On Social Media, Martell has this to say:

“Once the internet arrived and people were trying to monetize it, it was all about doing brand marketing across channels — your brick-and-mortar, retail, catalog, online and email.

So, in a way, it’s back to the future. It’s so important to make sure that the customer not only has a great experience, but also a great disposition to tell others about it, because now their voices are amplified through all these social networks.”

An excerpt from the blog:

“Peter Thiel: What areas do you think are particularly promising in the very near term?

Marc Andreessen: And that’s not such a bad idea anymore! Diapers.com was bought by Amazon for $450m. Golfballs.com turns out to be a pretty good business. Even Webvan is coming back! The grocery delivery company failed miserably back in the ‘90s. But now, city by city, it’s back, trying to figure out crowdsourced delivery. The market is so much bigger now. There were about 50 million people online in the ‘90s. Today it’s more like 2.5 billion. People have gotten acclimated to e-commerce. The default assumption is that everything is available online now.”

He gives these examples of e-commerce sites that are blending content normally reserved for media companies, and media sites that are adding marketplaces to make money with services other than display advertising:

“SparkFun, an electronics store, does weekly video blogs detailing new products and neat electronics tricks. People eat it up. Would you call that content marketing or is SparkFun a media company that happens to make money through a store?

Curbed is a superb real-estate website. Is Curbed journalism because they started out with news and added a marketplace later? Conversely is SparkFun not journalism because they started out selling components and their video blogs came later? When does a blog or podcast or newsletter stop being content marketing and start being journalism with an innovative business model?”

Speaking as a media industry insider, he says:

“We haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but they have. We are crying but they are having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.”

At O/G, with our focus on retail and brand direct e-commerce, while Debrouwere in effect sounds the death knell for journalism-centered media businesses, if you read his pointers for trying to save the media and apply these to omni-channel retail, there are some intriguing possibilities in his post. For instance, when he talks about media sites focused on passions, imagine e-commerce sites focused on those same passions (food, fashion, electronics, etc.) in a seamless experience with the items displayed on a page.

At the University of Minnesota, MBA students in the Carlson School conducted research on trends and leaders in retail and e-commerce.

At the Missouri School of Journalism, two Strategic Communications student-run agencies tackled semester-long projects using new social, mobile and data aggregation technology to tackle two pressing issues among college students. One group focused on the issue of the growing obesity problem among our population and looked at how to leverage technology tools and platforms to motivate college students to take small steps in healthier living during college for lifelong benefits.

The second group, @StrategiousMU pictured here, created a tech-enabled campaign addressing mental health and stress issues among students. Ovative/Group, along with entrepreneurs and agency principals, judged the two campaigns and declared the outcome a tie. The @StrategiousMU team surprised the judges during the presentation with a flash mob of dancing stress-busting student friends.

With all the speculation about Apple’s entry into the advanced TV market, we were surprised there is no mention of the company in the release, especially because of their forecast for Android in this quote:

“The study also reveals that proprietary operating systems will remain the main type used by manufacturers in the next five years, although Android OS will start gaining presence and it’s expected to reach a significant share of the market by 2014.”

At O/G, we are working with the venture capital industry and others in technology to put the consumer at the new experiences facilitated by the technology. While it will be a few years beyond 2016 when there are 10′s or 100′s of millions of these new advanced connected TVs in homes, the e-commerce and media/advertising industries we consult are starting to inquire about realizing innovation in the content experience on these screens, especially because of new data that shows increasing multi-screen use while watching TV via tablets, smartphones and notebooks.

Watch this blog for details on experiments with connected TVs and our clients in the year ahead.

“Our business, BloomReach, is a BDA for marketing, the next $10bn category in software. We could have merely analyzed websites to identify missing relevant content that could drive revenue across search, social and advertising traffic and made workflow and content recommendations to site owners. Instead, we decided to analyze and interpret web-wide demand, build semantic models around web content for a given customer and then dynamically augment websites with the most relevant content for their users. Adobe’s Omniture packages your data in a cool SaaS application to make marketing recommendations for your business. BloomReach analyzes the web’s data and then acts on it to drive more traffic and revenue to our customers.”

“Today’s heroes are everyday people whose actions inspire others to follow and whose stories generate the most interest, and whose advocacy we trust. People are participating. They’re involved in conversations about our brands and companies like never before. They’re creating content through conversations and creative expressions of how they think and feel about topics. To address these forces, our vision is to build our brands through lifelong, one-to-one relationships in real-time with every person in the world.”

This post reflects on recent posts about judging the digital business models at Mizzou’s Reynolds Institute created by journalism and business students and professors around entrepreneurs’ concepts.

All five presentations suffered from a huge miss: The customer.

At O/G, we counsel brands, media companies and retailers that in shifting dollars to digital, social, mobile and local you must first put the customer at the center and define how to best engage them. Only then should you build strategy and tactical execution with data, technology tools and platforms to transform the current business.

The Mizzou presentations all first focused on the current state of the business or new venture and then on plans for strategies, tactics, technologies, budgets, and staffing. When targeted current and prospective customers were even mentioned, it was with a single PowerPoint slide or a poor quality customer interview video.

Many of the judges’ questions focused on the customer: Who are they?; Why would they buy this versus that?; How could you afford to find them?; and so on. Often, the answers showed too little research and development work on the customer.

If I were to coach the teams next year, a couple of my suggestions would be:

1. Think about using the ‘Persona’ tactic that ad and digital agencies use to pitch new business. They take broad research data (surveys, consumer insights work, etc.) and create two to four profiles of targeted customers (such as current good, better, best customers and best prospects) and paint a compelling picture of why that profiled customer will pay attention, engage and (hopefully) pay for what the new product and service is.

2. Project the customers out into the future to make predications and do storytelling about winning by staying on top of trends and technology. I criticized one team for ‘looking in the rearview mirror’ with its suggestion for iBooks on the premise that individuals focus on the tablet screen only and rarely do social sharing. They missed the fact that data shows most tablet users have a second screen ‘on’ like a TV, while on the tablet. And coming soon is the syncing of content between screens, and human machine interfaces with voice controls, advanced gestural interfaces, and more for a multi-screen social experience.

From the post:

“Enter credit-linked offers (CLOs). From the consumer perspective, CLOs offer a better, more seamless and more practical experience. There is no need to print coupons, clip coupons, remember to bring a little punch card around everywhere you go or have 12 little plastic cards bulking up your keychain. CLOs also significantly reduce the hassle on the retailers’ end because CLOs eliminate the need for a retailer to collect paper coupons, categorize them, mail them into a clearing house and wait to be repaid. And for those advertisers out there, CLOs enhance your ability to target customers, track attribution, and control redemption; making the most out of promotional dollars.”

“This shortage is apparent in both hard technical skill areas such as tech development, specific areas such as data analytics, and softer areas including the requirement for good digital generalists who can combine broad knowledge of digital channels with the ability to see things from the point of view of the consumer.”