This is James Michelson; I’m the Principle and managing member of JFM Concepts and VDP Web.  I have a new book, Cross Media Marketing 101:  The Concise Guide to Surviving in the C Suite.  And what we’ve done is taken our experience over the last 10 years of creating cross media campaigns and put together the top 20 things and the top channels that marketing leaders need to know and so how can we sell those channels to those leaders so that they understand in an easy way what needs to get filled.  

One of the things that we’ve done as an industry is, we’re always swinging from the fences trying to create a very difficult, complicated campaign.  What we might want to think about, and one of the point here, is that we start with an easy sale.  We get ourselves integrated into the customer’s marketing mix regardless of what it is.  If we have print, we have advertising of all kinds, radio, television, hell; they can send it by a carrier pigeon if you want, as long as we’re in that marketing mix.  And the key takeaway is, let’s get into that mix by providing a data collection mechanism.  It can be a – something as simple as a landing page, take that landing page and from there be able to move ahead into other areas of the customer’s mix.  

I’m going to take a second and talk about social media and how that affects the overall marketing mix.  How do we leverage what people want to do with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Zing and Chamber.com and these thousands of channels that are out there on the web.  That’s a lot of content to manage.  And more importantly, how do we take that content once we’ve created it and do something that starts a two-way conversation?  The tool to do that is to use a landing page as a link on your Twitters and your blogs and your posts.  So if I have some piece of content that I send out, one of the best ways to start a two-way conversation to get things running and moving is to provide a small link to a landing page that allows our customer, if they want or our prospect, to take an action.  Send me more information.  Let me sign up for your newsletter, you know, join me and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.  Drive them to a landing page, measure your traffic and then your content can actually be generating leads for you.  

Now, that response mechanism, it might be a QR code where you can take a picture and get information on your cellphone right away.  It might be a URL that they can type into a browser on their iPad.  The collection mechanism is what’s important, not necessarily the delivery.  As long as whatever delivery channel you use gives the customer an opportunity to opt in your social and your mobile media activities will generate leads.  

And as we look at going from offset to digital printing, how can we make the transition from those jobs?  And what should that mix be?  One suggestion that we have is to start with a generic landing page on every static piece that you can get it printed on, that way when someone goes to that generic URL, when they opt in, you can transition from an offset to a digital print run by providing the “follow on” communication to that opt in.  Now, that could come from a digital printed postcard, maybe something folded and tabbed, maybe an entire production package or even an email, but it will help you go from that offset to a digital process and to get multiple print runs and revenue streams from one sale.