As we’ve recently discussed in our blog and the LeapCast, interactive contests can be a great way to promote your brand online. However, it’s important that you provide your interactive agency with adequate background data to properly plan and execute the promotion to hit your target goals. Answering these questions at the outset ensures a great result in th end.

What are your specific goals for the promotion? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you simply trying to promote your brand into a deeper penetration of your target market? Are you rebranding your business to an entirely new demographic? Are you pushing a new product line? Is building an email database the primary goal? Your agency needs this information to develop a powerful promotion that will work for you.

We also need to look at the overall existing online brand presence for the company. If your organization doesn’t have an established brand presence already, that makes the branding impact of the promotion that much more important.

A promotion can be a great way to motivate users to interact with your brand, so it’s particularly helpful when you are repositioning your brand in the market. In this regard, the more demographic and interest information you can provide to your agency regarding your target audience, the more focused and effective the promotion can be in reaching that audience.

Having clear goals in place prior to beginning an online contest promotion ensures that those goals are met and exceeded by the campaign. Providing your agency with comprehensive information about goals, target audience and your brand’s current position gets things off on the right foot.

“You can’t buy homegrown tomatoes,” as the old saying goes. You also can’t buy a “brand evangelist.” To understand why, you have to go back to the word “evangelist” and its ecclesiastical roots. The word comes from the Greek words eu and angellus, meaning “messenger with good news.”

At the most basic level, that’s what a brand evangelist is: someone who’s discovered something truly great, and is so excited that he or she is compelled to share it with the world. That’s why you can’t “hire” a brand evangelist. But you can find them, empower them, and reward them.

The first step is being legitimately great news to your customers, clients or patrons. If you don’t offer something truly exceptional, you simply can’t expect to pay people to pretend that you are. That kind of thinking goes directly against the principles of authenticity and genuine word-of-mouth value that brand evangelism embodies.

Paid endorsement is not brand evangelism, no matter how hard some marketers may try to spin it that way. Have businesses used paid endorsement models successfully to promote their brands in the past? Absolutely. In that sense, it’s no different than paying an athlete to star in your commercial, or doing product placement in a movie. Paid endorsement still has a place in 21st century marketing (although I personally believe its power is waning in favor of updated forms of word-of-mouth from ordinary consumers).

That said, paid endorsement is still traditional advertising. The jury is still out on whether or not paying bloggers to endorse your business has demonstrable value. But calling that “brand evangelism” is like spray-painting a horse and buggy and calling it an automobile.

As the buzz begins to slow on Apple’s iPhone, we’re hearing renewed rumors of the long-awaited “gPhone” from Google. While the rumors vary from source to source, there are a few consistencies, one of which is that a mobile device from Google would heavily utilize open source technologies and would most likely run on a version of Linux.

As recently as 2004, business bloggers such as Jeffrey Veen were still skeptical about the viability of open source technologies for enterprise-class business applications. Now, just three years later, it seems nearly everyone, including the Google Guys, is willing to stake their capital on open source.

The August 27, 2007 issue of eWeek, features a cover story relating how another LeapFrog, the toy manufacturer, is increasingly employing open-source solutions in their products.

Last year, when we began looking at developing our own enterprise-class Content Management System, we considered every option, including developing from scratch. We’ve got a terrific crew of talented programmers, so we knew that we had the capability to build a powerful solution from the ground up. However, we finally decided to build our LeapFrog Editing and Publishing Framework (L.E.A.P. Framework, for short) on the open source Drupal framework. The headstart provided by starting from a robust and stable codebase allowed us to both develop the finished CMS rapidly and cost-effectively, and also resulted in a more polished end product.

Our clients have been extremely pleased with the L.E.A.P. Framework, and it’s now been tested in some fairly aggressive use environments, proving capable of scaling well at a global level across multiple languages.

Open source technologies have made an impact on the global business environment. As more and more businesses turn to open source as at least a beginning point for application development, rapid deployment of more new and helpful consumer applications such as the gPhone are sure to follow.

When it comes to interactive marketing, where everyone is constantly scanning for the next big thing, there’s big potential everywhere, but in the words of Jerry Maguire, it’s like popcorn in the pan: some pop, some don’t. So lets take a look at some recent properties that had strong buzz in the last year, but didn’t quite hit those high expectations.

1. Second Life. Yes, you can argue that certain specific brands were able to effectively leverage a presence in Second Life for some significant ROI, but on the whole, the platform hasn’t yet lived up to the hype it received in its early days.

Why not? Because the vast majority of consumers are overtaxed trying to keep up with their first life, much less a digital second one.

2. Myspace. As with Second Life, some industries (the music industry in particular) have had great success with Myspace as a marketing platform. But other industries are rapidly losing interest in favor of its collegiate cousin, Facebook and its inviting open API.

Why not? Because most brands lack the understanding and willingness to commit time and resources to effective social network marketing. And it’s just not a great fit for every company.

3. Ask.com. This time last year, industry insider buzz was pointing to Ask.com as a hot contender to seriously challenge Google in search. A year later, Ask has yet to make a serious dent in Google’s search dominance.

Why not? It may be that Ask waited too long. Improved results and a snazzier algorithm isn’t enough to take on Google, now that their acquisitions take them far beyond search.

4. YouTube. When Google made its historic purchase of the video portal, speculation ran wild that online video was going to completely take over interactive marketing. While video continues to grow, the pace has been decidedly slower than some expected.

Why not? The head geeks at Google are still wrapping their prodigious minds around both the copyright implications of YouTube and developing a workable revenue model. YouTube will probably live up to the buzz eventually, but the industry may have expected too much, too soon.

5. Mobile. Technological innovations that enable marketers to advertise across networks has created tremendous interest in mobile and SMS marketing in the last year, but so far advertisers have been slow to test the waters.

Why not? Considering the wide penetration cell phones and other mobile devices have, this one is probably more a matter of time than anything else. Once an effective infrastructure is in place and some key industry leaders emerge, mobile truly could be the next big thing.

Interactive advertising as we know it is almost obsolete.With the Web, mobile-phone advertising and all other forms of “digital delivery” of advertising, change will come not in the span of 10 or 50 years, but over the next few years.

The greatest present challenge is the growing disconnect between content and where it’s consumed. In the past, video was meant for TV and only played on TV. Audio was meant for radio and guess what, only played on the radio. Now, content in any media is continually remixed and rehashed across a wide spectrum of channels.  Content originally created for television is captured, repurposed as a humor piece and sent out on the Web as a Flash video, where the audio might be picked up by a local radio station looking for something to talk about during the morning show.  You cannot predict where someone will view or hear your message or advertising.

The whole term “interactive advertising” has itself changed, leaving some advertisers dazed and confused. Just as most major advertisers have finally come to accept interactive advertising in terms of the Web and search engines, the term changes to mean all these other channels as well.

Today, interactive advertising comprises any kind of two-way communication. It’s anyplace there’s collaboration, community – whether it be between consumers or between a consumer and your brand. The Web’s dominance in our lives has changed consumer behavior regarding the way they look for information or content. In retail, going to the mall or any other store isn’t about finding something anymore; the majority of people these days already know what they want (and where they’ll find it) by the time they get in the their car. Window shopping takes place online, eliminating physically traveling from store to store searching for what you want.  Even in entertainment, the way we seek content has changed.  We’re no longer limited to sitting and watching a television program in our own living room.  We can watch that same episode while commuting on the subway.

Customers have become Interactive Consumers. They don’t simply take your brand, product, message at face-value anymore.

They have a loud voice, well-versed in researching on the Web. They are increasingly influenced in their decisions by social media and more likely to actively post information themselves.

These consumers expect to have things on their terms – what they want and when they want it. If you can’t provide the information or content that they are looking for, they assume your competitor will.

What does all this mean?

Advertisers’ methods of reaching these people need to adjust to this behavior.  They need to first look at their website and turn it into their most profitable retail channel and their best communication tool. Put that content out there. Update it often. Provide the tools and content using methods that will work across multiple technology platforms so that it is available to the consumer whenever and where ever they want it.

Look to advertise and post on websites where people already go – iTunes, YouTube, Flickr, Google Video. Lead the charge in talking about your brand on the Web.  So few companies are even taking the step of effectively reacting to what’s being said about their brand online (for example, the recent Home Depot and Kohl’s incidents).  The truly great brands proactively initiate dialogue about their company, and engage the interactive consumer as a creative force, driving truly effective content.

There is a significant advantage that advertisers and business will realize when they truly take advantage of these new channels of communication and leverage that raw, unvarnished consumer opinion for their brand. There is access to instant data confirming (or refuting) return on investment enabling incredible, never-before-possible agility in terms of targeting and correcting your message for maximum effectiveness.

We’re in a time of unprecedented opportunity for those willing to embrace the changes that are occurring online.  These changes are exactly like the tides: if you get on top of them early, it’s possible to ride them out for incredible results.  If you don’t, there’s tremendous risk of being overwhelmed by them.

People don’t like what they don’t understand. And a lot of people don’t really understand the internet. I honestly believe a lot of resistance you run into in regards to interactive marketing centers around a lack of comfort on the part of customers in relation to the web. They feel a bit in over their head, but they don’t want to look behind the times or dumb.

So they often do one of two things: find an expert they trust, and blindly accept everything they say as gospel, or reject the entire concept of interactive marketing while throwing around a lot of words like “dot.com bubble.”

I personally think that both those approaches don’t do a lot to further the cause of interactive marketing for either clients or marketers.

Is the internet complex? Yes. Is it unfathomable by normal, non-geeky mortals? No.

A little clear communication and dejargoning would probably do both camps a world of good, if well-applied. I truly believe a knowledgeable, informed client is the best kind of client on earth. Their expectations are based in reality, not fear or blind faith or wishful thinking. Their understanding of the process makes it possible for their interactive marketer to glean the brand knowledge that only they have, and apply it in the online realm that is their area of expertise.

Which would you pick: a client who thinks their new site or online promotion might be awesome, or a client who knows why their new site or online promotion is awesome?