BOW+ARROW

I had a real driveway moment yesterday as they say at NPR, where they apparently have lots of hidden video moments these days, when I heard the story of Alice Chen, a Cambridge-based, shamefully young scientist in a joint Harvard-MIT program.

Ms. Chen has managed to place a tissue-engineered human liver into a mouse. Into more than one mouse, in fact, and nearly 100% of the mice live. This is so innovative because drug companies the world over want to test how a drug candidate is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and excreted, and to date they’ve been hamstrung into using non-human models to do this before they get into clinical trials, which are toxically expensive and often dangerous. And though we’re genetically similar to mice, our livers work very differently.

So Ms. Chen had the idea, God bless her, to engineer a human liver in a lab mouse, since the liver is where so much of the body’s dealing with a drug works or doesn’t. I felt like Homer Simpson hearing about it. Doh! Why the heck didn’t I think of that? In retrospect it’s so stunningly obvious. And it’s going to be huge.

No big surprise that Alice is sinking her $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize money into a start-up company she’s formed with some colleagues. It’s called Sienna Labs. Sounds to me like a decent investment.

Clearly, we need innovative thinking like this all over America, in technology, medical devices and life science.

Homeless man becomes international celebrity overnight.
Ad gets remade into a million-view mockery.
Logo redesign reversed after online uproar.
Facebook page enables revolution.

If social media is teaching us anything, it’s that we now live in a world where we just can’t predict or control what’s going to happen once the online masses get involved.

It’s the kind of thing that can keep you up at night with dread, or set your mind spinning with new possibilities.

Either way, PJA Radio wants to feature you and your story on our live broadcast from South by Southwest, “Unintended Consequences: Marketing in a Social World.”

Can you tell a ripping yarn about the time you:

• Launched something (campaign, site, app, business, contest…whatever) only to see it generate unintended consequences – good and/or bad?
• Tried to purposely leverage the unexpected, perhaps through user generated content or crowdsourcing?
• Reacted on the fly to turn unintended results into new opportunities?
• Watched in glee or horror as your idea took on an online life of its own?

PJA Radio – one of the Internet’s most popular marketing radio shows, with up to 10,000 listeners a week – will be broadcasting live from SXSW on March 15. Our hosts and some (ahem) unexpected guests will share your real-world cases, talk about the new realities, and even take a shot at some actionable recommendations for anyone seeking to thrive in the face of the unpredictable and unintended.

So share your story by emailing us at unexpected@agencypja.com or by posting a comment below. We might feature you and your case during our SXSW broadcast – and then who knows what will happen?

Sincerely,

The PJA Radio Team

Did your company recently update its image by changing its name, and now you’re stuck figuring out how to reflect these changes on your social networks? Or maybe you’d like to change your username on your personal accounts?

Changing a username isn’t as tricky as you may think, but finding best practices and instructions for each individual social network can be time-consuming. We’ve curated all the information you need to change your usernames and minimize any confusion that your networks may face.

In this second installment of Social Media Points of Practice, we break it down into actions you can take before, during and after you change your username.

On yesterday’s episode of PJA Radio, Mike O’Toole and Matt Magee discussed the leaked copy of AOL’s new content strategy, which appears to stress the importance of SEO and page views over editorial quality. While many people argue that AOL is heading down the path of content farms such as Demand Media, others suggest that SEO strategies are the future of online content. Here are some of Mike and Matt’s reasons why it’s important for B2B marketers to continue to produce focused, customized, high-quality content:

Content should be more than just a page view. Most of the time when we produce content for marketing, we want people to consume it. We don’t just want an eyeball on a page. This tips us toward a quality consideration that we don’t see in content farm strategies. If your content can’t engage someone enough to consume it, you’re not going to get anywhere with it.

It’s one thing to sell an eyeball; it’s another thing to create a media brand that makes people want to act in some sort of way. When creating content, keep in mind this key consideration: what’s the action I’m trying to get people to take? What will improve people’s perception of our brand and move them closer to buying our product?

Think about the kind of relationship you want with the buyer. Providing content that people with very specific interests want to create a relationship around is generally beneficial. If you publish a niche topic that a small group of people are interested in, they may start turning to you instead of a search engine like Google for the information they seek.

It’s important to play to the highest common denominator. You don’t need to appeal to every eyeball possible. It’s more important to appeal to the influential people in your market. If you want to influence the influencers, it’s about more than just the amount of people who see your content.

Listen to the full episode here: My Way or the AOL Way: How Good Content Can Thrive

So you’re out to re-position, or even re-invent your brand – what better place to do it than the Super Bowl? Everybody watches it, and it’s a time when viewers are particularly receptive to your story; after all, these days the ads are the big story for some, and a close runner-up to the game for many others.

After laying out oodles of cash for television time and impressive spots, what do you do next to help cement your success? This year, you probably did a couple things. You previewed the spot online to build buzz. You made sure your website supported the brand proposition on click through. And in most cases, you built in multi-channel social engagement during and after the game.

But if you’re a marketer at Chrysler, Audi, Mercedes Benz, Skechers or any of the movie studios advertising big new movies, you forgot to think about the guy on the sofa with a smartphone in his hands. Especially the one who was interested in your brand. That’s right – you spent millions to reach consumers in a high-impact environment but didn’t build a mobile site to let them take action right away on the interest your ad created. In fact, nearly half of Super Bowl advertisers didn’t have a mobile site.

To quantify what they missed:

• In 2010, Pew Internet found that in the 30-49 age cohort, 43% of Americans now access the internet on their smartphones. (A 12 point increase over 2009.)
• Among the 18-29 year olds, that number increases to 65%.

And to put it in perspective alongside Twitter:

• Of the 30-49 age cohort, only 7% use Twitter.
• Among 18-29 year olds, just 14%.

To be fair, social media strategies we saw this year had more to them than Twitter – Audi’s “estate sale” Facebook promotion, for example. But Audi’s other big social concept was based on driving use of a conceptual hashtag – and consequently was aimed at a tiny fraction of their audience. (Among 50 – 64 year olds – those likely to buy a big fat Audi A8 – only 6% used Twitter, as of December 2010.) I’m sure the agency would point out that small groups of highly influential individuals tend to profile well against both advanced social media use and likelihood to influence purchasers. I know I’d probably haul out that rationale, but I’m not sure I’d really be able to feel good about it.

And if you’re Chrysler, and you just spent millions on a spot that powerfully communicates a new positioning for a company attempting to rise from its own ashes – how do you justify not providing an immediate next step?

For anyone looking for Super Bowl advertisers with great mobile sites that really delivered on the next step, check out Kia, Hyundai, GoDaddy, and VW. And be sure not to miss SalesForce’s mobile microsite for Chatter, which let you start the signup process for a free trial in a beautifully simple way – and gives Salesforce what they needed to follow up with you through your work email, thus moving the conversation from your living room sofa to the office. The site’s not elegant, but it’s remarkably effective at furthering prospect engagement.

I know from personal experience how hard it can be for the agency to affect decisions about the website; in many cases, the client’s marketing organizations are structured to split ownership of site and campaign decision-making and budgeting. And site development roadmaps are often built with far longer lead times than campaigns. These are gaps best closed by senior client-side marketers. The data is there to justify it – is the will?

Robert Davis is SVP Digital Marketing at PJA advertising + marketing. This post was written with research support from Tessa Sandler.