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The Interactive Mixer hosted by CentreSource is back! Escape the cold weather for a little get-together — come by our North Fourth offices, and mix with others in the Nashville community. This will be a bi-monthly event the last Thursday of every other month. Hope to see you here!

Host: CentreSource Interactive Agency (Hey! That’s us!)
What: February 2010 Interactive Mixer
When: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Where:
CentreSource’s North Fourth Office
1313 4th Ave N
Nashville,TN 37208

To RSVP, visit mixer.centresource.com.

How do I fix the red ring of death on my Xbox 360?

Can dogs eat pears?

Why doesn’t H&M sell clothes online?

Can you bring your own alcohol on a cruise ship?

I love Yahoo! Answers. If I have a question, someone there has already asked it… And more than likely, someone else has already answered.

I cannot imagine the number of minutes and hours I have saved customer service representatives by consulting with others on Yahoo! Answers to give my questions answers before sending an email or making a phone call. Sure, the answers are not always accurate, but knowledge is power and there is power in numbers.

You know what I am talking about – all those email lists you have signed up for but you never read them. You even have a separate email account just for that. You had to get those offers for that weekend trip to Las Vegas you will never have enough time to go to or for some reason you wanted to get alerts when a friend posts a survey on your Facebook page as it happens.

Pay per click, cost per impression, return of investment(ROI), and conversion rates are some typical buzzwords you will hear while devising an online advertising strategy. Add Click-to-Donate to that list. This is not new but a reemerging trend from the late 1990s. Click-to-donate provide users the ability to give back to the cause of their choice.

Advertiser’s can reap the benefits from creating positively associated relationships. These relationships create and appease the social awareness that prospective consumer may be looking for. The hard part is what goes on in the boardroom where these advertising/marketing decisions are made. “How much are we spending and What is our ROI?” These questions arise from the lack of concrete returns.

Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp and Julien Smith, a podcaster in Canada write an interesting manifesto about a new kind of economics on the web: Trust.At the core of trust is building relationships. We encounter all types of relationships: fake, manipulative, or worse, toxic. These type of relationships are not profitable to maintain – certainly financially, and most importantly, worthy of our attention. The authors maintain that we are starved for time. “…attention is scare – more valuable than cash and rarer than gold… When you get some, embrace it and find out how to get more.”

I have never considered voting as marketing. After reading Seth Godin’s Lessons on Voting, we do vote with our wallet, our time, our commitment to the messages that compel us to act.- Voting is free. – Some people really like to vote. It builds a connection for them. – A big part of voting are the senior citizens who sit at the desk when you walk in to vote. Surely we could figure out how to vote without so many paid poll workers, but it makes it better. – Other people have a real problem with voting, probably involving the act of taking responsibility.

Here’s a very interesting way to interact with customers from HEMA, a Dutch company that sells consumer goods. HEMA operates 56 stores in Belgium and 9 in Germany.This advertisement is a good way to showcase its wares, while providing a viral way to promote its business. Turn your speakers on and click the link below to watch the advertisement (safe for work).

LINK: http://producten.hema.nl/

hat tip: GearDiary

Here is a graph* with data from Forrester Research on the participation of US online users.

The Social Revolution is here to stay. All marketers must learn to accept the challenges by customer driven participation by proactively focusing on the relationships. The tools are available to engage the customer’s voice. Beyond the story boards, focus groups, and internal discussions are the critics and influencers that for the most part, beyond the rants, do offer valid constructive criticism.

In marketing, we obsess over understanding people and how they think. Marketing campaigns are created to nudge the populace into a call to action. Seth Godin offers up a great starting point of what people want.

I can be very forgiving over a less than stellar restaurant meal, if the server was apologetic and reasonably accomodating. Would I go back to the same restaurant? – most likely yes. I invite you to add your own.

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Seth’s list of what people want:

The same thing everyone else is having, but different.

Congratulations to us! CentreSource was recently nominated for two categories (Emerging Business and Businesses with 1-25 employees) in the Nashville Business Journal’s Best in Business awards! I (Nicholas Holland) was also honored as a nominee for Entrepreneur of the Year! While being nominated is quite an honor, we are pleased to announce that CentreSource is now one of the finalists for the NBJ: Best in Business – Emerging Business category!

We are truly honored and want to send a special congratulations to all the finalists – good luck!