I am relatively new to the blog space, but I have been following new marketing/digital marketing “rock stars” Mitch Joel & Joseph Jaffe for about 1.5 years. These guys have been constant sources of inspiration for me and I always listen in on their podcasts when they pop into iTunes. Mitch Joel’s inspiration is one of the reasons I started this blog. He has 2 great podcasts (Six Pixels of Separation and Foreward Thinking) and a blog called Six Pixels of Separation. It has been exciting to watch these two guys move to the top of the influencer world. Both run small digital agencies and still find time to blog and podcast.
Recently, there has been a big discussion across the social media/digital marketing community about “the fishbowl” effect whereby, despite the growth of this space, everyone in the agency/social media thought leader/online consultant community seems to feel as if they are just talking to themselves. Indeed, when looking across the AdAge Power 150 blogs, you mostly find blogs from this community, but rarely do you see a blog from an average brand guy within a company (a VP or Brand manager) talking about the benefits of digital community, dialog, and partnership (in the words of Joseph Jaffe). Joseph Jaffe has also repeatedly addressed this outage, asking for brand marketers to get into the new marketing conversation. He has written “traditional media” books like Life After the 30 Second Spot. and Join the Conversation to reach out to those who are not yet immersed in the digital space.
I started m-cause to talk about new/traditional marketing, cause marketing, and sustainability. I also want to provide some “normal brand guy on the front line” perspective to the community and help get the word out about this space. It would be really exciting to start more discussion around this with Mitch & Joe. From my side, I will provide more audio and written comments and continue to talk up this new world to the more traditional brand management community.
Ryan Jones is interested in marketing and good causes. He currently works in Global Brand Management at Procter & Gamble and resides in Geneva, Switzerland.
4 Comments
I just stopped by your blog and thought I would say hello. I like your site design. Looking forward to reading more down the road.
Robert Michel
Hey Robert, tks. I hope to improve on the site design as well…just getting started with this.
Really good to see brand marketers getting their thoughts out there.
Good to hear another voice in this space. I too am on the front lines of branding in traditional media. I create, write, produce, and edit traditional tv media and have recently stumbled upon Joseph Jaffe, Mitch Joel, and Seth Godin. I see this shift taking place in the media landscape as well as in advertising. In Mitch’s SPOS epi 97 he again mentions GM’s move to pour 1.5 Billion dollars of it’s estimated 3 Billion dollar ad budget into the digital space. If that’s not huge, I don’t know what is. However I will say on a smaller scale, most advertisers are uneasy at best, in making the move. Somehow the R-O-I on such digital investments needs to translate to customer V-A-L-U-E.
For example, I recently spoke to a small business owner about digital media/marketing and he brushed the idea away saying he spends all his ad dollars on direct mail. He was firm on his belief that he gets better results that way. However, the moment I mentioned having direct person-to-person conversations with customers and potential customers via an online radio show/podcast about his business, his interested shifted and said he wanted to talk more. No metrics. No technical jargon. Only perceived “value” on the use of digital media. Love to get your thoughts.