Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, kicked things off with an interview in USA Today. The campaign centers on the idea that many small businesses don’t already have a website and that setting one up is too much work, whereas setting up a Facebook page can be done in minutes.

While her premise is true, I believe the most receptive target will be those businesses who already have a web presence, but have not been able to use it to generate leads and new business. This is where Facebook advertising can play a big part. When used by an experienced marketer, Facebook advertising can be an efficient and effective tool for the small business.

However, for anyone who has used the Facebook self-service ad builder, the actual user experience does not live up to the definition of easy and intuitive. There are a lot of apparent black box processes that determine how often the ad will be presented (impressions), how frequently it will be shown and how the auction style bidding actual works.

The only way to learn is by doing and so my recommendation is that any small business who wants to get going in Facebook advertising will be well served by starting out working with a specialist who has learned what works from a technical side and combines that with a strong sense of what sort of ad will work for each type of business.

Labor Day at Paradise

My point is not to rave about a great family outing I had, although it was fantastic. On the drive home, I started thinking about what made the day a great experience. We got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic driving up the winding mountain road. The brand new multi-million dollar visitor center had fewer exhibits than a grade school science fair and we had to walk single file up the first trail because there were so many people. When I look at the day from a series of controllable human interactions, it sounded more like a bust than a memorable moment.

From a UX perspective, they could have designed better traffic flow on the roads. The visitor center might have been adaptable to my persona’s needs and of course they could have simply built more trails, scaling for the demand. But in the end, they wouldn’t have made much difference, because ultimately it wasn’t about navigational or operational issues, it was about pure experience.

My pure experience was blue sky, bright sun, views that dwarfed me and a time/place/people combination that wowed me. In other words, it was the content that made the experience. So much of the content we create today is mass produced, aimed at the lowest common denominator and tries to shock or titillate to such a degree as it simply becomes part of the noise and noise which is getting louder every day.

Looking beyond Paradise

The answer is not easy and there isn’t a simple solution, but if try to adhere to one simple principle we may be able to come closer to the mark. Every time we pitch, design, develop, or evaluate an idea, a campaign, or a business model, we should ask ourselves if it can rise to the monumental or at least taste like a lick of a blue glacier on the last day of summer.

There are multiple areas of marketing in which real-time has a unique definition, it’s own importance and a set of tools, practitioners and process that enable it.

From a transactional point of view, real-time means being able to transact from start to finish with no latency. In ecommerce, this is a given, although it surprises me how many websites still ask the customer to submit a form, or call a rep. to get a quote, complete a transaction or get customer service. The Holy Grail of this type of real-time marketing is the complete integration of multiple channels including online, social and in-store. While some, mostly B2C, retailers have done a good job combining online shopping, order and payment with in-store availability and pick-up, this cross-channel experience has rarely been duplicated in the B2B world where sales are still driven by direct sales forces and represent long and complicated purchase cycles. for example, it’s still virtually impossible for a company’s procurement department to negotiate, transact and fufill an enterprise software licensing agreement online.

From the data perspective, real-time refers to the ability to collect and process data in real-time. Whether transactional or behavioral, it is usually focused on the online advertising, search, web or email experience and increasingly user generated activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There appears to be the most momentum in capturing and analyzing social data, which is created, distributed and reacted to in real-time, however most marketers, agencies and analytics providers are still trying to apply the same methodologies to social as they have used in the past to understand traditional channels like broadcast and print. Needless to say, the importance of frequency and reach is completely different when applied to multi-facted social relationships. it is is this area of campaign management and analytics that appear to be paying the most attention to trying to achieve real-time. It won’t be difficult to generate mountains of data, but the trick is having the resources to understand the data and most importantly use that data in real-time. There appears to be very little progress in brands ability to act in real-time.

And finally, the most important area of real-time, is the one most overllooked; understanding the customer in real-time. We spend a lot of time, technology and resources to understand what consumers did in the past and hope that will help us predict what they are going to do in the future. But we devote very little energy to finding out what’s important to a consumer in the moment and then being able to communicate with them in a manner that is relevant to them in that same moment. This is the real real-time Holy Grail and in an increasingly ADHD afflcited world, this is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging customers on their terms. This is why I’ve started my new company Blab. We’re all about relevancy and relevancy is both listening as well as creating and distirbuting branded content. Check our our website for more details about our approach, www.blabbings.com.

The Justin Biebers or Ashton Kutchers of the world are not significantly different than the Hollywood hucksters of generations past. For anyone who can remember Orson Wells pitching Paul Masson wines, there is plenty of evidence of celebrities trying to convert their popularity into influence. They leverage their own personal brands to add a cache to what they are promoting; branding 101. These people are professional or editorial influencers and to which also belong most politicians, journalists and analysts. Regardless of your aesthetic, political or social beliefs, it’s hard not to acknowledge this class of bloggers, Tweeters and authors. And it’s hard not to understand that no matter where they come from, they are advancing their own or their sponsor’s agendas.

There’s another class of influencers who are exerting their presence of the Web and across social media; brands themselves. Within every category, there are competing brands that are generating content aimed to influence the conversation about and the perception of their brand and the products and services associated with their brand. And like the editorial influencers, they unabashedly have their own agendas.

So what does that leave? The rest of the social world made up of individuals who demonstrate their influence by their expertise, their ability to communicate and the authenticity of their messages. These are our peers, like the best Mommy bloggers, leaders in various forums; what Augie Ray of Forrester Research calls, Mass Influencers. This group which amounts to around 6% of the online population generates 80% of the influence impressions.

All these different categories of influencers can be leveraged by marketers, both to disseminate their content, buoyed by the influencers own credibility, but also as a means of understanding what consumers are genuinely interested in.

At Blab, www.blabbings.com, we understand that if you don’t first understand who the “influencers” really are and what is the nature of their influence, you won’t be able to use them to give a lift to your marketing efforts, regardless of channel.

There is no current ability to build massive data storage populated with agency owned data regarding what’s important to people, how they interact and make decisions. There is no ability to break down the FTE heavy structure and process inherent in making money to action campaigns in 72 hours or less. There is no ability to scale beyond tens of clients. There is no ability to use data collection to normalize between channels and determine a predictability regarding where and how to best spend marketing funds.

Agencies today develop client rosters based on cultural fit, revenue limitations, geographic limitations, reputation. Agencies don’t identify specific categories and set out to become experts in these categories as a cable broadcaster might, because there is no way of amassing long category term IP.

Agencies do not build and curate influencer communities within specific categories with the purpose of creating a category network that is ripe to consume and proliferate publishing.

….. but what if an agency were to throw the rule books out, starting with the business model and organizational structure

I’m very proud of the success I’ve had growing Ascentium from a small technology consulting firm into the 5th largest independent digital agency according to AdAge and being called out with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the country by Forrester Research in their 2009 Forrester Wave® of Top Interactive Agencies.

Now is the time to move on and focus on my real passion of mastering cross-channel customer experiences through the integration of the technologies that are helping transform the marketing landscape from search to analytics, lead management to CRM and everything in between. With the maturation of cloud-based services, today’s marketer is faced with a myriad of choices and almost no one to help navigate not only the applications and services themselves, but how they fit into an integrated cross-channel strategy, Forrester calls Digital Brand Orchestration.

I believe that my combination of executive experience on the client side for Lufthansa, T-Mobile and Gateway, agency consulting experience working with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Lexus, and Ford as well as start ups like Marketfish, Quasar, and Surveyanalytics as well as my thought leadership and speaking engagements for organizations like Forrester Research, the DMA, Digital Hollywood, Mirren New Business, The Integrated Marketing Conference and MarketMix, position me well to provide the strategic consulting services needed by leading companies, marketing service providers and advertising agencies.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like more information or if you know of any firm in need of my services.
I will also be devoting time to my commitment to our industry in my capacity as past president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Business Marketing Association chapter as well as lecturing on digital marketing at local institutes of higher learning.

Most of my contact information remains unchanged, with the exception that I can now be reached at john@rainierag.com or jkottcamp@gmail.com . Today I have also launched my new company website, www.rainierag.com . Farewells are always sad, but new beginnings are even more exciting. I continue to wish everyone at Ascentium continued success and I look forward to sharing new stories with each of you in the near future.

Several good cyber-journalists have already done a good job at recapping the entire event. Check out Barrett Sydnor’s “Top Ten Things I learned (or relearned) at BMA Engage 2010” or Sima Dahl’s “Personal Engagement: Bringing It Home” as well as exploring all the great content available on the conference site, www.bmaengage.com.

But at risk of contradicting my own first paragraph, it really wasn’t any individual keynote speaker or presentation that struck me, it was the underlying theme that permeated the entire event. From the body of work presented by Tom Stein of Stein Rogan & Partners, who won the B2 Agency of the Year award and Eduardo Conrado and David Srere’s “Engaging with Purpose” all the way through to Chris Brogan’s “Trust Advisor” and Jeffrey Hayzlett’s “Emotional Technology”, the single clear message I heard was that companies, brands and all the people who tell their stories, have to be honest, authentic and set the bar as high as possible in order to survive, succeed and prosper.

Eduardo Conrado, Motorola’s CMO, told us to throw out the mission and vision statements and get down to the heart of the matter that concerns both customers and employees, purpose. What is the purpose of the company? Why do they do what they do? This was echoed clearly by Jeffrey Hayzlett, the CMO at Kodak, who clearly stated that Kodak’s purpose is not to sell film (whose sales have dropped from $15B to $200m in the last 5 years), but to create memories. He showed videos of customers who said that in the case of a home fire the one thing they’d run back into the house for, would be family photos.

The highlight of the conference for me was Chris Brogan’s presentation from his book, Trust Advisor. His next to last slide was a simple illustration on the back of a blank sheet that says “Human Business”. To be successful, you need to focus of building the relationship first, “be there before the sale” and my favorite line of the entire conference, “bring wine to the picnic.” What could be more authentic than that?

But what I find more interesting than anything else is that digital agencies, once considered the mavericks, the outsiders are now about as mainstream as possible if for no other reason than almost all of the top twenty agencies are owned by much larger agency holding companies. The true independents are becoming rare indeed. It started a couple of years ago with Publicis gobbling up Digitas. They have since acquired Razorfish as well. Blast Radius is a part of WPP and the #3 digital agency is IBM Interactive and we know nothing speaks independent more than being a part of IBM.

In fact of the top 20 digital agencies, only 5 are not owned by a much larger company. And of those, Sapient has merged with Nitro, Rosetta bought Brulant and iCrossing appears to become a part of the Hearst empire.

What does all this mean for independent agencies, for marketers and for consumers? Well, sitting in one of the top five remaining independent agencies, Ascentium, makes me feel like I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back and I’m waiting to hear the M&A types pounding at my door. And perhaps that might not be a bad thing from a financial point of view.

Although for many us who have done both the big agency and the startup, we know why we went for the small option. It’s more fun, we get to work the way we want to and it frees up our creative juices. Frankly we produce better work because we feel like it. That’s the reason a lot of corporate marketers are turning more and more to independent and specialty shops; that’s where the ideas, the new technologies and the partnership mentality come from.

And finally, what about the consumer, do they care where marketing campaigns and experiences come from? Maybe not, but according to the latest from Forrester, watching advertising ranks lowest among consumers as a measure of influence, purchase intent and loyalty. And it’s the big guys who still make most of their money from these forms of traditional push advertising. So go figure.

I’m proud that Ascentium has made it to the #5 position among independent digital agencies this year. And I hope that demonstrates both our preference for going it alone and for our clients’ preference to work with an agency who considers their clients their partners, not their holding company.