The term agoraphobia means “fear of the marketplace.”  It derives from the Athenian Agora, the political, spiritual, commerce and cultural center of ancient Greece.  The Agora, the center of a powerful civilization, overrun by disparate messages, throngs of people and merchandise, enough to spawn a new type of sensory overload.  Sound familiar?

Well today’s modern Agora is now digital and full of words, videos, sounds and graphics, fueled by big brands and consumers alike, each sparring for your attention.  But how can brands navigate or even be seen in this marketplace when consumers suffer from a mutated type of agoraphobia?  Getting to the answer isn’t simple, but once you’re there, hindsight becomes 20/20.

Turn the Message

Let’s start with the basics of creating consistent, clear messages delivered seamlessly to consumers.  These must empower them to learn, interact with and share.  But don’t fool yourself, your message will not stand by itself.  Brands can spend countless dimes and time crafting the perfect messages and even more money laying the infrastructure to host them.  However, when all the work is finished and the final piece is in place, your message will spark action only when those with the most influence are on board to conquer your niche markets and conversations.  And if they aren’t speaking your message, well your empire won’t be worth a damn.

Deliver

According to HubSpot, 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know and 71% of online consumers say recommendations from family and friends have influenced their purchasing decisions.  Powerful stuff, but that’s just the beginning.

Take a look at how this translates in the ultimate persuasion arena: politics.

Think back to the presidential election.  In this post,  NPR cites a study about people’s likelihood to vote based on their friends voting.  The study concludes that people who saw their friends had clicked and shared a button on Facebook that said “I Voted” were more likely to click the button themselves and then actually vote themselves.  Evidence that people are substantially more likely to vote after they see their friends have.

Not only that, but the campaigns have gotten very smart about message amplification.  Here’s a quote from the same NPR story:

“So every time you get a message on Facebook from the Obama or Romney campaigns, or every time you get a tweet from them, saying please like this message or please retweet this, what they’re doing is taking advantage of the fact that when you amplify a message from the campaign, it’s much more effective than the campaign sending out messages directly.”

What they’re essentially saying is that although you need a solid hub to store your messages, simply sending them out from there is not good enough.  The messages need to be amplified by influencers and lead consumers back to the hub.  Let the influencers in these niche communities do their job, brands just need to provide the content.  So how do you do this?

A quick Facebook search for “Vote Yes” yields hundreds of results of micro-communities rallying around different issues and opinions.  The same can be said for Twitter hashtags, online forums, specialized blogs and countless other ways people gather digitally to discuss current issues.  Consumer products are no different.  They’re created to solve a problem and fill a need.  Using social listening tools like Crimson Hexagon and Mention give brands the power to engage users involved with these conversations, identify their influencers, insert their content and amplify their messages.

Drive

So we’ve identified what our message is, and where we want to deliver it, but now we need to decide what happens after it’s consumed.   In other words, how will consumers engage with your content and where will it take them?

Let’s use retirement as an example.  I see commercials all the time about saving for retirement but they don’t help me take any action and often don’t make me identify myself as someone who needs to be doing this in the first place.  This is where the type of digital content you create works its magic.

If a friend asks me about planning for retirement, one of the more useless things I can do is explain to them why it’s important.  That doesn’t help anyone and it doesn’t tell them anything they don’t already know.  However, if I have a tool to help them take action and answer important questions they have like “when should I start?” and “how much should I be saving?” now we’re making progress.  Even better, when this is a branded tool, it takes the conversation I was having with a friend, attaches it to an action and then facilitates the conversation into the hands of the brand, in this case someone like a financial advisor.

Facilitating content through influencers doesn’t stop at getting retweets, “likes,” and shares. This article on SEOMoz gives a perfect example of a niche market with a lot of skewed online conversation, but no channel leaders.  The author says the street racing community is a niche market for tire companies and points out that while there’s a lot of buzz about street racing on the internet, there’s no dominating YouTube channel for videos, comparison charts of tires in forums or brand messaging to facilitate conversation.  A perfect opportunity for a brand to step in and own the conversation.

When considering your messaging, content and delivery, focus on delicate balance between technological nirvana and the power of the message.  Through each step of the process, ask yourself if you are shouting into the crowds of the Agora, or are you dividing and conquering with precision?

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Don’t Waste Your Website

Back in 2010 I wrote an article called “Back to the Future. The dotcom in 2010” for the SoDA report  (the Society of Digital Agencies). Since then the digital marketing world has kept marching on and our heads have been turned by many new things, most of them in social media. But even after all this time the old brand website still wears its crown as the center of digital brand ecosystem.

As Pete Blackshaw, Exec VP of Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen & McKinsey, writes in a superb article on the role of websites “Importantly, if we’re truly entering a POEM (paid, owned, earned) media mix model, brand websites are key. They anchor the owned, reinforce the paid and incubate the earned.

Think about it. Where can a brand make as powerful and complete a pitch as it can on its website? Where else does a brand have as much control over the experience? Other brand touchpoints have bits of the puzzle and can certainly have influence, but only the brand site can be designed to take a prospect from curiosity all the way to SOLD and beyond. Of course brand sites may not be as sexy as a Pinterest page or a mobile app on the fad scale, but think about what they can accomplish.

Whenever we create interest with an ad or a piece of content we need to do something with that awareness. We always need a next step that can move the prospect closer to the sale, and nothing can do that better than the brand site. So don’t waste your brand site. Make it the next step for all your marketing and equip it to be a conversion machine.

A brand site should therefore be designed with three primary missions in mind:

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To coincide with Valentine’s Day, IQ Agency, a digital advertising agency, scanned 2.1 million online conversations to produce the “State of Love Report”; the first ever ranking of romance for each state in the nation.

“This is an example of how we can monitor millions of conversations online to give us unique insights into how Americans feel about issues, brands and ideas,” says Tony Quin, CEO of IQ Agency. “We wanted to have some fun with the data and give America its first look at which states are the best to find love this Valentine’s Day.”

Highlights from the “State of Love” Report include:

• Top 5 Romantic States: 1) California 2) Wyoming 3) Texas 4) Utah 5) Hawaii
• Best State to Find Love: New York
• National sentiment toward Valentine’s Day: 37% Positive, 23% Indifferent, 40% Negative.

Produced in association with Crimson Hexagon, a leading provider of Big Data analysis software and social media analytics, the report presents the results of continuous social listening analysis of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs and other Internet properties for a 14 day period prior to Valentine’s Day 2013.

Download the full report to see where your state ranks in romance: www.iqagency.com/StateofLove

Making complex things like financial services easy to understand and engaging is no easy matter. That’s why VALIC, a major financial services company, turned to IQ. With deep experience in the category, IQ created this new website with an entirely new approach, design and new content, including this series of videos, also produced and created by IQ.  VALIC’s retirement offerings can often be confusing and difficult to grasp for consumers, which is why IQ and VALIC set out to change that by designing an engaging web experience complemented by two series of videos, one about consumers’ goals and the other about understanding financial concepts. Continue Reading

I was very excited about watching the game Sunday night. It was the first time I have been able to watch the game since having kids, and my oldest is six. I had a very scientific approach, carrying around a notebook and logging every TV spot’s call to action.

Unscientifically, my gut feeling is 70% of the ads had a social component (mostly hash tags) when you filtered out all of the NFL and ABC branding.  The big takeaways for me are: Continue Reading

Attention all you content marketers out there: judgment day is at hand. That’s the day that many brands will wake up soon to discover their content doesn’t attract an audience like they were told it would.

Don’t Be Drowned Out

It seems that everybody and their brother is talking about content these days, and how the only way to connect with the consumer is by giving them lots of it. They are right, of course, because about the only way brands can still influence advertising averse, digitally savvy, consumers is with content. The problem is that we have already come to the point where there is a veritable tsunami of content drowning consumers. It’s a problem when both Nike and the local auto shop are doing content marketing.

I’ve seen this happen before. I remember the first time I was handed a loyalty card and told that I’d earn a free smoothie after 10 shakes. Delighted I dutifully put it in my wallet. The second time I got a card I also put it in my wallet. But soon I had no more room for loyalty cards and I bagged the whole idea. It looks like content is also becoming an out of control bandwagon. Continue Reading

Tony Quin, IQ’s CEO, gives a 90 second overview of the Connect, Cultivate, Convert marketing model. Get the 3Cs slideshow here: http://iqlink.me/14zB190 and the whitepaper here: http://iqlink.me/Vw6SCE

Ten things stand out as priorities for agencies in today’s changing marketing game. Of course the mainstays of creative etc., are always important, but here are ten that are critical now.

1. Really understand the client’s business

I know that sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many agencies don’t study company organization, goals, structure and constraints, as well as the industry and competitive landscape. Brands are looking for agency partners to be an extension of their own team and get frustrated when they constantly have to school their agencies on what’s meaningful in their world. Agencies that don’t do their homework on a brand, or don’t stay up on the category are not doing their job.

2. Collaborate across the client organization, and with other agency partners

Sharing a vision and getting buy-in across departments can be tricky. Agencies can help by acting as the independent “voice of the consumer” and marketing across the organization. They should also be able to work well with other agencies because it’s becoming less common for brands to have one agency for everything. Continue Reading

For this year’s Christmas party at IQ, we decided to compete for the ugliest sweater in addition to a White Elephant (AKA Dirty Santa) gift exchange.

Prepare your eyes for the world’s ugliest sweater, donned by none other than IQ CFO Phil Frye:

Check out the rest of the fun below:

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CMO.com reached out to 86 marketing pros, including our CEO Tony Quin, to find out what’s next for content marketing, big data, mobile, and customer experience. Among the responses, you’ll find a wealth of knowledge from senior marketers, thought leaders, and strategists in numerous industries.

Read it here:
Digital Marketing In 2013: Predictions From 86 Industry Luminaries

Now that you’ve seen their predictions for 2013, what are yours?