The marketing word of the year is "SLUT"

It's an acronym I came up with after reading an article about yet one more brand losing out on a unique, free, global branding opportunity because they failed sharing in Kindergarten. They should have been a SLUT.

"Hey! Knock it off, ya big palooka!"

It's short for "Share, Learn, Understand, and Teach". These are the four most important things any brand must do online if it is going to survive the next few years.

First of all, let's talk about Sharing.

An interesting post on the Post Advertising blog detailed how the Columbus Dispatch completely failed to catch the free ride offered by the viral rise and fall of Ted "Golden Voice" Williams.

You can read the first part of the story on Osocio.  Basically, a man who was living on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, was an ex-radio voice talent who had fallen on hard times. The Dispatch did a video story on his unique panhandling pitch, and when someone posted it on YouTube the video "went viral" in the advertising blogosphere. Not wanting to miss a great PR opportunity, KRAFT soon snatched him up for work.



the sad ending of the story was that, while Ted retained his professionalism, he also carried all the baggage that put him on the street in the first place. After tearful reunions with family, he ended up getting in trouble with the law over altercations with them, and sent to rehab.

Now Ted's story is both inspiring and tragic. But cynical marketing pros saw a whole other tragedy unfold when this happened right in the middle of the golden meme's viral rise to fame:

Post Advertising explains the epic failure:

The original video, uploaded by a user named “Ritchey,” got nearly 20 million views in less than a week. But now that video is nowhere to be found. A YouTube search for “Ted Williams Homeless” turns up plenty of videos of the homeless man with the golden voice, including one from Russia Today which has over 9 million views, but nothing from “Ritchey.”


According to an article posted on CNET, the Columbus Dispatch had the viral YouTube version of their video —which prominently featured Dispatch branding— removed, citing copyright infringement. They still host a page dedicated to the story on their site, and they re-uploaded the video to YouTube with even more Dispatch branding in conjunction with the Associated Press.

To their dismay, they couldn’t harness the buzz around the original video. The updated version of the video shows up well below the fold in a YouTube search for “Ted Williams Homeless” and nowhere on a Google search for “YouTube Ted Williams.” However, the CNET article that originally reported the removal does show up in a search for that term. All the momentum and exposure that The Dispatch was getting for breaking their story had flatlined, and it was their own doing.

Now let's talk about Learning. Have you learned anything about the Dispatch's failure to share? I sure hope they did.

But it's a lesson that many other brands are learning, both the good way and the hard way. I have written many times about how last year's most celebrated viral PSA, "Embrace Life", almost missed the boat because they wanted to force people to visit their site to see the video. Even now, I have campaigns of my own that I can't really seed to my blogger network because their copyright owners don't want to share their content with the world at large. This is a shame.

(And yes, I know I could have made the L for "Listening", but listening is worthless if you don't actually learn from it.)

Understanding is the key. You need to explore and map the new digital marketing and media landscape daily if you are to have any hope of navigating your brand where you want it to be. To say that "everything has changed" is an epic understatement. The most powerful brands in the world are in the hands of the most activist and organized consumers, and you can no longer simply buy their loyalty. You have to earn it by coming down from your tower and partying with them down in the mud.

Then how do you maintain brand leadership, when you're just one of the crowd? By Teaching what you understand. If you overlook his more mythical aspects, Jesus was on the surface just "some guy" who had a deep understanding of his audience and who gained followers by teaching them how to live better. (He taught by storytelling, too, which means he would've been very well-prepared for social media!) Buddha taught. Confucius taught. Socrates taught. Are you getting the point?

 If you want to be a leader in the current environment, you have to be a teacher. People want to follow other people who make them feel smarter and better informed. Brands can do the same — although they may not have the benefit of being able to perform miracles.

So there you have it. If you want to succeed, you have to be a SLUT. It's the intellectual equivalent of the free love movement. And it's going to put both the prudes and the prostitutes out of business.

"Sexy business?"

The rumours of marketing's death have been greatly exaggerated

Social media people seem to take great glee in pronouncing the doom of advertising as we know it. Blogs like Post Advertising are built around the idea, and Guy Kawasaki was grimly checking for advertising's pulse over three years ago.

Today I received the latest obituary from Jason, our digital chief, via socialmediatoday:

2010: The Year Marketing Dies...

But inflammatory headline and "obvious death of mainstream media is obvious" statistics aside, the effing article actually gets around to something I can use:

"Of course, if marketing burns to the ground in 2010, a new and more powerful marketing will rise from the ashes."

Thank you. Not just for telling me that I have a future, but also for giving credit to human nature.

As long as we have somewhat of a market economy, there will be marketing. "Advertising", "Integrated Marketing Communications", "Branding", "Social Media"... call it what you will. If someone has something to sell on a large scale — whether it's goods, services, or ideas — then someone needs to figure out how to reach, inform, and persuade their target audiences.

For that reason, the socialmediatoday article made some good sense. And since they are heralding the new era of interaction, I'll interact with the part I like:

The role of the new marketer:

• Won't be simply to focus on outbound messaging but to consult with sales, customer service, and human resources on how the brand must be communicated in every consumer interaction, every tweet, and every touchpoint,

QFT. As consumers become emboldened by their powers of mass communication, they expect their brands to be there with them. The days of one-way advertising are over. Today it's a nonstop, realtime focus group that everyone gets to observe, moderate and attend.

• Won't be merely to imagine creative messages but to fashion programs that are seamless with the actual product and service experience,

Not sure about this one. Do consumers always experience products, or do they sometimes really experience brands? When you get into consumer products, I would argue that people are still swayed by status symbols that do not represent true value for money or even decent performance. It's all about membership, and a strong brand can actually shape that identity — especially if a celebrity is involved.

• Won't be to plan bursts of communication on a yearlong calendar but to respond to and be part of the ever-changing dialog with consumers,

This. Things happen too fast for the traditional approach. We see this now with big TV productions, where the need for advance planning and commitment to production details clashes with the need to react to today's headlines. Everything needs to get more agile.

• Won't be to count friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, or viewers but to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent,

This is the big ROI question, and it's one we haven't been able to adequately answer yet. Fortunately, most of our clients are looking for just such attitude and behaviour changes rather than sales. Perhaps that's why we're not as scared as some others. When we can manage expectations honestly, social media works for our clients.

• Won't be merely to talk at consumers but to listen and engage one to one,

This is the biggest change in the way people consume media. It has become more and more personal. However, I would argue that smart advertisers have always listened to consumers, through market research, and have used their intuitive abilities of empathy and persuasion to create engaging ads. The media may change, but what goes behind the messages stays the same. It's just more immediate, and in some ways more exact. When you see someone starting a 10-member Facebook Group about how much you suck, though, it can also trick you into making a mountain out of a molehill.

• Won't be to build campaigns but relationships,

This has always been the point of branding, even in analogue days.

• Won't be to create impressions but experiences

10 BRANDING
20 GOTO 10

• Won't be buy media but to earn it.

This is the biggest change of all. When I started this blog last spring, one of the first issues I addressed was the idea that social media should "brand, not sell". I still believe that, and have been testifying this gospel to clients at every opportunity.

One of the toughest hurdles we face, with our clients as well as our own processes, is the fuzzy convergence of advertising, PR, and media in the new Internet. When you create a great viral, for example, you are practicing advertising. But your engagement strategy is more like PR or Media Relations (except that you're talking to unpredictable bloggers like me rather than news editors). And then there are ways to buy your way in as well.

But the bottom line is that great insights, and great ideas, are still as influential as ever. The barriers to entry may have been lowered in terms of access to readers and viewers, but the more choices people have to ignore you, the more the power of breakthrough creative remains key.

In other words, "I'm not quite dead yet..."