By all appearances that is exactly what happened.  Scott Brown’s upset, come from behind, win in the Massachusetts Senate race now represents the 41st vote in the Senate, breaking the Democrats filibuster-proof majority in Washington.  In another word passage of President Obama’s healthcare reform legislation is now very much in doubt.

When you dig a little (which we did) you’ll find not only that a Canadian orchestrate the victory but he utilized social media tools to pull off what some referred to as one of the biggest political upset in recent memory.   Whether you support or oppose healthcare reform in the US, the lesson is that social media marketing, properly leveraged, can significantly affect the outcome of a political race or, for that matter, the success of you company

For a good article on this check today’s National Post here or go to - http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2493174

One of the ways we make our clients’ lives easier is by reading and studying the latest marketing trends and then synthesizing them into actionable strategies and tactics. This way, we can help our clients keep up with the massive amount of information flying their way.  In fairness to my partners at AR, they often do come up with original thinking and ideas.  For me,  it only happens once in a very long while.  Most of the time I gather the best practices and strategies out there and tweak them so our clients can apply them to their businesses and industries.  It’s a win/win – they get a medley of the best that is available and I don’t have to over-tax my brain.

To this end, over the next few months I will be sharing some insights I’ve been gleaning from some leading thinkers and writers on marketing and social media/networking.

The first book I want to talk about is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, which I read (actually listened to, courtesy of Audible.com) over the holidays.  It will definitely influence some of our marketing strategies for clients in 2010.  To make life really easy (which is what the Internet is all about), before starting to discuss it, here is an excellent summary you can peruse to familiarize yourself with it.

Please share your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to check out the summary.

A good number of our clients have been rolling out social media initiatives over the last year or are in the process of doing so.  These initiatives include blogs, podcasts and social networking.

We also hear regularly from clients who are considering initiatives but are still unsure about the effectiveness and staying power of this particular marketing channel.  One of the most frequent questions we hear:  Is this social media thing for real and should be deploying our resources to leverage it?  To answer this question I will direct you to some stats that were sent to us by a friend of ours, who herself is a savvy marketer. Check it out here: http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

Regular newsletters are a fantastic way to keep in front of your market. With every issue, you have the opportunity to solidify your credibility, likability, and trustworthiness, and reinforce your brand identity. And if you’re doing it right, that’s exactly what will happen.

Of course it needs to look great – a clean, attractive design with your corporate look, white space that makes it easy to read, and pleasant, colourful pictures that capture attention.

But what, exactly, should you put in there? How much news should actually go into a newsletter?

News they can use – This should make up the majority of your newsletter, at least 80%, and includes articles, tips, and industry announcements that teach your readers something they didn’t know or reinforces something they already knew. It has clear applications they can take action on immediately, and plenty of resources (including your products and service) to help them do it.

News about you – If your newsletter was targeted well, your reader is genuinely interested in what you do, and will eagerly want to hear your latest news. Reward their interest with sneak previews of new services, special offers, advanced notice of upcoming events, or other “insider” or “subscribers only” information. Even if your reader simply found your newsletter left behind in a boardroom or on a city bus, if you’ve provided some news they can use, they will usually keep reading.

It’s like being a kid in a candy store these days, especially online. There are just so many tools, techniques, means, methods, gadgets, and gizmos – all designed to reach your customer, communicate your message, and deliver results.

As you sift through the books, Web sites, blogs, industry examples, and proposals, how do you choose the marketing communications vehicle that will meet your needs?

Here are five key sets of questions that will help you prioritize your marketing communications options:

1.    What are your communication goals? Who are you trying to reach and what actions do you want them to take?
2.    What is your budget? How much is there to spend overall, and what proportion of that do you want to allot to each initiative?
3.    What are the broader missions, mandates, or strategies that you have to adhere to? How well does this proposed solution fit?
4.    What are your available resources, including people, systems, and vendors? Will you have what you need to roll out this particular strategy?
5.    What are the time lines involved and how will this initiative fit into them? Is there a specific launch date or a scheduled event? Does your client have a preset deadline?

Selecting the appropriate communications media then comes down to deciding which ones will help you reach your goals, given your available budget, mandate, resources, and time.

So relax! You don’t need to know about, understand, or try every marketing communication tool that’s around. Avoid overwhelm by setting clear priorities, and make a deliberate choice.

“Blog fade” is an expression used to describe the fading enthusiasm for a blog; posts become less and less frequent until the blog is finally left sitting idle collecting pixel dust.

It’s happened to the best of us. We start out of the gate with a plan to blog twice a week, weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly. The blog was so easy to set up, we launch right in.

And it’s precisely because blogging is so immediate and accessible that we sometimes push it back in favour of more pressing tasks like, oh, I don’t know, taking care of clients! We figure we can always jump in there and put up a blog post; we’ll get to it later.

As part of a broader marketing communications strategy, well-written blog posts will improve your search engine rankings, attract traffic to your website, and reinforce your credibility as an expert. You may also use them to get a conversation going with your clients, prospects, team, employees, vendors, suppliers or other stakeholders.

When you don’t post regularly, you’re losing out on all of those benefits. But not only that – you’re also sending a subtle message that you’re not around anymore. People surfing the Web are hungry for information. They want more and they want it now. As brilliant as it was, the post you wrote last month is ancient history.

Have you ever heard the expression, “How you do anything is how you do everything?” When people look through your blog and don’t see any recent updates, they may start to wonder if you’ll “fade away” in other areas of your business as well.

When you’re trying to simultaneously manage 17 initiatives that all have a deadline of yesterday, it’s hard to keep track of current marketing best practices. How can you maximize the effectiveness of your print communications? Are leading companies even still using print? Should you be producing podcasts, hosting webinars, posting videos on YouTube, buying Google AdWords?

Clearly, the strategies you adopt need to align to your corporate objectives and your budgetary constraints. But there are some quick steps you can take to glean industry best practices:

Build your network – Find other marketing professionals via your professional associations, alumni group, connections through family and friends, service groups, or networking services, like LinkedIn. Visit their Web sites and check out their client lists. Get an introduction and interview them about where they look for advice and trends. Share your own resources as well, to strengthen these new alliances.

Read the want ads – Study job descriptions for marketing professionals, particularly the skill sets, responsibilities, and best practices that are stated outright as well as between the lines.

Consult with specialists – Have a chat with senior corporate marketers who are in the business of staying ahead of the trends. Look for people with hands-on experience, as well as training and certification in the specialty areas that most interest you, such as online marketing or search engine optimization.

If you or your employer are having trouble with the idea of spending time on this research, remember that your company is in danger of being left behind if you don’t. Getting up to speed on the newest and most effective marketing practices is a far better use of your time than ploughing forward with outdated campaigns just for the sake of getting done what you’ve always done.

You will be more valuable to your company and in a much better position to advance your career.

We’ve touched on the What and the Who. It’s time for the Why.

Recognize, however, that we can talk about the big Ws forever. At some point, it makes more sense to simply dive into the blogging pool. End tangent.

Knowing why you’re writing is critically important. It explains why people will visit you regularly and what they hope to get out of the process. It articulates, in concrete terms, the value proposition of your message. If you don’t know why you want to write a blog, chances are your readers won’t, either.

We’ve asked you to ask yourself a lot of questions in previous entries. These still apply, so feel free to review them anytime. Now it’s time to put it all on the line and ask yourself why anyone would invest time to read - and respond to - anything you’d write or share. What will they get out of doing so? Why is your message any better than anyone else’s?

If you can’t answer these questions, think it over a bit before proceeding. If you’re ready to start brainstorming responses, your blogging future awaits.

Knowing your audience is critical. When parents speak to their babies and toddlers, they use different words, phrases and tones than, say, you might use when you deliver a quarterly results presentation to the CEO. Fail to adapt the message to your audience and you may as well head home.

But if you know who they are and what they need, you’re in the bonus round. Knowing who might read your blog, listen to your podcast or otherwise consume your message is easier than you might think. Start by looking at your existing business contacts:

• Customers
• Prospects
• Suppliers
• Competitors
• Media
• Friends and family
• Anyone else who comes to mind

Now that you know who you’re dealing with, look at how you’re reaching them. You’re likely already using different media - phone, newsletter, corporate web site, among others - to interact with them. Take a moment to jot down which media are being used for which contact type.

Finally, look at each contact/medium combination. Toss these questions around for a bit:

• Is the medium helping or hindering your attempts to build a solid relationship with this contact?
• Do you think you’re successfully reaching these people with the tools you’ve got? Do some tools or media work better than others?
• Would a more interactive medium - a blog, perhaps - make it easier for you to build a more meaningful relationship with them?
• How would you know if you’re succeeding? Or failing?

We’ll leave it at that for now. You need to give some thought to who you’re working with and how well you’re reaching them. We’ll explore the answers in our next entry.

In our last entry, we touched on the need to figure out what to say, to whom it will be said and why it needs to be said in the first place. This time out, let’s look a bit more closely at the what component.

Whatever we read - newspapers, magazines, web sites and, yes, blogs - we do so because the topic interests us. The same thing applies to the folks who write all this stuff: they take the time to write it because it interests them.

Writing about something that interests you is probably the most important thing when you decide to launch a web log. If you’re jazzed by the topic or subject area, you’ll be motivated to share everything you know about it. The fact that you’re jazzed about it will come through in your writing. Passion sells, after all. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to write something that’s of only passing interest to you, as you’ll quickly lose interest…and so will your readers.

If you’re the go-to person among your friends for a particular issue, that might be a good place to start. If you’re still wondering, go sit under a tree for a while and think about what it is that you want to say. Don’t come back until you’ve answered the question honestly, and are confident that you’ll have lots to write in the months and years to come.

I’m not kidding about the tree, by the way. It works. You’ll have to trust me on that one.

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to say, you’ve got a bit more homework to do before it’s showtime. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is it unique? Read other blogs, looking specifically for sites that may have similar themes to the one you’re working on. Are you repeating what’s already being said or can you add to the discussion? Don’t scuttle an idea just because other, similar blogs may already exist. You can still succeed if you say it better, or slightly differently, than everyone else. Just make sure you take the time to know what’s out there
• Can I write dozens or even hundreds of entries on it? Try listing some potential blog entry titles to give yourself a sense of how easy it will be to keep the content coming. If after a week you’re still struggling with this, find a new topic
• Is the topic hot? Advances in manual typewriter technology may no longer captivate the public’s interest, and may not be compelling fodder for blogs in the 21st century. Steer clear of dusty topics that don’t show up on search engines. Look for those that stand a reasonable chance of being discussed at the water cooler
• Does research material exist? If the topic is relatively current, you’ll be able to find content out there that you’ll be able to fashion into future blog entries. Great blogs pull interesting bits out of the regular flow of online discussion and turn them into items of conversation: if you can’t Google your chosen topic and find good fodder for possible future entries, you may want to switch topics
• Do my friends care? Talk through the proposed topic with people you trust. If your loving spouse doesn’t want to hear about it, will complete strangers take the time to read you? Don’t look for cheerleaders: seek out people who will give you honest opinions, even if they risk hurting your feelings a bit in the process

We’ll dig deeper into the who and the why in subsequent entries. For now, your challenge is to start thinking about that one topic that fascinates you above all else. Happy choosing!

Last time out, we discussed whether or not you should even start a blog. On the assumption that you’ve decided to move ahead with it, you’ll need to go through a number of due diligence steps before your site sees the light of day.

We touched on what you would write about, who would read it, and why. Write these out on a large piece of paper and post them somewhere visible, because you’re going to be mulling them over for quite a while.

WHAT: There are a lot of voices on the Internet talking about a lot of different issues from a lot of different perspectives. Is your voice one among many or do you have something unique to say? Would you be able to sum up your blog’s reason for existence in a 30-second elevator pitch. Stop here and really think this through before you do anything else, because if there’s nothing unique and uniquely compelling about your message, there’s no point in reading - or writing.

WHO: It’s a given that we all want lots of people to read us, but you still need to understand who would be most interested in what you have to say. Separate readers by age range, gender, geography, ethnicity, income level…or any other point of differentiation that makes sense to you. Research your target groups online to see what else they’re reading. And if you remember nothing else, resist the urge to be all things to all people, because nothing is more vanilla than a broadly focused blog.

WHY: This explains why they’ll take time from their busy schedules to read you. It speaks to the value that you’re bringing to the table - to their table. If you can’t articulate it, chances are your readers won’t, either - which means they likely won’t become readers.

Take a stab at answering these. Bounce your responses off of people you trust. We’ll dig deeper into each of them in future entries.

Should your company start its own blog?

It may seem like a no-brainer. After all, blogs have established themselves as credible tools to connect with stakeholders in ways that traditional one-way media do not.

But starting a blog because everyone else is doing it is the first step toward failure. If memory serves, this excuse didn’t work too well in high school, and it doesn’t work now, either.

Before you reserve a domain name, install the software and tell all your friends, you may want to take some quiet time to consider what you hope to accomplish with it. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why are you considering starting a blog?
• What’s the value proposition for people who might read it?
• Precisely who’s going to read it?
• What kind of resources will you be able to devote to your blog?

If you’re not able to come up with solid answers to these basic questions, take the time to think them through. Talk to your stakeholders, solicit feedback from them on what you’re doing well - and not so well - from a communications perspective. Use their feedback to identify where you could be doing a better job of keeping them in the loop.

That last piece - finding ways to improve the way we communicate with our stakeholders - is critical. Blogs are only one of the many tools available to today’s businesses to reach out and engage the people who matter. Depending on the outcome of this early, informal process, you may or may not decide that launching a blog makes sense at this time.

In subsequent blog entries, we’ll explore this prep process more deeply. For now, take the time to think the blog rationale through, and feel free to share the results in a comment.

Fascinating things are happening in the world of social networking. While the MySpaces and Facebooks have attracted legions of younger-demographic users, they have been viewed with a certain sense of detachment by mainstream business.

Until now, apparently.

Canada’s TD Bank and Royal Bank have initiated their own initiatives on Facebook. I spoke with Toronto Star business reporter Rita Trichur about what motivates them and what it means for the banking industry. The article, TD reaches out with Facebook group, was published in yesterday’s paper.

The use of social networking resources as marketing tools will only grow as businesses in all sectors begin to realize the value of reaching out to clients and potential clients through these non-traditional avenues.

Is there a Facebook plan in your future business plans?

When I was scheduled to attend a conference in Shanghai a couple of months back, I took a plane. Soon after I returned home and recovered from the jet lag, I got on my bike and rode to the nearby grocery store to pick up some milk. Later, I used the car to pick the kids up from camp.

For these three different journeys, I used three very different vehicles. In some cases, I could have chosen differently - take the car for milk, for example. For the China trip, though, I doubt anything but an Airbus A340 or Boeing 777 would have done the trick.

I tend to view communication in a similar light. Every time I have a message to deliver, I start by thinking about my audience - the destination - and the method I should use - the vehicle - to reach them. Just as it is with my somewhat hackneyed travel analogy, sometimes I have a choice of communication vehicles, while other times the choice may be somewhat narrower.

Regardless, I always start by thinking about the vehicle. It influences how we travel, and it influences how we communicate with each other. The proliferation of new media types makes vehicle choice more critical today than it’s ever been. Make the wrong call and you could find yourself in the messaging equivalent of cycling a high-end mountain bike across the ocean.

We’ll explore vehicles in greater depth in future entries. For now, I hope you’ll take a quick moment to think about the vehicles you use in your day-to-day communication.

Once upon a time, the morning newspaper was our first and most detailed means of consuming the days news. We killed trees to keep on top of local and world news. When we were done, we shoved the yellowing, fraying results into the bottom of the bird cage. We didn’t call it recycling back then.

Today, breaking news no longer comes on paper. Sure, many of us still subscribe to our local rag. It lays out nicely on the kitchen table, and you can’t take a laptop to the beach. Not safely, anyway. Convenience aside, rapidly delivered interactive online media have changed the way we consume content. They’ve also changed the way we communicate. The impact extends far beyond the breakfast table. It changes the way we work, making the modern office a very alien place to people rooted in paper-based memos and, gasp, fax machines.

Whether we’re sending an e-mail to a colleague across the hall, preparing a PowerPoint presentation for company leadership or designing in-store signs for the next sales campaign, we can’t forget the one overriding truth: the Internet has fundamentally changed how we interact with others, and how we absorb and respond to messages.

But what to do about this. Start by knowing which way is up in this chaotically evolving world. Writing for online consumption is a necessarily different process than writing for print. Readers have ever-shorter attention spans. They scroll through a page and hover the mouse pointer over a selection of text, fingers to click on whatever link next tickles their fancy. They don’t have time to read War and Peace. They may not even make it to the War part. Be quick, be decisive, and get to the point. Now.

Speaking of which, we’ll leave the rest for the next entry. We said to keep it short, and that applies to us as well. And we’ll continue the story tomorrow.