How did we eat before the Internet?

I don’t know about you but Pinterest is a guilty pleasure – a time waster – a way to relax my brain when it goes on overload. That said – there is also some really cool stuff on Pinterest. Food and recipes are huge. I find inspiration and – get this – have even tried some of the recipes.

My absolutely most favorite app ever…today: Uber

I have to say that new media is doing all kids of really cool stuff. Some of it is changing the world. Some if it is just changing the mundane things in our lives. My absolutely most favorite app today probably isn’t changing the world – but it certainly changed my world.

I want it the way I want it, and I want it now! (or things that are frowned upon in kindergarten but are SOP in adult life)

One of the lessons that we learned in kindergarten, along with sharing, was patience. Another was to make polite requests rather than dictatorial (and often unreasonable) demands. But, as we grew up, things started changing. Burger King told us that we could “Have it your way.” More recently State Farm Insurance channeled Journey to tell us we can have insurance  “Anyway you want it…” (interesting – this ad seems to have disappeared from the internet – I didn’t even know that was possible – can you find it?)

These are reflection of a cultural shift towards an expectation of rapid and deep personalization. As marketers, this is a trend that we must pay attention to. It is about both how the product or service is structured and how it is advertised.

I’ll admit that I’m guilty of the ‘I want it my way now mentality’ and LOVE products and services that enable me. My lunch today is a great example. I ordered a Chipotle Carnitas bowl online – to my exact specifications (pinto beans, cheese, corn salsa, tomato salsa, & lettuce!) – and I didn’t have to wait in line. That is the beautiful magic of the online order – I place my order, wait a few minutes – show up – by-pass the regular line like a rock star and walk out with my food in record time. Chipotle can also serve twice as many customers this way.

We can see that this has clear implications for products and services, but what does it mean for the advertising – the marketing messages and content that we want consumers to digest. They want the content the way they want it when they want it – so how do we accommodate this?

As the personalization and immediacy trend is often tied to social media, it is an obvious answer. An interesting blog post asks “Is the Social Media Trend the Shiny Object Distracting Us From the Real Marketing Revolution – Mobile?” The author posits that since smartphones are really way more than phones and are becoming ubiquitous that marketers needed to invest creative energy in mobile strategies – something that she asserts has been lacking in most mobile efforts.

How can we make our content both productive for a brand and desirable for the consumer so that they are willing to seek it out? Lessons from kindergarten may also apply here – though these are more on the adult side than the student side:

• You can learn important skills while playing. Gamification is certainly one way that brands can create desirable marketing content.
• Hide the vegetables in more interesting food. Product placements expose consumers to a brand while they are seeking other content.

There may even be a next big thing around the corner.  Where the creative edge lies is in creating marketing content that is as desirable as the product. What are your thoughts?

Cheating is cheating, online or offline

No, this isn’t a commentary on the Romeny campaign’s recent ads. It is  a post questioning  a statement in a recent article that seemed to imply that emerging media technologies were at least partially to blame for increased cheating.

While online access to information may make it easier to cut and paste, it also provides tools to identify plagiarism.  In the cases of plagiarism that I have witnessed, it hasn’t required these tools to identify a copy and paste job. Merely clicking cited links revealed that, while the student cited a source, no paraphrasing actually took place and quotation marks were missing.

It seems to me that there are three components to this challenge:

1. Knowing what plagiarism is
2. Creating a culture of ethics
3. Enforcing (publicly) the penalties of violating those ethics

Knowing what plagiarism is
Based on what I have seen on a number of occasions, it strikes me that students aren’t maliciously plagiarizing. However, they don’t seem to realize that changing a single word in a sentence still constitutes plagiarism. Summarization is a skill that must be developed. As source material gets shorter and shorter, and in the case of blogs is sometimes already a summary, it can be challenging to provide a succinct restatement. Of course, that is what properly cited quotations are for. Emerging media should be more of a help than an hindrance in this aspect.

Creating a culture of ethics
With a student body that is fully cognizant of what plagiarism is and is not, building a strong culture of honesty and ethics is critical. At my undergraduate alma mater, the first official thing that we did on campus was sign an honor code. This isn’t something that we do in private in a cubicle while we fill out our financial aid forms. It is done as a community in a large public ceremony. The honor code was a part of our community ethic.

Certainly creating this depth of community is harder to do with a larger or geographically diverse student body, but setting and maintaining standards for ethical behavior is critically important. How can we create the feeling of looking someone in the eye over thousands of miles? This is one way that emerging medias might be able to aid rather than hinder academic standards.

Enforcing (publicly) the penalties of violating those ethics
In the article on cheating in higher education, the reasoning was that because it was easy to cheat people would cheat. In the age of extreme helicopter parenting, repercussions for unethical behavior may not be clear to all students and must be consistently and enforced. The cost of cheating then needs to be high enough and clear enough that it outweighs the cheating in the mind of the students. I suggest that it be public so that students who see cheating – namely plagiarism – in their classmates work are aware that their classmates have been punished. Otherwise it merely appears that there is no penalty, and tacitly approves cheating as a common academic practice effectively undermining any efforts to create a culture of ethics.  A public apology to the class in which the plagiarism took place in addition to any academic penalties would be a step in the right direction.

These technologies aren’t going away. The practices that individuals form during their academic career direct the practices they will use in their professional career. The rise of cheating and plagiarism does not bode well for the standards of excellence in any field but especially for marketing where intellectual property is the primary coin of trade.

What is your experience? How might we further build a community using new media to discourage departures from academically (and professionally) acceptable behavior?

Why blog anyway?

At one time the answer to the question “Why blog anyway?” would have been “To tell the world what I had for lunch!” – now we have Twitter and Instagram for that. Today, while there are still plenty of inane blogs, and the reasons for an individual to start a  blog are myriad, there are several primary reasons for businesses to blog: increase traffic to a corporate site, maximize search engine optimization(SEO), monetize a web presence.

Driving Traffic

One challenge faced by many small businesses is a relatively static website with little reason to drive return visits from customers and prospects. A blog can help address that. It provides new and compelling but related content. A blog can increase visitor interest and return visits, and it can also provide a network of links that increase the searchability of the corporate site. Which brings us to…

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is often seen as the holy grail of web strategy and there are companies that claim to be able to changing your search ranking through complex internet voodoo. Ultimately, SEO is about providing quality content that engages. When people are choosing your content, sharing it, linking to it, and you are providing current relevant content, maximizing your reputable use of keywords, you will optimize your search rankings. It can be hard to do all of that on a standard corporate or e-commerce site. A blog provides an opportunity for the rich content that enables these interactions.

Monetization

There are two primary ways to monetize blog content. You can develop a following large enough or targeted enough that it is desirable for advertisers and sell advertising space on your blog. If you’re interested check out these articles here, here, and here that have tips and how-to information for setting up ads on your blog.

Alternatively, creating a membership for ‘premium content’ can be an effective way to create a steady income stream. No matter how niched you are (and in many ways specifically because you have developed a targeted niche) your content will be valuable to someone.

Why do you blog?

If a Tweet Fell in the Forest . . . (or Why do we mess with these metrics things?)

Often times as marketers or communicators, we get so focused on telling the story of our product that we lose sight of another important story. Our story.

We excel at gathering all the minutia of a product, brand, or event and finding the most creative and effective way of sharing that information with our audience. We tell compelling stories with words, visuals, and sound. We share it in print, broadcast, and online. However, when it comes to the story of what we do as marketers and communicators, we often fall far short.

In reality, we have a compelling story of our own to tell. Not just, “We published a creative angle on a story, or produced a great ad.” Thanks to the beauty of metrics which are readily accessible for most if not all new media, we can identify what impact that story had, how many people it reached, how many clicks, actions, or sales it drove. Sure, we keep track of those, but they are boring, right? Wrong. This is our story.

At a time when especially smaller organizations and non-profits consider communications professionals an expensive item to be removed from the budget and replaced with volunteers or interns, this is our story that we need to sell with every bit as much gusto as we do the other stories that we tell.

True, we have the ability to collect an overwhelming sea of numbers – more than any sane person cares to review. We must ruthlessly edit in the same way that we ruthlessly edit every bit of copy that we use to create an ad, editorial, or feature piece.

What are the most compelling statistics and how can they be presented in the most cohesive persuasive way?

In a non-profit organization, I would argue that you should start with the strategic plan. Functionally, your communications should be working to advance the strategic plan, so what are some measurable outcomes that can support the goals of the strategic plan? This will drive what metrics you use to tell your story.

Admittedly, sometimes identifying the right metrics is the hardest part of the job. You might check out these articles here, here, and here that have different takes on the topic (from different industries, but the lessons are applicable). If you know me this is also something that I love to talk about so shoot me an email.

Once you’ve identified how you are advancing your organization’s goals, you have the metrics to demonstrate your success (or your lack of success and the strategic and tactical changes you are making as a result), what do you do with this information? If a Tweet fell in the forest would anyone hear it? You need to make sure that your management and or board can easily see the value that strategic communication plays in advancing organizational goals. You need to tell your story.

Memos, infographics, and short videos are all ways to imbue your metrics with meaning. I would argue that at least once per year it is important to report how effective your communications have been in advancing the larger organizational goals – tell your story.

I know you’re worried right now that you’ll find out that maybe some of your communications haven’t hit their mark. That is OKAY – as long as you have the data to know why so that you can adjust your tactics to more effective ones in the future. And that self-awareness and innovative vision is also part of your story.

Free the Frogs!! (or how technology makes school way cooler)

Do you remember the dreaded frog dissection in high school? I do. It was miserable. Turns out I’m good at a lot of things but frog dissection – not so much. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the strong suit of my lab partner either. In the end we mutilated the poor dead frog and had to look at another lab group’s just to take the practical.  Not the best learning experience since more than the anatomy of the frog I just remember what a disgustingly bad job we did!

Apparently, some of today’s students can be spared this horror. A new app lets you virtually dissect frogs. The awesomeness here is multitude – no nasty frog mess, you can’t mutilate it accidentally, you can learn the anatomy without the frog nastiness, no frogs need be hurt in the making of this lab experiment.

There are many interesting ways that emerging technologies are changing the way we do things, but I think that some of the most interesting applications are in educations settings (and apparently so does Mashable who has had several articles on best education apps lately – here, and here).

My brother teaches and has this nifty thing called a Smart Board in his room. It lets him do some really neat interactive stuff with his class including doing review games like Jeopardy and fun critical thinking and problem solving scenarios.  It allows students to interact directly with the content displayed on the board individually or in groups. His students beg to learn when the Smart Board is involved.

There seem to be a plethora of ways that technology is involved in today’s classroom and in education more broadly from educational apps, to online tutoring, to research. Some of it is great – clearly. Some applications of technology seem to be less so as we’ve seen with reports of rampant cheating at some of our nation’s top schools. But there are also great online tools to help teachers identify plagiarism and cheating.

Technology in education is a two way street, but I think that there are many more benefits than there are negatives. What do you wish there had been an app for when you were in school?

Another Class, Another Introduction

Hi, my name is Mary Getz. As I mentioned before, I’m a grad student and am now in another class that requires a blog.  So, for the next nine-ish weeks most posts here will focus on different aspects of emerging media – well, let’s not call it that. As it turns out the class in emerging media is really more of a survey of emerging media from the last 12 years or so. Some of what we look at in the class will be emerging (defined by one online dictionary as “newly formed or just coming into prominence”), some will be new applications of old technology.

To me the really interesting part of our emerging interactions with media is the two-way interaction between consumers of content and content generators. The line between these two roles is rapidly blurring.

CNN has it’s cadre of ‘iReporters’ that provide first hand reporting often with video of breaking news events. People who previously only consumed the news are now reporting it.

Doritos has crowd-sourced its last several Super Bowl ads with terrific results. Not only did they engage consumers with the brand through creating ads, people who didn’t have the time or skill to create an ad still had the opportunity to vote on the best ads.

The result of this deep interaction is changing expectations particularly on the part of consumers. This means that marketers have to adjust their techniques for effective communication. This is where the ‘emerging’ part of the communications really come into play.

Don’t kick the puppy… (or Why the Mac Genius ads failed)

The ‘I’m a Mac’ ad series proved to be highly successful for Apple and was copied and parodied by many. One element critical in the successful execution of this series was that they never “kicked the puppy.”  They didn’t take the cheap shot. They didn’t go nuclear. They didn’t take a sympathetic character and push him off a cliff. They didn’t kick the puppy.