WavyBrainy

Listen up, you lollygagging bunch of Googlephobes. There’s been enough analyzing, sniffling, webinaring and number crunching on this new media thing. What’s wrong little pretty print person? Fraid a little widget might tear a piece out of your superdog  boxers? Think some Tweety Bird’s gonna bring you down? Fraid something will, and you’ll have to take credit for it, and find ways to spend your big fat raise. You think that’s hard. I know hard. See that scar on my dome. Got that from an art director who went that PTSD on me from cutting type I melted iron and formed letters out of it. I stuffed envelopes, and I killed more trees than you’ve ever seen in your whole pathetic lives. So cinch up or sack up, and get your hinnies out there and take down some new media. I want you to taste it, feel it, own it. Get in the mud and put something real embarrassing about your coach on Twitter. Post a really bad quality video. Start a blog and only post once. Who cares? Daddy’s not going to spank you. Are you new media warriors, or total wimps. Now get out there and do something. Body slam an idea and go for it. No committees, no research, no internal polling or buy in. Just glory. Go grab it, team.

Research conducted on monkeys shows that Biffy’s brain releases dopamine when he gets to absorb knowledge before receiving food or drink. And another phase of the study showed that just the expectation of knowledge and drink released dopamine. Dopamine is like beer for the brain. It’s released when we achieve goals, and triggers the release of our primal urges. Long story short, of course, but it lends even more credence to the need of marketing to educate, entertain and interact with customers. No dopamine. No sales.

If you don’t live in New York, this bit may seriously bum you out. The Dulcinea bakery marks a growing trend of new personalized businesses that serve small niches. In Dulcinea’s case, that would be serious foodies. Every Wednesday, Dulcinea delivers six, hand-crafted baked goods to the doors of its patrons. The selections are based on seasonal produce and ingredients available that week. All ingredients are organic and locally grown. All goods are ordered in advance which all but eliminates waste and spoilage. So you want fresh muffins in November. You better hop on it. Orders are due October 30!

1. Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing  mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it’ll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a teradactyl is downright dangerous.
2. Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
3. Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women’s Suffrage and the internet, they’re all fads anyway.
4. Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
5. Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. Afterall, it’s your job to cultivate talent internally.
6. Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you’re on top of this new fangled stuff, but don’t do anything about it.
7. Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
8. Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency’s job is to suck up and take orders.
9. Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
10. Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.

Seriously, you cannot put this off another day. Go to Twitter.com and signup. Create an account name, send out a tweet that says “Hi, Mom,” and start exploring. I know, you may think Twitter’s stupid, until you discover…

1. What people are saying about your brand and your competitor’s products online.
2. How you can gather intelligence from your competition better by following their tweets.
3. What’s really happening the lives of your customers, the context in which they use your product, how they talk, and how you can turn that into better products.
4. How to discover unmet needs, e.g. I wish my toaster held 12 pieces of bread.
5. Learn what makes customers happy and angry about other products and services they use, e.g. we found someone last week who was thrilled to use WiFi at their hairdresser’s.

Get Crackin’! Need help? Give us a call.

Real time search engines are multiplying like rabbits — Collecta, Topsy, CrowdEye, TweetMeme, OneRiot, Yauba. Never fear, we have a favorite from the crowd. It’s called Spezify.com. Type your search term into Spezify, and it will return a melange of related images, posts and news items pulled from Twitter, other real-time media and the web. The search results look like a random display of notes and pictures. Click on key terms to branch out into new topics. Works kind of like your brain. Looks like your messy – I mean “our” messy – desks. It’s a great creative tool.

Sheer volume of web traffic, as we pointed out in our article on Bounce Rate, doesn’t tell you whether visitors had a good time at your site, learned anything, or absorbed key messages about your brand. Although there are some exciting new analytics tools that monitor the quality of engagement, you can get started by investigating the average time visitors spend on your site and per page. The underlying assumption is simple. If people like your page, they’ll spend time with it. If they’re bored silly, they’ll move on. Here’s what to look for:

1. What’s the Average Time Spent on the site as a whole?
2. Compare directories on the site, e.g. your about section vs. products. Where are visitors spending the bulk of their time on your site? Does that match your web strategy?
3. Are your visitors spending time on critical pages, e.g. product overview, pages that differentiate you from your competitors, etc?
4. Sort pages from highest to lowest Avg. Time Spent on Page. What’s performing well, what’s not?
5. Are there pages that drive a high percentage of viewing that don’t directly advance your business, e.g. the photo gallery with everyone popping brewskies at the office tailgate party? These pages are valuable, but keep in mind that they could be distorting your view of your site’s overall performance.

Use this information to build on content that already engages your visitors, and improve or eliminate pages that don’t.

Depending on your company’s industry sector, the economy is either recovering or getting worse at a slower rate. As budgets are finalizing for 2010, we’re staying true to the advice we offered our clients a year ago. Here are a few main points:

1. Invest to increase brand awareness and surpass larger competitors. Reap the rewards during the real recovery!
2. Improve your website and web marketing operations to achieve higher conversion rates. If you need to re-design, do it now before the market heats up.
3. Social media is not a fad. It’s a cost-effective way of building customer relationships and bypassing some of the expense of traditional media. Get involved.
4. Introduce new products and innovations now while market noise is lower.
5. Negotiate hard for lower media rates. The market is soft, and unsold inventory is just gathering dust.
6. Think niche. Social media, blogs and Twitter allow you to build customized channels and target pockets of highly profitable customers.

For additional information, download Ideopia’s white paper on“Marketing in the Recession”.

“Wired” is a must read for netizens, so we took note of its contest to design a kegerator for its San Francisco office. The design was crowdsourced from readers, a “few” items were donated, but the out-of-project budget was only $200. The PR, reader involvement, and not-to-mention the undying adoration of beer drinkers, was foamy beyond belief. See Wired’s how-to kegerator video, and check out the Beer Robot while you’re at it. Maybe these guys have a problem..

A new study from DemandGen Report shows that increasingly business-to-business marketers are adopting social media strategies to drive leads. In fact, over 28% of respondents said that social media was the most effective source of leads. LinkedIn (38%), company blogs (36%) and Twitter (31%) were the favored channels, and the most effective tactics noted were:

• Participation in industry groups (25%)
• Starting conversations on industry issues (25%)
• Answering questions (23%)
• Dynamic text ads (10%)

To vividly see the impact of social media, pull analytics from your website that segment social media users. You’ll notice all the loyalty indicators – time spent on site, pages per visit – far out-performing other traffic sources.