Now more than ever consumers are purchasing with a purpose. In the fourth annual Edelman goodpurpose® Study, experts indicate that what consumers want goes beyond just form and function to include a positive community impact.

As a business leader, are you doing the best job possible to develop sales if you focus on innovation, design, and brand loyalty? Not really. According to the study, nearly half (47%) of respondents said that social purpose ranks higher than brand loyalty and design and innovation as a purchase motivator. In addition, another recent PRWeek/Barkley Cause Survey suggests that a full 88 percent of American men say it’s crucial for a brand to support a social cause.

When business leaders think about how to engage their customers and communities around social causes, social media presents an ideal vehicle. Social media channels offer powerful opportunities for organizations to bring these purpose branding and marketing strategies to life. Exposure through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, etc. engages existing and potential customers, increases transparency, and solicits feedback. Yet with this relatively new frontier of branding and marketing opportunities comes many questions.

CEO’s are asking themselves: What are the leading companies doing? What should you keep in mind as you launch your next (or first) social media campaign? How do you make it effective, relevant, and consistent with organizational objectives?

Ultimately, the recipe for success centers on creating compelling content, building “living” campaigns and acting with creativity. Industry innovators like GE, Pepsico and Intel recognize that people want to buy from responsible companies and engage with purpose-driven brands. To achieve success, they go beyond simply communicating the social causes they support through a blog or a Facebook page. Their messaging resonates authenticity, directly connects to their brand and business, and incites action in their customer base.

When Anvil Knitwear, for example, convinced Disney to use its organic cotton knitwear line for all of its branded t-shirts, it turned to social media to communicate the significance of these efforts. Anvil operates a website called Track My T which allows younger customers to see the evolution of their tshirts from farm to retailer. They also have posted this video on YouTube which educates consumers about the negative impact of pesticides on farmers and the environment, further reinforcing their leadership position in organic and sustainable apparel.

Secondly, successful organizations treat social media as a living campaign, as opposed to traditional marketing where companies simply dispense ideas and hope for the best. Social media’s immediate connection with customers humanizes brands and provides a platform for engagement. To achieve a sustained community and build long-term relationships, companies listen to, track and solicit feedback carefully and towards a purpose. The GE Ecomagination project shows this best practice in action. The initiative calls for stakeholders to submit their ideas, inventions and strategies around clean energy. The winning proposals receive up to $200 million in funding, business strategy evaluation with GE technical teams, and opportunities to leverage GE’s extensive network of customer relationships.

Finally, social media offers many opportunities to interact that rely on creative thinking and not necessarily on a large advertising budget. One recent campaign organized by Keep a Child Alive, musician Alicia’s Keys’ foundation, featured celebrity social media “deaths” whereby celebrities stopped tweeting until fans donated $1 million to support AIDS-related causes in Africa and India. The campaign raised the money in less than a week and helped generate awareness through a creative and unique social media undertaking. Though not every organization is backed by the star power of a Grammy winner, every company has the potential to come up with inspired ideas and engage their customers to help those ideas take flight.

As a leader, how do you approach these issues? Are you sure that your social media strategy is really innovative, driving not only brand awareness but also sales and customer retention? By creating compelling content, building living campaigns and acting creatively, companies can leverage both their social media and social purpose strategies, enabling them to build meaningful relationships with their customers. It is these relationships, built on the power of social media, which ultimately drive sales and facilitate sustained success for a brand.

The results of a 2009 survey of top SEO professionals highlighted how important links are for good search engine rankings. Out of the top 5 ranking factors reveled in this survey, 4 are related to building links to your websites pages.

Why are Links so important?

The idea behind PageRank is that if a page is important, other web pages will link to it. The more important the linking page is itself, the more weight (“link juice”) that link would have. This system works amazingly well, instantly bringing up relevant pages for almost any search, without giving benefit to “keyword stuffing” and other attempts to trick the search engine into ranking a page higher. It works so well that Google is no longer the only search engine that is shifting to a link-based algorithm.

Quality vs. Quantity

Link building is not about building to a higher number than your competition. The quality of the links attained for your website is extremely important today.  Increase traffic to your site via blogs, press releases, article publishing, and directory submissions. Not only do these links provide additional avenues for people to navigate to your site, but these links give the site a growing authority for search engine rankings.

Link Building Techniques

Article Submission – Publishing Content on external sites.

One of the best ways to get links on the web pointing back to your site is by developing external resources yourself. Writing original articles and getting them published on sites such as Ezine is a good way to promote your site with quality backlinks.

Blog/Forum Comments – Comment to get a link.

Today many blogs topics and forums are on the web. Several of them allow for additional comments to be added to the authors post. When leaving a comment or participating in the online discussion, we can generate a link back to your site. Some sites allow comments to have links, or setting up a profile then adding a comment will link back to your site.

Contextual One-way Links – Keyword links from high PR sites.

Getting links from these sources is not easy, but very valuable. Negotiate PR2 – PR5 home page links that point back to your site with the proper anchor text for your keyword goals for the life of our link-building campaign.

Social Bookmarking & Social Media Mentions – Social site links

There are several social bookmarking sites on the web today that varying in popularity. Google has their own which is becoming more popular. Today, the most people use Delicious.com as their preferred bookmarking site.  The main social link exchange site today is Twitter. This site is not the personal update site many perceive. Search functionality, hash tags, RSS feeds, followers and several 3rd party applications has made twitter a great way to contribute online in under 140 characters.  Develop profiles and get site links socially bookmarked and indexed so search engines will see these as backlinks.

Ad hoc Link Building

Our team at Sweet Spot Marketing deems ad hoc links as important, but only as needed. The link building methods mentioned below can be priced in addition to the normal link building, or we can fold it into the current monthly budget by removing a percentage from the normal link building strategy.

Directory Submission – Submitting your sites URL to a directory site.

We recommend just two directories today. The DMOZ and Yahoo are still worthy links and getting into each requires special considerations. Google regards these as good directory links, so we do the same.

Press Releases – Directing news to subscribed media members.

An online news release, written and directed at members of the media for the purpose of announcing something claimed as having news value.  Submitting a press release thru a site like PRweb, will get it indexed by search engines and hosted permanently for ranking consideration. It will also be sent to top news sites, and distributed via RSS to over 250,000 subscribers which include bloggers, journalist and consumers.  Due to the very nature of this medium, we suggest PR distribution only when the company has something news worthy to say. When we submit a press release, we build backlinks and traffic to the site with today’s best practices in mind.

For more information, please contact the experts at Sweet Spot Marketing for their insights on Link Building Strategies.

What you say and they say matters…regardless of what the source. In today’s digital age, what is said online seems to matter most.

Social media has had explosive growth as a “trustworthy source” because so many individuals look to social media in their personal life, work life, and everyday life. From Facebook to Twitter, and LinkedIn to Evernote, we’re constantly surrounded by family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances that rely heavily on social media sources as their primary sources for information and relevant content. So, the next important question to ask is: Will this be the end of traditional media, and is it dead? “Dead” might not be the word. “Dying” might best reflect what’s truly happening with traditional media outlets.

There are many advantages to this shift. Utilizing new media (social media), gives us (the consumer) the opportunity to see a continuous movement or “flow” of information and relevant content. Gone are the days where we have to wait to get the latest, breaking story from any one source. Now, we’re inundated with opportunities to know what has happened, or what’s happening, sometimes, potentially before it’s even happened. This is a huge advantage for us (consumers), as well as for brands and businesses, large and small, that want to capitalize on an opportunity to speak directly to us, and create a brand connection that resonates and works. Whether specific to a review, or more generalized as a dialogue between friends, social media is alive… it shifts and shapes as needed, and morphs to the needs, wants and desires of our changing hearts. Often times, it creates a potential need, want or desire to help us live a more fullfilled life. This is a major plus that most traditional media outlets can’t satisfy.

According to Simon Mainwaring of simonmainwaring.com, the business of social transformation, “Technology is teaching us to be human again’”. In another social media brand article, he suggests “Used correctly these tools can be transformative within an organization both inside and outside the company walls.”

Disadvantages? Sometimes, too much content moving rapidly can become saturated. The key to all of this is creating connection. If a brand or business can specifically speak to the consumer, through these new social media channels, then they can escape the mundane overflow of information, and rise to the top.

In targeting different generational cohorts, brands and businesses can rest assured that even though they may not be receiving this information “directly”, it’s quite likely that their younger grandchild, niece, nephew, or neighbor will be spreading the word to them “indirectly”. Knowing that traditional media outlets (i.e., CNN, etc…) are big advocates of social media channels, confirming the validity of these sources for information, there’s absolutely no doubt that they’ll still be able to reach a fair percentage of listeners, decision makers, and advocates of their product, service or offering. Younger people are much more comfortable with being online, reading and writing reviews for products, services, etc… because they live for change (see Gen Y in the Workplace). They adapt easily. The majority are content connoisseurs and brand enthusiasts, ready for the next best thing, or new sensation…regardless of what that “thing” might be. At the end of the day, they want to be on the cusp of what’s new and exciting because it matters to them, their peers and their generation. They (usually) don’t hide behind walls, because there really is no need. They’re (usually) honest and direct, regardless of whether they’re online or offline. This is inherent to them, as they’re growing, learning, developing, maturing, and most of all…being receptive to change as change happens. Obviously, there’s a huge gap between younger and older markets, for this very reason.

Social media, and our online interactions, might not just be a “trend”, which is here today and gone tomorrow, but might rather be the beginning of something amazing. Econsultancy.com writer Jake Hird: states, “70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog”…and “38% of bloggers post brand or product review”.

Utilizing social media is truly a way for us (consumers and brands) to interact in a space outside of the space we’ve always known. To connect on a new level, a new dimension. To bring truth to a product or service (prior to this outlet) that would mostly hide beyond the walls of traditional advertising, or like approaches, to sell such a product, service, or offering. Most of all, it’s (social media) just as much a living thing as we are. It’s agile and adaptive, and feeds off of our interactions and movements. It’s truly biotic.

The future of social media is unknown. What is known is the impact it’s made to date, and the unimaginable possibilities that wait ahead.

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Foursquare’s partnership with Starbucks is giving the game even more  mainstream exposure but also leading to the kinds of stakeholder complications I discuss in my recent posting about Facebook.  The dilemma outlined in a recent article is this: Starbucks is offering a special reward ($1 off a Frappucino) to the mayors of its individual establishments.  However, what happens when the mayor of your local Starbucks is the one serving you your coffee?

Well, some are crying foul.  Employees, they say, should not be allowed to participate in promotional contests.  A valid point, but the complication comes from the fact that foursquare is not a Starbucks platform or even a platform developed for marketing or promotional purposes.

This harkens me back to the question I asked Dennis Crowley when I first heard him speak during Social Media Week in NYC. What, I asked, was his plan in developing 4Sq?  What was the history and the intention?  I asked because there seemed to be real monetization potential for this platform, that is strikingly uncharacteristic of predecessors such as Facebook, Twitter and even Google, which did not have a monetization plan for the first five years.

So I wondered whether the Crowley crew had these brand partnerships, e.g., Bravo,  in mind when they developed the tool.  Though Dennis deferred my question to a later conversation, my general feel from what he did say is that the application was created more with the users in mind than as a monetizable tool.  If I remember correctly, the main impetus was that since Dodgeball had been sold to Google, he and his friends lacked that kind of mobile tool to communicate and coordinate.  Moreover, as he stated during this week’s Bartiromo interview, the full monetization plan is still evolving.  And, in my opinion, it is evolving from several directions: (1) the power of the data (2) the simple promotional opportunities (3) the strategic partnerships.

Returning to the coffee cup at hand, Foursquare is not a Starbucks platform.  Rather, Starbucks is offering a benefit that is meant to enhance the foursquare experience and, in return, foursquare is providing a targeted communications vehicle and a platform that makes this special offer logistically possible.

But when real money starts to be part of the game – I believe that one of the big box CE retailers is offering a sizable incentive and Dennis, himself, just posted on Facebook that a lobster restaurant (@ Luke’s Lobster) is offering a 10% discount – things change.

4Sq today depends to a great degree on the honor system.  The team has had to implement some anti-cheating controls lately such as preventing people from getting points or badges or mayorships when they check into a venue too far away from where their phone says they actually are, but it’s still based on fair play.

But this is not the crucial point – to my mind.  The fact that the employees at SBs are checking in and, potentially, becoming mayor is not foul play at all. It’s the original intention of the game, to let your network know where you are.  Preventing employees from checking in or even becoming mayor changes the nature of the game and the meaning of the titles and badges.  I am interested to see how this unfolds as new people are introduced to 4Sq as a commercial – promotional tool first rather than vice versa.

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A recent “AdWeek” article observed that, “digitally centric agencies like R/GA are adding more traditional brand-building capabilities while TBWA and BBDO are trying to apply digital to their orgs.”

This article prompted a student of business to pose the following question on LinkedIn: “Who has it harder traditional agencies or digital ones?”

This was my response:

Full service, traditional agencies have longer histories and potentially tighter relationships with major advertisers. Digital agencies have deeper and wider technical skills and experience, e.g., building a rich media site or social media campaign. It will be very interesting to see how things play out, and I think, as I write this and look at the names you have listed above, it may be a case by case situation, i.e., some digital agencies are strong enough to make the transition, and some creative agencies are forward looking enough to make inroads.

One thing that I think both benefits and limits digital agencies is that many of these agencies grew out of the direct agencies of the large media conglomerates. While test and learn, measurement and optimization are important, and while digital realms provide a bevy of data to work with, that kind of mindset can be limiting as the interactive space becomes more and more “upper funnel” – with more opportunities for branding and truly breakthrough creative thinking.

All that said, what is happening on the ground right now is that
(a) creative agencies are seeking to hire talent with interactive backgrounds, particularly from top digital agencies and
(b) both digital and traditional agencies are expanding and changing out their strategy teams. Several major agencies have new strategy heads as of the beginning of 2010.

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If you’ve been using social networks for the past few years, you’ve seen how the buzz has shifted from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter and back to Facebook. These seemingly organic shifts between virtual worlds have probably left you wondering what might be next on the horizon. Well, many experts in the digital and social arenas have been keeping a close eye on Foursquare.

What is Foursquare you ask? In short, it is a location-based social networking game designed for mobile users to compete with their friends socially in the real world. The Foursquare mobile application uses your phone’s GPS function to locate your whereabouts when you “check-in” through the app at different locations. When users check-in at their favorite restaurant or nightclub for example, their friends are notified and the user can earn points or unlock badges depending on when, where and how often they check in. When a user checks in to a specific location more than any other user, they are known as the Mayor of that location.

How could this change the face of social media marketing? Foursquare offers the unique opportunity for brands to track and reward visitors offline who frequent their real world venues. It’s like a customer using a frequent diner card at any location and letting all of their friends know that they were there. Advertisers now have the ability to attract their most loyal customers with incentives, knowing that their dedication to the brand will be published for all their friends to see.

Starbucks is one of the largest and most recent brands to partner with Foursquare. Back in March the coffee giant began experimenting with Foursquare as a customer loyalty tool. After a visitor has checked in 5 times at any Starbucks location, they can now unlock the “Barista Badge”. Social Media Blog Mashable.com writes, “With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience.” Advertisers like Starbucks have been dreaming of location-based advertising on mobile phones and it seems as though Foursquare is now providing such a platform.

Some might wonder how an application that tracks their whereabouts could ever become popular. It sounds too much like an invasion of privacy, right? It also sounds like you actually have to leave your home to participate (might be more difficult for the workaholics and family folks). In addition, you have to remember to check-in if you want to earn points or badges. That’s a legitimate concern for the growth potential of Foursquare but consider this; before MySpace, no one considered posting pictures of themselves online for everyone to see; and before Facebook no one considered posting their inner feelings in a status update; and before Twitter no one considered tweeting their every move throughout their vacation. Social networks have changed the way we interact and what we consider private; especially for teens and twenty-somethings. Privacy is no longer something to maintain, but something that you must reveal when you’re a celebrity, at least among your 300 closest friends.

At this point, Foursquare seems poised for huge success. As long as major brands keep joining the bandwagon, Foursquare can sit back and let them do the advertising as they see their user base skyrocket. This has grabbed the attention of some major digital players such as Yahoo, who are reportedly attempting to buy the social platform for more than $80 million. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com suggests that Foursquare would be making a huge mistake to sell at this point. He notes how Yahoo is where “startups go to die” and that founders often “leave in disgust.” At the same time, Facebook and Twitter are poised to make their way into location-based networking which should have Foursquare worried. It looks like founder Dennis Crowley will have some very difficult decisions to make in the near future. We’ll be keeping our eye on Foursquare and look forward to discussing their progress.

Read the 2010 social media report:

Crowdsourcing is rooted in democracy, where all voices are heard equally. It is a system where people have a say, to speak freely and join together in collective progress. blur Group, a crowdsourcing agency, recently published an article that outlines effective crowdsourcing initiatives and draws interesting democratic parallels to government:

‘Volunteer Crowdsourcing’: the most obvious. Frequently used for gathering dynamic views, reviews, opinion and feedback. People often ask how Crowdsourced views differ from market research. Market research is a closed, tightly scripted and statistical process. Crowdsourced views are more dynamic, fluid, open, conversational and community enhancing. The former is more limiting and allows for little spontaneity or out of the box thinking. The downside to the latter is that feedback is harder to control and the crowd can get ‘out of hand’.

Volunteer Crowdsourcing can work with any size of crowd – from a handful of niche enthusiasts to mass audience crowd initiatives. The key is recruiting the right fit crowd for the right initiative.

Volunteer Crowdsourcing could be extended to public services that specific segments of the public will get passionate about. For instance Crowdsourcing artists to develop public art schemes. Street art is an obvious case study. But volunteers could also be used to help with garbage clearance initiatives, re-cycling, clearing public spaces, mapping, policing, supporting school programmes and more. There is almost no end to the ways in which volunteer crowds could be used – the key to success lies in their effective recruitment, organization and the clarity/appeal of the mission.

Contest Driven Crowdsourcing: the safest form. Content based Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular for one off, often commercial, projects. The idea is that you gather together a specialist crowd, for example techies, and have them compete to develop a new IT system. The provider(s) of the best solution wins the prize. Contest driven Crowdsourcing can be used for developing new IT systems, Web sites, innovation policies, architect drawings, public building design, public art commissions and more.

Contest driven Crowdsourcing must have a clear and detailed brief, a focused, specialist crowd, a Crowdsourcing Web platform and a prize that is both relevant and commensurate in value to the effort required – successful contestants should also get government backed PR – it will help keep the quality of entrants up for future contests. Successful contest driven Crowdsourcing is all about tight management and inspiring the best to compete!

Expertsourcing: the most sophisticated. Expertsourcing or Select Sourcing is one of the most advanced forms of Crowdsourcing. It is also the newest. Governments could use it to gather up focused, expert crowds from a variety of key disciplines within both the private and public sectors to come together in a more structured and permanent system to solve ‘bigger issues’. Expertsourcing requires that the experts either get paid for their advice, ideas, policies or creative inputs or have the opportunity to get involved in the implementation. At they very least they must be given ‘real’ accolades.

Expertsourcing could be cost effectively used to widen the number of advisors in government and move from the highly opinionated ‘celebrity’ advisor or hard-to-justify big consultancy with monster fees (and slow delivery records) to a more sophisticated, democratic, real-time and fluid spread of expert opinions makers and thinkers. The key to Expertsourcing is the make-up or mix of the crowd and its tight and inspired leadership, mission and rolling achievements. Access to the implementers is also critical to success and continuing engagement.

Crowdsourced Funding: good for charitable giving. Given how government budgets are getting slashed throughout the Western world Crowdsourced funding could prove to be a great stop gap mechanism for raising small mounts of cash from large amounts of people over the Internet to support very specific initiatives. It could support both domestic social change programs as well as targeted foreign priorities.

Crowdsourcing could change the way in which we are governed. It could even return us to a more open, involved form of democracy that I believe most electorates are screaming for. It will though take one bold leader to make it happen. Turn jargon and buzz into specific policies and programmes. Time to step beyond the spin?

To read more about governments and crowdsourcing, go to blurMarketing, a part of blur Group, a leader in crowdsourcing.

blur Group is the leader in focused Crowdsourcing. blur’s Crowds of creative talent power its Web Marketplaces offering buyers of creative products and services unprecedented choice, value and flexibility. blur’s talented communities are made-up of  designers, artists, marketing campaigns and writers.

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Here’s the deal. Instead of handing over your hard earned cash to a third party (the retailer), your money is invested into a designer’s new collection and in return, your investment (a minimum of $50) will help keep their business afloat. In exchange, your investment is exchanged for credits which are used to purchase items from the said collection.

Daniel Gulati, Fashion Stake’s joint-founder, chief executive and a student at Harvard Business School, believes his model removes the consumer’s choice away from the hands of a team of executives. Instead, the public has the opportunity to establish a more personal relationship with their favored designers and a chance to provide financial clout for items that they would like produced en masse.

“We think this can be a real game changer,” Gulati told Reuters. “What we’re basically doing is redirecting the margin to fans and cutting out the retailer altogether.”

As the company slogan states: Support a designer. Shape the creative process. Share in clothing and cash. It sounds simple enough.

In a discussion with fashion website, Styleite, fellow Fashion Stake founder Vivian Weng said that the ‘creative process’ will be a “delicate balance” that will involve a careful two-way communication between the designer and the customer.

The company says that all the designers involved with Fashion Stake will have a solid understanding of the production processes involved in the fashion industry and have had their work sold to at least one top retailer. In theory, the blend of fashion expertise, good business sense and direct consumer feedback should bode well for Fashion Stake.

So is this a new and innovative way that will ‘democratize fashion’?

For all of the hype surrounding the September 2010 launch of the Fashion Stake website, the idea is not entirely new. For instance, ‘Catwalk Genius’, founded in June 2007, has adopted a similar model. Reporting on Catwalk Genius for The Wall Street Journal in March 2009, Andrea Ordanini said:

“Aspiring designers sell samples of their work on the site. Customers can invest in designers they like in increments of £10 ($14), plus a £1-a-share processing fee. When a designer amasses ($70,000), the company says it will use the money to help the designer develop and sell a new line.”

The business model even has a specific term, according to Ordanini- ‘Crowd Funding’.

Crowd Funding, as defined by blogger Nick Smith:

“It’s based around using the internet to build a much larger group of private investors. It’s a shift to a much more transparent form of investment (normal Venture Capitalism is very secretive). With Crowdfunding everything goes into the public domain.”

Crowd Funding has already been used as a way to infiltrate a section of the music industry, with websites such as SellABand working along similar lines to the aforementioned fashion sites. By working at grassroots level, the consumer has a greater affiliation to the artist/designer/musician or suchlike. But can it work effectively in the world of design and fashion?

As Huffington Post blogger Eric Gaskins points out, professional designers may not appreciate the level of scrutiny and input provided by random outsiders. He says:

“A designer’s mission is to create something the public wants or needs before they even know it. If suggestions are part of the mix, they are coming from a Creative Director, a Buyer for a store or a trusted colleague. Information from a stranger, though kind enough to pay in advance for merchandise down the road, is not necessarily the voice a designer is likely to take as gospel.”

There are a few further potential stumbling blocks that Fashion Stake will need to address before their reported September launch date.

First, pricing will prove key for the designers. It’s all very well offering ‘credits’ in a designer’s collection, but only if the items within the collection are relatively affordable. Designer prices are notoriously expensive- but blowing the consumer out of the water on price is probably self-defeating, no matter how quirky or novel the website first appears.

The second problem may lie in the murmurings which question the legality of running such a company. Jeff Nolan, the author of Enterprise Irregulars, says:

“My first thought upon reading about Fashion Stake was that it can’t possibly be legal… it doesn’t matter what you call the quid-pro-quo for an investment, whether equity or credits it is still an investment regulated by securities act and the SEC.”

That said, any business that attempts to break up the cliquey nature of the fashion industry should be applauded. In the age of the so-called Web 2.0, the Harvard Business School pair of Gulati and Weng have recognised the importance of social media, and, more importantly, the growing need to develop tighter relations and dialogues with the consumer.

With the removal of the middleman, the designer gets a greater share of their profit, and the consumer has greater access and influence over the proceeding season’s designs. As with all start-ups, there are ifs, buts and maybes that will need to be addressed before one can say whether Fashion Stake is the revolutionary business that will really take off in a big way.

Nevertheless, if the legalities can be ironed out, the company’s principles are intriguing and their ambition to try and shake up the fashion industry is truly admirable.

To read more about fashion crowdsourcing, go to blurMarketing, we are part of blur Group, a leader in crowdsourcing.

Paul Bannister, CEO of the International Marketing Council of South Africa says:

“With the world’s eyes upon it as host of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, South Africa is seeking to establish itself as a competitive and relevant nation brand. We’re excited about the potential for social media channels to generate greater discourse and narrative about our brand from people who have experienced or researched our special place in the world.”

Current and aspiring creative professionals, digital media buffs, South African citizens and expatriates, and anyone with a lust for travel to Africa, are invited to come up with inventive ways to produce a fresh and evocative message about a country that has gone from tragedy to triumph in less than two decades.

“We’re looking for inspired messaging and out-of-the-box advertising executions that capture and convey the essence, attributes and qualities of Brand South Africa,” noted Donovan Neale-May, the Executive Director of the CMO Council.

The unique creative challenge asks participants to consider economic and political characteristics of South Africa along with the cultural dynamics of the ubuntu philosophy and international icons like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela when producing their work. Contest entry information including a creative brief, background on the contest assignment, and links to South African resources are available on the Get Wildly Creative About South Africa user-generated advertising contest page.

“Some of the world’s most recognizable brands have used our platform and engaged our creative community to produce advertising for consumer and business to business campaigns, and we’re excited to be a partner in this innovative approach to nation branding with South Africa,” said Wil Merritt, CEO of Zooppa.com.

$20,000 in cash and prizes – donated by SA Tourism, in-country partners and creative technology solution providers — will be awarded to the top submissions for video, graphic design and online banners. Winning entrants will have their work showcased globally to the CMO Council’s 5,000 members who control more than $150 billion in annual marketing spend and recognized at a special IMC-hosted reception in New York City.

Zooppa is the world’s largest source of user-generated advertising. With a community of more than 57,000 people, Zooppa offers brands an innovative model for developing creative advertising, building word-of-mouth and gaining consumer insights.

BIG, all-encompassing websites could be as redundant as the Lesser Spotted Floppy Disk if the future of digital marketing continues to fragment and accelerate campaigning efforts to the realms of Twitter, Facebook et al.

That’s the view of Mitch Joel, on his blog ‘Six Pixels of Separation’. While Joel falls short of writing a full scale obituary to mark ‘The End of Big Website Builds’, he recognises that the direction of digital marketing will be focused in strategising across a wide range of down-sized media platforms, in order to form connections with the target audience. He says:

“The ‘game’ used to be about always driving people back to your own, controlled, website, and the truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it.”

Social interaction is already increasingly important- and the best way to determine enthusiasm for a product or campaign is to actually engage with the customer. The art of grabbing a megaphone and making a very loud noise about something is very much a hit-and-miss approach. Anyone who has ever watched The Apprentice USA could tell you that. Yes Mr Trump. Yes indeed.

Is it the end for the BIG website? Possibly- but perhaps the sharpening of knives remains premature.  In the foreseeable future, pattern shifts suggest that social networking will increasingly swarm through the middle-market and reach out to the large group of reluctant technophobes. Some though, will be quite happy to stick with the status quo for now. The home page IS the brand, and micro-models dilute the message they are trying to distribute.

Certain businesses are well suited to BIG websites and are more likely to adapt and tailor their current plan to accommodate the latest technology such as the iPad and the bitty nature of its applications.

Companies, such as Amazon, will retain huge amounts of data on their main site because the brand commands authority and will continue to be the welcoming doorway that greets online window shoppers for the foreseeable future.  Nevertheless, it’s likely that the latest products will be be increasingly marketed through fragmented sources such as fan pages on Facebook, with an option for the customer to buy directly from the page.

Having said that, come 2020, and when the inevitable ‘I love the decade’ review airs on our standard 52-inch digital HD televisions, maybe we will all have a laugh at the by-gone era of the BIG website, the reserved attitudes towards Twitter and how we once squashedasmanyideasaspossibleontoahomepage.

To read more about future of digital brands, go to blurMarketing, we are part of blur Group, a leader in crowdsourcing.

Image by Michal Zacharzewski from Stock.Xchng