Denuo - denuology.com

It started with a phone call to our offices in Chicago.

The next step involved several meetings in New York and Montvale, New Jersey.

From there, it sent me to Tampa for a team training session and send off party.

And finally Tampa to Dallas, culminating in 4 cars, 4 starting points, and 3 days of cross country travel.

The denouement happened last week at the Chicago Auto Show where I stood, still exhausted from the journey, and answered questions during their inaugural Social Media Day.

One of the questions that continually came up is “How did you get people so engaged in this?”

My travels were half the answer.  Ultimately it was a digital experience that was rooted in humanity and the physical world.

Last week, we had the pleasure of helping run the world’s first Tweet Race for Mercedes-Benz. Along with our colleagues at Razorfish, we took four teams across the country in Mercedes-Benz vehicles that were “fueled by Twitter,” meaning the teams had to generate social media activity to keep their engines running. We designed a game around this that involved the teams competing in challenges, stoking their supporters for extra Tweet Fuel, and various tasks to accomplish both online and offline, all building up to a winner based on the strength of their social network and their skill behind the wheel.

Over a frenzied three days of racing, we learned a lot about games, digital marketing, competitive spirit, blizzards, Dallas ice treatment controversies, live event management, and when to let go and enjoy the ride. Join us, won’t you?

Starting this year, I’ll be cheating on Denuology and posting monthly insights for ClickZ’s new Community Management column. This month, I take pleasure in covering everyone’s favorite ’80s collectibles: trolls.

A peek at what’s covered in “Trolls are inevitable. Here’s how to deal with them.”:

• Don’t let them see you cry.
• Separate the genuine complaints from the rage.
• Kill ‘em with kindness.
• Feed your advocates, starve the trolls.
• Relish the troll fight.
• Avoid deleting.
• Prepare for a troll avalanche.

Confused? Then dive into the article here, and if you’re feeling generous and very community-managementy, check out my previous article on building a community management team.

Social media matters. Despite all the hype, I think we can agree there is tremendous potential in using it as a platform for building deeper relationships with your customer, allowing you to talk to them consistently over a longer period of time. That’s why most companies collect the likes, the follows, and the subscriptions (how many do you still know that don’t?). Some take it further – monitoring online conversations, setting up more robust communities or Facebook platforms, using a service to identify “influencers”.

But one area of social (and I’m lumping relationship marketing in here because they are so closely linked or at least should be) is still criminally overlooked in all but a few cases: the content. In other words, you have the attention of your faithful and the signal they want to hear from you. But what are you actually saying?

In many ways it’s a trickier problem than communicating via paid advertising a few times a year or whenever the campaign needs a refresh.  This is an ongoing stream of content meant to not only engage an audience but also respond and adapt to their feedback. It’s content as conversation. In essence, it is content that lives and breathes and behaves like a person. We call it continuous content at Denuo and believe it represents the next great creative frontier.

After watching An Inconvenient Truth,
Kennedy helped her cardio striptease workout studio become LEED-certified.

I want a book deal.  And not the kind where I have to sit down and write a fricken novel.  I want the kind where someone essentially copies and pastes posts from a blog I make, I write a small dedication to friends and family, and I distribute throughout kitschy stores in malls for people with money to burn.