The Engaged Consumer

During my time at interactive conference, South by Southwest (SXSW), I had the opportunity to do a few interviews. The one below conducted by fellow Social Media Club advisory board member, Deb Micek, speaks to how to be an influencer or one that brings values to relationships. During the interview (2 minutes), I talk about the importance of:

1. Introducing everyone -- never leave people out of the conversation. You'd be surprised who doesn't know whom.
2. Being a content creator, regardless of which channel you use (photo, video, audio or written).

What are your recommendations on how to be a good influencer?

About nine months ago, I started a weekly podcast called the Quick-n-Dirty show with my friend and co-host, Jennifer Leggio (Jennifer is a blogger for ZDNet). Jennifer and I take turns recapping the shows on my personal blog and Jennifer's ZDNet blog but my colleague, Beth Lopez, recently convinced me that I should be cross-posting my re-caps here. If you'd like to see more recaps, you can go here.

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It's been a few weeks since my podcast partner in crime, Jennifer Leggio, and I have been able to do a Quick-n-Dirty podcast together. For two weeks in a row, travel prevented me from joining her on our weekly show. Fortunately, we had a couple of more than capable substitutes in Brian Solis (author and principal of FutureWorks) and Greg Matthews, director of innovation at Humana. Write ups from the shows with Brian and Greg can be found here and here on Jennifer's ZDNet blog.

This week, Jennifer and I were back in the saddle again with me broadcasting live from Jackson Hole, WY (yes, I took one for the team). We had an action packed show starting with our featured social network of the week, Hollrr. Neither Jennifer or I had had much of chance to play with Hollrr but saw some decent potential in this site that Mashable likens to "Foursquare for product discovery" (full review here). Both Jennifer and I appreciated Hollrr's off-the-shelf integration with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and I personally look forward to getting product recommendations from friends and connections. Oh yeah, they have a pretty cool logo too.

Next up was our featured guest (and former "Twitterer of the week,") Simon Mainwaring. If you don't know Simon, you should. Officially, he is a branding consultant, advertising creative director, blogger, author and speaker. A former Nike creative at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, and worldwide creative director for Motorola at Ogilvy, he now consults for brands and creative companies that are re-inventing their industries. During this week's show, Simon shared some fascinating updates from a recent trip he took to the Middle East as a guest of the Brookings Institute. The focus was on social media and foreign policy, two disciplines that traditionally don't share the same space. I won't pretend to do Simon's interview justice so just this one time, I'm MANDATING that you listen to at least Simon's portion of the show (starts about 7 mins in and runs for aproximately 25 minutes).

Speaking of "Twitterers of the week," this week's choice was principal of The Community Roundtable (and close friend), Jim Storer. As I mentioned during the show, nobody has done a better job at taking community management skills to Twitter than Jim. Regularly mixing helpful tips, humor, love of bacon and Red Sox commentary into his stream, Jim is a "must add" to anyone's Twitter follow list irrespective of what industry they are in.

Last but not least, our point/counterpoint focused on one of Jennifer's recent blog posts, Twitter: Becoming Nothing Special. Jennifer's post theorizes that the recent announcement of Yahoo's partnership with Twitter pushes them from "new shiny object" into the merely "ordinary" category. While Jennifer didn't see this as all bad, she wondered aloud if this might hurt Twitter's future potential. Taking the opposing side of this issue, I argued that this is exactly what Twitter (and social media) need. Making Twitter and other social networks like "electricity" -- something we don't ever even think about in spite of the critical role it plays in our daily lives -- is a good thing. To me, this means that it's so ingrained in our daily lives, personal and professional, that we can't live without it.

Looking forward to next week's show, Jennifer and I will switch places and I will be working with friend and founder of Oneforty, Laura Fitton, as my guest host. Jennifer will be attending the RSA Conference and thus will be out of pocket for this week's Quick-n-Dirty. I'm sure she'll want to listen to the show (as will you). Fortunately for her, our shows are archived here and on iTunes (search on "quickndirty").

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled, The Start of Something Bigger? It came on the heels of Ants Eye View's announcement that they had just joined forces with authors/consultants, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. Then last week white label community provider, Jive Software, announced that they had purchased listening platform, Filtrbox. All the while I watched with interest knowing that we had some big news of our own to announce in early January.

Let's start with the news since I know that nobody likes to be left hanging. Today, I'm  proud to announce that Powered Inc is launching a full-service social media agency through the acquisition of industry leaders crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. The reason we're so excited about this is because we feel that we are now better positioned to help brands (and their agencies) define and deliver comprehensive social media strategies that integrate with their traditional marketing mix. How shall we do this you ask? By leveraging tools and tactics such as Facebook, Twitter, blogger outreach, events, communities and mobile applications of course.

We felt like it was important to take this approach because up until now, marketers have lacked a "go to" resource that could meet all of their social needs. This does not diminish any of the smart, driven and successful other boutiques and consultancies out there that help their clients with their social initiatives but rather that none of them truly provide the end-to-end solutions necessary to meet all of a marketers needs -- at least not with scale. While this may not have been a big deal in 2009 when the entire economy took a mulligan, it will be in 2010 as social media moves from experiment to mission critical. Okay, I know you've probably got tons of questions. I'm going to try to preemptively answer a few below but you there will also be several opportunities to join us live this week:

• Today (01/11/10) on Twitter at 1:00 PM CT for a live press conference (hashtag, #powered)
• Tomorrow (01/12/10) on JaffeJuice: New Marketing Podcast.
• Thursay (01/14/10) on the Quick-n-Dirty Podcast show.

As for the answers, here goes...

Why didn’t Powered just develop these additional social media capabilities? We thought long and hard about the “build vs. buy” strategy, but in the end, we realized that we would dramatically increase our speed to market and add some serious talent (not to mention about 50 new brand relationships) to the Powered team by moving forward with these acquisitions.

Who are Crayon, Drillteam, StepChange?

• Crayon brings extensive experience as a strategic social marketing consultancy to the table. They work with Fortune 1000 brands to develop strategies that positively impact customer relationships through the integration of continuous online conversations into traditional marketing programs. Crayon President Joseph Jaffe and his entire team will join Powered’s robust staff of marketers, content creators and social media leaders, with crayon and Powered immediately merging their capabilities.
• Drillteam is an engagement marketing agency specializing in earned media.  Drillteam helps brands acquire and energize customer advocates, then sustain momentum through both offline events and online communities, and promotions on platforms like Facebook, niche blogs and Twitter.  Drillteam will retain its name and operate as a Powered company.
• StepChange enhances a brand’s reach by extending presence into social networks and mobile platforms through Facebook development/applications, social site development, mobile/apps and Widget Ads.  StepChange will retain its name and operate as a Powered company.

Will Joseph Jaffe (Crayon) be staying on? If so, what role will he play at Powered?
Who is Joe Jaffe? Of course we’re kidding. Joe will play a big role in the new organization as “Chief Interrupter” of the group. He will continue to challenge the industry by providing prolific thought leadership, vision and guidance via his Jaffe Juice blog, podcast and TV show, keynote and panel presence at industry events and conferences, as well as his three books (Life after the 30-second spot, Join the Conversation and soon to be released, Flip the Funnel). More importantly, he will serve as a valued resource to Powered clients to “interrupt” the status quo, think through their social strategy and help conceive and flesh out unique and specific ideas and programs in the space.

Does the industry need another agency?
The industry certainly doesn’t need another agency that does the same thing as its predecessors. To be perfectly honest, we’re not exactly enamored with the idea of being called an “agency” at all. But this isn’t about us: It’s about the world’s largest, loved and important brands and what they need. Many members of our leadership team have lived, and successfully navigated through, several key advances in brand management, communication and emerging media innovation—led by the rise, fall and rise again of digital. We see the gaping void, disconnect or chasm between identification of need and the ability to fully deliver against that need. Social media is not another color on the media flow chart and it is not a subservient subset of digital either. Instead, we see social as a truly pervasive and transformational category in of itself that spans the entire marketing gamut—and even beyond it (touching P.R., customer service, R&D, innovation and customer experience). For that reason, we believe that we will be one of the first—and certainly not the last—of specialist, best in class agents that are equipped, staffed and scaled to fully execute and activate against this growing capability, skill set, need and opportunity.

What is a Social Agency?
A Social Agency or social media agency is an entity that assists companies and brands in the new world of conversational marketing. The confluence of digital, virtual and peer-to-peer networks is causing consumers to act more as a collective than ever before, and they are demanding a truly two-way conversation. We are looking to be the partner that will help brands enter and be successful in that conversation, by building a successful strategy that:

• Connects business to social
• Joins and manages network presence
• Builds and manages branded communal spaces
• Connects conversationally through mobile and physical events

The Social Media Agency is the horizontal layer that must be centrally managed but also closely integrated with all of the traditional vertical functions of marketing, such as media, interactive, PR and creativ

What else am I missing? A lot I'm sure. But as you know, I'm pretty good at delivering updates real time through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, my blog, etc. Oh, we're also planning a couple of big blowouts at OMMA Social (January 26) and South by Southwest (SXSW Interactive) in mid-March.

Let's get it on! 

Dear friends of Powered and readers of the Engaged Consumer Blog. If you've been here before, you might have noticed that we've just recently undergone a pretty significant face lift. As part of that process, we migrated our blog from Wordpress over to our Powered blog platform (nothing against Wordpress - just trying to eat our own dogfood again).

Our new URL is pretty simple. It's simply http://www.powered.com/blog. Our new RSS feed is also pretty straightford http://www.powered.com/rss/campus/700/blog.rss

While our old content will stay up over at Wordpress, any new content from Doug, Natanya, Kathy and yours truly will happen here. If you have any problems seeing the new posts on our site, or in your reader, please let us know. If you find anything rendering funny, we'd also like a heads up on that too.

In the meantime, we plan to continue writing/recording kick @ss content. We hope you'll stick around.

Aaron Strout
CMO, Powered
@aaronstrout