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Last week Backbone hosted a Big Idea Day (BID) in SLC.

We met with 7 top media outlets to discuss trends and opportunities in multimedia.

Here is a quick hit from Outside’s Michael Roberts, the first in a series summarizing what people are talking about.

Last week, Nate, Greg and I attended the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen.
Fortune Brainstorm is an annual conference hosted at the Aspen Institute, with speakers including big names like Katie Aronowitz, Design Director at Facebook, Neil Ashe, CEO of e-Commerce at Wal-Mart, John Donahue, CEO of eBay and Jennifer Dulski, President of Change.org. The conference also included some emerging voices in the tech world such as Ben Elowitz from Wetpaint.com, Alex Ljung from SoundCloud, Steve Stoute from Translation Advertising and Ryan Holmes from Hootsuite.

See Rogues Gallery here

Attending conferences can make your head spin in terms of new learnings as well as reinforce the obvious. It is amazing how central themes such as authenticity, (important, yes, yet not so easy to execute) and mobile continue to dominate the topline discussion.

Here are three highlights we left with:

Greg:
1 – Nothing ground breaking, it is all about MOBILE. Even Walmart, the largest brick and mortar retailer globally, sees mobile as a central and key driver of new customers and additional revenue with existing customers.

2 – The largest potential impact to retail is the very real possibility of Amazon same day delivery. It is currently in beta and working in Seattle. Once the model is perfected, it will be a game changer.

3 – Everything comes back to a quality consumer experience end to end, which includes content to ecomm. Even today there are relatively few brands getting it all right.

Nate:

Authenticity, authenticity, authenticity.

(When Nate was prodded – dude, c’mon you gotta do better than that…)

1 – The distinction between social media and social networks. Social media is the shared content. The network is the infrastructure to share.

2 – The fact that even in a room full of tech icons, representing huge brands and leading media, everyone is still struggling to mine actionable, real-time data from the social web. Many are working on it and making progress (including Adobe which surprised me) but no one seems remotely satisfied with where we are today in terms of analyzing and leveraging social insights.

3 – To paraphrase Jeff Zucker from CNN “we want to be more essential to more consumers more often.”

Penn: the hardest part about going last is not copping out and agreeing with what has already been said.

1 – Art and music are pure forms that shape society and culture. People aspire to adopt cultures that resonate with them personally. The best brands understand this and realize the rate of product acceptance is tied to brand relevance from a cultural adoption and community perspective.

2 – From a marketing standpoint collaboration and the need or lack thereof is directly related to the size of the opportunity.

3 – To paraphrase Steve Stoute, ‘Samsung did not care about Jay-Z holding their phone they cared about his content flowing through their phone.”
See you out there.

It’s no secret that mobile is shaking things up for consumer brands. The proliferation of tablets and smartphones is fundamentally changing the way that consumers behave and search for information. The implications for brands are enormous.

We spent some time digging into the mobile world and identified a few trends that brands, marketers, advertisers, PR pros, and even web designers should be aware of. Check it out:

Three important take-aways:

• Mobile has incredible scale: Nearly 50% of the U.S. population expected to be mobile internet users by 2015
• Speed and convenience are the main drivers of mobile activity. Is your mobile presence optimized to be fast and easily accessible from a phone? Is the user experience seamless and consistent across a desktop, tablet and phone?
• Mobile search is a key part of buyers’ decision making and buying process

Since people rarely ask we figured we’d just tell. After all we are in the business of story telling.
15 years ago, on the verge of starting a company with little more than an idea and some energy, Backbone needed a logo.

Being Colorado based and being that the continental divide is right out our backdoor we started playing with the idea of the using a stylized version of the continental divide – the backbone of the Rocky mountains – as our symbol.

Pretty simple really. Take the state of Colorado and smooth out the edges of the divide – and voila’

Whoever said the nike swoosh was a steal at $35…

Strip to your SmartWool: Inspiring, funny, and sometimes, downright scary.

We’re privileged to work with a number of brands that have large and enthusiastic social media fan bases. When it comes to media planning, orchestrating social campaigns, and even daily posting, an engaged fan base makes everything more fun and interesting. Case in point: SmartWool. With almost 100,000 Facebook fans, SmartWool enjoys an incredibly strong social following. SmartWool fans love engaging with the brand by commenting on posts, sharing their experiences, and submitting photos (which can be inspiring, funny, and sometimes, downright scary. Check out “Strip to Your SmartWool” to see what we mean).

So when SmartWool approached us for help launching its new PhD product line, we were thrilled to take on the challenge. It was an incredible opportunity to leverage its enthusiastic fan base and drive foot traffic to promotions occurring at over 130 retailers across the country (see map below).

In fact, the PhD launch campaign that Backbone/SmartWool ran through Facebook was such a success that Facebook wrote a case study on it. Take a closer look at the awesome work:

A big thanks to SmartWool for making great products and giving us this opportunity!

In the early days of New Belgium Brewing, an Airstream trailer affectionally called the Abbey was commissioned to travel the country to educate and ultimately convert people to New Belgium beers. In a time before social media, the whimsical and majestic Abbey was an excellent way to amplify word-of-mouth advertising and create buzz around the brand. Today the Abbey sits as a center piece at the New Belgium Brewery dedicated to teaching the history of the beer factory.

The New Belgium Abbey

As a nod to the history of New Belgium Brewing and the progressive nature of live streaming and amplifying word-of-mouth content, Backbone and New Belgium worked together to create the BeerStream.

The BeerStream is a live video feed that allows New Belgium’s Facebook fans to engage in real time with New Belgium hosts, Michael Bussmann and Matty Smooth. Monthly BeerStreams feature virtual beer tastings, details on new beers, events, culture and more. BeerStream allows New Belgium to bring the personality of the brewers and the brewery to their fans while encouraging them to take part in the tasting by purchasing a beer and following along – essentially driving an online action (virtual beer tasting) into offline activation (purchasing a beer and following along). The New Belgium BeerStream has gained momentum each month with an increase in viewership and engagement.
Stay tuned for our next BeerStream in February – grab a beer and join in the fun.
Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/nbbstream

How should brands leverage social media? We’re faced with this question daily — it is without a doubt one of the most common themes across nearly every industry. This fall, Backbone Media helped Eddie Bauer run a successful Facebook campaign that serves as an excellent example of how to harness the power of social.

Eddie Bauer had two overarching goals: To increase the audience for brand content (via more Facebook fans and email list subscribers) and boost fan engagement with the brand – and by extension, viral and social brand exposure.

To accomplish these goals, Backbone facilitated a partnership between Eddie Bauer and the Sun Valley Resort to create the “Epic Sun Valley Giveaway,” a co-branded Facebook sweepstakes application. Our friends over at Black Dog Digital designed and developed the application, and contest prizes included a head-to-toe ski setup from Eddie Bauer, two 2-day lift tickets and a two night stay in Sun Valley . The app ran from October 15 through November 1, 2012 and was supported with a combination of organic content and several forms of paid Facebook advertising.

The result? In just two weeks, we saw a 47% increase in the Eddie Bauer fan base – over 36,650 new fans. Their email list grew by 6,824 email addresses, and the number of people talking about Eddie Bauer increased to over 46,579 – a 1,236% increase (measured by # of shared stories about the EB page). Larger fan base? More emails? Engagement with the brand? Check, check and check.

Why does this matter? For starters, the Millennial generation typically values social recommendations above all else. In a recent study, 84% said that social opinions influence their purchasing decisions. When fans engage with the brand – liking, sharing and commenting on Eddiue Bauer content – their friends register those implicit social recommendations. With larger fan base, this becomes even more interesting: Eddie Bauer can now connect with the friends of their fans, increasing the total reach of their Facebook page content to over 8.4 million people.

Social media is exciting arena that allows brands to give massive scale to word of mouth marketing. From SmartWool’s Strip to your SmartWool and Fanalog apps, to New Belgium’s Shift campaign, and dozen of others in between, we’re excited about the work we’ve done this year, and can’t wait to see how the medium evolves in 2013.