If e-mail’s dead, then what’s all this stuff in my inbox?

Sally Saville Hodge

I keep hearing rumblings, then reading blog posts by various and sundry social media prognosticators that e-mail is dead.

“Taken out by Twitter, Chat and Communities,” opines Gartner Group’s Michael Maoz, saying, “Customers want more immediacy, and e-mail never lived up to that standard.”

Social American, a firm that designs social media campaigns, is a dab less emphatic than Maoz in sounding a conditional death knell. Is it dead? one of its bloggers queries, citing a Nielsen Online study that indicates more people in digitized countries use social media networks and blogs to communicate with each other than e-mail.

Of course, if you look at the difference in reach, as per that Nielsen study, the member communities were ranked at 66.8 percent versus 65.1 percent for e-mail. A 1.7 percent differential represents a stake in the heart of the e-mail channel?

Source: Sacramento State

Look at the numbers. Do you think 25.2 billion Tweets or instant messages are being exchanged by office workers each day?

I’d like to see e-mail evolve (in other words – that people would get smarter in how they use it), but I don’t think it’s dead. And that’s because, for all their allure, the other contenders have distinct drawbacks.

Take Twitter. Nobody (outside of Twitter itself) quite knows how many people are using it now, with estimates ranging from millions to tens of millions. You can Twitter online. You can use it from your cell phone. You can get all sorts of applications to help you use it better. You can follow Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore and Oprah or someone random, like me.

And, yeah, savvy businesses are using it to improve the customer experience, which makes it a whole lot cooler – and, yes, more immediate – than plain old e-mail. I recently tweeted a complaint about Comcast screwing up our service before a recent move and within minutes was tweeted by ComcastBonnie: “How can I help?” Cool beans.

Of course, responding to her was problematic because the issue would have required maybe 50 Tweets to explain fully. That’s because there’s a limit of only 140 characters (including spaces) per post. That limit is why so many of the tweets that I scan are incomprehensible, and why it’s no substitute for anyone who truly wants to create meaningful dialog. Between hash marks and RTs (re-tweet = sharing someone’s post with your network) and abbreviations and other forms of shorthand, you often need an interpreter to make sense of it all.

But replacing e-mail? Think again and be aware of how slippery stats can be. Consider the other side of the Twitter growth coin: The percentage of Twitter users in a given month who return the following month has languished below 30 percent for most of the past year. Not likely that’s a trend you’re seeing with e-mail usage.

Then there are the social networking communities. To me, these versus e-mail represent an apples and oranges comparison. Social networking is another communications tool, an adjunct, perhaps, to e-mail – less individual, less private, and with an entirely different functionality.

And chat? Again, it’s more immediate, and from a customer service perspective, that’s not a bad thing. Comcast, again, is using it to help solve customer issues. I tried it out the other day for a whole different matter. But how dumb is this? Because of the confidentiality issue, the customer service rep broke off in the middle of the online chat to call me on the phone to get my permission to give me the information I needed via chat. Once granted, she hung up, typed in the relevant information…and then my computer froze and had to be rebooted. Faster than e-mail maybe. But not necessarily more efficient.

And, again, as a broader communication tool, it represents a huge time suck. I know people who have juggled five or six “conversations” at once. I never could figure out when they worked because they were always available on IM. And it just seems so intrusive:  Give me e-mail, where you can control the pace of the back and forth, and delete and ignore at will.

I’ll believe that e-mail is in its death throes when I can stop tracking an increase in the missives – a substantial amount of it junk – delivered daily to my inbox. It ain’t happening yet!

Understanding and responding to the consumer mood

Sally Saville Hodge

Job No. 1 to creating a truly differentiated brand is developing a deep understanding of your customers and using that as a basis for words backed by actions that anticipate and meet their needs and concerns.

That’s true in good times and bad, but it’s a dictum that is particularly pressing in an environment like the one we’re living through today. The public today is both skeptical and fearful, and not particularly trustful of just about anyone in just about any position of authority.

Hyundai got that and got it early. It recognized (while the Big Three sat paralyzed) that people were avoiding car dealerships because they were scared to death of getting downsized and then stuck with a big-ticket financial commitment. Its buyer assurance program – allowing people to return their new cars if they got laid off after their purchase – made a huge difference for Hyundai in overcoming the fear factor that’s keeping pocketbooks shut tight. Its sales rose 5 percent in both January and February as a result.

JetBlue, despite the occasional and well-publicized toe-stubbing on the operational front, has always used its keen grasp of the customer’s relationship with air travel as a basis for its messages and action. It doesn’t want to live up to the typical low expectations that we have for an optimal customer experience.

A big part of its persona is irreverence. Here’s a three part series its corporate communications team produced that’s more than just irreverent. It hits the public sentiment chord exactly with spots worthy of SNL. Enjoy.

The press release revived

Sally Saville Hodge

I’ve long since lost track of the number of people who have come to me over the years saying, “We want public relations. Do you do press releases?”

PR is not, in fact, an acronym for Press Releases, a misconception fostered by many so-called PR professionals who apparently aren’t creative enough to find other tactics to add to their toolkits. It’s also often perpetuated by marketers who don’t know any better to challenge such thinking.

Well, of course, we do press releases. But for a long time, because of the kind of public relations we practice, we actually only did a handful a year. I found them so useless compared to other, more targeted and customized approaches to media relations that I wrote an article titled “The Press Release is Dead (Will Somebody Please Tell the Clients?).”

It appeared on MarketingProfs.com (Google my name and it’s still first up, four years later!) and generated numerous e-mails and blog posts, some friendly, some scathing. (And curiously enough, it also generated calls from prospective clients wanting to talk to us about, believe it or not, helping them do more and better press releases!)

PR folks sure do take their press releases seriously. And the debate over their value continues. Just last week, I linked through to End Game PR’s blog to read a post on “10 Dead or Dying PR Tactics.” Sure enough, the press release received honorable mention – with the author acknowledging its rebirth even though many experts put it in the doornail category.

I, however, am no longer of that opinion. It’s not because I now think it’s a particularly effective tool to reach reporters. It’s because of the changing nature of the media, and the 24/7 demand for content. It’s created much higher pickup rates by news sites for optimized releases that are driven out through wire distribution services. That, in turn, drives traffic to clients’ Web sites. Used in tandem with targeted and customized media outreach, it creates sustainable gains in visitors. (From there, of course, the trick is to get them to take some sort of action – but that’s a whole different post.)

Here’s how we have seen this play out for one client, an egg donor and surrogate recruitment agency. In late November, we distributed a news release via PR Newswire that was picked up by 123 news sites, and caused a 441 percent jump in traffic. A few days later, our direct pitching resulted in the story being picked up by a Chicago Tribune health reporter’s blog, which sustained the traffic gains. A few days after that, the Wall Street Journal carried a separate article quoting the client, which was in turn picked up by the Huffington Post and the “Quote of the Day” feature on Time magazine’s Web site. Traffic surged another 162 percent on top of the earlier gains.

It’s best if releases are accompanied by direct reporter outreach, but even without, they can create a healthy flow of traffic. For this same client, for example, we distributed two releases in February, without broader media coverage, and its site experienced a 138 percent increase in traffic.

It’s tricky given the nature of this client’s business to draw a correlation between increased traffic and increased business, since not everyone who might take action once they are on the Web site is qualified to be either an egg donor or a surrogate. But the client can see a correlating increase in calls and submission of online forms with the traffic surge – and so is happy with the results.

Press releases have experienced a happy recovery. They still have to be written well – and smart – and will never be the only tactic in a strategic communications toolkit. But it’s well worth talking to clients about rethinking how they’re used in a comprehensive program.

Atwitter over Twitter? It could happen

Sally Saville Hodge

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last three months or so that I have more actively started Twittering:

• The name is silly, but so apropos. After all, when you’re communicating in short bursts of words (140 characters max) and following more than one or two people, it does create something of the same cacophony on your senses as a large flock of birds.
• It has a ton of fans, some of whom are rabidly judgmental. Don’t let them scare you off though, because…
• …despite the judgmental folks, there are no real rules for using it.
• You really have to use it to get it and its implications.
• It’s an incredibly exciting example of how users are shaping the experience – far beyond what the people who created it ever intended or expected.

To the last point, here’s an interesting presentation by one of Twitter’s founders explaining the original idea and how users have innovated around it. Next week, I’ll take a look at some of the reasons for climbing aboard – whether for fun or for profit.

(And by the way, if you sign up for a Twitter account – it’s free – look me up at @sallyshodge.)

Why online hits matter

By Sally Saville Hodge

We still hear all too often from clients and prospects who thank us very much for those online hits, “but we want to be in the paper!”

I suspect that the full implications of the “viral” benefits of online media coverage are difficult for them to grasp. Here’s a case in point I use time and again. We got mention of one of our client’s blogs (with the link) on Reuters.com last year. It was still driving traffic there two months later – long after a traditional placement would have done its duty as birdcage liner.

Here’s a good overview (below) of the media channels out there that makes the case for why online is where you want to be if it’s reach you’re looking for. Special thanks to The Bad Pitch Blog for driving this out.

Don’t try this at home. Seriously.

Chris Scott

We get the idea that businesses are trying to trim their budgets in these economically challenging times (and are there any other?). And we’ve all heard that old saw that economic downturns are when businesses can least afford to reduce their spending for marketing and PR efforts. (You risk being forgotten when client dollars begin to flow again, etc.)

But a larger issue comes into play a lot more frequently (at least on an anecdotal level, so far): The “Do-it-Yourself” phenomenon. You probably know the drill – or at least have seen it. The head of Company X taps the human resources chief or the head of sales to develop a quick-response effort that can keep Company X’s name before prospective clients. (Or, in some cases, someone at the company’s cousin “knows someone” who “makes stuff” and can “do something” on the cheap. It’s a poor-man’s approach to PR and marketing and comes with consequences.)

Whether it’s a Web site, a promotional piece, an overpriced ad or an “e-mail blast” (so early 2000s!), what you’re likely to get is “something” that stands far apart from your previous efforts like a wallflower at the orgy, to borrow a phrase from Nora Ephron. It probably fails to support your brand, doesn’t look like anything that came before it, carries messaging that falls short of advancing your position and carries that patina of “this wasn’t done by a professional.” Inappropriate paper choices, bad design, clunky navigation, poor graphics all combine to threaten all that positive messaging Company X had built up in one fell swoop.

And if there are failings on the marketing side, let’s face it. On the PR side, most businesses don’t know how to get in touch with the media – much less speak with reporters. They don’t know how to provide that expert source quote or convince a relevant publication to write a feature story about how Company X is faring during tough times. And who has the time when there are so many other fires to put out on an operational level?

So resist the temptation. You might save a few dollars on the front end by not hiring an agency or laying off your in-house pros to help guide you through the process (if not manage nearly all of the actual PR and marketing work involved). But your reputation may end up paying the price if you try to tackle these specialized functions yourself or on the cheap. Even the most experienced do-it-yourselfer knows when it’s time to throw in the towel and call the electrician, plumber (or PR and marketing agency).

Why risk the company’s image and progress by taking on jobs that do not fall under your areas of expertise? You’d be amazed at the number of companies that wind up hurting their reputations with the exact people who could help them survive (or event thrive) as the economy shakeouts continue.

Coming soon to a gas pump near you

Judi Schindler

Try Googling “digital out of home media.” In doing so this morning, I got 27,500 hits. My cursory research indicates that number will increase exponentially over the next few months.

What started as a kiosk in a hotel lobby or an occasional elevator video screen has now become a $2 to $3 billion industry with projections of $10 billion for next year. Some 900,000 screens are currently in place at gas stations, health clubs, coffee bars, train platforms - even men’s urinals. (Now there’s a thought.)

The advertising industry, which has been wringing its hands over the ever-slipping numbers for traditional media, is jumping on this bandwagon with both feet.

Many of the major ad agencies have formed special divisions to manage it. The media companies are delivering “narrowcast” programming. A new trade association (the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau) has been formed. And MediaPost, the online marketing publisher, held its first forum on the channel in April and launched Digital Outsider, a weekly e-letter, May 23.

And if there was any doubt about the legitimacy of the medium, the Nielsen Company, best known for its television ratings, is planning to launch a similar service for out-of-home media.

What’s all the fuss?

Proponents believe that out-of-home media is a way for advertisers to reach active, highly mobile consumers at times when they are more or less captive. They may be waiting for an airplane or train, sitting in the back of a taxi or waiting in line at a store – occasions when they have time to be attentive.

Media buys can be targeted by geography, interests, demographics. When combined with cell phones, out-of-home ads can be interactive. (Call or text for a free sample or coupon.)

Media Life Magazine says that travel, financial services and automotive are the top categories for out-of-home digital media. Local businesses like dry cleaners, real estate and healthcare providers are also said to do well with it.

While out-of-home may not be appropriate for all advertisers, others may well find it worth a test run. Success, however, will ultimately depend on targeting, messaging and integration with other forms of marketing.

Don’t titter at Twitter – there’s a place for almost everything in this changing new media world

Sally Saville Hodge

A month or so ago, Helena Bouchez, our erstwhile, soon-to-be-former VP and resident guide to all things new- and social media-related, started telling me about the marvels of Twitter. Then she sent me some links to some of her favorite Twitterers.

I kind of knew about Twitter. Little top-of-mind messages – 140 characters max – that you can use to keep your friends and followers abreast of what you’re doing and thinking during the course of the day. A mini blog, as it were. Accessible through the Web, your cell phone, and instant messaging.

Now, Helena is a self-proclaimed early adopter, God love her. Once she gloms onto something, she does it with gusto. She now oooVoos and/or Skypes with aplomb. She has several blogs. So it’s not surprising that she’s Twittering away with great regularity.

It takes me a bit longer to embrace a lot of this stuff. It’s only been the last several years, for example, that I’ve been satisfied with the business benefits of a blog strategy, and, heck, we only just launched this one in January. (The time commitment I was worried about? I was right: It’s 1:21 p.m. Saturday and I’m writing this post instead of playing outside!)

So I went to some of Helena’s recommended Twitterers. One I liked. Gaper’s Block’s Twitters are useful little facts about stuff going on in the city. The others? Not so much. When I see a bunch of messages that read like this…

11:45 a.m.: landed at Las Vegas airport.
Left laptop in room; had to go back for it.
Was late to my meeting with students.
5:45 p.m., and I’m boarding now to go back home.

…my first reaction is: Does anyone really care?

Apparently they do, or Twitter’s ranks wouldn’t be swelling with each passing day. (*Pat on my own back: Many people have lives that seem to be as boring as yours!)

Helena hasn’t yet talked me into setting up my own Twitter feed. I am, nonetheless, keeping an eye on this utility to see how its applications expand.

The Bad Pitch Blog, for instance, just exhorted its readers to learn not to hate Twitter, and shared how some have used it for more than just mental masturbation. Like the PR person who followed one journalist’s feeds, and used the tool to not just successfully make a story pitch but to see the article through, including fact checking.

Now, that’s cool and useful. And the kind of thinking may make a believer out of me yet.

Swimming in the social media waters: C’mon in, the temperature’s fine!

Sally Saville Hodge

We just found out that we won an award for an integrated communications program we created and executed over the course of about a year for one of our clients. Woo-hoo!

I can’t give specifics on the award as it hasn’t yet been formally announced. But it occurs to me that the work itself is a case in point for all those PR and marketing folks who remain mired in traditional strategies because they’re too fearful and risk averse or just plain too lazy to bring themselves up to speed by reading up on who’s doing what and how that translates into best practices.

Says the Friday Traffic Report: Successful marketing practices are born of experimentation, testing and boundary tweaking. It’s time to quit complaining and start learning.

That’s what we decided to do last year, thanks to complete buy-in from a client that hired us for our expertise and trusted us to employ it in the firm’s best interests.

Alternative Reproductive Resources (ARR) initially hired us to do “traditional” PR, but it quickly became apparent that the way ARR does business (matching intended parents with egg donors and gestational surrogates in a highly principled way) and the demographics of some of its critical audiences (young women between 21 and 38) lent themselves to more.

At its heart, ARR is dedicated to building a community of families and the women who enable their creation. Moreover, while traditional media coverage is helpful for image building and credibility, by itself, that’s not sufficient to convince young women that the physical and psychological “testing” required to donate their eggs or carry another’s child is worth it – whether in hard cash or psychic income. This is a play where the peer experience is invaluable.

We believed a community blog would not only reinforce ARR’s positioning as a caring, ethical leader among egg donation/surrogacy agencies, but also allow women to share their personal experiences in their own words. The viral effect would boost traffic to both the blog, Conception Connections, and from there, to ARR’s Web site. Ultimately, with its own egg donors, surrogates and parents as implied endorsers, the strategy would respond to ARR’s ultimate business need to bring in more qualified donors and surrogates.

We proposed the idea to ARR and were told: “Go for it.” (Even though we had to explain what a blog was first!)

Here’s the point, though. We’d never done a blog before, from start (underlying strategy) to finish (content management). And there was a risk. Screw up and it could well cost us money, not just in time to fix, but in the potential loss of a valued client.

Gulp.

Luckily, it’s not like we haven’t been staying on top of developments in the social media world. We consult regularly with partners who’ve been blogging for years and others who specialize in search engine optimization. Plus, we have talent in-house with personal experience in this realm who helped guide the strategy and execution. So, I was comfortable in making this bet.

And it’s paying off. Media relations tactics, like a release sent to targeted bloggers and Web sites and a feature mentioning the blog on Reuters, combined with some SEO strategies, have caused traffic to steadily rise (about 2,500 total visitors since the official launch), and created a steady stream of comments and direct positive feedback to the client. On its role in meeting the ultimate business need? Time will have to tell.

More important to me than awards and succeeding at risk-taking, though, has been the client’s response. At our most recent meeting, mere hours after I sent ARR its monthly invoice, the company’s president handed me the check. “This is one I don’t mind paying because we feel so well cared for by your team,” she said.

Electronic communications (r)evolution

Helena Bouchez

Something weird has happened to e-mail. People have stopped answering it. Or it takes them a week to reply. And it’s not just one or two people anymore. I have to follow up on about half the e-mails I send now, when just six months ago I received responses from most within 24-36 hours.

Electronic communications methods are evolving quickly – and some say away from e-mail. In fact, e-mail bankruptcy, a desperate act in which the overwhelmed e-mail account owner highlights his or her entire inbox and presses the delete key, is becoming commonplace. People are increasingly protective of their e-mail addresses and many have figured out how to set up e-mail rules and filters to screen out unwanted – and unsolicited – messages. (Great video commentary on e-mail bankruptcy and what to do about it from French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur here.)

This e-mail tune-out is happening across realms: business and personal. In business, it’s across industries. Editors who used to respond to us almost immediately need to be nudged two and three times for the barest acknowledgment. For a current (annual) research project, I’ve even resorted to (gasp) phoning some of the sources to get some response to my time-sensitive requests. When I do get an e-mail reply, it tends to be extremely short. Like a text message. Or a tweet (Twitter communiqué – 140 character limit). I’ve also noticed a steady uptick in the number of actionable messages received via Facebook and LinkedIn.

Because things are changing so rapidly, we must stay on top of what messaging is relevant to our clients’ target markets and the best way to get it in their way. Every tactic has to be reassessed every time, especially if the last time we executed it was more than six months ago. We must be curious and experiment. How many of you Twitter? Use Skype or OoVoo? Belong to a forum? Are aware of the next generation of social networking sites? (I’ll help here: Brain gym and brain training site Headstrongbrain.com currently in beta, is one such site.)

As if keeping up is not enough, we also need to remember to inform clients as to the degree of flux the entire communications industry is in (and is likely to stay in) and educate them about the new communications channels and choices out there. It’s more work for us, of course, but will pay off big in the end – also known as Web 3.0.

And the battle twixt technocrats and luddites rages

Sally Saville Hodge

One of the never-ending discussions in both the PR/marketing blog world and in related traditional media focuses on who gets it and who doesn’t when it comes to social media strategies. By now, it’s become obvious. Only a chosen few apparently get it.

The most recent salvo, picked up by the media and bloggers alike, was issued in the form of a recent survey of senior level corporate marketers by TNS media intelligence and Cymfony, a marketing influence analytics firm. Agencies – marketing, advertising and PR – are all behind the eight-ball, was the consensus: They lack practical experience and tend to try to shoehorn traditional tactics into social media space.

To me, this study shows some flaws. For starters, only 70-some senior level corporate marketers were included in the survey, and those apparently with Fortune 500-level firms like Hewlett Packard, Hyundai and Johnson & Johnson. That’s not a huge base. Moreover, to my mind, such players have the financial flexibility and the human capital that smaller businesses don’t of being able to take the risk of experimenting.

And for all their talk, yes, big businesses are shifting more of their budgets to social media, but the lion’s share is still directed toward traditional channels. To be sure, a study last year (subscription required) by Ad Age of major advertisers’ spending showed the most growth in non-measured media (including some forms of digital communication, like paid search). But nearly 60 percent of their ad spend still goes to TV, print and some forms of Internet advertising.

Bottom line, though, is that I find this ongoing conversation both troublesome and irritating.

On one hand, the smug superiority of many of the social media specialists is irksome. (One tells ClickZ’s Mike Grehan that she believes traditional PR shops are “on their way out.”) Do they think they invented this next best thing? Do they truly think the once and future interests and needs of all audiences are met solely through this one channel? Please.

But I also understand the disdain they feel for some — too many? – of the traditional shops that don’t even try to grow some modicum of understanding of the power some of these new vehicles have to grow a brand. Call it inertia. Call it lazy. Call it incurious. Or something else.

Personally, I put it down to something else. Like the “order taker” mentality that is way too prevalent, both among agencies and professionals on the client side. If clients and employers aren’t pushing for it, why should PR and marketing professionals move themselves to advance along the learning curve? Other factors: Fear of failure. Risk aversion. Discomfort with change.

I agree with what the senior level marketers seemed to be telling TNS and Cymfony. Those of us whose clients and bosses aren’t pushing us to test these new waters should at least be trying them on our own accounts and measuring how they’re working. That way, we’re in a much better position to recommend some of these strategies that might augment what’s being done on the traditional side.

There are experts out there who are willing to share, especially when there might be an opportunity to partner on business in the future. We’ve found them and tap into them regularly, and never once has anyone with my shop been called a Luddite (even if some of us might deserve it)!

And for heaven’s sake. Anyone who doesn’t have “familiarity with social media and search” as a prerequisite for new hires needs to wake up. These folks are out there, too. Bill Sledzik, who teaches PR at Kent State writes about making his students blog – or they fail. “You won’t grasp the ‘zen’ of Web 2.0 until you become one with the medium,” he writes.

As much as some wish they would, the new communications channels are not going away. In fact some are expanding on a monthly basis. Instead of resisting and lamenting halcyon days gone by, marketers need to stop whining, hold their nose and jump into the deep end of the social media pool.

New media use slowed by old business ideas, not old marketers

Sally Saville Hodge

It’s hell getting old.

Your back aches more. It’s harder to get away with calling your growing network of wrinkles “laugh lines.” And popular wisdom holds that you become so mired in tradition that you’re not keeping up with the changing world.

These days, the lines separating old dogs like me from the young Turks in PR and marketing are being drawn in media – traditional versus new. MarketingPilgrim’s Janet Driscoll Miller states it pretty bluntly: Most of the marketers she knows over 40, she writes, don’t understand even the basics of online marketing. And she cites Mike Grehan at Clickz to further support her position that most PR firms aren’t bringing new technologies to their clients.

Oh, if it were just so simple as the generation gap at work.

Here’s what this dinosaur has observed after many years in business.

First, there’s a lot of inertia out there. If clients and corporate bosses aren’t pushing their marketing and PR teams to be more than merely order-takers, to be thinking creatively about new and traditional tools to help move the business forward, then they aren’t going to step out of their comfort zones. Everyone knows traditional media works (never mind that studies show effectiveness is falling off). So why tinker? Where’s the incentive?

A second factor relates less to the generational thing and more to the risk aversion prevalent in our business culture. Why take a chance on something new when you know, as the saying goes, that the more s— you throw against the wall, enough of it’s bound to stick?

Ultimately, whether you’re pushing new media strategies or old, the challenge is to speak in the kind of language that decision-makers understand: These are the kinds of results you can expect.

Whether you’re a new media groupie or a traditional media Neanderthal, your challenge is to strive to learn what’s on both sides of the fence, step away from the order-taker mentality, and find a way to mesh the best of both worlds to demonstrate value to the client. It’s a challenge we all should be stepping up to meet – at whatever age.

Integrated marketing helps brands walk their talk

Helena Bouchez

Following is a snippet of a post I wrote late last year for our internal blog (on which we are permitted to blather on and pontificate with impunity). It was inspired by the Nov. 29 Mediapost Online Spin article, “Word-Of-Mouth: Marketing’s White Knight?” Our internal blog, called 1brain, is where we try out new thinking and examine new ideas. This is one we thought worth sharing.

As marketers, sparking and showcasing passion about a product or service among consumers is what we do, and facilitating viral “word-of-mouth” transmission is definitely one way to go about it. But simply getting people to talk about a brand is no magic pill. Building (and sustaining) a buzz is hard work, best achieved through an integrated marketing approach (of which WOM might be one aspect).

Why are marketers looking for a panacea? Because some still cling to the idea that running the “right” (singular) campaign will get people talking – and buying. Maybe it will. But more likely it won’t.

I think the biggest reason marketers resist the integrated marketing model is because it’s hard to pull off. It’s program management at its most complex. (A program comprises multiple, often simultaneous projects.) And managing a bunch of projects is distinctly un-sexy. In my experience, successful program management consists of about one part creativity and three parts logistics. Most marketers I know signed up for the creative. The logistics? Not so much.

But like it or not, program management is fast becoming a vital part of our job. Done well, it allows us to exponentially increase the impact of a brand (and its message) with consumers in a very short time, significantly upping the chances that targeted customers will do a whole lot more than just talk about it!

So let’s keep our feet on the ground when it comes to evaluating tactics and continue to use all the tools required, in whatever combination is appropriate — even if it means the execution will be complex. Our willingness and ability to do this makes us unique, and sets us apart from those who continue to resist this new marketing paradigm. And that’s worth talking about.