Marketing in the Social Age

Joakim Vars Nils articulates in 102 slides (yes a long one) why empowering people is key in marketing. If you don't have time to go through the deck, I summarize and highlight the best parts of his deck below.

People don't want to be interrupted by brand advertisement, they want to be engaged. Engaging brands that work within niches will be more successful in the Social Age. People confer with each other about their interests and what to buy. You have to engage the influencers.

"We have gone from scarcity of media to scarcity of attention, which cannot be bought but earned"

Slide 20 - He shows top brands and highlights that only 50% advertise. I have a different conclusion from him on this slide. The most valued brands today in technology do not use advertising. They use viral marketing i.e. they prove their brands worth and let the community market them.
Slides 39-42 - The Mobile internet is the wave of the future, people social network everywhere, videos and social networking are used more important than email
Slide 73 - Great segmentation of the Social Internet (Internet Marketplace, Social Content, Social Networks, Services, You)

Marketing as a Second Language (MSL)

David Marsee is my lead designer. We were both laughing (and crying) this last week as we designed this.

During this experience we both about fell over laughing when we invented a new special services declaration within the bounds of our office, Marketing as second language or MSL.

While Dave has a great mind for marketing, the majority of the world does not. Ed Guadet, if you are out there, hands off!! He would get bored with your business model anyhow ;)/

Back on topic... when people can not understand marketing, it is painful to even try to explain certain concepts. And when you are sent whitepapers to create what should be a simple message, you can declare that these people need to be put into the MSL program. For the majority of the world that is MSL, I thought I would laugh with you and give you a few lessons on how less is more....

here are my tips... what are yours?

• the most difficult task is consolidating a page into one sentence that has necessary emotional and intellectual impact. It takes four months and potentially 60K worh to marketing spend to come up with:

SynaticMash
build's excellence in student achievement (copyright, 2008)

• 800 x 600 is all the information a mind can handle anyhow, so keep the nav unless you are communicating with statisticians
  
• 11pt font or larger
• 508 enabled cause everyone deserves the right to learn and teach
  
• the mind pulls to the right of the screen unless something is in the middle to draw the eyes
• people want simplicity, that is why blogger survives when I have 5 profiles on different social networks.. this is my blog, the other ones s#$% cause they aren't this simple
  

Anyhow... kudos to Dave