Supernova2008 just wrapped up this past week. If you’re not familiar with this conference, you may learn more at conversation hub. Last year, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) engaged the audience in a lively and insightful summary. You may watch the video that closes the interactive loop here.

As I listened to these passionate interpreters extrapolate from the experience, a few points jumped at me:

Access is ubiquitous - access to capital, relationships, resources.

Things get better the more people use them - these are betters, not goods.

All of your metrics are crap (they do not look at measures of devotion) - eyeballs and buckets don’t tell you the details about what matters and what’s going to be successful.

We don’t have a culture of getting good data - we have data filtered through the people who often have the least reason to give us accurate information.

Backchannels matter - at the event and to your business. If you’ve failed to engage, you will know because the backchannel will boycott you and join another conversation.

We need to pay attention to humans - we need to make things available to customers. They are people in their normal lives, not consumers, targets, or impressions.

Silence has value - we talked about how silence has a sound and a place at Conversation Agent last year.

Purpose beats profit - craft a strategy by who and why and bake that in the DNA of your business.

Your company can be a platform for customers to remix - firms are one economic component. The others are networks and community.

Plastic beats specific - today the economy is made up of plastic things. Things that can be duplicated and remixed and tweaked and hacked into in many ways.

If relationships are liquid, flows beat assets. How do you harness the power of these new forces for your business? Ask ourself, is there a DNA build underneath these technologies? How does what you do provide an experience, how does it make your customers feel? That is the component that is game-changing, not the technology.

The other week, I attended KOOZA, an experience in intense storytelling by Cirque du Soleil. It was the shortest two and half hours I ever spent - that’s because I invested them. My return was a full immersion in the passion and joy of the actors and athletes who shared the product of their love for the art of movement and skill. Plus one insight.

The Juggler

Who could not identify with someone handling multiple items at the same time? Let’s do five, then seven, how about nine? The speed and agility were truly impressive, I think I did not hear a blink in the tent. Yet, the most impressive part of the performance was the smile on his lips.

He was not acting as the juggler, he *was* the juggler. An expression of radiance and an act of love. The rapid-fire movements only added charm and elegance to his performance. There were no boring repetitions, just grace and enchantment.

Can you?

Can you look at your products and services in the every day routine with the same kind of attention?

Can you deploy the same kind of concentration while under pressure to deliver?

Can you display the same level of passion about what you do?

Then you are a creator - of product, price, place, promotion; of experience.

There is Love in Creation

In marketing 2.0 experience is key. When you open the door to conversation, what comes through is your stance, the smile on your lips, the belief in your mind, the love in your heart. That is the passion that triggers participation, inspires empowerment and leads to purpose, the four Ps of new marketing.

How do you learn to love the stuff you market? In the same way you learn to embrace the marketplace for the stuff you’ve got: by letting your customers be part of the action. They call it 2.0 for a reason - you are the second, they are the first.

[The Juggler is at about minute 5:30 of this 7:36 minute video]

An interesting study from the University of Texas recently showed that the typical information posted on social networking sites – favorite books, movies, music, and quotes; major; hometown; and similar personal items – doesn’t always give others an accurate impression of you.

When the researchers tested so called “friends” of a user on basic questions like those found on social networking sites, the information did not help users figure out what others were “really” like. Instead, the researchers found that users’ personalities were much better understood if they posted things on their profile like their most embarrassing or proudest moment, or their spirituality.

What can marketers learn from this study?

To me, I think it says a lot about a brand! If a brand posts very light information on a Facebook company page, has few conversations in the blogosphere, and isn’t really engaging, I expect the researchers would say the same about the brand – people don’t know what it’s “really” like.

But if the brand is creating interesting content, commenting in the blogosphere, reacting to postings with senior leaders, and maybe even having a misstep or two online, in my eyes it makes the brand real. Now I’m not saying to let it all hang out and anything goes online. But if you can tend toward letting go of your defenses and creating some controversy, perhaps you will be much better understood.

One of the big shifts in the marketing paradigm today is in the relationship of customers to the sales process. The broadcast marketing model was all about persuading customers to buy (by interrupting with effective, outbound messages). The P2P marketing model is based on inspiring customers to both buy and advocate your brand to others (by providing relevant products, service, content, and dialogue).

Last week’s BusinessWeek cover story showed the new model at work – in the nascent growth of Mac computers in corporate environments. The Mac may finally be getting some traction in companies outside of the traditional niche of design and communications firms.

The intriguing part of the story is that this growth is happening despite the fact that Apple has no corporate sales force. This is intentional. Steve Jobs has argued that companies can succeed by focusing on corporate or consumer buyers, but not both. (Agree? Comments? Counter examples?)

What is driving the Mac’s entry into the corporate environment is that managers are finally giving in to growing requests from employees to bring a Mac into the office place. Companies like IBM and Cisco are allowing pilot programs where a few dozen employees are allowed to switch from Windows to Mac OS, in order to gauge the impact on the organization. (Has any manager ever been faced with employees clamoring to allow Windows into the workplace?)

Part of this shift may be driven by the catastrophic roll-out of Microsoft Vista last year (like many, I’m sticking to my XP guns). But the Mac “pilot” programs are also testament to the power of inspiring a community of customers to support your brand, rather than persuading them to buy from you because they have no other viable choice.

Personality Not Included – a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone?

You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

But new media changes that paradigm and enables every brand to have a voice. From the smallest of firms to the largest and from the most obscure products to the most complex services. This is something every brand manager in every company should be working on right now – opening up your brand to be more conversational!

Which is exactly why Rohit Bhargava wrote his new book entitled Personality not Included. It’s not just another book about social media – it’s a book about how to regain a brand personality.

I had a chance to catch up with Rohit and discuss questions I had after reading the book. I hope you enjoy my interview with him as much as I did.

About Rohit

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, a leading agency, in helping clients navigate the social media universe. He publishes the Influential Marketing blog, ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world, and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company.

Rohit is also the author of the newly released book, Personality Not Included, published internationally by McGraw-Hill. A guide for companies on how authenticity is the new standard that brands need live up to in the social media era, the book has received significant early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

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Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

That’s the reason that Charlene Li and her Forrester Research colleague Josh Bernoff wrote their new, appropriately named book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

In the book, they describe the strategies and stages every company needs to go through to listen to, talk to, energize and embrace the groundswell. I had a chance to catch up with Charlene to get some answers to questions that came to me as I read the book and compared my social strategy with their recommendations. So I hope you enjoy this podcast …

About Charlene

Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0 through her work over the past nine years with the respected technology and market research company Forrester Research. She is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts. An accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, she often appears at industry events and delivered the keynote speech at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in 2007.

Charlene analyzes how companies can use technologies — like blogs, social networks, RSS, tagging, and widgets — to meet business objectives. She started her own analyst blog in 2004 and is regularly cited as America’s most influential analyst blogger. She shares her blog with Josh Bernoff.

Previously, Charlene led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and ran its San Francisco office. She has also been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, and served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Charlene has managed new-product development for the San Jose Mercury News and has also been a strategy consultant for Monitor Company. She holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

Charlene lives in San Mateo, Calif., with her husband and two children, all of whom are happy, engaged members of the groundswell.

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 Riding the Groundswell of Social Media: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (16)

This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

• Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
• “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
• “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
• While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
• Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money-making model.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

One of the first instances of this to hit the marketplace was Ogivly & Mather’s Dove “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (ok yes it is B2C but sometimes we marketers can take inspiration from our B2C brethren) Which won the 2006 Grand EFFIE Award and for good reason, They did a great job finding a powerful attribute of their brand and made a very inviting campaign around it that engaged their key audiences into a conversation. Evidence this by the nearly 3000 blog entries about it on Tecnhorati, the 2,000,000 viewers of their video on YouTube and you will see that they got the blogosphere humming about an ad campaign. Now I am not professing you drop everything and just do some clever video with your ad campaign, I do applaud the use of video to make their campaign more viral. What can we learn from this as technology marketers? Take a look at my next example.

Now compare this to the “Greg the Architect” campaign from TIBCO. Here is a B2B example that took a very different approach to making their technology funny, and engaging. What they have done is told the TIBCO story through a series of episodic vignettes and allows the viral component to kick in. Viewers are bound to have an opinion on these videos and so is the blogosphere. Also they have given the audience something to react to for better or worse rather than say “we do SOA better than the next guy”. Also don’t forget about the reaction internally to these videos and how that helps give everyone in the organization a conversation starter for the next meeting.

So why is this good news for technology companies? Because for the first time ever, technology companies specifically in B2B can lead the way using technology tools to get their message out to the masses for very little money. Just one tactic like using a video on YouTube can reach 325,000 viewers and engage them with your brand but more importantly with a message that they have sought out. But how to you take something so tactical like a video and make it part of an overall approach to your brand?

Here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line for technology firms is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with traditional media only any more, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

I was looking over the posts on this blog and realized that we are asking a lot of questions. We’ve covered a great deal of ground in a short span. Some would say it wasn’t fast enough. After all The Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999 - well, it’s still very much news today.

Others tend to take the new ways for granted. Chances are that some of those others are your customers. Thanks in large part to the downsizing, right sizing and readjustments that are still going on in corporate America:

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.”

Thank you, Web. As marketers, many of us are starting to ask a series of good questions:

• Is the mobile Web dead?
• What is the role of corporate marketing in multi-brand environments?
• Can a community be successful with low brand awareness?

Does the answer to those questions matter to us as customers? I started challenging myself to answer this last question every day at work. What do you think?

“New media has created a new marketing environment where the old rules of marketing no longer apply.”

- Cindy Gordon, VP New Media and Marketing Partnerships, Universal Orlando Resorts

How are you different? How are you relevant? Who loves your brand? Answer these questions with confidence and you can harness the speed and efficiency of online tools to allow your fans to spread news of your product. The key idea is that other individuals, not you, are spreading the word.

In addition to having a product or service that is buzz-worthy, what are some of the ingredients you need to reach word-of-mouse status? According to David Meerman Scott in his recent ChangeThis manifesto - The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How Word of Mouse Spreads Your Ideas for Free:

Great Web content in the form of a video, blog entry, interactive tool, or e-book that provides valuable information (or information that is groundbreaking, or amazing, or hilarious, or involves a celebrity)

+

a network of people to light the fire and links that make your content very easy to share

“‘Make Your Message Memorable.’ Simply put, you have little chance that something will go viral unless, like a disease, it can be spread easily mouth-to-mouth. For that to happen, your message has to be super tight and easy to transmit in as few words as possible. ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ is the answer to ‘what is an iPod?’ Before that, the Macintosh was introduced as ‘The computer for the rest of us.’”

- Steve Chazin, author of Marketing Apple

Is word-of-mouse guaranteed? Not by a long shot says Meerman Scott, and I agree. If you think like a venture capitalist or film producer, you will have an easier time taking a lot of bite size content to market and see some of it take off. Some of the ideas shared in the eBook are:

• invite people from outside the organization to brainstorm with you - they will have less bias towards certain aspects of the execution and provide insights on how to make it more fun and different

• develop a host of ideas, instead of working on just one. There is a bell curve in everything, including content-driven marketing initiatives. If two out of ten work out, you will gain a lift from those two so care for them. Don’t persist in backing ideas that are not taking off.

• have no buts, please. Since you don’t know what will work, stop trying to guess or talk yourself out of not pursuing an idea. My favorite example in the manifesto is the IBM mockumentaries on page 20.

• be a storyteller - give yourself license to create a compelling, engaging story that entertains your audience. Try different things. I find that much of the problem with corporate white papers and brochures, aside from not being exciting to read, is that they are cookie cutter.

• try video - we are visual creatures. Three minutes of home made narrative that is light, clear in its simplicity, and playful can do more for your brand than the most expensive message. If it works out, it could become a series.

• tell everyone. For example, although the contributors to this blog are well known, this site is relatively young still. If you’ve found the content her useful, help spread the word.

Word-of-mouse or viral marketing is not about buying access. Meerman Scott concludes:

The best word-of-mouse efforts promote your organization and its products and services by delivering great online content (video, an e-book, a great blog post, an interesting photo or graphic) that is directly tied to your products, services, and ideas. Successful viral marketing campaigns sell your ideas in a creative way that people want to share with their friends, colleagues, and family members.