0600 How do Web-savvy marketer use brand-interaction to steal customers from competitors?

Wow, first you can effect a transaction of hundredths of US cent — micropayments. Second, there’s no tax or, apparently, no transaction fees. Hello, Western Union and Amex, you listening? Finally, there’s no government - federal, state, or local oversight. We’re talking about 10 million Linden Dollar accounts in the world, right now. So it’s already got critical mass.

I know that sounds like it’s from Mars, today. But mark my word, 3 to 5 years from now — you will find that a whole bunch of digital assets will get bought and paid for using Linden Dollars as the currency exchange system.

Back to Terry. He says, “We have these little air chuggers. You put them on your property or on your island or building or whatever, and it scrubs greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere” I said, “Terry — there’s no greenhouse gas in Second Life. It’s all red, green, and blue dots. And the rest of it we just make up!”

He said, “Yes, yes. But we sell these for 560 Linden Dollars — about USD2 — we take those USD2 and buy seedlings and have them planted in an area where they need trees — thereby closing the loop on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, while inducting you into the Amway brandspace of healthy living.” Brilliant!

And that’s just one dimension of social media. We could spend a whole day or two just on social media, defining individual resources and mapping them to strategy. Oh well. Another workshop!

Darn, we just don’t have time here today for the fourth category of brand-interaction resources, Webcast Theaters, and the fifth category, Collaborative Selling. While most of it stands as self-explanatory, the real story entails Web-enabled interactions with sales and service and how streaming rich media moves from one-off content productions to content factories, digital supply chains, and a multimedia asset repositories.

However, for the sake of today, I want to highlight a curious finding from our work with clients. Strategy constitutes a mechanism for directing or marshalling resources — in this case, digital brand-interaction resources - for maximum competitive advantage.

In executive briefings and workshops, as we review each of these individual resources with most marketing professionals understand less than 50 percent of these brand-interaction resources as something to use or marshal. Well if you don’t understand it as resource, you cannot direct or marshal it and achieve a competitive advantage.

It’s a big opportunity. And the Web-savvy brand marketers have the advantage. This is our homework. We need to come up to speed with all of these brand interaction resources and learn how they work, who uses them well, and what can a results you might expect in your particular marketspace.

TITLE:
Long Tails Wag Big Dogs

SUBTITLE:
How the synthesis of professional and user-generated content will continue transforming media, entertainment, publishing, and marketing

KEY TOPIC:
How digital asset management speed convergence of professional and user-generated content

PRESENTATION DATE:
12 May 2008

VENUE:
Henry Stewart’s DAM and MOM Symposium, New York, NY USA