The American Red Cross had a big problem. The blogosphere was peppered with negative comments about the organization. So the American Red Cross decided to listen to the conversation taking place on the web.

They soon learned there was a gap between how they positioned themselves and how their stakeholders’ described their experience of the organization. Through daily monitoring of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools, the Red Cross changed the way they engage their advocates and recruit volunteers.

According to Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, this is what today’s customers and donors expect: to be listened to and understood.

Here Livingston offers his advice for making new media marketing programs work for your organization:

Brand & Strategy: Does social media increase lead generation?

Geoff Livingston: It really depends on the program. If you don’t integrate calls to action and natural ways for people to engage further, then your effort is for naught; social media is just a hot shiny object.

Your strategy should treat social media like a toolset, with different ways of communicating. Do your homework. By exploring this site, you can research how organizations have used social media successfully.

Can social media help a non-profit organization increase the number of new donors?

Again, if there’s no integration into your plan, then it won’t! If you do integrate, it will. It all gets back to strategy. Are you talking to donors to accomplish something, or are you just Tweeting? Check out Beth Kanter’s blog for more insights.

How do you convince management to engage in conversations with customer-communities without controlling the conversation?

Show them a blog search with all of the conversations about their company. Or even better, point them to the conversations about their competition. But really, at this stage in the game, if they are still not going forward with social media, it may be time to consider a more innovative organization.

How should “social media releases” be fundamentally different than traditional press releases?

They should be more of a story board for bloggers, providing them multimedia tools to create their own story. Rather than a positioning document, it should provide facts and paths for others to figure out the position, so they can tell it their way.

How do you reach out to bloggers, podcasters, and individuals with high-traffic social network profiles?

You get to know them through conversation over time. You definitely don’t pitch them out of the gates. It’s Relationships 101, really. Treat people like you want to be treated.

How should organizations integrate social media on their own web site?

First, they need to get to know their online community and listen for a while. Then once you understand what your stakeholders actually do online–what they talk about–build your strategy. It should flow naturally.

You’d call it absurd: a meatball sundae. Who’d ever combine the two?

Yet marketers do it all the time. They rashly garnish their meatballs—the traditional marketing basics their business is founded on—with fancy and tantalizing New Marketing tactics, such as social media.

CZ president Dave Goetz interviewed marketing guru Seth Godin about “New Marketing” and how organizations should think about and implement it for success.

B&S: How do I convince senior management to invest in New Marketing now for a payoff down the road?

Seth Godin: Well, it’s not easy. They got hired by someone who wanted them to do what they used to do, not to do something new. I’m not so sanguine that most of these organizations will figure out what to do in time. They surely missed the last two revolutions online. That’s why I wrote Meatball Sundae.

There are leaders who feel the transition you describe but also feel paralyzed about where to start. What is the intelligent starting point, aside from throwing lots of money at it?

Throwing money isn’t going to do it, not a chance. What will work is setting up something “across the street.” Get some great people, leave them alone, and challenge them to put you out of business by playing by the new rules. That’ll work.

Any examples of nonprofits that “re-launched” their organization into this new world of New Marketing?

The magic word is “re-launched.” Roomtoread.org and kiva.org and acumenfund.org didn’t re-launch—they launched. It’s the same way that Google isn’t called randomhouse.com and Wikipedia isn’t called britannica.com. I’m not so sure people have the guts to re-launch. I hope they do.

New Marketing is about building permission assets—direct to your community. How do you start building a permission asset today?

I think it’s about making a promise and keeping it. You measure every single day how many people WANT to hear from you. Not put up with it, but look forward to it. Complain when you don’t show up. If you measure that, and innovate around it, you’ll find it.

Social media allows you to engage your community in a real conversation. What are some of the things that kill authentic online conversation?

Social media isn’t about you, it’s about me. The minute you make it about you, I leave.

Which of your trends drives all the others?

The power of the consumer. To ignore you. To talk about you. To interact with you.

It may be a “good” idea—but will it stick?

According to Chip and Dan Heath, only “sticky” ideas will have lasting impact. In Made to Stick, the Heaths provide six qualities that make an idea stick—and transform the way people think and act.

B&S: Your formula for a successful idea is a “Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story”—but “Simple” and “Emotional” seem contradictory. How do they relate?

Chip and Dan Heath: When we say “simple,” we mean focused. It means you’ve whittled your message down to its core.

There’s only tension if “simple” means “short.” It’s possible to express a core idea through a long story. Consider Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” It’s a long story that expresses the message, “You shouldn’t deceive people or it might come back to haunt you.” If it was delivered in its short, abstract form, it wouldn’t stick. Because the story offers concrete images and emotional overtones, it has stuck for centuries.

Often, the best idea in a meeting goes unrecognized because the boss is threatened by it. How can the principles of stickiness help?

The boss might say, “Our new mission statement is that we’ll be the highest-quality provider in the industry.” You should respond, “That’s not concrete enough. People will not share a common mental image of what we’re trying to achieve.” It won’t be a judgment call or an opinion—you’ll be right.

You talk about the “archvillain” of sticky ideas: the Curse of Knowledge. How do you root it out?

The Curse of Knowledge says that once we know something, it becomes hard to remember what it was like not to know it. As a result, we communicate like speakers of a foreign language—and forget to translate.

Think of the IT guy in the office who speaks in jargon and abstractions you can’t follow. We’re the “IT guy” in our areas of expertise—our knowledge complicates our communication. We can avoid the Curse of Knowledge by using the principles of stickiness. A sticky idea crosses boundaries of knowledge, experience, and even culture.

In today’s world, the consumer decides the identity of a product or service means, not you. Should you adapt the message once you get feedback from your market, or is it then too late?

Audiences typically make ideas simpler—for example, scientific studies are inevitably boiled down to statements like, “Eating fiber cures cancer!” Audiences also tend to make things more unexpected, as with Leo Durocher’s quote, “Nice guys finish last.”

But sticky ideas are already simple and surprising. They require a lot less adaptation in the idea marketplace. This is because the forces you apply to make your idea sticky—i.e., simplicity, concreteness, and unexpectedness—are the same forces the idea marketplace would apply if you hadn’t.

How does the increased competition and clutter in the market affect the need for sticky ideas? For example, how would a consulting firm formulate a sticky idea?

Use your differentiation point—the reason someone should hire you instead of the other guys. Communicate it clearly and concretely. Don’t try too hard to make the language sound “professional”—e.g., “Our world-class team of expert consultants have a combined 114 years of experience across diverse industries.”

Here’s a test of clarity: A lot of customers should see your marketing message and think, “That is definitely not for me.” This is evidence the customers you do want will recognize themselves in your messaging.

In Seth Godin’s new book, Small Is the New Big, he continues his harangue against lousy service, boring products, and quaint notions like “branding.”

CZ recently interviewed him about his new book and about the continual pursuit of “remarkable.”

B&S: In short, according to your book, it seems like the new business climate favors businesses with flexibility, speed, and creativity.

Seth Godin: I make the point that acting ‘small’, being responsive, treating people with respect, acting like your name is on the door—those are the traits that the market demands now.

When developing a new product or service or even creating a new marketing initiative, how do you know when to make adjustments?

Godin: I think the opportunity to let the market decide is greater than ever before. You can get in front of consumers faster and cheaper than ever before if you’re just willing to fail now and then.

So fail cheap. And often.

You don’t like “branding,” per se. What ultimately is your beef with branding?

Godin: Brand is an unmeasurable generality. It’s a shorthand, used by consumers as a placeholder for a varied array of beliefs. Instead of trying to manipulate that, I’m pushing people into measuring, into launching and watching, into doing, not guessing.

There is so much marketing clutter today that even ostensibly fresh ideas seem to lose out. Will even permission marketing go the way of the TV industrial complex?

Godin: Permission marketing can’t go away—human beings will always want to hear from friends (not strangers) who have solutions to their problems!

There’s a corny saying that if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes. Most organizations and businesses are not the leader in their category. So how do you market your university or service if in fact you are going up against Goliath day after day?

The answer is the art and science of positioning. It’s marketing strategy that works. Positioning is even more relevant today than when Jack Trout coined the word in 1969.

In a recent interview with CZ President Dave Goetz, Jack Trout, the man behind the theory of positioning and co-author of the marketing classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, talks about what marketing must to do to compete in a world of overblown expectations, fierce competition, and commodity services and products.

B&S: What, if anything, has changed over the past thirty years in marketing strategy?

Jack Trout: Essentially, the only thing that has changed is the level of competition. Competition today is intense. It’s what I call the “tyranny of choice.” There is now so much choice that if you make a mistake, your competitors quickly get your business, and you don’t get it back.

It’s the General Motors problem. They made a lot of mistakes and market share continues to drop.

Has your thinking about positioning changed since you coined the phrase?

Jack Trout: No, not at all. My stance on positioning has become more important in the scheme of things because of the level of competition. My first article in 1969 about positioning pointed essentially to the “me-too-marketplace.” The concept of positioning was necessary because of the arrival of more and more competitors saying, “Me too.” My premise was based on the rise of competition.

But did I realize in 1969 what it would be like in 2006? Not at all. At that point, there wasn’t global competition.

Are there a limited number of positions?

Jack Trout: Remember, we’re talking about positioning as a science. It’s the science of the mind—psychology. One of the things we talk about in positioning is the Rule of Seven. In other words, in any category there are no more than seven brand names that anybody can remember, and those are only high interest categories. Harvard psychologists figured out that generally the finite number of brands that stick in people’s heads is seven.

But there’s also the law of duality. If you look at every category, only two brands eventually rise to the top. It’s Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji. The remaining brands—3, 4, 5, 6, and 7—are working in a fairly small market share.

Think back to a time when someone tried to change a belief (worldview) that you felt strongly about.

B&S: In All Marketers Are Liars, you talk about worldviews. How does one go about snooping to identify the soft spots in someone’s worldview? Any tips on how to listen and gather valuable information from one’s client list or student body?

Seth Godin: What a great question! I don’t think a worldview has “soft spots” though. Instead, I think there are hot buttons, places where people really want to tell themselves a story. The easiest way to do this is to watch which OTHER stories are appealing to this audience. People are very bad (and very ornery) about talking about an irrational worldview. But you can watch them all day and see what they choose to believe.

Colleges often use the storyline, “We’re ranked 23rd in U.S. News & World Reports Best Colleges in the Midwest” as the basis for their plot. Is that compelling?

Seth Godin: I’m not sure that this story is ineffective for the worldview of typical high school senior. The challenge is to identify a unique story that can find room in a brain that’s heard the “top college” story since 1652 at Harvard. One way is with sports. Another more productive and ethical one might be to obsess about a particular department.

In your book, you mention your Purple Cow concept. What if an organization doesn’t really have anything that spectacular to showcase—something that turns people’s heads?

Seth Godin: I’m saying that a Purple Cow is just a stand-in for the phrase “something about your product or service that your users will decide is worth talking about in a positive way.” Your story can be very compelling and it might sell me, but that doesn’t mean it will spread. That’s okay. You can use other techniques to get attention, as long as your story is compelling enough to get people to change their minds.

How does storytelling integrate with branding for smaller firms?

Seth Godin: Branding, it seems to me, doesn’t mean much any more. By obsessing about the story, an organization (of any size) can augment and leverage their brand.