Post 1: Frank Trivieri talks about GM Canada

Post 2: Steve Levy on spending money online

Post 3: Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation

Post 4
Markets in the Age of the Miscellaneous
David Weinberger, co-author of the influential bestseller, The Cluetrain Manifesto

I’ve never heard David Weinberger speak before but he has a fantastic amount of passion. His main point was that the internet is made up of people, and they don’t want to be marketed to or marketed at.

Here are the main points:

1. Don’t let old institutions or work habits or creative plans re-inflict themselves online. Don’t take the easy route, don’t just go with what you know.

2. Take the war out of marketing: guerilla marketing, target audience, consumer intelligence. We talk this way out of fear. Us vs. Them. We build our businesses as little forts and the information we let out we call marketing or press releases, and the information we allow in, we guard. Get out of the fort.

3. Markets used to be about place, socializing, meeting up, and shared interests and exchanges. This is what online wants to be, but “marketing” today is something that happens to people, usually against their will. The industrial revolution allowed us to believe that goods are interchangeable, as are workers and customers–we are cogs in the machine of progress. Consumers. (David made a graphic point that consumption used to be about coughing up blood.)

4. Marketers need to think about how to have real conversation online. Conversations are in our own voice, they are open ended, they are voluntary, they are about things both parties are interested in, they are not about something else (there is no alterior motive).

5. Blogging is where customers talk to each other. Blogging is not about cats. Reddit.com and Digg.com will show you it’s not about cats, it’s about a constructed self, it’s about pointing away or outward to other sites. Any marketer or ad agency who brushes off blogs as private journals, people talking about their cats, or self-involved little worlds are really out to lunch. If you want to talk about self-involved little worlds look at the New York Times website, or any CanWest news site, and you’ll see a self-involved little world. The only links out are for ads on the site. “There’s a narcissistic bubble,” says David.

David Weinberger, author of
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Small Pieces Loosely Joined

If you want more, check out David Weinberger online.

Post 1: Frank Trivieri talks about GM Canada

Post 2: Steve Levy on spending money online

Post 3:
Six Pixels of Separation ñ How marketing connects in a digital world
Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image

Mitch Joel interviewed the keynote speakers at the conference:
Listen to the MP3 interview with David Weinberger.

Six degrees of separation is now six pixels of separation. Wireless and broadband means that people are always connected, they build community, they have conversations, and they know who’s in control (hint: it’s not the marketing manager or ad agency). They are engaged in social media, they are participating, they have talent, and they know what they like, and clearly voice discontent.

Mitch’s request of marketers and ad agencies, when thinking of customers, is to
1. Think in terms of tribes (how are these people connected, “social networks do not care about technology, the individuals making up the network care about who they are connecting to, not how).

2. Everything is with … not instead of.

3. Everything is a conversation.

4. Add value to the conversation (not noise)

5. Raise the bar (if you’re the creative team, be creative, don’t rehash the same crap, put it online and call it new media).

6. Passion trumps technology (you notice the technology only when it sucks).

Mitch is the President of Twist Image, a marketing and communications company. He’s one of the leaders in online marketing. I suggest checking out his blog, TwistImage.com/blog and his podcast, Six Pixels of Separation.

To continue on the notes about the CMA digital marketing conference …

Post 1: Frank Trivieri talks about GM Canada

Post 2:

What are YOU Thinking?
Steve Levy, President, Canadian Market Research Eastern Canada, Ipsos Reid

Steve and the Ipsos Reid research really brought the marketing and agency staffers in the room into the spotlight. Not necessarily a good thing because the spotlight illuminated the fact that the majority of the people in the room were not well versed or experienced in digital marketing, and were not well read and/or had not researched or educated themselves on the field in which they apparently work. The alarming summary of the Ipsos-Reid study was that most Canadian marketers and agencies are in the same boat.

Steve put up an audience poll to see how many people in the audience had read at least one of these books:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger
Life After the 30-Second Spot by Joseph Jaffe
Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

I might have missed some titles. But the point is if you are working in the online space, pay attention to what the early adopters are telling you. These are seminal works. Please read them.

Steve gave a good presentation on what marketers and agencies are thinking about regarding online, what they are doing, and what they will be doing in the future. These numbers were, again, depressing. They are also proprietary so I’m going to wait until they are posted on the CMA site before I talk about them.

Steve’s main message was “get off the fence.” He said, 63% of the surveyed audience did not know what best online practices were, yet 90% believe the media mix has changed. He said basically that companies are spending silly amounts of money in ineffective media streams and yet are sitting on the fence about the whether to spend online.

More talk to come when the numbers are publicly available. But wow, if you are an online marketer or web design company or get the internet, there are companies out there that need help, and hopefully they paid attention and are willing to spend money in this space.

Thursday and Friday of this week I participated in the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Conference.

Below are my notes from Day 1, first session. I should say that I was unimpressed with the first session but that the conference overall was pretty good and I met many interesting people. I’m going to lament the excitement of GM’s online marketing now, but I should also offer congratulations to them for actually trying this stuff out. Every marketing department can do better but you’re not going to get better unless you try things out, get feedback, then improve.

Changing the Conversation: General Motors of Canada is Driving Success OnLine
Frank Trivieri, General Director of Marketing, GM Canada

Frank is a nice guy. He’s the General Director of Marketing. But he’s not a great speaker, well he’s okay, but for the first speaker of the day, he’s a little stiff. Frank glowed about the advances GM Canada is making in the online space and he showed off some of the innovative ways GM is marketing online. But I didn’t think his presentation was a real, hardhitting look at the online opportunities. It was sort of old school does old-school marketing online. Sure there’s some fun, flashy stuff, but I thought it was a bit of a yawn.

That said, I don’t want to be hard on Frank or GM because at least they are experimenting with online. “Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from poor judgement,” as Ralph Hancox, formerly of Readers’ Digest, quipped in my MPub management courses way back when new media meant CD-ROM.

So what did I write down about what Frank said:

– GM has reduced their broadcast media budget by 20% (go deeper, I say)
– Between 2000 and 2006 GM increased their internet spend by 200% (either he’s got these numbers wrong or this is delusional excitement, only 200% ???)
– GM is interested in integrated marketing: they have banner ads on third party websites that allow the customer to interact with the banner without leaving the third party site. A user can play with a car and then send an email to themselves. Interesting idea that could be better implemented.
– GM is using in game ads — billboards that you can interact with in video games — ok, but again, could be better.
– GM launched some commercials that are meant to attract the “young, hip crowd”. These are the Johnny ads. “Way to go Johnny!” They’re kind of spoofs on Napoleon Dynamite, but in my mind they’re just annoying, whereas “Vote for Pedro” was not. My favourite quotes about this campaign, the website allows us to “interact with users in a fun, hip way.” “The target audience is made up of heavy internet users … [we] intercept them.” But I shouldn’t mock because GM is pleased with this campaign, which is a good thing. They’ve had 200,000 visitors (not clear if that’s monthly or since the site launched), who spend an average of 3.5 minutes with Johnny, and 10,000+ have gone on to find a dealership. When GM did a survey about the Johnny campaign, 74% politely said that the campaign increased their likelihood of buying Cheverolet. (I had no idea Johnny was Cheverolet, but whatever, I must not fit in the young, hip psychographic.)
– GM has an email program. They sent out 3.2 personalized emails resulting in 816 online leads.
– GM is advertising or sponsoring some news bit on bbtv (Blackberry TV).
– GM has a virtual advisor, again a campaign to use a medium and spokesperson the youth can identify with because we don’t want to approach a dealer in-store.

GM needs AdHack.com

If you’ve been following my posts on Stephen King’s upcoming novel Lisey’s Story, then you’ll know that a bool is a treasure hunt with a prize at the end. In this case the prize is a story: a copy of the limited advance reader’s edition of Lisey’s Story (which is in stores Oct 24), plus a copy of some of his most popular book collections including: Carrie, Salemís Lot, Pet Sematary & The Shining.

In an ideal world, I would have created the bool well in advance of Oct 24 so that you could share my excitement of reading the novel before everyone else, but I hope the chance to win 6 books outweighs that.

How does this bool work? (I don’t want it to be exactly like Scott Landon’s bools because you’ll enjoy discovering how they work as you read the novel so this bool is slightly different.)

The first and last clues are identified with the word BOOL. Each clue is numbered, and the first clue will tell you how many clues there are until the end.

………………..
BOOL START (total: 4 stages, 3 clues)
#1 You’ll find me here if you want your say. (Hint below)

Hint: Check comments.

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature. Last year, about this time, James and I were returning from Turkey. I had read in all my guidebooks about Orhan Pamuk and at Christmas time we bought a copy of his book Istanbul in McNally Robinson. I still haven’t had a chance to read it, but now that the Nobel Prize for his writing has renewed the controversy of whether he did or did not “insult Turkishness” with his works, it’s definitely a SoMisguided reading pick.

In other book news, I’m in Calgary for Wordfest: the Calgary/Banff International Writers Festival. I’m on a panel tomorrow talking about where the internet publishing revolution is taking us. My answer is towards an online environment that is more participatory, has a higher level of engagement than present, and is more viral. I know most of you have caught the Google bug, some of you have the YouTube bug, and others are trying to get inoculated against MySpace. [I have a great link to a MySpace rant on why the author is not blogging, especially on MySpace. Sadly I can’t find the link. Perhaps Dan has it?]

Now I must go play LEGO StarWars on my new Nintendo DS. It’s hard being a technology enthusiast. So many fun toys, so little time.

My RSS feed was not working because of my fun post on World Cup of Literary Writers. So I closed it for now. RSS seems to be working. Now we’re trying to reconnect.

… is it working …