Steve Caputo, President of Strobe Promotions, Inc. visited Flightpath today and gave a general presentation to the staff on the future of digital marketing and promotions.  Some of Steve’s major points/themes included:

•  By and large, promotions are serving the same functions as they were in the days of the Betty Crocker Recipe Contest 50 years ago, but by leveraging digital channels they can be more intimate, immediate, interactive and inexpensive.
• If you’re considering launching a promotion, it’s a great idea to build up a strong Twitter following first so that your followers can jumpstart the promotion.
• Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming key components to many successful promotions.
• The future of digital marketing and promotions will leverage new platforms and technologies such as apps, GPS, 2D barcodes, RFID, bluecasting and augmented reality.
• The key to any successful promotion remains clear definition of overall marketing objectives and a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve.

Many thanks to Steve for a very informative presentation.

Effective use of a confluence of digital media by Starbucks resulted in two free breakfasts for me this morning.  The smart marketers at Starbucks published a coupon offering a free breakfast pastry with the purchase of a cup of coffee from opening until 10:30 am today. As so often happens, this thing made it to my inbox virally after a friend of a colleague had posted it on Facebook.

But one unique innovation made this offer exceptionally easy to redeem.  The coupon read “print this invitation or show to a barista on your hand-held device at a participating U.S. Starbucks store…”  (The fact that they call thing an “invitation” instead of “coupon” seems quite noteworthy too, but I’ll save that for another blog post.) 

What’s so innovative about this? Well, the fact that I don’t even bother having to print the thing out makes it super simple to redeem and share.  Because the “invitation” is available for such a short window, the possibility of fraud seems pretty inconsequential.  On the backend, the baristas are keying it into their POS system with the appropriate tracking code anyway, so it’s one less piece of paper/trash they’ve got to deal with.  And on top of all this, as an environmentally sensitive company, there’s the benefit of enabling consumers to participate without having to print/waste another piece paper.

On Tuesdays, I’m typically up early, so I started by redeeming the thing in a Starbucks near my apartment.  Around 7am, the folks at the counter didn’t seem to flinch when I showed them the coupon on my phone.  By 9am (time for a second cup of coffee), at the Starbucks near my office, I could see the cashier had some coupon print-outs near her station when I flashed the phone at her.  Apparently, no one had yet redeemed the thing via their device as she quickly conferred with a colleague before getting the nod and ringing me up.

Whether you like them or loathe them, kudos to Starbucks for a smart, simple breakthrough in digital marketing.

Judge Smails: .. There's a lot of...well, badness in the world today. I see it in court every day… The most important decision you can make right now is what you stand for- goodness...or badness.
Danny: I've made some mistakes in the past. I'm willing to make up for that. I want to be good!

- From my favorite movie, Caddyshack

Can you tell what book I have been reading?  Yes, Groundswell. This will be the third blog post I mention it – and I doubt it will be the last. But what can I say? It is such a great book about social media, everyone at Flightpath is reading it for our inaugural book of the month club. 

I was in HS when George Bush, Sr., uttered that the United States would become "a kinder and gentler nation." In his Inaugural Address he pledged in "a moment rich with promise" to use American strength as "a force for good." 

Well, fast forward to 2009, we are taking back our nation, shaking things up a bit and doing some good thanks to the social media explosion some have refered to as the “groundswell.” 

In Groundswell, Bernoff and Li talk about emotional motivation for the use of social media. Specifically, on page 61 they discuss the “altruistic impulse” to participate in groups on line. 

100 pages later, when trying to explain why thousands of people are helping each other (for free) at dellcommunity.com, they call it Psychic Income. Reminds my of my dear friend and mentor, Cliff Medney who has been taking about psychological capital for years.

Sometimes, it’s hard for number crunchers to understand how to track activity in the groundswell or to connect the dots to sales at retail. But there is more going on here.

There is a great example of this psychic income being played out here in NYC with an exciting Brand with good acts that leverages this notion of psychic income. Be Kind has created a program the taps into the idea of doing kind acts. I met them at the Fancy Food Show and they gave me a cool “You’ve been KINDed” card that gives me permission to do something nice for someone beyond common courtesy.

That very same day, while on my way to the Javits Center, I offered to help a young lady carry one of her three bags up the steps at the times square train station. I was sort of shocked when she rejected my offer, since she seemed to be struggling so much with these three large bags. Well, Natalie Gourvitch at Kind Snacks has solved that problem.

With the card, I can offer the card and say, “I’d like to help,” then you can pay this kindness forward. And the cool thing is at Kinded.com the person you gave the card to can anonymously tell the story.

Last time I checked there were about 500 random acts of kindness tracked on Kinded.com. We need more of that in this world, especially in times like these. We need to help eachother.  And maybe next time I see that young lady with all those bags she’ll let me give her a hand.

I attended a presentation by Microsoft last week at NYU about Bing, the new search engine. 

Bing is interesting, foremost, because it is not Google.  We all know Google is God, a theoretically benevolent entity that holds all knowledge and harbors secrets that would blow our minds, so when another engine pops up with vivid, landing-page images of exotic locales and promises of cashback on purchases you make through its links, suddenly, well, Google seems a little boring. 

That plain white screen, all that clicking to see if the page you think you requested is what you really, truly want--as if you could ever know what you want without the Internet telling you--all of this seems so . . . pre-June '09.  Bing isn't just a boring ol' search engine; it's a decision engine.  The alternate URL says so.  Microsoft's introductory letter to the public says so.

When you Bing (capital letter! like when you Google something!) an idea, Bing returns to you pretty different results than Google does.  This is because the algorithm for relevance is way different and way better, says Microsoft, than what Google uses. 

Google's algorithm for relevance is unknown in the entirety to most of us, but we do know a little bit about how we can trick out our results.  Type in the words that relate to the topic in concise, natural syntax that relies on noun forms for a lot of words and you'll generally get what you're seeking--if what you're really seeking is what you entered.  

Lots of people, though, do not really know what they want.  Good thing we have Bing.  Bing knows what we want, sort of.  

Say I type in "maintain energy while cutting carbs."  This is something I really want to do.  Bing's first result is "Maintaining your Energy Levels While Dieting."  Bing even lets me hover over the result and shows me a fun box that covers up all the sidebar ads and tells me what the first two paragraphs on the page say!  I don't have to click to the page and click back if that wasn't what I wanted.  I can hover over all the results on the page and see what's up with each offer before I make a final decision to click. Oooh, decision engine! 

Google, on the other hand, gives me a page about how to plan out a low-carb diet.  Ahem.  I already made that decision, but Google didn't know that, because it was too busy being extra-literal with what I said.  

Sometimes, Bing is all wrong--like when Microsoft demonstrated its travel search and showed me how it could find me competitive fares and predict fare drops for flights from JFK to San Francisco.  The results were really cool, but when I tried it alone, searching for "Newark to South Padre Island," Bing tried to make me decide I want to go on vacation blind through Priceline or stay at a HoJo.

Now, perhaps that is what many people want to do when they visit Texas' number-one Spring Break destination, but I actually want to stay somewhere really beautiful and ritzy and read about the cannibal Karankawas that used to inhabit the island.  Bing totally threw me lowest common-denominator results, because it didn't take my search entry seriously enough to simply show me what I said I wanted to see.  

What this means for how we focus on creating search visibility is extremely exciting.  Microsoft told me that Bing has 94 million unique users.  That's a lot of people that will soon expect their search engine to know what they mean without having to hit keywords in a certain order (you do this when you search whether you realize it or not).  That's also a lot of people that will not be reinforcing the relevance of search engine-optimized copy by clicking the link for a page that some amazing writer constructed carefully just for your goals. 

Bing is making SEO a lot harder for copywriters and digital marketers to direct.  The pages we create still require that we effect a legitimate strategy in order to garner visibility, but the substantive elements of the content now require a genuine, topical offer that delves into the minds and desires of the audience.  We need to consider the searcher as more than just a person who enters keywords, but as a person who is about to make a decision, because Bing is making it easier than ever for people to make decisions without the positive reinforcement for our work that Google has provided for us for so long. 

Essentially, if Bing is going to read minds, we, as digital marketers, need to read minds, too.  Should be pretty amazing.   

Let's talk next time about how Bing's market penetration and organic search vs. PPC models affect advertisers now and through the end of the year.  In the meantime, check out the New York Times' take on Bing, too.

In their book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff define the social media explosion that includes Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, etc. as:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

Sports fans are an insatiable bunch when it comes to news about their favorite team. I personally click on the NFL link at ESPN three or four times a day as if it were a refresh button, even though I’ve already read all the articles there.  The search for other sources has now led me to twitter.

NFL fans will remember Chicago QB Jim McMahon’s use of his headband in the mid-80’s to send messages. Imagine if he had access to Twitter (Commissioner Rozelle would probably have had a cow)! 

I have been following Shaq (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) on Twitter for about 9 months now.  While his tweets haven’t added tremendous value to my life, it is cool to be connected to  a larger than life figure and one of the top 50 players in NBA history.

I’ve met NBA legends MJ, Dr. J, Rick Barry, Moses Malone (fo, fo, fo - I wonder if he would have tweeted that in '83) and Magic Johnson, but I have actually tweeted Shaq during a game I attended in Washington, DC this past season. 

So, when I bumped into him at the All Star Game in Phoenix on my way to the NBA Technology Summit, I was able to say, “Hey Shaq, I’m one of your followers.”  Shaq, if you’re reading this, thanks for autographing my son’s jersey while we were in Phoenix!  Rumor has it Shaq found out he will be playing with the King via Twitter. 

Pro athletes have been taking to Twitter, as have imposters of them; hence the use of “real” in Shaq’s twitter handle. Bogus twittering has become such an issue that a new site – Athletestweet.com – has emerged, making sure athletes are who they say they are on Twitter.

I learned about the new site while reading about my Philadelphia Eagles on ESPN’s nation blog for the NFC East, which had a link to Ashley Fox’s article, “A case of athletes’ tweets” on Philly.com (http://tinyurl.com/mcbcmj) . When I wrote this blog, according to the article, the only Eagle who has been certified by the service is “Macho” Harris.

According to Fox, none of the leagues have specific policies that address Twitter and the nature of micro blogging in this format. Athletestwitter.com and a site I just learned about today from Bill Sobel’s blog (http://tinyurl.com/lsuqny), jockipedia.com,  seem like exactly what Li and Bernoff are talking about when they indicate organizations are not prepared to deal with this groundswell.

Considering the recent firing of Dan Leone for talking a little trash via Facebook for letting Brian Dawkins fly away (see my post: http://tinyurl.com/ljg6el), it will be interesting to see what “Macho” and the other Eagles tweet about going forward.  Will the Eagles bench, fine, or fire players for bad twitters? I guess we will find out soon enough. 

Organic SEO was once a meritocracy--not that long ago, either. 

Back in February, I talked about "the soulless algorithm" that defines search-engine visibility and how to accomodate its calculations while remaining creative.  My point was that an incisive choice of words that mirrors the common lexicon of a targeted market has the capability to generate visibility in search engines and excite and convince an audience about your offer's value in equal measure.  In simpler terms, I said smart writing delivers results.  

I mentioned, then, that search engines influence what we, as writers and marketers, offer them in concomitance.  I promised to tell you more about the syntactical evolution your offer requires to stay relevant in the market and to the search terms your targets enter. 

As it turns out, online marketing is trending away from that syntactical evolution, but only within the context of what creative marketers offer.  Where you may have been able to lead the majority of your market--and, thus, your searchers--into entering sequences of words you created for them, now search behavior leads the creative mind and the digital marketer more than ever. 

Organic SEO is becoming a democracy--and that means you need a lot of people to prefer your offer in order to generate the results your position-based angle generated in the past.

Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insight at Edelman, the world's largest PR firm, writes for AdAge [account required] about how sites earn search visibility more than ever these days:

 . . . the search-engine landscape is shifting. Today consumers are far more likely to seek out and, what's more, trust what they read on other sites rather than anything we put out. The reasons are both technological and sociological. 

He cites two new kinds of search, reputational and social.  Reputational search isn't anything new to most of us, but it recognizes that as online media grants growing credibility to blogs, social-media pages, and aggregators through increased PageRank, writers and marketers need to apply SEO concepts to traditional PR materials that appear online.  His tactical triumvirate of research, content development, and measurement is old hat for SEO copywriters, but offers a new approach for PR professionals.  

Rubel breaks ground when he discusses the importance of social search, though:

As more searches take place inside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, brands that are early adopters in building out "embassies" will be more visible.

There's no doubt that brand reputation today is incresingly shaped by sites we don't control.  This means that even a nascent field such as search-engine marketing must change in order to survive and thrive.

Rubel ends his thoughts with the mention of requisite change, undoubtedly so that readers engage with Edelman to learn more, but I like the idea of exploring the thought with you further here at Flightpath.  

Essentially, social search means search benchmarks are powered by the people.  SEO copywriters and digital marketers must meet the audience on its turf and on its terms, in all senses of the word.  We have to calibrate our message to keywords the masses use within their own worlds. 

As digital marketers, our traditional website and social-media pages must match the vertical and social engines' expectations.  Our blog posts have to satisfy the topical markers--the words--the audience promulgates.  Our tweets must integrate their hashtags.  Our voice is now the brand voice plus the voice of everyone in the world who already cares about our common interest, that is, our offer to them.  

The fine modicum of control we may have enjoyed as creative market leaders still exists in part--Google will never die, and natural search results will always matter--but, more and more, the future of search is in the hands of the people.