ANA Marketing Maestros

Marketers: Why No Blogs?

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

This week I sat in on a new ANA marketing skills course – “Word of Mouth Marketing”, facilitated by ANA instructor Phil Gomes of Edelman.  As I sat in the class and listened to the comments of those present, once again I was struck by the number of marketers who are not experimenting with blogs and other forms of new media for one reason or another – and not even following the blogs that cover their category.  “The world is in the midst of an ongoing conversation” says the CMO of a low interest category, whose company is on the leading edge with their involvement in digital media.  “You have to know what the conversation is and earn the right to be part of it.”  Every day this CMO reads the blogs that mention their company.  What a good role model for all ANA members.  I encourage you all to attend the next ANA “Word of Mouth” marketing skills training session and learn how you too can engage in conversation with your consumers.

Technorati tags: word of mouth

Open Post to All Marketers -- Why Blogging Matters

Sorry about my tardiness on the open post; I was vacationing for my first anniversary (legitimate excuse).

Below is the brain child of Eric Kintz over at HP -- a group perspective from some bloggers on why the blogosphere matters for marketers . Without further ado...

Introduction

Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.

Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand.

So does blogging matter? All of us are senior marketing executives in established corporations but we also share a common passion for blogging. At the initiation of Eric Kintz at Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz), we decided to all get together to share our thoughts about the opportunities and challenges of this new marketing frontier.

Join the conversation.

David Armano - Creative VP - Digitas – Logic + Emotion(http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ )

Peter Blackshaw - CMO - Nielsen Buzz Metrics – Consumer Generated Media(http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/ )

David Churbuck - VP Global Web Marketing - Lenovo – Churbuck (http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/ )

Dan Greenfield - VP Corporate Communications - EarthLink – Bernaisesource (http://bernaisesource.blog.com/ )

Eric Kintz – VP Global Marketing Strategy - Hewlett-Packard – Marketing Excellence (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz)

Will Waugh – Senior Director, Communications - ANA – Marketing Maestros (this one of course )

Annual Conference Highlights

Thanks to the contributing bloggers for their Annual Conference penmanship and another first time for the ANA -- member bloggers. We also had a social network, some nice video stream from our partners at AdAge and Brandweek (courtesy of DragonFly), and a host of other contributions, listed here as of this post:

A special thanks to our bloggers (The New Maestros), who for one, made outstanding contributions and added valuable insight (as well as made my job easier):

Amber Alexander, Charles Schwab

• Linda Kaplan Thaler
• Jim McDowell, MINI USA
• Lawrence Flanagan, MasterCard USA
• Ken Romanzi, Ocean Spray and Fran Kelly, Arnold Worldwide

Alex Gerson, NFL

• Stephen Quinn, Wal-Mart
• Russ Klein, Burger King
• Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo!
• Lisa Baird, NFL and Bob Baird, Philips DAP

Manish Shrivastava, The Home Depot

• A.G. Lafley, The Proctor & Gamble Company
• Becky Saeger, Charles Schwab
• Sony's Mike Fasulo and Chris Fawcett, Sony Electronics and Brad Brinegar, McKinney
• HP's Gary Elliott
• Time Inc.'s Ann Moore

Thanks also to Max at AttentionMax  and Steve at Micropersuasion for their coverage.

Advertising Age has a comprehensive report on the featured speakers and Brandweek discusses A.G. Lafley's remarks. Stuart Elliott over at the New York Times (sub required) also reviews the outcome of our top event as well as a whimsical look at some highlights (Marketing Maestros is mentioned!). MediaPost also rings in here with several looks at themes and speaker outlooks.

B2B Blogs More Important then Ever

“Blogs and RSS have quickly progressed into a mainstream medium. Blogs, in particular, give marketers the perfect opportunity to generate demand, nurture leads and stay connected with customers."  This comes from a Knowledgestorm survey of 4,500 B2B professionals.  While this is probably not revolutionarily news to most people, what is surprising is the level of involvement and engagement blogs are beginning to generate in the business space.  This survey reports that 80% of the respondents are blog readers with 51% reading blogs at least once a week.

Half of the business population is reading blogs once a week! Wow. That to me is incredible news.

But there’s more. Over 60% of the respondents reported that they believe blogs are a more credible resource for news or insights.  So now not only is this business population reading this new form of communications, but because it comes from their own community, it has more credibility – so they are using the information that’s being passed along to make business decisions.

Now that is revolutionary.  While you may not be ready to start your own blog, you better now become cognizant of what others are saying about your company, your products, and how your serve your customers.  Your business life might just depend on it.

Not Marketing Anymore?

Jim Nail, Cymphony's CMO, has an intriguing post about the state of marketing and brands where he states:

I'm definitely feeling an acceleration in the shift away from what John Stichweh Coca-Cola's Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing called "Holistic Harrassment" (aka, integrated marketing, 360-degree marketing) to a more respectful, engagement-oriented relationship with consumers.

I'm not sure we can even call it marketing anymore.

ANA is also seeing a shift to a more-engagement oriented model; though within this framework are also some exceptional integrated campaigns (not harassment per se). I believe we can still call it marketing, as Wikipedia states: The practice of marketing is almost as old as humanity itself. Marketing is about building relationships with your customers, it always has been and always will be. Some do it better than others. Some use a ton of different media to reach their customer. But yes, a lot of marketers are getting smarter (and becoming a high value asset as a driver of growth) as the marketing/advertising organization transitions to what Jim identifies as: the true purpose of marketing: to discover and satisfy the want, needs, and motivations of consumers.

Advertising The Snickers Way

They do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery . Adfreak talks about a Spanish language imitation of the Snickers current ad campaign (I think I saw the Snackilicious wrapper on a cab this morning). Regardless of whether you like it, people are talking about this campaign and it is standing out from the clutter.

Hooked on YouTube

At the recent Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference, new media guru Steve Rubel (he talks about Microsoft's new platforms here) was educating the audience with the latest in viral marketing, video sites, blogs and the like.  He noted that marketers should familiarize themselves with sites such as My Space, YouTube, and visit them every day to gain insights about consumers.  I repeated this for the audience and asked Steve if we could call him when our bosses’ caught us surfing these sites.  Well Steve, I am calling in that chit.  One aspect of my ANA role is to understand new media and I am now hooked on YouTube and Google Video so Steve,  please tell my boss Bob Liodice  - and my colleagues at the ANA - that when I am trawling these sites it is for work!   Last night on the train I read in Television Week that the most requested You Tube video last week was of an 11 year old girl on NBC’s America’s Got Talent and what TV Week noted was her “show – stopping, jaw dropping  rendition of  “And I am Telling You I Am Not Going.””  You have to applaud NBC for posting the segment  (along with several You Tube users) – NBC is fishing where the fish are and following the viewer however they are consuming what American Express now calls “rolling stock video” (formerly known as television).    So I had to watch it today – and sing along in my office with the door closed tightly shut.    And  I do have company here Bob –from very large ANA members.  Here are a couple:

• There was a certain high ranking marketing executive from a major packaged goods company who later forwarded to those of us in attendance at an ANA committee meeting the YouTube “Mentos and Coke” video he had told us about that day. 
• And I heard through the grapevine of a marketing manager from another very large and very traditional packaged goods marketer who posts videos to Google Video. 
• And at an interesting ANA Members-only meeting hosted by MSN entitled “Triangulating the Sweet Spot of pop culture, technology and brand”, a high ranking executive in the music industry noted that they are signing up those musical groups that have the most My Space friends.

So the good news is that even traditional marketers are keeping up to date with these developments and in fact, participating in them. If we are on these sites, so are our target consumers.  So give all of those marketers mentioned above along with NBC a pat on the back because as we stumble along and try to keep up to date and experiment with the latest media developments we are bound to make some mistakes – but even then we will still deserve an A+ for our efforts to be close to our consumers!

Blogger Notes and Q&A with Steve Rubel

Blogger News

• Blogger in the news, Mark Cuban, gets fined $250K by the NBA -- see his response on his blog (Congrats to my Miami Heat on their first world championship).
• Here is the long promised Steve Rubel Q&A session (.mp3) from ANA's Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference. Steve answers marketer's tough questions on the future of social media. (He has a lot to say about Mark Cuban and the "blogosphere's team")
• Eric highlights his findings from the Human Face of your blog's traffic (disclaimer: he interviewed me for this piece)

Masters of IMC

The premiere of ANA's Masters of Integrated Marketing Conference is tomorrow and we will be attempting to blog from there if we can get some WiFi at the Grand Hyatt.

Some speakers of note:

• Steve Rubel, of Micropersuasion fame : Talking about blogging being a trend in this post. (Disclaimer: Steve worked on our account when at CooperKatz)
• Joseph Jaffe of Jaffe Juice fame: listen to the latest edition of his excellent pod cast Across the Sound
• Ed Keller talks word-of-mouth, which should be entertaining, especially after reading cgm critique Keller at the Beyond Blogging Conference in D.C.

Top Advertising Blogs

I am a big fan of lists provided by sites like Beyond Madison Avenue because it helps blogosphere newbies learn about great websites quickly. One I found to be clever and well thought out was American Copywriter. This post in particular gives advertisers an idea of what agency creative types think about on their way to the lake.