I love living in the creative process. It's an enigma that has me wrapped around its little finger.

QuickMuse is a cutting contest, a linguistic jam session, a series of on-the-fly compositions in which some great poets riff away on a randomly picked subject. It's an experiment, QuickMuse, to see if first thoughts are indeed the best ones. We're not entirely sure about this, but we suspect QuickMuse will bring readers closer to the moment of composition than they have ever been before. Best part: our "playback" feature lets you watch the poems unfold, second by second. Or as Thlyias Moss says, it's "the chance for a poem to find its/audience fast," in which words don't "have as much/time to stale, pale/lose the relevance of the moment" to which they belong.

From Mr. Newman's obituary in The New York Times:

Mr. Newman was credited with popularizing a style of photography that became known as environmental portraiture. Working primarily on assignment for magazines, he carried his camera and lighting equipment to his subjects, capturing them in their surroundings and finding in those settings visual elements to evoke their professions and personalities.

Perhaps his most celebrated image is a 1946 portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, his expression deeply serious, is confined to the bottom left corner of the picture, cropped to his head and shoulders, an elbow resting on the piano, his hand supporting his head. The rest of the photograph is taken up by the raised lid of a large grand piano, strategically silhouetted against a blank wall, which is divided off-center into a gray and white rectangle. The lid forms the reversed shape of a leaning, abstract musical note.

If I could own but one photograph, this would be it.

Rest in peace.

• Understand the needs of your customer
• Win their attention
• Convert their attention into a relationship by taking care of their needs
• Deepen the relationship by becoming a content brand

Let me break it down.

The customer's needs and attention are still the only two things you need to focus on to create successful marketing. The goal of marketing is to win their attention, take care of their needs, and become their preferred brand in the category.

Winning attention requires that you:

1. Be where your customers congregate
2. Stand out by being visibly different
3. Be concise, human, and relevant to their needs

Winning attention can be expensive, so once you have their attention, you want to keep it. This is done by converting attention into a relationship. Creating a relationship begins with a promise that is relevant to their needs and can only be maintained by continually fulfilling that promise with your product.

Your product is your expertise. You share this expertise with your customers in the form of information, objects, and service. Defined this way, your product includes everything from your advertising to your physical and virtual deliverables to how promptly you answer customer inquiries. Together, all of these touch-points create an experience for your customer.

Brand is, and has always been, a result of the customer's experience. The metamorphosis from product to brand occurs when the product becomes a filter for the customer, a shortcut that negates the need to search for a new way to fulfill their needs.

In today's information-rich/attention-deficit world , becoming a brand means becoming a content brand. A content brand serves customers by helping them quickly find valuable information relevant to the category in which the brand lives. For example, if you are a runner, a running shoe content brand might bring you the training calendars and contact information for all the running clubs in your area. Not all of this content needs to be created by the brand, but the most powerful content brands will be those that author their own content and offer expert analysis on the content of others. The benefit promise of a content brand is "Come to us and we'll make it easy for you learn everything you need to know", again creating a shortcut to expertise for the customer.

That's my Marketing 2.0 strategy:

When the commercial Internet was introduced and a vast store of information and knowledge opened up to anyone with a computer and modem, a funny thing happened. Instead of satisfying our hunger for content, the Internet made us hungry for more. This insatiable hunger radically changed consumer behavior, so much so that in 2004, when for the first time in history consumers spent more on content than advertisers spent on advertising, marketing as we knew it was over.

Marketing has always been about giving consumers what they want and what they want today is content.

What do I mean by content? Let's first back up and look at what's really going on in consumer behavior and marketing? First, understand that the fundamentals of marketing are still in play, but they're in play with a twist. For example, brands are still important and consumers still buy the brands they're familiar with, but creating and maintaining a brand today is very different than it was in the days before the Internet. Back then, creative television advertising driven by overpowering media weight created awareness and a relatively long market buzz. Today that formula flat out doesn't work and the lifespan of buzz is frighteningly short.

Why? Empowered by the Internet, consumers can quickly log on to learn about any product that grabs their attention while access to their attention is no longer controlled by the television networks and the relatively few advertisers who could afford TV. With the Internet, the market for consumer attention is a free-for-all and the potential for new brands to unseat old brands is both constant and awesome. More than ever, marketing means both trying to take advantage of this churn and guarding yourself against it.

It's a daunting task. While anyone can build brand buzz if they know how to leverage the Internet's mercurial network dynamics, building brand loyalty is not so easy: the never-off Internet requires that you must continually share your value with the market. In the words of Neil Young, rust never sleeps.

But there is a solution: create content that shares your expertise and knowledge with consumers and you'll build both brand buzz and brand loyalty.

Sharing your expertise is direct selling. It's an inexpensive and very effective link back to your product or service. To start, much of what you need already exists as raw information in-house. Where do you look for these raw assets and how do you turn them into content marketing? Here's what I recommend to my clients:

1. Begin by transforming the latent knowledge and expertise within your company into content customers want.

The first place I look for raw material is in the R&D Department or wherever a company's products are designed and engineered. Specifically, I look for discoveries that have led to decisions regarding the fitness of one technology over another in meeting the customer's needs. Those discoveries and decisions have value and the Internet makes it possible to share them at relatively low cost.

2. Build your marketing strategies, tactics, and messages with the goal of attracting an audience to your content first.

The truth is people don't care about products at first, they first care about finding a solution to their need and they bring a lot of curiosity and questions to the process. Sharing your expertise and answering their questions leads directly to sales. Think of your expertise as your flagship product; build it, sell it, and it will sell everything else.

3. Close the gap between outbound marketing efforts and customers wanting to buy.

Pre-Internet television advertising may have been great at generating interest, but whether it led to sales is anybody's guess. Go both online and off to lead consumers to your expertise and WHAM, they're immediately in the sales process. Traditional marketing can still lead prospects to you, but content is the closer.

4. Become the trusted authority.

Brands that want to be category leaders must be content leaders. Become the content leader by sharing your expertise and consumers will come back again and again. When you share, people have a reason to trust, and trust is necessary for transaction. If you don't, you can bet someone else will.

The need and desire consumers have for knowledge, understanding, and expertise is not going away. If you want to succeed in today's Internet-driven marketplace, look honestly at your marketing. Is it designed only to interrupt or does it share what really sets your company apart, your unique knowledge and expertise? That's what consumers really want and giving them what they want is still the path to success in marketing and business.