This phrase widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer’s Ink, December 1921.

And while I am sure that ‘time’ was at a premium in 1921, its ‘attention’ that’s the new gold standard in today’s four screen world. And as a result, brand owners are turning to techniques that allow them to tell their story at a glance. Infographics , for example, help marketers make an immediate impact on their target audience using a much more progressive style of storytelling than traditional media can deliver.

Infographics are the graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge…manifested in a clear, simple, effective…and often times very beautiful…way to present complex information quickly. And with our attention spans being dwindled down to the tweet, having customers spend few minutes longer…and more engaged with your brand…than an ad or a white paper, it sounds like Mr. Barnard knew what he was talking about.

Predicting the future is tough, especially on the web. After all, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest, the game keeps changing. Will infographics replace press releases as the dominant form of communicating brand vision? Will trade show floors be consumed by interactive experiences that bridge the online and offline experience? In this presentation, I highlight 9 marketing trends for 2012 that are as exciting as they are important. Add any I missed in the comments.

Arnold Schwartzenegger, Terry Sanford, John Ensign, what’s with all these guys? Don’t they know that in politics, you can’t get away with anything? But a significant question to ask is, “Does the Public Care?” I think we are going to find out, given the histories of many of the Republican candidates for president. Check out my appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan discussing the implications of the recent scandals:.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0T_XkWV9Q

The Google +1 strategy will make the search optimization maze even more complicated. The +1 will be integrated into everything today’s progressive marketer needs to drive brand recall and market leadership through integrated digital marketing and communications programs.

You may be aware of the Open Graph Protocol introduced by Facebook. With the Open Graph Protocol, all the content in the web, websites and the web pages are turned into the graph objects (if the concerned websites have decided to embrace Open Graph Protocol). What that means is that every time you go to a website or a web page and press the like button, you associate your profile with the graph object. The challenge with this approach for marketers is that it is creating a walled garden, which was one of AOL’s biggest downfalls.

Google’s open and transparent brand culture combined with the introduction of the +1 button will drive the kind of laser targeting marketers have been looking for with the Google platform beyond just targeting keywords.  Gmail combined with +1 creates a social graph that is a tidal wave of dream data for marketers.

With +1 the search optimization game will drastically change because a site, blog, video, landing page, etc. will have search ranking impacted by collected +1s. Integrating the +1 everywhere in a brand’s marketing, and developing campaigns to drive your targeted audiences to “just +1 it” will be critical for driving this preferred brand position.

Open your eyes marketers. It’s time for a website audit to see where your +1s should go to be fully integrated throughout your digital media strategy. Bluetext can help you make these critical integrated marketing and communications decisions. Give us a shout if you need any assistance.

Those of us still paying attention saw that the court overseeing the long-running legal battle between Google and authors and publishers ruled against the proposed agreement last week (“Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books,” New York Times). Good luck figuring out what it means, and more importantly, why anyone should care. But it is important, if for no other reason than it is the result of a massive collision between an industry– book publishing–and the realities of the Internet and digital access to information. If you think you’ve seen this movie before, it does look like the fights over Napster and Internet file sharing that has decimated the music industry. Only in this case, the major players are attempting to find a legal solution.

I’ve been following this since the American Association of Publishers, together with the Author’s Guild, sued Google in 2005 to stop it from copying every book known to man–allegedly in violation of copyright protections. Google’s ambitious project was greeted enthusiastically by researchers, journalists, historians, people who read– just about everybody except those whose intellectual property might be given away for free over the Internet (remember those old companies in the recording industry, and what happened to them after the Internet got popular?) [Full Disclosure– Both the AAP and Google have been clients of mine over the years.]

But it is interesting, if perhaps not quite so important for most of us, to understand at least a little of what this is all about. For Google, it was co-founder Larry Page’s effort to digitize books and make them widely available, at least to search snippets, for students, researchers, historians, and anyone else wanting to  experience the bulk of human knowledge leveraging the Internet. Sounds good enough, and that’s the easy part.

What gets complicated is sorting out the three broad categories of authors.  Actually, two are easy, and one is difficult. The first is the volume of works through history where their copyright protections no longer apply– think Shakespeare, the Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc. Google (and anyone else) is entitled to go for those. The second is the volume of works under copyright protection where the author and publisher are known and active. Think of all the popular authors you know and love, Anne Tyler, Bill Bryson, Sarah Palin, fiction, non-fiction, and everything in-between. This is, of course, a little more complicated, but those authors (and their publishers) can actively protect their intellectual property, and do so by cutting their own deals for licensing rights, directly with Google or via organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center [another former client]. Or they can choose not to license their works for internet distribution at all.

That leaves the third category, and that’s what the fight now is really all about. This group includes all of the works where copyright still applies, but where the holder of that copyright– the author or publisher, her relatives, spouse or estate– cannot be found. In this category are (mostly) out-of-print books and other publications, known as “orphan” works, and these are what the judge decided that the settlement was not adequately protecting. The terms of the settlement– worked out between Google, the publishers, and the authors–according to the judge, “would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.” He called that “unfair.”

What the settlement would essentially do for orphan works is set up an “opt out” process, where copyright owners could come forward and decide not to participate in the settlement (keeping their works out of Google’s search engines). What he believed is appropriate is an “opt-in” process, where works of copyright owners could be included if the copyright owners come forward and gave permission. The problem with that, of course, is that by definition these people can’t be easily found. That’s the dilemma.

So why do we care? Most of us probably don’t. We are not hot in pursuit of out-of-print obscure books that have been long-forgotten. Unless you are a researcher, historian, journalist, academic, blogger, hobbyist, or anyone who likes to know what there is to know about a subject. Then being able to include these works in your scholarly pursuits can open up long-lost information, and maybe even a gold-mine of data. The courts will ultimately decide what’s fair, but it is a good example of how the Internet is challenging all of our assumptions– for better for for worse.

How do you define success with your federal government PR program? Are you still trying to count clips? Do you need to secure a set number of interviews to make your boss happy? Unless you have been living under a rock you know that the world of public relations has changed, the number of publications that will cover you has shrunk significantly, and unless you have a real game changing technology it is very difficult to get ink. But don’t despair…content is still king, and if you have a good strategy to deliver it via multiple channels to reach your customers wherever they may be, you can have a great PR program.

Last month Mark Amtower wrote a great column in Washington Technology (http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/02/24/amtower-column-march.aspx) that very much aligns with what we at Bluetext have been telling clients. That is why our tagline is “Any Challenge…Every Channel” and why we have built our company with experts that understand the power of different mediums for different messages. So the next time your technology lead clamors that they should be more coverage of your company in GCN or The Washington Post, grab your Flipcam and ask them to start talking – if the story is good there are ample avenues to deliver it.

A new energy policy bill was an early priority of President Obama, but it quickly fell by the wayside after the then-Democratic controlled House of Representatives passed a bill with cap-and-trade provisions that coal industry states despise. With free-market Republicans now in control of the House and the White House having put energy on the back burner, political pundits give the odds of passing energy legislation a very low probability. As a result, companies with alternative energy as their focus are sitting on the sidelines in Washington. An energy lobbyist friend this week lamented that he was struggling to convince his clients that this is actually a time of great opportunity here in D.C.

That’s a big mistake, in my opinion, for several reasons. First and foremost, Washington is driven by events more than political agendas. When lawmakers return to their districts during the Congressional recesses, they are going to hear loud and clear about the high prices at the pump that are inching towards $5 dollar-a-gallon gas, and the impact that is having on middle-class Americans, especially in the mid-west and other regions where distances are large and public transportation non-existent. Forget that the U.S. government and policy makers have little to do with oil supplies and gas prices in the short term. Taxpayers and voters are going to want action, and members of Congress may easily decide that an energy bill might be a good thing for their reelection prospects going into 2012. In that sense, it may be the high price of gas that actually forces Congress and the Administration to take a new look at a comprehensive energy bill.

Second, a time of no-action in Washington is exactly the right time to begin laying the groundwork for when legislation is back on track. This is the best time to lay the foundation for a communications campaign to supplement retail lobbying by companies and trade associations with a good story to tell on energy alternatives. Once the panic sets in and legislation starts moving quickly, it is often too late to get a seat at the table. Building the key relationships beforehand is much easier and more effective than hoping to cut through the clutter in the midst of the political battles.

There are a number of strategies that can be easily implemented without a large commitment of resources that can begin to position an organization as one worthy of government-backed incentives, so that when the issue does heat up again, they won’t be starting from scratch. These can include:

• A dedicated web portal that serves as a repository of information on the issue and a link to resources that members of Congress, their staff, and other policy makers can readily find and use;
• Video content of executives and industry experts describing and explaining the challenges and solutions they can offer;
• Traditional media outreach including op-eds discussing energy alternatives;
• Social media to identity and build an audience with policy makers and engage in a conversation about the solutions; and
• Thought leadership events that bring specialists together in front of opinion leaders and policy makers.

The most effective communications campaign is not one that looks like marketing, but rather one that truly does bring thought leadership and new ideas to the debate. This is the best time to take those steps, build those relationships, and engage members of Congress, their staff, and the Washington energy ecosystem before the train leaves the station.