Caution: Ideation In Progress

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs, as I begin my new segment on this site “People Marketers Need to Know”. We filmed the interview live in front of the monthly Refresh DC meeting. Topics that we addressed included developing interactive strategies, exploring social media, and much more.

iStrategyLabs is a digital agency that was started by Peter, an Emory University graduate, after his recent stint at then-Blattner Brunner and is focused on three core things: interactive strategy (connecting with the audience), experiential marketing (creating physical experiences), content creation (creation of all the photo, video, and text).

Peter explained why interactive strategy has become so important. He said that the Internet is where people are flocking to and that’s where the audience has resided. For iStrategyLabs, the goal is laying down the right strategy to reach the audience and making marketing more efficient. One of the things I posed to Peter was for him to define the term “social graph” and why it is important. He defines it as “a buzz word” – the mapping of the variables between human beings. The need is to evaluate all the variables associated with an individual and correlating it with other people and checking out their behavior.

Figuring out the steps in beginning an interactive strategy can sometimes be problematic as well. Peter suggests that you begin by putting yourself in the mindset of your target audience by thinking about what they do on a daily basis and evaluating what’s most important to them. But once you do that, you’re going to need to probably find a way to do an online problem, but there’s one problem…management isn’t buying into it. But why? No…chances are that it’s not the cost…it’s most likely because they just don’t understand the power of being online. “Create a committee of passionate individuals -comprised of management, marketing, IT, and legal – who want to participate and want to learn…” Peter says to help combat this aura of negativity and hopefully that will begin to help sway the nay sayers.

Although a rather somewhat brief interview (~40 minutes), my interview with Peter was very informative and I hope that what you’ll get out of this is a better understanding of what an interactive strategist does and how they can benefit your efforts.

Chat with Peter Corbett on Twitter or email him at peter [at] iStrategyLabs.com.