I had a great time presenting at the International Association of Business Communicators' Silicon Valley chapter… what a smart, engaged audience! You can check out my slides here:

I presented with Chris Boudreaux of Socialmediagovernance.com and Accenture. Chris focused on the tension between empowerment and control that companies confront as they try to organize and manage social media. Many want to empower employees but they also have to put rules and policies around these new social spaces.

I focused on a related, but largely ignored tension within the brand itself. How much do companies keep of their traditional brand? How much needs to be replaced or expanded, to accommodate this new more social age?

I really think we're seeing the end of the classic brand era, which we've been living with in some form since the concept of brand really hit in the 1950s. The classic marketing mission used to be:

• Find your customer
• Tell them about your brand
• Build brand equity through constant repetition.

The problem is that customers are no longer listening to marketers. They are listening to each other, and tuning out the two-dimensional brand messages thrown their way. As a customer with so many options for information, why should I care what a brand has to say? Particularly when it is simply repeating the same old narrow, one-way messages?

Brands have become boring and closed-off, so tightly controlled by their owners that they invite no human interest or interaction. In my talk, I explore why brands are in this situation, and how they can:

• Move away from their emphasis on brand control
• Embrace the people, ideas and causes behind their companies and brands
• Find new ways to interact in social spaces that fit their target audiences and brand personality.

Thoughts? Comments?

Krim

Also – and I’m not sure about this – I believe there may be a phone involved somehow.

After a few times seeing this ad I was ready to throw something at the screen. This whole episode led me to two questions:

• Is this some sort of little-known jobs program by the Chinese government to find post-Olympics employment for the gymnasts from the Beijing opening ceremonies?
• If you have a compelling product (and they do – I played with one recently, it’s great) why not feature it more prominently?

Sometimes marketers can outsmart themselves. Highly abstract advertising definitely has a place, but it’s been done better elsewhere and is not the best choice for Palm. Ultimately they do very little in these ads to address why the Pre is better than the two main competitors: the iPhone or Blackberry.

This overproduced, strident advertising has attracted plenty of attention and even spoofs. There is a school of thought that any buzz is good; but for a product in Palm’s position, in a clear trailing position behind two dominant market leaders, this isn’t good enough. They’ve done their brand a disservice by dialing up the abstract, lifestyle-statement aspect of the campaign at the expense of any tangible demonstration of the product.
 

As Rupert Murdoch announces that all of News Corporation’s online properties will charge for content by 2010, it strikes us that this is a pretty reasonable business response to web advertising rates being so low (and thus unable to sustain the labor inputs needed to run News Corporation’s online properties).

It will be interesting to see if it’s effective for a mega-media provider and whether it will spur fast-followers of that size. It’s illegal for companies to collude on prices, but this announcement by a provider of this scope is a very public signal that may establish a price floor.  We  expect to see other mega-players with the same wide channel capability make a similar move in response to this very public market signal.

Whether it succeeds is a whole other matter. Will subscription revenue exceed the meager streams thrown off by online advertising?

In any case, pretty exciting news in the world of media and marketing.

The top line revenue numbers are not looking good at the USPS. Internet marketing, which gets better and better in targeting and pull-through, has completely disrupted their traditional model.

They’ve been especially hard hit on their direct mail business as it has declined and is predicted to continue its decline.

Global ad Omnicom Group Inc. and Publicis Groupe SA predict that the worst is over for global ad sales.