Minneapolis, St. Paul, Thank You! Now, Let’s Collaborate!

Yesterday was one of the more interesting and fulfilling days I have had as a professional. Most of us know about #Unfollowgate. If not; check out my previous post on #Unfollowgate and its impact on the Minneapolis and St. Paul online community.

Between the hundreds of views, 18 comments, numerous public tweets, re-tweets, even more direct messages, and even some text messages and calls, the outpouring of support for me was astonishing. Thank you all very much for that.

I want to get away from #Unfollowgate and move onto the larger issue: how to make the Minneapolis and St. Paul online community more collaborative, more unified, and considered as a true leader in the online marketing space.

I have been going over what Chris Brogan said when he was here at the Minnesota Business/Reputations event, about our shortcomings as a community. It would have been easy for him to say ‘Minneapolis/St. Paul, y’all are great! Keep Truckin’!’ for a cheap pop. He did not do that, and I thank him for that. For him to say (paraphrasing) ‘you have the talent here, you don’t have the collaborative atmosphere’, and to call out Pittsburgh as his numer one community was gutsy. He travels and connects with enough people from each community where I trust his opinion more than others.

This should be a wake up call for our community. We do have the talent, we have the case studies, we have the clients, we have the passion (as was shown yesterday). How do we combine all that and more to help our community move to the head of the online marketing class?

Let’s start a discussion answering a few questions. As a community:

• What are we doing right?
• What are we doing wrong?
• What are your concerns about the state of online marketing?
• What do we want to do?
• Where do we want to go?

Minneapolis, St. Paul, metro area, Minnesota: your thoughts?

Skittles; Extreme Site Makeover

Go to skittles.com, and tell me what you see.

If it is still how it was at 4am cst, you will see it is the twitter feed (search.twitter.com) for skittles.  Take a few minutes to enter your age, and  determine whether or not this is a good/bad thing.

After viewing their homepage, I tweeted:

“Interesting concept by Skittles; on my own, trying to figure out why this is good and/or bad. #skittles”.

I refreshed skittles.com and found my tweet on the homepage; pretty cool, right?

After seeing myself on the homepage, a thought came through my head: what is this showing everyone?  Skittles has no content generated by Skittles; all the content, with the exception of the skittles widget, on the homepage is user generated.  Our thoughts and conversations are what is representing Skittles on their site.  From what I know, this is fairly groundbreaking to publicize the conversation that is out there about a brand. The free publicity they will receive in the following days will make this marketing initiative well worth it.

The question I pose to you: Does this mean that the conversation about a product, brand, or service is now more important than the website of that product, brand, or service?

~Jason Douglas

twitter: @jasondouglas