What everyone in Silicon Valley and “Venture Land” conceive of as the real game-changing model involves capturing and capitalizing on the “interest graph. The company that succeeds in doing so would be “close to the Google search paradigm because it would be right in line with demand generation and with discovery that relates to product purposes.” Thus, it is the interest graph that defines the middle ground between Google and Facebook — between search, advertising, and the social graph.

The above paragraph comes from a year-old post in Tech Crunch, following last winter’s Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.  It was a prescient sentiment for sure.

Just look at the current landscape. The new emerging social platforms are less about the social graph and all about the interest graph. Pinterest, Springpad, Svpply. We’re seeing an evolution from people centric social media (who I am connected with) to interest centric social media (what I care about, want to buy, hope to do.) Users are jumping on platforms like these and others in part because they make it so easy to express one’s self by posting stuff you like or find interesting.  Add in the fun of discovery and the rewards of sharing and it’s likely we’ll see accelerated user growth.

Springpad lets me discover and save stuff I want then finds me the best prices on the web.

For brand and marketers, this is good news. It’s a lot more lucrative to tap into intent and desire than it is to try and penetrate communities where you’re uninvited. Even the best conversation strategists can’t necessarily turn engagement into sales. And it’s become pretty apparent that collecting likes on Facebook will never be the Holy Grail.  Just go to any Facebook brand page and take a look at the metric revealed by dividing fans “talking about this,” by those who “like this.”  The percentages are typically pretty low.  For Harley Davidson half of one percent of fans are paying attention while Old Spice’s number is only slightly higher.

In a recent video Gary Vaynerchuk asks an interesting question. “What’s the Dunbar number for brands?” He notes that most consumers have liked so many brands they don’t even remember which ones. As marketers should know, fans rarely visit a brand’s Facebook page and unless they engage on a regular basis they won’t see brand updates in their stream either.  How many brands can we actually have social relationships with? Ten? Twenty? Certainly fewer than the number of people we engage with.

But we can like or want dozens of products and places. Books we want to read, movies we plan to rent, places we hope to visit, restaurants we know we’ll eat at. Offer that up to a marketer and it’s gold. It’s also likely that the right kind of message or alert or incentive to act, served up in a tasteful and polite manner, will be more than welcome.

Expect to see some pretty interesting (no pun intended) developments in 2012. Pinterest may have great momentum, effortlessly converting consumers’ interests into inbound links for the benefitting brand, but there’s more compelling stuff on the horizon. Springpad, a company whose board I serve on, goes beyond interest to identifying deferred intent, then delivering relevant alerts and information that convert interest to action. That’s a benefit for both a user and the brand whose product or service fulfills an obvious desire. Springpad has a slew of significant enhancements coming in February that will make it even more productive and incredibly social.

No doubt there will be others, too. I recently met a new startup called Aditive that offers yet another way to tap into intent. By making online ads social and shareable Aditive encourages readers to share offers with friends who they know might like the product or promotion being offered.  When executed right, this simple tactic multiples click-through and effectiveness by a factor of 10 because it’s allowing consumers to identify interests that their friends might have.

In March, I’m on a panel at SxSW to talk about deferred intent and the brand opportunities inherent in social media as the interest graph evolves. Between now and then I’ll probably return to the topic a few times.  Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and, of course, your interests.

Thanks for reading.

Other links:

Storify:  The Interest Graph

Nearly half of online consumers write comments to help others, not to engage with brands

This just in: 50 percent of all social media campaigns go unnoticed. They fall on deaf ears. Consumers don’t give a damn. And brands are wasting time and money. In large part because they don’t know how to listen to consumers or deliver content that matters to them.

At least that’s according to the recent TNS Digital Life 2012 Report. The study interviewed 72,000 people from 60 countries and discovered that consumers, particularly those in the US and UK, are pretty cynical. In those two countries 60 and 61 percent of consumers have no interest in engaging with brands via social media.

Are you surprised? I’m not. In fact, we probably don’t need a study from TNS to tell us this. Look how much mediocrity is out there under the guise of “brand journalism,” or “owned content.” Much of it might feel good to its creators, but it’s a yawn inducer for customers and prospects. The fact that anyone with a laptop and Internet access can be a content creator simply means we have “mountains of digital waste” cluttering a landscape populated by friendless Facebook accounts and blogs no one reads.

While some marketers are getting it right, most appear to be missing an opportunity.  Consider that almost half of all consumers willingly comment about brands on review sites – not to complain or praise mind you, but to share experiences and help others. So they’re using social media to engage. And they’re talking about brands. They just don’t want to have those conversations with the brand itself.

Ironically, when it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers rely as much or more on a brand’s content than they do on peer recommendations. They just want it on their terms and in a relevant context.

Let’s recap. Consumers want brand information and use it to make decisions. They willingly take the time to engage online, albeit for the benefit of each other. And too many brands, at least according to this study, can’t find a way to engage.

Why? TNS suggests inefficient targeting.

My conclusion would be a lack of creativity — a shortage of truly interesting, entertaining and useful ideas. Daily posts on Facebook – polls, questions, promotional offers (though the latter tends to work) – might cut it with a select group of  already engaged fans. But will they hold their attention long term? Or delight them on a regular basis. Or succeed in attracting new customers?

I’m a huge fan of earned attention. And owning content. And being in the publishing business. But the one downside of everyone and anyone — and that includes brands and companies — being a content creator is that just like cable television, the good stuff becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of all that’s out there.

We’ve all seen, and hopefully created, stuff that’s good. It might be an event that lasts a day. Or extends for a month. It could be a price promotion.  Or a new product launch.  A single app.  Or an ongoing story.  Even a Facebook page. When social content is great, when there’s actually an idea to capture our imaginations, when there’s an execution to delight us, we want to engage.

Social media may have changed everything. But not the need for new, interesting, useful, relevant, and well-designed ideas. Let’s make more of those.

Want to convince clients not to over-react? Who is in a better position to offer such advice than someone who made the mistake and lived to regret it.  Want to forcefully counsel clients not to delete those nasty Facebook posts?  Guess who now knows about that. Want to get paid by clients to develop a crisis management playbook that can be followed when problems erupt? The team that didn’t have one yesterday today understands how essential it can be. Especially for global brands with multiple content creators. (Note: read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and you realize exactly how important it is to have instructions worth following when the situation gets so stressful that it’s hard to think clearly.)

If you want to use this as a social media case study, check out this sequence of events on Storify. It includes links to video, articles and tweets, along with my two cents. 

If I were Sapient Nitro I’d take comfort in a few things. One, this too shall pass. It might seem omnipresent yesterday and today, but a week from now no one will really remember. United Guitar, Nestle’s and even Dominos all endured days of misery when they screwed up. But search Dominos social media on Google today and you get a story about re-invention.

Two, this story played out primarily on Twitter, a few blogs and AdWeek.  At least so far. It didn’t really make the mainstream press and most clients don’t pay as much attention to the same blogs as ad industry types do.

And three, admitting mistakes and laughing about them, presuming you don’t repeat them, is something everyone can relate to. (We’ve all done something stupid.)

True some clients may prefer their agencies to know enough not to make such mistakes. But with a little bit of “positioning” Sapient Nitro ought to be able to turn this into a useful case study that talks about the eight mistakes not to make in social media.

1. Don’t post the wrong kind of content
2. Remember the web isn’t local, it’s global
3. Engage proactively at the right time
4. Don’t try and control the community or delete their comments
5. If you do, archive everything
6. Have a crisis management plan in place and follow it
7. Try not to get defensive
8. Accept the blame, apologize, and move on

If you want the beginning of a case study, check out the Storify post.

Wouldn’t you love it if Tom and Ray had hangouts once or twice a week for open questions and clever repartee? Sure Car Talk hangouts might be hard to get into, and fans would get really frustrated if they got shut out, but the brothers could always produce brief videos of the best exchanges and share them on YouTube after the fact. Which by they way would help yield better search results and drive traffic back to their Google+ page.

They could share puzzlers on their Google + page each week, too. Fans and listeners could post answers right there. Instead of simply hearing the right answer on the next show, we could amuse ourselves with the wrong ones, too. Perhaps even engage in some argument and debate.

And while it may not be possible for Car Talk, as a Google+ Page owner to add individuals to its circles (at least until the page is circled by a fan first), once fans do add Car Talk to a circle, Ray and Tom could segment those users based on interests or needs, both automotive and psychological. They could have circles of “mechanics who want to get better,” “prospective new car buyers,” “people in bad marriages due to automotive disagreements,” etc. Click and Clack could offer up advice, information, links and content specific to the circles that could most benefit from them.

There are plenty of reasons for brands and media companies to get onto Google+ Pages.

To stake your claim before someone creates a fake version

Like this one for BofA. (They deserve it, though.) Looks like Google is already on top of establishing verified pages, but it’s always easier to avoid the hassle.

To increase search results

Certainly Google+ pages will come up higher in organic search than will Facebook pages. Plus Google can weigh inbound links to that page, so that if you get the right people to link to you your results are even better.

To take advantage of Direct Connect

As Google+ continues to get more popular searching for +Burberry or +Pepsi or +Google makes it really easy for people to find your page. Presuming that they want to because you’re doing great things there.

To avoid being late to the party

An awful lot of brands were late to Facebook and even later to Twitter. While it’s always possible to catch up, it’s hard to be perceived as an innovator if you don’t get there first and set an example.

To get familiar enough with the platform to actually be inventive with it

And I don’t simply mean putting some video in your profile pictures, though kudos to Burberry, it is aesthetically pleasing. Rather to figure out whether or not you can deliver better service here than elsewhere, take advantage of hangouts, or simply leverage your +1’s in a more meaningful way.

Here are some other posts that you might find helpful.

Why Google+ Will Have a Huge Impact Re: Brands

Brand Pages are Lacking, but You’ll Make One Anyway

Burberry and Angry Birds Launch Pages

How to Create a Google+ Page

Google+ Pages Won’t Save the Social Network

In the meantime, I’m hoping Click and Clack jump on Google+ pages sooner rather than later and set an example of how to use the platform.

The First Amendment, printed in its entirety on the SI Newhouse 3 Building at Syracuse University

The good folks at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication were kind enough to invite me to speak there this week as part of their Global Leaders in Digital and Social Media Speaker Series.

The experience was awesome. I had the chance to visit and present in two classes – Dr. Bill Ward’s Social Media You Need to Know, and Professor Brian Sheehan’s Integrated Advertising Campaigns –and then deliver a keynote in the school’s wonderful Herg Auditorium.

S.I.Newhouse impressed on all fronts. The facility is spectacular, especially Newhouse 3, with its curved facade and the full text of the First Amendment (written in its entirety) incorporated into the exterior glass walls.

The building houses media rooms, production facilities and editing labs that feel almost as cool as an Apple store. There are well-lit open spaces that act as metaphors for transparency and freedom of information.  But best of all, I found eager engaged students.

In my keynote, titled The End of Us and Them, I talked a bit about the somewhat conflicting trends in our business today. On one hand, TV spending in the US next year will grow 5.1 percent to well over 70 billion.  On the other hand the critics tell us that, “In the future marketing will be like sex. Only the losers will pay for it.”

We have agency models that are still beholden to the golden era of media defined best by Walter Cronkite, Bill Bernbach and Ed Sullivan. Yet the new media forces are people like Zuckerberg and Chen, who’ve liberated us all and therefore relegated the old model – in which agencies and media companies were owners of content and controllers of distribution – to the diminished position it has today.

I shared an exchange I witnessed between Ted Koppel (SI Newhouse alum) and Arianna Huffington to remind students that it didn’t matter who was right –Ted wants to give people news that’s good for them; Arianna wants them to have the news they want – the reader, and consequently Arianna, have already won. (You can see the entire video of that conversation if you want.)

But I also suggested that all would be well. Advertising and its practitioners will prevail and prosper presuming we learn to create not only with words, pictures and stories, but also with technology, APIs and community.

There are a few other suggestions and examples as well. Much of it familiar to regular readers here. But if you want to take it, use it, repurpose it for yourself, here it is.

Thanks to the folks at S.I. Newhouse and especially to @DR4Ward for the warm hospitality and dinner at America’s best rib joint. I suggest the pork ribs and pulled pork combination.

Oh, and if you ever get invited to speak there, do not pass it up. Talking to you Mr. Armano. You’ll get more Twitter love from the students than you’ll ever get anywhere else.

Our communities of concern have become too narrow

Before the Occupy Movement even launched, I heard Robert Reich speak at Google’s Zeitgeist 11 Conference. In a brilliant talk he clarified how our communities of concern are shrinking. We don’t do everything as a country to solve unemployment because those in power don’t really care. Why? Because they are college graduates. And the unemployment rate, while 35 percent for high school dropouts, hovers at a mere five percent for college graduates. High school dropouts are not in the community that matters.

Reich extended his argument to rationalize why the poverty rate for senior citizens in America has been reduced significantly (from 20 percent to five percent) while poverty rates for families with small children has sky rocketed (an appalling 37 percent of US families with small children now live in poverty). The former reside comfortably in the community that congressmen care about (powerful voting block; closer in age) while the latter sits outside it.

Whether his assessment is right or not, two facts emerges as crystal clear. Each of us – blue, red, old, young, urban, rural, black, white, gay, straight – tends to care disproportionately about those with whom we share empathy and interdependency. And as our country becomes more fragmented rather than unified, our communities of concern get narrower. In fact, even the Occupy Movement, which has  effectively called attention to the most obvious “us and them” gap, has been criticized for its lack of diversity, particularly in southern cities where there are large African American populations.

This is ironic in an age of social media when we have remarkable tools to connect us to each other. But what do we use them for? To find more people just like us. Take a look at your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, your Google + circles. Chances are they are a mirror reflection of your upbringing, your background and your profession. When I went to college, 30-plus years ago, even unimaginative housing administrators worked hard to match you up with someone from a different background. Now our kids use Facebook to find roommates whose tastes match theirs, reinforcing a tendency for both parties to stay in their mutual comfort zone.

As I thought about Reich’s argument, something else struck me. There are two places where we create “communities” that do work — juries and military service. Granted in the case of the latter, people’s lives depend on one another. But think about juries.* We stick 12 strangers in a room, present them with a very serious responsibility, and in most cases they fulfill their duty with the utmost of diligence.

So here’s my idea for saving America in case the Occupy Movement doesn’t work. It’s an idea that could help us increase empathy. It takes full advantage of social media’s true potential. It’s a program that steals from the military and juries — practices that do work — when it comes to creating interdependency.

Mandatory social media service

• We require every 18-year-old in America to participate in mandatory social media service as part of a daily or weekly routine for one year.
• We assign our young adults to a racially diverse online social group comprised of 12 people from different regions, backgrounds, income brackets. (Google+ is a potential platform.)
• We present each group with a social challenge – obesity, jobs, poverty, high cost of education, even the problem of young men getting their sex education from watching online porn – and we ask them to solve the problem.
• We give them benchmarks,  goals, and require an outcome in the form of an idea, a program, a new policy or maybe just a video.
• Finally we aggregate all of the solutions on one public website where the press, our legislatures, businesses and educators can access, rate and maybe even implement the ideas.

No doubt there are details to work out. Does each group have an official moderator, someone to coach and keep track? What happens when partisan differences challenge collaboration? How do we make technology and Internet access available to everyone? Is there translation software good enough to serve multi-lingual users? But these are all solvable through trial and error in the course of developing the program.

More importantly, we’re not asking anyone to give up an entire year of his or her life or make a significant sacrifice. We’re simply asking them to work together, as a community of concern, to find some kind of common ground that might yield a solution to a problem or an idea worth pursuing further.

Will a group of strangers on a social platform really solve big issues like unemployment, poverty, obesity, and urban violence? Maybe not. But as a society, we might solve our most pressing problem. The need to create greater empathy and understanding between and among people who are different but share a vested interest in America.

Think this idea has potential? Send a link to this post to your congressman or woman. Got a better idea? Please share.

Photograph courtesy of: Konstantin Sergeyev, who has some great images of the Occupy Movement on his Flickr page.

* A thought put in my head when Esther Dyson asked Sandra Day O’Connor a question about their effectiveness.

But many times, the conversation doesn’t end up back on the blog where it started. Instead it gets carried out on Twitter, or Facebook, or Google + where, let’s face it, there are many more people hanging out. You could have been the one to start the conversation, but as far as Google juice goes, you’re not getting much.

Now, thanks to Livefyre’s new social sync, any conversation that emanates from your post ends up back in your blog’s comment section, accomplishing two things. First, and perhaps most importantly, it aggregates the conversation – opinions, provocations, disgreements – in the one place where it really belongs.  Easily accessible for reference now or months from now. (Try searching for old tweets.) And two, it gives you, the content originator, the SEO credit you deserve.

I was one of the very first bloggers to install Livefyre. In part because I’m a big fan of founder Jordan Kretchmer, who once worked for me. But also because I’ve always liked Livefyre’s mission to replace static conversations with dynamic, real-time dialog that actually builds community. Jordan knows that blogging and journalism are as much about conversation and community as they are about writing and reporting.

Livefyre has been at it now for two years and continues to get better.  The company’s platform is now installed on more than 14,000 websites, from small-time bloggers like me to big publishers such as The Sun, Sugar Media, Talking Points Memo and MIT Tech Review.

Given that they just closed a second round of funding and stuck another $4.5 million in the checking account, I’m expecting the platform to get even better.

Do me a favor. Chat this post up on Twitter so I can see how well the new features work.

And let me know what you think of Livefyre as a comment system.

So Made by Many and Good for Nothing started the 50/50 project – the idea being to get friends and partners — advertising and digital agencies mostly — to launch 50 projects in 50 days to raise at least $1 million, perhaps much more, for relief. Today is the official launch day for many of those projects. October 16.World Food Day.

Our project at Mullen is called The Good Belly Project. We realize that we can’t actually transport food to East Africa. We can’t secure a fleet of helicopters. We can’t establish an on ground presence.

So here’s what we did. We launched a social-media powered fundraising partnership with 17 of Boston’s top restaurants and their customers using Instagram. Every time a customer takes a photograph of their restaurant meal and shares it, the participating restaurant will donate $1.00 to the Good Belly Project, which transfers 100 percent of the proceeds to UNICEF’s East Africa’s relief efforts.

Yes there’s a kind of absurd irony in posting photographs of gourmet meals in order to help people who are starving. But at the same time there’s a logic to it. It’s the ideal time and place to remind people who have plenty to eat how fortunate they are.  It taps into an existing behavior – food porn is pretty prevalent on photo sharing networks like Instagram. And it gives the participating restaurants something in return for their contribution. A bit of visibility and cred for supporting the cause.

I hope you’ll join us over the next few weeks. You can frequent the restaurants that have offered to help.  You can post food porn images. And you can, perhaps, realize how fortunate you are to have food in your belly and maybe write a big fat check to help those less fortunate. Feel free to make that donation here, at the Good Belly Project.

Good Belly Restaurants (links and addresses):

• Abigail’s American
• Bambara American
• Bergamot American
• Bon Me Truck Food Truck
• Figs Beacon Hill Pizza
• Figs Charlestown Pizza
• Fillbelly’s Food Truck
• Hillstone American
• Isabelle’s CurlycakesBakery
• Island Creek Oyster BarSeafood
• Kingfish Hall Seafood
• KO Prime Steakhouse
• Market by Jean GeorgesAmerican
• Naked Pizza Pizza
• Rialto Restaurant + BarItalian
• Sibling Rivalry American
• Stephi’s On TremontAmerican

A month ago I crowdsourced questions here and on Twitter for the instructors at BDW’s Making Digital Work workshop.

We settled on five.

How do we get clients to embrace more innovative work?

What can we learn from software startups?

Do agencies have a role in social media?

How do we stop the talent drain?

What kind of people should we hire?

Here are the answers from my good friends and teachers Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Kim Laama, Tim Malbon, Sheena Matheiken, Scott Prindle and John Winsor.I weigh in, too.

Some of my favorite soundbites:

Matt Howell on innovation: If we’re serious about selling more progressive work we have to get serious about investing in prototyping, showing how something works and how you’d interact with it.

Gareth Kay on social media: One of the biggest problems with social media is that people are too focused on the media part of social media instead of on the social part.

Sheena Matheiken on software inspiration: Developers in general, especially the creatively inclined ones, are such doers. They just create stuff. They don’t sit around and noodle. They make and prototype.

Tim Malbon on software inspiration: Try not to treat what you’re trying to make like a piece of traditional media. It doesn’t need to be designed massively up front. It can be cruder; it can be quicker.

John Winsor on retaining talent: Traditionally agencies are siloed. The creative department stands on a pedestal. The account people are there to serve them. Strategy is somewhere in between. But great ideas come from everywhere so you need to set up a system that accepts that great ideas come from everywhere.

Scott Prindle on hiring: The core quality is an entrepreneurial spirit. Someone who is passionate about the digital space, maybe someone who thought about being in start-up. They have to come into the into the agency and quickly generate ideas and move things forward.

One thing about all of these folks is that they’re willing to share. Ideas, advice, insights. Take a look and connect with them on Twitter. It will be worth it. Thanks for stopping by.

The good folks of Cleveland’s advertising community recently invited me to keynote at an AAF event there. Cleveland is a pretty nice city and to my surprise is a foodie town — it’s the home of Eric Williams – and even the some of the suburban restaurants are pretty darn good.

Anyway, they wanted to hear a little bit of my story, the culture and transformation of Mullen and some thoughts on how we think about the business today and where it might be going.

Here’s the deck I shared. As is typical for me, the slides don’t say much without a voice over, but here’s the story in a nutshell

Slide 1: You don’t survive in this business, from the past to the present, or from the present to the future, without constantly evolving and embracing change. You have to live in beta.

Slide 2: In 1983 we launched the computer shoe for Puma. There are two points to the story of this ill-fated product launch.

The first:  the sneaker maker asked the question, “Can we build it?”  Instead they should have asked, “Should we build it?” They may have learned what was wrong with it before they put it in market. This story becomes more relevant later on when we talk about innovation and thinking like a start-up.

The second point: we made ads. We told people about our clients’ products, bought their attention, and made a product that was finished, polished, varnished and re-printed. A small group of us – pirates, renegades and outsiders even back then – were determined to do good work, win awards, establish a reputation and build an agency.

(Slide 3 — 14) We did well, but over time the world changed — digital, social, consumer engagement, etc.

(Slide 15–16) Once ideas were crafted out of words, pictures and stories. Suddenly they were created using applications, utility and technology. Media changed, too. Can you spell proliferation?

(Slide 14 – 24) Next came numerous predictions of the industry’s demise. From within and without. Also new competitors and models: Gary Vaynerchuk-like do-it-yourselfers. Crowdsourcing platforms. Scalable software services that strive to replace traditional service models.

Meanwhile lots of businesses in related or parallel industries did die, fueling the naysayers.

(Slide 25) So where do you look for ideas and inspiration? Certainly not to other ad agencies. How about Steve Jobs?

(Slide 26 –34) We changed — or at least evolved — a few things.

Our philosophy: Unbound

We reduced it to one word. Unbound was intended to free us from solving problems with advertising only and to become way more diverse in our thinking. It changed everything from what we made, to how we pitched business, the teams we put in the room and the space in which we worked.

Our influences: Steven Johnson

Good ideas come from collisions. That word became the blueprint for our new space and how we organized people. The idea was that the more collisions we could create — crashing people, ideas and disciplines into each other — the more creative (and effective) our solutions might be.

Our behavior and mindset:  Social

One of our smarter moves was getting (or allowing) everyone in the company – and many of our clients — to embrace social media early on. We did everything from create experiences that introduced people to Twitter, started blogs, encouraged writing for the agency blog, designed conversation strategies for clients, even developed full-blown social media training and management guides. We started this in 2007. It may have been late for the early adopter but it was early for the ad industry. As a result, today we have a pretty good social media business.

Our culture: Curiosity

Some agencies and advertisers wait for new ideas and platforms to approach mainstream use before jumping in. We started trying everything new right away and encouraged clients to do the same. We introduced clients to Ning when it first launched so they could learn a little about community management. Today we have them playing around with Instagram, trying out Google+ (as individuals) and, of course, incorporating mobile functionality into more of what they do. Teaching, sharing, learning together has become a big part of our digital and social offering.

Our focus: Experimentation

We started experimenting more for ourselves. We incubated TNGG, a crowdsourced Gen-Y online magazine, which now provides content to Boston.com. To build our Twitter portfolio and generate coverage for the agency we created BrandBowl. And more recently, we launched the beta for a new integrated media platform The Pulse. If nothing else, our lab mindset has spurred a greater interest in experimentation of all kinds, with better work and creations likely to follow.

Talent: Digital

Not much needs to be said here. Every agency is doing this. But we’ve made it a priority and area of investment, recruiting talent in design, UX, front-end and back-end development, creative technology, production, project management, mobile, social media and digital media.

(Slides 35 – 72)  I personally learned some new stuff, as did the agency. Got better at collaboration, both internally and across external alliances and partnerships. Became comfortable living in beta. Embraced the Google-y concept of giving credit to the idea rather than the person who “thinks” he came up with it. Re-thought where ideas comes from. Hint: everywhere. Validated the inter-connected circle of momentum and the four forces that accelerate it: culture, space, briefs, and teams.

The agency won some cool clients, realized that culturally relevant brands that reflect what the agency wants to do are great clients to have since they inspire you forward, and attracted some attention and even better talent.

In some cases we got better at practicing problem solving rather than message crafting.

But, note that change is hard. There’s plenty of resistance and no clear set of directions.

(Slide 73) Agencies and individuals tell me this is what they struggle with. That is comforting.

(Slide 74) Some agencies are being even more innovative. That is motivating.

(Slides 75 – 103)  Five things every agency has to do. Why they have to do it. Some suggestions for how they can do it. Wrote about this a little bit in a previous post.

I think it went over pretty well. A sincere thanks to my new friends at AAF Cleveland and at Marcus Thomas for their warm hospitality.