Danville Support Services is a Salt Lake City-based company that provides professional in-home care for seniors and people who have disabilities.

After all the work I’ve done in my career for beer brands, cigarette brands and technology brands, Danville Support Services is a definite change of pace. And a welcome one. I love that there’s a remarkable and genuine brand story here, as these two local news clips plainly reveal:

These videos came to us as existing assets–Bonehook did not arrange for the PR.

We did make a place for them on Facebook and on the company’s “refreshed” website.

I came up in the business as a copywriter. I learned the craft and spent many years making things like print ads and radio spots. Then the web happened. Now I don’t make as many print ads or radio spots. I make web sites and create interactive experiences now. That’s the market today.

There are very few passive consumers today. People are armed with real-time information, from brands, the media and one another. The digital milieu is another planet from the static media of the past. Therefore, “ads” that work online do not look nor act like ads of old.

Today we are busy creating anchors–brand sites driven by content strategies that keep them growing and evolving on a day-to-day basis. Once these anchors are in place, social media marketing and search marketing are important next steps. And when it comes to social media marketing, there’s a wealth of ideas to discuss, but Facebook keeps edging to the top of the list of topics that matter.

According to Amy Porterfield of Social Media Examiner, there are four proven steps to Facebook success.

In another article on Social Media Examiner, Michael Stelzner argues that Facebook has grown to over 500 million active users for a reason. “They make it really easy for people to connect at a human level.”

Connecting at a human level brings us full circle. That’s what we always hoped to do with traditional advertising, and in the best cases, achieved it.

Today, the mission remains the same—connect with a brand’s best prospects and current customers and deliver them the information or entertainment they most desire. It’s the same mission, but the prospects and customers are now social, they’re mobile and they want whatever it is they want NOW, not in five minutes.

In order to meet the increased demands of empowered customers, everyone who “touches the brand” needs to be inspired to adopt a customer service mindfulness. Here is one reason why: when you create a Facebook page for your brand and many of the “fans” are employees, contractors, business partners, friends and family, you can see how word gets around. Literally.

Again, I marvel at the magnitude of the changes underway in marketing communications. A successful communications plan today often has major operational implications. Welcome to the social.

Jason Fry of Reinventing The Newsroom wonders what content atomization means to media brands. On Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Fry argues that media brands are increasingly meaningless today because we, as readers, don’t rely on them for news; rather, we rely on our network for leads to news and search engines to find said news.

Too often, home pages are committee-built disasters anyway — a cacophony of news, features and corporate messaging from every internal constituency too big to be ignored. Readers, relentlessly trained to hunt for signal, rightly dismiss them as noise. When he was consulting for the Guardian, TBD.com’s Jim Brady shut down the Guardian America front page, explaining to PaidContent’s David Kaplan that “you’re better off putting your stories on Twitter and posting them on Digg and Facebook and pitching them to blogs that can move a lot of traffic, than posting them on a section front that’s getting no traffic anyway. One of the things I pushed for was that you have to get away from the idea of getting people to simply come to your home page. You have to get your home page to the people.”

What can non-media brands learn here? Plenty. For one, any brand operating online needs to create content worth talking about and sharing, and it must be easy to find via search. This may sound simple, but it’s not. Media companies are content pros, and they’re struggling to adopt an entire new set of rules for the digital space. It’s like they were playing polo for 100 years and now all of a sudden, they’re made to play water polo.

Fry mentions consumers relentlessly hunt for signal while ignoring the fluff. That’s also the way people shop online, whether they’re shopping for information, or shopping for a product in an online store. Again, there’s a lot to learn here for brands of all shapes and sizes. Traditional advertising is heavy on the fluff, but that doesn’t play online, not when someone is hunting for a good price on a new canoe or that special case of wine.

The point about needing to get your homepage to the people is also well made. To me it means more than adding one’s URL to every point of contact, it means making one’s homepage worth visiting. As mentioned, that takes content that’s worth sharing and easy to find. It also means the brand’s website and social channels must be a special destination of some sort. Brand loyalists need to be rewarded for their visits and time spent. This can be accomplished through web-only promotions, by creating special clubs for online fans and/or by incorporating social gaming mechanics into a site.

Lee Odden of Top Rank says knowing SEO and Pay Per Click basics are not enough to retain a competitive advantage in the online marketing world.

I agree, which is why I turn to an expert like my friend and colleague Shawn Hartley when rolling out search campaigns for clients. At the same time, I do what I can to stay on top of the fundamentals of the business, so I can help advise clients on their best moves.

Odden recommends looking beyond Google; tapping the power of local, mobile, and social networks; and he thinks it’s a good idea to leverage paid search and native SEO to boost overall performance.

According to Vanessa Fox, creator of Google’s Webmaster Central and author of Marketing in the Age of Google, there have been several studies that show click-through rates, conversion rates and revenue are all higher when both organic and paid listings appear for a search. While many small business marketers assume that they should scale back investment in paid search once their SEO efforts achieve a top organic placement, companies that leverage both can realize significant benefits.

We spend a lot of time and energy building digital destinations. But, online marketing is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Success online requires many things—a great content strategy, consistent execution, a will to listen, plus the desire to serve customer’s needs and provide utility and/or entertainment. I think success also requires some push marketing like a search campaign to go with all the pull (i.e. creation of content that people search for).

Eric Weaver of DDB Canada in Vancouver gave the following presentation, “You Don’t Need A Social Media Strategy,” at 140 Characters Conference last week in Washington, DC.

Slide 18 is the key slide in this deck. “Rather than a ’social media’ strategy, we need an Engagement Strategy. An Influence Strategy. An Activation Strategy. Focused around our clients’ end business goals, not media specialties!”

Or to quote slide 16, “Social should be woven into everything.”

Scott Belsky of Behance and The 99% Percent mentioned the need for transparency on Twitter yesterday.

That’s a funny but poignant way of putting it, because the very reason that organizations oppose the call for transparency is in order to control the message.

“If everyone doesn’t know the story, they’ll make up their own.” Damn, that about sums it up.

Yet, I often bump into situations where agency principals want to keep a lid on things. All sorts of things–everything from head counts to how many clients they have and what work they’re actually doing for those clients. The head count disguise is particularly sophomoric. A shop has the number of people it has on board, period. It’s not a fact that can be massaged. But “the oily massage” is standard operating procedure at most agencies.

New business wins are another area where agency principals clam up. Sure, some shout their wins to the high heavens, but others won’t tell a soul. Partly, it’s a real concern about saying things their clients don’t want to hear, but more often than not it’s fear of having employees poached by a competitor. Or fear of appearing too successful. A firm that’s overly successful has to pay people more money, and worse, may face client requests for fee restructuring.

So what motivation is there for letting it all hang out? Why conduct one’s business out in the open, where everyone can see? So people know your story, as Belsky said. And frankly, there’s nothing like a true story to captivate an audience.

Because Bonehook is a new company, we have a lot of explaining to do. I could perform “the oily massage.” All good copywriters know how to do it. But I’d rather just come out with it. Right now, Bonehook is a one person company, but that one person (me), knows lots of other people in the business. People to partner with on a multitude of projects.

Over beers, a friend recently characterized Bonehook as a consultancy. I said, yes, like all agencies are brand consultants. But no, because Bonehook actually does the things it recommends to clients. I know some great consultants, and I don’t want to diminish their important contributions, but I prefer to do more than advise. I need to build things and clients are the patrons who need these things built. My most trusted friends in the business are the designers, web developers, directors, editors, photographers, etc. that I work with to do the jobs. This keeps Bonehook’s overhead low and also allows for much greater flexibility, creatively speaking.

Agency heads desperately want to say their shop can do it all. But it’s almost always a lie. No shop can do it all. But every shop can be the central point of contact and most trusted adviser to a client.

Jennifer VanGrove of Mashable, writing on American Express OPEN Forum, says many small- and medium-sized businesses are missing the social media marketing opportunity.

She also provides an example of one brand that’s not missing a SMM thing:

The Express retail chain has their chief marketing officer’s Twitter handle printed on all their bags, which works to reinforce that the company cares about person-to-person connections. Take that idea and apply it to your own business. For that extra touch, make stickers, punch cards or window decals that showcase your small business’s online personality and reinforce that you’re interested in conversations with your customers.

In the example above, I like how it’s not just the brand’s identity on Twitter, but the CMO’s. One of the benefits social media marketing provides is humanization of the brand, and @ExpressLisaG makes it clear that there’s a real person standing behind the company’s tweets. It might be a small detail, but it’s an important one, in my estimation.

We’re ramping up on social media marketing best practices in the health care industry on behalf of a client interested in what SMM can do for their group of companies. During our research, one gentleman’s work has come to our attention. Lee Aase, Manager Syndication and Social Media for Mayo Clinic, appears in several videos on YouTube where he shares insights and information on what Mayo is doing with these new tools.

Aase is right on regarding the need for compelling content and his working example–a syndicated radio show–is definitely the kind of content play we love to see. According to Mayo’s official press release, Medical Edge Weekend, is a weekly one-hour radio program that offers listeners in-depth information and discussions of important medical topics with Mayo Clinic specialists, including the opportunity to interact via social media tools such as Twitter.

Fittingly, Lee Aase is the program’s executive producer. He says participants can ask questions via e-mail or through Twitter, using the #mayoradio hashtag. The show airs on 19 affiliates currently, or one can listen to the live audio stream on the Web every Saturday at 9 a.m. CST.

Mayo is a world class brand and it’s good to see them extend themselves in this way. Lots of brands have the opportunity to educate and communicate via social media, but health care is such a perfect fit for this brand-consumer interplay, since people are actively seeking important information for themselves and their loved ones, and in many cases they need someone to talk to.

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and VaynerMedia is a guy with big hairy audacious goals, a.k.a. BHAGs. He wants to own the New York Jets, for instance.

Naturally, Vaynerchuk likes to compete, and to use his own words, he takes the field with every intent to Crush It.

Interestingly, Jason Fried of 37 Signals, who spoke at Big Omaha this month right after Vaynerchuk, says be aware of your competition, but don’t dwell on it. Both men are correct. To be successful, you need to focus on building a company that delivers value to customers (and never lose that focus). At the same time, very few companies have a truly unique product or service offering and there’s always someone else with their foot in the door.

In the marketing services realm, there are approximately 10,000 agencies in the U.S. alone. So there’s a wealth of competition and it’s not easy to stand out in this large of a crowd, which is one reason that firms develop specialties–it shrinks the size of the pool considerably. For instance, Bonehook is a content provider and identity specialist working with businesses that offer compelling products or services. Therefore, for Bonehook to “Crush It,” we don’t need to be the best creative services provider in the land, we simply need to be the best at what we do (so our clients can consistently “Crush It”).

What’s interesting to me is how like-minded and complimentary firms can cooperate and team up to out-maneuver the competition. What’s really required today is the dual ability to cooperate and compete. No creative services firm has all the answers. Most claim they do, in person and online, but they don’t. What’s the point in pretending otherwise? Lost income is the point, but there won’t be any lost income when a firm tells the truth about their shortcomings and works to fill them by hiring contractors, and in some cases, by building out a new practice or area of expertise.

I saw Jason Fried of 37 Signals speak at Big Omaha last Friday. He had several interesting things to say, many of a contrary nature (and I love people with the ability to think, and work, against the grain).

image courtesy of Silicon Prairie News and Malone & Co

I have not yet read Fried’s new best-selling book, Rework, that he co-wrote with his colleague David Heinemeier Hansson, but I did pour over the free PDF sample 37 Signals makes available. Here are a few gems from that free offering:

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Amen to that. I don’t care what business you’re in, it’s imperative to work smart, which means creating efficient means of doing things.

Here’s Fried’s take on the must-have business plan:

Unless you’re a fortuneteller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.

As you might have guessed from Fried’s take on workaholics, he isn’t a big fan of overachieving either.

Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.

I think it’s all great advice, but this last one really resonates for people in marketing services. Most agencies get paid by the hour, so it’s natural for an agency to want to build something–a website, say–that will take hundred of hours. In some cases, that’s the right call. But in others, it’s overkill.

It’s important to be honest with ourselves and with our clients about what is truly needed to solve a marketing problem, and what’s merely window dressing/ego stroking/invoice padding.