Because everything is new, and so much had to be done, we’ve all been working at a feverish pace to get everything ready. In the last few weeks the communications elements have rolled out. TV and radio spots are running, a new local website was launched, billboards and street pole banners were put up, an insert appeared in the paper, email marketing got hot and heavy, a text alert program was launched, airport multi-media displays at baggage claim began running. The list was long. And now the big event is about to kick off.

Yesterday was the official kick off press conference and even some of our interns got put to work. Joe Burke delivered some 20k information inserts for fans to area hotels and businesses. And both Joe and Jennifer Fisher acted as human easels today to make sure exhibits didn’t blow down during the press conference.

We had an entire crew down at the stadium for the press kickoff to work logistics. Pictured here are just a few. Interns Jennifer Fisher and Joe Burke and  staffers Emily Wenstrom and Laura Spaulding.

Just in the nick of time, literally with only 30 minutes to spare before the first team arrived on Wednesday, the airport welcome banners were installed.

Every year has its share of challenges. This year the big one is water. It’s everywhere. Even cropping up this week into parking lot D and giving officials some headaches. Flooding is also on the mind of fans coming into town and we’ve needed to provide information about road closures and suggested detours. This is the first time we’ve needed to add a page to the website to include updates on flooding and road detours. Challenges aside, everyone is powering through it and the show will go on. And it will be great!

Come on down and catch the free opening ceremonies and a game. Tickets are still available at the box office and the view is FINE!

I was struck by the fact that at least six of the technologies have already, or will, impact brand strategy and communications planning. Many of these are already being employed at some level.

Listed below are the six technologies with a brief explanation taken from the Gartner press release.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.

The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.

Social Communications and Collaboration

Social media can be divided into:

1. Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise.
2. Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing.
3. Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr.
4. Social feedback – gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video

This is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream.

Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Next Generation Analytics

Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action.

Social Analytics

Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web.

Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-Aware Computing

Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee.

The other strategic technologies are cloud computing, storage-class memory, ubiquitous computing and fabric-based infrastructure and computers.

Are you using these technologies to your advantage?

And then there are the companies that send me two or three of the same piece – at the same time!  Again, I’m sharp enough realize it is caused more by your lack of ability to execute efficiently than by my enormous importance to your company.  So again – I’m underwhelmed.

I don’t get a huge amount of snail mail these days.  So much comes through e-mail it’s not all that surprising.  And the shear expense of snail mail when executed inefficiently is mind boggling.  But I can say with some authority that conservatively 50% of what I see is going to the wrong person or is inaccurate in some other way.  It’s your money guys!

Getting it right is not all that difficult.  It’s all in how you manage your database.  My advice to those of you who haven’t cleaned your list for 10 years and counting is don’t waste your money.  You’re hurting your brand with every batch of mail that you drop.

As a viewer looks at the system screen, the built-in camera technology analyzes data such as gender and age, audience composition, time-of-day and other criteria, which enable the system to display tailored content and graphics based on estimated demographics. The system anonymously sends audience information to advertisers who can use that information to understand the type of content and messages that are most popular with viewers. This, in turn, helps advertisers target their advertising to maximize the impact on the audience.

Innovations like Intel’s prototype (pictured above) and NEC’s plans as reported in WSJ today, will change the way people interact with digital signage technology in environments such as stores, airports, banks and hotels.

In the Intel demonstration, multiple consumers can use this side-by-side window display simultaneously to explore augmented reality-enabled maps of each floor of the store, on which retailers can superimpose images such as coupons and sales promotions next to the product visualizations on the glass, improving the customer’s shopping experience. They can send coupons to their phones and more.

These innovations in digital signage concept bring a new opportunity for advertisers to smart target messages through the use of anonymous video analytics. Consumers, especially those with growing privacy concerns relative to data collection and behavioral targeting, may object to getting their faces scanned without their knowledge. However, both Intel and NEC stress the concept of anonymous data points and modeling.

“The program tracks a person’s age and gender and throws out the footage, keeping only the macro data, he said, adding that no individuals are singled out.” Mr. Yamamoto in WSJ story.

When consumers click on the icon they will be taken to a page explaining how the advertiser uses their Web surfing history and demographic profile to send them certain ads.

Consumers should  start seeing this icon along with phrases like “Why did I get this ad?” by midsummer.

With data collection and integration becoming ever more sophisticated, the industry has been under increased scrutiny about data acquisition models and the impact on consumer privacy. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) threatened to step in if the industry failed to self-regulate, and several trade groups are now working on third-party systems that will help regulate behaviorally targeted ads. The new informational icon is one step toward industry transparency.

“Jules Polonetsky, the co-chairman and director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an advocacy group that helped create the symbol, compared it to the triangle made up of three arrows that tells consumers that something is recyclable.”  From NYTimes.com

There’s confusion, trepidation, and a general feeling of being overwhelmed.  Add to that the pressure to get more bang for your marketing buck in today’s economic climate and the anxiety increases.

More and more companies need or want to expand their visibility online.   To be found where people look.  That often means tapping the potential of social media, but they don’t know how to enter the conversation or are paralyzed because of a stumble.  We’ve heard tales of being banned from Digg, kicked off Facebook, deleted from Wikipedia, stumped by Twitter, slammed by bloggers or caught off guard by employee comments in cyberspace.  We hear the the same question over and over, “What do I do?” And the dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of web pages dedicated to the subject only seem to make it feel more overwhelming.

So we’ve developed this series of seminars, starting with social media marketing, to go beyond theory and platitudes to practical applications to answer your questions and give you tips you can put to work immediately.  We also have sessions scheduled that will focus on increasing your visibility on search engines and on smart marketing tips to turn data into intelligence and insights. You’ll take away not only a better understanding, but also a little peace of mind  and some tools to get you started.

Why the Sausage Factory name?  Because it fits (and it sounded better than Bozell Seminars).  People once referred to marketing like a recipe for soup — a little of this, a little of that, add a little seasoning, simmer it for a while and you’ve got a meal.  Now it’s not nearly so neat or orderly and time to simmer…fat chance.  It’s all about now.  And piecemeal doesn’t cut it anymore.  It has to all be ground together to create something cohesive and tightly integrated.  It really is like making sausage. It’s messy.  But at the end of the day, it’s much tastier and more popular at parties because it’s centered on the consumer.  Could the name Sausage Factory raise a few eyebrows?  You bet.  But that itself is part of what the marketing game is about today.  To have a voice, a point of view, something that might be worth talking about.  Check it out:  www.sausagefactoryseminars.com or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/SausageFactory.