Click here to view the embedded video.

More importantly, what might they do with it?

An insurance company called RSA in the Middle East has created an interactive print ad that enables readers to ask for a quote, no mobile phone or other consumer device required, though the quote comes back via the reader's mobile phone (which obviously provides the brand with contact information it could use for follow up communications).

As PSFK points out, the ad, developed by OgilvyOne, is targeted to prospective customers in Dubai, and supports the brand's "Easy as Ever" promise.

Sure it's early days in this kind of thing - a first step toward some of the interactive print concepts we saw in 'Minority Report' a decade ago - and it will need to be enhanced before it gets truly compelling.

But here, the medium is quite literally the message - an innovative "wow" moment that directly delivers on the brand's positioning.

Read more here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There was that 3D projection mapping experience on an LA Hotel a while back. And in October, the brand brought a print ad to life with the help of a handy iPad.

This time out, Lexus is going a bit simpler, keying into QR codes - the scanning of which reveals models kinda-sorta hidden in SI print ads for the new IS.

Still, the pursuit of perfection could have added a little more punch to the reveals than just having the models strut toward us. Integrating with the car in some fashion - or really just doing anything a little more interesting - would have been a better pay off for going to all the trouble.

Okay, it's still pretty cool. And it's apparently just the opening act. According to ADWEEK, the Lexus IS is also included in Sport Illustrated's first-ever 3D projection mapping experience on the facade at Caesar's Las Vegas.

Get the full scoop here.

Networking

Since I’m a networking junkie, I figured I’d start with what I know. Networking generated the greatest overall value for me at SXSW. What benefitted me the most, and I recommend this to any attendee, is to leverage any local relationships you have, in terms of getting a sense of what events and sessions matter, and it can help in terms of transportation. Secondarily, be sure to plan in advance to meet up with folks you know from your network or city, as it’s much easier, fun and effective to travel in packs.

I attended a variety of parties and venues, some better than others. I’m a big fan of Driskill Hotel, a classic venue and popular hangout. We hit up a Bing party Friday night, complete with hosted bar and food, swag and a decent vibe. We moved on to other local venues lacking sponsors, but packed with people. Saturday, I visited Google Village an impressive compilation of bars, all of which offered free drinks, snacks, bicycle blenders and swag, as well as demonstrations and presentations.

Sunday morning I attended a brunch and panel Google hosted, including a variety of agency, VC and entrepreneurs that captured the essence of why people attend SXSW, including what’s hot (social discovery) and what’s not (Bing Lounge). On Saturday, I attended a Klout house party, complete with food, beverage and a social-powered jukebox: Roqbot. Saturday evening Microsoft & Frog co-sponsored the official SXSW party, which was DIY-themed (build your own LED lights, mini-robots & play life-sized pong). Unfortunately, it was a bit too crowded, so I moved on.

Sunday evening, I attended the SOBCon mixer at Dogwood, which was one of the best parties: great people and a good vibe. In fact, it was so good, I missed the Urban Airship & Mashable parties, which was unfortunate, but a smart investment in terms of meeting great folks. Most nights end at The W, and this was no exception.

Educational Sessions

While I had roughly 2.5 days to attend sessions (and paid $650 for the honor) I only attended 4 (not including the Google Village panel off-campus. The first session I saw, which I was greatly looking forward to attend, was Rainn Wilson of The Office and SoulPancake. It was slightly disappointing, as he was unfamiliar with PowerPoint, rambled a bit, but saved the day by smashing guitars with a lucky audience member.

My next session was Ebay to VC, where the theme was social discovery, (Highlight, Circle, Glancee) and what makes a good investment. The speaker, Jeff Jordan, was solid, but the host was not. The third session I attended was intriguing, but not actionable: Privacy & Neuro marketing. The presenters and audience discussed the conflict between privacy and marketing insights: what is a fair exchange of value between people and marketers (convenience vs. security)? The last but most inspirational session I attended was Internet legend Jaron Lanier, discussing how social media has improved or worsened our lives. He challenged us as consumers and content creators to get paid for the value we create on networks like Facebook (we are the product).

Marketing

My biggest takeaway from SXSW 2012 was definitely that corporations have taken notice of the marketing potential of the weeklong event. That’s potentially bad news for SXSW purists, who’ve likened 2012 to the jumping of the shark by Fonzie. True or not, it was apparent many companies bet big on making a splash at SXSW Interactive in 2012. One of the best sources of news for SXSW was Mashable Buzz, which managed to turn out solid recaps and timely updates. They even made the news themselves during the event, with a rumored $200M buyout.

The big winners at SXSW in terms of buzz, had to be the Homeless wi-fi and Nike, who made news with its venue, parties, Nike+ and Fuelband API during the event. In terms of SWAG, FILTER Talent brought it’s a game with LED light sabers handed out at various parties. Additional kudos go out to the companies that sponsored value-added (albeit somewhat risky) giveaways like ponchos, umbrellas and scarves in a city that ended up being colder and wetter than anticipated by many visitors. By Monday, the sun returned, and with it, sunglasses and sunscreen SWAG.

One of the smartest (yet under-reported) viral marketing campaigns was Catch a Chevy, which is exactly what it sounds like: get free rides care of 45 Chevys. The cars were skinned and branded, but it was dumb luck if you managed to hitch a ride anywhere outside of the convention center grounds, as there was no hashtag or other easy way to contact the drivers. Regardless, it did generate buzz and goodwill from weather-weary walkers. As a foodie, I appreciated the free food carts provided by brands like SquareSpace and The Today Show.

Last but not least, shout out to Google for their significant and strategic presence, in the form of Google Village. It was a great place to get beverages, snacks, swag, phone recharge and even a product demo or two. As far was what didn’t work, beyond distributed venue locations, lines, crowds and general mayhem, I thought the #FAIL sign went to free t-shirts in general (too many of them). I also noticed a trend of brands (like Klout & Google) expecting you to write a personalized message on the t-shirts.

Technology and Company Launches

More a marketer than technologist, I didn’t pay as much attention to the product and company launches at SXSW as others. That said, a few apps did bubble to the surface during my time at SXSW. The first was one of many social discovery apps: Highlight. The social discovery category generated a good deal of buzz, with Highlight leading the pack. Additionally, I was pleased to see one of Formic Media’s clients, Tixie, debut with its digital/mobile concert ticket giveaway platform. I also checked out Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture, AllThis, which is essentially a marketplace for exchanging time with others who have desired expertise. Lastly, I was impressed with, Roqbot, which debuted last year, yet I was impressed with the socially-powered jukebox platform at the Klout party.

Overall, SXSW Interactive 2012 was informative, entertaining and inspiring, but mostly via serendipitous moments, vs. the planned and engineered events. Now that I have a better feel for the event and the city, I will have a game plan in place for next year. If you plan to attend SXSW 2013, I suggest formulating your own plan (and making reservations) as soon as possible.

That’s why many people in the advertising and marketing industries have to be reminded that print, as in hard-copy newspapers and magazines, was the first interactive medium, and that’s why it’s still a powerful and effective part of any media mix.

Print is also the most sensory medium. Only print can activate each of the five senses and usually more than one of them at a time: Think scented perfume ads, varied paper textures, and embedded sound devices.

Some ads have a real and practical use in and of themselves. For example, back in 1988, several years before the words “internet” and “web” entered the global lexicon,  Spin magazine caused an uproar when, as part of a public-service effort to combat AIDS, each copy of the November issue contained a free condom (donated by Trojan).

Talk about useful, sensory, interactive, and memorable advertising. We don’t need to count the ways.

And as recently as September 2010, a print campaign in Entertainment Weekly touted the remade series Hawaii Five-0 by playing the show’s iconic theme song when the two-page spread was opened.

It’s tempting to wonder if print’s visceral appeal is responsible for the boost in print magazine pages this year. Don’t rub your eyes. You read it right. Magazine ad pages have grown four consecutive quarters, beginning in Q2 2010 through Q1 2011, when they were up almost three percent compared to Q1 2010, according to the latest data from the MPA—The Association of Magazine Media.

I’m pretty sure there’s an additional reason—the web. Believe it or not, print is an integral component of any web-based campaign, and the web is also helping print advertising to evolve.

Print is a strong driver of online behavior by whetting the reader’s appetite for a complementary web experience. Have you noticed that over the past several years, almost all print ads carry some URL or digital code? A lot of the new web-based mobile technologies, such as QR codes, have forced media planners (and consumers) to give print a closer, more appraising look.

Print ads become even more engaging if they are also tied to a text-messaging campaign, because it is the most effective means of accessing short-code messages on a mobile phone. The process of consumer engagement doesn’t start on the mobile device; it has to start from a print ad. So integration between print and digital is key. Additionally, there’s no fee for a QR code because it’s part of the creative execution of the print ad. What needs to be built out is the mobile site.

Short code in print ads has also helped big-brand marketers (think McDonald’s and BMW) to build customer databases.  Consider that the biggest boost in magazine print pages this year came from the automotive market, which bought 1,692 pages in 2010, but bumped it up to 2,134 this year – a jump of 26 percent, according to the MPA.

Additionally, the Publishers Information Bureau reports that magazine ad revenue and pages increased in seven of 12 major advertising categories during the first quarter of 2011: Toiletries and cosmetics; OTC drug remedies; apparel and accessories; media and advertising; automotive, financial, insurance, real estate and technology.

The next time you find yourself asking if media planners and buyers should continue to include print in their media-mix modeling, remember my retort: Absolutely.

Magazines remain a welcomed and effective advertising medium. People still engage with print even in a young demographic. Consumers enjoy the tactile, personal relationships they have with their favorite magazines. And not everyone has the disposable income or desire for an e-reader, which you can’t use to cover your head in the rain.

Deloitte’s recent “State of the Media Democracy” Survey documented America’s continuing unbroken love affair with TV. Seventy-one percent of respondents said watching TV was their favorite thing. Eighty-six percent TV ads have the most impact on their buying decisions. Compare this to 47% who said online had the greatest influence; roughly half as much.

And yet nearly three-quarters split their time and attention even when parked in front of a screen. Forty-two percent are online, another 29 percent are on mobile devices and 26 percent are IMing or texting. With all this activity, TV watching feels like a background activity so it’s hard to imagine how much branding or ad copy is being received or actually absorbed or how memorable or influential those ads really are.

But just when you doubt it, think about the growing phenomenon of watching TV and simultaneously tweeting, commenting, reviewing or responding in real time. Think about the Oscars, the SuperBowl, the NCAA Basketball Tournament or the Grammys as occasions for split attention and all three screens operating at the same time focused on the same content engaging overlapping yet different sets of consumers.

This creates a much richer, more connected and more engaging experience than just staring or screaming at the television.  Some brands have begun to exploit this new behavior by mounting successful cross-channel promotions. There’s a huge share-of-mind media roadblock opportunity lurking here somewhere.

When you consider that more than 80 percent of Americans currently use a device that connects them to the web and a similar scale exists for the use of mobile phones, you get the picture of an ADD universe of consumers who can be concentrated or fragmented based on content, attitude and timing. Who said mass audiences are dead? You just have to corral them.

But when you do, sort them by what they do not by who they are.  Here the TV gang seems to have learned a lesson from digital marketers. According to new research spearheaded by CBS’ Research guru Dave Poltrack age and sex don’t matter when it comes to TV ad effectiveness. And my hunch is the same holds true online.

As a the result of a massive study of Nielsen and Catalina data, Dave came out squarely against the reigning conventional media wisdom by concluding, “There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign… reliance on the 18 to 49 demographic is hazardous to all media and marketers partly because it doesn’t strongly correlate with purchases.”

To some this feels like a defensive play by broadcasters eager to prorect and preserve their lion’s share of ad dollars. To others this signals a shift in consumer behavior that integrates rather than edits media choices. Remember disruptive new technology has not actually killed off any traditional media.  New and old exist side by side interconnected in ways we are just beginning to understand.

BlueLink

Hyundai and Toyota are working to improve and expand upon driver navigation systems, introducing advanced telematics platforms to the dashboards of a few of the newest car models. Hyundai's BlueLink and Toyota's Entune systems offer nifty features such as voice-to-text service, allowing drivers to respond to texts with voice commands. Entune will permit drivers to control music, make dinner reservations through OpenTable, search the internet via Bing, and buy theater tickets on MovieTickets.com through an advanced voice recognition system. BlueLink provides over 30 useful features including point-of-interest searches such as nearby gas stations and restaurant recommendations. Drivers will be able to personalize their BlueLink services on Hyundai's website and connect to their mobile devices. According to a Hyundai representative I spoke to at CES, BlueLink is powered by Bing and Navteq, providing a powerful new way for marketers to reach drivers.

BlueLink console

Click here to view the embedded video.

Instead, I wanted to start you off with some things that are sure to recharge your creative thinking. I plan to show you things that might amuse, inspire, upset, annoy, confuse, encourage, frustrate, and all of these at once. While I typically write about healthcare related topics, this post is for every marketer out there. There are quite a few healthcare examples included (I can't help it), but the vast majority have nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.

What you aren't going to get here is a list of things to do. I'm not going to show you a bunch of ideas to copy. You're going to have to work a bit to figure out the applicability to your industry.   In the end, I'm sharing many of these to simply expand your thinking and force you to look at things a bit differently. You'll also probably come across a few resources that might just make your job simpler in 2010. You may have seen some of these before, but hopefully, they still make an impact. I've tried to loosely bunch things together into "topics." It sort of worked, so allow me a little poetic license.
 
14 Things That Will Inspire Your Digital Marketing in 2010  

Simplicity  

• Been in a drugstore aisle lately? Did you feel slightly overwhelmed with the choices? You walked into the store with an aliment and wanted a solution. Maybe your allergies were acting up. Where's the allergy section? Which of the thousand products do you need? The online buying options on sites like Drugstore.com can be equally overwhelming and frustrating. Enter Help Remedies (their homepage below)...

They have a handful of products (you'll notice that some are duplicates). There are no brand names. Rather, each product is named based on the aliment it treats. Each treatment uses common, generic medications (loratadine [aka: Claritin] for allergies, for example) in simple packaging at a fixed ($4) price.

Make it simple for people to find what they need to fix their problem. Nothing more, nothing less.

• Sometimes we really over-think things. In our efforts to make things more simple, we have the opposite effect. The more complex idea, the less likely you are execute it successfully. At the same time, the complex execution of your complex idea is more likely to leave your consumers confused and frustrated.

For Windows users out there, you probably hate that little strip at the bottom of your monitor--"The Taskbar"

Did you ever notice that you can't move around the programs in that taskbar? I have and it annoyed me to no end. But Microsoft allowed no way to do this in Windows XP. Rather than a massively complex program or huge upgrade to Windows, someone (not a Microsoft employee) decided to simply write a tiny little script that makes those programs movable. Meet Taskbar Shuffle. It's a tiny 640k-sized "program" that fixes something that Microsoft hasn't. Sometimes a massive project or update isn't necessary when you need a simple solution.

Technology  

• What's the "proper way" to use YouTube? You post a video and direct people to it, right? Maybe you embed the video in your site and you sit back and hope that people see it. Well, that's one way to use it, but that might not be the most engaging for your customers. How about looking at YouTube a bit differently?

Did you know you could do this with YouTube? I'll bet you didn't and I'll further bet that you probably watched the second video in the series and the third (and probably more). It's an engaging use of the technology. Try not to be confined by how you think about the technology. Instead, investigate what's possible and see if it's applicable to what you're trying to accomplish.

Speaking of rethinking YouTube, why not put your entire website on YouTube? Not all of your videos, your entire site. What's that you say? You don't want to pay the outrageous "partnership" fees in order to have your own page. No problem. That's not what I'm even talking about. I mean putting your entire site into a video. Think there's no way to do it? Tell that to the folks at Boone-Oakley. They didn't get that memo.

Make technology your friend. How? You've got to invest some time in learning it for yourself. That means more than just reading a blog post about it. It means using it. Do you think the Boone-Oakley people used YouTube for the first time while making this video (er, website)? No. They likely use it all the time and figured out some interesting things you can do with the technology and they put it all together.

• Blogging is really hard, right? Just the set-up alone is enough to deter most people. Then the thought of using some complex platform and hosting and editing and getting the graphics just right (and on and on) is enough to ensure that there aren't too many regular bloggers out there. I've seen companies send hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up their blog only to watch them do one or two posts and give up. Blogging takes time to write posts and think of interesting topics, but it shouldn't take time to set up or actually use. Meet Posterous. If you can use email, you've got a blog. Here's how complex it is to have a Posterous blog:

See for yourself. Right now (I'll wait), send an email to post@posterous.com. Attach a picture if you'd like or an MP3. Add a little text and see what happens.

Congratulations, you're a blogger.

Engagement  

• Do you have a lot of boring data lying around? You've probably got stacks of binders filled with it and an entire section of your hard drive dedicated to spreadsheets. Do you really use any of this data? Did any of it really change the way people do things where you work? Did any of it help serve your customers better? What I've found from a lot of data is that it's unactionable (if that's a word). You can't do anything based on the findings. That's one problem. But let's assume your data is actionable. The next step is to explain it to everyone else at your company. That's not easy. Data is boring (sorry, analytics friends). However, the presentation of that data doesn't need to be.

After watching this, do you promise to never again show a PowerPoint slide with a spreadsheet embedded within it, and then say, "You can't read this, but..."

Good.

• Tired of car commercials? I am...have been for years. So, I'm glad to see that they're using my money (via government bailouts) to make even more. They're worse than ever of course, but only slightly. So, do you think I can get you to watch a five minute commercial for a car? No? I accept your challenge. Check this out from Volkswagon of Brazil for the Eos and come back (warning: make sure your connected to a solid broadband connection...you'll need it).

So, how much did you watch? You've got to give them credit for "forcing" you to pay attention throughout in an entertaining and challenging way. How are you encouraging people to watch your content all the way through? Is it ever good enough that they should watch it all the way through? [Thanks to Adverblog for the heads up on this one.]

Creatitivy  

• By now just about everyone has seen this next video. If you're a digital marketing and you haven't, you've got a lot of catching up to do. So, for those who have seen it, my apologies, but watch it again. It's that good.

Instead of spending millions on TV and print advertising, in 2006, Dove took a different approach. It created "Evolution" (credit to our sister agency Ogilvy Toronto). It was a "simple" video all to support a campaign that would later be called "The Campaign for Real Beauty." This concept was borne out of research the agency did that showed that 50% of women say that their body "disgusts them." 50%. "Disgusts them." Clearly, there was an opportunity to change that. So, with little hype (and no mass media buying), "Evolution" was launched.

If that doesn't stop you for a minute, I'm not sure what will. That video, thanks to a massive viral spread, has been seen more than 500 million times. How much would it cost you for 500 million impressions? How about 500 million impressions on people who WANTED to see your commercial? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000? Nope. Try $50,000. That's how much "Evolution" cost to create. Sure, not everything is "Evolution," but you probably don't need 500 million views of your video. However, you probably want more than the few hundred or few thousand your videos have now.

That's your inspiration. That's the best of the best. If you intend to create a video that people will watch and spread to others, this is your guide. Watch your video and then watch "Evolution." Close? If not, keep working.

• If you read my blog regularly, I know you've seen this next one, but I'm going to show it to you again. Everything you do can be creative. That means that even the lowly banner ad can be creative. What's that you say? It's not possible to make a banner ad that people want to see and click? Try this one on for size:

Told you so. Even banner ads can be good. The ad for Pringles you just saw (and probably clicked a bunch of times) was the winner of the Gold Cyber Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival this past year. It's the highest honor you can get for digital work...and it was a banner ad. [Fair balance, my company, Bridge Worldwide, created that banner for Pringles (we are the digital agency of record for the brand).]

Yes, even your banner ads can show some creative thinking. "Can Hands" isn't appropriate for everyone, but the thinking that lead to it should be required for everyone.

• Coming up with the next big idea is hard. There's only a finite number of people at your company and the time they each have to spend on thinking is pretty limited. But, no one knows your market or products as well as you do, right? What about your customers? Don't they have a pretty good sense of where your brand should go? They certainly have a good idea of where they want it to go and that's worth paying attention to. Moreover, they might be the ones to give you the next big idea.

Both Dell (with Ideastorm) and Starbucks (with My Starbucks Idea) are two companies that have figured this out (along with many others). Dell has implemented 390 ideas that were submitted and voted for on the site. Starbucks has done more than 50. Cost to these companies? Nearly free. It's really just the time investment from a handful of employees. How much would you pay for the next big idea and to have an ongoing discussion with engaged customers about how to improve your brand?

Community  

• When I asked pharma marketers what they would do if there were no rules or regulations, their number one answer (as I predicted) was "create a brand community." Why? I don't know and I certainly don't agree with their idea.

I think there are two problems with this idea. First, who wants to join a community owned and maintained by a pharma company that's likely to be laced with brand selling messages? People don't trust "big pharma," so to think that they'll be willing to have open and honest conversations when they know that "big pharma" is watching and potentially controlling what they say is a ridiculous notion. Second, why join a pharma-owned community when there are so many that aren't controlled by pharma companies? Yet, this is one of the first things that pharma marketers want to do.

Okay, I get it. You want to do it regardless of what I say. Fine. Here's my only request: make your community better than what's out there. If it is better, then people might join up even if "big pharma" owns and controls it. If you're not going to make it better, it's a waste of time and resources. Need to know what your comparators are? No problem. If you want to see what true community engagement looks like, then look no further than Tu Diabetes. There are more than 12,000 members and it has an extremely engaged and active community. It's alive and you can tell right away that you're dealing with a group of people who are passionate about an issue. By the way...interested in knowing what they think about pharma or healthcare companies participating in their community? You should be. Check out this thread all about it. Think you'll be welcomed with open arms?

Need another example? How about Patients Like Me? If you're thinking about including tracking tools in your community, this is the gold standard (in healthcare at least). Not only are the tools used by a very large percentage of users (and used regularly), the data that people provide are used to help others determine the best treatment for their disease. Are you willing to provide this kind of help on your website even if it's help that might include telling someone to stop taking your treatment? If not, then your community doesn't stack up well.

Everything Else

I've got a few more that didn't quite fit into a neat category, so I'm lumping them together here as things you should know about (and likely don't). Some of these are simply to show you some really interesting technologies just for the "wow" factor and others are essential to being a good digital marketer. 

• If you haven't figured out how to incorporate Facebook Connect into what you're doing, then you're missing out. Of course, many marketers have figured it out and now use Facebook Connect. If you aren't familiar with it, then check out this primer from Facebook (be sure to check out all the tabs). Very simply: "With Facebook Connect, users can easily share your content and their actions with their friends on Facebook. As these friends discover your content, they click back to your site, engaging with your content and completing the viral loop." Think of it as a way to connectyour site with Facebook. People share you site's content with their friends on Facebook and these friends, hopefully, come check out your site for themselves.

And that's the way most marketers have used this very powerful tool. They simply make it easier to share links on Facebook and pray that others click on them. However, Facebook Connect is far more powerful than that. When you give permission for a site or application to use your data, they have access to everything your friends do. This means all your updates, your pictures, your information (job, interestes, etc.) to name a few. What you do with this information can be pretty amazing. Think completely customized experiences.

If you want a great example of how you can use Facebook Connect to create a VERY memorable experience, then you should try the Discovery Channel's Frenzied Watersused to publicize its "Shark Week" or Activision's The Prototype Experience to promote its platform game, Prototype. CAUTION: you might not like the ending of the former and you might be a tad bothered by the latter if you're not a fan of first-person shooter games and the storylines behind them. If you want to see some other, more tame, examples, check out this post from Mashable.

• All right, here's a little technology "wow-factor" you can share with your friends. Try out Photosynth from Microsoft. Try clicking on different parts of the image, zooming in and out, and scrolling around. Essentially, Photosynth takes hundreds of photos of a single place and stitches them all together so that you can view the place from multiple angles almost as a 3D experience. Can you come up with a way to use this technology for your next promotion? Check it out here. (I would embed it, but the blogging platform at iMedia is somewhat unusable.)

• Slightly less cool, but more likely to impact you day-to-day is Get Satisfaction. What is it? In their words: "Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. Tens of thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate."

In my words, it's a place where people are complaining about your brand and looking to each other to solve the problems they are having. Well, that's what's going on if you're not there. You could be there though. You could be officially representing your company or brand and answering questions as they come in and cutting down on unchecked, Internet-based, brand firestorms. Is anyone talking about your brand and looking for answers right now? Go to the site and check it out (use the search box in the upper right).

If they are talking about your company or products, I'd recommend getting officially involved. To me, this service started as a tool for small, start-ups to help them manage customer service, while big companies relied on their call centers. But now, big companies are joining in because their customers are used to going to and using Get Satisfaction. Big companies like who? How about Nike and Microsoft for starters?

• And finally, to close this out, I thought a glimpse into the future was necessary. Here it is:

What is it? Here's the description from Popular Science's The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images (number 24): "A dead heart beats again, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the University of Minnesota. To rebuild and reanimate the organ, which was harvested from a rat, scientists first stripped the old heart cells away with a detergent typically found in shampoos. That left behind a collagen matrix—the protein fibers that hold groups of cells together and help give organs their overall shape—which they then reseeded with heart cells from a newborn rat. They attached the organ to electrodes and waited. Then it happened: The heart started to beat regularly."

Wow. If that doesn't inspire you to think that anything is possible, I'm not sure what will. Best of luck for an inspired 2010.

Jonathan Richman is the author of Dose of Digital, a blog about e-marketing in healthcare. He works at Bridge Worldwide as Director of Strategic Planning. You can follow him on Twitter (@jonmrich).  

That doesn't change when I'm at the office. Unfortunately, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new things and forget to look back. It's hard to be the best, though, if you don't remember to: "Create it. Measure it. Improve it."

If only we could tackle online creative like the Three Little Pigs. Yes, even this Harley-ridin' 40-something knows a nursery rhyme or two.

The first little pig had the right idea when he built that straw house: Construct a shelter that would keep him dry and provide him a little privacy.

The second pig took a different approach and tried to create a stable home made of sticks that looked edgy and different from anything the other pigs had ever seen.

And the third pig decided it would be worth it to spend a little extra cash to build a rock-solid, indestructible house of bricks.

Until the day that wolf came along, all of the pigs thought they had the perfect solution.

1.   Create it
It works the same for all of us. Client asks, we jump — sell a product, raise awareness, provide information, whatever. Like those fabled pigs, we've got options when it comes to how we do it:

• Just get it done. Keep it simple and be sure all your bases are covered. Make it easy for customers to see we want them to "just buy the damn thing."
• Apply a concept. Make the main idea your focus but take a little creative license to make it stand out in the sea of digital media.
• Blow 'em away. Take a chance on the big idea that gets customers to stop and take notice. It may take more time and money to bring it to life, but it'll pay off in the end.

2.   Measure it
Marketing is a profession, not an art show. Your work's got to be far more than just eye candy. It needs to be smart. It needs to be trackable. And you'd better know ahead of time what you're going to consider a win. In other words, how will success be measured: Opens? Clicks? Calls? Sales?

These numbers don't stifle your creativity, they strengthen it. And, as our pigs once again proved, there are tons of ways to meet your goals. Everyone should have an "in" with analytics. So I'd recommend the creative and analytics folks get to know each other. Maybe plan a BBQ. Nothing like some well-seasoned pork ribs to bring everyone together.

3.   Improve it
It's been measured and your numbers are in. But only a fool would leave it at that. You've got to learn from your results and, by all means, use them. Otherwise, you're back to spitting in the wind hoping it doesn't land on you.

Let's go back to those pigs.

As I recall, all three pigs built their houses at the same time. Their mindset? "Go with your gut!" If they had tested and used their results, here's what they may have learned:

• Straw won't cut it. It can't hold up to the competition.
• Sticks looked badass, but still can't stand the pressure.
• Bricks worked perfectly, but did the extra expense break the budget?

Who knows what they'd come up with next time around. Maybe infrared sensors or heavy artillery to keep that wolf from blowing hot air in the first place. Either way, you can be sure they'd do it up one better.

It doesn't matter what you call it — a mantra or New Year's resolution — "Create it. Measure it. Improve it." are words to live by. Make it part of your 2010 code. (Or I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down.)

This is part two of a series on relationship marketing. Please check out the first post,  7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing, and make sure you're not committing any of these before figuring out how to fix them. That post will also give you a bit more background on relationship marketing, but I'll include a brief overview here as well.

[PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on "The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma." It's the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.]

Here's our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath):

"Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication."

Ongoing: It's a rhythm of regular, expected communication.

Direct: It doesn't mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms.

Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI.

That last one is important: "fills a need." If you're not doing that, then you're probably just annoying your customers.

So, to ensure you're not doing this, I'm going to share with you what I call the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. This is your list of "what to do." Follow these seven rules and you'll be well on your way to a very successful program.

One note, some people refer to relationship marketing as CRM, or customer relationship marketing (or management). For the purposes of this post, I'm saying they are the same thing.

So, here's the list of what TO do:

7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing

1. Sharing, partnering, endorsing
2. Perfect pitch
3. Personalized and individualized
4. Keep it simple, stupid
5. Members only
6. Personal investment
7. It's not about you

1. Sharing, partnering, endorsing

If you are completely reliant on your own promotional efforts to increase enrollments in your program, then you're missing a giant opportunity. At a bare minimum, you should include social sharing tools that make it easy for people to share your offers with others and encourage them to join your program. Incentive strategies, where you pay current members something for each new member they enroll, fit in here as well. Beyond social sharing, if your program is good enough, you can look towards industry groups and, in the case of healthcare, patient advocacy groups to grow your enrollment. If your program is valuable enough to their members, these groups will help you and will be your most effective enrollment tool. In the case of healthcare, physicians can become recruiters too if you show them how your program both benefits their patients and helps them to more easily manage these patients.

2. Perfect pitch

(Image from The Brand Builder Blog)

In order to keep people engaged over time, you have to communicate with them regularly (but not too regularly) and about things they care about at that moment. This is simple to achieve if you're willing to do a little planning. Before building anything, plan out what you want to say and what channel you think is best to communicate it. From there figure out when it makes the most sense to communicate. For example, you probably should hold your stories about cold and flu until cold and flu season hits. Once you have these three pieces, then it's simply a matter of laying it all out on a timeline.

Doing this accomplishes three things. First, it ensures that you're covering your main points of communication and what your customers care about over a set time period. Second, it also serves as a commitment and motivation tool for you. Once you have it down in your timeline, you're far more likely to actually do the work to launch the piece on time. It makes it far more tangible. Finally, having a quality timeline will help you make budget decisions should you receive more funding or (more likely) have some cut. You'll be able to tell where you have additional capacity or where you can use some more.

3. Personalized and individualized

I've written about this before and spelled out what I think the difference is between these two terms (yes, there is a difference).

Personalization means adding some personally identifying information to your communications. This usually means putting someone's name on the top of an email or direct mail piece. It's remarkably simple to do with digital media and has become very simple (and cost effective) in print as well. Adding someone's name to an email, for example, is much better than sending an email with "Dear Person" or "Dear Cancer Person." I only joke because I have seen these before. I assume they were mistakes, but I saw them.

Individualization is something different. For our purposes, individualization means creating communications that are tailored for each and every individual person. The test to see if you're sending out individualized messages is simple: does someone read what you sent and think, "Wow. They wrote this just for me." If not, then it's not individualized. This too can be really simple and more and more companies are embracing it. Here's a great example that my colleague, Bob Gilbreath, wrote about on his Marketing with Meaning blog:

First, Delta included his name. Good. That's personalization. However, then they go on and apologize for sticking him in a middle seat on his last flight and offer him some miles to say sorry. Interesting point to note, Bob didn't ask for this or complain to Delta. They just did it. Delta knew the situation and sent an individualized response. Question: if Bob got this email and the 500 miles or another email that simply gave him 500 miles without the individualized touch, which would have more impact? Each results in the same value for him, 500 miles. But clearly the one that talks about his specific situation makes a lasting impression. So, you can't just give away stuff and expect that to be enough. You have to make the extra effort to make it meaningful.

If you invest the time and effort to know what your customers are doing and what will be meaningful to them, then your communications will become more and more relevant to them. As they pass over hundreds of other emails they receive, but can't remember why, yours will be the one that stands out.

4. Keep it simple, stupid

We marketers like to complicate stuff. One of these things I mentioned in the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. It was number 4: Make it hard. Basically, if you make your enrollment process really difficult or make it a hugely daunting task to get any sort of individualized information, people just aren't going to do it. So, you have to make it easy...simple, that is. Of course, our programs can be highly complex and necessitate a knowing a bunch of information in order to give good information back. That's all right.

If your program requires a complex or lengthy process to yield the best information in return, you can't just start with this. You need to start with a "light" version of your process to get people interested and engaged. Later on, you can add in something more complex once people are committed to your program and want to do even more with it.

For ConAgra Foods' program Start Making Choices, our company (Bridge Worldwide), created two different ways to get individualized information. The first consists of just five questions on a simple slider bar design:

If people wanted the most individualized information (likely after seeing the quality information they received from the "light" survey) and their personal Balanced Life Index (BLI), then they are presented with a 23 question, multiple choice, survey. However, instead of making this question after question of text (or worse, 23 pages with one question each), we created an engaging design in which people swiftly entered all the relevant information. They did this because the questions were simple, but also the design kept them clicking and onto the next question, which kept dropout rates at a very low level.

5. Members only

Everyone likes being part of an exclusive club. They like the special perks that come along with membership and they like the prestige that comes with being a member. They like knowing that they're getting something that everyone else can't get. That's just human nature. Do you belong to any clubs like this? Better question: do you wish you did?

Take Neiman Marcus' InCircle program. On the surface, it's basically a rewards program. Spend this much, we give you this much. However, because it's Neiman Marcus, they are also dealing with people who are members of a lot exclusive programs and for whom a $100 gift card isn't that meaningful. Neiman Marcus needs to provide them much more. So, when you get to the President's Circle (just spend $75,000 or more in a year), you get special offers that others don't such as exclusive off-hour shopping events.

Not every program is like InCircle, but the concept is the same. You need to reward your customers who are part of your programs lavishly and regularly. They are your best customers, the ones that spend the most, and who talk about your products to others. They're the most engaged, as evidenced by them joining your program in the first place. Keeping them your customer is an important priority. One note of caution, simply giving people incentives without changing their underlying attitude is one of the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing (number 5, Dollars don't change everything).

Giving gifts to people in the healthcare space is pretty much prohibited either by company or government policy in most countries, so this makes it a bit more challenging. You have to think beyond gifts and consider things like access. This could be access to industry experts like, say, the leading physician in lung cancer treatment. If your patients are fighting lung cancer, they want to hear what this person has to say. Limiting it to members provides a special reward to those who have given you something (their business and trust) and also makes it possible to do more. You can do more because instead of spending $5 on a hundred thousand people to give them some tiny gift, you can spend the same amount and conduct a series of powerful programs (and even travel to where patients are). That's just one example, but the point is clear. You can provide member benefits in any industry regardless of the specific regulations.

6. Personal investment

If people aren't personally invested in your program, it'll be a failure. Their investment is almost always their time (but can also be financial in the case of membership fees). Time is very valuable to people especially people who are fighting a disease. They don't have time to invest on every website about their disease. They have to focus on one or two for the long-term and everything else is likely to be ignored.

People must invest their own time in order to be engaged with your program over time . There is only one way to get people to invest their time: give them something of value in exchange for their time. This doesn't mean offering them rewards for coming back to your site or buying things. It means that your program should become more valuable to them for each minute they invest. A great example of this is Patients Like Me.

The more information you provide about your disease (including tracking your progress and compliance with treatments everyday), the more you'll learn about your disease. You'll be able to track your progress against "the norm" and receive information on how to improve your situation. If you're not willing to input this information up-front and over time, you won't get much out of the site. However, if you are willing to do this, you receive a hugely valuable item in return: information on how to improve your health.

7. It's not about you

This is a common sin committed by us marketers. I've talked about this before in the context of how to appropriately participate in social media. The same idea applies here. People inherently don't care about your brand. Actually, they don't care about your brand as much as you do. Because of this, creating a program that only features your brand is sure to be a failure. Instead, you need to balance your program with a mix of information about your brand and related information from which your customers are likely to get additional value.

P&G maintains one of the largest consumer databases in the world and is among the biggest users of relationship marketing. Our company works on Everyday Solutions, which is the central program for all of P&G's products. It's a single stop for brand offers and new product announcements, but there's much more. There is also relevant content that matches with what each consumer has either said is an area or interest or whose behavior (pages visited, coupon offers redeemed, etc.) indicates that they are likely interested. In other words, people come to the site (or open emails or direct mail) not just for product offers and discounts, but also for other information. Those who initially come for offers see that there's more to it than just a couple dollars off a certain purchase. This encourages them to return or to sign up for the program.

To be sure, the brands are prominently featured and are the focus of the program, but it's not just one brand message after another. Every marketer wants to get in every core message at each customer "touch," but that's not necessarily a winning long-term strategy. There will be time for your messages if you can show people that your program is more than just a commercial.

Those are the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. Follow these and your program will be head and shoulders above nearly everything else out there. In case you missed them, be sure to check out the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing so you know what to avoid.

If you'd like a POWERPoint version of this, you're in luck. You can download a copy of The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing right here. One request: if you do download it, how about sending out a tweet?  

Jonathan Richman is the author of Dose of Digital, a blog about e-marketing in healthcare. He works at Bridge Worldwide as Director of Strategic Planning. You can follow him on Twitter (@jonmrich).

For those of you who have heard me talk about my company, Bridge Worldwide, you know that I always say that we're a digital AND relationship marketing agency. We've always been the latter, going back to 1979 (and the former for almost that long). It's an important distinction to me. Digital agencies make a lot of cool stuff, but many lack the fundamental skills that are required to build lasting relationships with customers.  Of course, we can make cool stuff too (and win the biggest awards in the process), but we pride ourselves on being able to deliver the relationship marketing piece.

So, with that, I thought I'd share what I know and have learned about relationship marketing from working with some talented people over the past few years and from the experience we've gathered from managing programs that now have more than 30 million total members. I should pause for a minute and, of course, mention that we think relationship marketing is evolving to something better called Marketing with Meaning. However, the basics of what makes relationship marketing REALLY work is embedded into Marketing with Meaning.

PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on "The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma." It's the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.

To get started, relationship marketing isn't this:

Just because you ask someone's permission before bombarding them with ads, doesn't mean you're not still bombarding them (of course, no one is asked to"opt in" in Minority Report, where the clip above comes from). That's not real relationship marketing. Here's our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath):

"Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication."

Ongoing: It's a rhythm of regular, expected communication.

Direct: It doesn't mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms.

Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI.

That last one is important: "fills a need." If you're not doing that, then you're probably just annoying your customers.

So, to ensure you're not doing this, I'm going to share with you what I consider the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. If you're doing any of these, stop now. Seriously…now. In a later post, I'll share my 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing. That'll be the list of "what TO do."

One note, some people refer to relationship marketing as CRM, or customer relationship marketing (or management). For the purposes of this post, I'm saying they are the same thing.

So, here's the list of what NOT to do:

7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing

1. No enrollment
2. Program lapses
3. Loss of interest
4. Make it hard
5. Dollars don't solve everything
6. No customer ownership
7. All about the brand

1.  No enrollment

If you're metrics for your program look like this, well, you can imagine that you're program isn't likely to be a success. While having more enrollments in your program doesn't mean that you're program is better than one with less, low enrollment numbers (i.e., well below your target) does indicate a larger problem. This problem can be a number of things, but it usually points to a lack of commitment in the program by some function within the organization. Presumably, you set your targets based on solid estimates and extrapolations. Perhaps it was a certain percentage of people who visited your website. Well, if "corporate" pulls funding for all the traffic drivers to your website, then you aren't going to hit your target for enrollments either in this example. If you have a bunch of enrollments followed by a bunch of opt-outs, then your program just might be bad (or commit a number of the sins below).

Figure out why and fix it.

2. Program lapses

Nothing annoys me more than this one. I enroll in your program and one of two things happen. Either you send me a welcome email or direct mail right away and then I don't hear from you for months or you don't send me anything initially and three months later send me the first correspondence. If you're doing this, then don't even bother continuing. Put yourself in your customers' position. They probably get a lot of email that appears to be junk everyday. If an email for a program they signed up for three months ago and have long forgotten shows up, how do they react? . And that's your best case. Worst case, they've literally completely forgotten about signing up for this program and think that your message is unsolicited spam. They report that spam to, say, Google (via their Gmail account) and before you know it, Google thinks you're a spammer. Not good.

3. Loss of interest

This is somewhat related to number two above, but has an entire other component as well. If you never send me anything, I'm going to forget why I spent the time signing up in the first place. I've moved on. I probably signed up for your competitors' programs too and if one of them is taking care of me and I'm using their products too.

And to illustrate why it's so simple to lose interest in your program, I'd like to show you a random day from my Gmail inbox. I chose July 16 because right now I miss the summer. Here's what it looked like:

Almost all of the emails I got that day were for programs I have signed up for at some point. You'll also notice that I didn't open a single one of the emails. That's what I mean by "loss of interest." Why did I lose interest? Simple: if your offers and correspondence are always the same, people forget why they signed up in the first place. Something interested them. Something sparked a touch of excitement. That's long gone and they aren't even opening your emails anymore.

4. Make it hard

There's no better way to kill your program than to make the enrollment process a pain. Someone sent a screenshot to me of this form a while back (they can't recall where they found it, so if it's yours, speak up and I'll give you the credit).

It's a perfect example of what I like to call an "are you kidding me?" form (usually I put an expletive in there as well). An "are you kidding me?" form is one that a person takes one look at, says, "are you kidding me?" and clicks onto a different site. If your enrollment process makes someone say "are you kidding me?" then change it immediately. Keep in mind that you don't need to know everything about the person at the beginning. Think about it as though it's a first date. If you asked all the questions you ask on your "are you kidding me?" form, then you wouldn't have many second dates. Instead, get the basics now and later on collect more information. Remind people that the more they tell you, the more tailored your offers will be (they will be tailored, right?). Then deliver this. The more the customer sees this, the more information they'll share. And, by the way, you don't get a pass by making your two thousand, initial profile questions "optional." Just the sight of them or the thought that one day they'll HAVE to answer them to get anything useful from this program, is enough to turn people off.

5. Dollars don't change everything

Hold onto your hats, this one's a bit technical. For those psychology experts out there, you'll love this one. The main idea here is that simply "bribing" your customers via more and more offers or discounts over time isn't likely to be a winning long-term strategy. The reason for this is simple. First, you have to keep increasing the offers to keep these people interested, which will eventually bankrupt you. If it doesn't bankrupt you, it's because you've withdrawn the best offers and likely lost a ton of very unhappy customers.

So, why, you might ask yourself, do people who previously have been given so much instantly desert me when I stop the offers? This is simple and, ironically, it turns out that those who are offered less, will likely be the ones who stay with you forever even when you take away their small offers. It's a classic case of cognitive dissonance at work. In this case, your loss of customers is explained because you never changed their attitude towards your products. You only changed their behavior because of the money (or other offers) you gave them. When you take away the incentive, you're left with the same attitude they've always had, which means they go back to the original behavior (i.e., not buying your products). This phenomenon is called the Point of Minimum Justification (which is explained really well in one of my favorite business books: Universal Principles of Design). It's illustrated like this:

As you increase incentives, you change behavior (red line). This is the idea behind "everyone has their price." That is, for the right amount of money, people will do almost anything. The blue line shows how attitude changes with increasing incentives. It too increases at first with increasing incentives, but eventually disappears. Attitude here is your attitude to the product or service (or situation). An increase in attitude on this chart symbolizes a positive change and you want people with a higher, positive attitude towards your product.

Why does this graph look like it does? Simple. When you give people a lot of money to do something, they justify doing it because of the money and NOT because they think what they are doing is a good or enjoyable thing. On the other hand, if you give people very little incentive to do something and they start doing it, they justify the reason for doing it because they believe that what they are doing is a good or enjoyable thing. It's all because of cognitive dissonance. In the case of a product being marketed through relationship marketing, increasing your incentives will get people to use your product because they are simply taking advantage of your incentives. When the incentives are gone, so are they. On the other hand, having just the right incentives causes people to truly consider why they are using your product. They become more invested and perhaps learn more about what makes it so great and even become advocates. Since they aren't justifying using your product because of incentives, they justify it in other ways.

The point at which you can provide the smallest incentive with the greatest change in behavior AND attitude is the point of minimum justification. It's what you want to shoot for in your program. In the case of pharma, I see too many new adherence programs relying soley incentives to keep people on the drug. This isn't a winning strategy. For people to truly want to continue their treatment, they need to understand why they are taking it and the risks and benefits. If they're just taking it to collect your incentives, then they aren't doing this. You're not changing attitude, which won't be effective over time.

For more on where this concept was born, check out the Wikipedia article explaining Festinger and Carlsmith's classic experiment back in 1959.

6. No customer ownership

If I have nothing invested in your program, then I'm not going to continue with it. My investment is usually my time and if I haven't given you this, then I'm not going to be a part of your program for long. However, be careful that you don't create this investment while you commit sin #4, Make it hard. Don't create work for people just so they waste their time. That'll get them to quit your program really quickly. Instead, find ways to ensure people's time investment yields them something of value. Consider the time people invest in tracking their runs via Nike+. It would be hard for another competitor to come along and steal away any regular user of this program simply because they have so much invested. They'd have to start from scratch and they'd lose all the "credit" for all the runs they've done, lose all connections to people they've challenged, plus having to learn a new system. Nike+, of course, gives great information back in exchange, so people feel that their time investment is worthwhile and at the same time, they make it harder and harder for themselves to leave the program each day.

Remember these things? They were everywhere for a long time. What made this so effective is that AOL realized the more free time they give, the more likely you are to stay with them when you run out of free time. Why? Simple. You've invested so much time into it by the time 1,000 hours (or 45 days) rolls around. You've got an email address you've shared with others, a profile that took a long time to get just right, friends who you IM…you're not leaving all of that. AOL used this concept perfectly and became the largest ISP almost overnight. Of course, if your service stinks, then no amount of investment will keep people forever.

7. All about the brand

People don't inherently care about your brand. The sooner you recognize that, the better. Certainly, this is true for most pharma brands. And, while some brands might have an almost cult following (Apple, Harley, etc.), most brands don't have this luxury. Because of this, your program has to offer more than just a connection with your brand. There are already so many other programs out there connected to specific brands and stores that people lose track. Instead of getting overwhelmed, they just drop everyone. Does your stack of loyalty cards look like this?

Do you think any of these stand out from any other? Is it any wonder why people never have their card when the cashier asks?

To stand out, you program has to offer more. It has to be more than just the product. Nike+ isn't all about Nike's products. It comes with a valuable service that makes me (all right, makes other people) better runners and, in turn, healthier.

So, those are the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. Steer clear from these and your program is already far ahead of most that are out there. Coming soon, I'll share the 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing, which will highlight what you SHOULD be doing to make your program a success.

If you'd like a POWERPoint version of today's post, you're in luck. You can download a copy of The 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing  right here. One request: if you do download it, how about sending out a tweet?  

Jonathan Richman is the author of Dose of Digital, a blog about e-marketing in healthcare. He works at Bridge Worldwide as Director of Strategic Planning. You can follow him on Twitter (@jonmrich).

To my surprise, there were 30 different presents, each wrapped in everything from plain brown paper to shiny, multi colored aluminum foil. So, which one to open first? What grabs my attention and what will I push to the bottom of the pile?

This is the same question consumers will ask about their overflowing email boxes every day of the holiday season. So here are a few rules to make your emails rise to the top during any season:

Make it snappy.
The subject line may seem like an afterthought to many, but I consider it the gateway to the message. The ones that stand out give me an idea of what the email contains or create an air of mystery to draw me in.  And above all, they're short and to the point (45 characters or less is a good rule of thumb). 

And to keep from kicking myself later, I run all emails through a spam filter. If my message never gets to their inbox, I can be sure it's not getting opened.

One at a time, please.
So the consumer has already taken the leap by opening the email. I now have one major goal in mind: Don't scare them off. Some writers find it best to minimize the message points and the number of offers. Too much copy will turn off all but the most diehard consumers and a hodgepodge of imagery confuses and leads to deletion.

The trick is to make it easy to understand — if no one in my office can figure out the message or offer, consider how consumers will feel when they try to decipher it. Experts agree that the general rule is to write to an eighth-grade reading level, and I tend to drop it a notch or two below that.

Make it work.
There's nothing more frustrating to me than building something extremely complicated, like a shelving unit from IKEA, and finding out that I'm missing that single, ridiculously important widget that holds it all together. In the case of email, that's the CTA or Call To Action, and it can make or break the entire piece.

From my experience, I agree that buttons like "Order Now" or "Click Here" will sometimes garner the clicks, but we can be more creative than that. I strive to tie in the CTA with my email in a way that wraps up the message begun in the headline. It gives both a sense of completion and a drive for the consumer to take action.

The end is only the beginning.
And you thought I was done once they click a link. Getting consumers to follow the CTA is only part of my job. Thinking through where they end up is equally important. You can read more in-depth about this in one of my other posts: Closing the Click.

The short version is that I want to make sure they land somewhere that helps gain their confidence and encourage their trust in the product. Do you want your customers ending up on a gorgeously rendered, user-friendly landing page or a flashing-icon, text-heavy, incredibly confusing, flaming turd of a website circa 1995?

The results are in.
So the email is out and the sales have been made. How do I make the next email more successful? I do the research. I look back at the subject lines, messaging and links that worked best. If something didn't work, we find out why and learn from it. With a lot of research and a little luck, you can push your emails to the top of the pile every time.

So there you have it, how to build a successful email from subject line straight through to the CTA, and hopefully the landing page. In a time when consumers are pretty much picking at random what to open in their email, there's quite a bit you can do to make your present the most eye-catching of the bunch. So get out there and make it happen, the holiday is almost here.

The Myth of "Great Content" Marketing Itself

One of the common misconceptions of good content is that it drives itself via social media. Successful social media marketing needs two things. Good content, and a significant sized audience to launch that content with. If either of those are missing, you've got to do some work, spend some money, or both.

Twitter is Now Bigger than MySpace in the UK

This is pretty amazing. Of course, MySpace isn't exactly on the rise, but none-the-less, a good example of how fast things change in technology. 140 characters taking over MySpace. Murdoch has to be stewing.

22 Facebook Funded Startups to Watch

A good glimpse of where Facebook is headed. Or at least where the money thinks it's headed.

Twitter Search Queries

An example of some of the more interesting search queries in Twitter's advanced search. As Gary V said, the most interesting thing about Twitter is the Search. I tend to agree with him. To see this live and test your own, just enter anything into Twitter's advanced search.

Coca-Cola Zero Face Profiler game

Love this idea. Using photo-matching technology, they'll use Facebook Connect to find other people on Facebook who look like you. But they're only doing this with people who've opted in. So they first need to compile the database of images, which seems to be taking a while. I'm not sure how long ago this went live, but the database is still only 15% full, and hasn't changed much in the last few days.

Video from Red Bull Soapbox Derby Atlanta 2009

This is just great content for a lifestyle brand. Humorous event, good music bed, and fun slide show commentary about what's taking place in the video. What's also great for the brand is that it was done by a 3rd party. More authenticity combined with zip for cost.

IKEA Heights [VIDEO]

A 5 minute short film shot in the IKEA in Burbank, during work hours, and presumably without authorization from IKEA. It's hysterical watching them act out the various scenes, in the appropriate settings around the store, while random shoppers are walking by in the background. I'm sure somewhere an IKEA lawyer is cringing, but this is fun and creates a positive association with the brand in a highly-memorable way.

People of Walmart: Viral Blog Showcases Retailer's Clientele

And now, the underside of UGC for a brand. Like the previous two cases, something completely uninitiated by the brand. In this case though, it pokes fun at the brand's clientele. Which is arguably worse than making fun of their products. Like other popsites such as fmylife.com and latfh.com, I'd guess this will have a short life, and won't warrant a response from the brand.

Stunning time lapse footage of the LA fires

Amazing footage of a tragic event.

Brazilian Graphic Artist and Illustrator

Another example of a cool mix of photography and illustration.

Scale: The Importance of Cafe-Shaped Experiences

A good excerpt from Chris Brogan's new book "Trust Agents". It speaks to how the scope of much product development and it's related marketing is downsizing, or going niche. And with both products and marketing going less mass, it requires a more personal touch. That effects profitability for sales and cost-effectiveness for marketing. The challenge of doing more for less is all-too-familiar in marketing circles today. This article is a bet that won't be changing any time soon. It's an interesting dilemma, because the big question many marketers have for social media is its scalability. Companies accustomed to running national mass media campaigns who then try social media as a more personal approach to marketing often report the lack of a blip on the radar screen of sales or traffic. Perhaps the mass media model will need to take further hits in acceptance or credibility for this trend to completely play out. Or, maybe social media will find new ways to scale the impact of more personal conversations. Whatever the case, a more personalized approach takes time and diligence. And companies accustomed to mass media who try to bring that mindset to social media are likely in for a difficult transition.

Apple – Movie Trailers – Art & Copy

I've seen this going around the web, and apparently it just opens today in a few small markets. While Mad Men will probably broaden the appeal of this, it's still probably a special interest movie. I'm curious how soon films like this will go straight to online viewing.

New Site for CMO's

CMO.com. Curious what they paid for the URL. Launched by Omniture, they're accepting content submissions, but seem to be mostly aggregating at the moment.

New Facebook Privacy Policies Will Have A Significant Impact On Platform Applications

I've been writing a lot on privacy policies lately, which feels pretty odd for a creative guy. But I'm confident these issues are going to have a strong bearing on creative capabilities, particularly in social media, over the next several years. Seriously, most people have no idea what information is out there on them, and how easily it can be dug up. Facebook seems to be taking the self-regulatory approach that the alcohol and tobacco industries have taken for years. The question is, Will they ever be able to really crack this nut, and if so, will it happen in time before it all hits the fan. Reading Facebook's Privacy Settings section reads like the Ts and Cs of most websites. And we know everyone pours through those before clicking "I Agree", right? Right?

Is 'Friending' in Your Future? Better Pay Your Taxes First

On the subject of Privacy, you may be surprised to know that the IRS is hanging out on social media sites, looking for confirmation or contradiction of your latest filing. Seems like small potatoes stuff, but tax revenues for the government are at devastatingly low numbers due to the economy. They're going to look under every crack they can to find loose change.

LAPD releases security cam vid of break-in at Lindsey Lohan's house

Speaking of government agencies using social media, LAPD released this break-in video. On YouTube. While this makes sense, I think the big story is, the IRS and now LAPD are both using social media to improve their performance, and there as recent survey's have shown, there are still CMOs of major corporations that aren't convinced that social media has a role to play in their marketing efforts. Interesting.

New campaign for CWs "The Vampire Diaries": Tying cause marketing with for profit business objectives

Not every marketing story can have an 'green' or 'socially conscious' angle to it. But here's a TV show tying into the Red Cross as a way to promote both. I like this as a way of bringing a heightened social awareness to the campaign, which feels compassionate and relevant in troubled times like this.

Justin (shitmydadsays) on Twitter

A pretty good story. A simple daily Tweet of what a 28 year old overhears from his 73 year old dad. And the growth has been remarkable. I first noted this last Tuesday, when 'Justin' had 53,000 followers. Earlier this morning, it was at 149,000. It's now over 151k. Like Daily Candy, it's simple in structure — just one posting a day. A good reminder that an impacting message doesn't have to have large budgets or extensive production timelines. There was a rumor that this was tied to V Australia, which I've not been able to confirm. However, if this does turn out to be marketer-drive, I'll be curious to see both a) Who it's for, and b) How people will react.

Cheese and Burger Society

Fun site from the Wisconsin Cheese council. I'm always up for a new burger or sandwich recipe. I do think there's a lot more they could have done in the way of social interactions around this site, though. But good content all the same.

Photoshop Artworks

Striking photoshopping applied to portrait photography.

At the Core is the actual movie or product. The key features that we can identify with at this level (what makes a good movie) are the story, the cast, the brand, the genre, characters, and the trailer. Some may argue that the trailer should be outside of the core, but as it should be the closest element that encapsulates all of the core elements of the movie I have included it here.

Moving away from the movie itself, we can begin to look at the key influencers that have the potential to positively affect the success of the project. Current market trends, real life events, news and history itself can be tapped into and used to assist in the marketing efforts for the project. Doing this right can be hard, but when done properly it can take marketing dollars further – like jumping on a surfboard that's already on the wave. Other areas that can be tapped into include celebrities, fans, bloggers, and critics. The influencers that have a relationship with any or all of the elements in the core will ultimately aid in the success and/or failure of the project. It can pay dividends to leverage this properly.

Once we get into the outside ring, the one where the viral and marketing efforts are realized, we begin to connect with the masses. This ring begins with the definition of the strategic objectives and goals for the initiative. Once the strategy is defined a series of programs are identified and evaluated for their potential contribution to the overall strategic objectives. Each program needs to be developed individually, with its own objectives and goals, and contribute to an identified function as it moves the target audience through the conversion funnel. The conversion funnel functions include awareness, direct response and engagement & conversion. The metrics for success on Facebook or at and event should be independent of those on Twitter, and those of the website for the movie. At the same time they should all be interconnected, contribute to each programs success and tie back to the overall strategic objectives. The ongoing evolution of online marketing opportunities is contributing to an exponential increase in the speed and reach for all communications. By monitoring the Core and Influencer rings through the life of
the campaign we can leverage emerging opportunities by jumping on the surfboard and injecting relevant information into our selected programs. For example, if a cast member hits the news with relevant involvement in trends, this can be leveraged to promote the film. A story on a site like the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) allows readers to spread the information easily to their contacts using social networks such as Digg (www.digg.com), Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com) This same opportunity can be leveraged in online marketing opportunities using Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertisements. This information is also spread via syndication through blogs, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), and other news sites. Multiply this by the many opportunities that arise during the life of the campaign. The campaign can be rewarded with a wave of viral communication as the target audience interacts and contributes to the growth and spread of information. These activates do not replace the requirement for an overall awareness campaign, however it increases the speed and reach of the awareness campaign and most important the level at which we are able to immerse andengage the target audience in the experience.

Collaboration between the filmmakers, marketing team and the agency or agencies that are involved in these initiatives are imperative to achieving maximum results from the program. The theme and consistency needs to cross over all elements and although good results can sometimes come from teams working in silos, the great results are achieved when everyone is on the same page.

For those with more enlightened teams who are willing to work closely together, I've got some advice that I think can make it even simpler. I mentioned in my talk at the Business Development Institute that, to borrow a term,  "it takes a village" to get a program approved, particularly if that program is social media based. Never before has a single healthcare marketer conceived, developed, and launched a program on his or her own. There are teams of people that help along the way and some of these people are charged with making sure  that the program isn't going to get the company in trouble. So, if it does "take a village," how can you get your village on your side?

Here are what I think are the six most important things you can do as a marketer give your program the best chance of approval:

• -- Know the "why"
• -- Become your own toughest critic
• -- Check in along the way
• -- Be an educator first
• -- Force "Yes, if..." instead of "No, because..."
• -- Try something

Know the "why"

The regulatory folks at your company aren't standing in the way of your program because they don't like you (probably not anyway). They aren't saying "no" because it's much simpler to do so. They have good reasons. Likely, they understand both the internal and external rules much better than you do. As you're developing your program, invest some time in understanding the regulatory rules that are likely to have an impact on your program. If you do this well, then the approval process should be much simpler and it's going to allow you to be a better partner, as you'll be able to really understand where your regulatory colleagues' concerns.

Become your own toughest critic

Be honest. You know the flaws in the program you're creating. You know why it will never get approved as is. Why bash your head against the wall then? Be tough on your program just as you know your regulatory team will be. Doing this during the development process is going to force you to rethink things and to look for ways to do them differently. This might be where the big breakthrough comes from. A word of caution: don't completely stifle an idea because you think it'll never get approved. That's an innovation killer. Figure out a different approach that might work or...

Check in along the way

You probably have a very formal process for reviewing a new program. That's good. But sometimes, you need to go outside this process a bit. As you're developing your program and run into something that you think is going to give your regulatory team (and therefore federal regulators) heartburn, ask. Ask someone on your regulatory team for advice. You can do this rather informally and it may save you a ton of heartbreak and money later on. It makes no sense to completely develop a program (including all the resources you'll use) only to find out that the key component is a complete non-starter. Check in before you commit too much to see where the problems might lie. You can not only do this internally, but also externally as well. You can request a meeting with DDMAC (the pharma marketing arm of FDA), for example, to review an idea before it's complete. They will give you their take on why or why not your program is all right. This is a formal process that your regulatory team can help you set up. If you're thinking about a really big, really innovative program, don't get a million dollars into it before you figure out that DDMAC will never allow it. Take advantage of these meetings. Your fees and tax dollars are paying for them anyway.

Be an educator first

You may be a social media expert. Great. Chances are that the people who have to approve your program aren't. That's a problem. While you've invested a lot of time figuring out how to, say, do a brand page on Facebook that will be compliant, your regulatory teams might not understand the finer points of Facebook. Because of this, they only can go on what they've heard or read. We all know that's not enough. You never really understand the finer points of a channel until you dig in yourself. That's part of your job. While you can argue that it's also part of your regulatory team's job too, it might not be happening that way. That's where you come in. Educate your team. Teach them about emerging channels and the benefits and risks of each ahead of time. Don't try to teach them about Twitter in the meeting where you're asking for approval to do a branded Twitter page. It's a little late then. (My company, Bridge Worldwide, via WPP, offers a "Digital Immersion" program that can do this sort of training as a one-day seminar. Contact me if you're interested in hearing more.)

Force "Yes, if..." instead of "No, because..."

This one isn't mine, but I had to use it because it says it all so perfectly. It comes from Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations at Johnson & Johnson. You may have heard his name from the J&J blog he helps edit or the J&J Twitter account that he manages. Both, in my opinion, are the standard in healthcare. Marc sent this tweet a couple weeks ago in connection with the Business Development Institute (#BDI) conference I mentioned earlier:

Think about that for a minute. Which do you hear when you propose something to your regulatory group? The first one, "Yes, if...", indicates someone who's willing to help you find a way to make your idea possible. You might not like the concession, but it's a step forward. The latter, "No, because...", tells me that this regulatory person isn't interested in a solution, but rather just in following the company's and federal regulatory rules. It doesn't have to be that way though. Force your regulatory teams to think about the issue with "Yes, if..." instead of "No, because..." It's a powerful difference. You can enable this by talking this way yourself during the discussions with your regulatory team. Come prepared with alternatives and be willing to compromise (assuming it doesn't kill the intent of your program), but also encourage your colleagues to do the same. PS: you might want to add that this idea comes from J&J, who probably has the most robust social media program of any healthcare company.

Try something

This isn't "Do something just for the sake of doing it." Here, I want you to try something because I want you to test all of the above. If your company hasn't delved into any major social media initiatives and you suddenly spring one on them, expect it to be denied pretty quickly. Instead, do something small now. Maybe an unbranded Facebook page. It doesn't have to be incredibly robust and the point isn't to get thousands of people to join. Your goal is to test your process. The process for approving a social media program might be completely different than any other program. Do you know the process? Is there a process? Maybe you need approval from a higher level or the PR/corporate communications team needs a say. The process may be totally different from everything else. Figure it out now, so that when your big program comes up for review, people will be familiar with the process and you won't have to waste time figuring it out. Also, if you need to respond very quickly to something in the social media space, you can't waste time creating a process, as things happen in hours, not weeks when it comes to social media.

These six steps are designed to help you and your company advance its social media program. In the end, you'll need a lot of people to buy into it, so make it as simple as possible. Like many things in life, getting a major program (that also relies on a newer channel) approved involves some selling. These tips hopefully make your sales call just a bit easier.  

Jonathan Richman is the author of Dose of Digital, a blog about e-marketing in healthcare. He works at Bridge Worldwide as Director of Business Development. You can follow him on Twitter (@jonmrich).

I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

You've seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video, now read the case study. This is what YouTube and everyone else who isn't a record label has been saying for years. That associating your music with emotionally-powerful user-generated content is good for sales, not fleecing the artists. Labels should be thankful they don't have to a) pay people for developing this content, b) spend the money to drive the traffic to support 10 million views, and c) pay the video streaming bandwidth fees.

New Report Suggests Facebook Has Replaced Email For Sharing Content

I've previously reported on how Facebook is driving sharing and traffic, but here's additional proof. What's particularly reinforcing is that the two sharing apps have such similar data. Perhaps most telling about the power of Facebook and community in general is that they're driving all this sharing, and their email app pretty much sucks.

Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital

Yep, the whole enchilada. I can't recall a major brand that's made that leap yet. And this from a distiller in Kentucky, no less. Their logic is right on. If you want to sell to the people going out to clubs and purchasing spirit-based drinks, the Web is a great place to be.

Tweet Sentiments – Know Who's Tweeting About What When Where & How

Probably more fun than functional at the moment, but pulling sentiment data out of massive text chunks is going to be huge for both target marketing and market research. So not a bad thing to stay on top of.

Twitter post leads to lawsuit

Perhaps inevitable. Chicago apartment management group Horizon is suing a Twitter user for stating their apartment was moldy, on Twitter. Now, they may have a point, but if they settle this at all in their favor, it's sure to be a Pyrrhic Victory. The woman Twitterer had 20 followers. Just 20. And Horizon went and turned this into a national spectacle. D-U-M-B. Not to mention there must be a zillion companies in the US named Horizon, so even for those searching for Horizon for whatever reason, this Tweet probably would have been buried. Then, in the middle of the media storm, one of Horizon's owners explains their lawsuit to the Chicago Sun-Times: "We're a sue-first, ask-questions-later kind of an organization." D-U-M-B-E-R.

Winery's 'dream job' idea leaves an aftertaste

A winery in NoCal posted a job opening for a "lifestyle correspondent" to spend their days blogging, tweeting, and singing the praises of their winery from beautiful Healdsburg. $60k for 6 months work. Not bad in a bleak economy. And like a good social marketer, they encouraged participants to promote themselves and the brand by soliciting votes. Several social media experts jumped on board, with one amassing far and away the most votes. But the winery didn't even include him in their top 50 finalists. A social media community backlash ensued. As Digg founder Kevin Rose said: "You can't ask the community to help you vet candidates and then just disregard what they said". This campaign was essentially a knock-off, me-too version of the Australian "Best job in the world" campaign from earlier this year. And I think this demonstrates that you can knock off someone elses idea, but that doesn't mean that you get the idea. And I think it's especially true in social media that it really helps to understand the emotional dynamic of the campaign you're running.

Marketers Get Valedictorian to Plug Movie in Speech

A studio pays a high school valedictorian $1800 to mention one of the catch phrases from the movie in her valedictorian graduation address. They video taped it, and then pushed it for viral success. The results? Not much viral activity, and a pissed off school district and high school administration. Personally, I understand the annoyance, in particular bringing commerce into a graduation ceremony like that. But at the end of the day, it's seems pretty harmless, and a bright student has some additional money, which she'll certainly need attending MIT.

New York Nearest Subway augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

There have been some similar examples of compass and location-based services popping up, and keep in mind this requires the iPhone to be jailbroken. But a great example of where things are headed.

Busted! Thieves Caught by MobileMe's Find My iPhone

Great story. A 15 yr old and his dad are on a river trip and get back to find their car broken into, and the kid's iPhone among the stolen items. He had the MobileMe Find My Phone feature, so he got the location and called the cops. Turns out it was a family they'd been trying to nail for a while. Cops arrived and reclaimed the stolen goods and arrested the culprits. Case closed.

Eric thinks we're in a death spiral of online ads not covering the cost of the content that hosts them.  I know many of our leaders, such as Steve Goldberg, share the same fear.  But I'm not so sure that the economics are THAT far out of whack.  

I have always assumed, as have many others, that oversupply of display impressions has been the primary culprit in the cratering of CPMs. But looking at Eric's chart showing cross-media impression volumes, it becomes clear that display volume, on a relative basis, is not out of line with other media types; in fact, newspapers have the highest impression volume. This tells me there is much more than pure over supply at work here.  Seeing this was a "myth-buster" moment for me.

Eric also raises a good point about how much money, time and energy is spent on optimizing ad performance and direct response while brand marketing gets lost. And his point about enlarging creative units makes sense. But in singling out specifics, he is obscuring his very real insight about weak effort around brand marketing.

Financial health is not a question of inefficiency or ad unit size (though these could help).  

In fact, CPM's are falling for two reasons:  1) we are now able to separate audience from content which undermines the ability for branded content to command price premiums; and 2) the increasing ability of advertisers to measure effectiveness is driving prices to a point of positive ROI.  I believe the train has left the station on #1.  This is the new reality and publishers have to find new ways to monetize their assets.  But I believe #2 is addressable with a few simple fixes on both the publisher and agency side that will make the medium a more powerful communications vehicle.  With stronger performance, the ROI threshold will rise, and buoy the entire ecosystem.

So the big, screaming issue that Eric is poking around is the quality of the online creative itself. While there are exceptions – Apple's ingenious page takeover campaign on the New York Times site – why is so much of online creative today so bloody awful? This is not an issue of ad size, but of the creative spark that spurs interaction and evokes an emotional response.

Clients have created this problem.  They seem to not be demanding creative excellence from their online agencies, or if they are, they are unwilling to pay the fees required to get it.  Just a few years ago, when online media budgets were small, this made some sense, as the ratio of working media to creative expense had to be kept in line.  But with the size of today's online investments, clients are shooting themselves in the foot. They squeeze their agencies' margins to such an extent that there's not a lot of room for them to experiment and do great work.

The agencies are not without blame, either.  They are not making the case for the power of great online ideas…but that is a topic for another day.

So here are some suggestions on how to rejuvenate online advertising creative, and in doing so, create upward lift on CPMs:

• -Demand intelligent interactivity in the banner. Way back in 1994 – the Internet's early Middle Ages, really – AT&T's Olympics program made brilliant use of online interactive, at a time when doing interactivity was not so easy. If we could do it in 1994, there's no reason why we can't we do it today.

• -Enabling session-based ad experiences. Instead of having a different ad on each page, advertisers could buy a user's session, with consecutive impressions over four or five pages.  This would allow the advertiser to tell a story. That's a powerful concept, allowing the creative to unfold over the course of several pages and truly engage the consumer.
• -Make better use of audio and video. A great example is the GE "imagination" campaign produced by Beeby, Clark & Meyler, with its trademark electronic echo. Bringing audio and video into a campaign can turn something unusual into something that's truly breakthrough.

In addition to creating larger ad units, premium publishers can contribute to more impactful experiences by requiring visitors to watch a 15-second ad as the price of admission to the site. This solution won't work for everyone, but for publishers having unique, differentiated content, it's a solution waiting to happen. It's amazing to me that sites like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times don't take advantage of this, yet they charge $2 at the newsstand.

Jacking up the size standards for creative, using session-based marketing and enhancing video, sound and interactivity are all steps that can be taken to make the medium more powerful in its ability to communicate. And given that economics are not that far off, a modest improvement in these areas can make a huge improvement in the overall financial health of the industry.   Unfortunately, the publishers whose economics depend on this are not in a great position to affect it.   Maybe the publisher trade organizations like the IAB and OPA can take this on, and become the champions of creative excellence that we need.

IAB Blog:

http://www.iab.net/iablog/

Brand Asset Valuator: http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_brand_asset_valuator.html

If you’re a creative, you’ve been there and know the feeling. If you’re not but you work with creatives, then hey, think a few minutes about what your influence may be doing to us. It’ll make both of us better at what we do.

Between client services, user-experience architects, brand planners, media, and the boss (not to mention the client), everyone has an opinion about creative. And we designers love to complain about it. But despite what you might think, being under the influence of those opinions isn’t always a bad thing. Collaboration, handled correctly, really does make things better.

When I work with a good team like I do now, it’s magic. We’re in and out of each other’s cubes, constantly tweaking and polishing the work to make it better. We spark on each other’s ideas. And this constant contact keeps us accountable to each other. Of course, when opinions come in from every direction like a blizzard, it’s easy to hunker down and get stuck.

So, in the spirit of improving creative collaboration among all parties, here are a few things I recommend that creatives do to keep the insanity to a minimum:

1. Admit that you don’t know it all. Because you don’t. Really.
2. Listen. Someone else (even someone without creative creds) may help you see old problems with a fresh perspective.
3. Cool it. Don’t let criticism get under your skin. Yeah, it’s hard, even for old pros, but it only feels like torture if we let it.
4. Let the outside world in; allow your surroundings to be a positive influence. You wouldn’t be a truly creative person if you didn’t get inspiration from the “other” side, and you know it.
5. And finally, remember that at the end of the day, we need to convince people to buy what the client is selling. If we forget that, we’ve failed — no matter how beautiful our work is. And failure is far worse than a little feedback from the team that makes us squirm.

That’s all well and good for the creatives, but what do you do when you’re the one trying to do the influencing? How exactly does someone from media or planning or client services deal with creatives? It just so happens I’ve got a couple of pointers for you too:

1. Give creatives credit — just because we don’t wear suits doesn’t mean we can’t think about the big picture too.
2. Don’t dictate; collaborate. Explaining why you think something should change is much more effective than just telling a creative to change it.
3. Be an advocate for the user. If you think we’re sacrificing good user experience for flashy design, say so.
4. Keep your criticism constructive. A big part of that goes back to #2, explaining the why of your opinion.
5. And remember to leave space for creatives to be, well, creative. Sure, help us stay on track, but then give us the room to do what we do best.

When all is said and done, our best work comes when we broaden our perspective, keep our focus on the user and work as a collaborative team with the same end in mind.

In fact, I believe when we’re under outside influence, that’s when our creativity really thrives. So the next time you reach for the mouse, make sure you stick to the rules of the road and design responsibly.

Rob Boman is an Interactive Creative Director for Javelin Direct.