Overview: Marketers can no longer interrupt users with advertisements and other materials thanks to technology advancements like TIVO. Now, we need to engage users.

Here are some helpful guidelines:

A. You have to be about ONE Thing. Currently, marketers create a list of features and benefits for a new product, which makes people research specs. Need to have 1 thing that you focus on that people can't research. Eg: Apple's one thing: STYLE. In a marketplace where style wasn't important, Apple made style a key factor. Style was a good choice in the 1 thing, because it's personal and emotional. B2B marketers need to capture people's hearts.

B. Once you have that 1 thing – Attract people by controversy, vision, interaction, and/or simple tools
1. Controversy. This starts the dialog. Eg: Bob Garfield at NPR — comcastmustdie.com — got a lot of attention for him and got comcast to take action.
2. Be the visionary in your business. Discuss future services, technologies, etc. Get users to keep coming back to you.
3. Interactions (polls, surveys, rank). Do anything to get your users to "push a button."
4. Have a simple tool. Eg: Hubspot.com — website grader — you vs. competitor. If you don't get a good grade, use hubspot for SEO. Eg: 4-hour work week –lifestyle design quota. If you don't get a good answer, you should buy the book.

C. Create Together
Use wikis as both a marketing and community tool. Have users help with marketing. Also, let users solve problems with the company. Users will get involved if end result will help them.

D. Build Street Cred
Eg: Yvon Chouinard – Patagonia (uses real customers in ads)
Eg: E-books. Give e-books away. Creative Commons is great because users will brand you for you.

E. Think User Experience
Nike Plus — tracks runs and uploads data to iPod and the Nike Community. Brings people back to Nike over and over. Consumers constantly create new data not Nike.

F. Spread Ideas
Word-of-Mouth is still young in marketing process. It's about being relative, creative, and humor. It must also provide info that people didn't have before.

G. Choose Strategic Path
Choose what media fits your value and customer base. If your client doesn't want to advertise on mobile phones, don't make them.

During our debate, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) made a brilliant observation which was totally marketing driven and not at all technical.

Tim Berners-Lee’s response

People are used to seeing WWW on business cards so it’s expected.

Technically, we don’t need the WWW in our Web addresses. However, many Web masters are failing to park their domains properly. Could you be turning away potential visitors?

Does your Web site work when you remove WWW from the address?

Aidan explains how to ensure your site works with and without WWW.

It’s not good practice to use automatic refreshing of menus and other functional areas of a Web site. So, to automatically refresh an entire Web page by assuming visitors have had time to read its content is a little ridiculous to say the least.

I’m a very slow reader. In fact, I sometimes read the same sentence more than once and still not take it in. This usually because I have very short-term retention as my mind wonders in different directions. Forbes’ Web site allows you to control the speed but the slowest still isn’t slow enough for some people. Why not assume the page should be still and allow users to select an option which enables the automatic refresh.

Check this out and see what you think.