Meetia Marketing: Crafting Conversation & Cultivating Connection through Social Media

Conversation marketing is not a new concept.  But it’s one that has been slow to take root.

Challenges abound in incorporating a more conversational tone into a corporation’s marketing voice.  But advances in technology and the changes in consumer culture they have enabled have signaled companies that it’s time to stop shouting and start engaging.

Interactivity is the fuel behind the conversation, and social media is the engine that propels it.  Within social media lies the power to facilitate consumer engagement.  Social media provides the porthole through which companies and audiences can gain mutual awareness and forge relationships with one another that transcend the transactional.  It’s the vessel in which substantive, customizable and conversational meetia marketing is possible.

Meetia marketing finds its bedrock in the belief that the most effective marketing techniques are those that require the company to introduce itself to its consumers in a whole new way.  Transparency, honesty, authenticity, and truth are the cornerstones of marketing in the Web 2.0 era.  It is within the social media milieu that advertisers can find a way to reach prospective customers in more meaningful and personal ways.  It is within these virtual communities that advertisers can find their voice.  How?  By listening to ours.

In order to engage prospective customers, earn consumer respect, and compete for our increasingly strained attention, ad agencies and marketing departments must be willing to adopt a culture that places a premium on listening.  But listening is not enough. They must act on what they learn and answer the call of the consumer with an authentic, human voice.  They must formulate marketing strategies that are grounded in transparency and governed by an understanding that success in building an audience will hinge more on the messages companies receive than the messages they send.

The notion that companies are now better equipped to ask consumers for input, listen to the advice they receive, and incorporate it into an overarching marketing strategy has been referenced in such concepts as permission marketing, conversation marketing, invitation marketing, and relationship marketing.

Seth Godin proposed the notion of permission marketing as far back as 1999, and was one of the first to articulate the need for businesses to transition away from the interruptive marketing techniques that dominated the Internet and offline landscapes (Godin 1999).  With the realization that genuine conversation is made possible once permission is given, permission marketing evolved into conversation marketing.  It’s time to take the next step.

The next step requires companies to exercise even more transparency and trust.  It asks companies to loosen their grip on the top-down control of messaging that has been so engrained for so long.  The next step asks consumers to collaborate with each other and coordinate with corporations in their marketing initiatives.  The next step is collaborative marketing, and the movement is already underway.

Collaborative marketing tosses aside the old model of the passive consumer and molds marketing methods to better suit the new reality of participatory engagement (McConnell & Huba 2007).   Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba refer to these creative consumers as citizen marketers and the online activities they conduct as customer evangelism. “As everyday people increasingly create content on behalf of companies, brands, or products- to which they have no official connection- they are turning the traditional notions of media upside down  (McConnell & Huba, 2007).

Citizen marketers are “democratizing traditional notions of communication and marketing,” and are forcing companies to abandon their long engrained advertising instincts and adopt a collaborative marketing model that encourages consumers to participate and contribute.

Gadget Grapevine: Wordle Your Blog

This edition of Gadget Grapevine discusses a new use for an old standby software.

Like any conscientious blogger new to the blogosphere, I’ve been wondering about what messages my blog posts are sending.  Am I communicating what I’m intending to communicate?  Or is the message being lost in a cloud of semantic ambiguity?

I started wondering if there was a way to capture a snapshot of the words and phrases that are dominating MEDIAtion Way Station.  It turns out there is.

Many of you are familiar with Wordle.  This versatile online resource allows users to  generate word clouds from selections of text.  The cloud you create will give bigger billing to the words that appear more frequently in the passage and will display words used less frequently less prominently.

Wordle also offers the option of entering a URL.  The program will then create a word cloud based on the textual content of the site associated with that URL.

See where I’m going?

Enter your blog’s URL into the URL field on Wordle’s Create page and you’ll generate a word cloud reflective of the content of your blog.  It’s that easy.  Check it out…

MEDIAtion Way Station's Word Cloud

The first thing that caught my eye was the coincidental but revealing grouping of “without” and “time” in the middle of the cloud.  My Wordle knows me well.  I’m perpetually and mercilessly without time.

“Starbucks” makes an appearance.  Like they need any more promotion.

And no… I do not have a bionic eye.  But you can download the iPhone app if you’re interested in acquiring that elusive super power.

When my Wordle cloud talks, I listen.  And my Wordle cloud is telling me that MEDIAtion Way Station is not communicating the kinds of themes or messages one might expect from its title and billing.  Yet.  I plan on checking MEDIAtion Way Station’s Wordle periodically to monitor the words that are jumping off its pages.

What can Wordle tell you about your blog?  Let me know if this exercise brings you any value…

4 Contrateristics of Viral Videos

What makes a video go viral?  What makes the sky blue?

A more pressing question that some of you may be asking is, “What is a contrateristic?”

It seems that the solution for those unable to find the right words is to make one up— to combine two or more words together into a hybrid mutation of their former selves.  If the car industry embraced hybrids half as much as media analysts do, Al Gore would be out of a job.  And it’s hard to get fired by the environment.

This blogger is not afraid to admit— I’m not above the fray.  Contrateristics is used here to describe the amphibious nature of viral videos.  The characteristics that define virility are contradictory.

There are a host of different ingredients that can be poured into a viral video and there’s no single recipe that guarantees stickiness or spreadability.

Viral videos transcend creator and context and bear a uniquely cross-cultural appeal.  They are relevant, relatable and malleable.  But what characteristics must they possess in order to receive universal adoration?

Our group posed this question this morning and discovered that for every property we attributed to a sample of viral videos the opposite characteristic could also be found in other examples.  For instance, as quickly as we identified originality as a prerequisite for virality, we realized that the appeal of a large number of viral videos is their blatant mimicry.

In honor of the duplicitous nature of virility, I offer these four characteristics of viral videos.

1. Origitypal: Some virals can be original while others gain their appeal by embodying strictly archetypal foundations.

2. Simplexity: Viewers can often be drawn in by a video’s simplicity.  At other times, the visual complexity and high-end production are the hook.

3. Mystervious: Viral videos are sometimes purposefully abstruse and mysterious.  but sometimes they spread because their message or joke is so obvious.

4. Fakuine:  Lastly, some are simply shams.  Fakes.  Yet others owe their popularity to their genuineness.

Maybe the most glaring characteristic of viral videos is this; as often as we’ve seen them, and as often as we swear we’ll never watch again, we can’t seem to turn away.  So in honor of virility, here’s a compilation (courtesy of Boxxy) of some of the more memorable viral videos that have robbed us of countless hours over the years.

Gadget Grapevine: The Bionic Eye

Seeing what’s in front of us is the easy part.  Knowing what’s around us but just out of sight is another thing.  That’s where the Bionic Eye can help.

The Bionic Eye is a newly released iPod app introduced by Presselite that can help you locate and visualize the nearest points of interest in any US city.  Over 100,00 points of interest are already locatable.  They include subway stations, restaurants, hotels, and other destinations.  In addition to locating these places, the Eye uses an augmented reality functionality to help you visualize them as well.

Here’s how it works:

Say you’re visiting a city and looking for the nearest Starbucks.  Activate your Bionic Eye and hold your iPhone or iPod up in front of you horizontally, like you would with a camera.  You’ll see both the real image of what is in front of you along with virtual signage of the points of interest in the area around you.

If you want to find out more info about the Starbucks that your Bionic Eye locates, lower your iPhone and you’ll be able to select the Starbucks from a list of local points of interest.  Once selected, the Eye will provide detailed information about the exact location of the Starbucks and your relation to it. Turn the iPhone vertically and an arrow will point you to where you want to go.  Your distance from your destination will update in realtime based on your movement while the arrow continues to point you in the right direction, just like a needle on a compass.

The Bionic Eye works in the US without any Wifi or data connections.  It’s just $1, but subscribers who wish to locate subway stations will have to pay an extra $1.99 for each city’s subway system.

The augmented reality view is only available on 3G iPhones.  (Other versions can run the app, but your points of interest will be plotted on a Google Map instead)  There are also versions for France, the UK, and Tokyo.

If you hate asking for directions (and let’s face it… who doesn’t?), download your Bionic Eye now.

5 Ways to Get the F*** Away from the Internet: Tips for Managing Your Hyperconnected Life Before it Manages You

Talk around our water coolers in Elon’s iMedia halls centers around enabling connection and navigation within the digital landscape.  The focus is constant— or to steal a word from the new Internet landscape— ubiquitous.

It’s so pervasive that it’s understandable when iMedia academics and professionals occasionally crave escape from their hyperconnected, always on lives.  And you don’t have to be studying this stuff to relate to this need for escape from our digital lives.   It’s not uncommon for digital migrants to seek solace and silence.

A group of students got together this morning and shared some getaway techniques.  Here are a few ways to escape the digital noise.

We’ll count down… Letterman style.  Without the inappropriate touching.

5.      Limit or schedule Internet-enabled device use.
Avoid spending extended periods of time on your Internet-enabled device without incorporating breaks and varying activities.  Build in a minimum of 30 minutes of down time for every 2 hours of computing.  Think of it as a work-to-rest ratio of 4-1.  And take your rest when you get it.  A side note…To help work more efficiently while online, avoid setting alerts for incoming messages, texts, or emails; it actually wastes more time than it saves.

4.      Don’t institute self-imposed technology blackouts.
On the surface it sounds like a good idea.  We’ve all heard someone say it. “I make sure my cell is turned off every Sunday after 6pm.”  It’s that individual’s way of drawing boundaries between the demands of his virtual identity and the real world.  But we can see his lip quiver as he shares his strategy with us.  He panics just talking about it.

Blackouts cause too much anxiety and require us to abandon the lifestyle we’ve grown dependent on during the other 164 hours of the week.

Say I wanted to drop a few pounds.  Would I starve myself on Sunday night and give myself permission to eat anything and everything the rest of the week?  This is not a recipe to achieve a healthy body or mind.

3.      Make time for non-Internet based activities and hobbies.
Basic stuff right?  This one is too obvious to leave off our list and too easy to forget during the course of our days.  Remember what it was like to read a book?  Go for a jog?   Or initiate a conversation with someone you didn’t have to poke or ping?

2.      Don’t let mobile devices disturb face-to-face interactions.
We’ve all seen this table at the restaurant.  Mom and Dad stare at each other’s plates wistfully eyeing each other’s meal as their two angels hunch over, eyes down, texting frantically as if craving communication and connection with anyone other than the people sitting across from them at the table.  The people closest to them, both literally and figuratively, are ignored.

I’m no parent.  I’m certainly no family consultant.  But really?  I don’t know what the rules will be in our house.  (All I know is that they’ll probably be broken on a regular basis)  But the family dinner table is in danger of becoming extinct.  And I’m not cool with that.

“Eat your vegetables” has been replaced by “Shut your phone off.”  We can’t solve this problem by feeding the phone to the dog.  Shut it off!!!

1.      Most importantly, don’t name your devices.
I met an iPod named Herbert today. Herbert’s owner had good intentions in naming her iPod.  She had hoped it would help facilitate a close bond between the two of them.  Be careful what you wish for.

Naming technology can contribute to the development of unhealthy relationships with your devices that foster dependency.   And your iPod will not be the one going Single White Female on you.

They are not your pets.  But like most pets, they will own you if you don’t own them first.

Can you tell that we’ve been staring at a computer screen all day, every day since September?