Consider for a moment how most advertising or marketing campaigns get developed. A marketing decision-maker in a firm has a goal to increase revenue. Using all her best training, she (if she’s one of the better marketers…how many campaigns get launched without any research or feedback?) holds a few focus groups, interviews salespeople, and consults with market data to develop the message, the reach plan, the "offer", etc. She most likely works with an agency to build the creative and launch.

Even if she took the next disciplined step and tested the campaign first before launching (only a fraction do), it’s still a top-down, controlled approach to building a campaign. What would a customer-centric, community-oriented "open source" approach look like?

For one, the customers themselves could have been asked to share their ideas on what the company’s campaign should look like. What would customers like to hear the company say, and how? Perhaps a contest from customers on campaign ideas, which would be released to the customers to decide the winner?

While it’s true that most customers would not participate, the most passionate fans of the firm probably would. And after all, they tend to be the advocates who want the firm to succeed anyway and influence many others on your behalf.

The recent Inc. Magazine has a great article on innovation that highlights Threadless , a t-shirt company whose entire business model rests on community participation in the design of new t-shirts. From the article:

Threadless, he explained, ran design competitions on an online social network. Members of the network submitted their ideas for T-shirts — hundreds each week — and then voted on which ones they liked best. Hundreds of thousands of people were using the site as a kind of community center, where they blogged, chatted about designs, socialized with their fellow enthusiasts — and bought a ton of shirts at $15 each. Revenue was growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company had never advertised, employed no professional designers, used no modeling agency or fashion photographers, had no sales force, and enjoyed no retail distribution. As result, costs were low, margins were above 30 percent, and — because community members told them precisely which shirts to make — every product eventually sold out. Nickell’s company had never produced a flop.

Interesting model, one that requires a lot of faith in your current and potential customers. Many will react to this with a cynical eye, thinking this could never apply in their industry (especially highly technical categories). But I suspect that it applies to almost every industry, at least to some level.

Why not run a small pilot in your company with this approach?

Just a little background info – Justin just so happens to be my boss and I just happen to be his “New Media Specialist”.

So you can rate this liveblog post on a scale of 1 to 10 on the blowing-smoke-up-backside-o-meter…

Anyway here’s the basic gist of the general gist:

• Organizational blogging

• Social networking, wikis, twitter, and other forms of social media

• Search engines, online press releases, and ways to fuse online and traditional forms of marketing

Blogs: Somebody not interested in reading blogs – man it’s like a personal slap in the face…..I shall get to this at some point.

It shouldn’t be a case of reading blogs so much as coming across information written on blogs. I mean, does anybody claim they don’t read forums as an entire mass? Pfft.

How many people write blogs…..stat attack. (will find)

Still amazes me about the low information threshold on RSS feeds and such.

Basic blog rules and ethics. Probably best to throw out a few top five lists on certain points Frightening or perhaps not or maybe I’m in my own little blogging bobble bubble.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

We’re at least fairly cogent on facebook mysapce and social networks.

PRESS RELEASES:
Brad wins for most press releases with 4-8 a day.

Press releases as SEO.

A big happy new media and old media conflab. All media is crap apart from the decent crap. Point out the uses of social media with regards to blended/universal search.

Not as much on this as there should be and that’s my fault.

So, seeming you’ve got your notes, go ahead and ask any questions you’ve got loitering in your frontal lobes.

I’m supposed to know about this stuff!

1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in how universities market and promote their sports programs since you started out at UConn?

The internet is biggest change. When I started at UConn in ‘93 the internet/email was in the very early stages (if we even had it all – I can’t remember ever using it at UConn in the beginning). Now, it is generally the first medium we think of when deciding how to best promote one of our games/events.

We still promote our events through traditional vehicles, but the internet is the one we think of first. It allows the most flexibility and the best opportunity to hit the most people during the course of a day.

2. How are you moving the WVU athletic department forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?

We are constantly looking at new ideas for our web site. Recently, we have started adding more video features to the site. We receive instant feedback with our web site via the traffic. We can see right away if something we did on there was well received. That is tougher with traditional television, radio or print advertising.

Most of measurement techniques are basic at this point. If it’s web based we look at the page views, unique users and or “click throughs” if it’s a pop up ad or something similar.

We are fortunate that we get most of our feedback about events by looking in the seats at a game. We can tell pretty quickly at a game if our promotion worked or not. I can expand more on this topic at the conference.

3. You mentioned in the last session that you’re moving ticket sales to an all electronic-based system in the near future and that you’ve experienced some resistance to that, particularly with older generations. If you could sit down with one such person, how would you explain why you’re moving these sales to online processing and why it’s a benefit to both them and you?

Great question. I still think it will take us a few years to become fully automated in this area. I think the benefits are the overall ease for the customer. No more waiting on the mail to arrive with the ticket application in there. No more writing out two different checks and sending them back. Click a couple of buttons, put your cc info in and you’re done. No filling out forms, doing the math on how much you owe. It’s all right there.

4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?

Facebook and MySpace I think are extremely interesting applications. It’s amazing to me how many students/people use one or the other. As I mentioned at the Charleston event, I think people have to be careful with this as well. While it can be a great marketing tool (both individually and for groups), people that post to and speak to our athletes about their image and how much one picture on their Facebook page could change the perception of them that is out there.

That said, they can be valuable promotional tools. We had interns post events on both sites this year in an effort to attract people to a soccer game, wrestling meet, etc…

5. You’ve now had the opportunity to speak at one city (Charleston) and listen to a couple of the sessions. Do you think this is the type of event marketers in West Virginia can use to their benefit?

I think these events are great. I think it is invaluable for marketing people to get out of “their world” and share ideas as often as possible. So often I think busy executives get hung up in their day to day duties and don’t have the time to think on a bigger scale. I know I do. It’s amazing how much more creative I feel after sitting in a room with a bunch of other marketing people and throwing around ideas. I think these conferences are outstanding and will only get better as they get more and more participants!

6. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Morgantown and Charleston?

Both have so much to offer. Charleston is great because of the multiple ad agencies, gov’t groups and just the fact it is the capital. Morgantown because of the obvious draw of the University. But, Morgantown gives you more than just the Univ. It has been one of the few areas in West Virginia that continues to grow and thrive. Construction continues at an unbelievable pace. More and more students are coming to the Univ each year only leads to more and more growth in the business community.

Morgantown and Charleston are both vitally important to the growth of our state. I think bringing bright, energetic, talented people together (as these conferences are doing) will benefit not only the individuals, but also the cities in this state and the state as a whole!

Our focus will be Web 2.0: Blogs, Pods and Twitters — How Emerging Internet Technologies Can Enhance Business Communications.

We’ll be discussing the growing importance of blogs, podcasts, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. We will discuss the significance of these technologies to West Virginia businesses and organizations.

In a bit of an unconventional twist, we utilized a Web 2.0 tool, a Zoomerang survey application, to poll our audience in advance of the presentation to assess their familiarity, needs and expectations. Here’s what we learned:

• There’s an absence of understanding of the phrase “Web 2.0″ (53% have not heard of it).
• Likewise, most folks do not understand or utilize RSS (69% have not heard of it).
• More respondents (80%) have been to YouTube than any of the other social media.
• Twitter and Flickr were among the lowest (17% and 15% familiarity, respectively).
• Most (84%) are familiar with blogs, either publishing their own blog or reading blogs.

Most encouraging to us was the fact that a strong majority (67%) of respondents agreed with the following statement: “I believe that Web 2.0 tools are viable tools for business applications.” Now that is precisely the foundation for learning that we plan to build upon tomorrow. Thanks to this valuable, advance information from our audience, we have content that has been carefully tailored to their needs.

The event is sponsored by The State Journal, SCORE, and the West Virginia Small Business Development Center. We greatly appreciate their support.

Pre-registration at http://www.score.org/ is appreciated. The event is sponsored by The State Journal, SCORE, and the West Virginia Small Business Development Center.

Add questions and comments here or at aBetterWestVirginia to get the conversation started early.