Advercation = Advertising + Education

This week 275 authors submitted their individual chapters for Why Don’t They Get It, a follow up to The Age of Conversation. (All proceeds go to Variety, The Children’s Charity.)

Last year I wrote a chapter on how brand marketers should approach using social media for marketing purposes.

Since that time, I launched my own agency, iStrategyLabs, which focuses on providing clients with interactive strategy (the “iStrategy part”) and digital/physical productions (the “Labs” part).

So, in keeping with iStrategyLabs focus, I contributed a chapter called “Four Principles for Fusing Experiential Marketing and Social Media”. It is my firm belief that interactive channels are rapidly burning out. Think about it this way: how many websites can you visit? How many banners can you click? How many RSS feeds can you follow? Here is a small piece of one of the principles:

The Creation Principle: Experiential marketing is employed by brands to drive deep engagement with an audience in a physical place. However, event producers must think beyond how the offline audience will interact with the brand so that they can build experiences for the online audience as well.

• Structure your talent agreements so the audience is allowed to capture content.
• Allow all cameras onsite. Video and photos shot by your audience will be uploaded to social networks and used in blog posts.

In this increasingly cluttered digital environment marketers need to marry the online and offline worlds to have authentic and lasting conversations with their audiences - this is how marketing is done today. It’s not the future. It’s imperative to market this way NOW.

The book is currently being editing and will be published soon. When it is released I hope you will pick up a copy because, a) my chapter may provide some value to you, b) if not, one of the other 274 could and c) in the worst case you will have contributed to a good cause as all profits are donated.

I look forward to reading the chapters of my fellow authors, especially those by friends:

C.C. Chapman, Ernie Mosteller, Joe Talbott, Jonathan Trenn, Laura Fitton, and Sam Huleatt

You can find out more about the other wonderful authors after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a marketer. Yep. I admit it. My profession is right up there with Dentists and Lawyers in terms of the public’s favorite job types. I typically dismiss the ‘evils’ of marketing and advertising, but every once in while something grabs my attention: witness below the underhanded subliminal advertising Marlboro subjects Spring Breakers to in Mexico.

I only noticed this while on a client shoot down there by pure chance (no, I wasn’t in the club shooting Girls Gone Wild)…and the subliminal ad caught my eye for maybe a hair longer than Marlboro would have hoped. My video camera caught the rest…Anyone know if this is illegal?

Hosted, shot and streamed by Peter Corbett. Produced by the XinDC.tv team.

Video 1:

Video 2:

The following videos contain interviews I conducted at the Web Manager’s Roundtable.

The focus of the discussions was ‘how broadband video can deepen brand engagement.’

Enjoy:

Video 1 of 3

Video 2 of 3

Video 3 of 3

I’m in love with Ustream.tv these days and as a digital agency sponsor of the Web Manager’s Round Table we thought it would be fun to live stream the event.

One Wednesday, July 18th at 8:00 AM Blattner Brunner (bbdigital) will be broadcasting live from an The Web Managers Round Table, a DC event we’re sponsoring that it will focus on “what broadband video can do for your brand.”

This is a gathering of about 100 web managers from around the DC area. We’ll be interviewing interactive marketers, asking them how broadband video is moving their business forward – hopefully we can uncover some tips for you that you can apply to your own online efforts as well.

Please tune in by visiting http://www.bbdigital.com/bbtv tomorrow beginning at 8am!

Or clicking the play button below:

I’ve recently contributed to what may be a first-of-its-kind collaboration via the internet - more than 100 thinkers have joined together online to write The Age of Conversation, a book focused on social media.

After months of preparation, The Age of Conversation was published today and is available for purchase (All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity).

The book can be purchased here:

Here’s are some articles about the book:

Coverage of the book in Advertising Age

An article in Social Computing Magazine

Some of you may be aware that 102 of my closest friends and I have written a book that is soon to be published. Actually, I’ve never met any of my 102 co-authors, but we all share two common traits: one, we’re obsessed by social media, and two, we love helping children.

So, when the opportunity presented itself for me to write a chapter, whose profits would go to charity (the Variety Children’s Charity), I jumped at the chance. Launch day is a week from today. I’ll post a link to the ecommerce site when it’s up. I hope you all will take a leap, buy the book and know that you will be gaining some valuable knowledge with you purchase as well as donating to a worthy cause.

Launch date: Monday, July 16th

Formats/Prices:

Hardbacks $29.99
Paperbacks $16.95
E-book $9.99

Background
Dedication

Authors:
Gavin Heaton

Peter Corbett
Drew McClellan
Christina Kerley
Valeria Maltoni

Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Gruber of TECH Cocktail has sent out a little sneak preview of what he’s been work on at his new gig at AOL.

From the look of the video, myAOL’s new interface may be a little sexier than iGoogle and MyYahoo! I’m looking forward to seeing this in action.

I posted a little while ago about my co-authorship of www.allfacebook.com.

Since its launch two weeks ago, we’ve seen huge traffic to the site and have received a ton of great feedback.

We were especially happy when Facebook emailed us to give us props for the work.

Today we got a nice endorsement from www.wallstrip.com, which was recently acquired by CBS for $5million.

Howard Lindzon said:

“I like allfacebook.com as a blog for keeping up to date on Facebook. I have been spending some time there after my friend Mike mentioned it this morning. Please recommend others. Everybody in the Facebook pool “

Many thanks to our readers, and especially Nick O’Neill for all his hard work setting up the site, and blogging until his fingers go numb!

I’ve been struggling to find a case study on how a brand has used Twitter to truly engage their audience.

Thank you Palm Pictures for finally providing me with a great case study on how a brand can use this social media tool.

Here’s what they did:

0) Palm Pictures is an independent studio focused on the acquisition, production and distribution of innovative music and independent film projects.

1) Palm Pictures created a twitter: http://twitter.com/palmpictures

2) They diligently tweet’d away, providing a running commentary on the films and music they were interested at the time. They provided 155 updates in about 2 months time….which was almost too much…and I almost stopped following their updates.

3) However, one day I received a direct twitter message from a Palm Pictures twitterer Rosalie:

“Hey!!! Thanks for supporting Palm on twitter!!! If you are interested in receiving some screeners mail me on xxxxxxx@palmpictures.com”

4) So as an avid indie film/music fan I was overjoyed to see that Palm Pictures was going to hook me up with some cool merchandise…so i naturally replied and basically said “sweet, hook me up with whatever you’ve got. I LOVE 1 Giant Leap so whatever you think I might like based on that is cool with me.” (I also HIGHLY recommend Sex and Lucia and Bomb the System BTW…actually…anything made by these guys is more than likely worth taking a look at)

5) The payoff came in the mail 3 days later:

Now I’ve got some really awesome films and music to check out this week. Not only that, but when my clients ask me “Peter, how can we use twitter to engage our target audiences?” I’ll be able to point to this case study for a really good example of how to do just that. Great job Palm!