While at NewComm Forum last month, I attended Rohit Bhargava’s session on “The Future of Marketing & Advertising.”  During the Q&A I asked Rohit one of those classic, simple questions that tend to elicit surprising answers.

“What keeps you up at night?  What do you fear in this brave new world?”

Rohit’s answer – and I’m paraphrasing – boiled down to, “I’m afraid of what happens when a big corporation peels $1M from their advertising budget and hands it to me for a Social Media campaign.  The types of demands they’ll make regarding ROI for that kind of budget won’t be easily answered.”

With all due respect to Rohit, I don’t share this anxiety.  Forget about PR blacklisting for a second (it’s an insular issue amongst relatively tiny communities) and think about the stupid antics of those advertising agencies that have not figured out that Marketing has become a transparent, 2–way street.  Remember “All I Want for Xmas is a PSP” for example?  The PR industry gaffes have been stoopid, not fraudulent.  I think it’s high time that corporate marketers shaved those ad budgets in favor of grassroots Social Media concepts, where PR is the stronger partner.       

Heck, give me a million dollars – I double-dog-dare you – and we can talk about how we’ll use that money to generate more positive word-of-mouth for your company than any single advertising campaign could ever accomplish. 

With $1 million we can play the biggest game of smallball ever played.

Sure, we’ll cover the waterfront in terms of top-tier blogs, mainstream media and vertical channels. 

We’ll also be sure to appropriately reach-out to the B-Z list bloggers, too.  Thanks to tools like Radian6 we’ll know who’s talking about our client and related industry-level issues, and when & why, and can respond rapidly and transparently.

We’ll empower everyday users, too.  We can create a Flickr group that pays homage to their creativity by identifying images via related tags.  The best of those images might be highlighted on the corporate website.  We can create a YouTube channel where the million-dollar-client can speak forthrightly and in human terms about their news, events and mission and solicit video responses, too.

We’ll be on Twitter, of course, and using tools like Tweetscan and Tweetbeep to monitor conversations 24/7 – again, we’ll be monitoring not just for client references but for associated industry themes.

We’ll train and empower a cadre of client employees to serve as community liaisons.  Think of this as “distributed PR.”  Some of these employee evangelists will be bloggers; most will be on Twitter too; the charismatic folks will be gifted with a Flip camera so they can vlog their thoughts.  These internal advocates will work hand-in-glove with the PR team.

Speaking of video – we’ll create a video production group, complete with mini studio rigged with an HD video camera, audio recording equipment, green screen, etc.  Thus equipped, we’ll produce weekly podcasts and vlogs with our million-dollar-client’s execs and other industry do-gooders.  If appropriate we’ll also create funky videos that might have some viral appeal.  Heck, we could “live-vlog” a major product announcement! 

I’m not generally a fan of creating branded social networks, but you can’t argue with the success of white-label solutions like Ning.  If our million-dollar-client served one or more niches that was prone to fandom, this would become a serious consideration.

SEO would play a role, but I’d be just as intrigued to explore Search Engine Marketing options, too.  How about testing out NewsAds – contextual Google ads based on industry and news-oriented keyword searches?

Oops – almost forgot – we’ll also want to create an RSS microsite as part of the Social Media Newsroom we’ll create.  This will aggregate all the blog posts about our million-dollar client in one feed.  As described by Marshall Kirkpatrick, “It’s like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what’s being written about (the client).”

These are just the ideas that spewed out in the initial rush of pondering for our imaginary deep-pocketed client.  For an actual client – one where we’d have a sense of products, customer satisfaction, industry trends, etc. – we would get much more granular and creative.  (Just as Picasso started out as a fine classical artist before delving into Cubism, the Agency team would need to do a deep-dive into the million-dollar-client’s business before breaking out the disco ball of creativity.) 

Ultimately a big goal of any million-dollar program would be to make every stakeholder feel important through monitoring, response, and transparent, frequent outreach. 

Measurement?  Think about benchmarking the BEFORE and measuring the AFTER of: web traffic, sales, online mentions (volume and tone), customer service inbound calls, media buzz, customer satisfaction index, etc.  It’s possible to measure – and would still be worthwhile even if it weren’t.

What Big Ideas would you add to the list?  What else would you measure?

Meanwhile, make your million-dollar check payable to …

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