Our panel will feature:

Todd Van Etten, Republican National Committee
Paris Dennard, Republican National Committee
Darian Rafie, bep Interactive
Danny Allen, Sensis

The session will be on Monday, March 15, at 9:30 AM in the Hilton, Room C.  It should be really interesting and a lot of fun, so come check it out.

Hash tag for the panel is pretty unfortunate (#digirebrandrepubparty).  I didn’t make it up, it was assigned by the SXSW folks.

This is the first time I’ve been to SXSW since 1991, so I’m really looking forward to it.  If you’re there and want to drop me a line I’m at @dannyallenjr.

In the mean time, the godfather of social CRM is Paul Greenberg.  To get yourself up to speed on the basics, you should read his two posts on his CRM Forecast 2010.  The posts are here at Part I and Part II.

Another cool thing about Wharton BizTech, was that I got to meet MC Hammer, who was the morning keynote speaker.  He is surprisingly sharp when it comes to speaking about social media and the future of marketing, and has a pretty amazing fanbase on Twitter.  Follow him at @MCHammer.

The digital campaign ends on a positive note, with solid results, and you put together some kind of wrap-up or “post-mortem” report summarizing how the campaign performed. Included in the report are all kinds of metrics, ranging from CPMs, to effective CPCs to potentially CPL (cost per lead) and/or CPA (cost per acquisition) analyses. After going through the results and explaining what everything means, and maybe even after supplying some industry benchmarks to provide a point of reference, you get a response something like this:

“this is great, be we were actually hoping to see a lower eCPC”

or maybe this

“thanks for the report, but we were expecting a lower CPA than what the campaign produced.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve been involved in launching, managing and reporting on online advertising campaigns for more than 9 years, and I have consistently seen this type of response from clients (particularly newer ones). Recently, after receiving a similar response, someone from our team had the courage to ask the client what results they seen from some of their traditional media buys for the same campaign. The client responded “oh, we don’t know what that produced.”

So why the higher expectations for digital media?

On the other hand, I think about the incredible complexity of the digital strategy world and the trend towards specialization and wonder if merging the Planner and Digital Strategist is feasible? For instance, with the rise of unique digital areas of specialty / expertise such as information architecture, user experience planning, analytics and social media, the role of digital strategist appears to to be too much of a simplification and generalist position out of sync with the rapid changes in digital communications?

What do you think?

We hope that our new look and layout will make the site easier to navigate, search, and comment on (and we definitely encourage your comments and feedback!)

Stay tuned as we begin rolling out new blog posts on the ever changing world of digital marketing and it’s intersection with traditional advertising.

Regards,

Jose Villa

Check it out here: http://www.thinkmulticultural.com/2009/11/05/twitter-land-grab/

1^st Place: Third Jack-o-Lantern from the left “Super Mario” by Rachel, Aretta, and Eric

2^nd Place: All the way on the right, “Dia de los Muertos” by Diego

3^rd Place: All the way on the left “Chonga Cat” by Isa and Diana

4^th Place: Second from the left, “Rats Nest” by Nicole and Genesis

Congrats to Rachel, Aretta and Eric!

Check out the TechPresident story on the back-end rebuild.

This is a big deal, as it is rare for large government agencies, particularly high profile ones such as the White House, to build their public-facing Web sites using open platforms.

As an agency that builds a lot of Web sites for government agencies, the White House’s decision to go with Drupal might signal a major shift in how government agencies, and their IT leadership specifically, look at open source solutions.

While we do not ascribe to the notion that open source is always the best solution for every client, we also think that the tendency for many government agencies to not even consider them as viable options is short-sited. Organizations should weigh the pros and cons of a variety of Web site CMS platforms, regardless of whether they are open source, and then the select the solution that best fits their needs.

Hopefully the White House’s decision to go with Drupal will begin to remove some of the unwarranted stigma still attached to open source platforms among the public sector IT community.

Jose Villa

David interviewed agency principal Jim Copacino, and one of his quotes was brilliant:

“The Burger King ‘Subservient Chicken’ phenomenon opened my eyes to the possibility and power of interactive digital communications. For me, it snapped everything into focus—technology, community, experience, engagement. The fact that it was a brilliant digital interpretation of the 30-year-old ‘Have It Your Way’ positioning vividly illustrated the difference between 20^th and 21^st century communications.”

As an agency that is always working with offline, traditional “lead” agencies that usually drive the positioning for our clients’ brands, we have consistently struggled to get those partners to understand how to interpret the brand positioning digitally – how to interpret and express the brand positioning leveraging technology, community, and experience with the goal of achieving that elusive goal of engagement.

Jim Copacino has simply and elegantly articulated the challenge and opportunity of digital communications, something that is organic to digital agencies, but unfortunately still very foreign to most traditional agencies.

The “difference between 20^th and 21^st century communications” – sage!

Jose Villa

(this is part of 2 of a 3-part article on using Web 2.0 strategies in Health care. Click here for Part 1)

Join the current dialogue

Social media trends make Web 2.0 strategies attractive marketing options for health care organizations. Your target audience is already out there communicating with one another, so go ahead and join the conversation by listening to what your audience is saying and contributing to the discussion.

There are already a number of patient social networks –general communities like HealthCentral and MedHelp and disease-focused sites like PatientsLikeMe and DiabetesMine. Watch as former patients talk about the service they received from your organization. Thank people who sing your praises and learn from those who make negative comments about the service they received from your employees.

In addition to these health care-specific outlets, the mainstream social media sites are also engaged in important conversations your organization needs to be aware of. For those just starting out in the social media world, take time to learn about Facebook, Twitter, Technorati (blogs) YouTube and Flickr. These are “common” outlets that can quickly help you see what conversations are going on. For example, for Twitter, you can go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in your organization’s name. This will search through all the Twitter conversations and pull up any mentions of your company.

Start your own community

While there are numerous conversations already going on, sometimes the best way to reach your target audience is to create your own avenue for dialogue. We helped one of our clients, White Memorial Medical Center, create an “I was born at White Memorial” Facebook group. To maintain the authenticity of the discussion occurring on the Facebook page, White Memorial has recruited actual patients born at the hospital to serve as the group’s administrators and be the face of the social media campaign.

White Memorial didn’t want their audience to see this as just another marketing gimmick. At the core of the campaign is an opportunity for White Memorial patients to talk to each other. By helping them see what they have in common – having been born at White Memorial –hopefully that will help forge friendships with one another and a lifelong relationship with the hospital.

The Facebook group has been introduced to the general public through organic and viral marketing, again with the ultimate goal of people viewing this as an authentic and natural place to converse. As the group further develops, it will likely also be connected to White Memorial’s marketing and fundraising efforts.

Check-in next week for Part 3 of this series.