The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

Welcome to another edition of “Chris can’t stay away from his over-stuffed feed reader” — on today’s menu is a serving of 10 delicacies culled from a week’s worth of multiple-windows with dozens-of-tabs, lightly sprinkled with banal commentary and liberal use of the <em> tag.

• The Blogletter is Coming - Actually, it’s Already Here
  Chad Horenfeldt of Anything Goes Marketing follows up on earlier coverage of an emerging content distriubtion method — publishing blog posts directly to an email. Feedburner and Feedblitz make this pretty easy already, allowing for near-zero-configuration and automatic addition of standard blog features like comments (imagine that! direct participation in a staid old medium like email), injecting a core benefit of blogging into an email campaign seemlessly.
• The Top Ten Brand Measures
  If a brand manager could only focus on ten measures of brand vitality, these are the measures that Brad VanAuken of Brand Strategy Insider would recommend:
  1. Top-of-mind unaided awareness
  2. Relevant differentiation
  3. Perceived value
  4. Perceived accessibility
  5. Emotional connection
  6. Loyalty
  7. Market share
  8. Price premium
  9. Brand as a badge
  10. Brand associations/personality attributes
• Practical Advice For Radical Innovation
  Idris Mootee knocks another one out of the park; this guy can’t be contained! He sets us a packed-but-brief primer on how large organizations can overcome their natural inertia to encourage innovative thinking. It’s primarily an issue of leadership, as people will naturally fear sticking their neck out, and retreat to their comfortable habits to get by.
• Firebrand CEO Laments Company’s Demise, Misunderstands Commercials
  AdRant’s Steve Hall is right on here — Firebrand never could have come into existence but for the navel-gazing propensity of the industry. Let’s reiterate: people don’t care about advertising. They care about themselves.
• A 20-Step Process For Finding Your
  1,000 True Fans
  Man, looks like Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans post is getting a lot of attention — imho Brian Clark’s got one of the better takes on the “you don’t need a huge audience” theme. He’s pleased to see Kelly’s thesis matching up with an idea he had earlier kicked around on buildling a profitable member site. He offers a easy-to-follow step-by-step process to creating an interactive training program; all of which is portable to a narrative-based digital experience.
• War v. Story
  Leland Maschmeyer, who’s an absolute must read, contrasts the military lingo and constructs (officers, briefings, strategies, campaigns, etc.) that dominate the marketing and advertising industry with the narrative-centric storytelling concepts (variability, transportation, transformation, curiosity, discovery, etc.) that are the underpinnings of his Transformational Design argument.
• SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
  I had the fortune to attend this year’s SXSW (after years of pleading for the chance) and I’ll probably post a lame “me-too” summary sometime soon. I didn’t get a chance to see this panel, but I think a co-worker did. In any case, 37 Signals is a force to be reckoned with in the design and development world (a sphere that I started out in). The lessons that jumped out at me were: Red Flags (watching out for the use of words like need, can’t, easy, only, and fast, that are almost never accurate in context) and Question Your Work Regularly (a mid-project gut check against the fundamental objectives and purposes that I regularly do for better or worse).
• Free Web Page Heat Maps?
  I’m going to go ahead and admit that 90% of my skepticism towards Feng GUI is the name itself. However, I’m not going to let that stop me trying it out. Your mileage and suspension-of-disbelif abilities may vary.
• SXSW: Tools for Enchantment. 20 Ways to Woo Users
  It simply does not get any better than Kathy Sierra when it comes to creating delightful and superior user experiences. It’s been about a year since her last post, and she’s still number 1,000 or so on Technorati. If you haven’t taken the time to catch up on all of the Creating Passionate Users posts, you need to drop whatever inane activity you’re doing now and get to it. I’m still waiting with baited breath for a book-ified version of the blog. I’d make it mandatory reading for the Experience Planning team at CE, if not the entire Digital department. I saw this presentation in person, but certainly appreciate Aaron’s succint summary. Saves me some typing time.
• How to Build a Better Office
  *cough *cough. *adjusts collar. Any chance whatsoever that a certain Warren-based agency might take note of this? belaboring the point.

Tags: email, links, marketing, strategy, sxsw