Creating Brand Awareness on the Internet

In my last post I promised one more rant before I shut down for the summer—a continuation of my long-term campaign against awareness as an objective, on the Internet in general and in social media in particular.

I wrote about the issue two years ago in the context of metrics. At the time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that if you want to measure the accomplishments of Internet marketing programs you need to set behavioral objectives and collect the behavioral data to measure them. That still seems a perfectly logical argument to me, but it doesn’t make my point explicitly enough.

What I’ve seen in the interim is two-fold. First, endless students who tell me they want to create awareness (of their brand, presumably) in social media or on the web in general. I keep pointing out that it requires marketing research to measure awareness and that takes time and money. If people do something—register for your site, sign up for a newsletter, become a fan of your Facebook page, whatever—they are aware, aren’t they? Ok, the awareness and the behavior can be almost simultaneous, but the behavior is a manifestation of awareness. Not only that, any of the actions I suggested—and many others I can think of—put the marketer in a position to communicate further with the customer/prospect. That’s what I meant in the last post when I said that attitudinal awareness objectives on the Internet simply constitute leaving cards on the table. I like that phrase; it captures the foolishness of the way many marketers still approach the Internet.

The second think I’ve seen is practitioners setting awareness objectives even though I think they understand the argument for behavioral objectives. Behavioral objectives imply measurement. They know that the necessary marketing research to measure awareness objectives is unlikely to be done, hence no measurement. That constitutes hiding behind awareness as a hard-to-measure objective.

Actually, there is a third issue. Most of us have grown up practicing and teaching traditional mass media. That is still the mind set of most marketers. More so older ones, but also younger ones who should know better.

The lack of understanding of the fallacy of awareness on the Internet often leads to a major strategic error. It especially shows up in something like “we want to create awareness in social media.” The question is how do you get people to your social pages in the first place? They have to be aware before they initially visit the page and sign up to be your fan. How do you create the level of awareness and interest that gets them to your page or to your website? Oops, we hadn’t thought about that! Actually, what they often have not thought about is that it’s going to require some money to make this happen.

Yes, there is such a thing as social sharing and it can create awareness. A recent study from ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest suggests that social sharing can create substantial referral traffic. How many of the referrals are to customers who previously had no contact with the brand? That doesn’t seem to be a question the study, based on the ShareThis database, can answer. Actually, I’d like to see the entire study because I don’t understand some of the explanation in the blog. However, their data seems to make it clear that sharing is not likely to create viral content and that people only share in one or two content categories in which they are particularly interested or expert. The latter is what we’ve known about WOM in the physical world for a long time; the more things change, the more they stay the same!

I’d like to encourage you to think about this issue by doing some reading and listening. First, the Bain online branding study “In Search of a Premium Alternative” in which they point out the predominance of direct response ads on the Internet and decry the lack of online advertising alternatives that break through the clutter. Then you need to listen to Randall Rothenberg’s introductory speech to the “Future of Display Advertising” conference last week. He builds on the Bain study and recent announcement of new “Rising Stars” ad formats, designed to allow more creativity and impact in the online branding effort.

But don’t leave it at that. Take a look at the 6 new formats on the IAB site. Look at how many options they give for viewer behavior—from watch a video to download a mobile app—and everything in between. Again, the point is to encourage viewers to take action—action that can be measured. No need for awareness objectives here!!!

Farewell to Super Bowl 2011

I think most of the voting for Super Bowl ad favorites has closed now. That probably is wise; I’m not sure how many people still care. But I wanted to do a wrap-up to my pre-game post, which had a title that now seems remarkably inaccurate.

If you want a rehash, here are two good sites. Superbowl-ads.com has been doing this for a long time and has an incredible archive. Fanhouse has a nice Super Bowl page and you can compare the 2011 and 2010 winners. The Volkswagen Force ad was the winner on most of the sites I looked at. It was cute, and it had quite a bit of pre-game buzz.

Overall, I thought the ads were either bland and uninspired or technically deficient. Seems to me the fan-created ad contest has about run its course and I missed the A-B Clydesdales, but the Dog Party Ad was cute. The Eminem ad for Chrysler (an expensive 2 minutes worth) has gotten a lot of post-game buzz, and its intent was commendable. However, I watched it closely, wondering whether it was a Chrysler ad or a Detroit ad. Of the two, only Chrysler could afford to pay for it, so the answer was pretty obvious. It was, however, one of several ads that didn’t mention the sponsor until the last few seconds. Why do advertisers and agencies think it’s ok to spent $3m and not identify the source of the ad in the beginning so the viewer can connect the brand and the message? I know all the arguments about great creative to make an impact on the Super Bowl, but the basics of good advertising still apply. Finally, I thought the Groupon ad was in astonishingly bad taste. I think it was a last-minute buy, so they probably pulled something off the shelf, but if you can’t do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all.

For me the biggest disappointment was that the social media aspect I was looking for was not in evidence. I’m sure there was a lot of Tweeting going on, but in terms of obvious advertising tie-in, it just wasn’t there. What was I expecting? I don’t really know either! Is it possible that social media has a huge role in building pre-game and post-game buzz, but relatively little during the game itself. A firm called ymarketing did a report on the ads and their impact on social media that came out a couple of weeks after the game; here's the link. A similar study by PRLog says that all advertisers benefitted from social media traffic and that Motorola, Doritos, Hyundai, and Dove benefitted most. That’s interesting, because those four don’t tend to show up or at least show up high, in the best ads rankings. What does that mean??

Fast Company has an interesting take on Super Bowl ad metrics and some interesting additional coverage. Ad Age columnist Ian Schafer was also disappointed in the social media connections and has some pithy things to say about the ads themselves. The usual excellent SB coverage can be accessed on the sidebar.

So it’s clear we still have a lot to learn. Back to work!

Do You Have a Personal Content Strategy?

Dan Schawbel, the personal branding guru of Gen Y, spoke in my social media marketing class last week to an audience of mostly Gen Yers. He made a strong case for building a personal brand. It makes sense to me to do it in the early stages of your career. In fact, it strikes me as the digital counterpart of having a good paper resume in the ‘olden days.’ It’s essential. The issue is how far you want to go with it and on what platforms. In other words, what are your objectives and your target audience?

Something that hadn’t occurred to me was the importance of building a network in actually getting some kinds of jobs. An applicant for a job in social media needs to be an accomplished user of social media, with friends and followers. It’s probably especially attractive if the profile of the friends and followers is similar to the target audience of the employer. When I stopped to think about it, the point was obvious. Would you hire someone to drive a car who didn’t know how to drive???

To me, the utility of a personal digital brand as you are career building is obvious. What about us older ducks? It still may be useful; think about your own situation. For some of us, it’s not. For me, that seems especially true because I have a pretty big digital footprint already. If someone wants to find me, they can. But in spite of that, I got an interesting tip from Dan and I’ve pursued it. Dan creates an enormous amount of content, but he is also a dispenser of relevant content created by others that he Gathers and Monitors. Most of us do that with email and RSS feeds; it creates a huge amount of incoming content to manage. His content management strategy is online. Mine consists of a bunch of file folders and Google Desktop search. I don’t tag, so search often comes up empty, even though I know I’ve read something and I think I’ve saved it.

So I found Dan’s Organize guidance especially useful. I had investigated Del.i.cious but I hadn’t become a regular user. I signed up and started using it over the weekend, and I think it’s going to be useful in both cutting down the clutter in my Documents file and on my messy desktop and, at the same time, enabling me to find things I need.

Now I have 3 buttons that let me easily tag the URL I’m on at that time, to look at my recent bookmarks, or to go to the Del.i.cious site to see what others are doing. There is also a bookmarks sitebar, which is easy to open and close from the pull-down menu on the Del.i.cious tab. Since I use Yahoo! as my opening page, all this was essentially automatic and I didn’t have to do much configuring. My only objections are minor; an extra line on my header but that’s text, so it’s small. It occasionally interfered with my Yoono sidebar, which is the one I prefer to always have open, but I seem to have settled that.

As you can see, I’m bookmarking content for a current project in higher ed as well as content for classes and writing. This has just got to be easier than all those files and folders. It’s also going to be useful to see what others are doing in terms of similar content and tags.

I think I like this. Will I Distribute much of this content? I’m not sure I will, but I’ll probably do more than I’ve done in the past because this makes it so easy. I’m going to be happy if it just streamlines my work!

What applications of this good concept can you make to your work or to your creation of a vibrant personal brand--or both!?!

Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; here's the microsite. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.
How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 Conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.
Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. What do you suppose they have on tap for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Stay tuned!

BMW Roars Down the Road (Desk?) Again

I found my original link to the new BMW “Expressions of Joy” campaign in a Tweet by Kevin Swanepoel—thanks, Kevin! My reaction was that BMW has done it again in terms of pushing the envelope on advertising (build your own) and, more recently, customer engagement (the graffiti wall).

The campaign, launched in the UK in the spring, is for the new Z4 model. If you look around you’ll find a lot of the typical—photo galleries (some so complex they froze my screen so I’m not providing links) and TV ads posted on YouTube.


But it’s the augmented (not virtual) reality application that intrigued me. It’s a technological update of earlier ad campaigns. Basically, once you download the software (called a paintbrush app), it lets you drive the new Z4 on your desk. If you wish you can create your own “expression of joy” and upload it to the contest on Facebook—reminiscent of the graffiti promo. There are several posts on the wall of the Facebook page and at least one on the photo page.

There are lots of comments about how much fun this is—and that’s a lot of the point!—scattered around the web. The one I liked most added something about how this was a geeky toy to be used by companies with a lot of money.

That is no doubt true. It seems to be a proprietary application; is it based on the Microsoft Paintbrush Tool? I can’t tell.

What I do know is that BMW continues to reach out to a young, well-heeled target market and to understand how to engage them. The challenge for other marketers is to use innovative, cost-effective ways of reaching and engaging their target audiences. Some of that is technology and tools; much more is creative marketing thinking!

Another CPC Launches New Product Online

One point of yesterday’s post was corporations doing well by doing good. A recent article in Ad Age (subscription required) highlights another example that takes a more controlled, corporate-focused tack, but still engages in cause marketing.

Johnson’s® adult body care line is not new, but apparently they have reformulated the line with aromatherapy and maybe other elements. So perhaps it’s a relaunch, but it’s definitely starting in social media. After the social media program is established they’ll support it with print and digital advertising (no TV mentioned); that may be more for the baby products contest (more below) than for the adult skin care line. The hub of the program is a MySpace page, chosen for its entertainment and beauty issues value.

Ashanti is the spokesperson for the campaign. She launched the “cause parties" with a party to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem, with which Ashanti has a personal relationship. The idea of the cause parties is to allow women to host parties in support of a cause of their choice with Johnson’s® providing body care products. Johnson’s® made a $10,000 donation to Ashanti’s chosen cause to get the campaign started, and there was a lot of buzz in the online beauty and music world so that part worked.


In fact, the nature and content of the buzz supports their choice of spokesperson and strategy. Ashanti seems to be a permanent resident of MySpace, and the comments on beauty blog postings I read were all about the party, the dresses, the celebs. I didn’t see a thing about Johnson’s® body products, but I suspect they were pleased with the attention given to the initial party.

They have reached out to bloggers associated with Mom Central to promote the program. A second party is already scheduled. Latoicha Givens, the author of Luxe Tips, will give a party in Atlanta on April 19 to raise money for CARE’s Women Empowerment Initiative. There’s obviously cross-promotion between the beauty blog and the body care product line. Johnson’s®, Ms. Givens’ blog, and CARE will all benefit. A win-win-win!

In fact, the campaign seems to be quite woman-friendly. According to Ad Age the “program looks to let women who may be out of work remain active by volunteering for causes important to them and enable working women to help out charities whose coffers have been depleted by the recession.”

The campaign is not without detractors. One of the commenters on the Ad Age article said, “Great brands like Johnson & Johnson shouldn't be climbing on borrowed-interest bandwagons so obviously insincerely. It makes products women have always trusted to most--J&J Baby Stuff [a separate program on YouTube happening simultaneously]--seem shallow and suspect.” I’d peg that as another “just doesn’t get it,” whether we’re talking about moms entering videos of their babies in a contest or women hosting parties to benefit causes they care about. What’s not to like?

It seems to me that Johnson’s® has it right. According to Rich Hildebrandt, group product director-new ventures for Johnson’s® , ”the goal of both programs is to deepen engagement rather than reach a maximum number of people.” He wouldn’t say how much they are spending, but it has to be less (probably a lot less!) than a traditional television launch. And the body care program has the halo effect of women they have identified as influential bloggers and of the meaningful causes they support.

Their alternative was intrusive, expensive mass media advertising. I like their choice. What do you think?

Would You Turn Your Home Page Over to Customers?

Mars’ Skittles brand yesterday began what is indeed a social media experiment. Prior to Sunday they had a wonderfully interactive, but still a traditional, brand page. This one is from February 14, 2008. You can see more on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is a fascinating place to study the evolution of websites.

Yesterday it took that site down and replaced it with a site that directs visitors to the chatter around the web about Skittles. The only marketer-controlled content is the small box which rotates themes; Interweb the Rainbow is the other theme. The page is composed solely of Tweets that contain the brand name. I found over 30 pages of Tweets already archived; at that point my finger was tired of clicking and I quit. The point is that there’s lots of chatter about Skittles. Some of it is funny, most (to me at least) rather silly, and some obscene. That could prove a problem with their core teenage audience (if their parents are paying attention, at least).

Clearly they worked to stimulate the volume on Twitter. My guess is that the number of blog mentions is no accident either. This video is one of the interesting results—or are this video and perhaps some blog posts, the result of reaching out to bloggers? This kind of a spike in activity doesn’t happen by accident.


What can the rest of us learn? Few marketers are likely to be willing to go to this extreme in embracing social media. Will some be willing to bring microblogging content onto their sites? Probably not without monitoring. Can sites afford monitoring of a robust Twitter stream over an extended period of time? Will this experiment soon lose momentum? Or will it crash and burn as a result of malice or the sheer grossness of some of the content? Will something else happen that none of us has yet forseen—good or bad?

And where does Facebook fit into all of this?

What’s going on here really interesting, and I’m sure the business writers and the blogosphere will be following it with interest.

Understanding Your Personal Brand

This isn’t a subject I often write about. It’s interesting and important, but there are people like Mitch Joel who are much better at it. In this difficult economic age, many of us ought to be following this important topic.

A few days ago, however, my friend Linda Netherton sent me a link that I couldn’t resist--thanks, Linda! It's fun and interesting and I want to pass on to you. It's an Online Identity Calculator. Not surprisingly, it’s a tool developed by consultants who have written a book and do training on the subject of building your personal brand. You'll get a polite email from them, but the results of the calculator are worth it.

The calculation takes only a few steps and the result is fun. I’m not showing you mine, because I’m all over the web as a result of books, so I’m going to get a high score by definition. What’s funny is that there’s a Stanford historian named Mary Louise Roberts who is active also, so you can well imagine that our name search results get all mixed up. Point is that you need to keep an eye on these things.

So try the calculator, see how you score, and see if it meets your stated goal. If not, what should you be doing to bring your score into the quadrant where you want it?

It’s important to pay attention to the advice of the experts, to keep an eye on what’s being said about you with Google Alerts, and to manage your personal brand as you would your corporate brand!

That’s good advice any time. It’s even better advice when the economy is putting so many jobs in jeopardy!

Managing Your Branded Community

As noted yesterday, I’ve been writing a lot about community lately; I think it’s a (the?) pillar of Web 2.0. I’ve done posts on aspects including best practices and monitoring. It was the monitoring post that connected me with Brian Person when he made a thoughtful comment.

Bryan works for LiveWorld, a supplier of community-related services. I’m breaking from usual practice in writing about it, because they don’t offer free services. Their target market is large corporations who are willing to pay for services that smaller businesses can provide for themselves. That gives them a special perspective.
LiveWorld offers a platform, but their value added seems to be in the services they offer to assist their customers. They manage branded communities and provide a monitoring service that is available to even to communities that do not run on their platform. That says something about what corporations are finding difficult or onorous. Why? I suspect its because of the necessity to set management and monitoring guidelines and train a group of people to implement them. In some cases it may also simply be that the corporations do not think they have employees with the necessary time or expertise.

They have an interesting new addition to their product line called LiveBar, which allows customers to add social functionality to their own websites by offering conversations and something they call “soapboxes” that have blog-like functionality. LiveWorld CEO Peter Friedman demoed the new offering at the Web 2.0 expo in late fall.

Earlier in the week I had an opportunity to talk to Brian Person, who’s written some interesting posts on the corporate blog lately. I asked him what made their services worthwhile when there are free counterparts available. He said that it’s partly their experience with social networks and communities. It takes 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a sustainable community. It’s not a silver bullet and good consultants help managers understand that and have patience. Monitoring does seem to be a real issue. He says they usually monitor communities for their customers. They require the customer to invest at least 10 hours each week in community management. This is not an activity to just be outsourced and then wash your (corporate) hands of the operations. It’s your brand; continuous involvement is necessary even if you hire management services.

Both those are useful lessons for the small firm. “Community development,” if you will takes ongoing effort. Monitoring, with careful guidelines especially if done by more than one person, is essential.

So community may be the common theme of Web 2.0 and branded communities may be seen as desirable. However, they are neither resource-free nor quick nor necessarily easy to establish. The smaller business may find it wise to participate in established communities of interest rather than trying to start a branded community. What do you think?

A Brand-Driven, Viral Fundraising Business Model

One of my students introduced me to SocialVibe—thanks, Tao! It is another interesting business model—a combination of fundraising for non-profits and cause-related marketing for brands. As Tao pointed out, the focus on social networks also makes the efforts viral.

Leading brands have signed up as sponsors. Consumers who want to raise money for a cause (members) select their cause and create a widget (they call it a badge) using graphics supplied by the non-profit and the sponsor. The member then posts the badge on a social networking page and earns sponsor points by getting donations there. As the site points out, it’s a chance to do good without the member committing a lot of his or her own funds. For the brand, it’s impressions on the social networking sites that are probably a lot more effective than paid advertising impressions.

Some causes are seeing it as an especially effective way to reach certain target audiences. To Write Love on Her Arms is a teen suicide-prevention advocacy that is actively using the viral power of the site. But others are going beyond just the obvious teenage target audience. A Canadian publication talks about using sites like SocialVibe to get out messages that attempt to stem the tide of obesity and the related problem of Type 2 diabetes.

Another active user is Charity:Water, a non-profit with another “new media” business model of its own.

It is impressive and heartening to see non-profits making effective use of the Internet in their fundraising efforts. It is also impressive to see corporations and brands joining in these efforts in a way that is beneficial all the way around.

It’s a good thought for the holiday season!

The BrightTALK™Social Media Summit

As I indicated on Friday, the Social Media Summit is scheduled for Tuesday. The program was still evolving as late as this weekend. There are many interesting speakers and topics. Hope you'll be able to take advantage of some of them!

Here is the link to my webcast. Others can be found on the BrightTALK pages.
Get the PPT presentation here.

Building Trust in the Social Space

The multiple ways people connect on the social web never fails to fascinate me. More important, it keeps adding to my store of knowledge about developments in the social space. A recent post on community was picked up in Social Computing Magazine, and in response I got an email from Alex Todd, CEO of Trust Enablement about their product. Trust is incredibly important in brand development—second only to a good product, it seems to me. So I researched his company with interest.

The firm offers a managerial framework for building trust with key stakeholders. The stakeholder group I’m most interested in is customers, so I followed that thread. They have just conducted a survey with 366 responses that deals with what managers need to do to create trust in online social networks, broadly defined. Here’s some of the data I find most compelling. Basically it says that management needs to learn more about how to develop conditions that promote trust. Firms also need to lighten up on controlling practices that suggest lack of trust in your brand and your products (interpretation mine; obviously I feel strongly about issues of letting your customers have their say).Ok, so you agree with me! How do they do it? These images are from a presentation made to MBA students at McMaster University. They have identified six factors that contribute to the development of trust. Each factor has particular impact at a given stage in the brand development process. It’s reminiscent of the old hierarchy of advertising effects and similar in tone to the new media model I set out last year. To build a trusted brand the marketer needs to move people through a process beginning with, in their words, “Discovery” and culminating in “Advocacy.” Right on.

How should marketers go about doing this? The resources needed for trust development are:
• Experiential sources
• Interpretive sources
• Empowerment (to make the choice)
The practices that protect trust in a brand are:
• Motives
• Proficiencies/expertise
• Risk transference.
At each stage/for each element there are specific marketing activities that can be undertaken.

There’s lots of food for thought here and more in the sources I’ve used here and many others on the Trust Enablement site. Two things seem especially useful to me. First, there is a set of stages in trust development that parallels the stages of brand development. Second, there are specific marketing activities that need to be employed in each stage to build trust.

There’s also the more general message. Enterprises/managers don’t know all they need to know, they often don’t have the appropriate attitude set, to go about building trust. They often seem to be trying to protect themselves from their customers instead. Does information and openness lead to trust? I think so!

Is It the End of Surveys?

You may have noticed an article in Ad Age last week, “The End of Consumer Surveys.” It is based on an ongoing program by the Advertising Research Foundation that aims—not to do away with consumer surveys—but instead to integrate conventional marketing research and social media metrics to give a clearer picture of how well brands are doing to get their message out. “Out” is meant in the broadest sense; not just how much is being spent on brand messages in conventional media but how well that is translating into (unpaid) online chatter favorable to the brand.

ARF is being supported in this effort by marketing research firm TNS and its Cymfony Division, which specializes in social media. TNS has a number of resources posted on their site. The ones I was especially taken with were a 2007 white paper “Making the Case for a Social Media Strategy,” (chart at right) and the ARF webcast ”Social Media Analysis for Consumer Insight: Validating and Enhancing Traditional Market Research Findings.” I’m going to hit some of the highlights and try to bring them together for you. The webcast runs about 40 minutes and is worth listening to in its entirety (access it from this page). There’s another in this series coming up on November 12 and other related webcasts on the ARF events page.

Using brands of HDTV as their basic case study, the researchers from TNS used what could be called marketing research triangulation to look at brand impact. They used:

• Conventional marketing panel research to understand conventional brand metrics like favorability
• They used projective techniques to uncover the attitudinal (“emotive”) dimensions that characterize brands in the category
• They used convention web metrics (e.g. visits to websites) and social media metrics (e.g., brand mentions in blogs) to measure online activity and chatter.

Two key metrics which they report—and which they find to be interrelated—are share of market and share of discussion.


One of the products of their analytics that I found most interesting was a list—ordered by “contact clout”—of various contacts points that affect consumers’ decisions about brands. Experience with the brand is really important—points 1, 2 and 4. The first mention of traditional media ranks 9th—articles in newspapers and magazines. This probably reflects the innovative and technological nature of the HDTV product. TV comes in at number 14, but remember the metric is “influences brand decisions” not “creates awareness.” Nevertheless, the preponderance of personal and in-store information sources is striking.


But the main theme of the ARF/TNS collaboration is the need to combine conventional marketing research and social media metrics. Their argument is that just looking at brand activities is not sufficient. It is also absolutely necessary that you look at what consumers are doing and saying. The tough part is bringing the two together. I’ve argued the point in a somewhat different way; use behavioral analysis—first—to find out what people are doing; then conventional marketing research adds value by finding out why. The TNS analysis adds to that argument by demonstrating that you can get some of the whys from online chatter.

Their recommendation for effectiveness includes two kinds of communication—marketer generated and consumer generated. The marketer needs to work at nurturing (“spinning”) social networks and generating real online dialog between consumers and marketers.

The ARF has long been known for serious scrutiny of marketing research issues. This is an important effort to move marketing analytics in a direction that is essential to marketing effectiveness in the Web 2.0 world.

Financial Service Aggregators and Trust

Last week I received an email from Aimen Minhas, VP marketing at start-up PageOnce quickly followed by one from Guy Goldstein, CEO (listen to WSJ podcast here). They were reaching out to bloggers with information about their service, which is currently in private beta.

Essentially their message is that the user Finds (adds) the accounts--from financial services to social networks--that she wants to manage, Views and manages them from a single page and then Relaxes, letting PageOnce take care of details involved in managing all these accounts. It's the type of aggregation for the convenience of users that Internet pundits have been talking about since the early days.

Their emails came at a particularly interesting time. Someone, an amateur fortunately, had gotten the number of the credit card I use exclusively for Internet purchases. I was busy and hadn't checked my accounts for a few days; might not have noticed it right away anyway because the amounts were small and the amount of my total bill wouldn't have prompted me to look at the detail. Bank of America, though, caught it right away because there had been two $0 purchases recorded which customer service explained was the thief testing the account. BofA sent me multiple emails and left a voice mail. From there it's kind of a long story, only because I was away from home and got back Sunday night when the system was updating and couldn't be accessed. But a hold was put on the account right away and on Monday morning I did all the right things to get it taken care of. So far all the joker had actually purchased was two memberships in Match.com--isn't that trackable if anyone cared enough?

BofA handled this well and prevented further damage. Isn't that exactly what they are supposed to do? How would another layer of security help? All I've read suggests that PageOnce has strong security in place; certainly their executive team has strong IT backgrounds and extensive security experience. All the pieces are in place, but I wonder how easy it's going to be to get users to commit financial services data to an unknown site.

One of my students wrote about another financial services aggregator on our Internet marketing class blog a few weeks ago. I'm not making a link because the blog will go down sometime after the semester ends, but I'd like to quote some of what Yolanda said about Mint.com:

Although it looks a great way to handle your finances, I still feel skeptical about typing my accounts information in the site even though Mint claims to have high security. The company teamed with Yodlee, an on-line banking-service provider, to make secure connections to banks. The registration is anonymous because the system just asks for your e-mail address, password and zip code. The company also claims that it never stores password information or see account numbers. In spite of all these claims, I still do not feel secure on typing my account information on the site. I am not definitely in my twenties and maybe that is why this thing of sharing information still scares me. However, if my bank could provide this kind of service, I would definitely look forward to it. (Yolanda Cantu, May 5, 2008, Internet Marketing at Harvard Extension)

That's interesting on several levels and when we had a few minutes to talk about it others (mostly thirty-somethings) agreed. It takes a high level of trust to sign up for a service like this. You might accept such services from an institution you already know and trust; BofA went up several points in my estimation as a result of the quick action in my instance. Building trust for an unknown brand takes time, as we all know. For PageOnce that may be compounded by the fact that they are allowing social networks, which are leaky faucets as far as data privacy is concerned, to be part of the system. When I questioned this, Aimen Minhas pointed out that users can choose which accounts to enter (or not). Good point.

PageOnce is clearly a service in the Web 2.0 mold. If you want to check it out, sign up for a beta account. I wish I could say there was nothing to lose, but that's not true, and it's the challenge that services like this have to face. What else do you think financial services sites should do to build user trust for web and mobile financial services?

A Thriving B2B Community

Thanks once again to a student for pointing out a great site. BobKent.net proves that B2B marketers can have a sense of humor. More important, it makes a great case for using social media techniques for B2B branding (and probably lead generation).

Ok, so it’s sort of techie humor. But try some of the links; you’ll see that it’s not beyond us marketers if we happen to stumble upon it. That’s a bit more than you can say for the firm itself. Blue coat is a leader in the field of WAN optimization, if you know what that is. They also provide security of website applications, and that’s where Bob Kent (who likes to download movies at work) comes in.
Bob is the star of his own videos and they are set up to be shared with your friends and colleagues.











He has his own MySpace (and also Facebook, but it's hard to find) page.








He posts videos on YouTube.






Throughout the branding is subtly done, but it’s there. The genius of all this is that it is entertaining at the same time it’s brand relevant. Every office has a Bob, and it’s the job of the IT managers to control his network-abusive behavior.
There are invitations to submit content, join contests--a variety opportunities to interact with the community.

This is a great job—one that ought to send all B2B marketers to their creative drawing boards and may also give some branding hints to their B2C cousins!
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More Virtual Worlds for Children

The annual virtual worlds conference is taking place in NYC today and tomorrow. Just a list of the speakers is instructive; there are a lot of major brands that are becoming players in the virtual worlds space.


The announcement that caught my eye was from Nickelodeon. They’re planning more virtual worlds to join Nicktropolis, now about a year old. They include the popular SpongeBob SquarePants, which will delight my grandson! More to the point, if you look at the comparative site statistics for the Disney Virtual Kingdom and Nicktropolis (both of which are relatively generic), versus the Barbie World, the wisdom of building a virtual world around a more targeted brand seems evident.

Virtual worlds have taken a lot of hits lately, but they seem to be here to stay, especially for the young crowd that likes to spend time playing games and communicating with a network of friends.

A couple of questions. First, is there a strong first mover advantage here? Even for kids there are a limited number of sites that they are going to patronize at any given time. The real question is, “Will they be loyal?” Kids? I think not. If their friends are suddenly all over a new site with cooler stuff, they’ll leave for the new one.

Second, when is a brand franchise strong enough to warrant this type of investment? Barbie seems obvious. SpongeBob may be also. But again, how many, how strong? And how do you keep the virtual worlds vibrant?

These are truly brave new worlds--watch for further bulletins from this space!
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