Today, CMO.com published a wide-ranging compendium of predictions for digital marketing in 2012 by 32 industry leaders. Scratch that – 31 industry leaders, and me. If you have been reading other digital prediction pieces, some of the prognostications will sound very familiar: the rising tide of mobile and tablets, a heightened focus on big data and the stories it tells, social coming of age, shifts from broadcasting to experiential engagement, content marketing, digital integration and convergence…

However, “Digital Marketing in 2012: Predictions from 32 Industry Luminaries” also included really thought-provoking entries that spark more questions than answers in my mind – and maybe you have some thoughts that can help bring more clarity. Consider this from Aseem Chandra, VP of product & industry marketing for Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business unit:

“There are several disruptive technologies that have emerged over the past few years–gamification, 3D video, IPTV, multiuser gaming, and augmented reality. Consumers will continue to lead digital marketers in the adoption of these innovations.”

It certainly does seem as if digital marketers are prone to simply following the herd, reacting to where the masses seem to be headed. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, or both? Should digital marketers be out in front of consumers in terms of platforms, channels, and approaches – or should we simply be reading the tea leaves and then trying to deliver experiences that coincide with the way our constituents seem to want to go? Using Steve Jobs to make a point has become cliche, but it fits here. Jobs didn’t deliver products according to what people told him. He looked at how people lived and interacted with things, and then sought to make a better world with products that no one knew to ask for. Aseem is right – digital marketers for the most part are following trends, they aren’t innovating.

Gary Katz, chairman of the Marketing Operations Future Forum, proffered this:

“The Web is full of directional guidance and detailed ‘how to’ tutorials. What’s really needed is better middleware-structured experiences that instill actionable insight to help marketers bridge the gap between the why, what, and how so they can get to the desired outcome.”

The digital age has sped up everything for businesses and consumers, as Jay Baer and Amber Naslund so powerfully articulated in The Now Revolution, and that has led marketers to look for simple plug-and-play guidance and how-tos. The downside to having access to information on anything, anytime is that it is all too easy for digital marketers to resort to stock guidance, tactics, and tools, without enough consideration for the goals, objectives, and strategy. I certainly agree with Gary that marketers need to bridge the gap between the why, what, and how – and much of that can be gleaned from actionable intelligence. But what I think is the biggest problem is that we have too many marketers running at top speed at all times and piggybacking on what others are saying and doing, and not enough marketers actually thinking, really thinking, and then building a customized, cohesive strategy before actually doing. Middleware will be helpful in that context, but it requires a healthy commitment to apply it in the right way from the people investing in it.

Gayle Matthei-Meredith, chief marketing officer and principal of Cassidy Turley, said:

“This year we’ll see more premium investment on narrowcasting (reaching the few vs. many to drive deeper engagement with people who truly do value your brand)…”

Segmenting audiences and addressing them according to their defined interests and observed activities is definitely something to aspire to. I think of it more in terms of engaging with many groups of few, as opposed to focusing primarily on influencers or a small subset. There are many subsets, often at comparable levels of importance to your brand.

The last snippet I’d like to highlight is from Dr. Robert Pasikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys:

“Look for a desire for the coolness of beauty–whether a graceful delivery system or a gorgeous product–to escalate.”

Steve Jobs would have liked this one, but he also would have responded that most businesses, most business executives simply aren’t willing to risk making something beautiful, or just plain don’t know how to create an environment in which true beauty and user-friendly design can thrive, and make it to market. That takes strong, gutsy leadership, an understanding of the value of solid creative, and a leap of faith. And none of those come easy.

There were plenty of other great insights that will provoke, inspire, and perhaps piss you off. Check them out and let me know which ones really speak to you. Or which ones you think are totally off-base.

And if you want to see what I offered up for , you can find it here.

In Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a computer known as Deep Thought spent seven and a half million years contemplating the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Seventy-five thousand generations passed before Deep Thought revealed that the answer was “Forty two.”

Responding to the confusion and backlash of the crowd, the computer said, “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

The concept of “engagement” follows a similar storyline and is quickly becoming one of those words that makes you throw up a little in your mouth. Like “buzz,” “leverage,” “ROI,” and “word of mouth” before it, engagement has become the word du jour for marketers. But few are measuring it and most aren’t asking the right questions to define it.

Everyone wants to know what the magic metric or metrics are to track website engagement. But here’s the secret (and it’s not 42)…

Read the rest of my guest blog post on Jay Baer‘s ConvinceAndConvert website:

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Tracking Website Engagement”

I recently penned a guest blog post for Beth Kanter, one of the foremost experts on nonprofit marketing, online and offline, measurement, and social strategies. Below is a note from her that prefaces my guest blog post, and a snippet from my post, along with a link to the full piece.

Note from Beth: I’m working on the sequel to the Networked Nonprofit – it is a book about using measurement to prove and improve results with the Measurement Goddess KD Paine.  (Her  recent book, Measuring What Matters, is a must read.)

So, lately, I’ve been on the hunt for good nonprofit measurement stories.   Last week, I read Jocelyn Harmon’s post about Nonprofit Facebook Fail and in the comments, Petri Darby refers to the dramatic increase of visits to his nonprofit’s Make-A-Wish Foundation Web site.  He goes onto say how they are focusing their integrated strategy on a metric that matters:  conversions.

This resonated after reading KD Paine’s “Social Media Measurement Meets Sex in the City” that talks about the importance of tracking your strategy to understand how to get people to become life long supporters.    The goal is not exposure.

Petri’s post shares a few thoughts about how his organization is focusing on the relationships through connection, not just traffic.

Recently, we adopted a new vision for wish.org and our online channels, including social networks.  Our focus has shifted from transactional to connecting and engaging key constituencies over the long-term, and empowering them as brand ambassadors and advocates.

Read the rest of this guest blog post featured on Beth Kanter’s blog.

Do you know what’s driving spikes in your website traffic? Or increases in website sales or donations? You probably get the same questions I do from colleagues or executives. “Did that PR launch drive website visits?” “Did we see an uptick in online revenues after that big TV program aired?”

An event dashboard can help you identify what might be driving measurable changes in your key website statistics. Here’s how to create one.

Step One: Identify Popular Inbound Links

Hopefully you are already tagging urls from your blog, social media sites, web banners/badges, email campaigns, and other inbound links with campaign tracking codes, through Omniture, Google Analytics, or another analytics platform so you can track clicks from your own channels. If so, you will want to make a list of the ones that drove significant traffic. But even after you look at those numbers, you probably still have a large segment of website visitors that are unaccounted for – whether from search engines or direct or bookmarked visits. So the question is, what is driving those visits.

Step Two: Aggregate Cross-Departmental Calendars of Events

If your organization keeps a master calendar of major events and activities, congratulations. If yours is like most organizations, these calendars are housed in departmental silos, and some departments may not keep a calendar (I know, hard to believe). Compiling calendars will be easier than convincing departments that they need to start keeping one. But both are worthwhile efforts if you truly want a clearer picture of the external influences on your website.

Step Three: Isolate the Important Events

Look through the aggregated calendar and highlight the items that have the most potential to trigger a response – whether general interest or a direct action – from the audience or recipients. Yes, be sure to identify those items that reach a wide constituency, but also those that are particularly targeted toward your strongest supporters, customers, and prospects. Product launches, national events, earnings reports, email solicitations, major media relations efforts and placements, direct mailings, corporate sponsor promotions, and ad campaigns are the types of things you will want to compile.

Step Four: Chart Website Traffic, Sales/Donations, and Revenues Along with Events

Once you have all of the raw data, you can create a spreadsheet graphic that tracks website visitor trends, the number of people who completed a sale, or a donation for nonprofits, and the total daily revenues from those transactions. Then plot your major events in conjunction with the charted metrics over a designated time period – we track these items monthly. Here is an example of our dashboard from one month:

We also look at separate dashboards for weekdays and weekends, as we see different trends Monday-Friday vs Saturday and Sunday.

Step Five: Analyze the Dashboard for Insights

You probably will immediately see some obvious signs of causal relationships between particular events and your key metrics – whether some outreach efforts or events drive traffic, but not sales or donations, and vice versa. But, like us, you probably also will see some spikes where you don’t have any major events listed, or some peaks and valleys where you might not have expected them. So the dashboard represents a good tool for identifying where more information is needed, where you might need to dig deeper to confirm whether particular events truly were responsible for heightened activity, and what questions to ask in order to get these answers.

Step Six: Repurpose the Dashboards

Once you have your dashboard in place, don’t limit yourself to general weekly or monthly tracking. Think about applying it over the course of particular campaign timelines to compare against traffic, sales/donations, and revenues from past years during the same period, and against your goals for those campaigns.

Using benchmarks and targets, tracking real-time progress, and having a sense of what is driving what will provide you with the hindsight and vision to know what needs to be done to fulfill your goals.

Is this helpful to you? Do you do something similar? Or do you take a different approach that you think works better?

Several years ago, I handled marketing, PR, and business development coaching for a national B2B professional services company. After getting up to speed in the new role, an executive asked me to develop a marketing plan for a local office. I of course asked for the business plan.

I knew something was not quite right when he responded with “What?”

I clarified that I needed to understand the goals and objectives for the organization – in what areas there existed opportunities to grow and what metrics defined success – so I could base the marketing plan around that.

His response: “You’re a marketing guy. You don’t need a business plan. Just come up with a marketing plan.”

He opened a desk drawer and said, “You know what we really need? I was in a client’s office earlier and he had this cube on his desk that unfolds into different shapes and has lots of cool pictures on it. My eyes were drawn to it and I couldn’t stop playing with it. I think what we need is a cube like that. Can you get me a cube?”

So a bunch of people have visited your Facebook page. They clicked Like. Now you have a bunch of Facebook Fans. Maybe you’re even getting a bunch of new traffic to your website from Facebook. And now the questions are coming.

“Why aren’t we getting a lot more sales (or donations)?”

“What do we need to do to get our Facebook Fans to buy from us (or donate)?”

“What now?”

Fair questions, especially how conditioned we’ve become to chasing the short-term gains, approaching every channel as a direct-response revenue trigger, and lamenting every time an audience doesn’t open their wallet or purse – even after just the first interaction.

During these conversations, I harken back to business development coaching discussions I had with attorneys when I worked at a law firm several years ago. Here’s a conversation I had many times with different attorneys:

Attorney: “I went to that networking function, but I didn’t get any business!”

Me: “Did your wife agree to marry you the first time you talked to her? The first time you took her out on a date? Or after the second or third date?”

Successful business development, dating, and Facebook efforts all involve a courtship. For professional service providers – whether attorneys, management consultants, or public relations reps – the keys are to be perceived as competent, for the prospect to have a need, and to be top-of-mind when that happens. Being likable is helpful, since people like to do business with people they like, but not absolutely essential.

For other organizations, including nonprofits like the one I work for, the key is successful engagement that grows over time. Engagement (of the social, not nuptial, sort) starts with listening, responding, storytelling, entertainment. Multiple interactions on this level facilitate relationships. Relationships fostered over time build trust. And trust opens the door for support and action.

Think baby steps. Facebook Fans can be fickle. They may Like your status update, your photo, your video. They may even click a link to go to your website. But most of them are going just for that – and then moving on. They probably are Fans of a lot of different pages – a lot of different organizations. Their original intent on Facebook wasn’t to look for a reason to click through to your website. You gave them that reason. Good for you. Now you need to make sure you are presenting them with easy ways to choose the next step in the relationship:

• consuming your best content
• consuming different types of content
• subscribing via e-mail, mobile, or print
• further connecting with you: online, social, mobile, events
• helping them connect with others in a community
• responding to your content
• voting on your content
• sharing your content
• creating content
• changing, repackaging, and repurposing your content
• giving you opinions and/or ideas
• making a small first purchase
• making a small, specific donation

Relationships take time. And if you truly care about your connections, your Fans, your supporters, your audiences, your girlfriend, your wife – then you don’t start with the proposal. You don’t start with the ring. First, convince them you are worthy of their accepting it.

*This article clearly was directed toward men. Women already know all of this.

This blog post highlights mobile questions facing both companies and charities alike.

Mobile Apps

Everyone wants to talk about mobile apps. Everyone wants an app. Hell, I want an app. Apps are sexy.

Unfortunately, app revenue stats are not easy to come by. Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur wrote a blog post in 2010 titled “How much can you really make developing mobile apps” that suggested that, despite 5 billion app downloads and $1.5 billion in Apple App Store revenues, the average paid app probably makes just $500 for its creators. And by “make,” I don’t mean profit, since apps often cost $20,000 or $30,000, just as a starting point.

An app has to have some cache to get people to download it in the first place – and extra oomph for them to even shell out a dollar, or two dollars, or ten. Free apps still need something sticky to make people open and use it time and time again.

Working in the nonprofit arena, I also receive regular inquiries from developers wanting to create apps for the Make-A-Wish Foundation that feature us as a cause marketing beneficiary. Often those proposals hinge on using our name to promote their app. Usually it’s pretty obvious who benefits more from that association. However, we’re always open to the possibilities, so we have a list of questions that we ask prospective app developers to help us gauge whether there is any there-there. Some of these include:

• How many mobile apps have you developed?

• Tell us about the team and their experience in mobile development and promotion.

• How successful have those been in terms of downloads and revenues?

• What type of marketing/PR/promotional investments are you planning to launch this?

• Do you have any PR/marketing/promotional plans that we can see?

• Who is the target audience for this and how do you plan to reach them?

• What platforms are you targeting with this (iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc.)

• Do you have projections for downloads and revenues for this particular app? And what do you base that on?

• Why do you think this would benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation and how?

• What else do we need to know?

Are we missing any big questions that we should be asking?

There’s a lot more to mobile than just apps

Text-To-Give Campaigns

After the Red Cross raised a bazillion dollars for Haiti relief through mobile donations, charities started going wild about the fundraising potential using handhelds. And mobile vendors were quick to promote mobile donation widgets and texting options as the hot new must-have across every channel. Here’s the rub – text-to-donate only fits under certain conditions and it can detract if you don’t apply it in the right manner.

Say your charity has an average website donation of $75. Mobile text-to-give programs currently only allow for $5 and $10 donations, with a $25 option coming soon. So does adding a $5 or $10 mobile donation widget make sense for your website? Probably not – but it might make sense on third-party websites.

Lots of charities are offering introducing mobile donation options at their events. Not a bad idea, if done right. Most are not. Just because people have a phone doesn’t make them inclined to donate, even such a small amount.

The Make-A-Wish national office and several chapters across the country have and continue to offer mobile donation options as part of larger fundraising efforts. We’ve found that, when you’re not conducting a mobile campaign related to addressing high-profile disasters, the most successful text-to-donate campaigns involve as many of the following conditions as possible:

• in-person events
• brand context
• storytelling/personal testimony from a beneficiary
• a competitive fund-raising environment
• real-time donation tallies

We learned a valuable lesson after an attempt to raise money at a rodeo event fell flat, and adopted a new mantra: “Cowboys don’t text.”

SMS Texting

Charities can offer donors, supporters, fans, and website visitors the opportunity to subscribe to receive regular updates, news, promotional opportunities, or time-sensitive and topic-specific content of their choice. SMS texting is cheap, fast, and still largely unexplored territory for nonprofits.

Mobile Websites

While the lion’s share of questions and discussions revolved around the possibility of Make-A-Wish apps, the analytics were revealing – the percentage of our website traffic coming from mobile handhelds had increased to upwards of 10 percent, double that of just months earlier. So it was clear that our first priority was to offer those site visitors a mobile optimized experience. In early April, 2011, we launched our first mobile website – a streamlined version of our traditional website tailored for mobile, complete with popular mission-centric content upfront, mobile optimized forms, a mobile optimized donation flow, social connection and sharing options, and a clear, consistent navigation architecture. You can check it out by visiting wish.org on your mobile handheld – it will automatically direct you to the mobile version of the site. Or you can just scan this QR code, which I’ll talk about next.

2d Barcodes

2d Barcodes have been hot in Europe and Asia for quite awhile now, but they are starting to gain traction in the United States too. There is no leading platform in this space yet, although QR codes, JagTags, and Microsoft Tags are among the top players. They each have their benefits and drawbacks. We tested JagTags in conjunction with our 2010 holiday campaign, Season of Wishes. We embedded them in print ads and when someone snapped a picture, using a smartphone or basic cell phone, and texted it to the number indicated, they received a campaign video on their phone. The results were lackluster. We now are testing QR codes in conjunction with seasonal campaign displays, in our annual report, in ads, and in sponsor materials. We even got one in Times Square in April as part of our World Wish Day campaign (see the bottom corners of the side panels).

The most interesting possibilities for 2d barcodes, that we plan to test soon, are related to point-of-impulse and point-of-purchase locations. Imagine standing at baggage claim, waiting for your luggage and seeing an airport duratran ad for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It features a wish story along with a message about how 70 percent of all wishes involve travel and how the organization would need 2.5 billion frequent flier miles to grant every travel wish in a year. Finally, the ad would include a barcode that you could scan and be taken to a mobile optimized page where you can donate frequent flier miles to help grant wishes. Gratuitous plug: Did you know that when you donate your frequent flier miles to the Foundation, they never expire?

You can imagine all sorts of possibilities for other advertising, marketing, fundraising, educational, and promotional campaigns. You also can add some design and branding flair to your QR codes, which we plan to start doing soon.

Advertising

Of course, there are lots of easy mobile advertising opportunities out there for those who either:

1. Have maximized most of their other marcomm possibilities
2. Are leveraging it as one part of an integrated outreach and promotion plan
3. Have a large budget, a keen sense of hyper-local or niche target audiences, and don’t want or have no idea how to build an multi-channel program organically (I’m always leery of those who promote advertising as the primary or sole messenger of a campaign)

Geo-Location/Check-in

Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla, Scvngr all offer interesting location-based social connection, reward, incentive, and loyalty opportunities. These may be a natural fit for some nonprofits who stand to benefit from foot traffic – whether volunteers at a soup kitchen or customers of a charity thrift shop – but for most, check-in programs likely are a better fit for sponsor fundraising campaigns.

We benefited from a check-in program involving Southwest Airlines and Facebook Places, whereby Southwest Airlines donated travel credits and Facebook donated ads in return for check-ins on Facebook Places.

What Next?

There’s always something new on the horizon. I think one of the next big things for charities will be the capability of handhelds to be used as mobile wallets. When cell phones replace or become the equivalent of credit cards, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for charities. It takes away the challenges associated with text-to-donate programs.

What big possibilities did I miss? What else are you seeing or hoping for? And if you are using mobile in some or all of these ways, how are you measuring it?

I’ve been meaning to recap my first South By Southwest Interactive experience ever since I got back. But work and life got in the way. So, a month and a half later, hopefully I’ve gained a little more perspective, now that the adrenaline rush has passed and I’ve had a chance to reflect on all aspects of the…conference? Festival? I’m not even sure what to call it.

If you went it without ADD, you certainly caught it there. If you went in with ADD, that condition spread to all your other senses. Session over here! Keynote over there! Check out the Empanada/taco/curry truck down the street! VIP party starting now! Come try our new game! Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you!

This was the biggest SXSW Interactive ever, with 15,000+ attending, and there were thousands more who were in town for the film and music portions of SXSW too.

I read up on SXSW as much as possible before I went, and I tried to apply the guidance offered. But it’s impossible to really know what the hell to do until you’ve been through it. There were a few nuggets that really helped though, like:

1. Tapping into the social site offered by SXSW, through which you can search for people by name, company, keywords, etc, to find, connect, and make introductions with particular people before you even head to SXSW. I contacted several folks and met a few of them at sessions (Tara Grumm from Microsoft and Jennifer Buxton from Real Posh Mom – a mutual friend in Seattle introduced us via Twitter during SXSW), over beers (Andy Pearson from Crispin Porter + Bogusky,  Eric Swayne from RockFish, and Tac Anderson from Waggener Edstrom), and sometimes just via email or Twitter (Shawn McPike from AT&T and Paull Young from Charity Water).

2. Bringing a power strip with me everywhere I went. I made a ton of quick friends by offering them a source to recharge their mobile phones at sessions, parties, and even just in hallways. People thought that was a brilliant idea. But like most great ideas, I got it from someone else. So thank you whoever wrote that in your blog. At SXSW, being on your phone is considered being social.

3. Planning out your agenda in advance, but planning to scrap that early and often. I ran into my pal Jay Baer, of ConvinceAndConvert, in the Austin Convention Center hallway in between sessions and he said “Dude, you’re coming to ‘The Now Revolution‘ Tacos & Tequila lunch party right? You blurbed for the book, you have to be there.” I don’t think I was even aware of it, but you bet I immediately cleared my schedule for that. And seeing Jay in his mini sombrero was priceless. By the way, the book is brilliant. Go buy it. Now.

At SXSW, new events are announced like popcorn, meet-and-greets and juicy conversations happen everywhere, and sometimes you just need a few minutes to breathe.

4. Hanging with a friend or two. It’s helpful to have a buddy who can attend other sessions you can’t make so you can share insights gleaned and work a room together. I was lucky to have two, Josh Feig, my counterpart at the Make-A-Wish Foundation International, and Freddie Yeti, whose grand adventures you can follow on his Yeti Tales blog.

5. Serving on a panel. I had the privilege of serving on the “Social Media for Social Good – how digital charity is changing our world” panel hosted by Blackbaud. That opportunity came to me, but it was a phenomenal opportunity to meet a bunch of people, including an all-star cast on the panel:

Frank Barry (Moderator) – Internet marketing & strategy at Blackbaud and the blog voice of NetWits ThinkTank.

Ramya Raghavan – Political and social change programming at YouTube.

Claire Diaz Ortiz – Social innovation and philanthropy at Twitter.

Charles Porch – Marketing related to public figures and nonprofits at Facebook.

Jake Furst – Business development at Foursquare.

Beverly Robertson – National director of the Pregnancy & Newborn Health Education Center at the March of Dimes.

And of course Freddie Yeti.

My attendance resulted in me being interviewed for two media pieces and one video blog segment. Following the panel session, Claire Diaz Ortiz and I were interviewed by an Austin NPR reporter for a “Social Media for the Social Good” piece. I also was interviewed for an AOL Daily Finance piece, “Where the Geeks Are: Dispatches From the Largest SXSW Interactive Ever.”

Then the panel moderator, Frank Barry, interviewed me for his blog.

The SXSWi sessions were hit-or-miss, but part of that was because I didn’t understand how best to pick them. I quickly learned that if a session’s title sounded like a good blog post title, it was probably a very broad, high-level session about general theory and principles, and that if I wanted to get some practical meat from a session, I was best served looking for titles about very narrowly focused subjects.

It took me days – maybe a week – to recover from all the walking, running, hailing cabs and cars, eating and drinking, thinking, and networking. And it was awesome. I can’t wait to go back next year, now that I know a thing or two about what I’m doing.

Finally, where else could you get someone like Guy Kawasaki to cradle your yeti?

The next few days, I’m attending South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive for the first time. From the time I signed up, it was clear this was no ordinary conference or festival. It wouldn’t be fair to call it an event. It’s already been an experience and I haven’t even hit the road yet.

SXSW Interactive has been donned the “Spring Break for Geeks.” I’m totally down with that. I resemble that. The attire is generally jeans and tees – the funnier and the snarkier the better.

I’m serving on a panel Monday morning titled “Social Media for Social Good – How Digital Charity is Changing Our World.” Of course I’m representing the Make-A-Wish Foundation and am excited to join a panel of real professionals:

• Charles Porch, marketing for Facebook
• Claire Diaz Ortiz, social innovation & philanthropy for Twitter
• Ramya Raghavan, political and social change programming for YouTube,
• Jake Furst, business development for Foursquare
• Beverly Robertson, national director of the Pregnancy & Newborn Health Education Center for the March of Dimes

Frank Barry of Blackbaud is moderating the panel.

As soon as I got my ticket, I started getting emails from SXSW, event (ahem, party) organizers, and other attendees. I’ve been provided dozens, maybe hundreds, of suggestions, links to the SXSW social site – where you can search for and send messages to registered attendees – the online scheduling platform, event RSVP pages, and apps to download and use during the…whatever SXSW Interactive is.

There’s #Hashable, which allows you to tweet who you’ve met, share that with others, and make introductions, while helping develop an updated “relationship book” of those folks and see who your friends are meeting.

There’s SXSW Go, which provides access to your SXSW schedule, social connections, and background on the chaos around you.

There’s Bump, which allows you to swap contact information with others with just a fist bump and phones in-hand, so you don’t have to worry as much about business cards.

There’s SitBy.Us, which allows you to share whether the panel you’re in is good or otherwise, hear about other panels, and find out who else is in the same session so you can connect.

There’s Beluga, which offers group texting so your entire posse can holllaaahhh regularly.

Of course there’s Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places for the location-based check-in inclined.

And a ton of others promising to hook you up with the inside info on the newest sessions, underground parties, and where to find the best barbecue…I already know where it is, but I’m not starting a firefight by posting it.

I signed up late for SXSW and almost didn’t get a traditional hotel room. My travel rep said that there wasn’t a single room to be had in Austin during SXSW. So I went to Twitter and in five minutes I had several options for not only hotels, but houses, apartments, dorm rooms – even tents.

I’ve been organizing my schedule for days and I still don’t feel like I’m ready. But I also understand that you’re never quite ready for SXSW and that the best things happen there when you leave room for them to happen to you. So, here I go. I suspect I’ll be blogging throughout SXSW, but if I don’t find the time, you’ll definitely be hearing from me afterward. Lucky you.

I started blogging in June 2004, using a Blogspot platform, and continued pretty regularly until the beginning of 2009. That year I left my solo gig and joined a brand marketing and design firm as an equity partner for about four months. During that time, I blogged for that company, leaving my own blog dormant.

When I parted ways with the agency – talented, ambitious, nice guys, but just not the right fit – and returned to darbyDARNIT at the beginning of 2009, I blogged a little again until the Make-A-Wish Foundation® of America (my blog posts are mine and do not reflect the opinions of my employer) recruited me back to serve as its national director of brand marketing & digital strategy. Although I’ve been blogging internally for the organization, I haven’t done any public blogging since the beginning of 2010. The time off has been good and much needed, but I’m ready to start blogging again.

I have had plenty of time to think about what the new iteration of this blog would be. I first explored the possibility of taking a whole new approach and writing from a more personal husband and daddy perspective. There are two reasons why this would be a bad idea:

1. The wifey would have good reason to divorce me.

2. I’d have to write about those types of things only during non-work time, and the wifey would have another good reason to divorce me.

3. I really love my wifey and don’t want her to divorce me.

Over the years, blogging served as a source of inspiration, introspection, and a way to create clarity around big hairy strategic frameworks. And I missed having that anchor whenever something moved me or I was struggling to understand how new innovations and approaches were relevant to my work.

So, it was clear that I wanted to get back to writing about work stuff. The next question was whether I should focus content around a very specific niche within the marketing and communications industry. But I don’t think any of these can operate in isolation and be successful. Marketing and communications professionals need to be focused on integrated strategies and tactics that are grounded in listening, connecting, engaging, and impacting the bottom line.

So, my goal is to start anew – although I ported over most of the blog posts from the past seven years so they wouldn’t just be lost in the ether – and cover brand marketing, digital strategy, and creative storytelling, with a particular focus on how to connect and engage with key stakeholder groups on emotional and practical levels.

And of course I’ll throw in some personal stuff from time to time, like these pictures I took while the wifey was out one night and I decided to prove that she wasn’t the only one in the family with photography talent.

I hope you find value, humor, food for thought, and a reason to provide feedback – complimentary or critical – in what I write. The journey begins again…