• “The evolution of the live marketing paradigm continues, as marketers push to light up their 2008 event marketing with a strategic ignition,” wrote Dan Hanover, editor and publisher at Event Marketer. We’ve said before that events should be part of an integrated branding program.
• Entertainment media producers and consumers are hot on the heels of innovation, inquiring about everything from definition to significance. Oddly enough, there’s little discussion about how to encourage innovation. The simple answer: stronger relationships, stronger communication.
• “[C]ontrol has taken on a new meaning. It’s about … giving them [consumers] the tools and information they need to make the right purchase decisions,” wrote Vik Murty for Consumer Electronics Vision. We made empowerment integral to strategic branding several years ago.

Renewing the emphasis on strategy, innovation, and empowerment is not a bad move. In fact, there’s great potential for gain, but don’t stop at renewal. Revisit your strategies and account for this year’s technological awakening.

• While enabling creators to retain authorship relinquishes control and intellectual property rights, authorship drives innovation. With innovation comes more variety for consumers and thus more value to licensors, especially in this creative drought and climate of radical change.
• Unionized strikes for authorship are capable of severely impacting revenue from product development; however, in addition to content industries, the issue of authorship is key to the vitality and continuity of emerging markets and technologies, such as social media enterprise.
• Authorship can be used as a marketing device for establishing, managing and renewing relationships with professional and fan creators to extend and stabilize the life cycle of products and even entire industries. Furthermore, authorship strengthens brands by encouraging participation.

By working with creators to secure their authorship, businesses secure their futures, ensure that consumers are free of the paradox of choice, reinvest in the culture of innovation, and produce results that matter to investors.

• Listening provides feedback that can be used to measure attitudes and track behaviors. Listening begets understanding which begets trust. Listen to all of your consumers, which includes even those of your competitors as well as your employees, to earn their trust and eventually their commitment.
• Stanford professor Itamar Simonson cautions against accepting feedback from consumers without skepticism; however, Simonson is explicitly referring to the use of surveys. Listening is a skill that goes beyond surveys. If sending out surveys is all you’re doing, you’re not listening.
• When do you listen? How? Who listens? The short answer: keep your ears to the ground when people talk. Listen by engaging consumers in conversation. Everyone should be paying attention. Marketers and those charged with facing consumers are best prepared and should collaborate.

When I was a lad, I wanted to be a ninja. The most famous lesson of ninjutsu I learned was to not waste breath on trivial chatter, to speak only when you have something important to say. The rest of the time, you just listen.

• Engagement. Although threat awareness surpassed expectations, evacuees complained that communication from official channels was disappointing. Insufficient information and miscommunication led some residents to run road blocks and hinder utility restoration efforts.
• Empowerment. Authorities, frustrated with residents who ignored evacuation orders, claimed resources allocated to rescue operations would have been better spent on fighting fires. Nevertheless, undermanned firefighters accepted support from those sheltered-in-place citizens.
• Elevation. Firefighting assets, such as the Martin Mars waterbomber from Canada and more than a dozen military aerial firefighting teams, were delayed by both United States Customs and CAL FIRE officials. Governor Schwarzenegger, however, expedited the deployment of these assets.

While official websites were offline, local media provided updates via blogs, radio, Google Maps, and Twitter. Instead of organizing for emergency response when disaster strikes, that infrastructure should have been in place.

• How much spam do you read? How about e-mail you asked to receive? Both educators and event specialists have recognized the positive correlation between registration and action. Similarly, by investing time and effort to download music, an underground audience commits to distribute.
• Although these consumers do not participate in the sales process, they are motivated by the effects of sharing and trading and thus have formed expansive social networks. These networks allow them to distribute product to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with little effort.
• Most importantly, the underground audience is comprised of people who, all motivations considered, are driven to talk about their inventory to more people just like them. This audience spreads word and increases awareness faster than any street team and can indirectly generate revenue for artists.

While embracing music pirates as anything other than bootleggers with zero respect for intellectual property rights is taboo, underground audiences are undoubtedly untapped as high-performance marketing channels.

• Communities thrive on conversations, especially the conversations that help form connections between people. Content can be used as a centerpiece, the spark that ignites those conversations, but content should always be seen as the means to an end and not as the end itself.
• Once alight, communities produce their own user-generated content through discussion, but that content often spreads like wildfire in any direction the conversations turn. Content can be used to align the interests of a community, such as in the case of book clubs and panel discussions.
• At the point that communities begin to flourish, the quality of the content produced will burst into the spotlight, encouraging managed duplication. The quality of the content produced by users, however, is actually determined by how effective the content was in bringing people together.

Ensuring communities produce high-quality content requires understanding the purpose of content in relationships, a willingness to enable the community to create and share, and reorienting your goals toward bringing people together.

• Brands are not birthed by the marketing department. Brands come into existence, regardless of whether we are aware of them, the moment imagination meets action. The startup environment, where there are few barriers to growth, is the ideal breeding ground for brands.
• In the beginning, your vision is unhindered by the everyday realities of business. At this time, your vision is strongest and most contagious. Dreams excite, so therefore sharing your dreams allows others to be seduced by your vision. Brands thrive on the passion of their ambassadors.
• Employees are your greatest and closest allies. Everyone knows that people who join an organization for the first time are driven to talk about their choice. The people who also put their blood, sweat, and tears into your brands day and night are even more enthusiastic.

Your brands are too important to the health of your organization to leave unmanaged for any duration. Whether you are pitching to investors, building a team, or launching your flagship, you are ready. Start early, start now.

• Brand Engagement is the initiation of a relationship with consumers by catching their attention, holding their interest, helping them make decisions, and allowing them to act. Instead of leading customers through the sales process, engagement calls consumers to act in their best interests.
• Brand Empowerment is the process of developing a relationship with consumers by providing them the means to carry out their activities effectively. While AIDA encourages customers to crave satisfaction through acquisition, empowerment transforms consumers into brand champions.
• Brand Elevation is the relinquishment of control over a relationship to consumers by assigning them responsibility for developing the brand. AIDA assumes the sales process is the means to customers; however, brand elevation is about promoting consumers as a channel for long-term growth.

The Three Es of Branding is the foundation of our approach to cultivating meaningful relationships between businesses and consumers, from customers and employees to management and shareholders, through branding.

• Find a venue you can rent or have sponsored. Restaurants will usually reserve space with no money upfront. If you want an auditorium, publicly funded colleges typically host events with little to no strings attached.
• Compile a mailing list and send a periodic newsletter about your organization, local happenings, and upcoming events. Describe your events in terms of who should attend, what’s the point, when and where to find the event. Include a map and directions.
• Ask recipients to tell others about the event. Provide them the means to spread the word such as a website, printable flyers, and fact sheets. Reward these “talkers” with custom stickers and other token gifts.
• Show up to the event, intending to stay all day. Introduce yourself, the organization, and the event to everyone. Introduce everyone you meet to other people. That’s how you get the party going.

As a safety precaution, if the venue serves alcohol, be safe and arrange for the venue to hold the keys of its patrons. This will limit your liability and demonstrate that you care for your people. Finally, enjoy the experience!

What better way to celebrate our warfighters and commemorate our fallen heroes is there than supporting their passions? A music video shot aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, featuring the skipper and crewmembers singing along to Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” was recently pulled from YouTube by Navy officials due to concerns about “propriety.”

Instead of enforcing a victorian standard, why not embrace social media and empower our warriors in uniform to maintain and promote their identity as real people in service to their country? The short list of benefits include an improved trust within the military organization, between the military might and citizenry, and thus the reduction of information security risks, and even a refreshing experience to offer prospective recruits. That makes more sense than staving off what makes Americans American through hardline regulations.