January 26-28, 2009, the American Marketing Association is hosting the "MPlanet" Conference in Orlando Florida. David Sovka, Associate Director of College and Community Relations at Camosun College in Victoria BC, is attending the conference, and has generously offered to provide a daily Guest Blog for Academica readers.

What’s a nice Canadian boy doing with hundreds of marketers?
MPlanet is a conference for marketers who apparently work in nearly every field except post-secondary education. They talk about B2B versus B2C challenges, and worry about how the economic collapse will affect toothpaste revenues in the fourth quarter. Despite that, there should be more post-secondary people here. We have a lot to learn from them.

Education isn’t a commodity like toothpaste, but it is sold to the same people who buy toothpaste. What I mean to say has less to do with teeth, and more to do with exposure to strategic messaging. The prospective students we reach out to are sophisticated viewers used to high-quality, CGI-driven extravaganza Super Bowl ads. With dancing. They are used to the tools that marketers use each day to grab some airtime on the attention landscape.

We like to think of ourselves as the good guys. Public post-secondary marketers wear the white hats because we sell people a hope and a future. The thing is, we deal with a public who expects us to be the bad guys. A recent survey of North Americans found that nine out of 10 people “distrust” ads (NOTE: by “recent survey” I actually mean “unverifiable survey” because I sat at the back of the room during that session and couldn’t read the fine print on the TV screen; that’s right: it’s all HD screens now, nobody uses projectors anymore). In any case, here’s another reason to pay attention to the bad guys: they’re figuring out how to get around the public’s mistrust.

Marketer’s forgotten secret
Stephanie Diamond, President of Digital Media Works, says the secret to successfully promoting your widget, service, college, whatever, is to remember that even in the 21st century, people are still people. That is to say, despite radical changes in communication and information storage and retrieval, we are still who we started out as. In particular, we like stories.

This is the take-home message of the day for me: despite an almost daily barrage of new technologies, which certainly change how we do things, the way to promote anything is to create a story about your product or service, make it easy to tell, and then listen to what people are saying. The story is who you are. That’s it; you can stop reading now.

Two stories
Stories spark the imagination and invite participation. They marry ideas with emotion, and draw prospective customers, students, participants into your world. Online media allow story telling in richer ways than ever before. Self-serving example: check out MyCamosun for student-created stories of their experience at college. You can’t pay for this stuff. There are two basic stories your customers, students, whomever, will tell to others (scary NOTE for old-school thinkers: online media allow them to tell EVERYBODY!):

1. How you treated them.
2. Stuff about your actual product/service.

Guess which one is most important?

These cookies suck!
Customers, consumers, and alumni have always been the best advocates of our brands. New technology tools just make it happen faster, and across a wider audience. Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing cited the example of her mother buying food from the neighbourhood butcher, grocer, and baker in 1950s New York. If the cookies were stale, you could tell it to the baker directly. Other customers would hear, and would tell their friends and neighbours. Flour would fly. Business would be affected.

Online technologies allow us to develop corner grocery store relationships. Social media is the only marketing tactic based on a shared culture (ingredients: authenticity, transparency, honesty and passion, bake for 20 minutes at about 250).

Story first, tactics later
Every day a new tool comes online. You need to have your story in place first, before you decide on tactics to tell your story, then listen to what others are saying. For example, don’t say “I want to start a blog” first, because that tactic may be a terrible way to tell your story. A better approach:

1. Find your market niche(s), which should be as well-defined and narrow as possible.
2. Determine your brand: who are you, and how do you treat your customers, partners, etc.?
3. Figure out your story. This is how you convey your brand.
4. Determine how people will find you via search (hint: nobody types URLs anymore).
5. Create your content.
6. Pick your best tactics, which have to make sense given your story.
7. Analyze your results (respond to feedback continuously, and don’t rely on your IT people).

Everyone’s favourite price

Why give things away online, whether service or software or social network? Kevin Kelly (not at the conference, but he’s an editor at Wired magazine, so one should listen) in “Better Than Free” suggests that we should give to our customers what our competitors cannot copy. Watchwords to guide online presence (i.e. this is what the Internet has led consumers to demand of anything and everything):

· Immediacy
· Personalization
· Authenticity
· Accessibility

The worst possible thing in the world
Julie Fleisher, VP at DIGITAS, points out that not long ago, the opposite of quality was “junk.” Now the opposite of quality is “fake.” Consumers on the Internet demand authenticity and they question everything.

There is no right answer to the digital challenge: “how do I use online technologies to blah blah blah?” It’s because technology (but not people, remember) is changing so fast. What was marketing dogma yesterday will be laughable tomorrow.

The online solution for marketers is to create a multilayered story that plays out to their best advantage across a bunch of different media, an incomplete story in many pieces across many channels that customers want to help tell.

The Next Billion
I’ve never seen so many Blackberrys and iPhones in the same place. What hangs on the marketers’ belts is a touchstone, if that’s the word I want, of what’s going on in the rest of the world. The mobile web has seen a 46% increase in users year over year, with no immediate slowing down, according to Russell Buckley, Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association, and VP Global Alliances at AdMob Inc. This is true both on and off portal (“on portal” refers to when you want to use your smart phone to access the web and instead it gives you the crap, useless Rogers portal or the crap, useless Blackberry portal, or the crap, useless Verizon portal, or…). Nearly a third (30.2%) of cell phone users in North America are mobile media users, 30 million of which are on fixed rate data plans.

That latter point is huge. It means those people aren’t afraid to push a button to access a website, to click an ad that connects your phone directly to a customer service representative, or to fire up an app that tells you exactly where to find the closest Thai restaurant. I have fixed rate envy. My Blackberry connection is with a company (I won’t say which, but it rhymes with Smodgers) that makes me frightened to even check the weather forecast. I have to rely on old-school methods like sticking my head out the window, which makes me look like a hick.

Mobile marketing is a lot smarter than it used to be. Targeting specific demographics is a lot easier, as is measuring the effectiveness of handheld device campaigns. Check out the free software at Admob Inc. to see how.

There are four billion cell phones in use on the planet right now. Any post-secondary institution with an international footprint has got to figure this out, and fast. “The Next Billion” refers to the developing world, where cell phones are already in high use. Indonesia, the Philippines, India and China mostly use ONLY mobile phones to access information. They don’t have TVs and they don’t read newspapers.

Three new cool things from Microsoft
The bad thing about technology blogging is that there is an extremely high risk of making a Gee whiz! comment about old, lame technology. If you already know lots about the following new tech, I recommend you tell your coworkers. Give them lots of detail. They like it when you do that. If not, here’s the latest from Microsoft’s Brian Johnson, whose title is – I swear I’m not making this up – Developer Evangelist (NOTE: apparently Developer Evangelists differ from Televangelists in that they don’t come with big hair, big teeth, and big extramarital affairs).

Microsoft Live Mesh
The average user has lots of computers, including home and work and mobile stations. What if you could tie them all together, plus use 5 GB of online storage in a virtual “cloud” to plug into all your data and applications, wherever you are? I know what you’re thinking: didn’t Microsoft come up with version after version of spectacularly-lousy home networking software? Sure, but this is different! A Developer Evangelist told me about it. Anyway, the Live Mesh concept is that you download some software from MS which allows you access to all the machines you want to put on your “mesh." Then you can swap files and folders around, and even use applications on one machine that actually live on another. Check out www.mesh.com for details.

Microsoft TAG
Imagine a colour-coded geometric design that could stand for a URL, a bit of text, a Vcard or all of the above. Now imagine that your cell phone camera could “read” the code and immediately access the website, add the Vcard to your contact details, launch a movie trailer, or whatever the code tells it to do. Invented by RazorFish, the tag works. It even comes with software to generate and print your own tag. Check out http://gettag.mobi to download the software.

Bill Gates is giving away $1,000 if you email this to 10 friends!
Just kidding.

Tune in tomorrow for more enlightenment from the sunny south!

DAY TWO
There’s a reason marketing people have a bad reputation in polite society. I probably don’t have to spell it out for you, but it’s the same reason that normal people don’t like communicable skin diseases, or way-past-the-due-date headcheese, or Dick Cheney. What I mean is, something smells funny about them.

Of course, marketers have solutions for that pesky odour issue. Two of them, in fact. The first involves a combination of slicker spokesmen; more smoke and bigger mirrors; and impressive phrases like “post accumulation desire.”

The second solution is more refreshing and a lot more pleasant: smart, hard-working professionals with a conscience and a passion for doing the right thing. I met both kinds today in a pantheon of marketing who’s who: C-level brass from Xerox, American Express, McDonald’s, The Wharton School, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, and General Mills, among others.

I’ll skip over the first kind of marketers, save to say, “Hey, credit card guy, we know you’re in the usurious business of profiting from dumb people who can’t control their spending!” and “Hey, fast food lady, we know you’re in the business of making money by selling fat and cholesterol to children!” For Pete’s sake, stop couching your business raison d’être in terms of social cohesiveness and “bringing hope to the masses.” I mean, do you think we’re all stupid? Wait, don’t answer that.

Instead, I’ll focus on the second kind of marketers, as exemplified by Anne Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation (and the first woman to be voted by her peers as Chief Executive of the Year in 2008).

Mulcahy’s message focussed on the notion that marketing is more important today than ever before (a convenient message, and yes, I hope my President and CFO are reading this).

We live in an age of information overload: digital overload (the amount of information generated over the previous year is more than all the books ever written previously – I mean in all human history); paper overload (15 trillion pages were printed in the USA last year); and delivery overload (100 million pieces of direct mail are sent every day in the USA, there are 25,000 daily periodicals, etc.). She also provided some stats about how many e-mail messages are sent every day, but I missed that as I was checking my Blackberry for the thousandth time that hour. Her point is that today we spend more time looking for more information that is less reliable.

iT or It?
Mulcahy argues that the technology that helped get us into the problem has a role to play in the solution. We used to focus on the T of IT (information technology), but now we must move on to the I.

We need to use technology wisely, to help develop and foster relationships with our customers (NOTE: please insert “prospective student” every time you see the word “customer”; if you don’t like it, I’m sorry but this is 2009 and that ship sailed about 20 years ago) in finding that holy grail of marketing: one-to-one relationships with our customers. She suggests three steps:

Get as close to your customers as possible.
This beings with listening. Pay attention to what your customers are saying, or someone else will. This needs to happen right at the top of the organisation. Seventy-five per cent of customers who say they are satisfied eventually switch service providers (this is because the enemy of “great” is “good”). At Xerox, every executive is responsible for communicating with a certain number of the company’s top customers, so that customer feedback and feeling influences senior-level thinking. The executives have three jobs: listen; take care of the issue; and assume responsibility for fixing whatever the underlying problem was.

Go back to basics.
There are always lots of new things in the market and lots of new whizzy new ways to make more noise about them. What is needed is consistency, clarity, and a few good messages well-communicated.

Nurture your brand.
Brands reside in the hearts and minds of customers. Your brand is what people say and think and feel about you, not your logo. In a sea of change, the brand should be a company’s north star. It can change over time, but it should accurately reflect who you really are, not who you say you are. Marketing professionals should unapologetically take up the mantel of being stewards of their brands.

I like the second kind of marketer a lot better than the first. In my experience in the Canadian PSE sector, they are the norm, not the exception. That makes me feel good. Nobody likes the smell of way-past-the-due-date headcheese.

DAY THREE

Beer isn’t just for breakfast anymore!
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the way you grew up doing things is the right way. This is true for just about everything: the way you fold laundry, the kind of food you eat for breakfast, the way you think about and do marketing.

Dr. Jagdish Sheth, the Charles H. Kellstadt Chair of Marketing in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, and Krishna Kumar, Vice Chairman of Tata Tea and Indian Hotels, made me wake up and smell the tea with respect to all the assumptions I hold dear. Their point: China (1.3 billion people) and India (1.2 billion people) entering the first world will have a huge impact on how we do business, education, breakfast, and even marketing. Three trends to consider:

Affordability will be the driving force behind business and marketing. China and India are poor countries, and their peoples will not be able to afford goods and services in the way we do, despite wanting and needing them. Hence the $2,000 car to be sold this spring.

The Western world will see the rise of Chinese and Indian brands. These foreign brands will be marketed to us in ways that currently seem, well, foreign. Say goodbye to marketing’s iconic four Ps: product, price, placement and people. Say hello to… well, I have no idea. Neither do you. But it will seem weird to us both. Eventually it will seem normal to people (but by then we will be old and crabby and will long for the good old days when OJ used to leap suitcases at the airport, not strangle people and rob hotel rooms).

The eventual, culture-shifting influences they will have on us means that unless we fully participate in foreign markets and figure out how they do business and engage in marketing, we will not do as well as we used to domestically. The coming “domestic” will seem very foreign.

Yes we can
I don’t mind telling you, in my deep and manly voice, that I’m still giddy from hearing a first-hand account of the Obama marketing campaign from Larry Grisolano, Senior Communications Strategist for the Obama Presidential Campaign. Regardless of your politics, what Senator O and his team did on the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was amazing. Highlights:

By the mid-term elections of 2006, the USA (and I think the rest of the world) was hungry for change: change in the economic status quo, in international policy, and in Washington politics. It wasn’t a partisan-inspired call for a new guy, but a genuine, heart-felt desire for transformation.

Obama ran a different kind of campaign, with a different leadership and organisation (which threw out the traditional palace-intrigue model of dog-eat-dog and self-promotion in favour of banding together to be part of something great), real empowerment (trusting local folks to manage phone calls and lists), and a focus on youth (lots of cool, fast-cut, music-thumping television and website ads).

The Internet came of age in this election. The Obama team used it effectively with advertisements and outreach, but also with relationship management, which is a fancy-pants phrase that means “huge database of people we can tap for money, and more importantly, mobilize to vote.” They did this in clever ways, including Google ads that appeared when anybody in a particular area searched for things like “caucus voting rules” and “voting booth location. ”

Grisolano talked about battling public cynicism, building credibility and actually having substance in your policies, then moved on to a hindsight critique of what went wrong for Clinton in the primaries and McCain in the presidential race (aside from Sarah Palin).

Grisolano concluded with five common things the Obama team heard from focus groups across the country:

1. Talk to us like adults.
2. Tell us what you’re going to do and how.
3. Be real.
4. Take responsibility.
5. Do what is best for the country.

What’s really interesting is that he contends these thoughts are not limited to government. People expect companies and colleges and corporations to subscribe to them as well. They want their country to be great again.

The day made me think a lot about what I do, and how I do it. The world is changing. Is our college ready to change with it? How badly do we want to be great?