Along with a cadre of Louisville’s digerati and web pioneers, later this week I will test the outer limits of information overload while attending SXSWi in Austin, TX. I’ll be there with many friends including: Brendan Jackson, Dave Durand, Jason Falls, Kevin Frey, Matt Winn, Rob May, Shawn Morton, Todd Earwood, Chris Claxton, and Michelle Jones, and I plan to network socially with a many more that recently hit my radar (Paul Sizemore, Bill Johnston, Greg Matthews…)  Isn’t it interesting that we have to travel a few hundred miles to get everyone in the same place at the same time?

I also hope to interact with others that are as passionate as I am about entrepreneurship, digital strategy and the future of all things interwebs such as Peter Kim, Scott Monty, Charlie O’Donnell, Bryan Jones, Aaron Strout, Adam Cohen, Len Kendall.

Yes, there will be a lot of continued discussions about web 2.0, social media and the like, but this year I’m really focused on immersing myself in conversations that deal more with the intersection of all these shiny objects with real-world applications in technology (especially mobile, retail POS), marketing (augmenting customer and brand experiences) and business objectives (show me the money).  I like to ‘think outside the browser’ so my goal is to encounter others who do the same when it comes to interactive.

With a stack of new contacts and business ideas, I’ll return refreshed and energized.  Also, I revel in the prospects of sampling some quality BBQ, [breakfast] burritos, and Shiner Bock as well.  I’m looking forward to a memorable long weekend of friends, fun, and frontal lobe fecundity.  Austin, here we come!

I’m thrilled that Social Media Club’s new Louisville chapter is already attracting a lot of people and discussion. Big ups to Falls and Earwood for executing on an idea which was destined to blossom among the digerati in the ville. Before our last meeting, Jason Falls asked me to fill in as a featured speaker for the evening. Normally not too many people derive value from anything featured or spoken by me. Thankfully I had the great fortune of playing clean-up after outstanding presentations and discussion led by Brian Wallace of NowSourcing and Aaron Marshall of DBSinteractive. Both offered great overviews and angles of selling social media to execs and clients, as well as some best practices and caveats. Honestly, I don’t really have anything to sell since my ‘vendor’ days are indefinitely on hiatus, so I wasn’t sure what compelling reasons anyone might have to listen to me. So I volleyed an example of selling lemonade as a child and how it might apply to social media to marketers. Since I hadn’t prepared one iota before the meeting, the concept wasn’t exactly developed when I lobbed it to the crowd. So I’ll give it more thought and detail here:

Marketing a product, idea, or whatever ‘viral’ ‘microsite’ for which your client wants to use to social media to ‘increase awareness’ only works as well as your efforts to sell lemonade would have when you were a kid.

{{diddly-doot, dream sequence}} So you spent all morning mashing hundreds of lemons into deliciously sugarfied juice, making pretty posters to hang on the neighborhood stop signs, and even got a nice comfy chair to sit in while you waved and screamed at the passing cars. Dozens, no, hundreds of neighbors and passersby see your lemonade stand, honk at your cuteness and a few even make time to buy a refreshing glass.

After your long day of hawking the citrus grok, your mom comes outside to help you tear down and revel in your success as a budding entrepreneur.

Mom:”So how’d it go today? Sell a lot of lemonade?”

Kid:”OMG mom! Like a bazillion of people came by and waved and honked and a ton of people said they’d come back to buy a LOT later on cuz they didn’t have their wallets on them.”

Mom: “So exactly how much did you sell?”

Kid: “Well, not much since this busy intersection doesn’t let most people stop to actually buy the stuff. And the rain kinda sucked. But like SO many people saw us and honked.”

So flash back to the present… {{doot}} this analogy reminds me a lot of what I’m observing as more and more marketers attempt to embrace this new-fangled-social-media-magic-pixie-dust to enhance the spread and velocity of any sort of message.

For far too long, traditional marketers and advertisers have gotten away with using hollow but hard-to-replace metrics like impressions and awareness. When we apply empty metrics like those to the childhood lemonade stand, we’d jump with glee at the 87% awareness at that busy intersection and even doubly so at the tens of thousands of impressions we may have received that day. The more sophisticated and refined analytics that can be applied to social media marketing initiatives, however, tell a story that most marketers might not want to hear:

Something about your efforts might really suck: your location, your timing, your message, or – gasp – maybe even your lemonade.

Is there a correlation between awareness, impressions and increased sales? Absolutely! But the days of listening to, “half of my marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half,” are far behind us. New tech and tools provide us elucidating insights into data-driven interactions, conversions, and subsequently customer loyalty. Tech-based media also allow these campaigns and relationships to be measured and managed more effectively. A significant hurdle associated with tech/social/new media, however, remains the scary proposition of what messages can be enabled and propagated rapidly. No one wants to hear that their lemonade sucks.

We all agree that social media offers no panacea for marketers. Here’s what it does do:

• Technology accelerates the consumption and spread of media.
• Conversations and multi-channel media are not new or unique. Technology, however, makes our interactions more transparent, transportable, and enduring. And therefore more influential and authoritative.
• Technology provides new ways to interact with people that may have otherwise never found you.
• Technology-based media both initiates and perpetuates the conversation among and between individuals and people that represent brands. As in other areas of life, follow-through is often more powerful than the first impression.

If your marketing efforts indicate abysmal redemption / conversion / loyalty rates, maybe you should look at the way you’re making and selling your lemonade. More posters and honks aint gonna cut it, junior.
To put a bow on all this, I’ll summarize by suggesting to both marketers interested in social media and little Louie the lemonade mogul:

• Understand that your lemonade better taste good. So good that people gush about it or chime in when others are.
• Understand that some people won’t like your lemonade no matter how hard you try. How will you accommodate or otherwise satisfy these people?
• If you really want to sell some lemonade, you should probably do more than slap up signs and hope that awareness and sales maintain a positive correlation.
• Understand that only a small portion of your customer base is loyal enough and excitable enough to actively engage with your product in socially influential way. i.e. You don’t want BIG numbers, you want meaningful interactions.

The most successful purveyors of lemonade might use word-of-mouth marketing (testimonials, brand ambassadors, guerrilla marketing) to make sure their product breaks through the clutter no matter where they are situated. Interconnected masses can surely drive rapid and extensive awareness, but it is the personal – or trust-based – relationships that create engagement.

For instance: I love all my Sony stuff. So much so that I’d consider myself a Sony bigot of sorts. But I won’t be caught dead playing a ‘viral game’ or responding to an ‘innovative’ video ad unless it engages me in precisely the same way Sony products make my life easier, faster, and more enjoyable. Sony will have nailed marketing with social media when they send me an opportunity [not an 'ad'] that invites me to recruit my friends into the Sony family in exchange for some exclusivity, exceptional value, or genuine entertainment. Presently, I am only passively enamored with my array of Sony gear, quietly waiting to buy something else I think it cool. But that won’t happen until I become actively engaged with the brand again.

What are you doing uniquely to sell your lemonade? How are you deriving benefits from listening and responding to your customers and fans? Media are inherently vocal and social by definition – remember to take advantage of that.

When people ask me what I want to do when I grow up, I can never provide an answer other than “it doesn’t exist yet.”  For the entirety of my career, I’ve pondered the answer to that question and usually responded by creating opportunities on my own.  With the exception of my web / business strategy roles at Norton Healthcare and Yum! Brands, I never had a job I didn’t create out of thin air.  To date I have served in a variety of roles in:

• Information Systems
• Marketing
• Software Engineering
• Creative Services
• Business Development
• Communications / Public Relations

As the nature of business, technology and marketing have changed, I too have maintained interests and skills in those spheres.  Like Jeremiah’s Venn diagram of effective web strategy, I try to explain my “job” in terms of having knowledge and skills in all 3 disciplines (and several more esoteric ones), not just one.  This rarely makes sense to the relatives, career counselors and  the “do one thing and do it well” advisors that seem perpetually confused by my aversion to focusing on just one area of expertise.

A few years ago Gartner let me know that not only was this “versatilist” approach ok, it was seen as a key to future career success.  I felt my stubbornness was somewhat validated even though positions like these are rare in Louisville.  My interest in business strategy had taken a back seat to many of the other creative and technical projects I had been a part of, so I enrolled in U of L’s IMBA program in 2002 to underscore the importance and inherently the skills needed to derive business value from ‘the new economy.’

Had I listened to my career counselors or other parental pundits, I’m sure I’d be an architect or engineer (or ‘doctor’ or ‘lawyer’) right now.  But I dashed all hopes for those scholarships and career path when I opted to go way out of my comfort zone by attending a liberal arts school.  When a conversation traverses topics like bluetooth, blue chip stocks and JetBlue’s marketing, I’m excited to delve into the nuances of each ’sphere’ and also have the ability to abstract an idea that might hit the sweet spot for a new business strategy or opportunity.

Among other self-imposed or attributive labels: I’m a geek, I’m a marketer, I’m an entrepreneur.  These characteristics keep me always craving more information and always questioning “what if?” with the understanding that the best way to predict the future is to create it.  So I’ve hereby labeled myself and this resurrected blog the “Creative Versatilist.”  As I continue to write and think abstractly in this medium, I will assuredly struggle to find a singular voice or set of interests.  But that, to me, is what will hopefully keep it interesting.

Until then, anyone that wants to chat about subnets, subliminal influences in colors, and substitution effects – or all 3 at once – will know where to find me.  Any other professional versatilists out there?

So the landscape of social media seems to change daily: new tools, new tactics, new opportunities. People know me as ‘the social media guy’ already at Yum, so I’m already fielding a variety of interesting questions. One topic that seems to surface most is a version of this: [paraphrased] “so this RSS/YouTube/blogging/Facebook stuff… how do I get more hits and awareness with those things?”

Well I can click the link you sent 100 times and then email the link to my friends with the instructions to follow suit but the point of social media is not hits or awareness. Social media is just one more instrument in the toolkit of business and marketing strategies used to actively engage people. Like remarkable marketing is supposed to. In an environment where tallying ‘hits’ or ‘impressions’ seems to be the primary element of measuring success, I have begun the Sisyphean task of [un]educating many folks about what really matters in today’s climate: engagement, influence, and conversations with those that matter.

Without an overarching business strategy in which objectives and tactics are defined, many companies fall into the ‘me too’ trap of social media in which objectives and tactics do not match or are not articulated at all. In that vein, I’m still learning all there is to know about social media and what it means to brands and businesses. Anyone that claims to be a social media expert should be ignored, in my humble opinion, because we’re all participating in a game that evolves by the minute.

Regardless, I maintain my focus as a business strategist first and foremost. A growing cadre of tech-based communication tools allow me to apply business strategy in new ways via online media outreach, so that brings me back to my original thought: give me some business objectives and I’ll suggest some innovative ways to connect strategy, tactics and results. An example I used recently… just because a screwdriver, antifreeze, and new fuses could all be used to ‘fix a car’, that doesn’t mean I should change a tire with jumper cables. As with anything in business, give me a specific need or problem and I’ll try to solve it in a way that makes dollars and sense.

Engaging consumers of the world’s largest and coolest brands is one of my primary roles these days, so it is imperative to understand what elements of the brand people identify with in order to figure out how they will perceive and participate with media we provide or solicit. Take Jason Falls’ strategy and execution of involving social media with Jim Beam’s sponsorship of Robby Gordon in the Baja 1000 race, for example. His thought leadership captures the essence of the brands and demographics that identify with this event. Fans can track race updates via Twitter, blog-by-phone Utterz, and YouTube videos. I don’t have intimate knowledge of the strategic objectives of Beam and their sponsorship of this race / driver, but by using the tools that parallel the needs and behaviors of Beam and Baja target influencers [note: I didn't say audiences], Jason brings a creative and entertaining solution to a unique opportunity. Will these efforts generate ‘millions of hits’? Unlikely, but they drive and influence the fans of the brands that matter. And those influencers make waves and drive the conversation around the brands with others.

So as I prepare to craft dozens or, more likely, hundreds of new/social media strategies and tactics for brands like KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, I’ll ask myself and my peers repeatedly: who are my influencers and what behavior [read: type of engagement] do I expect from them as a result of this plan? If I fail to define these parameters and anticipated outcomes, I’ve failed as a strategist and we’ve failed as brands to engage our consumers.

With some world-class thinkers and doers on my team and in my sphere of influence, I am confident we’ll someday shed the dependence on ‘hits’ and focus instead on engaging action. …Just as we did for World Hunger Relief Week recently, but that’s another blog bloviation for another day.