Marketing Is Not Dead

See Marketing Is Not Dead at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Forrester Research claims that 2010 is the year marketing dies. I mostly agree with the article and its conclusions. However, I do not think that marketing is dead: I just do not think it means what you think it means. The article conflates three distinct concepts: marketing, media, and advertising (although media, advertising, and public relations do overlap). It assumes that media exists to serve advertising and that advertising in turn exists to serve marketing. The second part (advertising serving marketing) is fairly accurate since advertising is a marketing tactic. The first part has mostly been true in the past (media serving advertising). I think it would have been more accurate to say that 2010 is the year we decouple marketing from advertising and advertising from media.

The cost of producing and distributing media has become much cheaper in the digital world. It is no longer assumed that media cannot be produced or distributed without advertisers footing the bill. The decoupling of media from advertising has opened up the door for all sorts of creativity (and arguably a lot of garbage, too). Public, educational, and governmental media have been producing and distributing content free from advertising for years.

On the flip side, it is no longer assumed that marketers need to spend a lot of money on advertising to get their messages in front of eyeballs (or ears or whatever). If you have a good message then people can hear that message without the need for paid media gatekeepers. Word-of-mouth has long been an effective marketing technique which requires no media buys. With the Internet, Web 2.0, social media, or whatever you want to call it today word-of-mouth marketing takes on a whole new dimension.

Sure, if you have a product or message that does not resonate with people then you may still need old media and advertising to get your product and message in front of them. Of course, once people try your product and are disappointed with it they will share their thoughts about your product with other people. I hope that 2010 is the year that old media and advertising wanes and that good old word-of-mouth has a resurgence in influence. This is the kind of marketing we focus on at Found Line: marketing as a form of communication and education. As the Forrester Research post concluded, "Marketing is dead. Long live marketing!"

Common Good Vermont

See Common Good Vermont at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The other day we launched the first iteration of the Common Good Vermont website. From the about page:

Vermont (pop. 621,000) is a small, tightly knit rural state proud of its independent spirit and high levels of civic engagement. Vermont's independent sector (3000+ organizations, $4 billion annual revenue) plays a primary role in the delivery of human and cultural services and in the preservation of the state's cherished natural resources. Most social services—food, shelter, healthcare and education—are delivered within local and regional community settings.

Often separated by geography (mountains, rivers, lakes), Vermont's 251 towns and 14 counties are increasingly knit together by broadband "build-out". Common Good Vermont leverages these electronic networks to bridge the barriers of Vermont's geography and the "beaten paths" of its hyper-local networks. New human and electronic networking activities will support the delivery of information and innovation to the state's community builders: project volunteers and professionals who, by virtue of their civic and nonprofit roles and responsibilities, are the lifeblood of the "green mountain state". Common Good's place-based and community virtual events are designed to improve the capacity of so many "small networks" that, improve Vermont's unique "quality of life".

Common Good Vermont aggregates content for (and from) Vermont independents and nonprofits by pulling in RSS and Atom feeds including blogs, news sources, social bookmarks, and event calendars. The goal is to serve as an information hub encouraging knowledge sharing and increasing cross-organization communication. Content is currently organized by a combination of taxonomy (categories defined by Common Good Vermont staff) and folksonomy (tags from the feeds themselves). Our goal is to eventually remove the taxonomy layer and have all content organized completely by broad and, to a lesser extent, narrow folksonomy. However, the taxonomy layer is there for now to allow a certain amount of curation while we seek out, connect, and aggregate additional sources of information.

Common Good Vermont is built using Zend Framework and hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Components from Zend Framework used include its MVC system, Zend_Application, Zend_Feed_Reader, Zend_Tag_Cloud, Zend_Search_Lucene, Zend_Paginator, Zend_Db, Zend_Date, Zend_Auth, Zend_Acl, and Zend_Form. Stay tuned for future iterations to the website!

Project Retrospective

See Project Retrospective at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

When Peak Organic Brewing Company started in 2005 they asked us create their website (yes, it's a table-based layout — this was 2005, get over it). When it launched the website included (and still includes as of this writing) the ability for you to "share your peak experience" with other users of the website by uploading a photo and a brief description of your experience. Other users could then view and rate these "peak experiences" and each newsletter sent would include a recent top rated "peak experience." User submissions were even selected occasionally for use on the product's packaging.

With around 500 submissions and 15,000 ratings this "share your peak experience" aspect of their website allowed Peak Organic to learn about the people who drank their beer. Even better, it allowed their customers to learn a little bit about each other. It also gave people an opportunity to contribute, quite literally, to the Peak Organic brand with the chance of having their photographs and experiences incorporated into the product's packaging and displayed on store shelves throughout the country. I liked to call this "user-generated brand," a form of user-generated content. All brands are influenced by their users but this was user-driven brand evolution made tangible. This content was also a factor in helping them reach the number one position on Google for the search term "organic beer" — sorry Vermont's own Wolaver's!

In addition to Peak Organic's website, we also created their brand identity, developed materials for their event marketing, designed their packaging, made point of sale materials, and created sell sheets. We worked with Peak Organic for several years but we no longer work with them today. I'd like to explore some things we'd do differently today knowing what we know now four years later and with the tools available today. I wouldn't suggest anyone simply try the same things we did with Peak Organic. This worked because it fit in with their brand. However, there are some things you may be able to learn from our experience (no pun intended).

First, I would "unlock" the user generated content from the website. This could be done simply through a feed of recent "peak experiences" with links back to individual experiences. This would allow people to easily access this content from outside the website. If they're engaging with the brand, why does it matter if it they're on the brand's website or not?

An alternative approach would be to have users submit their "peak experiences" to Flickr and aggregate these photographs with a tag and possibly a group (Flickr was still in beta when we first launched the Peak Organic website). The website would then consume these aggregated photos like anyone else would and could even add a metadata layer on top for implementing the rating system. This would potentially give the community more control of this content and give Peak Organic the possibility of tapping into existing communities on Flickr.

When we first launched the Peak Organic website online photo sharing was still relatively new. Since then sites like Flickr have grown exponentially and many people are at least familiar with sites like Flickr, if not sharing photos online themselves. Today, microblogging (e.g. Twitter) is relatively new but growing very quickly. This leads to the second thing I'd do differently today — experiment with tagging beyond Flickr. I'd try tweeting from various events using an event hashtag and/or a brand-specific hashtag. Relatively speaking, not many people are on Twitter yet. However, the momentum is there and mixed in with the all those tweets must be a few "peak experiences" ready to be shared. Coincidentally, the maximum length for a "peak experience" description was 150 characters, 10 more than Twitter's 140 character limit.

New Media Office Hours (East)

See New Media Office Hours (East) at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

If you're a "new media" (social media, digital video/photography/editing, podcasting, etc.) enthusiast (or just curious) in Burlington, Vermont then you should check out the New Media Office Hours this evening. From the VCAM blog:

So we’d like to officially announce that the first New Media Office Hours (east-coast) gathering will be this coming Monday evening at The Sapa coffeehouse in downtown Burlington at 5:00 P.M. A small group of new-media pros and arm-chair enthusiasts will be on hand to chat with anyone who stops by about whatever is on their mind (related to new-media, that is).

I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make but it sounds like a fun event!

Tagnabit Usage

See Tagnabit Usage at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

It's been two weeks since we launched tagnabit. I want to share some information about how people have been using tagnabit. Some of the most popular tags used so far include:

btv

BTV is the airport code for Burlington, Vermont (where we are located). This tag is pretty heavily used on Twitter to represent our city, but it seems to have other meanings on the other social media sites.

btvsmb

A local event, the Burlington Social Media Breakfast took place a few weeks ago.

acmedia09

Next month in Portland, Oregon is the Alliance for Community Media's International Conference and Exhibition. The activity so far has all been on Twitter. If it's anything like acmne09 then I won't be surprised to see lots of photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks once the conference gets started.

tek09

php|tek 2009 was a PHP Conference that took place last month in Chicago, Illinois. While tagnabit actually launched after the conference was finished, it was an example tag that I used to explain the idea behind tagnabit to several people in the PHP community. There's lots of great content tagged with tek09. Tagnabit is built using PHP and Zend Framework in case you're wondering what the connection is.

cxage

Leadership in a Connected Age conference - also a local event.

champ400

The tag for the Celebrate Champlain Quadricentennial events taking place here this summer (sensing a local trend?). There will be lots of happenings so hopefully there is a good amount of participation in tagging content around the events. Vermont Public Radio is encourage people to tag content about Champlain 400 as well, so that should help.

On a more serious note, another tag worth mentioning (although I don't think anyone's used tagnabit for this yet) is the iranelection tag. There is a constant stream of tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks using this tag. Our thoughts are with the Iranian people.

Tell us how you've been using tagnabit. Do you plan on using it for an upcoming event? Are you mainly using it to follow tags or are you also posting content? We've got lots of ideas for improving tagnabit but would love to hear your thoughts! You can either comment here or use the tagnabit tag to give us feedback through Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious.

Tagnabit Launched!

See Tagnabit Launched! at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last night we announced the launch of tagnabit, a social media aggregator. It's "a service that aggregates tags from popular social media websites. It is useful for conferences or other events. Participants can use a shared tag across Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube and Delicious. Tagnabit then aggregates this content in one place." The idea originally started with Town Meeting Day Vermont and then was used for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast regional conference. People found it useful, so we decided to make a "generic" version that basically has the same functionality as these sites, but for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon has a few ideas on how tagnabit can be used.

The functionality behind tagnabit was built using Zend Framework (MVC components, Zend_Feed, Zend_Service_Flickr, and Zend_Cache). The client side is all semantic XHTML (with a few Microformats), CSS, and a few JavaScript enhancements (using jQuery). We've got plans for some new features - but we're curious to see how people use the site first. If you've got feedback, please send it our way via Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious by tagging your content with tagnabit (#tagnabit on Twitter).

ACM-NE Conference

See ACM-NE Conference at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last week the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) had a conference here in Burlington, Vermont. Organizers of the conference encouraged participants to use a shared tag, acmne09, on sites such as Twitter, Flickr, blogs, YouTube, and Delicious. We created a website for the conference (similar to what we had done for Town Meeting Day) that aggregated content from these various social media websites. You can see the website at acmne.net/09.

I also had the pleasure of speaking on a social media panel and helping with a social media workshop. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, has a good summary of the conference on his blog.

The Social Graph

See The Social Graph at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

In my last post about the semantic web I mentioned the XFN project which allows individuals to define their relationships to others simply using semantically marked up hyperlinks. I also said that a global graph can be made of all of these relationships making the "walled gardens" of existing social networking sites obsolete. Before I continue, I should probably mention that the word "graph" in this context refers to graph theory in computer science, not a chart or diagram (although these graphs could be visualized). At risk of over-simplifying: graph theory talks about how individual "nodes" connect to one another and how data can be extracted from looking at these connections.

Google has an interesting project called the Social Graph API that lets developers "utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful." It uses public XFN as well as FOAF data to accomplish this. FOAF is, interestingly enough, an example of something designed around the W3C's Semantic Web specification. Here's a video that explains a bit about how Google's Social Graph API works:

The power of this open data is another example of why facebook won’t last as a walled garden. I don't expect existing social networking sites to simply disappear. However, open standards like XFN and FOAF will help level the playing field amongst social networks by allowing even small social networks to benefit from the network effect. Having lots of social networks trying out different things can only be good for innovation in the long run.

TMD VT Social Media Recap

See TMD VT Social Media Recap at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Wow, thank you to everyone who participated and helped make Town Meeting Day Vermont '09 a social media success! In the spirit of openness, I wanted to share some things that Jason and I learned from the tmdvt.net/09 experiment. First of all, some disclaimers. It's important to note that we were just one small part of something that was bigger than us. Our goal was to encourage people to use tagging on Twitter, Flickr, blog posts indexed by Technorati, YouTube, and Delicious so that others could easily find Town Meeting Day related content. It didn't matter to us if people used tmdvt.net/09 directly, what mattered was that people used the relevant tags when publishing or when searching. In fact, I doubt that tmdvt.net/09 had much of an effect on adoption of the #tmdvt hashtag on Twitter, which was the site that, by far, had the most tagging activity.

Before you continue reading the rest of this blog post, you should read my first post on Town Meeting Day Vermont, Bill Simmon's Town Meeting Day & social media, Cathy Resmer's Town Meeting Day 2009, and Ryan Freebern's Townsourcing; or, the promise of localized community media for some background and other perspectives… OK, back? Great!

A big thing we noticed was that since most users found out about tmdvt.net/09 through Twitter, they expected the same level of immediacy as Twitter from the other websites we aggregated. Flickr, Technorati, and YouTube all had delays that were longer than what users expected. Delicious bookmarks didn't show up immediately but were still relatively quick. We couldn't quite figure out why some of the content from Flickr was delayed. It seemed to be based on a variety of factors, such as the account's submission frequency (possibly as an anti-spam measure).

As I mentioned earlier, the heaviest tag usage was on Twitter with over 360 tweets from countless people using the #tmdvt hashtag. Next up was Flickr with over 150 uploads tagged with tmdvt09 from a handful of users. Only 6 blog posts used the tmdvt09 tag and were picked up by Technorati: 1 was my original post about the tag, 1 was from Vermont Public Radio's blog, and 4 were from The Seven Days Staff Blog. I think there were more blog posts that used the tmdvt09 tag, but for whatever reason these didn't get indexed. Only 2 YouTube videos were uploaded and tagged with tmdvt09. There were 21 bookmarks tagged with tmdvt09 on Delicious; however, none were tagged enough to be considered "popular" by Delicious.

CCTV Channel 17 pointed out that they were posting exit interviews to blip.tv and that there was no option for that on tmdvt.net/09. It appears that blip.tv doesn't support tagging or categorized feeds so we had no way of syndicating content specific to Town Meeting Day from blip.tv or CCTV's channel. However, a representative from blip.tv was paying attention and was quick to respond to my tweets, which I was very impressed by.

I was also impressed with local news outlets bridging the gap between traditional and social media during Town Meeting Day. Seven Days, Burlington Free Press, Vermont Public Radio, Vermont Community Access Media, and CCTV Channel 17 all had a presence on Twitter, and some had a presence in other social media as well. I had conversations with representatives from several of these news outlets and there was a general interest in further engagement in tmdvt.net/10.

The original sketch for tmdvt.net/09 included tabs for traditional media outlets in addition to the tabs for various social media websites. I don't think social media will replace traditional media. Traditional media provides the resources (i.e. time and money) to do real reporting and the authority that comes with that legwork. I do, however, believe that traditional media and social media can learn a lot from each other, which is part of why we wanted to put them at the same level on tmdvt.net/09.

In order to include traditional media, we needed Atom or RSS feeds specific to Town Meeting Day content. In my research, and in talking with several people from the media, I couldn't find anyone who was currently doing this. The Seven Days Staff Blog was the closest with their Town Meeting Day 2009 category. However, they didn't have an Atom or RSS feed set up for this category, so it would have been very difficult for me to try to aggregate that content. My challenge to the news media is to provide more fine grained feeds so that your readers can decide exactly what type of stories they're interested in reading. It will likely increase the number of people who subscribe to your Atom or RSS feeds and allow people like me to make mashups using your content.

I think there is a lot to be learned from this experiment and I'd love to hear what insight others may have about this. Let's continue the discussion online. Also, it might be interesting to have an offline discussion sharing perspectives from this year's Town Meeting Day and ideas for similar events in the future. If you're interested, let me know!

Town Meeting Day Vermont

See Town Meeting Day Vermont at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The first Tuesday of March is Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont get together and elect local officers and vote on budgets. While it doesn't get as much attention as some of the bigger elections, it's still an important day in local politics. This year's Town Meeting Day will be on March 3rd, 2009.

We've put together a simple website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites (along with traditional media, where available) around Town Meeting Day Vermont '09. If you use the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content will show up on the website. We're also looking for Atom or RSS feeds specific to Town Meeting Day Vermont '09 from traditional media outlets. If you know of any, or have other suggestions, please email participate@tmdvt.net. Please be gentle, we put this together in one day's time!

Vermont 3.0 Thoughts

See Vermont 3.0 Thoughts at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

On Saturday Jason and I attended Vermont 3.0. We were interested in seeing what it was all about and see if it's something we'd exhibit at in the future if we're looking to hire. We walked the floor and had a chance to to talk with several people we know.

First of all, I think it's great that there is a concerted effort to promote Vermont as a technology center. However, the name "Vermont 3.0" is an immediate turn-off to me. It's an obvious reference to "Web 2.0" — a loaded term that is often misused. Most so-called "Web 2.0" practitioners haven't even gotten Web 1.0 right yet. Sure, we've got technology here in Vermont but I'm not sure how anyone could imply that Vermont has somehow moved on from "Web 2.0" to "Web 3.0". Or maybe I'm wrong and the name is not a reference to "Web 2.0" at all.

Speaking of "Web 2.0" — I didn't see a folksonomy section on the Vermont 3.0 website. A handful of people used the #vt3 hashtag on Twitter but there were several more people talking about it that simply used "Vermont 3.0" in their tweets. Some guidance from the event organizers on suggested tags would have helped to make this content easier to find and encouraged online conversation amongst participants. The event organizers should have suggested tags to use on Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, and any other social media site that a conversation may occur at. I didn't have the Eee PC with me so I'm not sure if wireless internet was available. In my opinion, free wireless internet is a prerequisite for a tech conference.

We dropped in on two of the panel discussions. First the "So you wanna build websites?" panel and then the "So you wanna develop software?" panel. The discussions were definitely geared towards people interested in switching careers (or choosing what career to go into). We've generally been disappointed about the topics on which schools are focusing. It seems that schools are more interested in teaching what's "hot" and will boost enrollment numbers rather than teaching a fundamental base that will serve students throughout their careers. I was pleased to hear Mike Battig, a computer science professor at St. Michael’s College, talk about how a good computer science education will teach students things that will be relevant regardless of changing technologies.

In conclusion, I'm not yet sure if we'd exhibit at Vermont 3.0. I think a career fair might be too narrow a focus. I think it would be much more interesting to have Vermont organizations showing how they are using technology to create value in the world. This would give people a chance to gain much more insight into these organizations and the true state of technology in Vermont.

Social Media Manifesto

See Social Media Manifesto at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

At Found Line, we often have people ask us about using social media as a marketing tool. Unfortunately many try to approach social media as just another marketing avenue or, even worse, as a form of advertising. Here are a few key rules you must follow or you will fail miserably.

It's not about you. It's about your users/ customers/ readers/ viewers. What are you providing that's valuable? Where is the overlap between your users' needs and wants and what you have to say?

You are not the center of your network. You are just part of a larger network. Be a good citizen. Provide something of value. Connect with other networks; grow your network.

Whatever you do, do not try to control how or what is communicated. For employees, set clear boundaries as to what is OK to publish and what isn't and don't punish employees if they say something you don't like within those boundaries. Encourage everyone (inside and out) to speak their minds. If they have something bad to say, it's an opportunity to improve your product/service. If they have something good to say then great!

Social media is not one-way. It is a conversation, not a broadcast. Don't start a conversation if you're not willing to listen. No one will listen to you if you don't listen to them.

For some interesting reading on how companies are using social media, see The New Robert Scobles: Seven Leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists Today and Zappos Shows How Social Media Is Done.