I’m a strong believer in the “innovate or die” approach to business.

We’re in an unprecedented age of innovation and change. Not since the industrial revolution has the world experienced such rapid advancements and wholesale change as technology has freed information and enabled incredible leaps in communication.

Over the last few years much of this blog has been dedicated to the changing nature of media and marketing; two areas heavily affected by 21st Century innovation, and it has allowed me to study business models that need to rapidly evolve or become extinct.

But these days innovation is crucial to most industries and communities. The powerhouses of modern business have been the most innovative companies: Google, Apple and Facebook to name just three. They’re now being joined by companies like Groupon (who are innovating around retail), Netflix (innovating around home entertainment) and Zygna (innovating around gaming or micro gaming). While these companies are pushing innovation previous industry leaders in the same categories are dying.

I’ve long believed that the way forward for an old industrial town like Newcastle is not to look at the past, but to embrace the future. While steel-making might have been Newcastle’s past innovation and technology could be it’s future.

Web and mobile innovation could be the path to future prosperity in Newcastle. If ever there was a town that should lobby hard to have the National Broadband Network sooner rather than later, it’s Newcastle. Running high speed broadband cable down the currently dilapidated Hunter Street could enable smart start-ups to reinvent the area as an Innovation Capital.

Cheap rents, great lifestyle and a large University all combine in Newcastle to create a perfect environment to attract talent and foster innovation.

While this vision may be a little way off, there is already a nucleus of innovation in Newcastle. They’re not making a big noise yet but I think they will soon.

And that’s where the Lunaticks Society’s next event comes in. On Tuesday 3 May they’re holding their first Digital Showcase. Its a festival of innovative ideas where presenters will be offered the chance to give an elevator pitch in a 15 minute session to an expert panel of judges and audience of digital enthusiasts, creatives, entrepreneurs and investors.

If you have a great idea you’ve been working on and want to share then contact the Lunaticks to be one of the presenters. If you’re keen to hear from some innovators then roll up and join the audience.

I’m really hoping this will be the catalyst for a new era of innovation in the area; one where businesses begin to realise they must innovate or die.

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3 great rewards, your choice

Three things are essential for modern business marketing, and I’d like to give you at least one of them:

1. A professional online marketing plan

2. Excellent search engine optimisation to be found on Google, Bing and Yahoo

3. Intelligent traffic conversion strategies to turn visits into sales and inquiries

I want to offer you any one of these three marketing essentials (you choose) in return for a tax-deductible donation towards my Tour de Kids fund raising for the Starlight Foundation.

So it’s basically FREE, and you save thousands of dollars for great marketing solutions.

First let me explain the rewards….

My agency Sticky assists medium-to-large organisations to compete successfully online through Inbound Marketing. Along the way we have developed a series of highly efficient and successful services to focus on the individual components of Inbound Marketing:

• social media audits and online marketing plans,

• NLYZR search engine optimisation program

• Sticky CRO – conversion rate optimisation

These services are used in Australia and overseas by leading organisations in the fields of property services, financial services, telecommunications, charities, local government and software providers.

Here are the 3 rewards in detail:

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The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing: How to Attract and Retain Customers and Grow the Bottom Line in the Globally Connected World (See all Marketing Books)

Increasingly marketers are having to accept that social media is here to stay and that they will need to learn how to adapt and thrive to the era of social media marketing. There have been a few very good books published in the last year or so that successfully introduce and explain how modern marketers can compete in an increasingly social world. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s 2010 best-selling Trust Agents is one and now a new book has arrived that is equally worth reading: The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing.

Written by experience US marketers Beverly Macy and Teri Thompson, The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing explains how to take advantage of today’s fluid business environment and develop innovative way to meet market demands.

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social media monetization

There seems to be a lot of action this year around finally monetizing the communities and traffic that have grown around major social media networks. From day one, many have wondered where the revenue would come from amongst all the wonderful free services and networks we enjoy online. In 2011 it appears we’ll find out.

The biggest social platform of all, Facebook, has never been in a rush to monetize, preferring to build the base, grow the connections and steadily accumulate data on its members. Sure, over the last few years they have steadily added advertising which is increasingly targeted due to your Facebook “Likes” and activity. Now Facebook have announced that they are jumping on the group buying bandwagon with Facebook Deals. We heard at Social Media Club Sydney this week that Facebook Deals will be launching in Australia in the 2nd quarter of 2011. I believe you’ll start to see a lot more revenue streams appearing on Facebook soon.

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Google has announced an initiative in partnership with business software firm MYOB to provide free websites for small and medium sized Australian companies. It’s called Getting Aussie Business Online and follows a similar initiative in the UK.

This will probably cause a panic amongst web designers and digital agencies, but in a way it had to come to this and overall may actually be good for the industry.

Already there are plenty of cowboys in the market who seem happy to design and sell websites for ridiculously low prices. In many cases these operators do untold damage to the industry as their sites are poor and the results for the client are unimpressive or negligible. It creates massive scepticism and mistrust amongst customers and perpetuates a belief that the web doesn’t help small business.

The truth is, bad websites don’t help anyone, so the sooner the cut-price cowboys are starved out of the industry the better. Perhaps the Google / MYOB offering will expedite this.

As the owner of a digital agency, am I worried about the Google / MYOB deal? Not at all.

The free website initiative is clearly a way for Google to help grow the overall market, and of course their client base. And having more businesses online with decent websites can only be good for the industry.

I’m yet to see what these sites will be like and how effective they’ll be, but if they’re decent I would have no problem referring smaller businesses to them as a way of introducing them to the web.

The fact remains that for most sites to really succeed they need a steady flow of useful and relevant information. They need to be properly optimised for search. They need to have a clearly conceived traffic conversion strategy. They need to utilise the power of social networks. We call this inbound marketing.

The web these days is about content and connections, not the mere fact that you have a website. I would suggest that 90% of the businesses who launch a free website via Google / MYOB will not do so with a professional strategy but at least they won’t have wasted their money.

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…unless you want to learn some extremely innovative ways to reinvent your marketing.

Dentsu is a Japanese advertising agency that has become one of the largest and most successful in the world. That in itself was news to me. But what was more interesting is how Dentsu have pioneered fascinating cross-communication strategies that resonate strongly in the fragmenting world of modern media and digital ubiquity.It’s all been revealed in a new book called The Dentsu Way by Kotaro Sugyama and Tim Andree.

What got my attention in The Dentsu Way is how this agency doesn’t follow the old reach and frequency, interruption model of advertising, but aims to draw consumers out on their own accord. They try to deliver information with which consumers want to be come involved. It has a lot of similarities with inbound marketing in that regard.

My headline “Do not read this book” is a nod to a famous campaign Dentsu did for a manga publication where their late night TV ads pleaded with viewers not to search for the new title on the internet. Of course everyone then did search and slowly a cat and mouse game played out rewarding those who dug deepest. These fans then spread the word and the buzz and subsequent sales went crazy.

The core of the book explains Dentsu’s Cross-Communication theory and then shows case studies and how you can design your own Cross-Switch strategy. It balances creativity with a data-intensive approach, something that once again should appeal to modern digital agencies.

The Dentsu Way really is a fascinating read and makes a good argument for the merging of traditional advertising agencies with digital (as opposed to the current either or approach) so that a truly integrated approach can run through a campaign.

So whatever you do, don’t buy this book…..I’d rather keep these ideas for myself.

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Trust in government and business has reached heights similar to that before the GFC, however Australian trust of the media trails most industries and is amongst the lowest in the world according to a major report by Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm.

According to the survey, only 32% of the Australian  public trusts the media, compared to a global average of 49%. Only the USA and U.K had lower media trust than Australia.

Edelman say that “Transparency, honesty and trust are key reputation attributes for Australians”. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be as evident in the media sector which ranked behind banks, insurance and financial services for trust.

The survey suggests that “Search is King: Online search engines the ‘go-to’ source of information about a company”:

Australians are using search engines first when sourcing information about an organisation (35%), followed by online news outlets (22%).

Company websites are now also seen as an important information source, ranking third (16%).

Although Australians are going online first for information, they view traditional media sources such as business magazines (27%), newspapers (23%) and radio (23%), along with online search (27%), as the most trusted (“Trust a great deal”) sources of information about a company.

More survey details here:

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State of the Internet 2010

Here’s a comprehensive set of numbers that illustrate the state of the internet at the end of 2010. Source: Pingdom

Email

• 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 480 million – New email users since the year before.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
• 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
• 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
• 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

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A friend of mine in the real estate industry just sent me a link to the following video from a Queensland firm, asking my opinion of it as a marketing device. Holy cow, talk about sexing up a staid industry!!!

Sure, the guys involved say it’s tongue in cheek but they clearly wanted to create some buzz.

What do you think, is it smart marketing, plain sleazy or a welcome innovation for a conservative industry? Post your comments and let the debate begin.

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John Laws has plugged the golden microphone back in at 2SM

While digital radio continues to make inroads into the media landscape, in a stroke of retro genius Bill Caralis has lured possibly Australia’s most analogue announcer back on air. John Laws plugged his golden microphone in today at 2SM’s Sydney studios to begin broadcasting to the Supernetwork stations after 2 years in retirement.

It’s strange marriage that just might work. Certainly Laws has nothing to lose in this comeback. 2SM isn’t currently surveyed in Sydney after last being measured at a sub-1% audience, so it will be a long time before anyone can actually determine whether he’s pulling an audience. If they decide to re-join the ratings race any increase will be seen as a victory…and surely they can rate more than “margin of error” with Laws on the roster.

The bigger win will be across Caralis’s regional AM network where ratings have slipped in the morning shift over the last two years. There’s a strong chance the return of Laws will produce a lift in ratings, even if the average audience will as old as the man himself (75).

However you suspect this game isn’t about ratings, but rather network sponsorship deals. And Laws has always been good for sponsors. Supernetwork sales teams should be rubbing their hands together for a while now as they bask in the warm glow of the golden mic.

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