When I was a cub reporter at a small newspaper on the central coast of California nearly a decade ago, a respected veteran reporter on staff, upon resigning from her post, left me a note saying she was certain I would run a publication one day.

While I was flattered that she saw such potential in me, I shrugged off the message. I was only interested in getting out and covering the stories, and I had no aspirations to become part of management.

I remained in journalism for several more years, but I eventually left the industry, disheartened with where it was headed.

Now, four years after my last newspaper job, I’m working at a digital marketing agency, where I find myself managing the company’s blog and thinking about audience and content and how they relate to marketing and growing a business.

In the past, media content and advertising were black and white. On TV, we tuned in for the content and we accepted that, in between segments of content, we would be subjected to a certain amount of advertising. It was the price we paid for enjoyable programming, and there was no question which was the content and which was the advertising.

While that model is still alive and well, today the idea of advertising and content being one and the same has become more accepted. And while there are many purists who bemoan this model, there is no question that it opens up many new possibilities in how we receive our information and entertainment.

But when you add in another advance in media – the opportunity for interaction, not just between creator and consumer, but also between consumer and consumer – things get really juicy.

This is where the content you produce takes on a life of its own and where one plus one adds up to more than two. Because not only are you creating quality content for your audience to enjoy, you’re creating a place where relationships form.

And when relationships begin to form between members of your audience, you’ve officially built something much stronger than a mere publication. You’ve built a community.

I was proud to be part of the editorial staff of a newspaper back in my journalism days. I felt we were doing important work. It was a huge responsibility to deliver the news to people in a balanced way to keep them informed about what was happening in the world around them and how they might be affected.

Most journalists would probably scoff at what I’m doing now and how I refer to myself as the manager of a publication. But I honestly believe I’m helping to bring more to people’s lives here, as part of a branded blog, than I ever did as a “legitimate” journalist.

I’m proud to say I am indeed running a publication and a community …from the dark side.

Photo courtesy of Forum One Networks

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Guest post by Mike Schaffer, social media and online marketing manager at Iostudio.

Despite the incessant buzz in the marketing industry surrounding Foursquare and Facebook Places, I see four major challenges facing location-based services.

For all the hype, only four percent of adults are using these services (not to mention the 84 percent of adults who have no idea what they are). Clearly, not a ton of folks are taking advantage of them, so let’s investigate the main reasons why they haven’t caught fire…yet.

1)      Fear – I’ve heard from countless people that they feel online check-ins leave them and their homes vulnerable to robberies, muggings, and sexual assaults. While few, if any, cases of “Foursquare burglary” have surfaced thus far, I think this is a valid point. If you tell everyone where you are (or aren’t!), all of those types of attacks are possible. Not likely, but possible. And most people don’t want to leave a figurative unlocked door to their homes.

2)      Lack of technological penetration – The geo-location world is tied to your smartphone, and if you don’t have a smartphone, well, you have to call or text people to tell them where you are (how 2009!). Despite protests from Apple, not a lot of folks have an iPhone (and let’s not even discuss the proper way to hold an iPhone 4). Until more people are living in a smartphone world, geo-location will struggle. For the record, just one in five mobile phones are “smart”.

3)      Metropolitan/urban design – Foursquare was created to help people find their friends in Manhattan. Translating that platform to other places that aren’t as densely populated (by people or public transportation options) means it will lose part of its identity. The challenge for geo-location platform developers is to give the networks value to a geographically diverse audience.

4)      Badge exhaustion – I use Foursquare. A lot. So let me be completely candid here: Those early months where I got lots of points and badges for doing things were AWESOME. I felt like a good little adventurer. I checked in at an airport at 5 a.m. for a business trip and got TWO badges that day: One as a frequent flyer, and one, mistakenly, for “staying out late on a school night.” I haven’t gotten a badge in months and it’s really starting to kill my motivation.

So, with all of these roadblocks standing in their way, do you think location-based services can overcome these four challenges?

Mike Schaffer is the Washington, DC, based social media and online marketing manager at Iostudio. He is the author The Buzz by Mike Schaffer and has been named in the Top 30 and Top 100 Publicists to Follow on Twitter.

Then, I’m going through my Google Reader last night and I find a post on Harvard Business Review called, “How Sex Hurts the Workplace, Especially Women.” An article that explores Mark Hurd’s recent scandal (Hewlett Packard CEO) as a casualty to high-achieving female executives because now men will look at the situation and think, “Poor guy was fired for dining alone with a junior woman. No one is even alleging a sexual relationship. How crazy is that! It makes me want to avoid ever being alone with a younger female colleague.”

I own a business. I employ mostly women. I don’t have children. I was always treated fairly in my jobs and, really, made more money than I probably deserved. So I’ve always had a hard time understanding how men and women aren’t treated equally on the job.

But it’s out there and a recent New York Times article shows there is 23 percent wage gap between men and women for the same, exact job. Twenty-three percent. You know why? Because “many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late.” Total baloney. The women I know who have children and work, actually work harder than their male counterparts. There is a certain guilt associated with needing to be home with the kids (that our society has created) so they go above and beyond to prove how serious they are about their careers.

Being treated equally on the job, which I strive to do with my team daily (pay, raises, bonuses, and incentives are commensurate with their goals and how they help the business grow, not on sex), is overly important to me…it’s that fairness gene I inherited from my mother. But that’s not to say that we, as a company, have been treated fairly in new business pitches or when we’re up against our male counterparts.

I’ve written about Charles Arment, an imaginary partner we made up (a la Remington Steele) for those times when new business prospects insisted on meeting my MALE partner, insinuating a woman can’t grow a business alone.  This was early on in the business when I didn’t have the confidence (or, really, the cash flow) to tell those kinds of men to stick it where the sun don’t shine; now I have zero problem walking away from someone like that.

However, not everyone owns a business. Not everyone has control of how high they can make it on the corporate ladder without being mentored by a male executive. Not everyone has a female executive (only 15 of the Fortune 500 have female executives) to support them and their growth.

I think there is only one thing we can do: Change the way we behave, as individuals, at work. Men, it is your responsiblity to show restraint and responsibility if you take on a leadership role and have female junior workers working for you. Sure an affair might be alluring, but it does more than wreak havoc at home. It has long-lasting effects on you, your colleague, your family, your career (and hers), and our society. And women? You have a responsibility not to sleep your way to the top (a Center for Work-Life Policy study shows 37 percent of women got to a leadership role through sex) and show the same kind of restraint as men. You want to be treated equally? Act like it.

What do you think?

Guest post by Anna Barcelos, co-moderator of #IMCChat.

Many organizations have an abundance of data. The big question is how are they using it to better communicate with customers and prospects? Additionally, some of this valuable information resides outside of marketing, making it a challenge for effective, relevant marketing and communications.

From an integrated marketing communications (IMC) perspective, the best use of customer/prospect data is aggregating it into behavioral groups; for example, aggregating information on existing customers based on how, when, and how often they buy the company’s products and services. This is more valuable than traditional segmentation methods that classify customers into categories according to demographic, geographic, or psychographic types. Once behavioral groups are established, the organization can more effectively tailor its messages to customer/prospect needs. Most importantly, customers and prospects are treated as individuals, not markets. So do marketers have to start wearing pocket protectors? Maybe! Here are five data-driven actions you can take today that will bring you closer to your customers.

1. Take a look at what data is currently available within your organization from various departments (Oh, if it was only centralized!). In addition to marketing data (e.g., campaign analytics, survey results, social data, etc.), work with other departments including service, finance, and sales to learn how you can leverage their information. Come on. You can do this! Chances are most of the data you need is already available somewhere within the organization.

2. Organize data into behavioral groups. It may begin with aggregating current and prospective customers, and then further breaking each down into the behavioral subcategories mentioned above (i.e., how they buy). Once these behavioral groups are established, “traditional” demographic, geographic, and psychographic data can be appended to them if necessary. Data houses Experian, Equifax, and Epsilon provide this information.

3. Visualize your customers/prospects. A great way to gain insight into customers/prospects is through visual analysis and mind-mapping tools. Visual displays of data are powerful because they provide an alternative way of detecting patterns, trends, and sometimes surprises (a.k.a. outliers) you wouldn’t immediately see on a spreadsheet, database query, or report. Another plus is that this information can be presented to upper management in a way that’s easy to understand.

4. Develop an integrated marketing communications strategy based on behavioral groups. Because these groups are based on customers’ or prospects’ past behavior with the organization (or a competitor’s), marketers are able to use the most effective communication channels and relevant messages.

5. Test, measure, adjust as there is no “cookie-cutter” strategy. Marketing today is a laboratory. Constantly test and tweak messages based on responses from your customers and prospects. After all, they are human beings with evolving needs. Marketers and organizations as a whole should always be conscious of that.

How are you using your data for more effective communication with customers and prospects? I encourage you to share your thoughts here.

Anna Barcelos is a 16-year integrated marketer who uses data as the foundation for customer and prospect communications. You can find Anna co-moderating #IMCChat every Wednesday night on Twitter. Connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or through her blog.

Think about that for a second. You no longer control your company’s brand; your customers do.

It used to be that the big, Fortune 500 companies would spend millions of dollars on fancy advertising and huge global PR campaigns and years and years and years to tell their customers and prospective customers what they wanted them to think about the brand. If someone was happy with the product or service, they wouldn’t tell anyone. If they were unhappy, they’d tell five to 10 people and hope to get attention through a nastily written letter to the CEO that almost always went unanswered.

Now, with the speed of the web, customers tell not just a handful of people, but thousands if they’re happy or unhappy about doing business with you. That’s good and bad. In the “old days,” people wouldn’t tell their friends and family if they were happy, but they now go out of their way online to talk about the great experience they have with you. Likewise, they badmouth you online in a moment’s notice, in the hopes that you’re paying attention and will fix their issue immediately.

Let’s start with the good. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Foursquare are all changing the way we do business, both as company leaders and as consumers. Let’s say you have a retail location and one of your brand loyalists, “checks in” on Facebook Places or Foursquare (both location-based tools that link to a person’s network). That person’s 500 friends see them check in and, having never heard of you, ask about your store. Suddenly you have new customers because one loyal person told their friends…and their friends told their friends who told their friends who told their friends.

Or, you have a service business that doesn’t have brick and mortar. Most of us built our businesses through word-of-mouth and referrals. You go to lunch with a client and the client tweets, “Having lunch with Gini Dietrich and her amazing team.” Suddenly your client’s friends want to know why Gini’s team is so amazing and what it would take to get to work with them.

Let your customers control your brand and tell their friends.

Now, the bad. The story I like to tell when I speak is that we have a client who owns assisted living homes in Illinois and Indiana. I was traveling with their CEO in March and we were on their Facebook wall, as I showed him what our respective teams were doing together to develop their social media presence. While we were on there, we noticed a resident’s daughter had posted how unhappy she was with a hair cut her mother had had that day. She ranted and raved and wanted someone to respond.

This was after 9 p.m. in Chicago, which meant our teams weren’t monitoring the wall at that moment. So the CEO posted a comment to her that said something along the lines of wanting to help her and asking her to direct message him her email address or phone number. She did. They chatted. He ended up giving her mother a free hair cut.

But this is where the magic happened: The woman went back to the Facebook wall and said how sorry she was that she’d said negative things about the company, that the issue was fixed, and she’d recommend the home to any of her friends looking for help with their parents.

With a simple email exchange, he turned an irate customer into a brand steward.

It’s a new world where your canned messages are no longer enough. Pay attention to what your customers are saying about you online. Participate in the conversation. Listen to their wants and needs. Let them help you with customer service, new products/services, and market research. Let your customers tell their friends about your brand.

What tips do you have for those who are scared of letting go of control in the new online world?

* Fabulous image from RonAmok

Guest post by John Heaney of Orange Envelopes.

Entrepreneurs perpetually play the role of David against their Goliath corporate competitors. And, just like their biblical counterpart, small businesses can defeat their large competitors by outmaneuvering, out-imagining, and outperforming them.

In a recent scholarly analysis, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” author Ivan Arreguin-Toft analyzed battles between very large armies and small forces and concluded that during the past 200 years the smaller David-sized forces won nearly 30 percent of the time. In many of these battles, the smaller forces were outnumbered 10 to one, yet were able to defeat their numerically superior foe.

Even more amazing, is that when the smaller foe employed an unplanned, surprise battlefield tactic instead of conducting combat in the traditional and anticipated way, their winning percentage shot up to 64 percent.

The business lesson: When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win.

Entrepreneurs are perfectly positioned to operate as insurgents against their entrenched corporate competitors because they’re more willing to challenge the conventions about how commercial battles are supposed to be fought.

Large companies expect to confront competitors. They build enormous corporate strongholds and fill them with regiments of employees in anticipation of large scale engagements. They deploy massive human and financial resources to execute their strategic plan and prepare to crush their competitors.

But, despite their size and strength, these lumbering companies are rarely prepared to confront nimble and fast-moving adversaries that refuse to challenge them on the battlefield of their own design.

How can the entrepreneurial Davids succeed against their Goliath adversaries?

1. Define yourself differently. If you own a hardware store, and Walmart announces plans to open a store in your town, you’d better have a plan to be the anti-Walmart. You know how Walmart positions itself: As the low cost provider. Knowing that, you’ve got to recognize that you’ll never beat Walmart at its own game. Because you can’t win being the low cost provider, you have to define your own niche and then own it. Stock specialty tools, provide in-depth training classes, rent tools, or  become an expert and indispensable in home renovation. Be delightfully different.
2. Attack their weak spots relentlessly. It’s easy to identify your large competitor’s strengths and essential to pick out their weaknesses. Large organizations are typically prepared to counter direct competition but are woefully unprepared to respond to guerilla insurgencies. Because they like to remain above the fray, you can attack them on your own terms on the battlefield of your choosing.
3. Deliver the goods. The success of every strategy comes down to one essential thing: Execution. Once you’ve defined yourself, you have to deliver the goods repeatedly and relentlessly. There are no days off.
4. Extend yourself online. People will continue to do business with people they like, so pursue efforts that make you and your business personable and likable. Start blogging daily about your unique approach to your business, create a Facebook page that actually invites people to engage with you, create compelling content on your website that informs, educates, and entertains, and connect with the Twitter devotees in your area to build enduring relationships 140 characters at a time.

What tips do you have for defeating your large competitors?

John Heaney’s professional experience has centered around marketing, branding, customer experience design, strategic communications, and business development. His current professional endeavors are focused on developing strategic digital marketing programs that integrate compelling social media components. His perspectives are captured on his blog at http://orange-envelopes.com/blog.

Though I don’t have all of the details, the gist of this program is that Cisco pays $500 to every employee who comes up with an idea, a few thousand for those whose ideas are good, and a few thousand more if a patent is sought and the company uses that idea. Cool idea, right? So, why then, other than the person who sends in several hundred ideas a week (known as internal spam), is no one taking part of this program?

While I rode my bike the next morning, I was thinking about that and about Daniel Pink’s philosophy in “Drive.” If you’ve not read the book, I highly recommend it, but if you want to get the Cliff’s Notes version, watch this 12 minute video clip, “The surprising truth about what motivates us” (though, I warn you, it may make you car sick – it did me).

Pink shows study after study about the things that do motivate us, as human beings, and money isn’t one of them. So I have this discussion with Christopher about the program at Cisco, I’ve read “Drive,” and, that very same week, it was a topic of conversation in my Vistage meeting. A lot of my fellow Vistage members believe people are, in fact, motivated by money and that it doesn’t matter what rewards you give employees, they won’t appreciate them unless they’re in the form of cash.

I vehemently disagree. Don’t get me wrong. I’m motivated by money. I love being able to buy wine and shoes. It’s pretty nice to be able to pay my bills without living paycheck to paycheck. But I didn’t take a paycheck for nearly a year during the recession (and I haven’t bought wine or shoes in two years), so it wasn’t money that was getting me up every morning to go to work and to grow a business through an economic meltdown. My employees didn’t receive raises or bonuses for more than a year so it wasn’t money getting them up to go to work every morning.

Put in a different light, if someone were to pay you double your salary, you’d likely take the job, right? Most of us would. But then let’s say you get to your job the first day and they walk you into an empty warehouse. They put a chair in the middle of the warehouse, take away your technology, and tell you it’s your job to sit there and do nothing. How long would you make it? I’m willing to bet not an entire week…despite the amount of money you are making.

I’m not so naive to think that monetary incentives don’t work, but I do think if you want your team to be innovative and create good ideas consistently, the rewards need to be in the form of something they wouldn’t necessarily buy themselves, but would love to have (i.e. gift cards to expensive restaurants or stores, a $300 flat iron, or even a $50 Starbucks card). I wonder what would happen if Cisco changed their program from monetary rewards to incentives that were personalized and meant something to the employee providing the idea?

What do you think?

Our brains need downtime; we need to digest information in order to think more strategically.  Maybe this is why billionaire and new owner of the New Jersey Nets, Mikhail Prokhorov, is able to run such a successful business.  He doesn’t own a cell phone and claims to rarely use a computer.  “I don’t use a computer. We have too much information and it’s really impossible to filter it,” Mikhail tells 60 Minutes.

But I don’t know if I remember what real downtime feels like.  While waiting for the subway I check my emails to kill time and to go to sleep at night I play on my iTouch, in fact, that’s how I found this article, reading the New York Times at 1 a.m. from my digital device in bed.

With the idea that there is really no such thing as multitasking, just having the ability to master the art of scanning, what are digital devices doing to improve our brains and how are these technologies helping the thought processes of new generations?

We have decided to do the round-up on Fridays because it’s our non- self-serving day as we already discuss reasons you should #FollowFriday someone on Twitter and on their blog. We figure this is another great way to talk about our smart friends around the globe.

So here goes…in no particular order other than what’s most fresh in my brain at the very moment I’m writing…the top five stories for week ending August 27, 2010.

5. PR Pros Have to Pitch More than the Media. If you’re a PR professional or own a business where you do your own PR, Becky Johns has a great article this week on using the back channels to not only pitch reporters, but also build a local community of people who care about your client’s or company’s news. While this isn’t happening at a broad level (yet), it’s important to be aware of, keep in the back of your mind, and understand how this will affect how you do business in the future.

4. Tips from Jim Collins, Daniel Pink, and Jack Welch. Even though the posts are from a couple of weeks ago (I know, that’s an eternity in the online world), the reviews Brad Farris did from the Willow Creek Leadership Summit are top-notch. Get information, nuggets, and goodies from Jim Collins, Daniel Pink, and Jack Welch.

3. My Niece Is Famous. Alright, this one is a little self-serving, but it is H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S! Shelly Kramer grabbed a photo I put on Facebook of a drawing my niece made for me. Then she blogged about the drawing – what she saw, what she thinks I’m saying with my mouth wide open, and my niece’s sheer brilliance (she is, after all, related to me). Trust me on this; I’m not just a proud aunt. If you don’t read the post, the drawing, alone, is worth a visit.

2. Fake Reviews on iTunes. A PR firm in California settled charges for engaging in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews online of clients’ games, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so. The New York Times warns companies that writing good or bad reviews is illegal if you are being paid to do so and charges will be brought against you if you’re caught. If you have employees or your vendors/partners submit a review on your behalf, make sure they’re disclosing their relationship with you.

1. Building Customer Loyalty. MarketingProfs has 10 tips for building customer loyalty during a recession, but we think the content works no matter the economy.  Some of the tips are common sense, but some of them (such as identify and build your brand so your customers know why they’re buying) are great thought starters.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Want more? Could do without?