This week I’m representing CCA at the annual South by South West Interactive conference (SXSWi). There are few better places where you can immerse yourself in some of the most creative ideas that are changing the interactive and social web spheres.

A prime focus of CCA interactive is to be a part of, or ahead of, these ideas so that we can advise our clients on the best ways to utilize the Web rather than simply mimicking the latest social media case study from their competition.

“Tomorrow Happens Here”

I’ll be reporting back throughout the week on everything that I’m soaking in from the conference. Here is the short list of some of the sessions that I’m most excited about attending.

• Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For
• What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data
• The Revenge of Editorials
• Is The Brain The Ultimate Computer Interface
• Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple
• Community Innovation Summit
• How to Create a Viral Video
• Banking 2.0: Financial Services Driven by People & Emerging Technologies
• Can You Copyright a Tweet?
• Debunking the Myth of Social Media Fundraising
• Measuring Blogger Credibility: FTC Regulations vs. Crowdsourced Solutions
• ‘Make’ vs. ‘Gather?’ Successful Content Business Models
• From Blogger to Social Media Guru to Professional Speaker
• Rules of BrandFiction from Twittering MadMen
• How To Spark a Movement In The 21st Century
• ER 2.0
• How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business Model
• Persuasive Design: How To Encourage Users To Do What You Want Them To
• Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change
• Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process

It looks like SXSW will keep me pretty busy this weekend.

If you aren’t attending, what sessions are you most looking forward to reading about after the fact or following Twitter’s comments in real time?

Early in my career, when I first had the responsibility of hiring an employee, I spoke with a colleague who was a longtime HR director. His advice? Look for attitude above all else. Skills are important, he said, but can be acquired or enhanced on the job to some extent. Attitude, on the other hand, is tough to change.

In today’s economic climate, folks are either struggling to maintain their businesses, grateful for the job they have or anxiously looking for work or clients. It’s not an easy environment for a great attitude, I know.

Having a positive outlook is like jet fuel – it provides you with lift and can take those around you up a level as well. A good attitude inspires energy and enthusiasm on the job on the good days, and it keeps you moving toward higher ground when times are tough.

Think back to your first week at a desirable new job – you were excited to be there and eager to contribute and learn, remember? That’s the attitude that we should strive to keep. This is the backbone of working toward a common good with colleagues and clients alike.

What creates a good attitude?

• Enjoy what you do. If you need to revitalize your career, find something new to learn, whether it’s through a book, a webinar or a colleague. If you need a change, look into other options – action steps will improve your view of the current situation.
• Keep the team going. Work diligently and creatively. Be liberal with praise when it’s due. And if someone drops a ball, help them toss it back in the air.
• Find the silver lining. Even the worst situation will bring something positive, even if it’s only a lesson or new insight.
• Maintain a sense of humor. Laughter is a universal bond, and it keeps good energy flowing through the day.
• Balance confidence with humility. It’s important to believe in yourself and your skills, as long you don’t ram your accomplishments down everyone’s throat! Be aware for opportunities to assist the common good.

In the world of marketing, advertising and PR, a good attitude is essential since it transmits to a much wider audience. It eases collaboration in the creative process and keeps you flexible and patient through each round of edits or press pitches. And it’s absolutely mandatory in social media conversations. Remember that your words may be floating on the Web for years! Your thoughts and opinions are important but use diplomacy when sharing them.

So what’s the big deal about attitude? Everything. It’s something you carry with you, from day to day, job to job, person to person.

What do you think makes a good attitude on the job?

Donna had a great post last week about understanding the media’s perspective in order to be a better PR person. I loved her post and it got me thinking that her philosophy can be applied to far more than just media relations.

One of the reasons why CCA is able to be so successful is that we don’t just “talk the talk.”

Working in marketing, communications and social media without having real-life experience consuming the media that you are creating is a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine a reporter for the Boston Globe admitting that they just weren’t “a news person” and could go weeks without picking up a paper or going to the local news Web site. It would be pretty hard to trust their reporting credentials.

To that same point, wouldn’t you have doubts about taking advice on how to manage your company’s presence online from an agency that doesn’t blog, has one Twitter follower, can’t be found anywhere on Google and couldn’t find their way around an RSS feed?

Here at CCA, we are fortunate enough to be in the position where we get to learn on a daily basis from other marketing pros. Not because we are simply sharing war stories from the trenches through various discussion boards or LinkedIn groups, but because they reach out to US on behalf of THEIR clients to tell their stories for them. Trust me, getting a phone call from another PR agency trying to convince you to blog or tweet about their client while you are doing the same for your own client is an out of body experience, and one that isn’t all that rare around these parts.

We blog,  manage Twitter followers by the thousands, build communities on LinkedIn, Ning and share videos to our YouTube subscribers not just for the sake of creation, but as a gigantic and constantly evolving social media experiment. Read all the books you want on effective social media marketing. While you are curled up on the couch reading the latest insights from 2009, we’ll be in the “lab” testing our latest experiments created to help us understand anything from Twitter trending topics to blog syndication strategies. Then we get to turn that all around and bring back all those lessons to the client with the freshest understanding of online behavioral trends.

Now how do YOU experiment and test your ideas online?

While Facebook is arguably one the best places to stay connected with friends and family, it’s also a powerful marketing tool that we have helped leverage on behalf of many clients. A stat recently came out that 25% of all US page views are on Facebook, showing the immense reach that the site has built.

One campaign that we launched for a major Boston hospital was focused on driving attendance at an event that they were running, educating prospective patients on  available varicose vein treatments. We were happy to once again prove that there is business value in Facebook, even if you aren’t a farmer, mobster or in a wagon train going down the Oregon trail. (Anyone remember that app?)

In fact, statistics show that mothers and middle-aged women are the fastest growing population on Facebook.  CCA used that knowledge to help our client after learning that their target audience was women, ages 45-60, with concerns about varicose veins and/or possible treatments for varicose veins.

By targeting users through their social data and geographic proximity to the various events that were being hosted, we were able achieve an ROI that far surpassed that of other traditional marketing tactics that were being used.

Here are the results of the campaign:

• Over a 5 week period the targeted ads were shown 2,042,151 times
• 773 people clicked on the ads
• 17 people registered for the event directly through Facebook
• Cost was a fraction of the budget compared to spending on local newspapers and radio
• Cost per conversion (attendee):

Facebook: $42.80

Radio equated to $525

Newspapers equated to $128.53

What was most powerful about this campaign was not only the capability to use Facebook to target the users that mattered to us, but the ability to do so without the hefty budget of traditional radio and newspaper advertising. Leveraging public social data to place relevant messages in front of audiences willing to listen may be one of the most underestimated impacts on marketing that the social media revolution has caused.

Although the thousands of articles about social media often overshadow it, e-mail remains highly effective as a results-oriented platform that can increase sales and drive traffic to your Web site or Facebook page.

Importantly, e-mail is the most popular and effective medium for sharing information online.

In a recent study from ShareThis.com -

• 46 percent of consumers said they share information via email
• 33 percent said they share information via Facebook
• 14.5 percent said they use other channels to share information
• 6 percent said they share information via Twitter

Our recommendation for this coming year: Maintain and even strengthen your e-mail marketing efforts. Your e-mail program and your Web site are still the pillars of your online marketing efforts.

Google’s Marissa Mayer announced, at the end of Google Search Event that Google will soon receive real-time access from Facebook Fan Page updates.

“Facebook will be providing us with a feed of updates from public profile pages, also known as Facebook pages,” says Mayer.

This is a great opportunity for the more than 1.6 million active Fan Pages on Facebook, of which almost half are local business, who are sharing content on a regular basis. With Facebook profiles and Fan Pages being indexed by Google, businesses can leverage their Fan Pages as part of their Search Engine Optimization strategy.

By continuing to update your Fan Page on a regular basis with relevant, engaging content, your Fan Page will likely be found by prospects and customers who are searching for products and services on Google. If you execute the strategy properly, you could grow your fan base exponentially and get your company in front of more qualified prospects who are actively searching right now for what you offer.

The thing that I’ve seen consistently raise eyebrows when presenting marketing communications strategies to clients is the idea that social media programs do NOT have to live in their own isolated bubble.

“Wait, you mean the intelligence that I gather through my email campaign can be used in my PR/Facebook/Twitter/SEO programs (and visa versa)?!”

Yes.

Each medium does have its own challenges. You can’t treat people the same over email as you would over Facebook. It just doesn’t work. BUT, the information you gather from how your audience best responds to email campaigns to what keywords they search and have alerts set for to what types of blog posts they are most likely to “like” on your Facebook fan page has no boundaries (other than extrapolating to unrelated audiences).

Audience behavior intelligence is universal.

Don’t just collect all that information and stare at it. Use it! Understand the way that your audience behaves on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Linkedin/Google so that you can be exactly where they are, in ways that they want to see you while encouraging the behavior that you want them to express  (phone calls, link sharing, blog post publishing…).

For a lot of marketers, social media technology itself still seems pretty foreign, but let’s not forget that behind (most) of those Twitter accounts is still another human that has the same basic needs and desires as any other person.

Because when you break it all down, your Twitter followers aren’t all that different from your Facebook fans and your YouTube channel subscribers. They just choose different channels to engage with your brand and the content you produce.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackystuff/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Tired of hearing about how the next big killer application is going to turn your business into a gold mine and make life easier for you?

Yes, we all know that mass media habits have changed and that we’re now a wired society, dependent on our computers and iPhones for information. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that something new equates to something better for your business.

As we become mesmerized by and inundated with new technologies, we tend to forget about the one deciding factor when purchasing a service or product from one company over another: human trust.

A stroke on a keyboard, an e-mail or a tweet will never replace the experience of meeting someone, shaking a hand and engaging in a conversation. When that happens, there’s trust and with trust comes customer loyalty. Optimizing for better ranks on Google will help bring people to your website and posting your updates on Facebook and LinkedIN will help connect you with more people, but there’s no replacement for meeting prospects in person!

As the holidays approach, we urge you to try the next big thing in marketing – human trust.

From the October 5th, 2009 New York Times:

“On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.”

So the jig is up. Advertising claims and the people who love them are once again under the microscope.

While I’ve used some pretty bodacious adjectives and gussied up a few product shots to bring out the best in my clients’ offerings, I’ve always tried to live by the slogan of one of my previous employers: truth well told.

Truth well told was originated by McCann-Erickson at a time when many products were making some pretty questionable claims. Even big companies were guilty: a 1914 ad for Ford’s Model T featured the headline “Buy it because it’s a better car” and suggested the reader get the particulars from a Ford dealer. Um…okaaaay….

Fast forward about a century. Laws and guidelines are in place to protect the public from misleading advertising claims and fuzzy endorsements. And generally speaking, I think the ad world does a pretty good job of policing itself as well. But, thanks to the anonymous nature of the internet, we’ve taken a few steps back.

I think the general public will always be wary of advertising but let’s get back on track. Let’s put our clients’ wares out there in the most honest, best possible creative light we can.

Let’s try the truth well blogged.

CCA recently received the honor of joining the 2009 Inc. 5,000 list as one of the country’s fastest growing privately held companies. After a rigorous vetting process, we are very proud to announce that we have been named to the prestigious list for the second time.

While we are proud of our accomplishment, it is our valued and respected clients that entrust us to build their brands—along with the talented team at CCA—that enabled us to not only be in the Inc. 5000 list in 2007, but again in 2009. Our thanks and gratitude go out to all of our past, current and future clients for your commitment to our brand of marketing and client services.

Especially in a time when marketing teams are constantly forced to defend their investments, we couldn’t be more humbled by this accomplishment. We are truly lucky to have such an amazing stable of companies that we view more partners than clients. It is these valuable partnerships that have allowed us to grow even under the toughest economic conditions.

Thanks to everyone to has helped us make this accomplishment possible. It has been a true team effort.