On Sunday, I picked up a tweet from MeetUp CEO Scott Heiferman, who took notice about one of the subjects I tend to write / tweet about:

Conveniently on that same day, Mitch Joel wrote a post about the fact people had been asking him similar questions such as: “why do you Blog about journalism so much?” and “why do you even care what’s going on in the newspaper industry?“.

I loved Mitch’s response on why he pays so much attention to the media industry:

… for me to be a better Digital Marketing professional, I have to know what all of the media channels are, what they can do, the trouble they’re facing, how they’re surviving, where the opportunities are, and who the recognized and experienced voices are within the channel. The media landscape is changing in such a rapid and dramatic way, that the only way to stay on top of what the potential outcome for Marketing will be in the coming years is to be tracking what they uber-smart media pundits are thinking, pushing and collectively hoping for.

I feel the same way about the world of start-ups and Venture Capital. It’s the reason that last week I took the time to attend the General Catalyst Entrepreneur Forum and this week I’ll be attending Landmark’s Media Technology Showcase in NYC. I have written before about the importance Brand Marketers to start acting like Marketing Technopologists. For me, staying close to the world of start-ups and Venture Capital is an important way to do so.

If you look back 20 years ago, Brand Marketers only had to be concerned with a handful of forces in their day to day business. Most of their day was spent working with their company colleagues, advertising agencies and occasionally media partners from TV and print. Start-ups and Venture Capital frankly did not matter because few of those companies would make a material impact on their business. But today is different. We all know the facts about how fast change is happening.

• In just over a decade, Google has gone from being a thesis project to a company with a market cap over $120 billion.
• In just over 5 years, Facebook has gone from a dorm room in Harvard to a service reaching over 400 million users.
• And in just 18 months of existence, GroupOn is rumored to be on track for $350 million in revenue in 2010.

Personally I think one of the single biggest issues facing the Marketing industry right now is that not enough Brand Marketers are paying attention to the speed of change taking place under foot. Not enough marketers are taking the time to personally use tools like Foursquare, Aardvark, or uStream. And not enough Brand Managers are taking the time to form relationships with (or even return the phone calls of) entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists.

For me, the start-up world is my canary in the marketing coal mine.

Not every company I meet with is going to be one that I end up working with. In fact, I probably only end up doing work with 5 to 10 percent of the start-ups that I meet with. But I learn something from each and every meeting. And if I am doing my job right, hopefully they learn something from me that helps as they build their business.

Just like many VC’s, these meetings help my pattern recognition so I can have a feel for the trends that will impact my brands and my business. And most importantly, I have a chance to build a strategy around these trends well before competition that only pays attention to companies they read about in the Wall Street Journal or Advertising Age.

If a Brand Marketer wants to be a Marketing Technopologist, I cannot think of a better place to start than having a foot in the world of entrepreneurs.

Vivaldi Partners recently released a study entitled “Social Currency” that looks at why brands need to build and nurture social currency.  Social Currency is one of those sayings your hear tossed around, but no one ever really defines it.  That is one of things that makes the Vivaldi study so interesting.  In the words of Vivaldi’s founder, Erich Joachimsthaler,  Social Currency is:

“the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives… Social currency is not  just about conversation, buzz or community.  It is all this and much more. It does not impact every brand equally and certain levers of social currency are more important than others in driving value for companies.”

The report is a great read but there are a couple of key takeaways and snippets that I have captured from the report below:

Social Currency consists of six core levers

• Affiliation: What share of your users has a sense of community?
• Conversation: What share of your brand users recognizes and stirs buzz?
• Utility: How many of your users derive value from interacting with other users?
• Advocacy: How many users act as disciples and stand up for your brand?
• Information: How many of your users feel they exchange fruitful information with others?
• Identity: How many of your users can identify other users?

Social currency represents a shared asset of consumers and company-owned brands

It originates from interaction between customers and consumers.  Companies can stimulate the creation of social currency through means that cultivate a sense of community, strengthen consumer interaction and provide value to the community.  When done credibly brands earn trust  and can grow into an integral, almost symbiotic role in customers’ lives.

What matters is “meaningful” social currency.

Social media efforts should be evaluated in terms of the extent to which it contributes to a brand’s equity, the extent to which it drives category or industry attributes or connects with consumers. Example: successful viral efforts like Burger King’s subservient chicken digital efforts created a lot of buzz but did not really contribute to the strengthening of key components of its brand equity nor did the effort deliver on factors that drive purchase and consumption in the category.

Social Currency must be built and nurtured

Today’s digital technologies open up new and enormously exciting opportunities for building social currency. While there has been a plethora of experimentation over the years, it is clear that we have merely scratched the tip of the iceberg. As technologies evolve, new ways will emerge of how social currency can be built over time.  The big conundrum for marketers is that in an online world, brands are far more broadlyand proactively discussed than ever imagined.  As these conversations are often beyond the direct influence or control of a company, marketers must find innovative and creative ways to thoughtfully leverage these independent brand conversation and act credibly in the digital arena.

The full report does a great job of pulling out examples of Social Currency across different product categories.  Also, for more perspective on the topic, the May 2010 issue of Fast Company used the study for the article  “Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency“

More brilliant work from the folks at Nike.   The blending of marketing and entertainment continues…

Recently Fast Company launched a new feature on their site called Brand Innovator Spotlight.  Written by Brandon Gutman of FOCi Group, the feature is an interview with Brand Marketers who are pushing marketing innovation in their businesses.  In their first two features, they put the spotlight on industry colleagues of mine: Aaaron Magness, head of Brand Marketing at Zappos and Bert DuMars is VP E-Business & Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid.

I particularly love this excerpt from the interview with Bert where he talked about how they are using Social Media to gain a better understanding on the troubles consumers are facing:

We partnered with BazaarVoice to enable consumer generated product reviews on the Rubbermaid.com brand Web site.  This allows us to get real-time feedback from consumers on what they like and do not like about our products.  It also helps identify issues that we can respond to or fix.  When we launched our Produce Saver food storage product the first 7 reviews came back as two 5-Star and five 1-Star reviews.  That is quite a difference but good to know.  We contacted the five 1-Star reviewers and found out they were not following the instructions on how to use the product.  We immediately put additional instruction information on the product page and wrote a blog post on how to use Produce Saver for best results.  You can see the results of this effort as we moved from 71% of the first reviewers not recommending the product to 92% of 129 reviewers currently recommending product.

If you are looking to hear from the best leaders in the Brand Marketing space, these Brand Innovator Spotlights are a must add to your RSS reader.