Marketing and content trends, tools, and tips that are always one step ahead of leading edge

I watch a lot of video during the course of my day: Video data sheets, video news, video conference recaps, and so on. But until now I haven’t really realized the power of video to make a case for a product.

Good for fashionistas and foot fetishists alike, heels.com provides contextual video that demonstrably helps the presale experience. All video should be this helpful.

When Charlie Villanueva, a basketball player with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, decided to tweet from the team’s locker room during halftime of a March game against the Celtics, a cry was heard across the land. What was he thinking? Why wasn’t his mind on basketball? His own coach said it gave the impression that the player wasn’t focused.

The tweet in question read, “In da locker room, snuck to post my twit. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.”

Still, there are several things working in Villanueva’s favor. First is that he did step up, scoring 11 of his 19 points in the fourth quarter as his team upset the defending NBA champions.

Next is the fact that sending a tweet at halftime is not so essentially different than a sideline TV interview, done as the player makes his way to the locker room.

Finally there’s the Shaq factor.

Never one to pass up the opening moments of a trend, less than a week later Phoenix center Shaquille O’Neal dropped word (via Twitter, of course) that he was planning something similar during halftime of his upcoming game against Washington.

Sure enough, he came through with this: “Shhhhhhh.”

That O’Neal suffered no repercussions (his coach, Alvin Gentry, also tweets) is probably a sign of things to come. Tweets from baseball players between innings. Tweets from football players between possessions. Tweets from golfers pretty much any time.

The lesson here is one of accessibility, of giving your audience (or your customers) what they want. Debates about an athlete’s in-game focus will always have a place at the table, but so long as the NBA—or Charlie Villanueva or Shaquille O’Neal—is more popular now than it was a month ago, even a die-hard traditionalist must admit there’s some merit to the practice.

O’Neal was among the league’s most popular players before Twitter ever existed. Now he reportedly has more than 471,000 followers and plays Twitter tag, wherein he tells people where he is at any given moment and offers game tickets to the first person to find him.

Could any marketer come up with a better program? —Jason Turbow, managing editor

The concept of jargon reached new levels of importance last week when it was elevated from boardroom to courtroom. Fed up with inaccessible language within its system, Britain’s local government association (LGA) put its foot down. No longer tolerated are the terms taxonomy, re-baselining, mainstreaming, holistic governance, contestability, predictors of beaconicity—and 194 more.

Martin Luther had 95 Theses; the LGA has 200 terms to avoid. And they’re doing more than nailing them to a church door—they’re making policy out of them, banning them entirely from official use.

“The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases. Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead? . . .” said LGA Chairman Margaret Eaton in an official press release. “Councils have a duty, not only to provide value for money to local people, but also to tell people what they get for the tax they pay. People would be furious if they have no idea of what services their cash is paying for and how they should get to use them.”

It only makes sense. The best way to reach people is through plain language, and the antithesis of plain language is jargon. Jargon can certainly be clever and catchy—heck, Tendo devotes an entire feature to it each month—but it can also be confusing and cumbersome.

It’s a good lesson for marketers. Jargon can be great when talking to other marketers who actually speak the language. But when trying to communicate with your target audience, there’s little point in presenting the air of faux legitimacy that jargon can instill, especially if it obscures the message you’re ultimately trying to get across.

As the saying goes, if it’s good enough for government work . . . —Jason Turbow, managing editor

If the words “Twitter” and “tweet” sound more like noises outside your bedroom window than a Web 2.0 application, you’re behind the technological curve. Here’s a quick refresh: Twitter is an online service that allows any subscriber to update his or her profile with updates of no more than 140 words. It’s like having a little place to yourself for doing nothing but writing Facebook-esqe status updates. Only Twitter is more often used to expand beyond a private little corner and share one’s innermost life updates with the world. In reading your updates, other Twitter users have the option to subscribe–or “follow”–what you’re posting. And you can follow them as well to see what they’re up to. Easy? Well, the popularity of Twitter has blown it beyond just a simple status update engine. True, the core function remains the same, but the user base has expanded in its size and scope:

• Corporations Twitter: Their employees use the service to officially (or unofficially) interact with customers in a real-time setting.
• Celebrities Twitter: Want lunch with Shaquille O’Neal? Follow his Twitter and say hi to him in the restaurant. You might even get free tickets to a game!
• Too many people Twitter: From George Stephanopoulos’s less-than-thrilling Twitter interview with Arizona Senator John McCain to jurors who Twitter during trials, Twitter is pushing straight into the common vernacular. And it’s not always for the best.

Face it: Twitter is here to stay. That said, there are a number of different ways to make the most out of this emerging communications platform. We’ve come up with three different applications that help you maximize your presence in the Twitter cloud. Whether you’re intending to contribute or lurk, each provides a functionality far greater than that of the boring ol’ default Twitter interface.

Twitterfall

Like a waterfall for words, Twitterfall is a real-time stream of every single (non-protected) update that gets posted to the service. Expect a backlog of information even when you set the posts to enter the display at a rate of one per second there’s just that much information flowing into Twitter. You can set the service to display tweets based on popular trend words or your own custom search, functionality that makes this tool invaluable for discovering the up-to-the-minute buzz on a particular topic.

TweetDeck

For those who want to read as well as contribute to Twitter, TweetDeck is a powerful, Adobe Air-based application that you can download to your PC and use to interact with the service. It displays your personal Twitter profile in a columnar format. From there, you can add additional columns into the mix depending on your preferences. This can include a real-time feed for direct messages and Twitter replies to your updates,  a listing of tweets related to keywords you select, and powerful grouping functionality to help segment your (many) Twitter friends.

Twhirl

Similar to TweetDeck, the application Twhirl breaks away from a column-based organization and displays Twitter information in a single, tab-based window. You can do all the same activities you could in TweetDeck: send tweets, look at replies and direct messages to tweets you’ve posted, and generate real-time feeds of information based around particular keywords you select. The added benefit that Twhirl brings to the table over TweetDeck is that it allows you to conduct Twitter business across multiple accounts simultaneously. It’s a perfect choice for those wishing to maintain both “corporate” and “personal” Twitter identities, if the two can even be distinguished. –David Murphy, associate managing editor

If your workplace is experimenting with blogs, this recent study posted on the HP Labs’ site offers an interesting read (full disclosure: HP is a Tendo client). 

Sarita Yardi (Georgia Institute of Technology), Scott A. Golder (Cornell University), and Michael J. Brzozowski (HP Labs) studied some corporate folks in their natural habitat to try to figure out why they blog—or not (in addition, Mia Dand, social media monitoring manager at HP, recently wrote a post for Social Computing Magazine called “To Blog or Not to Blog”).

What I found most interesting was this: Corporate bloggers “desired management buy-in. They wanted management to acknowledge and recognize their activity in this community.”

While the study referred only to the internal blogs of a “large technology corporation with offices around the world” (hint: starts with H, ends with P), it squarely fingers two huge weaknesses of many blogging programs: resources and rewards.

While blogging offers a low-cost way to communicate directly with customers, too many companies mistake it for being “no-cost.” Employees have jobs to do, after all, and they will eventually give up blogging if they aren’t given the help they need to keep going. Sometimes just offering a hand with blogging can be recognition enough that their efforts are appreciated.

Most importantly, blogging support can keep your company in the conversation with its customers with timely and interesting content.

If you’re not already doing it, here are just a few ways to support your bloggers, either with in-house resources or an outside agency: 

1. Finding topics—Keeping on top of the news and trends in a field takes time and effort. A predigested list of possible blogging topics with links to news stories, other blogs, and sites of interest gives bloggers a jumpstart.
2. Editing—Few bloggers are professional writers, and don’t have to be to blog. Still, a little editorial spit-and-shine can keep your company’s image sharp while letting the blogger’s personality shine through.
3. Commenting opportunities—Half of blogging is commenting. Finding the best opportunities for commenting can drive more people to your blog and make certain your company is in on the right conversations.

Of course, there’s plenty more to do: Analyze metrics to glean ideas for improvements; do the legwork on incorporating new tools into bloggers’ repertoires (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube come to mind); syndicate, whether by RSS feed or through a site that deals with your industry. Whatever form it takes, offer your employees a helping hand to blog. And don’t forget to give them a hand when they do. I like dark chocolate, myself. —Margie Wylie, senior editor

I was delighted to see Rick Burnes’s recent blog post suggesting that companies that invest in engaging Web content will ultimately attract a greater share of customer attention.

This reality has been building for several years. Companies large and small that invest in producing high-quality, original content—focused on the real interests of their target audience—not only build trust and credibility with customers and prospects, but also an annuity of organic search results that deliver cost-efficient audience engagement.

Think about it: You can build traffic through expensive banner or paid search campaigns—bring visitors to your website and treat them to an expected mix of content about your product or service—or you can invest a portion of your Web marketing budget to producing content that complements your offering with content your audience finds uniquely valuable. The search benefits are even greater if you commit to publishing new content on a regular basis. 

This is not a new idea. Many successful marketers have embraced this strategy and are enjoying the dividends of their efforts. P&G’s Tide brand detergent provides a resource for laundry questions. Kohler provides a great service to site visitors with content that educates, inspires, and no doubt builds affinity and preference for their products. Does your website do all it can to maximize both customer engagement and your search ROI? —Karla Spormann, CEO

In a move demonstrating the Obama administration’s commitment to technology to continue possibly the most brilliant voter engagement efforts ever, it was announced recently that the president plucked a product manager from Google to serve as “director of citizen participation.” The appointee, Katie Jacobs Stanton, formerly a group product manager at Google, worked on Google Moderator, a tool the Obama campaign used to let the public submit questions during debates.

So what’s the big deal? For starters, it demonstrates how well the Obama administration gets it in terms of understanding Web 2.0 technology and audience engagement.

Secondly, it underscores how critical technology is to facilitating human interaction these days. Notice that they didn’t choose someone with more traditional political chops, such as a community organizer.

The online story I read in MediaPostNews didn’t specify Stanton’s exact responsibilities, but it indicated a focus on moderating online forums and facilitating the administration’s dialogue with the public.

A quote in the story from Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk sums up nicely the context of this appointment for marketers in the private sector: “If we think about Obama’s administration like a corporation, the smartest corporations are ones that put tools in place to help them listen to, speak with, embrace, energize, and support customers.”

The White House is proving adept at Web 2.0 and conversational marketing. Where are you with your conversational marketing efforts? —Bill Golden, managing editor

It’s day 3 of my 2009 work year and I’ve already received 83 Facebook updates. I’m sure that’s a paltry amount compared to the level of activity that many people experience, but let me tell you: I’m horrified at that stat (and awed at these stats).

So as I start this new year, I’m wondering: What is it about Facebook that causes previously communication-averse folks to suddenly start yapping like a coked-out Chihuahua?

For example, I used to hear from a longtime friend once every three or four months via a brief email or a hurried phone call. Now, she’s all over Facebook like a diaper rash: asking for book recommendations, rooting for USC games, commenting on photos, joining online groups, filling out “How Italian Are You?” quizzes, etc. I find this behavior puzzling from a woman who didn’t turn on the computer for the past six years.

I’m not trying to single her out; she’s just one example of the phenomenon that is Facebook. Though online communities have been around as long as the Internet has, Facebook is apparently the right application at the right time. The convergence of a couple of factors help: Home computer use has reached critical mass and “new” technologies like video and sound communicate experiences in ways that mere words can’t. Add in Facebook’s extreme ease of use and you’ve got a compelling online experience.

It’s the holy grail of online marketing: an application that grows by word of mouth and becomes essential—at least for some users—to their daily lives. And yet, I’m still left feeling that never has so much communication amounted to so little real connection. Let me know what you think. Are you getting substantial communication out of Facebook? —Christine Zender, VP, creative services

How much is a word worth when it describes a sound? I’m searching for stock music on a site called StockMusic.net and having more fun than I thought was possible while performing this mundane task.

Why? Whoever wrote the descriptions for the music clips is a genius. A demented and (quite possibly) chemically altered genius, but a genius nonetheless. I’ve searched a lot of stock music sites and the descriptions usually say things like: “Great for travel, vacation, holiday, etc.” or “Spanish guitars, percussion, clapping, castanets.” Helpful, but not inspiring.

StockMusic.net’s descriptions, on the other hand, say things like: “These clowns sound like they’re pretty confident and they just might take ice cream away from children—but then they would give it back.” Or “If Ozzy’s family and Alice Cooper’s family were having a feud, this is the theme for it.”

I may not be sure what I’ll hear when I download the demos for these clips, but I know that I need to listen to them both. —Christine Zender, VP, creative services

During the holiday season, shoppers are inundated with catalogues, email promotions, and other retail marketing materials. I was out of town for several weeks in late November and early December and I came home to at least 10 catalogues in my mailbox, and countless email offers and reminders. Only one stood out from the pack.

The email message was from HeidiSays, a store on Fillmore that actually has three physical locations (Collections, Casual, and Shoe Salon). I’ve shopped there for years, though recently I’ve done more browsing than buying. With the economy on the skids, I’m obviously not alone. This email newsletter was actually a letter from the owner. These were the key points:

1. Appreciation. She thanked shoppers for their loyal patronage.
2. Sympathy. She addressed the fact that everyone is facing tough economic times: “Our business has seen a slowdown in the past couple of months and some of our customers have withdrawn out of necessity. We understand.”
3. A request. She asked clients to keep the store in mind as they do their holiday shopping, and she offered to match or beat department store prices on merchandise.
4. Graciousness. She talked about her stores as part of the Fillmore Street community, and asked shoppers to remember all Fillmore Street merchants this holiday season.
5. Incentive. She offered an incentive to shop at her stores—providing “HeidiSays Dollars” to clients, with a minimum purchase.

The letter from Heidi was well-written, and it hit the mark with its tone and its message. Instead of deleting it, I kept it in my inbox as a reminder to stop by her stores before Christmas this year. Now that’s a successful piece of marketing. —Julie Jares, managing editor