What’s the last ad campaign that stopped you in your tracks?

There aren’t too many around that can do that, are there? Billions of dollars spent on advertising each year and we can count on just one hand the number of ad campaigns that get above the static. Than makes a brand scoring big worth notice.

I’ve been in Portland a lot lately, where Wieden and Kennedy’s “Just Do It” campaign for Nike is legend. (Here’s a nice case study on that.)  You can also find a copy of David Ogilvy’s best work on my desk, when it isn’t being borrowed. This is marketing at its best. What makes up your cannon of great work?

Guess what, I’ve found another that’s scoring big.

Some of the absolute best social media work anywhere is being done by a century-old firm you probably already know. The Hartford’s Achieve Without Limits, is taking cause marketing to “at-scale success”. They are gaining real social media credibility and capability, and they’re building a sizable engaged tribe of followers. And what makes it work, is this is authentic and aligned with their corporate zeitgeist, or as marketers would say, their brand architecture. This alignment is the table steaks for  moving from good to great.

The Hartford launched a multi-year campaign, Achieve Without Limits to celebrates the firm’s long association with U.S. Paralympics, and the example its athletes set for dedication and achievement.

How would you build a platform based on dedication and achievement? They recruited the talent of Janusz Kaminski, the Academy Award Winner who filmed “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindlers List” to create breathtaking vignettes that introduce the Paralympic athletes. Then, they dedicated their ad slots in the NCAA’s March Madness finals to debut the ads – which carried calls to meet and support the athletes through a robust Facebook Fan page and specialized Twitter account.

Hearing Melissa Stockwell say “no, I would not give back my disability if I could” simply is a remarkable moment. It earns comments and engagement. Great advertising campaigns share four attributes: they are  tangible, approachable, personal, and memorable. This platform gets around those bases well.

The Hartford also pledged to donate $1 to U.S. Paralympics for every “Like” or “Share” that the Facebook page receives.  And, they backed this promise up with innovative paid advertising on Facebook. But most importantly, they delivered prospective fans to social media experiences worth liking. There are parts of this campaign that are transfixing – as in, pausing it to show the rest of the family.

The edge of Sam Kavanaugh’s Excuse Converter has perceptible snark that recalls Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“. Team members share indepth profiles and some of what they’ve  learned through their Paralympic journeys. And The Hartford promotes meeting them on the road to the London 2012 games.  If good marketing is a story, there’s a rich and long enough story arc to hang a novel or series off this platform.

What has the Hartford learned? The created a lessons learned document which they shared as Social Media 101 for the entire Paralympic movement. While competitors were inactive, preachy, commercial, or just chatter, The Hartford did something good to advance a social cause they’re part of. And along the way, they built a social media audience of 105,000 members who are willing to join them in their support of these athletes.

The Hartford treated their social media and cause marketing as long term assets. They avoided being caught up in the tactical questions of lead generation and attribution, and instead did what marketing does at its very best. They used the brand and its values to create a campaign that aggregated and moved an audience.

With another year to go on this story arc, I’m looking forward to cheering on our Paralympic team for the first time, and enjoying the art and spirit The Hartford marshals to take this work across the finish line.  Greatness is within reach.

It’s a pleasure to hold up a relatively unsung campaign as an example of what brand marketers do at their best in cross channel campaigns. Congratulations to everyone at The Hartford, and to Team USA.

Now that you’re in the race, what will you show us next?

Is SEO Greed Good?
There’s been naive shock in the media that brands like JC Penney, Overstock and Fortune have dared to take steps to game Google search for higher results. And faux shock by the firms themselves to learn that their teams have been using tactics to inflate their rank with Google.

Last year I asked, Is it time to sunset the very idea of an SEO agency? Why? Not because SEO is bad, evil, or ineffective. Quite the opposite. What the firms I just listed have done is rational, legal, and beneficial to their businesses.  Google has every right to fix its algorithm, or exclude results its finds suspect, but wrapping this in moral terms of “black and white hat” is nonsensical.

Stripped down to economic terms, Google has made a market to connect searchers and content publishers. However, obvious imperfections to Google’s system remain, and these have kept SEO firms in business for a decade. Firms like Penney and Overstock are monetizing what an economist might call inefficiencies.

The SEO Arms Race in Competitive Markets
When one company in a contested area starts manufacturing “optimizing” success markers for Google, it causes a marketing arms race as competitors must either must give up valuable search traffic or join in a spending contest. As a result, firms then waste resources trying to beat each other in these ultimately worthless measures. And by “waste,” I mean once they are used they are entirely useless.  What are the fake links Penney invested in worth now? And how about the value of the crappy content written for SEO from the linking sites?

My objection to the SEO sub-industry is fundamental. Marketing seeks to build persistent market advantages. SEO in heavily contested spaces has become nothing more than a short-term arbitrage based on taking often valueless actions that Google overvalues.

Competitive SEO no longer adds persistent advantage and value to firms. It only exists because Google’s slow search innovation has allowed this sub-industry of SEO tricksters to blossom. Given that Google exploits the system it created for its own profit, the company shouldn’t then blame those who are trying to do the same.

This year will see a change in how search engine rankings are decided as Google relies more on social proof. This will — hopefully ? make it harder to generate rankings through mechanized efforts as real people will rank what they find helpful. Real people are even less likely to be impressed by link farm sites than Google’s bots.

2011 is shaping up to be the year that Google rediscovered search as an innovation priority. Its business depends on it.

If my title has you humming the popular R.E.M. tune, then good.

It seemed a fitting title to discuss the revolution that’s upon us. In a world where there is a PC in practically every household — half of American households have two or more PCs in the home (source: 2010 USC Annenberg Digital Future Study) — a major shift is occurring. We’re at the dawn of a new era of computing, in which tablet and mobile applications provide a more convenient and immersive user experience.

The End of PC Dominance

Fact: Three million iPads were sold in the first 80 days of its launch. To date, no other technology or hardware device has experienced such rapid adoption.

Fact: Forrester Research predicts tablet sales of 80 million units by 2015, while the folks at Goldman Sachs predict tablets will cannibalize one in three U.S. PC sales this year.

That’s not all. Stephanie Baghdassarian, the Research Director at Gartner, estimates that by 2014 there will be a new $150 billion market for tablet applications. Such an emerging market, the size of both Microsoft and Apple revenues combined, equals a HUGE opportunity.

The tablet era is earmarked not just by profound hardware sales and an increase in application sales, but more importantly by a complete shift in buying behavior and the user experience. The combination of convenience, more immersive app experiences, and greater device and data interoperability will drive a user experience revolution. I’ve talked about this since 2007, but it’s our industry’s story for 2011.

So What’s the Big Deal?
If you’ve yet to jump on the tablet wagon — I say ‘yet’ because I predict in the next year you’ll be a tablet owner — it seems fitting to share why I believe the tablet has skyrocketed to rock stardom.

The Contrivance
For over a decade, we’ve worked to build an always-on, ubiquitous network. The tablet is the missing interface for using that network. This level of portability is causing a major shift in behavior.

With the introduction of the iPhone, Apple designed an interface that is finger-centric, not mouse-centric.  Scrolling, selecting and typing are all eloquently performed with a finger, adding to the overall experience and ease of use.

The Convenience
Quite simply, tablets give you the ability to do an amazing amount whenever, wherever. For example, I recently attended the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego. My iPad rarely left my side. I checked in for my flight by showing my ticket via iPad. I rented and downloaded a movie ($4 for The Social Network) while I waited for my flight. I used the conference app to schedule and RSVP for conference sessions, and the GPS feature on my iPad to map the route to the hotel. With Hootsuite and Twitter almost always in reach, parties were located, bagels and lox were procured, and tweets of the best nuggets from conference sessions reached me, even while decompressing by the pool.  Should I go on?

The Content
In Japan in 2008, 17 percent of web pages were served on mobile devices. In 2010, that number rose to 84 percent. I use this stat because Japan is one of the earliest adopters of cellphone technology. While our “dumb” phones do nothing more than place calls and perhaps take pictures, most Japanese phones—called keitai in case you were curious—run apps and play video, even live TV. And Japan is much more advanced than the U.S. in fields like mobile payments.

The breakthrough of tables is now bringing to US consumers what people elsewhere in the world have had for some time: the enjoyment of the mobile experience. Thanks to rich, mobile-friendly media and geolocation APIs, tablets deliver “active” information and a highly immersive experience.  This level of usability, rich interactivity, and ease of use has already raised consumers’ expectations of their online experiences.

Tablets Are the Boats to Deliver Web 3.0
That immersive experience is being driven by our lust for the app and the drive to get things done. The app-driven world, a.k.a. Web 3.0, is a more engaged experience that is ideally suited for tablet delivery. Beyond the iconic Facebook and Twitter, the next generation of applications will be “mashups” that combine functionalities and seek to empower users.

For example, Loopt blends the love of social networking with location-based services. It detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints mobile friends in the vicinity. Tripit goes beyond the travel search engine to be your “personal, full-service travel assistant.” It compiles itineraries, from transportation to dinner dates, and adds weather reports, suggested local attractions and more. Openstreetmap is about people mapping everything worldwide from great hiking routes to ski runs and wine tours.

What’s Next?
2010 is the last year in which mobile strategy could pass as a “junior version” of a corporate website. The page metaphor of web publishing is near the end of its usefulness. It’s being replaced by a more interactive mobile experience, and that will change how we work, market and consume media ourselves.

This end of the digital world as we know it looks pretty useful. It’s about time.

You’re going to miss 2010.

In five years we’ll look back and realize that this was a simpler day. A lack of established business models and rules gave some the belief that a free Hootsuite account, a mantra of “Just do it” and being “open and authentic” would make them a social media ninja.

By 2015, people will already look back at 2010 as a “digital love-in” with the nostalgia that aging hippies harbor for the ’60s. So much was just about to change, and nobody imagined the digital horizon was about to be turned upside down.

In 2015, being socially unlisted will be a status symbol
At first social media looked like a pathway to “hyper-empowered” consumers.  That’s because consumers were first movers in social media. As they connected to each other and shared knowledge, they found  a new source of power

But once firms started to connect and share their views of the social grid, their superior analytic horsepower began to turn the tables on consumers. Phone companies use network analysis of who you speak to, as social networks turn into data maps of association, and location-aware phones tell advertisers which displays slowed you in their stores. Suddenly, automation, analytics and lots of available personal data produced “hyper-empowered” marketers.

Once firms can map who really brings friends with them when they change accounts or promote causes, a new set of social media scores will became  as important and formalized as credit scores. Chris Selland describes this in his post on how Klout Score is the start of corporate profiling of customers, just as FICO credit scores are used to understand credit history. Chris says there’s a business opportunity, but its not what today’s social zealots think it is.

It may have once been liberating to think of “brand YOU”. But once firms can calculate the exact value of your brand to them, they can judge consumers, and to some degree make being their promoter part of your relationship to them. The self-objectifying scoring of social media is training a generation to buy and sell their own bodies by the pound. The game is fun, until everyone’s in on it.

In 2015 Social Media Will Hardly Be Personal
As social media is professionalized, it will also become depersonalized.  By 2015 everyone will know that digital lives are performances. By then, it will seem ludicrous that real athletic or entertainment performers would be personally using social media to connect with fans, any more than they connect with fans call-in programs.

Sure you can “talk with Shaq” on Twitter.  But to work at scale, everyone will know this is a digital characterization, same as when we “talk” online with the Cookie Monster or the King from Burger King.

Naturally, as social media becomes less personal, corporations will be more at home with it. Social media was once the way that geeks could bypass customer service and get to “a person.”  Far before 2015, social media will be just one more incoming line of contact, and you’ll get the same staff that you’d reach through the 800 line. Just as VPs don’t answer many service lines today, they won’t be picking up on social media mentions. There will be a team for that, and what management needs to know will roll-up to a dashboard.

Yep, tie dyes, leisure suits, and button-downs each had their day. The same is true of technology trends. The dot.com smugfest gave way to a crop of “social media ninjas.” But 2010 is when corporations started to operationalize social meda, and use this new channel with skill. That’s a good thing, but its a sign of a maturing space where experts will increasingly have real experience, and hiring managers won’t look to social media gasbags to tell them about openness or to think like publishers.

In fact, it’s 2011 and these old saws already seem kind of quaint. Do you think social media is starting to show its age? Though media never dies, neither does new media stay new indefinitely.

When we get away from the vanity of social media and its self-worshiping communities – we find what we have missed. There are experiences drowned out by the chatter, just as stars are drowned out by the green light spilled by streetlamps. Those experiences – away from the online world, perhaps that’s what you should really be dwelling on, recording, and sharing. All the noise in the echo chamber of social media makes it harder to know that – but it is what we most need to hear.

My friend Constantine von Hoffman was out walking with his wife and son, when his wife stopped, took a picture of a tree and then announced she had uploaded it to Facebook. His son – his teen-aged son, said, “Remember when we just looked at leaves?” Has your archiving and curating gotten in the way of communing?

While traveling to Death Valley it occurred to me that the origin of the great religions are disproportionately in deserts. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed all began their preaching after long stays surrounded by nothing except endless sand and endless sky. In the desert it is starkly clear if one is alone, or with another – and sometime that other isn’t in the mere physical realm. The environment forces a fundamental question: Am I isolated on the world or part of a larger interaction?

This year there’s been a broad discussion on whether social media makes us stupid, or ADHD. I pay no attention to it. Hasn’t this, or something similar, has been said of every emerging media? Some of the ancient Greeks complained that the written word would destroy people’s ability to remember things. TV was a “vast commercial wasteland.” Actually each new media changes us, how we think and how we see. I’d argue that social media can make us creators and greater agents in the world. Living in the city I took to carrying a camera and nailing one fantastic shot a day. It changed how I saw my urban world, perhaps social media does too.

This much I can say for certain about social media: It certainly makes it hard to be alone for an extended time. One morning at 3 AM I posted, “For the record this is when I write UsefulArts.” Moments later the response came from my friend Louis, “For the record this is when I read it”

As a parent I struggle with when to share this connection to the digital world, and when to buffer it so my kids can grow in other ways. And I wonder how my behavior has shaped them. They’ve rarely, if ever, been ignored in favor of a signal from the hive. However, as I write this, I know they’ve waited while I signaled and interacted with friends here.

The wired, global city has banished the night and abolished the dusk. We are free of so much uncertainty and isolation. Mobile media dispels silence. You can find out things almost immediately if you want to and you never have to be alone if you don’t. But have we also banished the poetry of revelation? How do you go on a quest for something when it seems everything can be found?

Through mobile technology social media is now the omni present other, a perpetual connection to machinations of the digital hive. But as we look at it, our eyes grow comfortable with the view, and the heavens are obscured by pixels. Didn’t our eyes look up in to the sky or across the vast ocean and find more than just data?

To grasp again the moral sense of our being, we need to step away from the crowd and recover the gift of the night. Solitude. When we stop speaking we begin to hear; in the darkness we can be immersed by the life beyond the digital media monad.

This season, solitude – something freely available to everyone – seems rarer than all our hand-held technical marvels made of the rarest, most exotic materials on earth. A contrarian voice inside me, maybe a gift from my Cherokee ancestors, says it is best to live in a world of connected dusk, balanced between the individuated light of technology and artifice (techne), and the healing poetry of darkness and mysteries (poiesis).

This solstice, my friend, walk away from the light, and remember the world beyond it.

All the best,
Dave Wieneke

Back in the 1970’s Dustin Hoffman showed up to film his famous “Is it Safe?” scene in Marathon Man with Lawrence Olivier. To prepare for the scene, Hoffman had deprived himself of sleep for several days to help him seem more tortured. Famously, Sir. Lawrence suggested that Hoffman should “try acting, its easier.” (He was Olivier, so he could get away with things like that.)

The Best SEO Helps People
Over the years I’ve run search for a number of firms, and even found myself briefly using it to aid a hostage contact team to influence a colleague’s captors. In that case we relied on every trick and technique available, but obviously our actions were constantly squared to a bigger goal. Most people’s goals hopefully aren’t so literally life-and-death, they’re more likely to be focused on acquiring a certain type of audience which is motivated to do business with the firm. But too often SEO focuses its enthusiasm on a metric or rank, and it gets cut off from delivering the right visitors.

There’s lots of “good” SEO. You may remember that I recently wrote about a domain strategy I used to triple organic visits to a site. SEO insights set-up a small change which delivered disproportionate and persistant results. I like smart SEO, and by that I mean search engine optimization which gets you the right audience when they’re ready to buy.

The Worst SEO Lives in a Hype Vacuum
Old school marketing was all about “NEW AND IMPROVED!!!,” “10% BETTER!” and other such usually pointless claims that were frequently made to draw attention to a product that was mediocre at best. That’s what trying to rig SEO is: Making noise because you don’t have any substance.

We get awareness, engagement, and reputations based on the quality of our content. Unless you are only trying to get a lot of very brief visits then SEO by itself is useless.

I laugh when SEO scammers try to counterfeit the appearance of having good content by renting links, or creating spam inlinks through social networks, or astroturfing comments. It doesn’t work. People come by, see the crap and they’re gone. And when Google recognizes this, their investment of effort is washed away.

SEO riggers are doing you a favor. The more garbage they put out there, the more eager people will be to find the genuine, informative article. Making SEO metrics ends in themselves is as ridiculous a position as those who over focus social media metrics. One can rack-up huge counts of “Friends” or “Followers” that mean nothing to their business.

But too often, firms buy in on SEO fads, which are nothing more than an arbitrage of taking lots of marginally useful actions which have no value other than to influence Google.

While we can see that folly in social media, too often firms miss this in SEO. They start to manufacture metrics they know have little meaning, but may make that make their content appear to be more popular relevant or prolific just for search.

If this sounds familiar, it It may be time to tell your SEO ninja, guru or rockstar (or their disciple in management) to “Try marketing, its useful to the business”.

I’m not sure who’s an expert about social media. But I’ve figured out a few tips to steer clear of stupidity.

1. Shun Gurus, Ninjas, Rockstars
They should be translated as follows:

• Guru = “Windbag”
• Ninja = “Novice”
• Rockstar = “Marginally competent”

How did ninja – an elite assassin and/or practitioner of ninjitsu – come to mean “someone who is good at social media”? In this context, shouldn’t a ninja be someone who is good at destroying reputations?

A friend of mine got a call from her daughter’s kindergarten, claiming the girl had been lying. Seems when they ask the kids in the class what their dads do for a living, the daughter says, “He’s a ninja.”

Long pause from mom on the phone. Then mom says, “Well, what do you call someone who teaches ninjitsu?” (And unless that’s what you do, best to stop it now before you meet a real ninja.)

2. List-Based Headlines Announce Weak Content
Y’know, like “iPads, Facebook, Pro Wrestling and You.” Or “Three Tips Anyone Can Use to Muck up a Headline.” It’s a sure indicator that the author doesn’t have anything new to add to the topic or even a coherent idea.  I stopped reading these (and writing them) cold turkey, and life has only gotten better.

List headlines may good for SEO. But since people make all purchasing calls I’m part of, it’s a no-brainer to default to writing for the humans who pay the bills, rather than the search algorithm that’s trying to  ignore over-optimized drivel.

3. Follow Your Own Path
Beware of any blog written according to the Problogger/Copyblogger formula for success. Jason Cohen has a great post at his blog A Smart Bear explaining what this formula is and why he’d rather get a root canal than follow it. This formula is perfect for people who have nothing to say. The only reasons for writing like this are because you’re lazy or you think your readers lack a clue.

4. Don’t Study “Authenticity”
If you want to be authentic then just say what you have to say and stop wondering if you sound authentic. If you’re worried about sounding authentic – whatever that means – then you have a bigger problem: Figuring out who the hell you are. An authentic person just is. Maybe your authentic voice is that of a stuffed shirt. That’s OK, as long as it’s a stuffed shirt with real information. If you don’t have the information then, again, SHUT UP.

5. Avoid the List’s End
Be extra-skeptical of any post that has five, seven, 10, or 15 items. Real life doesn’t work that way, even if marketing wants it to. Generally, a list like that has been padded out. And that last item will be real short and self-evident. Like this one. ;>

It was an honor to join Perry Hewitt, Philip Crampe, David Bierut, and Jeff Cram, at yesterday’s FutureM discussion about the Future of Digital Strategy. Thanks, to everyone who participated. We had a super engaged audience.

I am so impressed by the quality of this impromptu video shot by Dazza Greenwood. The full two hour session is here, its clear, there are great close-ups and fades. Wow! Thanks, DG!

Next time, let’s jack this guy in to the soundboard.