Aaron spoke last night at a Viget-hosted meeting of DC’s Social Media Club.  He covered a lot of blogging topics, with a focus on how engaging in social media effectively can impact a brand (for a company or an individual).  My favorite line was:

“Authenticity will always garner trust, even if you’re an ogre.”

Brand is “less about perception and more about trust.”  Building trust is what’s important, and that has nothing to do with who you are or what your message actually is — it just matters that you’re direct and transparent about it.  I find that a common concern among companies and individuals is that too much transparency will reveal the “warts” and be a detriment to establishing credibility. 

When the goal is not a perception of perfection, but in fact a real relationship rooted in trust, it changes the game.  The warts become a good thing (because they show it’s real) and a positive pressure is created to not just seem worthy of trust and respect, but to actually be worthy.  Everyone wins.

You can watch Aaron’s entire presentation here.  Thank you again to Aaron for speaking, attendees for attending, and Larissa / Livingston Communications for organizing.

Yesterday, Brad blogged about how hard (and painful) it is to get products out of their “plastic jails.”  Today, Seth wondered if “smaller and lighter” will become “sexier” when it comes to product containers.  In addition to being a healthcare issue (Brad’s hands are apparently a bloody mess) and marketing issue (heavier Gatorade bottles apparently sell better) it’s a huge environmental issue. 

I think it’s up to us.  If, as consumers, we decide that heavy, excessive, wasteful packaging is bad, and we show our position by buying products that embrace less waste (and by telling companies why we aren’t buying their over-packaged products) we can change this.  I think it’s a worthwhile issue.

We talk a lot about search engine optimization at Viget.  Seth posted a new ebook (download it for free) and in the post he notes:

“… the best way is the long way. The long way is to create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic.”

Well put.

The coolest thing about what’s going on with the Web right now is that game-changing innovation is sparked by small teams of smart, motivated people who just do stuff.  They try things.  They hack on their ideas and put it out there.  Some take off, some don’t.  The difference between now and 8-10 years ago is that the audience is really there, so the really cool ideas can really take off.  And thanks to open source software and open platforms, part of that “take off” is others contributing to the ideas to make them better.

This model has been limited to software, but BugLabs is taking it to hardware.  The BUG is a collection of open-source hardware modules that you can snap together to make your own custom device.  If they can successfully connect these gadgets so that the collaboration and community building can happen as seamlessly as it does online, there’s no telling what people will come up with.  Check out the video with founder/CEO Peter Semmelhack and marketing guy Jeremy Toeman:

It’s cool to see this “rough” product display, brought to us via a cell phone video interview, generating buzz and getting the word out.  No need for fancy marketing speak and flashy demos.  I’ll take an unedited chat with a founder/CEO showing off his/her product any day.  In this case, my favorite quote from Peter is:

“I’m building it because I really want it.”

That’s how the best stuff comes to be.  Kudos to Scoble for the interview.  My second favorite quote is Peter calling his company “Bell Labs” — a mistake I’ve never made at Viget Labs.

My dad, who was hacking on hardware and software as far back as I can remember, would have loved this thing.

Last Thursday (sorry for the delay — been on travel) I talked with a group of direct marketers on the topic of search engine optimization in the context of marketing as ”conversation.”  The event was put on by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington.  The Buzz Bin managed to live blog the day, and covered my SEO for Web 2.0 talk here.  Thanks for taking notes, guys!

But how many people watching Monday Night Football tonight really do (enough that they’d influence a major purchasing decision?) .005% of the audience?  Why, between ads for trucks and beer do they stick ads for IBM BladeCenter, which must appeal (or even make sense) to almost no one? 

Because it works, I guess, but after talking about targeted search advertising all afternoon, mass market television advertising is inefficient enough to make you laugh.

The Era of Conversation event is happening in DC on October 4th, hosted by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW).  I’ll be giving a talk about “building individual relationships and readers” in the tactical “Organizational Blogging & RSS” portion of the event.  From DMAW:

It’s too late to talk AT your customers and donors. The New Media Conversation involves talking WITH them. Blogs, social networks, wikis, user-generated video, and other web 2.0 interactions have put organizations in the listener’s chair. Meanwhile, companies, non-profits, and political organizations are scrambling to understand and embrace the two-way dimension in one-to-one communications [Don’t be discouraged. YOU can do this — and you WILL profit from the experience!]

Start with the basics. This unique “Era of Conversation” event discloses the underlying principles and tools of conversational communications (keynotes). Then, sessions hammer brass tacks into some of the more popular social media tactics (track 1), and spotlight real live case studies with [shock!] actual results (track 2). 

Hope to see you there.  If you have any specifics you’d like me to cover in my talk, leave a comment or email me — or just show up and heckle.

Local marketing / PR / social media guru Geoff Livingston, who blogs at The Buzz Bin and is the primary author of the upcoming book Now Is Gone, asked me a few questions about SEO that I did my best to answer intelligently.  He was way too generous with his description of me (*blush*), but I do appreciate the opportunity to discuss the topic.  Thanks, Geoff!

Seth, intro’d as “the #1 marketing guru in the United States” (which he politely disputes,) posted this 6 minute video on his blog today.

It’s a quick summary of a lot of the themes he talks about on his blog and in his books including the recent history of marketing — a great way to get to know Seth and how he thinks. Some points:

• Old marketing (i.e., “yelling at people”) doesn’t work on TV, and, contrary to the hopes of marketers when the Internet arrived as a marketing platform 10 years ago, works even less online. Traditional Web advertising fails because ads are too easy to ignore.
• Getting permission to connect with potential customers is the key to successful marketing today and in the future.
• Web 2.0 is a lot about how customers can “market” (positively or negatively) on behalf of companies over the web — most of the results for product searches are for web pages not built by the product company.
• The key here is that the product / service needs to be truly remarkable so that people will be inspired to talk about it.
• Marketing for the next couple years will be all about empowering your biggest fans / customers to talk about your business.
• Web 4.0 will be when “the Net just gets smart” and — with permission — knows what you’re doing at all times and can therefore manage your life better.  His example: your flight is delayed and it not alerts you, but reschedules all of your meetings on your behalf. 
• Social networks grow fast and often die fast because “the party gets so popular that no one wants to go to it anymore.”  The key to success is balancing scarcity such that the right people are in the network, but enough activity so that these “right” people can find each other.
• He notes that blogging — not pounding the networks in Facebook and LinkedIn — is the best way to build credibility and foster this kind of discussion.
• Seth ends with words like “authentic,” “transparency,” and “reputation” — without these, none of this stuff works.

Ryan Carson runs Carson Systems and Vitamin.  He also puts on some of the best web conferences in the world, specifically Future of Web Apps (FOWA) and Future of Web Design (FOWD).   While I’d love to hit both, FOWA is in London this October, which is a bit of a hike for me.  FOWD is in NYC, though, and a few of us from Viget will be there.

To help promote FOWA, Ryan is mixing 2 of his favorite things: drinking beer and meeting people.  At the recently (and nicely) redesigned FOWA Road Trip page Ryan invites people in 12 European cities to “get away from our laptops and have a good ol’ fashioned night on the town.”  Ryan’s Twittering along the way, and the FOWA crew is documenting the trip.  Looks like they’re having fun so far.

Being the earth-friendly type, Ryan’s also using the Climate Careprogram to offset the CO2 emissions from his trip.

I think this is a great idea — especially for a guy with seemingly endless energy like Ryan — for how to get out and promote a conference while making a real connection with the community he cares about.

I met Ryan at SXSW earlier this year, and invited him to participate in the Web 2.0 for Business conference that I help put together through ExecutiveBiz.   Ryan will be moderating a panel on … what else?  The Future of Web 2.0 for Business.  Looking forward to having him in town — perhaps we’ll invite some folks out for a beer …

I was one of the lucky 100 TechCrunch readers who got to try a Moo StickerBook for free.  No gimmick here — I just clicked on the link, uploaded a few photos, gave them my address, and I was done.  They arrived today.  They’re normally only $10 (plus shipping), but  seeing as I’m a sucker for free stuff, I have to admit that the promo was the only reason I gave them a shot.

Do they serve a purpose?  Not really.  But they’d no doubt make a nice little gift — 90 different little custom sticker photos.  They amused my wife and kids.

In addition to some photos I uploaded the Viget logo as well.  Turned out nicely.  I could see why people might want to stick their logo all over everything.

So why did Moo give away 100 StickerBooks for free on the day they launched?  Was it a good promotion?  They probably figured that TechCrunch readers are the type to write blog posts about products they like.  Hmm … What do they know?