Have You Been Pingged?

I’ve been evited, but I’ve never been pingged. Presumably the name of this new site is a play on the technical term ping—clever!

Pingg came to my attention as the result of a story from DM News’ Sara Holoubek. It’s a good story that has an important marketing point. I was initially intrigued by the complete “party management” service she described, so I looked at the two sites and found a lot going on.


Evite has been around for awhile and according to the site has 18 million registered users. Evite has recently added the ability to send and receive invitations from your cell phone (assuming that you want to. . .). It also has a photo page to which you can upload pics of your parties, so they are clearly adding social networking apps.

Pingg is new, having been launched in March of this year. It is obviously designed with social networking in mind. It’s surroundSend functionality lets you get your invitation to the recipient, wherever he or she may be. The event management function provides all the basics and some cool Internet apps. The gift and charity registry allows you to embed your Amazon Wish List or to ask your guests to contribute to a charity instead. If you’re selling tickets to your event like Sara was, invitees can purchase their tickets with PayPal. If you are doing this for a worthy cause, you can show the fund-raising target on your personalized event page. Not only cool, but useful!

Back to Sara’s point. If your goal is to draw an audience, just putting something out there, even to your handpicked guest list may not be enough. “Searches and online transactions all originate within the physical world.” Right! And with all the clutter in both physical and cyber worlds, it usually takes more than one communications channel to get your marketing message to its target audience!

Do Seniors Blog?

A few days ago I made the point that it’s not only the young and very young who participate in social media. Boomers and seniors do also. While I was sure it was a true statement, I was interested when I ran across some data on the behavior of older boomers and seniors. The first is from a Groundswell/Forrester post. Josh Bernoff points out that these two demographic groups are more skewed toward the Spectators Technographic segment than to the Creators. His advice: “help them out. Seed your networks and applications with content and make it effortless to respond. Seniors are a lot more likely to participate if you make the on-ramps easy to navigate.” That’s good advice for all target segments! Want to get a picture of how your target demographic scores on the Technographics? Try Forrester’s free data tool.

Interesting, but not surprising data. I kept looking and ran across a study by Ronni Bennett, owner of the As Time Goes By blog. Results were posted on her blog in five sections starting on May 5, 2008. As is the case with most Internet surveys her 402 respondents are self-selected from her readership, so the data only reflects over-50s who are active on the Internet. Pew data says that 72% of Americans 50 – 64 are on the net; it drops down to only 35% of those 65 and over. Ronni Bennett points out that almost 94 % of her respondents are White and 81% are women. So the data is skewed, even for the over-50 demographic, but it gives a fascinating glimpse of their activities.


Almost 88% read blogs, while “only” 54% publish one. The 63% who comment include the Creators, Critics and Collectors in the Forrester Technographics survey ladder (the Joiners seems to refer specifically to social networks, not blogs). It’s hard to compare a response percent to the index on the Forrester chart but they both show a high level of commenting or being a Critic. Interesting.

Respondents in the Elderblogger survey are active in a lot of categories. The number who list blogs and the number who say “banking” are both a surprise to me.

Other data reveals that over 69% visit blogs directly with almost 24% using RSS feeds and only 7% retail subscriptions. The RSS is not what I expected from this segment; the great majority who go directly to blogs suggest considerable reader loyalty. Almost 74% read blogs daily; again something of a surprise to me.

What are they looking for? Information and fun are the two top categories; tis may imply that these people have more time to just read for entertainment than some younger groups. There’s a pretty high level of socializing here too.

Elders are looking for useful content, entertaining content, and connectedness—and a surprising number are looking for it on the web. That’s something else that’s only going to grow in the coming years. Marketers need to connect with this group online!

Building a Trusted Business Blog

This week’s (June 2) cover article in Business Week is an update of their popular 2005 article on blogs. I’m making a direct link to it because it’s on the home page. I took the opportunity to read BW’s Terms of Use again (last updated April 2007) and found that the policy against “deep linking” is still there. In spite of that, the authors of the cover story clearly “get it,” as far as social media is concerned and the article is well worth reading. Not so all the other editors at BW. Maria Bartiromo’s interesting interview with Chris DeWolfe of MySpace has an edited-in definition: “A click-through is a measure of user engagement with an ad.” Hardly; Eric T. Peterson has an excellent discussion of the effort going into developing a valid measure of engagement to replace click-through as a key metric.

About the time of the first article a colleague said to me that if it’s on the cover of a major magazine, it’s mainstream (before we began doing it; true of many companies). It still is. One of the “alt tags” on the cover of the print magazine captures managers’ worst fears. “Get this: One worker’s ramblings on these networks could land a megadeal or sink the company.” Overblown, but basically true. There are ways of participating in the space while maintaining the integrity of the brand and the corporation. I’ve written about examples, good and bad and about the importance of transparency. Recently one of my students brought a set of corporate policies on blogging to my attention, and this seems like a good time to review them. Thanks, Noah!

I’ve taken some of the best features of several in order to suggest what your corporate blogging policy should cover. Here are important issues:

•Coverage. All employees who blog who so identify themselves are covered. Purely personal blogs, with no reference to the company, are not covered.
•Privacy. Employee blogs must link to the corporate privacy policy and abide by its terms.
•Write well and clearly in a way that promotes interactivity. Make the style lively and personal; write about what you know and maintain your focus. Keep the blog active. Allow both email subscription and RSS feeds. Use images freely, but be constantly aware of intellectual property issues.
•Be responsive. Encourage comments and discussion. Remove only material that is inappropriate under this policy or generally offensive. Reply to comments and emails in so far as you can. Never let a negative comment go unanswered, but insist that you and your readers be civil.
•Be truthful. Identify yourself and post as detailed a profile as you wish, being aware of your own privacy. Never plagiarize; quote, link and otherwise identify content created by others. Be accurate; correct mistakes promptly.
•Be transparent. Include a statement that these are personal opinions and do not represent the company. If any of your activities create a conflict of interest, reveal it.
•Be professional. Don’t say anything that reflects badly on yourself or your employer. Don’t say anything that is derogatory to colleagues or customers or that reveals confidential information.

Charlene Li of Forrester has a good list, updated frequently, of corporate blogging policies that you can review. As you do so, think about any special needs and requirements created by your own circumstances.

Corporate blogs should be monitored, lightly. One approach is to make the marketing communications function the oversight entity. I sugest that brand/operating managers be the monitors. RSS feeds bring new material directly to them. In a very short period of time each day they gain insight into what employees are thinking and doing. This creates an excellent employee feedback channel with the possibility of being excellent insight into what customers and others think.

Does this policy outline apply to other types of networking, Twitter (often described as microblogging, for example)? Probably. Does it apply to other types of networks from personal Flickr sites to Facebook pages to LinkedIn profiles? Probably it does; the basic issue is still whether the person is identified as an employee. Purely personal pages may still deserve mention on the grounds that everything is connected to everything else these days (less than six degrees of separation?) and personal behavior should be acceptable to one’s employer. It would be nice if we could keep personal and work life completely separate, but it’s not that kind of world.

And it’s not a reason to fail to participate in the social media ecosystem that is fast becoming the communications standard around the world.

The News Media and Marketers

I have friends and colleagues who are bemused by the fact that a lot of people get most or all of their news from the Internet. I’m not because I’m one of those people. I read more “hard news” from traditional sources because they are fed to me by email and RSS. I supplement that with trusted Internet sources--some run by traditional media, many by trusted Internet publishers. I’m always tempted to add “even though I’m not part of the demographic,” but that assumes that only the young turn to the net for news. My conversations with Boomers suggest that many of them see the Internet as a major news source also. A Pew post from last week gives several more interesting references that support the argument.

Over the long weekend I stumbled onto an interesting report on the broader subject of changing journalism. The report by The Media Center of the American Press Institute is full of food for thought. It begins by saying , “In this report we describe a landscape in which citizens are increasingly informed – and inform each other – through means and relationships that disrupt journalism as it has been traditionally practiced.” There is an agenda; the report calls for a new journalism think tank/research center, but they make a cogent argument for a change that is dramatically affecting marketers. Unfortunately, the full report is 61 pages long; the shorter summary doesn’t deal with the issues most relevant to marketers. So here are some of my take-aways if the Walter Matthau imagery doesn’t completely convince you.

They call it We Media:

WE MEDIA: Audiences, not institutions, are shaping the future of news and information. The emerging ecosystem relies on a symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media. Civic, social and economic systems are set in motion. Standards of trust, influence and relevance are being redefined.(page 7)

It’s a complex ecosystem in which citizen journalists both compete with and provide sources to traditional media vehicles. See some great stores on pages 12 – 14. Did you remember that a blogger saw John Kerry’s plane take off, snapped the Kerry-Edwards sign with her cam phone, and posted it on her blog? She beat the Democratic committee announcement of the vice-presidential choice by 1 hour and traditional newspapers by 24 hours. I didn’t.

It has become a complex ecosystem with citizen journalists operating under different rules from traditional journalists and trust being a major issue for both (see the stories to refresh your memory). This graphic shows The Media Center’s view of the ecosystem (page 15). The image is pixilated in the original, but I can read Filtering of the News in the top quadrant and Conversation in the right. Maybe someone will fill the other two boxes in for us.

If you don’t have time to read anything else, I’d suggest the Convergence section on pages 21 – 28. It’s a thoughtful discussion of where the business models are/should be heading. They summarize by saying:

Unfortunately, the defensive strategies [reliance on the advertising-supported model] have yielded mostly narrow, and largely disappointing, results. Even the most successful online operations – those at The New York Times, Knight Ridder and Tribune companies – have generated revenues equivalent to less than 4 percent (and typically 2 percent or less) of total revenues at news companies. These meager revenues fail to replace losses of 15 percent or more in print classifieds and display advertising – advertising that has migrated to the Internet – in each of the past three years. Not only have online news operations failed to replace this lost business, they have failed to either create a growth strategy or to define news media in the visible future. Most of the $10.5 billion in online revenue generated in 2004 will go to the top 50 Internet sites such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and eBays. Only a handful of news sites – CNN.com, USAToday.com, New York Times.com, and MSNBC.com – crack that list, sharing less than $100 million in revenue, or a relative sliver of Yahoo’s $50 billion market cap.(page 28)


The lengthy ending section on the industry (page 52 on) is also relevant to marketers. This brief summary captures a great deal of it (page 4).

I recently quoted the statistics that suggest that advertising expenditures are not keeping up with the changing media habits of the consumer. This study puts a flesh on the bones of that argument.

Marketers must shift their efforts to the content channels where their customers are. And they must not rest on the comfortable assumption that it is only the young who rely on the Internet for most of their information. Two reasons; first, it’s not true of demographics up to, and increasingly including, Boomers. Second, the younger demographics—Gens X through Z, if you will—are going to get older, and they’re going to continue to rely on non-traditional, interactive, user-generated media. There will be ongoing change in specific channels, but the trend is inexorable and it's ongoing. The disruptive change we have seen so far is not over. Marketers need to be riding the wave, not fighting it!

Men, Women and Social Networking Data

Late yesterday afternoon a headline on this subject caught my attention. It must say something about the rapidity of change and news in this space that this morning I can’t find it on either of the sites where I think I saw it! Fortunately, I used the time-honored tactic of making a cryptic note on a sticky pad and it led me back to the site Rapleaf.

I was looking for the data from their social media study, but on the way I took a small detour. Who can resist looking up their own email address to see what’s out there. The site knows correctly that I belong to Facebook and LinkedIn. It also has my Amazon Wish List—wonder how they got that? The data on my profile all came from MySpace (try it yourself, and you’ll see). I thought I had cancelled that account a long time ago. The link was connected to my very minimal profile on MySpace that still exists. I looked up the directions and tried to cancel the account—we’ll see.
Having satisfied my curiosity, I looked for the study. It’s not terribly new having been released in November 2007. It’s also not comprehensive; it covers only social networks on Google’s Open Social platform. Still, it’s very interesting. I just choose to take headlines from various articles on it; that gives you the links:

•The Social Media Gender Gap (Business Week, May 18, 2008)
•Women ‘Lead the Way” in Social Networking (UK)
•Women ‘Hold Down the Fort’ of Social Networking (UK)
•Women ‘Outpacing Men’ on Social Media (UK)
•More Men are Uber Connectors
•Men More Likely to Use Social Networking for Business
•Women Make More Friends on Social Networks
•Women Like to Socialize But Men Are All Business on Social Networks
•Men and Women Differ on Social Networks

Paints an interesting picture, even if you just read the headlines! But there’s more. They offer business services that, according to the site:



Analyze the social web footprint of your consumers to effectively plan online ad campaigns and engage with your consumers across social networks.




Discover the demographics of your customer base, including age and gender groups across social sites.





Identify influencers and friend groups among your consumers, to drive new referrals and viral marketing.


Yes, there are privacy issues. But it gives marketers who want to reach users of social networks not only a lot to think about, but a tool that may help them connect with networkers.