For today’s Signal topic, I’d like to talk about marketing as a portal to understanding your business.

Now, before you roll your eyes and click away, stick with me for a minute. If you’re reading this post, chances are you are in business. And chances are also pretty good that business is media or marketing, because that’s the focus of Signal, after all.

So, what business are you in? Or, more to the point I’d like to make: What is your business?

You’d might be surprised at the number of folks I’ve met with in the past year who pause when I ask that question. Because, in the main, that number is exceedingly low.

Allow me to explain. While it might seem, from a cursory review of my career, that I’m fascinated by media and marketing, what really gets me up in the morning (or more accurately, wakes me up in the middle of the night) is business. I love the puzzle that is connecting a great idea with a great market (that’s the entrepreneur in me), and I love learning how Really Big Companies work. In fact, over the past decade or so, I’ve gone pretty deep in both: Starting several small businesses based on Big Ideas, and spending a ton of time with very engaged folks deep in brands like HP, American Express, Walmart, P&G,  Intel, McDonald’s, and countless others.

And without an exception, I’ve found that asking interesting questions of senior folks responsible for marketing at large companies has led to exceedingly smart insights on how those businesses work. It’s sort of like Clift Notes for Big Biz – if you want to understand the company behind major brands, start with the folks who run marketing.

An example. Earlier this week I sat down with an SVP responsible for marketing at a major retailer. Because I don’t have his (or her) permission, I’ll keep my source – and the company – anonymous. But know this – this company has a top 25 e-commerce site, a national brand, a major catalog business, and several different divisions, all of which are high-end and are sub-brands in and of themselves.

As we dug into our conversation, we quickly dropped any pretense of our dialog being about marketing, at least in any traditional sense, and quickly got to questions that had to do with the business – what products sold when, where, and why; what kinds of data were gathered to support business decisions; which customers were most profitable, most elusive, and most difficult to convert; what role the founder’s DNA played in what had become a major enterprise’s business decisions (and why it was crucial to respect that); how the competition was playing its cards and what response to take to those moves; what institutional blocks were impeding innovation in the business; and on, and on, and on.

I could spend hours and hours, and days and days, in conversations like this one. In fact, I’m honored to say that for the most part, doing just that is pretty much my job these days.

And I came to this job by asking what I hope are smart questions, given my journalistic background, of smart people who run marketing in large companies. And given my entrepreneurial background, and my native interest in digital media, often I also find that our conversations help inform how I might guide my own (modest by comparison but soon to be very large, I am certain) enterprise.

In short, I’ve found that if you want a shortcut to understanding any business, start by having a conversation with its marketers. The rest will follow.

Onward to the linkages:

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Does Your Company Have a Compelling Voice? (Hint: Be Bold, Not Boring) (OpenForum) Learning how to have a voice in the Conversation Economy ain’t easy.

New Data on the Nestle’s Social Media Crisis: Just How Scary is It? (TheNextWeb) Not as big a deal as many thought, it seems.

Social Media Is A Meal Not A List of Ingredients (NewCommBiz) I really like this metaphor. Works well.

The Corporate Social Networking Manifesto (Loic Le Meur) Sensible advice from a pioneer in the space.

Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close (WSJ) Walt likes him some iPad. We all know I have my reservations, but I’m not one to ignore it when Walt Likes Something.

Are You Walking in Your Clients’ Shoes? (AdAge) Germane to my thoughts above.

Yahoo Shutters Contextual Ad Publisher Network

Exclusive: Google Goes to Jail for April Fools? (Fast Company) As a casual student of Google’s April Fools’ day shenanigans, this one leaves me a bit cold.

Google Launches Lab For New Advertising Products (SEL) Good idea. Let’s see if it yields cool stuff …

David Cameron’s Battle To Connect (Wired UK) I’ve met this guy, years ago, and it’s interesting to see how the UK’s conservatives have rallied to social media.

Atwood in the Twittersphere (NY Review of Books) A noted author makes the case for tweeting. “The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden….Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.”

Google, Microsoft, ACLU & Others Push For “Digital Due Process” – No Personal Data Without A Warrant (SEL) “The principles aim to upgrade and enhance privacy protection for individuals using the internet, sending email and storing data in the cloud. Basically these principles seek to apply the probable cause standard and require a judge-issued warrant before law enforcement officials can gain access to private information or data online. This would include search query logs.” I can’t stress enough how important this is. As we live in the cloud, it’s critical the protection we assume we have goes with us. So far, it’s not very clear. It must become so. Good on the companies involved for focusing on this.

Confession #44: My Head is in the Cloud (Tweetage Wasteland) I’m enjoying Dave Pell’s blog, he makes a good point here, one that marketers would be wise to understand and, perhaps, help consumers address. Relates to, and  humanizes, the story above.

Where 2.0: The Big Conversations (O’Reilly Radar) Where 2.0 is a conference focused on location based services. It’s been around for several years. A scan of its major program points is a good indicator of what’s up in this critical marketing space.

What Social Media Ad Types Work Best? (Mashable) I’m not sure this study is defensible, as it was done on two very disparate sites (Allrecipes and Facebook) and who knows how high quality or engaging the actual content was, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The iTunes App Store Comes to Facebook (Mashable) I’m not really sure why I find this fascinating. As far as I can tell, Apple has blessed this, and given the war its fighting with Google, anything that strengthens Google’s enemy Facebook must be blesssed, for now. I think. Now, the next story is more directly Apple’s doing:

Flash Player To Come Bundled With Google Chrome, New Browser Plugin API Coming (TC) Well, there you have it, another move in the chess battle. For background, read this.

How Clorox uses gaming mechanics in social media — live from BlogWell (SMBC) I believe social gaming techniques will be important to ongoing marketing programs. Interesting that Clorox picked up on this early. This is a 30 or so minute presentation, FYI. You can get the gist from the ppt here, though.

How the Social Media Really Gets Made at Agencies (AdAge) …”the digital ideas get added on to the deck — usually somewhere around Slide 29.”

How Do You Keep Mass Influencers Engaged? An Example from TripAdvisor (Forrester) “TripAdvisor cannot succeed in being a content and opinion destination if reviewers only post a review or two and then never return. Their simple email program suggests one way that feedback can be used to keep influencers influencing.”

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter on the Signal home page (upper right box). You’ll get an exclusive, email only weekly roundup of Signals.

If you enjoy reading FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, AOL, as well as top execs from American Express, Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Todd Pruzan (Editor, Federated Media) is a longtime editor and writer for print and online publications including DailyFinance.com, Condé Nast Portfolio, Details, Print, Blender, Inside.com, McSweeney’s, Chicago, and Advertising Age, where he’s covered business news and personal finance, advertising, design, media, and the culture industry. He’s the author of The Clumsiest People in Europe (Bloomsbury 2005). He lived in Brooklyn for nearly a decade and now lives in the somewhat Brooklynish suburb of Maplewood, New Jersey. Welcome, Todd!

Tuesday’s here, and I have more to say in each of the stories below than at the top, so without further delay:

After a Sour Start in Social Media, Skittles Gets Sweet Results (ClickZ). Look, I liked the original Skittles play, just thought it didn’t pay off its original promise. But as with many social media “experiments”  the lesson is clear. If things don’t work out, act like a human – a human who wants to win. Keep trying, over and over, and don’t give up. Worked for Skittles – in Facebook anyway. I wonder, however, how many of the Facebook fans came through paid advertising on Facebook?

Toward a New Understanding of Publishing (Part 1) (FM Blog) What, me point you all to something I wrote yesterday? Imagine that. This piece starts to unpack the “brands must be publishers” mantra I’ve been on about for some time. I do find this interesting work and I plan on writing part 2 this week.

Brand Butlers (TrendWatching) A long-ish overview of a thesis that boils down to this: Brands must add service to their products. This fits in very nicely to the idea that all brands are publishers now (there’s me pointing to me again).

Is Google Buzz Dead Already? (SEL) A catchy headline, to be sure, and it caught me, because 1. anything Google does will get a lot of attention and 2. since Buzz’s very buzzworthy launch (I was a bit down on it for various reasons), almost no one I’ve spoken to in the industry has brought it up to me as important. Is this another Knol? I don’t think Google will go away that easily, not on this one. Then again, it may decide it’s time to buy someone instead, as it did with YouTube after Google Video failed to get traction. Trouble is, there’s not much to buy. Unless it makes an offer Twitter simply can’t afford to ignore. My price on that one is pegged at about the same as YouTube – $1.5 billion or more. Yow.

How to Survive Geolocation’s Looming Apocalypse (AdAge) Wow, there’s a headline! But a good overview and some sound advice on the Next Big Thing.

Social Influencers Get Talking (eMarketer) “The report described influencers’ desire to participate in word-of-mouth as “inherent,” and noted that influencers often restricted themselves to talking about only those product categories that were personally important to them.”

After Google’s Move, a Shift in Search Terms (NYT) Interesting to see how search usage shifted in China due to Google’s own changes.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter on the Signal home page (upper right box). You’ll get an exclusive, email only weekly roundup of Signals.

If you enjoy reading FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, AOL, as well as top execs from American Express, Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

A few weeks ago we announced the initial lineup of speakers for our annual CM Summit this June 7-8 in NYC. It’s an impressive group, including the CEOs or Founders of industry defining startups like Boxee, Foursquare, The Huffington Post, and AdMob, the CEOs of major agencies like GroupM, Razorfish, and Moxie, and senior executives from AT&T, Adobe, Google, Twitter, the New York Times, and Paramount.

Hard to top, but I think we’ve managed to do it. Look who has joined this amazing lineup:

John Hayes, CMO, American Express. Hayes is an innovative thinker responsible for helping Amex navigate its brand through what has been one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the financial services industry. He’ll be kicking us off with a conversation on Day 1.

Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President, Yahoo! Americas. Hilary is Carol Bartz’s right hand, and like her boss she does not pull punches. I’m very much looking forward to hearing what she has to say.

Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley. Anyone who has seen Mary present knows your head hurts afterwards – in a good way.

Curt Hecht, President, Vivaki. Curt is leading Publicis’ charge around DSPs, technology partnerships and platforms across all media. We’ll be talking agency models and platforms in a session on Day 2.

Deanna Brown, President and COO, Federated Media Publishing. Deanna is a super star who we brought on to run the company day to day. She’s also an expert in the women’s market, and will be leading a discussion of notables on the topic on Day 2.

Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief, Mashable. If you know social media, you know Mashable. We’re thrilled Adam is joining us to moderate a conversation on metrics and ROI in a social media world.

Tim Armstrong, CEO, AOL. Tim is responsible for all aspects of reinvigorating AOL’s brand as a standalone public company. Expect a lively 1-1 onstage conversation when he joins us on Day 1.

Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos. Now a part of Amazon, Tony built Zappos into the signal example of a customer driven brand.

Joanne Bradford, Chief Revenue Officer, Demand Media. Joanne made headlines early this month when she left her position leading sales for Yahoo to take the helm at Demand. Find out why when she joins us in June!

Mike Murphy, VP Global Sales, Facebook. Mike runs all sales for Facebook – we’ll ask how he keeps his hair from igniting.

Seth Goldstein, Entrepreneur, Stickybits. When I saw Stickbits, I just had to ask Seth to show it to you all. Another example of the kind of innovation you’ll only see at the CM Summit.

As you can imagine, our lineup is nearly full, though I’ll have one more post in a month or so with the full agenda and additional speakers.

Tickets are selling quickly for the event, so if you’re planning on coming, get yours now, and we’ll see you at the Summit!

PS – If you’re interested, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Facebook and join our Linked In Group. And be sure to check out FM Signal, where we track marketing and media in a digital context every day. We look forward to shaping this conference together.

Due to the length of my other Monday post on Publishing, I’m posting my linkage as a separate piece.

Apple Poised To Unveil ‘iAd,’ New Mobile Ad Platform Is Jobs’ ‘Next Big Thing’ (MediaPost) Well we knew this was coming. But there’s no detail here.

Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically (RWW) Facebook is getting ready for the inevitable explosion of new uses of its firehose data. Pay attention to this, it’s in your interest – business and personal – to know what’s going on here.  Also read Facebook Proposes Broad Updates To Governing Docs — Our Analysis (Inside Facebook).

For the media biz, iPad 2010 = CDROM 1994 (Scott Rosenberg) YES! “The Web triumphed over CD-ROM for a slew of reasons, not least its openness. But the central lesson of this most central media transition of our era, one whose implications we’re still digesting, is this: People like to interact with one another more than they like to engage with static information.”

Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US? (AVC) Noting this because it supports my very first prediction for 2010: “2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web.”

Not Creating Content. Just Protecting It. (NYT) The Times comes to the conclusion we’ve all reached: “Running a media company requires a set of values that selling a can of soda or a pair of sneakers doesn’t. So Google, which held itself to a higher standard last week, can expect to get hammered any time it falls short in the future. Google may or may not be a media company, but people will expect it to act like one.”

SmashBurger Builds Social Media Into the Burger (Open Forum) Case studies are always fun.

In the age of digital media, we believe every brand must become a publisher. Here’s why.

(Part 1 of a series, Part 2 is here)

Ask most media professionals to define “publishing” and they’ll most likely resort to something akin to the standard dictionary entry: “The business of issuing printed matter.”

By that definition, publishing ain’t much of a growth business.

But here at FM, we’d like to recapture what we believe is the essence of the term. To us, publishing means something far more than putting words and images to paper. Back when paper and printing presses revolutionized how humans communicated, we ended up conflating two very important concepts. One was the message – what was being said, and in what context. The second was the medium – the transport for that message. The two became seen as the same thing in printed matter, and the traditional definition of publishing was born.

It’s not an accident that we identified the message (what is being said) with the medium (how that message gets into our minds). After all, before print, all we poor humans had as a medium was our voices. Back then, with apologies to McLuhan, the medium truly was the message.

Think of publishing as speaking – a conversation – it’s clear that publishing means far more than printing. Publishing means connecting a community through the art and science of communication. And nowhere is publishing more vibrant – and conversational – than through the medium we’ve come to call the Internet.

The Early Web

A brief (and admittedly simplified) history of publishing on the Web helps put that vibrance into context, and provides context for why we at FM believe that in the age of digital media, every brand must become a publisher.

Cast your mind back to the early web – the mid 1990s, when Yahoo was literally a directory of links, and the hottest thing on the web was a site called “Cool Site of the Day.” Back in those heady days, the web was all about putting up a site declaring your presence – thousands of new “brochures” sprang up each week, from corporate websites to personal journals to “new media” sites which translated traditional print models like magazines to the Web format.

The thing that made this new “brochureweb” so cool was the link – the ability to add context and connection between each individual “piece of printed matter” on the web. Add to linking the ability to comment upon that link – what’s known in academic publishing as “annotation” – and a revolution in publishing was born.

Note the big names in this early web – the companies that became extremely valuable – Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite. What did they all have in common? You guessed it: They all took the “noise” of the early brochureweb and filtered it for signals. By commenting on and curating all those new web pages, then declaring which were worth our time, they all became important (and highly valuable) brands on the web. They were the web’s first meta-publishers.

Search+Social

But publishing on the web didn’t evolve to a new level until sophisticated search engine burst onto the scene in the late 1990s, changing forever our understanding of how media works.

Search – in particular Google, driven as it was by the magical signal of link influence – made nearly every static website available, findable, and ranked. Suddely it wasn’t enough to simply find great links and curate them, you had to do more. Because search made every piece of content findable, content itself was loosed from the chains of portal-based distribution – it mattered less where content was (the home page of a portal), and more what that content was and who thought it was worth paying attention to (ie who linked to you, who was “talking about you”).

We’re now in the midst of a second and related sea change in how publishing works: social media. We are today with social media where we where with search nearly ten years ago – at the starting blocks.

And to bring this short history to the point: social media and search directly impact Brands. In Part 2, we’ll dive into how, and why in the age of conversational media, Brands must become Publishers.

(As with most of my writing, I consider this to be a draft, with you, the reader and community, as the editor. So please use comments or email to tell me your thoughts!)

It’s a roundup Friday at Signal, as I am working on a longer piece on publishing practices for marketers in general. Hope to have something posted on that today. Meanwhile, an interesting 24 hours in the world of digital media and marketing.

February 2010 Mobile Metrics Report (adMob) All of us can learn from how AdMob has used its published statistics to establish itself as a leader in the mobile marketplace. Graphic from the study at left. Speaking of mobile…

Mobile App Forecast Up, Up, Up (eMarketer) Well, there’s news. But if you’re like me, you like stats.

Title Tweets – Follow your Team to the Finals (FM blog) Am I promoting executions that FM does in Signal? Damn right I am. This is one cool program.

Ground-Breaking Findings About the Branding Impact of Online Advertising (Comscore) Look, I don’t mind a headline that draws you in, but…come one. We all want this too much to overpromise! It’s a fine study, but limited to video and the UK market, for the most part.

Bing Adds Foursquare Data to Maps (Mashable) Good to see, now let’s see if Foursquare can scale to this kind of expectation.

China Hands Down New Rules on Media Coverage of Google (Mashable) Anyone else get the sense that China is going to lose this one?

Check Out The Amazing Video Of Location-Based Services Taking Over The World (SAI) Again with the overpromising headlines, but this is worth a view. Social data visualization is just cool.

Facebook Fan Pages Evolve Into CRM Channel for Big Brands (ClickZ) Just waiting for Facebook to provide direct APIs for brands to manage this. (There’s always the Salesforce deal...)

Social Media Consumers More Likely to Buy, Recommend (MarketingProfs) “Two-thirds (67%) of consumers who follow brands on Twitter are more likely to buy those brands after becoming a follower, and 51% of Facebook fans are more likely to buy after becoming a fan, according to a study from Chadwick Martin Bailey.”

Marketing Needs Real Innovation From Agencies (AdAge) Former Denny’s CMO has some good advice for all marketers.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter on the Signal home page (upper right box). You’ll get an exclusive, email only weekly roundup of Signals.

If you enjoy reading FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, AOL, as well as top execs from American Express, Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Happy Thursday! Today I think I’ll open Signal with a response to this post: Why Social Media May Not Be for You… (Yet), from Joshua-Michéle Ross of Opposable Planets.  I like the thinking in this post, but disagree with the final thought. Musing on the recent Nestle Facebook “debacle” (which I do not believe is, or needs to be proclaimed a debacle), Joshua-Michéle concludes: If Nestle neither wishes to change or defend itself on the merits – then they shouldn’t be operating in social media.

Well, yes and no. Yes, in that the sheer beauty of social media is that it forces questions to the fore, and thus forces companies to respond to those questions. But no, it’s not OK, as a strategy, to “not be operating in social media.” I sense, perhaps, that Joshua-Michéle was making the same point in a roundabout way.

My reasoning? Because all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps. I’ll make it the focus of a Signal soon, I promise. For now, here’s my crazy voice post on the idea three years ago.

Perhaps the most considered coverage I’ve seen of the Nestle story is from longtime media commentator Andrew Leonard, in Salon. In his piece, titled “Nestle’s Brave Facebook Flop,” Leonard notes: “But what I find most confounding about this whole sorry display is that the real error here was for the moderator to act like an actual human being. …. if we are going to use social media to its fullest capacity, it should be to help us make real connections between people — not to attack them when they reveal their own humanity.”

To summarize: I don’t think any major brand can operate in the conversation economy (IE, the one we all live in now) absent a presence in social media. You can’t pretend the conversation doesn’t exist. You just can’t. Your competition will kill you, and so will your customers. So join the conversation, screw up, and then keep going. If you act human, you’ll figure it out in the end, and given all your customers are human, you and your relationships to them will be the better for it.

Meanwhile, the day’s linkage:

Display advertising: towards creativity without limits (Google Blog) The second post in a series on how Google thinks about display. I am reminded of the stuff Microsoft used to roll out in an endless parade: “Imagine if you will, how cool it will be when your computer does (X, Y, and Z) for you!” Remember the Microsoft paper clip? Alright, perhaps that’s a cheap shot, because the post goes on to make a very important point: That you need a technology platform that allows you to scale creativity across the entire social web. For Google, of course, that means across the Google Content Network. Watch this space, because more is coming, and not necessarily from Google. Key to creativity is the participation of those whose creativity got consumers to pay attention in the first place. Those folks are known as publishers….and I’ll have more to say on that in another Signal. (Wow, that’s two new Signal ideas already!)

Advertisers Show Interest in iPad (NYT) I am sorry. This is a story? Guys, the iPad is a shiny new object, but it’s a CLOSED environment. Good luck spending dollars there that actually drive an ecosystem of conversation, or scale in any way that matters (other than to Apple’s bottom line). Maybe once the iPad supports multitasking, cut and paste, and Flash…

Get Ready For Twitter to Start Animating Machines (AdAge) Yes, the Internet of Things is getting very real. See my post yesterday for more.

GoDaddy.com plans to stop registering domain names in China (WashPo) This is exactly what I expected – Google’s move may well give other companies the courage – or air cover in public markets and with boards – to make a decision like this.

Google v. China? No, It’s Bigger Than That (Searchblog) Yeah, that’s my site. And yeah, I care enough about this issue to point you to it!

Meet Buzzzy – The Buzz Search Engine (NextWeb) Google Buzz gets a third party search engine. If you don’t see the irony in that, well, pinch yourself, you’re nearly asleep.

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Earlier in Signal I said I’d choose one new subscriber to the Signal email newsletter from the first 100 who would get a free pass to the CM Summit this June (more than $1500 value). I’ll be picking another winner from the next 100, so if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for it on the Signal home page (upper right box).

If you enjoy reading FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, AOL, as well as top execs from American Express, Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Check out the second-coming of TitleTweets! Announced last year, TitleTweets is your annual go-to site where you can find, follow and engage with NCAA basketball teams and fans in real-time.

We’re down to the sweet 16. Got a stunning upset prediction? Despise Duke? Love them? Make you voice heard right here.

Thank you AT&T for making this possible. Be sure to follow all the action with hashtag #titletweets and check back often for all the real-time goodness.