What's Your Digital iQ

Known as the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing,” Mitch Joel is the president of Twist Image – an award winning digital marketing and communications agency. If you ever read Fast Company or BusinessWeek you’ve probably stumbled across one of Mitch’s many articles.

Mitch believes that there have been 5 massive shifts in business that very few businesses have taken advantage of…and are missing a huge opportunity.

1) Direct Relationships

With web – more specifically social – brands no longer have to communicate with their customer through newspapers; brands can now build direct relationships with consumers. Mitch shares a story about how we bought a pair of the wildly popular Beats By Dre headphones from Target. He made an investment of $120 in headphones and also liked each of those brands on Facebook. Here’s an interesting question: Who owns the relationship with Mitch? Beats By Dre? Target? What about Facebook?

Mitch contends that this is a really complicated love triangle and that if we aren’t careful, we’re going to blow our opportunity to build a direct relationship with the consumer. The challenge for brands is that they are no longer just competing against their closest competitors to build relationships with the consumer but also the folks that are helping them sell their products (ie Facebook).

So, who will end up winning the relationship? The brand that will own the direct relationship with the consumer will be the brand who understands what it takes to build and manage that relationship.

Tip: Every time you update content, ask yourself if you’re adding value to your relationships or just static.

2) Sex with data

If you look at the history of advertising research, consumers – though skeptical of advertising – demand that advertising be personalized and relevant. The challenge for marketers is walking the fine line between personalization and privacy. Consumers desire brands to speak to them, not stalk them.

Sex with data is the ability to really connect data to behavior and use it to create a better marketing experience for the consumer. Amazon knows a tremendous amount about us: what we search for, what we purchase, our name, address, and credit card information. They know what we link to and they know what we prefer. But do we mind? No, because they provide such a personalized experience that we value the experience over our own privacy.

3) Utility (or death)

Utility is creating something that is extremely useful for consumers. Charmin (yes, the toilet paper company) created a really useful for app. Have you downloaded SitOrSquat from the App Store yet? For those who must have a super clean bathroom, the SitOrSquat app allows people to identify and find the cleanest bathroom around them. Charmin has figured out utility. Great utility is great content.

4) Passive vs. active

Mitch has an interesting observation. TV is a passive medium. People don’t want to like, friend, or search the TV. Consumers want to sit back and relax. Yes, there is a small percentage of people that will make it active but most of us just want to passively watch our favorite shows. Twitter on the other hand is a more active medium. So we have to decide, is our content going to be passive or active? What’s the channel and what’s appropriate?

5) One Screen

We spend a bunch of time talking about the 3rd screen, don’t we? Mitch contends that maybe we should just focus on creating the best experience on one screen. As the computational ability of our devices continue to give us everything we need in one device the less likely we will need anything more than one screen at a time.

Mitch asks which is better: giving a presentation by sliding your laptop over in front of somewhere and then sliding it back to navigate or by putting an iPad in their hands and letting them drive? In iQ, we definitely agree and that’s why we’re testing prototypes like Mercury Controller.