this afternoon for a few seasonal ales and a fat-chew about all matters digital.  Alex is forging ahead in his area at a pathological rate and it was good to hear his Englishman-abroad-in-Redmond's take on Web 2.0.  Aaron sparked a conversation about the value of trademarks for small companies - as opposed to the protection that Google can offer.  And James Governor was regaling us with his vision for declarative living - which fits in nicely with an Outside-In view of the world.  We also found an innovative technique to finesse elevator pitches and I discovered that all the really clever folk are living in Hawaii - but that's another story...

At The Blog Altar

In his Guardian column Charles Arthur warns against the dangers of online 'cults' that appear around community-powered, state-of-the-art, social software systems.  Such is the fun of playing with the myriad of web tools now available to us all, that it's easy to forget that they are just that - tools.  Clever, easily accessible, empowering tools.  But still tools.  "There is a quasi-religious fervour surrounding the "rightness" of Wikipedia, or Apple's products, or RSS vs Atom. To outsiders, it makes little or no sense. To those inside, it is the most important topic they can imagine."  For the modern marketeer, this should be kept front-of-mind.  It's new and exciting - but watch our for the 'purists' and remember to come up for air.

Honda's Inaccessible Dream

Over at Weiden + Kennedy's London blog they are enjoying some yuletide back-slapping about their latest Honda ad, which is a kind of epic Bond-style adventure with a bit of Will Ferrel's Anchorman thrown in for fun.  The ad is intended to breathe life into Honda's 'Impossible Dream' notion and it does the job pretty well.  The W+K folk have been pinning some reviews about the ad up on their blog, all of which are gushingly favourable.  I posted to the W+K blog asking if they'd had any poor reviews and they replied that they haven't.  Which I think is a shame.  These days the most engaging communications occurs where there is room for a decent debate.   We may sit in the cinema and enjoy W+K's epic, but only brand stories we can join in with give us the insights we need to actually purchase.

Blogs Schmogs

I've only just got round to reading Kevin Kelly's Web 2.0 and beyond article.  But darn it's good.  His main point is that there are so many tiny, technological developments occuring that it's easy to overlook the resulting social upheaval.  Obviously, Kelly puts it a thousand times more eloquently: "The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous."  In an article destined to fuel a million powerpoint presentations he also nails the most surprising fact about today's web:  "The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event."   Or, if I might paraphrase the great Kelly-one: "Blogs, schmogs, this is where the real fun starts".  The question for us modern marketeers is how do we take part in massive online cultures where collaborative action is the driving force?  Here's my answer.  What's yours?

Plugged In

Business Week has this helpful, broadranging, article about social networking sites (think MySpace, Buzz-Oven, Xanga, Classface, PhotoBucket, FaceBook) and their relationships with the commercial world.  I particularly liked the comments from the young networkers.  Talking about Coke's sponsorship of BuzzOven: "I know they care; they think what we're doing is cool,"; "I don't know if they care about the music or they just want their name on it, but knowing they're involved helps,"; "They let us do our thing. They don't censor what we do."  But this more critical one from the comments section is probably the most enlightening of all...

Brands On Open Mike

If you are in charge of a brand or corporate reputation, an interesting question to pose yourself is, "what would people say about us if we gave them a video camera and asked them to say exactly what they thought - without any censorship or direction".  Web browser company Mozilla Corp is trying out such an "open mike" route now.  If that makes you break out into a slightly uncomfortable light sweat, it may be worth asking yourself, why?  In our experience with the blog monitoring service we run, most brands get a pretty balanced write-up in the open blogosphere.  Mozilla is an unsual company because it's come rocketing straight out of the heart of the Open Source Movement.  But it's grand experiments such as these that the rest of us mere mortals can learn from.  Our job is to eek off small learnings to help perk up our traditional brands that don't benefit from such ultra-modern marketing pedigrees.

Modern Marketing Tag

I've got a tag running at del.icio.us which is an extension of the topics I cover on this blog.  If you are interested in what is happening in the fast-moving world of blogs, mash-ups, podcasts, consumer generated media and all the things that are being wrapped up as Web 2.0 you might find it useful.  And, of course, you can add to it if you wish.

Weinberger Rules

It's great fun to think about the new social aspects of the blog world and the weird and the wonderful things that are emerging.  But if you just can't be bothered to tackle the really tricky stuff, read David "clue train" Weinberger instead.  Here he writes about the way truth is changed in a web environment.  That might sound incredibly dull but DW is also very funny (he used to write jokes for Woodly Allen).  Here's a typical quote, "The old, romantic view of truth was lonely. This one is social, and thus is joyful."  And here he is giving a great talk at the Oxford Internet Institute.  Wonderful.