Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Open Sauce Feedback

Richard Wise, Chief Strategic Officer of Agent 16, has given the following thoughtful feedback on our Open Sauce session in New York:  “This was a memorable day of discovery, creativity, risk- taking and trust-building as James and Johnnie deftly introduced us to a new kind of freedom and inspiration.”

Lego's Citizen Developers

Wired has a great write-up about how Lego harnessed the open source ethic and managed the opening up of its new product development processes.  I think this quote says it all: "In Billund Denmark (Lego's HQ) not only is the customer always right, he's also a candidate for the R&D team. And he'll work for small plastic blocks."  It's fair to say that Lego have an advantage due to the nature of its product but as Johnnie and I have found at our Open Sauce sessions, once people understand the thinking, the OS ethic can be applied in the most surprising ways.

The World is Following Scoble

Scoble, Microsoft's modern marketeer, defends himself following allegations of being an "edge case".  Well said sir...

PR's Big Opportunity

Here at Collaborate Marketing we've long thought that the changing media landscape and growth of the 5th Estate offers bags of opportunity for the PR industry - so long overshadowed by TV advertising.  Oliver Blanchard at Corante agrees that now is the time for PR to reinvent itself while Marcel speculates that PR's future role is going to be more about content creation than media relations.  Of course, as the Economist points out, the PR biz is in fine fettle so will probably be happy to stick with the status quo.  However, the fact that the US version of PR Week (not known for it's, err, modern stance) is carrying an article about open source marketing suggests that the business is changing.  And tonight I am off to a Microsoft launch event that I have been invited along to in my role as the Modern Marketing blogger.  Interesting times.

McFan Reviews McCorp

This is good.  The brand fan McChronicles blog is reviewing the new 'official' McCorporate blog.  Now let me think - which one am I most interested in....?

Open Source Wine

Johnnie and I met Jason Korman of Stormhoek yesterday to chat about the successes the company has had using blogging and an open source marketing approach.  Great stuff.  You can download the interview here and read Johnnie's interview notes here.

Open Juice

The Open Business blog has an interview here with Eric Von Hippel, MIT professor and author of Democratising Innovation (free CC download here).  Hippel's a great read with loads of case studies and open-juice for the modern marketeer.  Here's one quote that makes sense to me:  “Firms that understand the distributed innovation process and users role in it can change factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate and direction in ways that create value.”

Why Conversations Are Like Snowflakes

In the blog reporting services we create for brands, one of the most difficult aspects to get right is the balance between meaningful aggregated trends and actual grassroots conversation.  Uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis picked up Hill and Knowlton's Niall Cook here last week for presenting blogging conversations only as trends.  Niall is a good guy and he responds to Jeff's point as a comment - but it's an important point. While the huge number of aggregation systems out there are able to provide an overview, none of them are nearly sophisticated enough to provide an understanding of what is being said by individuals.  Sometimes, people are surprised to hear our answer to the conundrum of understanding what hundreds or even thousands of blogs are saying about a brand.  Our cunning strategy is....

New Social Circles

The New York Times has published a great article about how a new generation - The Millenials -  is organising itself around technologies and the implications that has for marketing and advertising.  Many twentysomethings now create vibrant online social circles through which almost every part of their lives is filtered for relevance and credibility.  For marketeers this means that unless a brand can enter that circle it is likely to just be ignored.  So brands have to work hard to present themselves in a way that clicks with The Millenials outlook on the world.  "When someone wants to share it, forward it, record it, take a picture of it, whatever the case may be, that puts it into a form of currency." (Via Three Minds).

Typepad Woes

Here are at Modern Marketing we have been suffering with the Typepad service we use for this blog.  My whole system went down on Friday and TP is still not able to help me get back up and running properly.  I like the TP service alot and recommend it widely but I won't be quite so quick to praise it to others after this incident...