Busy reading day today in the halls of the Marketing Hub. To make things easy, let's just split up the posts by topic:

Co-Creation

Chris Carfi (who was at the Business Marketing Association Conference in San Jose today) points us to a terrific presentation made by Justin Crotty, VP of Channel Marketing for Ingram Micro. The skinny:

"At first, Ingram was going to do an ad campaign around "partnering" with their customers. They pulled some prospective ads together.

The ads were abysmal. Stock shots of the attractive business people of all genders and races, smiling cheerfully at the camera. Ingram knew their customers would (rightfully) call B.S. on them. So, the drawing board was revisited.

In other words, it's not that the strategy is aimed at the customers...the customers ::are:: the strategy

Crotty brought up a number of very salient points. In particular, he shared another insight that was spot-on, especially in a commodity business. "If you can get customers to help you develop your go-to-market strategy, the you don't need to sell to them anymore." Think about that for a second."

...and angels sang.

"A couple of other key quotes from the presentation:

* "Relationships create emotional barriers to exit."
* "Supermarket card programs reward card ownership...they don't reward loyalty." (For example, how many times has the checker at the local supermarket swiped a "dummy" card for you?)
* "Every business is a small business...your word is everything."

Good stuff. Whereas a number of the other presentations have been a little too close to "marketing business as usual" throughout the day, Crotty's presentation was an unexpected oasis of clue."

(I like that last part.)

Also be sure to read Jennifer Rice's piece on co-creation. Here's a taste:

"Companies who view customers as "slimy masses" can never be successful in the long run; it is those customers who make corporate existence possible. Customers smell arrogance like a dog smells fear. Microsoft is a great example of a company who became incredibly successful based on following their own vision... which ultimately resulted in customer resentment. Now with over 1200 Microsoft employees participating in the blogosphere, the company has actively, publicly entered into dialogues with customers. Robert Scoble gets a ton of suggestions from customers and passes them on to the right folks internally. Microsoft is beginning to co-create.

Does this mean we should always do what customers say? Of course not. But we should always be listening to them to ensure that our products and services maintain relevance in today's rapidly changing environment. We design products and services that people will buy... and we find out what people will buy by listening, observing and participating in dialogues."

By the way, Jennifer's point (which you'll have to go look for in the post) about co-creation in Apple is accurate.

Advertising & Branding

Check out Grant McCracken's spot-on review of CP+B's new VW ad, and my bit on Advertising & Skepticism.

WOMM

Shel Holtz beat me to it: Boldmouth and Osterman Research just released the results of their 'Perceptions, Practices and Ethics in Word-of-Mouth Marketing' study today. According to Todd Tweedy (Boldmouth's CEO), "the goal of the study is to provide organizations interested in, or even intimidated by, word-of-mouth campaigns with data and guidance designed to help them integrate this (exciting) strategy into their marketing and media plans."

According to Boldmouth's press release, here are the most telling pieces of data to emerge from the study:

- 34.7% of study participants stated that they plan to use WOM marketing, which could expand the industry to the realm of more than one billion dollars in activity.

- Nearly 90% (89.9%) of all study participants noted that WOM was ethical.

- Face-to-face communications received the highest WOM effectiveness rating (86% or “extremely effective”), however, when online WOM marketing strategies are combined, this aggregated category of responses under the heading of Online WOM Marketing Strategies suggest as high, if not a higher, cumulative effectiveness rating than face-to-face communications.

- Organizations appear to have no misconceptions about what can trigger WOM: Excellent customer service (82.2%) and/or satisfied customers (53.3%). Survey data support the conclusion that most marketers grasp as the chief principle behind successful WOM marketing: namely, that satisfied customers or advocates represent their most important source of referrals.

- A wide-scale belief across organizations that buzz from a WOM campaign happens quickly (44.9%) and campaigns are most effective if the buzz is created quickly (48.7%). Managing expectations is likely to be a major hurdle for marketing professionals when 45.4% of respondents anticipated seeing results within a few weeks or less.

- 51.2% of organizations are unable to track performance and 20.9% of organizations lack in-house talent to properly manage WOM campaigns.

The results of the study can be downloaded here.

PR

Mike Manuel points us to a very interesting podcast about open source public relations. Definitely worth the listen.

Creativity

Check out Chris Carfi's post on the new meaning of the word "creative."

Okay, that ought to do it for today. Have a great Friday, everyone. (And remember that Mothers' Day is this weekend!)

Hi everyone. My laptop problems are finally resolved, which means I can finally post again. (It's a good thing.) Today, we're going to take a quick look at online communities and some of the new tools and trends that are emerging from the digitalization of our hardwired pack behavior. (I would love for Grant McCracken to give us his take on all of this.)

Lois Kelly starts us off with a brief but telling study about communities (online or otherwise), and how our "social creature" nature allows our peers to affect our tastes and purchasing habits. The question, of course, is this:

"Are online customer communities an undervalued marketing approach?

A new research study released today by Communispace, “What Companies Gain from Listening: The Effect of Community Membership on Members’ Attitudes and Behavior in Relation to the Sponsoring Company,” found that:

* 82 percent of the surveyed community members said they were more likely to recommend a company’s products since joining its community.
* 76 percent felt more positively about the company.
* 75 percent felt more respect for the company.
* 63 percent said that membership had increased their trust of the company.
* 52 percent were more inclined to purchase products from the company.

Why do communities affect people so much? One reason may be that it provides a way for people to talk with a company and feel heard: 91 percent said they felt that their community allowed them to give candid feedback and suggestions to the company."

Mike Manuel also points us to a new peer-based reputation system called RapLeaf, which apparently just launched this weekend. Here's some of what Mike has to say about how it works, and why it is useful to us:

"The major search engines, like Yahoo and Google, are crawling and aggregating the bread crumbs of our digital selves, our digital reputations, making this info discoverable to anyone who seeks it, while the vertical search engines, like Technorati and Sphere, are taking it a step further by focusing on blog content and assigning authority and relevancy metrics to that.

To me, RapLeaf's service seems like the next logical step in this progression, where real-world feedback and offline sentiment can now be combined with algorithmic metrics and online measures to capture and represent one's reputation. I think the message this sends to PR practitioners, particularly consultants and agency folks, is the obvious one: that you're the keeper of your reputation, manage it diligently, or face the consequences. Write a bad press release, the world can see it. Send a bad pitch, the world can see it. And if you act unethically, the world can now see that too."

Read his whole post here. It's well worth it.

Along the same lines, check out how network-based models of communications are changing the world of poltics here. (Thanks to Chris Carfi's heads-up, and John Lebowski & Zach Rosen's insights.)

The table that illustrates the differences between traditional and network-based models is as brilliant as it is simple. Definitely spend a few minutes checking it out, as it is very similar to how network-based models affect consumer behavior as well.

That's it for today. Have a great Wednesday, everyone. :)