Sarah Biedak: Why We Seek the New: A History and Future of Neophilia – An interesting look at why we all are always trying to discover the next best thing.

Jesse Davis: Social media measurement is difficult. There’s no one tool that does it all, no one strategy for measurement, no one department that owns this space, but this article by Fast Company has some interesting thoughts about how to organize, strategize and analyze social media ROI.

Melissa Lion: I don’t condone crying at your desk, however, if you’re up for a bit of a weep and some very beautiful stories from people all over the world, check out DearPhotograph.com. And hand me a tissue.

Julie Yamamoto: Video: where good ideas come from http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU.

Gary Rubin: How social media is changing college athletics and recruiting. http://espn.go.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/7510010/social-media-makes-mark-recruiting

Stefanie Week: Ever wonder what those tech-savvy youth are doing online and with their mobile phones these days? Ekaterina Walter from Intel compiled an impressive list of the top stats for how Gen Y is using technology.

What did you read this week?

Meet the new cloud consumer

Are you ready for the next billion? There are 7 billion people on the planet today, and another billion are predicted to arrive in the next 10 years. A child born today will experience a terabyte of data in a single year. She will own her first computer by the age of five. And with another 15 billion connected devices coming online in the next 3 to 4 years, the way she will experience the world will be fundamentally different than the way we understand it.

The new cloud consumer is redefining ownership. This generation understands that people don’t own entertainment content anymore—it’s simply borrowed from the cloud.

It’s time we start thinking about brands in the same way.

Tips for succeeding in the cloud

Encouraging your consumers to become your brand advocates is the new currency of the cloud. Creating opportunities for them to have authentic peer-to-peer communication is the best way to continue to build an engaged customer base. Doing so enables your customers to promote your brand far more effectively than relying on traditional top-down messages, which often come across as heavy-handed, no matter how clever the headline.

No matter the type of cloud platform, and regardless of who your customer is, be it a Fortune 500 CXO or a 14-year-old girl who is considering diet cola, the following guidelines can help build your brand in the cloud.

Content. King of the Cloud.

Drive your success by giving your consumers content they can own, feel a part of, and share with their peers.

Create engaging content. Think infographics instead of whitepapers. Short videos over lengthy manifestos. Develop animations and simple, useful tools and apps that encourage customers to engage with your brand.

Embrace a syndication engine. Engagement is not a one-time event, it’s an ongoing conversation, requiring constant encouragement and updating. Push content out to your consumer regularly and consistently.

Create content that is adaptable to all devices, but optimized for each platform. An incredible iPhone app looks less impressive on the iPad, for example.

Brand your content, not the content container. Find subtle, smart ways to keep your brand ever present within the content, not just on your landing page.

Going beyond Content

Add a thought leadership strategy to the mix. Doing so positions your company and brand as an innovator. It’s critical, especially considering how quickly data—and brand advocates—move in the cloud.

Capturing the Cloud

Are your customers talking about your brand? If so, where? And how often? Use a dashboard that provides a single view of your brand’s relevance across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (and many others).

Track your brand’s impressions and reach in the cloud. Use analytics to figure out how many people are seeing your brand and, even more importantly, sharing it with friends and colleagues. Doing so can help shape content responses and further maintain your brand’s momentum in the cloud.

While the cloud can aid in building your brand, increased awareness isn’t the only benefit it has to offer. At CMD, we believe that taking your company to the cloud can help reduce costs, improve efficiency and boost flexibility. What do you think some of the biggest advantages of the cloud will be for your business in the future?

But first, the rules

Over the years I’ve developed a bunch of loose rules to follow when I’m doing “outreach,” also known as “posting links to stuff on the Web.” I recently broke one of those rules and that’s what prompted this post. So here they are:

1. Invest in the community. Posting “cold” on a community you’ve never taken part in is commonplace for marketers, but it makes sense do more, and try to participate in a community—especially the ones that are most important to you and your client. That means posting and building up a legitimate history you can point to in case people ever accuse you of being a worthless shill.
   

   The typical forum response to anything posted by marketers

2. The first sentence of your post should state your name and what your intentions are. Example: “Hi, I’m Erik Sebellin-Ross and I’m posting here on behalf of my client, Acme Ink Company, because I think people in this forum might find our newest pen of interest.”
3. No bullshit. If you don’t know the answer, say so and try to get it. If getting an answer is really difficult or not feasible, be honest about it and don’t set expectations you can’t meet.
4. Subtlety is best. The link to your news/product/service should be buried underneath things of genuine value to the community, if you can get away with it. This balances the negative (shilling something is perceived as negative no matter what you do) with the positive (things that are genuinely interesting).
5. Know the rules of the community where you’re posting. This one is really tough to keep track of.

So what rule did you break, Erik?

I broke number five. I was posting on a forum that I’ve been a regular member of for two years—won’t name it because doing so usually brings the wrath of the gods of the internets upon the discloser—about my wife’s new Kindle book. I was immensely proud and knew people on this forum would get a kick out of it. But I couldn’t leave well-enough alone. Instead of just a plain old post, I made it a Q&A. I’d field the questions and respond to them with her answers. And that’s where I fell afoul of the rules—you can’t “share an account” on this forum, and a moderator not only banned me, he also deleted my thread, which was going pretty darn well and had served to generate some sales in a short period of time.

Thus ended two years of work on my behalf nurturing this account. It also deprived me of my history with a community I genuinely enjoyed taking part in and had gotten great results from marketing to in the past. Yes, I could create a new account anytime, but my cachet was gone.

What’s the lesson?

If you’re participating within a community, the rules typically aren’t a big deal. Odds are you’re taking part in threads that others have started and you run no risk of being banned unless you are trolling, or post something offensive, etc. Common sense is a good-enough guide.

But when you’re proactively initiating something with a community—starting a new thread—it pays to go through my list and make sure everything is kosher. And, when in doubt, contact an admin or mod for permission.

One Hour's Worth of Programming at SXSW

But Darcie Meihoff, Julie Yamamoto, Ben Samples and I will be on the ground for SXSW and we’ll need to coordinate our efforts somehow. (Looking at the chicken cam now . . .)

I’ve downloaded the SXSW app for my phone and I’m checking out SitBy.Us and I’m adding every single topic that looks interesting to my schedule. I’ve double- and triple-booked times. I’m going schedule crazy!! (Cue the chick cam.)

I do know that I’ll be at my own session, From Personal Blogger to Professional Marketer, on March 11. I’m presenting with Deb Rox, and we’ll turn that idea of monetizing one’s blog on its head. I can’t answer how a blogger can monetize a blog, but I can give advice on how to leverage your blogging skills into a marketing position. I’m talking about working at an agency, and Deb’s going to break down how she started her own creative firm with two others and how she uses her blogging skills to help her clients at 3 Smart Girlz. If you’ve not read Deb’s blog, or met Deb in person, you’ve missed one of the funniest women on the internet, and one of the kindest people IRL. So go read her blog now! Or do it after reading this post.

Here’s a roundup of other panels I’ll attend, or not attend but encourage one of my colleagues to go to and take copious notes, then go through each point one by one with me. Because that’ll be fun after a long day of sessions, am I right?!

Friday, March 11

From Personal Blogger to Professional Marketer This is the must-see panel of the conference. Also, it’s my panel.

Hate Gone Viral

Saturday, March 12

SXSW Newcomer/Veteran Meetup I’m hoping to get some guidance here.

Chicken or the Egg? What Search Activity Conveys This appeals to my inner snoop and to my desire to learn more about SEO. I wonder if there will be actual chickens . . .

Social Media Data Visualization: Mapping the World’s Conversations Again, inner snoop and I love a good data visualization.

Lurkers: Your Most Important Community Members I hope they’ll cover how to encourage lurkers to leave a comment. Are you lurking now? Tell me how I can get you to comment in the comments section. (Did you see what I did there?)

Sunday, March 13

Can the Internet Make Us Happy? Answer: yes.

Content First, Everything Else Second—I might be the choir getting preached to in this one, but it’s good to be among your people, you know?

27 (Fun!) Ways to Kill Your Online Community—Patrick O’Keefe is presenting here. I saw him at BlogWorld and he is fantastic.

Mashable Party I hear this is the place to be.

I leave on Monday because I know my limits. What’s your SXSW strategy? And if you’ve been to SXSW before, tell me the best thing you learned at a past conference.

New page, new possibilities

A few ways Facebook’s changes have improved the brand and user experience:

• Custom tabs with iframes allow brands to streamline content and pass data directly to a hosting or analytics service. This is a big one, I’ll explain later.
• Admins can set and receive alerts based on fan activity and engagement.
• Brand page layouts are now similar to personal pages—five photos on the top and tabs on the left.
• Both fans and administrators have new filters for the wall that help prioritize wall content.
• Admins can now represent their page when interacting with other pages.

Which Facebook changes will have the biggest impact on marketers?

1. iframes, additional analytics and opportunities to serve up highly interactive content make custom tabs even hotter. With iframes, marketers can deliver more target—based on the user’s location and referral source—and more engaging content than ever before. Add Google Analytics to any tab for a deeper understanding of how users are interacting with its content.
2. The ability to comment or like other pages as your brand page leads to a larger potential audience. As part of your Facebook strategy, consider creating a program of interaction, where you post with your page identity to related pages and groups as a member of the community. By contributing positively, you’re likely to draw potential fans back to your page.

Bonus Facebook Tips!

• Not all likes are created equal. Just because someone likes you doesn’t mean they’ll consistently see your updates and posts. Facebook uses a complex algorithm to display posts on news feeds. Ongoing engagement with followers is critical to get value from your likes.
• Facebook ads are easy to manage, and with careful messaging and targeting can be very effective at drawing people to your page or your website.
• Post questions, activities and cool content. Try to put some type of link in your wall posts. The more interaction the fan has with your posts, the better.
• Facebook likes are now crawled by Bing. Your search results are likely to be influenced by what people are saying about you on Facebook. Here’s a peek at CMD on Bing:

How are some of your favorite brands using the new Facebook page design? What innovative ways are you using it? Tell us in comments.

Today, the medium is just as important as it was in the past, but the way people consume the message has changed.

A product demo now serves as a conversation starter or a building block for deeper discussions.  A newspaper article may be shared more times on Facebook than it was read in its original format. An advertisement created for TV may have more views online than in prime time. No longer is the consumption of media an isolated experience. Most targets will see multiple impressions of your message across different formats and they need to all build together to tell a cohesive story.

Today an integrated marketing department (or agency) is one that can take the best content and strongest engagement and create multidiscipline experiences.  It’s also an organization that knows what resources it has available and understands how to create efficiencies by reusing and repurposing its content for maximum reach and effectiveness and then measuring it all in one place.

It’s not enough for a Web marketer to be the best Web experience developer; your site is never experienced in isolation. You need to be a storyteller and a demand generator and understand the roles of search, social media and other tactics that can drive traffic to the experiences you create, and leverage that experience throughout the sales cycle. It’s about delivering the right information to the right place at the right time.

Some questions to ask yourself for maximizing an integrated approach:

• Are you looking at customer engagement points as part of a mosaic of activities? Are they unique touch points?
• Who in your organization is producing content? Are there other places you can use that content?
• Is search marketing built into everything you do?
• Are your PR and social media teams actively driving demand for your Web tools, and vice versa?
• Are you spending more time briefing partners than strategizing with them?

Ed. note: Kevin is one of the newest members of the CMD team and specializes in integrating digital campaign approaches to create synergies in content and engagement for the agency’s clients.

Why do I need to read this?

One day — it could be tomorrow, it could be in ten years — you will find yourself at a fork in the road. One path represents something you don’t understand, and at the end of that path lays the possibility of great things. The other path is what you do understand, and at the end of that path is an expectation of success. More often than not, we choose the path of success. In fact, that’s probably the responsible thing to do. But that other path, that’s dangerous.

Taking the dangerous path will result in one of three outcomes for your work: Failure, “meh”, or success. But it also has another outcome that is incredibly important — you’ll grow and benefit from the experience personally.

Because I’ve been willing to get out of my comfort zone when I believe the risk warrants it, I’ve learned to edit audio and video, have live-streamed content from conferences, understand Photoshop, build Web pages and blogs, setup servers and fix computers, and more. I’m versatile, and I didn’t have to pay anyone a cent to learn it all. This lead to exciting projects, many of them successful, some of them not. But in the end I came out better for it and able to offer more services to my clients in the future and make more informed decisions.

God Erik, you talk too much! How do I learn new software or technology quickly?

Forget everything you know about learning. Follow these steps and you’ll be fine.

1. Stop and think. Do you have time for this? It’s decision time kids. In addition to needing time to learn, you’re going to need time to put your hard-earned knowledge to work. If time is tight, I suggest you take the safe route.
2. Time and focus. Not gonna lie, this is gonna be tough. You need to set aside, minimum, 3-6 hours per day until you get whatever you’re learning. You mustn’t interrupt yourself. Plan your learning time ahead so you don’t interrupt the rest of your schedule. Do this and you can skip weeks of classes.
3. Just do it. Take the thing you’re trying to learn — a Web service, a new video camera, or video editing software — and start using it for Pete’s sake. Forget about manuals – how do you know you’re reading about something relevant? Start tinkering with anything and everything, try to screw things up — and, when the function of something isn’t instantly obvious, research it.
4. Drown yourself in research. This is the hard work. Any time you don’t understand something, you need to look it up. In this case, the Internet is your friend — chances are, someone out there has already encountered your problem and fixed it. Prepare to spend up to 30 minutes reading up on each problem until you feel you’ve understood it.
5. When in a tight spot, band-aids are good. Sometimes you’ve got to fudge things. Perhaps you don’t know how to seamlessly insert introductory text at the beginning of your video, so you create another video that looks like what you want and splice the two together. Perhaps you don’t have time to make the Web site you want, so you go find a template that looks just about right and you edit it to suit your needs. Band-aids are an excellent way to get things done and learn, but don’t use them if failure or rejection is a risk, and especially if you’re going to have to go back to the work in the future and set it to what you originally intended. Never do the same work twice.

Examples of when this process will not work

1. Programming, Web or otherwise. I’ve tried. Unless you’re a bloody genius you cannot learn to program quickly, nor can you cut corners. You’ve got to put in the time.
2. When you need to produce top-notch, award-quality work. I will never be confused for a true film editor – I’m YouTube grade, and I don’t even kid myself that I can match the professionals. Nor should you.
3. You have a history of not finishing what you start. I’m not going to mince words with you, we’re all adults here. If you are the kind of person who starts projects and never finishes them, this is not going to help you.

In case you haven’t heard it, here’s the background: two weeks ago, Gap tried to introduce a new logo to replace its decades-old blue box icon. Customers and designers piled online to heap criticism and venom on the new artwork, and ultimately forced the retailer to bring back the old version in a public show of humiliation (and probably at great expense).

I’m not a graphic professional, but I know where to find some experts in the field. So for a little perspective I asked some of CMD’s design pros for their thoughts and what they would have recommended to Gap. Here’s a little taste:

Jenn Brewer, CMD designer, says brands need to look at their logo and brand history while keeping an eye on their audience when they go through a rebranding exercise. Only then can a redesign campaign (slight modifications or a total overhaul) be determined. Does she think Gap should have given in to the criticism?

“No, it should have been confident enough in its new logo that it could rationally and intelligently deflect the criticism,” she said. “Giving in to the criticism tells me that perhaps the company was not in agreement about the new logo in the first place.”

Thom Marchionna, CMD creative director, said that a logo is only the tip of the spear for a brand evaluation, and other companies could learn from this situation by paying attention to core issues first before introducing a refreshed logo.

“Solve any underlying business problem first, such as product quality, customer service or differentiation,” he said. “Only when you can make a promise to your audience that things are positively better and different, can you introduce the symbolism that reinforces that. To do otherwise is like putting a fresh coat of paint on the hull of the Titanic.”

And what should Gap have done differently?

“Pretty much everything,” he continued. “Forget the lousy logo. Those happen all the time. Entrusting a logo redesign to a traditional ad agency may have been the first mistake. A branding firm would have started with more probing questions, the first three of which might be, ‘how much equity exists in the current logo with our most loyal customers and influencers?’ ‘what is the nature of that equity?’ and ‘what do we risk by changing our symbol?’”

Marchionna said the real failure, in his opinion, was a surprising lack of understanding of the power of the social web.

“It is the most immediate and powerful focus group technology in history,” he said. “And it dictates a code of conduct that one would expect a company such as Gap to be attuned to. Its response to the criticism was disingenuous at best and tragically underestimated the audience’s intelligence to see through ill-conceived efforts to save face. All of which violated the implicit social contracts on which all relationships are based: trust, honesty, and authenticity, to name but a few.”

As this situation showed, indeed every brand change is now open to debate and fair game for backlash by the public and the marketing community. The key to success, in my opinion, is to do the research, answer the tough questions that need clarification internally, and have the confidence to stick to what your gut tells you. I had a basketball coach once who said “you can’t lie to yourself,” so if Gap was lying to itself about its overall business shortcomings and thought a new logo would help distract the public, it was asking for criticism.

What do you think?

Today, of course, marketing is a different environment. Compared to a 1960s ad blitz, a modern campaign can incorporate elements such as traditional print advertising, search engine buys, ongoing two-way conversations on numerous social media channels, a contest, special website landing page, blog, trade show experience, video, and so on.

How does a client today manage all of these activities? The answer is to work with an agency that offers marketing synergy.

The benefit of partnering with a synergistic marketing agency, which offers more than one marketing discipline, is simple: it’s the ability to handle multiple marketing tasks, put strategic thinking behind each initiative, and blend the tactics together to increase the overall value of each component. This saves clients the time and energy of coordinating separate agencies and juggling various budgets with a number of firms.

Working with a one-stop shop is different than with a single-disciplined firm, so here are three tips to keep in mind when looking for a partner that can handle all your marketing needs:

Be open to concept extensions: Sometimes clients come to us with a singular request, such as a website, a video or a special event. Because we are a synergistic agency, we tend to look at how the other components in our toolkit of capabilities could support that singular idea and grow it into a complete campaign. We have found that in many cases, it’s that extension of a concept that the client is really after.

Define success: Before embarking on any campaign, understand what success means to your organization. If you don’t know, we won’t know. Success comes in many different forms. For an integrated campaign, each tactic should have a goal, such as total number of downloads, registrations, purchases, etc. That success definition should always be a point of reference when a tactic is being considered and developed.

Be honest and collaborate: Last year we worked with a new client who had a high-visibility product launch and a short time frame. Sound familiar? While a traditional approach may have worked fine in the past, this job required a constant flow of communication between us and the client in order to fulfill all the various campaign elements. This took the client’s honest feedback and commitment to daily engagement, and it got them what they wanted—a successful project.

At the end of the day, marketing synergy brings simplicity to today’s multifaceted marketing world. Simple. Done. Pass the Scotch.

We really want to emphasize taking a fresh look at your resume and ensuring it communicates what you do, and perhaps more importantly, who you are. Your accomplishments and identity simply need to jump off the page at hiring managers if you want yours to stand out among the flood of cover letters.

Here are a few choice examples, taken from real-life resumes that have passed through my inbox.

“… experience including writing, content creation, media outreach”

OK, that’s a good start describing the basic skills that I may be seeking for a job opening, but I really want to know what the outcomes and successes have been as a result of doing these things in the business world, or in blogging life. Here’s what catches my eye a bit more:

“Writing for client pitches in a variety of voices from a ‘playah’ to a women’s rights activist.”

Now that tells me this is a skilled writer who can research and adopt the appropriate tone for various target audiences and then get down to the business of networking with them online. What would make this event stronger would be to articulate the outcome, such as, “secured a client interview with top-tier blogger reaching an audience of thousands.”

Here’s another example of going beyond “event planning.”

“Grew audience from a forty-person gathering in a crépe shop to sold-out theater crowds.”

Now that, I like. Who doesn’t want to bring on a team member with this kind of gumption? This is also the type of detail that helps you get the interview and builds up an identity–the perception of who you are–prior to that interview taking place.

Do you need a translation service for your resume? If you have a quick description that needs a brushup, post it in the comments below and we’ll throw you a few thoughts by return.