A key take-away (which we all know but was underscored at the Summit) is that digital technology is evolving event marketing at a dizzying speed. For an event to achieve its highest success we must find the perfect synergy between the immediate physical experience (where we interact with consumers face-to-face) and the extended engagement and interaction with the brand that occurs in social networks (where the consumers share their experiences with their friends and extended community). This synergy is possible if you keep these three things in mind:

Make the transition between IRL (In Real Life) and digital seamless.

A favorite acronym at the Summit? RFID, radio-frequency identification. There were excellent examples (especially from Diageo/Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange and SXSW) of how RFID bracelets enable consumers to “live in the moment” while simultaneously broadcasting their experience to their social networks.

Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project

RFID bracelets can be used to check into events, create Facebook status updates and “like” different products or events, and even upload photos from connected cameras to a user’s social media accounts. Need numbers? Coachella’s use of RFID bracelets this year increased the music festival’s online audience by over 30 million!

Listen and respond in real time.

Another beauty of RFID is that it allows organizers to quickly check people into events and keep track of them during the event. SXSW deftly managed crowd control across the entire city of Austin by monitoring live RFID data; this made the mega-event not only safe, but much more enjoyable for the enthusiastic crowds that were attending. We were also fascinated by the fact that there were several people dedicated to “listening” to the crowd, or simply monitoring real-time tweets about SXSW, which enabled organizers to quickly identify and address any issues that were resulting in negative experiences at the event.

SXSW Interactive Keynote Hashtags

Be willing to lose control.

Consumers’ BS-detectors are more finely tuned than ever, and they expect authenticity and access. Don’t tell your brand ambassadors (who are your employees as well as your customers) that you care about them and invest in them, and then keep them at arm’s length. One of the most memorable events from SXSW was Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address, when the interviewer ceded her control and allowed the audience to control the Q&A via social media. A lack of rigid brand control no longer means chaos, it means the creation of new, even more powerful experiences.

And gaming experiences aren’t just a powerful way to encourage consumer brand engagement– they’re also a wonderful way to strengthen community ties and awareness. We’re inspired by Daniel Stark’s Realitree concept which will ignite the eco-consciousness of urban inhabitants across the world with enormous projected trees in 50 iconic city centers.

The visible “health” of each tree will be dependent on not only local pollution levels and environmental efforts, but also the level of community “game play” on various social media platforms.

It’s not just about developing your own social games, either: the potential for brand messaging within existing social games is phenomenal when you realize that 29% of all internet users will play social games in 2012. Think virtual branded environments within games, virtual goods (like Farmers Insurance crop insurance on FarmVille),and even custom games (like Angry Birds Rio).

Offline games and real-world engagement are also exploding: International Pillow Fight Day,

Nike’s The Grid to make running a game, Norelco’s Playoff Beards, even the New York Public Library is in on the action with its Find the Future game.

Still need convincing about the potential for playing games? Take a few minutes to watch Jan McGonigal’s 2010 TED talk, Gaming Can Make a Better World, which explains how games challenge us, offer satisfying rewards and recognition, and even make us more willing to engage with each other.

Your move…

But this demographic of 79 million Americans between 16 and 34 is much more complex than that. The Boston Consulting Group has drilled down into data that identifies six distinct groups within Millennials.

While Millennials aren’t a generic monolith (not that we ever thought it was), we’re looking at a demographic that thrives on engagement marketing and leveraging the power of word-of-mouth. Consider some of these compelling findings as you develop your Millennial marketing plans:

From the Boston Consulting Group report:

Millennials rely much more on recommendations from peers or friends than from “experts.”

• For this generation, the meaning of expert—someone with the credibility to recommend brands, products, and services—has shifted from someone with professional or academic credentials to potentially anyone with firsthand experience, ideally a peer or close friend.
• More Millennials than non-Millennials reported using a mobile device to read user reviews and to research products while shopping (50 percent versus 21 percent).
• “Crowd sourcing”—tapping into the collective intelligence of the public or one’s peer group—has become particularly popular among Millennials.
• Millennials are much more likely than non-Millennials to explore brands on social networks (53 percent versus 37 percent).

“This is why blogs are disrupting newspapers. It’s why short web videos get watched, and long web videos generally don’t. It’s why people like Twitter and Facebook. It’s why magazine articles aren’t “better” than newspapers, even though they’re longer. It’s why sites that are image-driven as opposed to word-driven are now taking over the world.”

People love blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media not only because they’re more convenient mediums, but because people are inherently social creatures looking to share experiences that inspire, entertain, challenge and give a sense of community, both online and off. That’s why people will take the time to attend a live magazine, sing “Do Re Mi” with hundreds of others in a train station or sit down to dinner with 1,000 strangers.

We’ve seen it in our own campaigns: consumers are willing to engage longer with brands at compelling events like luxe private cocktail parties, product samplings that feature spa services, sexy dares in bars and pop-up stores where they can try out fitness equipment and play video games. And the better the experience, the longer they engage and the more they’ll share it with their social circles, either via word-of-mouth or online.

It’s the quality of the experience that dictates the time spent. People will make the time to watch and share longer TV spots,

read compelling full-length books or enjoy other full experiences when the content is interesting and relevant enough to do so. Great content

—as well as cringe-worthy content–gets consumed and shared. Mediocre content doesn’t.

Ultimately, the idea that brands just need to create shorter content addresses only part of the issue. The key to getting people’s attention is creating content and experiences that are simply better.

Sorry, is this post too long?

Jim, who is also a professor at UCLA Anderson and president of the Jim Stengel Company, is enthusiastically building a movement to change the way that the world does business. In an age when the public has an incredibly low opinion of the corporate sector, it’s critical that businesses elevate their mission and demonstrate how what they do improves and enriches people’s lives. To that end, we invited a wonderful cross-section of thought leaders, friends and clients of Grow Marketing, Millward Brown and method, including C-level executives from companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., TED, Visa, Hewlett-Packard, Virgin America, Charles Schwab, Birkenstock, Mekanism, Lucy, Premier Nutrition, Facebook and Yahoo!. What our 100 guests all have in common is the influence to effect change in business and the power to take Jim’s message and ignite the movement.

The lobby of method’s San Francisco headquarters was transformed into a salon and the room was filled with an energetic and passionate buzz as many intelligent, creative and progressive people came together in one place. As the wine flowed and hors d’oeuvres were passed, Grow Marketing co-founders Cassie Hughes and Gabrey Means welcomed guests, talked about what they personally loved about Jim’s book, and introduced Millward Brown’s Senior Vice President Nile Rowan, who moderated a dynamic discussion between Jim and method’s co-founder Eric Ryan.

Jim focused on the importance of getting a business’ employees on board with the company’s brand ideal, which creates internal ambassadors and ensures that the culture, values and ideals of the brand come to life in both product and service. Grow highlights method as an ideal case study of how a brand ideal is identified and activated, and Eric provided our guests with a wonderful example of how method activates its brand ideal within its team. He described how the very lobby in which we were enjoying our event is the site of method’s “Monday Morning Huddle,” in which all 75 employees at their headquarters gather every week to talk about their culture, product innovation and share an email they have received from a method consumer. The huddle, Eric pointed out, serves as an effective way to continually remind the method team why they come to work every day: to make people “clean happy.”

The discussion was followed by a Q&A, where guests asked the tough questions on how to apply what they had learned to their companies. A Levi’s executive asked Jim how to approach a situation where a company has several different brands under its umbrella. Should each brand have a different ideal, and if so, how do you define the values of the company? Jim shared that each brand should have a distinct ideal, but all of the ideals should work in harmony under a larger corporate ideal. How can you achieve the authenticity that’s critical to inspire employees and attract consumers, Jim asked, when your company holds brands that embody diametrically opposed ideals?

We were thrilled to see how inspired our guests were by the evening’s conversation, and several executives happily noted that not only did they learn new principles, but they were also reminded of the essential tenets of brand building that sometimes get overlooked in the daily hustle and bustle of business. Everyone received a complimentary copy of Grow, and we’re eager to see how they implement the messages in Jim’s book.

 Are you interested in learning more about the new movement in business? Pick up a copy of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies here.

Nice Kicks  has a really nice pop-up shop at this year’s SXSW, but they’re adding a twist to the concept by taking it mobile  with the Nice Cream Truck. Modeled on a traditional ice cream truck, the Nice Cream Truck tweets out its location to lucky shoppers who can pick up an exclusive pair of Vans.

British Airways  is getting ready for the Olympics with a pop-up airline cabin to open in London next month. Visitors will be able to sample BA’s inflight Olympic menu (at proper tables!) as well as enjoy representative inflight entertainment and an gallery featuring Olympic-themed art to be painted on some of their planes for the event.

And finally, a pop-up initiative to support young adults in tough circumstances: First Friday, a retail training and consultancy company in the UK, developed the Pop-up Shop Project  to employ young unemployed workers. The shop, which is selling locally sourced clothing and crafts, is designed to encourage unemployed young adults to become more “business minded and entrepreneurial.”

Think a pop-up initiative may work for you? Get in touch!

In a sense, what the venerable motorcycle manufacturer has done is
simply employ the most basic rule of marketing: know your customer.
But they took it up a notch by creating a convenient virtual space
where they can have conversations with their customers, and, more
importantly, listen to their wants and needs. The Harley Fan Machine is a
Facebook app where consumers can actually submit advertising ideas and vote on
them. The result? #StereotypicalHarley which highlights the diversity of hog riders. As one consultant put it, “They’re getting people to put a narrative of their lives atop the
product.”

Now, we understand that not every brand has the lifestyle equity that
Harley-Davidson enjoys, but we also understand that consumers no
longer simply want to be spoken to. They want to be engaged, and they
want the control to evaluate a product on its own merits. Which is why
here at Grow Marketing we’re firm believers in the power of engagement
marketing, whether it’s powering conversations online or off.

Which is why this recent Fortune article on how Nike is “quietly engineering” a marketing revolution really hits home.

Their secret weapon? Nike Digital Sport, a division launched in 2010. Digital Sport is best known for creating devices and technologies that allow us to track our personal stats, whether it’s how many miles we’ve run in Golden Gate Park with our Nike+ Sport Watch, or our overall fitness goals with Nike Fuel (we knew that walking the dog could get us that much closer into our prized pair of Levi’s skinny jeans!).

Nike Digital Sport gets it: consumers no longer respond to the personality-cult direction of their earlier campaigns (let’s accept it: Tiger and Lance are fallible), and instead are now engaging directly with consumers about what’s ultimately most important to them–their own well-being and fitness.

The hard numbers spell it out: Nike’s ad spend on TV and print is down 40% over the past three years, while the revenue of the world’s largest sports company is soaring.

Source: Fortune

Yes, it’s still somewhat of a brave new world when it comes to social media and engagement marketing, but the results that Nike is achieving should embolden any company willing to challenge traditional rules of outreach and engagement. There’s an incredible community of potential customers out there who are ready to start a conversation. Let’s do it!

Pop-Up fans have a near Fight Club– reverence for ‘the world’s first live magazine.’  Issue 5 was held in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 9th at the Davies Symphony Hall — the event’s largest venue to date and it sold out in less than two hours — and brought together some of the country’s quirkiest and groundbreaking writers, musicians, an inventor, an environmentalist, a photo documentarian and even a deep sea diver to share their stories for one night only.

There is no event photography, video or transcription. Every issue is completely unique.

Even the ‘contributors’ were not announced until the day before the event. There are no theme or presentation requirements. There was poetry, PowerPoint and a classical trio.

For me, the common thread was adventure and the personal challenge to remember.

So many of us have conditioned ourselves to share and (if we’re very honest) remember through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. For people to willingly give up this precious documentation for an event makes Pop-Up incredibly special and refreshing.

From my vantage point in the ‘nose-bleed’ section I didn’t see the glow of a contraband smartphone even once after the magazine went ‘live.’

How many of us have gone to concerts and readings where people limit their experience to the tiny screen on their phone in an effort to capture and prove they were there? You have to wonder why they don’t save their money and watch it on YouTube.

We have incredible tools at our fingertips and in our pockets to share our experiences but there’s power in an event that requires you to just be present to experience it too.

Melinda