I’m constantly surprised by the cool small businesses we have locally in Asheville.   Some things I’ve seen mentioned around the internet and until recently didn’t know were here in town.  Some that come to mind are The Modern Baby Co. and Figs and Ginger and Stupid Creatures.

Some things that I knew were in town but are still cool are Doctordirectory.com and Immaculate Baking Co.

There are also a surprising amount of National Non profit organisations that were either founded here or moved their headquarters here.  I can think of The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, The American Chestnut Foundation, The Alliance for American Quilts.

Who else is around here that I’m not thinking of?

Twitter has proven to be an effective marketing tool and a potential damaging wildfire.  Marketers are learning to keep better tabs on social media and use it in their favour instead of becoming the butt of it.

Heather Armstrong (www.dooce.com) complained about her brand new Maytag washer on twitter (http://twitter.com/dooce) recently and created a stir.  Now I’m sure the marketing guy who runs the twitter page at Whirlpool had a small heart attack over the amount of conversation this started.  It’s not good to have Dooce belittle your product.  She has over 1 million followers on twitter alone and only recently slipped out of the top ten on Technorati. 

By following her stream you can see that Whirlpool has tried weakly to calm the storm.   But realistically,  I’m pretty sure Seth Godin would teach us that this is a huge opportunity to turn it all around. Dooce is a relatively fair blogger,  and if she were made happy,  she would cry that just as far.   Whirlpool should be falling all over themselves to send her a new washer yesterday.  What’s worth more,  saving the money on a whiny customer or showing over 1 million people at once that your company cares about it’s customers?

From Media Post by Karlene Lukovitz

By undermining the financial viability of traditional media, marketers are jeopardizing the only viable means currently available for reaching mass audiences.

 That’s the core premise of “The CMO’s Dilemma: Can You Reach the Masses Without Mass Media?,” a new white paper co-authored by John Rose and Neal Zuckerman of The Boston Consulting Group. Rose and Zuckerman argue that it’s critical that marketers, agencies and media companies start addressing the issues surrounding this dilemma together.

The current shifting of advertising dollars to new types of media and below-the-line marketing channels such as PR, events and in-store promotions represents a fundamental structural change rather than a cyclical ebb tied to the economy, say the authors.

“If traditional media companies think the advertising dollars will return when the economy rebounds, they’re kidding themselves in a dangerous way,” Rose, a senior partner and managing director at BCG, tells Marketing Daily. The high fixed costs built into their current business models mean that they cannot withstand even a relatively small absolute decline in their share of advertising revenue. “Cost-cutting may have bought them some time,” but to survive, they will have to build new business models that embrace cross-company partnerships, as well as integrate media channels, he says.

Advertisers have shifted enough of their spending to threaten traditional media companies’ economic viability, but not enough to create alternatives that approach the effectiveness of television, newspapers and magazines at providing national advertisers with broad demographics and massive reach — and strong alternatives won’t be available for at least the next several years, Rose says.

Underlying all of this is the reality that CMOs’ ability to create marketing strategies reflecting optimal mixes of traditional and digital media and below-the-line channels is severely hampered because of a vacuum of integrated media planning and measurement solutions, Rose and Zuckerman maintain. Instead of integrated solutions that enable them to determine the effects of shifting budget dollars among media, CMOs are pitched “unique” sets of solutions for each channel, while agencies have by and large responded by creating specialty divisions.

However, CMOs are beginning to ask the questions needed to arrive at new solutions, according to the authors.

These include:

What are our goals and targeted customer base for each traditional and new marketing channel, what specific activities will best help us reach customers, and how should we measure their success?

How do we allocate dollars across increasingly overlapping marketing activities and create an integrated cross-media strategy that recognizes each channel’s value?

How do we work with agencies and other partners to put our media strategies together?

Will our media mix changes contribute to the elimination of traditional media and what, if anything, can or should we do about this?

“None of us can fully answer these questions until advertisers, agencies and media companies collectively recognize that the crisis in mass media is a marketing challenge, too,” Rose and Zuckerman conclude.

However, they say that traditional media companies need to work with advertisers and agencies to develop sustainable, relevant business models; that advertisers need better support from agencies to leverage opportunities; and that large advertisers should be considering developing select in-house capabilities to fill the gaps in their needs.

Great interview with John Quelch on Bnet.

How to Market in a Downturn

by Ann Marsh

Still trying to figure out the best way to utilize Twitter?  Who isn’t.

Mashable has put together some very useful guides:

http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

From Cosmos Magazine:

SYDNEY: Solar panels could soon be printed in the same way as bank notes, thanks to world-leading innovation by Australian scientists.

Researchers from the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium, which includes scientists from government research agency the CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and Monash University, have developed a new technique that could open up the door for cheap, mass-produced solar cells.

“These solar cells are cutting edge technology and offer advantages over traditional solar technology,” Peter Batchelor, Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources, said at the launch. “The production of these film-like solar cells will be literally as easy as printing money.”

The Daniels Group, (Daniels Graphics and Daniels Communications) collected nearly 1700 lbs. of food for MANNA FoodBank with their “Will Print For Food Campaign” (The equivalent of 1392 meals (or a Kodiak Bear)).

With the help of their vendors and customers, The Daniels Group hoped to do something positive in this time of economic uncertainty.  During the month of May the company donated 10 cans of food for every print order received. In addition, employees of the company participated by donating food to the cause.

“We appreciate the help we received from our vendors, customers and friends in our effort to help those in need.”, said Tim Bryant, VP of Sales and Marketing, “This campaign fit in with our mission of supporting our community. We encourage other companies in Asheville to consider helping MANNA in a time when donations are down and the need is rising.”