A few months ago, the mesh team — in other words, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Mike McDerment and I — announced a new event we’re calling meshmarketing, a one-day series of keynotes, presentations and in-depth workshops about online and digital marketing ideas and tactics. During the summer months, we’ve been lining up some world-class speakers and marketing experts for the event, and we wanted to get as many details about it out there as possible, because the event is coming soon (October 22 at CIRCA) and tickets are relatively limited.

In a nutshell, meshmarketing is focused on insights, tools and tactics that are designed to help you get more out of the growing online marketing and advertising markets. It’s designed to provide you with ideas and perspectives on the key trends but also practical and valuable knowledge that you put into action immediately. You can register here.

Our keynote speaker is Hugh MacLeod, a popular cartoonist, author and marketing thought-leader. We also have two though-provoking panels to kick off the event: the first looks at how competition is heating up between PR, traditional ad agencies and digital shops, with each one trying to take the lead in the competitive online arena. Featured on the panel are Mia Wedgbury, president of Fleischman-Hillard Canada; Katherine Fletcher, a senior partner with iStudio and Jill Nykoliation, president of Juniper Park.

The second panel looks at the merging of marketing and social media, and will tackle the thorny issue of how to blend the two successfully. This panel includes Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image and author of the new book, Six Pixels of Separation; and Ferg Devins, chief public affairs officer for Molson Coors, who leads Molson’s social media activities.

The rest of the day features a series of workshops, filled with hands-on, practical tools and knowledge. A big part of the inspiration for meshmarketing came from feedback we got at mesh, where people said they wanted more focused and practical insights and tools about marketing and the online world, so we’re hoping these workshops fit the bill. They include:

- Building Web Properties that Convert, with Dan Martell
- Advertising Networks 101, with Mladen Raickovic
- Search Engine Marketing/Search Engine Optimization, with Jeff Quip
- Generating Customer-Driven Creative, with Andrew Sutherland and Dino Demopoulos
- The Keys to Mobile Marketing, with Amielle Lake
- Facebook 101 for Marketing, with Elmer Sotto
- Social Media Analytics, with Katie Delahaye Paine
- Inbound Marketing Campaigns, with Dharmesh Shah

As usual, we’re planning to kick off meshmarketing with a pre-event party and, of course, an after-party. More details on those to come as we get closer to the event. But in the meantime, get your tickets for meshmarketing soon — if mesh is any guide, they will be going quickly :-)

When I first heard about the YouTube rap video “I Get On The TTC,” which a couple of Toronto rappers recorded recently about the venerable — and much criticized — Toronto Transit Commission, I was really hoping that the TTC wouldn’t blow it by either ignoring or somehow trying to de-legitimize the video. I thought the fact that TTC commissioner Adam Giambrone is (as far as I can tell) about 19 years old might help them get with the “user-generated content” program, and for whatever reason it looks like that is in fact the case. According to a post at Torontoist, the duo got a call from Toronto officials, and wound up being honoured by Mayor David Miller and Giambrone, who played the video and even danced along, and then gave the two a free January Metropass. And some props are also due to Mayor Miller for the shout-out to “Spadina Bus,” the 1980s hit from The Shuffle Demons.

Guest poster Mark Drapeau has a piece up on Mashable that looks at what — for the social-media sphere at least — has become an age-old question: should companies and brands be on Twitter? He comes to the conclusion they should not, for a whole bunch of what are very good reasons, including that company names “reduce authenticity and transparency,” and that “brand names and logos, as opposed to full names and user images, are not in the spirit of the Twitterverse.” As he puts it:

“Does anyone really want to talk to @DunkinDonuts? Or would they rather talk to Bill Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin Donuts of Canton, MA, or perhaps the local franchise owner on Capitol Hill, or a disgruntled but funny summer employee punching in at 4am? People connect with people, and so I think the latter.”

There’s no question that the post raises some good points. But as someone who has been spending a lot of time in my new role at the Globe and Mail thinking about social media and how (or whether) we should be using it, I’m not sure he is completely right. I agree that one of the appealing things about Twitter is the personal aspect, and the ability to connect with someone, even on a somewhat trivial level. But I don’t think that means companies — or brands — can’t use it, just that they have to approach it in the right way.

Obviously, throwing an account like @DunkinDonuts up there and hoping to attract thousands of followers is pretty dumb, just as creating Facebook accounts for the Burger King mascot was kind of dumb (even if it was trumpeted as a huge success). As a number of people have pointed out, no one really wants to interact with Dunkin Donuts on a personal level, apart from the actual process of buying a donut. But what about an account like @Comcastcares? Hundreds of people have interacted with the person (or people) behind that account and been pretty amazed by the response. That’s a good thing, no?

Or look at @ColonelTribune, an account maintained by Daniel Honigman, who works for Tribune Interactive and also writes for the Old Media New Tricks blog (which had some smart thoughts from Robert Quigley of @statesman about Twitter use). The avatar is a cartoon mascot, but there is clearly a human voice behind the posts, and that makes all the difference. Honigman comments on things, introduces links, drops hints about things that are going on at the Tribune, which has a had a pretty busy couple of weeks lately, what with going bankrupt and then being caught up in the Blagojevich debacle. And the Colonel Tribune account clearly helps the paper, I think, if past events are anything to go by.

With one of our most recent Twitter accounts, we’ve tried to walk a similar kind of middle path: Simon Beck, who is in charge of the new Globe Campus site, is now Twittering, and the photo that appears on the account is his — and the voice will most definitely be his — but the actual account name is @GlobeCampus, and it’s clear that he is posting on behalf of the site. I think that’s a pretty good compromise between the personal and the corporate. I’d be interested to hear what others think.

For other perspectives, see this Jeremiah Owyang post and a post from the Future Lab marketing blog about what to do and what not to do. And the Sunday New York Times has a great column about how brands are trying (and in some cases failing) to make use of social networks like Facebook. My friend Alistair Croll also has some interesting thoughts about how Twitter isn’t a site, it’s a protocol.

Over the past year, Twitter has become a wildly-popular social network, allowing people to stay in touch not just with their friends but also with celebrities like MC Hammer and Shaquille O’Neal, who use the service to talk directly to their fans. For many companies, meanwhile, Twitter has effectively become a real-time market-survey tool. Comcast and Zappos, for example, have used it to track reactions to their products and have been able to respond to their customers much faster than they could in the past. Some companies, however, have found themselves at the center of a Twitter-storm — including Johnson & Johnson, which faced criticism from mothers both on the service and in the blogosphere at large, after an advertising campaign for the painkiller Motrin made what were seen (by some) as disparaging comments about moms who carry their kids in slings.

The latest company to feel the slings (pun intended) and arrows of a Twitter-storm is Pepsi, which was apparently trying to make light of the fact that Pepsi Max has a single calorie with a campaign that showed a cartoon-like representation of the calorie committing suicide by drinking poison, shooting itself through the head and hanging itself. While according to the company, it only officially ran in a single magazine ad in Germany, it quickly made its way around the world. Not surprisingly, it struck some observers as being in very bad taste, particularly since the primary target market for soft drinks — young people — has a high suicide rate.

Among those who criticized the company’s campaign was Christine Lu, a blogger and video podcaster whose sister committed suicide and who said that Pepsi — or more specifically, the ad agency BBDO — should be ashamed of itself for making light of such a terrible phenomenon. Her Twitter posts were subsequently picked up by a number of advertising and consumer-related blogs, and reports about the campaign started appearing on news sites as well. Soon, a comment appeared on Twitter from Pepsi spokesman Huw Gilbert, who apologized and said that the campaign was totally inappropriate, and that it would not happen again.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Pepsi quickly removed the controversy-inducing ads, even though there was a considerable amount of debate (in the case of Motrin, at least) about whether they were actually offensive at all, or whether critics were simply being hypersensitive. Some have argued that doing what Motrin and Pepsi did was worth it, even if they got a lot of criticism, because at least people are talking about their products (as the old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”). A couple of years ago, Chevrolet allowed people to use video clips to make their own commercials about the Chevy Tahoe, and while a number of them chose to make critical commercials about how bad the vehicles were, the company reportedly still saw the campaign as a positive thing.

One thing is clear, however: Regardless of how valid the criticisms of either Motrin or Pepsi were, using Twitter gave both of the companies behind the products the tools to respond to those concerns quickly and directly — not days or weeks later with a press release or an official statement, but minutes or perhaps hours later, with a personal comment from someone directly associated with the campaign. In that sense, as I pointed out at a Canada News Wire event this morning, Twitter can act as a kind of early-warning system, alerting companies to sparks of customer dissatisfaction that could (if ignored) turn into all-out forest fires. That’s not to say every company should remove an ad or change a product just because someone complains on Twitter; but it certainly makes it easier to get a head start on such a decision if one needs to be made.

My kids are too old to carry around in slings — I mostly drive them everywhere now — but I can still sympathize with the mom (and some dad) bloggers who are up in arms about Motrin’s latest marketing campaign, which uses “baby-wearing” as a way of trying to appeal to moms as potential customers. The rationale seems to be that using slings and other baby-carrying paraphernalia is mostly a fad, and causes back and neck pain that requires Motrin. Instead, hundreds of moms are criticizing Motrin on Twitter — where they have helpfully tagged their comments with #motrinmoms — and on dozens of blogs as well.

If you’re one of those who believes that “any publicity is good publicity,” or that getting potential customers “engaged” with your product includes pissing them off, then the Motrin campaign probably seems like a great success. And I’m sure there are those who will argue that the critical Motrin moms are a vocal minority, that they are too easily offended by something that was meant to be humorous, etc. That may even be true. But it’s still a problem for the company — a very modern problem. For better or worse, this kind of social-media “flash flood” of negative PR involving Twitter, blogs and Facebook is becoming more and more commonplace.

It will be interesting to see how Motrin responds. Will they take the same road as GM did when everyone used the footage they provided to generate negative commercials for the Chevy Tahoe? Or will try their best to they ignore it? If they’re smart, they’ll run a bunch of the Twitter comments, video responses and blog posts on the Motrin site. Dave Knox, a digital brand manager for Procter & Gamble, says Motrin has a problem on its hands (link via Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at The Industry Standard). Shannon McKarney has some good perspective on the whole kerfuffle here.