One More Reason You Need Video Marketing Now and Ten Reasons to Produce It for the Tablet

A compelling video from Gary Hennerberg convinced me that video and tablets -- together -- will lead the digital marketing revolution. Gary is a direct marketing consultant, copywriter and author of Online Video Marketing Deep Dive, so it's no surprise that he is armed with facts, explanations, inspiration, and more than a little great copy, 

In the six-minute video, Gary cites ten reasons marketers need to think about creating video for the tablet market today, including these highlights:

1. The number of tablets purchased this year doubled over 2011, reaching 119 million in 2012 (Gartner). Smartphones started the trend, but this is the early part of the curve for tablets. Takeaway: Get ready now.

2. We’re in the post-PC era, and the amount of video watched on tablets has jumped 26%. iPads presently account for 95% of tablet video viewing. Takeaway: The iPad won’t play Flash, so convert your legacy videos to a format that doesn't rely on Flash.

3. Tablets are one of the most rapidly adopted technologies in history. Tablets are used for "watching" everything (TV viewing, included). Takeaway: The future is “location-based video.”

4. Video viewing is a “given” on tablets. Takeaway? Got a tablet? You want video.

5. Tablet users are three times as likely to watch video on their devices. Takeaway: Shoot and upload your videos in HD, whenever possible. Tabbies expect quality.

6. Nineteen percent of tablet users watch video once a week, nine percent watch daily. Better yet, One in four viewers is willing to pay to view. Takeaway: These users have money and are willing to spend.

7. The heaviest concentration of smartphone and tablet users combined occurs between the ages of 25-44, but the tablet cohort is 28% more likely to be age 65 and older and 25% less likely to be 18-24. Takeaway: Tablet users tend to be well-heeled.

8. Three in five tablet owners reside in households with a $75,000+ income. Takeaway: See takeaway #7, above.

9. Tablets will become the preferred, primary device for millions worldwide by 2015, overtaking notebook PCs by 2016, says Forrester. Takeaway: Start early and travel fast to master this marketing channel.

10. Ten percent of a publisher’s audience are “power viewers” willing to watch five or more videos in a given day. Takeaway: Consider producing an ongoing series of educational and instructional videos to build trust, authority, and a following. Then you can sell.

Check out Gary’s complete video here.  There's lots more good info in the full monty.

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Objective: Get Publicity. Tactic: Publicize Publicity.

What adds up to “publicity” today? How about the fact that you already got publicity.

I subscribe to PR Newswire for Journalists. The top – and only -- release this morning was as follows:

05-Jul-2012 

 * Bliss Drive Reaches #1 Position for Highly Competitive Key Phrase: 'Orange County SEO'

And your point is .... ? 

Here's what the first paragraph of the press release says: "Bliss Drive, a full-service Internet marketing and web design company that is located in Irvine, California, has just achieved a crucial milestone. They have climbed their way to the top of Google's search results, and now the company's website sits proudly at the number-one position for a highly competitive key phrase, Orange County SEO."

No doubt, today's press release will Bliss-Drive the company's Google positioning up even further.

And, really, that’s what search engine optimization is all about, isn’t it?

Annoying, perhaps. Effective, definitely. Executed, blissfully.

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Will Facebook Go the Way of Yesterday's Yahoo? This Expert Says “For Sure.”

Facebook will lose dominance as a major Web company in less than a decade, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital said in a June 4 video interview broadcast on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," Jackson said. "Yahoo is still making money, it's still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it's 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it's disappeared."

Jackson assumes that Facebook will not be able to evolve any better.

“When you look at Web companies … there have been three generations of Web companies over the last 15 years: Web portals, social Web, and, currently, companies that are purely focused on Mobile (phones or tablets)…. No matter how successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank or how many smart PhDs you have working for you."

Jackson forecasts Mobile as Facebook's Achilles heel. "I think Facebook will have the same sort of challenge moving into Mobile … The world is moving faster. It’s getting more competitive, not less, and those who were dominant in their prior generation are really going to have a hard time moving into this newer generation."

Google, too, will struggle, Jackson predicts. "Specifically, with Google, in five to ten years, the world of typing into a blue box on your desktop PC to get search terms? That’s going away. In the world of mobile, search is far less profitable for Google."

How can a company with 900 million subscribers disappear? It won't. "I think Facebook is NOT going bankrupt … but something new is coming along that we haven’t seen yet probably… People will be fascinated by it and attracted to it …[As for Facebook] what makes you successful in generation one, doesn’t make you successful in generation two. [In the world of mobile], Facebook is still a big fat website.”

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Source: Cadie Thompson, Technology Editor, CNBC.com

Study Shows B2B Marketers Do Better with These Ten Skills

An article in this week’s B2B  reports that corporate marketers have 10 key roles in the organization:

1. Devise a marketing plan that’s flexible, but tight.
2. Act as your brand's advocate, articulating the organization’s big vision.
3. Bring the voice of the customer into corporate strategy and planning.
4. Help technology-trained staff understand business marketing.
5. Deploy specialist teams within established business units, as needed.
6. Share marketing perspectives with staff coming from a scientific or engineering background.
7. Make sure “internal integration” means aligning the entire organization to an overriding objective.
8. Communicate during a crisis.
9. Keep up with and introduce new trends and tools to the staff and the organization.
10. Master funding and measurement skills and work with the CFO.

Source: B2B article by Kate Maddox based on a study conducted jointly by the Penn State Institute for the Study of Business Markets  (ISBM) and Blue Canyon Partners, Evanston, IL.

Can -- and Should -- Creativity Be Crowdsourced?

Crowdsourcing our own opinions and relying on others' is all the rage: Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook Likes -- apparently, we won’t buy anything unless we consult to see if groups of strangers think it’s okay.

Crowdsourcing, first name-tagged in a 2006 Wired magazine article, has infiltrated the creative arts, too.

For instance, the Japanese are heavily into keitai shosetsu -- thumb novels written by collaborating hoards of teenagers and 20-somethings who knock out romance novels and crime thrillers via mobile phone texting.

The trend to crowdsourcing film has been tested in the Netherlands. The Dutch filmmaker who undertook this effort said, “We wanted to make a movie that shows the opinion of the public, created by the public, on a subject that concerns every tax-payer: The bankruptcy of DSB Bank in the Netherlands (2009) … We did not have any budget. Lucky us, we have an excellent … social system in the Netherlands.”

Mashable demonstrated the possibilities of creative crowdsourcing when it featured “10 Cool Crowdsourced Music Video Projects.” Similar collaborative projects have popped up at Fashion Stake, communal problem-solver Innocentive, photo sharing site Flickr Creative Commons, and Wiki-Art.

Naturally, somebody saw the dollar signs in crowdsourcing. In Chicago, the enterprise Crowdspring.com has sprung.These online marketing folks allude to crowdsourcing in their name, but others describe the process as a worldwide contest wherein folks in the creative arts (design, website development, writing) are invited to “work for spec” and, if they’re lucky (?), be chosen to actually work on a project and get paid. Chances of being chosen and getting paid are very slim, say detractors – and some (like Brian Yerkes) who have participated are, frankly, furious.

In a Nutshell, Please: Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?
Garrick Schmitt addressed that question exactly in AdAgeDigital in 2009. Garrick concludes: "For agencies, crowdsourcing forces us to re-examine how great work gets produced and where the best talent resides ... For marketers, crowdsourcing creative services poses both great risks and rewards ... And finally, for the industry as a whole ... time will tell."

Point Is, There's Crowdsourcing and Then There's Working for Free
In his article, Garrick came up with some excellent examples of creative crowdsourcing, as has econsultancy. In many of these examples -- though not all -- true sharing and collaboration occurs when participants group together in a common pursuit. A different scenario emerges when dozens (or hundreds) of folks of all ilk compete fiercely, investing time and resources in pursuit of a positive outcome that only one will ever enjoy.

And, now, for MarketingBrillo's Final Word ...
Crowdsourcing for creative inspiration and a good time? Definitely yes.
Crowdsourcing spec work in hopes of landing a job or getting cheap work? Definitely stupid, probably exploitative.

More Resources For Deciding How You Feel About Crowdsourcing
As for whether crowdsourcing can work for commercial enterprises looking for publicity, this report demonstrates that effective crowd sourcing requires 1) a crowd, 2) incentives, and 3) an easy project.

For an authoritative voice on the economics and ethics of crowdsourcing, check out writer/designer/entrepreneur/Ironman competitor Andrew Hyde's various blog posts on the subject (alert: Andrew thinks spec work is evil, period.)

For more info on what’s new in crowdsourcing, see The Complete Idiot’s Guide here.

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This Spring, Webinars Get the Gold Star for Superior Content Marketing. More, More, Please.

Something happened in April. Free webinars from every corner of the industry hit my email inbox like rolling thunder. A quick and casual count reveals I have been offered 31 webinars since April 1. Experts like MindFire, Marketo, HubSpot, Printing Impressions, MarketingProfs, and Vocus have shared what they know. And they know a lot.

Sure, all these folks are selling products/services, but I couldn’t care less. In the last few weeks, I’ve attended five Webinars, with two more scheduled in May. I even have a “webinar” folder in my email so I can go back to see who, what, where, how. What’s going on here?

For way too long, marketers saw webinars as a way to make money, charging $199, $297, $499 and up. Providers have gotten MUCH smarter. This spring, content marketers are keeping webinars free and short (one hour max). What a gift!

•For my part, I take notes while I’m listening. These turn very quickly into blog posts. Sometimes five minutes after the Webinar is over I’ve blogged and Tweeted. I figure it’s the least I can do for the great information I’m gathering!

I’ve gathered a couple of stories while listening. For one, Guy Kawasaki’s computer decided to do a software update during his Enchanted presentation. Viewers saw the prompt on his computer to "upgrade now." When Kawasaki said “sure, go ahead,” the software download took over. He couldn’t get back online with his slides for seven minutes. Let that be a lesson.

Bryan Yaeger’s phone rang while he was making his Printing Impressions presentation. We heard the ring, but fortunately the phone was not on speaker. Lesson number two.

What features have I most enjoyed in my various webinars?

• I love the button that lets me “download slides now”, since I tend to miss some stuff while furiously typing.

• I find I can monitor email and work while I am listening. Super efficiency.

• Thank you, thank you for post-webinar download options. It’s great archival material that I can refer to in the months ahead.

Advice to webinar Mavens? Please do send me a reminder the day before and TWO on the day of. I do forget what time it is and fail to tune in on time (if at all)

Bottomline: Webinars are a super-duper learning environment. I’m hooked on Webinars!

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Mildred Pierce Pays Tribute to Direct Mail

This weekend, I watched the very gifted Kate Winslet starring in the Todd Haynes-directed TV mini-series, Mildred Pierce. In her role as a beleagued restaurateur (among other beleaguered life choices), Winslet opens the door of her new chicken place… and then waits .. and waits….

Tense moments pass before the tables begin filling up. And then the flood of hungry diners almost overtakes Mildred. Where did all these people come from, she asks her friend and business partner, Wally Burgan. “It’s direct mail, baby. It works because you only mail to people you want!”

Wow. That got my attention.

When Mildred’s restaurant opened in the depression era (1932), “direct mail” couldn’t have been a term bandied about by the uninitiated. But the business-savvy Wally definitely knew his marketing. In the “History of Direct Mail,” one expert estimated that, in 1920, 45 percent of total American commerce was done through the mails.

At first glance, Wally's appeared to be an anachronistic reference to direct mail, but Mildred Pierce historians were dead on. And they were prescient, too.

Direct mail worked then and it still works. Now, more than ever, you can mail only to people you want -- which in 2011, are likely the very same people who want you.

Thanks, Wally.

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Technology is the problem. Technology is the solution. Let us pray.

In February, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council released results of a study that show today’s marketers struggling to innovate while keeping up with exploding technology.

Dubbed Unify to Multiply Marketing Ecosystem Effectiveness* [whew; that’s a mouthful] the report shows chief marketers scrambling to centralize data while extracting meaningful knowledge from vast volumes of transactional, behavioral, and attitudinal information. The dance has marketers seeking out partnerships with IT experts and/or relying on third-party sources to supplement customer profiling.

All the while, product life cycles are shorter and more tenuous. Consumer audiences are increasingly connected, opinionated, and virally influential. Supply chains and customer markets are more complex and distributed globally. And demand side marketing and sell-through requirements are now more resource intensive and channel-driven, requiring greater integration and alignment with the field.

It’s tough out there.

According to the white paper report sponsored by Webtrends, marketing process improvement, efficiency, and yield are directly tied to more effective use of tools—better platforms, analytics, and intelligence that improves rich media content creation, relevancy, delivery, access, control, workflow, partner collaboration, market engagement and sales lead provisioning, as well as campaign measurement and tracking.

It’s relentless out there.

Despite these pressing requirements, most marketers are hamstrung with antiquated legacy systems, an inability to “talk tech” with IT groups, and lack of resources to implement marketing automation projects. In short, tools that improve the quality and outcome of marketing decisions, as well as the effectiveness and performance of marketing teams and partners, are hard to come by.

It’s lethal out there.

This is the bad news. The good news? Well, we’re still looking for that.

In the report, the CMO Council identifies the top 10 ways marketers can create “marketing ecosystem value.” This includes the need to:

• Break down functional silos
• Institutionalize the use of data analytics
• Provide market insights + intelligence on-demand
• Transfer best-practice knowledge worldwide
• Synchronize supply and demand side operations
• Add discipline and rigor to campaign design, development, testing and delivery
• Ensure brand consistency, compliance and digital asset control
• Power the pipeline across acquisition, cultivation, and closure cycles
• Maximize customer value – relationships, revenue, and rapport
• Institute closed-loop performance measurement systems

What we haven’t been offered are the “how-tos” for breaking down functional silos or any of the rest of it. I mean, haven’t we been talking about this for years? HELP!

Source: The 20-plus page strategic brief can be downloaded here.

p.s. Why did they have to give this study such a jargon-ridden title? Yikes!

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Webinars Have Touched A Content Marketing Sweet Spot: Short, Free, and Friendly

Webinars were hot about two years ago when users first caught up with the technology. Then webinars went quiet. I suspect that’s the time promoters found out people weren’t rushing to pay $199 (or more) for webinar information that’s readily available from a lot of other sources. We can all buy a book for $14, download a free white paper, read an eNewsletter, follow a group of informed bloggers, or even – with effort – Google search any topic.

Now, webinar sponsors have embraced content marketing.

In the past two months, content marketing webinars are eating up the landscape. The new model is free, short, and friendly. Since mid-March, I’ve had offers to attend six free webinars. Not only were these webinars complimentary, they aired for only an hour. Short is good and we’ll likely start seeing the ½-hour “blinkety-blink-blink” version soon.

I listened in on two of the six and would have indulged in two more had time been available. One of these (Anne Holland’s “Winning with Better Landing Pages”) taught me a lot and I spread the wealth via my blog post. I did something similar in December when I blogged about Chris Brogan and Pawan Desphande’s “Content Curation” webinar. Maybe that was a pay-off for the sponsors. I hope so.

I also missed a webinar I’d registered to attend. I certainly meant to attend, so I was happy when the sponsors acknowledged my empty seat. The follow-up email came a couple hours after the webinar finished, telling me I’d receive a link as soon the webinar was posted online. That’s a classy move (thank you, Marketing Experiments) and should count among webinar “best practices.”

Sponsors appear to have realized that webinars are a poor substitute for in-person meetings/seminars. Moreover, the early promise of webinars as a money-making scheme flopped. Webinars are, however, a superb approach to PR, branding, customer service, and community building -- otherwise known as “content marketing.”

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Which Parts of My Landing Page Should I Test?

With great new, easy-to-use technology like Marketo and Unbounce, marketers can easily execute a key feature of direct marketing: Testing.

But what exactly should marketers be testing about their landing pages? Marketing sherpa Anne Holland shared her wisdom today with webinar participants who checked in to learn about “Winning with Better Landing Pages: Top 5 Secrets to Lifting Conversions.” Here are some pointers from the session.

Buttons
Button visibility is a major factor in getting visitors to take action, so go to any necessary lengths in size, color, and position to make your “do this” buttons stand out. Simple, less complex landing pages tend to work best (though there are exceptions.. always exceptions), so try testing “distraction removal.” For example, one test Anne showed culled the copy, removed the navigation bar, and pared instructions down to a single, big orange button that said “Get Started.” The result? “Get Started” outperformed its more complicated counterpart by 1,363%. (Yes, one thousand three hundred sixty three percent).

Headlines
Headline testing is critical for B2B lead-generation landing pages. What seems obvious may be wrong, so marketers shouldn’t rely on their own “best practices” experience. Rather, run an A/B test on headline variations.

In particular, test the headline on your registration form. For example, which header do you think pulled best when featured on a registration form?

1. Risk Free
2. Create your own profile for free and unlimited access

Answer: The second.

Images
Marketers often turn the “pretty” part of landing pages over to graphic designers, with the notion that photos and images are simply “window dressing.” Not so. These, too, need to be tested. Should the image be male or female? Show people happy or neutral? Use avatars or real people? Show people or product photos? You can’t know until you test, since all of these (and other) differences affect response.

Forms
If you have a forms page, you need to test that, too. Marketers often defer to the IT or database folks about the information that must be on a form. That’s not a good idea, says Holland. “Marketers need to work with the database or IT department on the design of forms. Nothing should be assumed.” For example, should a form have "required fields” indicated or not? One such test showed a 31% lift in forms submitted when the “required fields” notation was left off.

Finally, if any of the following options -- “clear form,” “reset,” or “cancel” -- are offered any where near your form, get rid of them all. This is one thing you don’t need to test, says Holland, who notes that these options (often a hangover from database practices in the 90s) suppress results. “Strip them off,” she says.

Videos
Do videos on a landing page suppress or boost response? By now you know, “That depends.” In one case, a ‘form-only’ landing page out-pulled its ‘with-video’ counterpart by 190%. “Don’t just jump on anything because it’s the new thing,” says Holland. “Test.”

For lots more online examples of WHAT to test, check out the whichtestwon.com.

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Six Ways To Keep Your Blog Buzzworthy

Amanda Moshier’s “How To Write A Blog Post in 30 Minutes or Less” hit home for me – and not because it has anything to do with writing a blog in a half hour.

In addition to being organized, opinionated, and authentic, Amanda makes the point that good blogging involves dogged, persistent background work. She says, “Get outside. Read the news. Go on YouTube if that’s your thing. Talk to people.”

All that connectedness doesn’t happen in 30 minutes, of course. Rather it means keeping up with industry buzz by ...

• following relevant groups on LinkedIn,

• subscribing to and scanning lots of trade and business publications,

• reading other bloggers in your field,

• keeping an eye on new developments via Twitter, and,

• my favorite, jotting down extensive notes (with links) as ideas occur.

As for staying current with pop culture? Buzzfeed makes that easier. If it’s contemporary or celebritorious (aka celebrity-focused), buzzfeed is probably featuring it. Warning: Buzzfeed videos can be very distracting. The end of the day – when work is finished – is a good time to browse this site.

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Why Are You So Busy?

A recent email to members of the Direct Marketing Association of Washington from Executive Director Donna Tschiffely began, “We’ve entered into 2010’s fourth quarter and word is out that people are busy!”

So I’m not the only one who’s noticed that people are working hard, right? Let me add this: In my 30 years in this business, I have never seen anything like the levels of exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and just plain overwork that I’m seeing around me – everywhere – today. People are busy, yes. And people are tired.

A little light reading from Ray Kurzweil explains it all to me. Everything in our world is increasingly complex, while change is accelerating. Exponentially. Here’s how that's probably affecting you.

Once upon a time -- oh, maybe, 12 years ago -- your computer's operating system remained static for several years and was easy to upgrade. Over time, though, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started changing your operating system more frequently. Some of those changes were nightmarish, but compare that technology tango to 2010.

If you’re like most knowledge workers, today you’ve got several computers -- a few at work, a few at home, and maybe one for travel. You’ve also got cell phones, which are getting smarter every day; external devices like the iPad, Kindle or Nook; video streaming equipment hooked up to your TV; several digital cameras; various computer gaming gadgets, GPS; etc. All of these devices malfunction, need upgrading, and become obsolete – and all of it happens much faster with each passing month. Very few people can keep up. Those who do can become “addicted, as this series in the New York Times explored.

Besides our personal technology running amok, everybody else's technology has the same vulnerability. It's cumulative in a way only The Rev. Malthus could appreciate.

How are people coping? Today I got the following response when I tried to email a fellow blogger:

Dear friends,

I'm giving up on email. It's just been too much, and I've decided I need to focus my life on creating rather than constantly answering emails. I hope you understand!

If you'd like to interview me, please send an email to xxx (at) gmail with the words "interview xxx" in the subject line (or it won't get through this filter) ... and please don't abuse this or we will no longer speak! :) In general, the best way to contact me is on Twitter: ... friends can DM me on Twitter. Close friends and family, please call me if you like. Please do NOT email me or contact me on Twitter to promote your blog, or your product or service, to review your book, to join your network, to become an affiliate, or to do a guest post. I am not accepting any of these and will not appreciate being contacted for these purposes. I no longer accept advertising on any of my sites, nor do I do link exchanges or any other types of sponsorship. I am also not accepting consulting work at this time, as I'm completely booked.

This may be the 21^st century version of retiring to a mountain in Madagascar to meditate. I’m trying to figure out how to get there myself.

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How the Heck Did Dingus Become News Anyway?

Once upon a day – back when men were men and so were editors – the patriarch of the newspaper decided whether an event or happening was worthy news. He selected, based in part, on whether or not his readers “needed to know.”

Sure, it was a somewhat subjective call, but that was the basic tenet -- the “need to know,” as defined by the editor. Not the desire to know, not the itch to know… the need to know.

Remember when your parents refused to tell you something because they said you didn’t “need to know that”? Same principle. Oh sure, newspapers carried opinion and entertainment stuff, too – right on the op-ed page and across from the comics page so everybody could differentiate entertainment from news. Not so today.

In the new century, stuff gets into the newspaper only if – and always when -- it will get repeated by some other paper or reap some broader attention. It doesn’t matter whether we, the readers, need to know it or not. We’re just the lab rats for “information.”

The Dingus case in point:

I mean, seriously…. "Does any reader NEED to know that some Dingus in Florida with 50 other Dingi in attendance is going to torch a certain book? Does anybody need to know that? Not unless they live next door [or dangerously close] to the Dingus in question. Seriously, folks.

And yet … over the past so-many weeks, what “news” organizations have been asking if their readers/listeners need to know this? En Oh En Ee. NONE. Every media voice – TV, radio, newspaper, online news, bloggers, etc. – jumped in to ride this Dingle Baby for all it was worth.

And what was it worth? The construction of faux catastrophe, with a possibility of widespsread mayhem , death, and increasing violence.

That’s the idea, of course, since today “news” isn’t about news at all. It’s about getting “eyeballs,” about pumping up readership, about not being “left out” of the spin, and, most of all, about pandering for money, pure and simple.

Not that I’m blaming editors, mind you. Geneva Overholser puts it well in her piece on the State of the American Newspaper. “Most of the foregoing litany boils down to money. America became obsessed with business, and newspapers did, too. John Carroll, editor of Baltimore's Sun, sees the larger changes when he looks back, past his 35-year newspaper career, to his alma mater, Haverford College. ‘Business is ascendant in this society to a degree it has not been in my lifetime,’ he says. ‘The best and the brightest from my college are all becoming investment bankers. When I went there, I'd never heard the term 'investment banker.' People all wanted to be journalists or doctors or college professors. But now--a lot of publishers and CEOs want an editor who talks about leveraging assets.’”

And that is how and why the Dingus became an international celebrity.

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Are "Free Content" Consumers Our Lab Rats?

In my Internet wanderings I came across a blog written by an anonymous guy who calls himself MrHeretic. Considering the stuff he’s posting, it’s no wonder he’s afraid to be identified. In a poignant post titled “You Killed Market Research,” MrHeretic condemns a series of practices that he thinks have written the obituary for market research.

I’m wondering how much of this heretical finger-pointing should be applied to marketing generally and, more specifically, to so-called “content marketing” within the direct marketing industry. Here’s what I mean.

Direct marketers are now buried in the Malthusian multiplication of online “content.” Increasingly, the “information” we’re fed may not be “information” at all, but rather a poorly disguised grab for our information. That might be okay, except much of what we get in return is awful offal.

You already know how the shill works. Whether it’s a whitepaper, webinar, webcast, video, podcast or simply access to an article, you must register to see it. Some would argue that’s a fair exchange. Amid the demand for open, transparent communication I, personally, would disagree, but willing trade or not, many of MrHeretic’s principles seem to apply to the development, dissemination, and data gathering tactics driving this “content” giveaway.

Obviously, service providers who openly share industry information deserve our thanks. Direct marketing has become increasingly complicated by integrated and multi-channel efforts and we all want to know what is working for others. What do “best practices” look like? What have we tried that didn’t work? How can we adapt to so much change? What does the future hold? Who can help us? The search for answers to these questions has made participation on LinkedIn’s direct marketing-related groups explode. We need each other and, if you know “something about something,” I will love your blog, appreciate your knowledge, and maybe even decide to work with you.

Meanwhile, a different response to our thirst for guidance has launched an avalanche of “bastardized information,” the primary purpose of which is to both beguile us and get our data. Are your in-boxes stuffed with this junk info, too? Here’s one example.

A respected industry resource uses its reader email list to push out content that vendors have paid them to distribute to us. So what’s wrong with that? Some might say it’s no different than receiving a piece of direct mail from an insurance company simply because we subscribe to The Wall Street Journal. What can I say? It feels different. Wait, darn it! It is different.

What comes to my inbox from a respected information resource suggests to me that any information they deliver has been vetted for value, right? Not so when money alone will get that information delivered to me. Not so, when the distributor isn’t telling me the “information” is “advertorial” or “product placement.”

Bottomline: I trusted you and you sold me out. Or, to edit MrHeretic a wee bit, “You killed [the value of your content] when you treated respondents like lab rats.”

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Digital in the Headlights ... Why Worry?

I often blog (and worry) about the effects of technology on human development. This morning John W. Peterson, consulting futurist and strategist, sent me a couple of pdfs, one of which predicts likely developments in the timeframe spanning 2010 to 2040. Written by forecaster/futurist Marvin J. Cetron, president of Forecasting International, Technology Timeline 2010 blew me away (and shut me up).

If this stuff is even in the ballpark, there’s really no point in worrying about how technology will affect human society. As Cetron notes, “Ultimately, speculations may prove correct that we are approaching the ‘Singularity’s event horizon.’ At that time, our artifacts will be so intelligent that they will design themselves and we will not understand how they work. Humanity will be largely a passenger in its own evolution as a technological species.”

This thought already occurred to be during the BP oil spill, when I realized that – within the behemoth, 80,300-employee complex that is BP – no single person completely understood how the oil spill happened because no single person understands the BP beast. Sure, individuals know how to “fix” pieces of the system, but as a whole? BP – like all other global conglomerates -- has a life of its own, huge parts of which function via technology.

Nevertheless, some of what I read in Cetron’s predictions staggered me.

• Designer babies born outside the U.S. -- 2012
• Virtual reality used to teach science, art, history, etc. -- 2014
• Smart paint containing computer chips -- 2013
• Earth-like planet discovered -- 2012

And that’s just within the next four years. Looking further out, we have fantasyland:

• Robots for almost any job in homes or hospitals -- 2018
• AI (artificial intelligence) technology imitates thinking processes of human brain -- 2018
• Effective prediction of most natural disasters -- 2020
• Antimatter production and storage becomes feasible -- 2020
• Computer-enhanced dreaming -- 2020
• Living, but genetically-engineered, electronic toy/pet developed -- 2025
• Infectious disease eliminated from developed world -- 2028
• Emotion-control chips used to control criminals -- 2025

And in the 2030 decade?

• Robots are physically and mentally superior to humans -- 2032
• Development of an artificial brain -- 2030
• Robots completely replace humans in workforce -- 2035

Even if Cetron is off by 50 years, our children will likely see all of this and more. Turning salt water into fresh water will become economical; we’ll “discover” alien civilizations that travel faster than light; zero-point energy will be engineered/commercialized to the point where all other energy sources will become obsolete. Where are you now, BP?

In the face of all this, how many hours per day a given child is “plugged in” seems immaterial. In fact, no matter what any individual does, technology appears to be "doing what technology does." With or without us.

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo

Video Snacking Will Starve the Mind. Long Live the Knowledge Center.

Lucy Kellaway's article -- "When Too Much Information Harms the Office" -- was published in the U.K.’s Financial Times in late November. Kellaway wrapped up a story that’s been obsessing Marketing Brillo for months, to wit: What are people actually doing about information overload? Answer: Stuffing the ears, closing the blinds, shutting down.

Kellaway offers anecdotal feedback that workers aren’t reading anything. “The first comes from a friend who works in communications for a large organisation. She has noticed that her staff are responding to the information overload not by digesting too much of it, but by stopping to digest anything at all. She tells me that, in her company, the written word has lost almost all its power. No one reads e-mails any more - with the exception of those from the boss. Messages from anyone else are either deleted unread or given a cursory glance and then ignored.”

Counter-offensive #2 also is pretty shocking. Kellaway reports that companies are dealing with too much information by closing down their libraries and knowledge centers. “In one big consultancy, all the people who used to sort information into usable chunks have just been fired, and consultants have been told that they will have to 'self-service their knowledge needs'."

The buzz that prompted Kellaway’s article came from Carol Bartz, president and CEO of Yahoo, who contributes to The Economists’s “the World in 2010.” Bartz notes that -- in the free flowing information waterfall -- managers are losing control of employees. “That’s why the greatest mandate for leadership in business is the ability to cut through the information clutter and make clear decisions without apology. More than at any time, employees need—in fact, desperately want—unequivocal direction.” As for Yahoo itself, Bartz talks about video “snacks,” calling video the “cornerstone” of Yahoo’s strategy.

That's confusing. Where does a a preferred diet of light weight video snacks square with a CEO's mandate to lead, manage information overload, and make unapologetic, unequivocal decisions?

Snack video may be able to effortlessly quell hunger pangs for "vital information," but factoids have little to do with thought and judgment, and not a whit to do with leadership. Marketing Brillo sincerely hopes that CEOs will remotivate employees to consume a full-course of considered, well-written, prudent content, no matter how long it takes to serve it. Long live the knowledge center.

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo