Wert & Company, Inc
an international recruitment and consulting firm, conducting executive, senior searches for dynamic companies and organizations across a range of disciplines and industries, specializing in marketing, brand strategy, design and innovation.

Wert & Company is seeking Digital Marketing Manager on behalf of one of the most celebrated, global design centric brands—to plan, develop and implement the effective (next stage) use of web-based technologies in support of their global business and marketing requirements. As the primary director, creator and evaluator of public-facing web channels, this person will bring new energy and perspectives to an already well established brand—to broaden the consultancy’s online presence, and foster more meaningful digital connections worldwide. As a member of the marketing communications team, this individual will collaborate with a small team of content generators to build a cohesive future-facing plan for the firm’s corporate websites as well as commerce sites and content portals.

Candidates must be champions of great design!

If you are tired Bay Area conferences where you hear the same old cheerleaders in what has become an increasingly incestuous web 2.0 echo chamber you need to check out the PSFK conference in San Francisco next week. This is sure to be a very creative and inspiring conference with great people from creative and successful companies in the real world, like Virgin America, Method, Modernista, Apple, and NASA. My blog buddy from Ogilvy 360, Rohit from the Influential Marketing blog will be there i’m sure signing books as well.

This is the confirmed speaker list:

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones
Amit Gupta, Photojojo
Andrew Hoppin, NASA
Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America
Chris Riley, Apple

Colin Nagy, Attention
Ed Cotton, Influx Insights / BSSP
Eric Corey Freed, Organic Architect
Ezra Cooperstein, Current TV

Frank Striefler, TBWA/Media Arts Lab
Gareth Kay, Modernista
George Murphy, Modo-Group
George Parker, Adscam / Author

Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks
Jen Bekman, 20×200
Jeremy Townsend, Ghetto Gourmet
John Pollard, Microsoft
Josh Handy, Method
Josh Morenstein, fuseproject
Kevin Allison, Financial Times

Liz Dunn, FunnyOrDie.com
Lynn Casey, Team Noesis
Mark Lewis, DDB
Max Schorr, Good Magazine
Nate Pence, Method
Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence / Author

The liquid on top of a metal tray on top of a booming sub-woofer produces some memorizing effects that look supernatural. The liquid is a mixture of water and cornstarch at about a 1:6 ratio, start with the cornstarch, add water slowly, it’s a substance that feels ‘hard’, pours like liquid.

Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.

Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.

Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.

Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.

Here’s how they calculated engagement:

(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)

I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?

Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.

I had a blog post brainstorm a while ago on what a “social media phone” would look like, check it out and feel free to continue adding ideas.

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Being a mega early adopter means having to accept that sometimes things won’t run right. The guys at Twitter are building a technology that has never existed before, and they are doing it while everyone is using it. Talk about building a plane while flying it and transporting passengers, I wish them the best of luck.

Love the fail whale, check out the t-shirts.

Wow!

If you want to know more about Creative Commons check out this video here:

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Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.