Why Big Internet Marketing Ideas Will Rule

Junk Heap Of Habituation

There were rumors, “Christo is doing something, you know one of his wrappings,” you heard at a coffee shop nearby. You Googled Christo and instantly knew his work. The Oslo cathedral buildings were beautiful to visitors and tourists, but you couldn’t see them with “new eyes” anymore.  For a moment you thought about the frivolous use of what had to be a lot of money then you went on about your life.

Christo knows his enemies. Complacency, judgment and smallness fight any artistic desire for joy, magic and love. Christo knows his process disrupts and resets vision changing patterns. For moments in places around the world Christo asks us to do things that scares us. Christo asks us to imagine.

“Yeah he wrapped a building or put those orange banners in Central Park, so what,” the hardened skeptic says.

Slouching Toward Big Ideas

You know the skeptic. You may have one on your team. Skeptics start the wrecking ball of big ideas with sentences such as, “I don’t want to play ‘devil’s advocate’, but…” or my personal favorite “What is the ROI on that?”

Return On Investment is important, but more greatness has been killed by the ROI Police than can be counted. Here is a cool ROI trick I’ve learned for the precarious ledge we occupy, the ledge between greatness and oblivion. Flip the question from presence to absence.

Ask your financial Scrooge to provide the ROI associated with doing nothing, with reducing risk to the point where there is NO RISK. Done honestly any Internet marketing analysis favors presence and action over absence and inaction. Investments, as they do in the real world, naturally decay online. The network is always moving and it only ever moves in one direction – FURTHER and FASTER.

Why BIG Ideas Important NOW

I live, sleep and think about Internet marketing. I am not obsessed just in love. I love the strange and changing art and science of Internet marketing. Most of my friends are similarly engulfed and consumed by Internet marketing (certainly my fellow New Leaders of the Purple Sage Phil Buckley, Mark Traphagen and Amy Lewis are as bewitched).

As you read this something BIG is shifting under our feet…again.

I’ve been pecking at the shifts I feel as much as know with posts such as How Entropy Is Creating Web 3.0 Right Under Our Noses and SEO Knowing The Unknowable. Those ideas are part of a larger shift, a tectonic shift. Evidence of the shift abound and include (but are not limited to):

• Mobile and Smart Phone ubiquity.
• Facebook passes Google as #1 web traffic destination.
• Second screen active consumption of previously passive media.
• TV is now connected to social media.
• Soon print will be connected via QR codes.
• The gamification of everything  promotes positive heuristics.
• The New SEO’s insistence on ever improving heuristics (time on site, return visitors, pages viewed, etc.).
• The secret implications of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes (storytelling and video marketing).
• And so on…

These tends are boiling and crashing into one another fighting for TIME and ATTENTION. When choice is infinite, when there are a number of GREAT options, we BUY with different currency. We buy with LOVE. Money is the last transfer in our black is white and up is down new world of Internet marketing. Earn enough “new currency” and money is an anti-climax and the smallest contribution to the most generous gift – advocacy.

The only certainty is there will be more questions.

Know answers to your company’s or brands biggest questions including:

• Who are we?
• Why are we here?
• How do we align with our customer’s Unique Customer Aspirations?
• How do we save the world in an an appreciable way?

Unique Customer Aspirations (UCA)

I promise a post on UCA soon. The simple idea is know how customers and supporters will be changed thanks to their interaction with YOU, your company and products. Will they be more joyful, proud or likely to explore? UCA is a mashup of two important books: Jim Stengel’s Grow: How Ideals Power Growth And Profits At The World’s Largest Companies and The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin. Read both books, but page 38 in Grow is BEYOND IMPORTANT.

Page 38 explains how to align your marketing to your customers ideals.

The web never waits. The web creates expectations every second of everyday. You enter with sins and prove yourself guilty or sin-free by actions. If actions are grounded in a strong sense of SELF, and I mean the SELF that is a company or a brand, then you may win disproportionate treasure in the blink of an eye. Any wobble will be accentuated and can easily blow years of hard work, advertising and strategy up in seconds or minutes.

Welcome to the wild west that is Internet marketing where your brand’s life is table stakes and Big Ideas only keep you in the most dynamic game ever rendered until the River or the Raise. Big Ideas will RULE because they already ARE ruling. Soon my fellow New Media Leaders (Phil and Mark) and I will discuss how BIG IDEAS can be created. We have a growing army of magic wands, tools capable of generating more ROI even as you use them less.

Let’s leave quickly since our ROI Police may be more relaxed now that at any other point. Sleep well my ROI Police as we Internet marketers,we “lucky few”, rub hands together in front of a New Media Leaders fire and slowly slouch toward the Big Ideas we knew were there, the Christo ideas, the artistic “reasons to live” and have joy stuff no one likes to discuss but we all depend on to get through the day…

What are your Big Ideas? What ideas help you find life’s joy and get through this day and then the next?
Tweet your Big IM Ideas to @ScentTrail @1918 @MarkTraphagen or Amy Lewis @CommsNinja