Those who do digital strategy well earn the right to be part of brand strategy conversations. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about my job. When you peel away all of the noise generated by connectivity and technology, the brand’s left in the middle. Peeling away all of the noise is difficult, though. There’s always something else to do on the Interwebs and another Mashable post to distract your client’s attention. Knowing the noise will only get noisier; we’ve got to make the most of it. No, that doesn’t mean we oblige to shiny object syndrome. It means we should be using the digital insights available at our fingertips to clarify and strengthen brand strategies. 

The challenge we face when doing this is that most clients and agencies think digital is tactical. A tactic of part of a bigger strategy, idea or campaign. This was exemplified in a meeting I recently attended with other agencies where their creative lead referred to digital as “a supporting element to TV” after reading the script from his iPad. It’s not that digital is tactical, it’s that people who don’t get digital think it’s tactical. You’re not fooling anyone by reading TV scripts from your iPad.

Assessing whether or not “the latest” in digital makes sense for a brand isn’t easy. Figuring out how to extend a campaign idea into digital is. Display ad here and proverbial social post there. Oh, and a mobile application of whatever on the side. This kind of thinking is easy because it’s lazy. And it takes advantage of the traditional mindset of most marketers. There’s a time and place for traditional advertising, but digital doesn’t “support” or “extend” it. In fact, I’d argue TV is a supporting element to digital, not the other way around. People want experiences where they can interact with your brand at their convenience. Focus on this first and then create a TV spot to let people know about it.

Digital becomes strategic when we’re able to find the signal in the noise. When you find consumer feedback in social media conversation you had yet to uncover in focus groups. When you look back historically at keyword volume to help map out your content strategy for the upcoming quarter. When user experience design for a website influences how a company merchandises their products in store. When deciding not to create one-off Facebook and Twitter feeds for a campaign because it’s short-lived. When you come to the realization that the number of websites isn’t the Internet’s fault, but rather a lack of properly mapping out your brand’s architecture. When data analysis gets you to the ah-ha moment that it’s not a mobile website or an application – it’s both. When key stakeholder interviews you’re doing for a website redesign leads you to additional research that gets you in the door to work on a brand identify refresh.

Digital strategy and brand strategy are interchangeable. It’s not one or the other. One’s not more important, or that different, than the other. Digital strategy can influence brand strategy and vice versa. They’re blurring together and may eventually become one. In the meantime, make sure you’re intimately dialed in to what’s going on in digital. Otherwise, you run the risk of reading TV scripts from an iPad in the future.

The market is filled with self-proclaimed experts. People and organizations. Especially the social media kind. There are probably even Pinning and +1’ing experts to be found. Claiming expertise in the world of modern marketing is limiting, if not impossible. Limiting because expertise narrowly defines what you can do. Limiting because what you think you’re an expert at now is at risk of being irrelevant in six months. If you express expertise of what you know now, your ability to evolve will be hindered.

On the contrary, there are people and organizations that position themselves as generalists. Those that know a little about a lot, but not a lot about a little. Generalists have the biggest sandbox to play in and exercise a chameleon-like mentality depending on the environment they’re in. They architect a public-facing façades that only go two feet deep in term of what they could do, but span fifty feet wide in terms of what they can do. Like expertise, generalization comes with limitations. Limiting because a width of knowledge is not as strong as it’s depth in a few focused areas. Hopefully these areas are things you’re passionate about and great at doing. If you accomplish this, you’ll be distinguished among your competitors vying for the attention you seek.

Then there are those who have found the sweet spot between the extremes of wizardry and imprecision. People who express humble confidence about a few things they’re great at. Companies that recognize the value of bringing in specialists when the depth of knowledge required is beyond their means. Those who are constantly shaping their skillsets to keep up with the momentum of consumer behavior and technology trends.

Finding our sweet spot and evolving it to maintain relevancy is key. As we do this, we need to be careful not to niche ourselves into a corner. Or jack-of-all-trades ourselves to the point where people don’t understand how we can help them. By finding our sweet spot, we’re that much closer to being remarkable and happily successful.

What started out as a narrowly focused initiative to track the correlation between TV spots run and Twitter activity during the Super Bowl has annually evolved into something bigger at Colle+McVoy. In 2010, we found that the House Rules spot from Doritos drove the highest volume of posts on Twitter (35,000), which equated to a cost-per-tweet of $313.

Last year, we expanded our coverage and monitored the entire social web to uncover how the Super Bowl influences people’s behavior throughout the nation. We created an interactive infographic that illustrated the Super Bowl’s social footprint using the Google Maps API. As you navigate through the experience, you’ll come across the ten most frequently mentioned topics and brief snippets of our findings beneath the infographic.

 

This year, we will deliver a more dynamic experience that offers visitors the ability to observe how certain topics trended throughout the course of the game. To capture minute-by-minute activity on Twitter, we are building our own proprietary data crawler using the Twitter API to capture the tweets needed to tell the Super Chatter story.

At the center of the Super Chatter experience will be an interactive graph that allows visitors to dynamically observe social media activity throughout the course of the game with one click. We’ll be tracking brand mentions, team and player references, the halftime show and more. The site will also include various infographics, charts and lists that visually guide visitors through social media’s side of the Super Bowl story.

Our team will be working tirelessly through the night on Sunday to deliver you the goods at collemcvoy.com/superchatter by the time you roll out of bed on Monday morning. During the game, keep an eye on the @collemcvoy Twitter feed for #superchatter coverage and updates on when we expect everything to be live.

Inventiveness breeds remarkable interactive experiences. Unique experiences allow a brand to stand out amidst the chaos and clutter. Standing out online is harder than it’s ever been and oftentimes stalemates a brand from making any progress.

Inventiveness doesn’t happen by mistake. Inventive thinking leads to insights. Insights inspire ideas. Ideas require compassionate implementation. A remarkable interactive experience is the sum of these parts. When building these parts, I believe the following principles should guide a brand’s quest to create a remarkable experience:

VALUE

An interactive experience must add incremental value to the brand experience. By doing so, people will naturally pull brands into their lives on their own terms.           

ENGAGEMENT

Capturing someone’s attention is only the initiation of a meaningful brand interaction. It’s what you do with people’s attention that matters most.  

UTILITY

The purpose of an experience is defined by its usefulness and influenced by what the brand is attempting to accomplish. Function over form and not vice versa.

PARTICIPATION

As attention is earned, the experience must be inclusive of at least one way for people to advance from leaned-back browsers to leaning-forward participants. 

CONNECTION

By analyzing participatory interactions, brands can better understand people’s preferences.Therefore, leveraging the strength of a like-minded audience.

SHARING

If the experience delivers on the previously stated principles, it will spread. If properly integrated across social networks and platforms, it will spread further.

CONVERSION

Desired consumer outcomes are established and monitored to ensure that the experience is achieving its purpose and positively influencing business results.

I don’t believe inventiveness happens by chance. I also don’t believe there’s an equation for producing a remarkable online brand experience. But I do believe there are common principles marketers should consider when evaluating which digital idea(s) they should execute. By applying these principles, your brand increases its chances of standing out.

4,075 people have visited this blog since the beginning of the year. For those keeping score at home, that’s approximately 11 people per day. Or, about 8 people per post as I’ve published 43 times during this timeframe. Yes, you’re right. That’s not very many.

But that’s not what this is all about. I have no interest in trying to convince any of you that my blog should be on a top 25 power blogger or whatever-the-hell list. Rather, I’ve pulled out what I consider to be interesting tidbits from this amazingly sophisticated tool I use called Google Analytics. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Here’s what stood out.

Love of Spiders + Post Quality

Year-over-year (2010 vs. 2011), unique visitors have increased 37%. It’s important to note I’ve only published 5 more times (this is my 44th post this year, compared to 39 last year). Why? Because the notion of quality over quantity rings true in this case. It’s safe to say the four additional posts I published didn’t make up the 37% uptick in unique visitors. I attribute this increase to the following factors: 1) a substantial increase in organic search traffic from Google (up 338%!) and 2) post quality. I’ve been publishing to this blog for two years and there are now more breadcrumbs in my Internet past than ever before. I’m more findable. Google likes this. Additionally, I resisted the urge to publish because I felt like I had to. I made a conscious attempt to only write when I felt inspired and had a story to tell. As a result of this, my posts were shared more through Twitter and Facebook and overall time on site increased 33%.

The Interwebs Want to Hear from You

Given the substantial increase in organic search traffic from Google, I took a deeper dive into top organic keyword phrases and their associated behavior metrics throughout the site. Not surprisingly, the keyword phrases “craig pladson,” “interactive strategist,” and “craig pladson blog” rose to the top. “craig pladson” drove the highest time on site at 3 minutes and 23 seconds. Which is more than two times the average time spent on site. People are looking for you. Once found, people want to know more about you. This is the reality of the social Web world we live in. If nothing else, hopefully this inspires you to consider sharing your thoughts with the Interwebs. It wants to hear from you.

Miscellaneous Nonsensical Data

Top three posts of 2011 (based on pageviews):

Why You Should Get Your MBA

Students: How to Stand Out in a Crowd of Many

Social+Mobile: Shaping the Future of Photo Sharing

Bottom line: it works to my advantage that people literally type “why should i get my mba?” into Google. Try it. I own two of the top ten listings (St. Thomas repurposed my post for their blog). Another note: it helps to post immediately following a presentation. My post about students standing out was published after I presented at the Student Advertising Summit earlier this year. Including the deck is also a plus.

Highest Average Time on Page Award goes to …

Why I Want You to Be Uncomfortable

Bottom line: people enjoy a little controversy and attitude. I wrote this post after being inspired watching Faris Yakob present. Another note: I’m guessing there are quite a few interactive-marketing-type-peeps that can empathize with my point of view here. Can you tell me exactly what you do and when you should be involved? :-)

Maybe the world is flat ... 

Locally, the northernmost Minnesotan city to land on my site was Roseau.                  

Nationally, Californians surfed around the site most. Santa Monica beating out L.A.!

Internationally, Canadians led the charge, followed by the U.K., India and Australia.

Bottom line: from the Land of 10,000 Lakes to the Outback, people have somehow ended up on my blog. It must be my optimization techniques in the Australian search engines. Or, the fact that I’m a Foster’s beer enthusiast. Or, neither of those things.

I find myself frequently telling clients that they’re leaving data on the table. After spending an hour in Google Analytics assessing my own site, it looks like I am too. No, this is not the type of analytics magic you’re going to get from someone like Dan Mandle. But, spending some time purveying your data is better than none. Pay it forward to the end user in the New Year and do some analysis of your own.

Writing this post got away from me a bit with the birth of our son Jonah, but I feel like it’s still worth sharing with you. Towards the end of August, my wife and I were getting ready to purchase a pre owned car before the baby arrived. As we were test-driving cars, I took a picture of Kristin, uploaded it to Instagram and shared it on Twitter.

As you can probably tell by the enthusiastic look on her face, I made her stand in front of the Dukes of Hazzard-looking ride for my enjoyment with the hopes of a few laughs from followers. A few Likes and ten minutes later, I received an unexpected response from @edmundslive on my iPhone offering their services as we continue our car-buying journey.

I was impressed. Real-time customer service helping people get fair prices for pre owned cars. Its usefulness took away from what could have been an annoyance due to the unsolicited nature of communication. The author’s initials also added some personalization that made me feel like it didn’t just come from an automated response.

I didn’t respond immediately, but it stuck in my head as we continued looking for cars the next weekend. By that point, we had focused our search to two specific models at two different dealerships. One dealership left room for negotiation; the other offered a fixed take-it-or-leave-it price. At the dealership where we could negotiate, I decided to take advantage of the @edmundslive service.

I received the response you see above in five minutes. Quick enough for me to use it as leverage to negotiate a cheaper price than the dealership was offering. As we were waiting for a quote from the sales person, my wife also checked Kelly Blue Book on her iPhone to get one more point of comparison. At this point, we had all the leverage we needed to successfully get a fair quote on a car we felt was initially priced high.

While we did get a fair asking price on the Nissan Maxima, we ended up purchasing a Nissan Altima from the other dealership. But that’s not the point. Throughout my experience, Edmund’s did a fantastic job of leveraging Twitter the way it should be. With value that helps move people forward. One of the most stressful parts of buying a car is the lack of transparency around pricing. Edmund’s service relieves this stress. And their Twitter strategy aligns perfectly with their overall purpose of “empowering, engaging and educating automotive consumers.” Props to Edmunds for using Twitter to move both people and their brand forward towards achieving their goals.

 

Three years ago, I led the vision behind the agency's efforts to formally develop an educational platform with the purpose of spreading inspiration and sharing knowledge. We’ve had a wide range of amazing speakers, including Scott Belsky, Robert Stephens and Alex Bogusky. Independent film director Hunter Weeks will be coming to the agency to kick off our 2012 speaker series in January. As an extension of this educational platform, we launched our inaugural digital excellence session last week. These sessions take an active approach to learning through demonstration with a focus on interactive marketing.

This month's topic was Google+. We started by framing up Google+ within the context of Google’s greater mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This, of course, placed an emphasis on search as we talked about the purpose and long-term validity of the network. The point is that Google+ is more than a social network. It’s an opportunity for Google to integrate their ecosystem of products and services (e.g., Gmail, music, photos) through a consumer-friendly social platform with targeted sharing functionality. Google+ also primes the pump for +1’s, which have a positive impact on search relevancy as people can easily find endorsed links from people within their Circles. We also informed the audience of the network's usage activity, demonstrated its main features and outlined implications for marketers. Click through the deck below and let me know what you think. Is Google+ here to stay?

In partnership with Corey Sax of Pizza Luce and Sarah Townes of Caribou Coffee, I spent the morning talking about social media with the Minnesota Restaurant Association. I was enlisted to kick off the presentation and facilitate a Q+A. Here's the deck.

In the presentation, there's a quote from Joe Sorge, Owner of restaurant AJ Bombers in Milwaukee. "My restaurant was made by Twitter. That is no lie." This was pulled directly from an interview he did with Chris Brogan, which you can check out below.

As I was doing research for my presentation, I came across a great study commissioned by eMarketer titled, Digital Dining: Chain Restaurants Add Social Media, Mobile to the Menu. If you're in the restaurant industry, it's certainly worth 15 minutes of your time.