Repower America's Video Wall

As the climate summit began in Copenhagen I received this email from Repower America. While none of the supporting activities are strikingly new, some of them are interesting.

Their communications in and from Copenhagen center around a wall created just for the purpose. It’s worth either watching the video or going directly there. Videos on walls are nothing new; a video wall is new to me. So much for the technology. The content blends contributions from corporate promoters of efforts to halt climate change with the submissions of well-known people in the field and of the general public. That alone is interesting. The corporate activists are interesting; some are acting in terms of their mission, some clearly in self interest, and others were something of a surprise to me. You can mouse-over the wall and see for yourself.
It took effort to get the wall up and provisioned with a credible number of videos in just a month. I’m sure that they did a lot of reach out; here’s how some of it went in the blogosphere.

This is a little different from the usual cause-related marketing in which one corporate sponsor usually plays a leading role, whether or not there are multiple sponsors. I was going to use Komen Race for the cure as a good example; I see they’ve gone beyond a single major sponsor plus many lesser sponsorships. Their sponsorship page is fascinating. It links to a page with 5 questions corporations should ask when considering cause sponsorship. The questions are excellent; they provide a useful framework for non-profits that are considering a major sponsorship push.

I’ll make the point again. Cause-related marketing not only is a heavy user of social media, it is part and parcel of social media strategy. Corporations are searching for ways to relate to and engage customers and potential customers in a way that does not mimic the intrusiveness of traditional media advertising. Cause-related marketing presents one superb solution, aligning the corporation with a worthwhile cause and providing visibility and support for the cause. Everybody wins!

The New CNN - Marriage of Site and Social?

Very early this morning I heard John Roberts and Kiran Chetry introducing the new CNN website on American Morning. Even at the early hour it sounded interesting, so I checked it out.

CNN's web designers seem to have brought as many different types of content to the home page as possible. It has latest news and features -- both headlines and videos, most popular (newspulse), a whole banner of editor’s picks videos in a banner across the middle of the page and topic boxes with links to stories. I think that sounds confusing, but it’s well organized and easy to follow. Take a look for yourself.


It was the personalization and social features that I was most interested in, though. There are more, but here are two that I investigated. I set up a profile, personalized my weather for Boston (easy), tried to upload a picture (didn’t work), and followed some topics, which John and Kiran said was easy. I didn’t find it so, at least initially, but as you can see, I did make it work. I wanted to follow Tech and thought I’d get latest headlines. All the RSS feeds to that macro level of topics are still there, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. What I found was that I had to read an article; at the end there was a Follow This Topic button. Hitting that button usually gave me several keyword-type choices which then showed up on my profile page. The topics are rather micro for my taste, but it will be interesting to follow them for awhile and see what shows up. You can follow up to 12 topics, which on the one hand is enough to keep up with, but on the other hand may not give the reader much of a perspective, given the small scope of most of the topics.

I’m not an iReporter, but I was interested in what’s happening on the citizen journalism front. What was new to me was the concept of “vetted” iReports. These reports have been checked (for correctness, acceptability, they don’t say exactly what) by CNN editors. One assumes that’s an attempt to give credibility to citizen journalism. On the iReport main page they have an Assignment Desk where readers can get story ideas while in search of their 15 minutes of fame. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real purpose, for CNN or for local news sites. News happens and often reporters aren’t on the scene, but people with their phone cameras are. With that in mind, CNN just launched an iPhone app so people can upload iReports directly from 3GS iPhones. Events and breaking news seem to be the whole point!

As I looked as this I was reminded of a section of last year’s Razorfish FEED report (now hard to find but is on SlideShare). The chapter on usability/Dr. Nielsen is what I was recalling and here is the provocative quote:

The New Building Blocks

Jakob says:
People don’t read your websites; use a different editorial style and make your pages “scannable.”

We say:
Throw away your concept of primarily designing “pages” as building blocks and start designing experiences. (slide 20)

I think that’s what CNN is trying to do. Call it engagement, call it offering experiences, it may be a guidepost on the road to the future of the web. It’s an experiment worth following.

Carefully-Monitored Community for Students and Their Parents

I’ve spent most of my adult life on college campuses and an innovative approach to communicating with a college community always interests me. So I was interested in the Auburn Family site when a colleague sent me the link—thanks, Nancy!

First, let’s be clear about what the problem is. Colleges and universities don’t want parents and alumni to hear or see the raw, unfiltered accounts of what their students are doing; you know, the kinds of things that all-too-frequently show up on MySpace and Facebook. Students have the same problem; they don’t want their parents to know all of what they are doing at school. This problem led to the unceremonious closing of some of the early social networks that schools set up. This is well known in the higher education community, and schools have struggling with a way to give voice to their students—in a way that will not alienate their parents and the alumni of the school, the latter being donors, of course.

Auburn University has come up with a model that has promise. The concept comes from public relations professor Robert French and 30 of his design and management students designed and built it and currently do most of the posting. The site was launched on or about September 20 and at this moment it has 1,386 members. Take a look at the pictures; it appears to be a nice mix of students and parents. While you’re on the site you can hear the Auburn War Eagle fight song and, oh yes, there’s a link to the admissions office.


No secret is made of the fact that the site is under the total control of the students, their professor, and the University. Here is a quote from their site guidelines:

Because Auburn prides itself on its friendliness and thinks of itself as a family, and because this site will attract prospective students and visitors who want to know more about Auburn, photos, comments, and other postings must not be offensive or suggestive in any way. Since the space being utilized is part of the Auburn.edu domain, the university reserves the right to remove any postings and content at any time. (this phrase is underlined in the original)
All posts and comments are moderated on stories and videos posted here. Your posts will be moderated as soon as possible. The site is monitored throughout the day. (underline and bold theirs, not mine!)

They’ve got clear guidelines and people to do the community monitoring. According to the local newspaper, Prof. French:

wants to make sure the site is safe and clean for anyone to join, meaning anytime someone requests approval, there's a vetting process.

As you can see from the site guidelines, that applies to all content, not just to people who wish to sign up for the site. The goal is clearly to keep this a nice, clean site that no alumni donor can reasonably object to! Same goes for parents, especially parents of prospective students!!

Will this site be too controlled, too sanitized, for some Auburn students? Absolutely, it will. They have other places to post their commentary, pictures and videos. They may just be hoping that their parents don’t see those!

This is perhaps an extreme example of community monitoring and control, but I submit that it’s necessary for what Auburn wants to accomplish. What do you think?

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!

Starbucks Listens--and Acts!

Earlier in the week Michael Estrin had a good advice in iMediaConnection for those who want to have a good blog, either personal or corporate. The graphic from Starbucks caught my eye. It perfectly captures the concept of a community being involved in idea generation for a brand.

I always wonder whether companies follow up on good ideas so I checked it out. Here’s what I found.
















The My Starbucks Idea site seems to be the home page of the enterprise. It’s where you can sign up to be part of the idea generation process. It’s on a SalesForce.com platform, so clearly it’s intended for CRM. Do the numbers in the Categories section represent posts and comments—5,483 for Tea & Other Drinks, for example. Probably. I checked some of them and there are active postings, comments and discussions.

The Idea page links to the Ideas in Action blog where Starbucks employees give feedback. I captured a post that’s reporting on the number of ideas launched in a given week. Posts are frequent.

What’s really interesting is that there tend to be 2 or 3 comments on those employee blog posts—agree, disagree, whatever—there are a few comments on each post. Comments on the Idea site tend to be more active, and assuming that a point for a post represents a vote, the voting is very active. My point is that there seems to be more action on the site that’s mostly UGC than on the blog where employees, chosen for their expertise according to the site, blog about what they have actually done. Worth thinking about! Does it mean that brand enthusiasts enjoy talking with one another even more than they enjoy talking directly to the brand?

All in all, it’s a site—and a concept—worth exploring. Starbucks has created a community around something everyone loves to do—telling you how they think you should run their business. They’ve found a way to involve and engage, and they are following up in a disciplined fashion.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly easy, especially the follow-up. I am saying that it’s worth seeing what you can learn from Starbucks about engaging customers in your own brand.

Glue Yourself to Your Friends

I found Get Glue by way of a mention on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog—thanks, Jeremiah! It’s an interesting concept, and I did a bit of exploring.

The basic idea is that you can share reviews, opinions etc. with your friends without interrupting your web browsing. Here’s what they say:

Developed by AdaptiveBlue, Glue enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you're visiting online.

They have a brief video on their home page that says what they do, but not much about how it actually works. I explored as much as I could without signing up. What I found is interesting. Here’s a capture of the Glue Stream. As you can see by the pull-down, you can get streams specifically for books, movies or music. You can just let the stream scroll by or you can pause it, presumably to follow follow the link in the stream item.

I found the most interesting function to be the spider. It has the same choices—books, movies and music and adds specific users. I choose books because the new book Free by Chris Anderson, which I’m thinking about buying, was there. When I clicked on it, I was shown the users who had commented on it, and where. That’s useful if I want to find reviews beyond the ones I normally look at on Amazon. When I clicked on a specific user I was taken to a view of that person’s reviews, comments, etc. Cool! I went to the “popular users,” clicked on Glue Classic, and one of them turned out to be a restaurant I know. Four people had reviewed the restaurant. Hum—this is beginning to sound both interesting and useful!

I couldn’t get into any of the specific reviews because I haven’t signed up yet. However, I’m fascinated. It looks like a user can get a lot of useful peer reviews and comments here. We’re well aware that peer reviews are a prerequisite for purchasing for a lot of us these days, so that’s good.

Is it also a way for monitoring content about your own book, restaurant, whatever? It seems obvious that it is. It also looks like you’d have to do that manually for now, but it’s easy to do, and the reach of Get Glue seems to make it worth the effort.

This is Web 3.0 stuff, in that it’s based on semantic technologies. They’re searching quantitative data and making it easy to follow things or people you’re interested in. As I understand it, the service follows the user around the web, so it indexes your activity without effort on your part. If that creeps you out, then Get Glue isn’t for you. If you do this sort of commenting/reviewing to provide info to other people (isn’t that the main reason?), then maybe you want an easy way to share what you do, making it more readily visible to more people.

Yes, definitely interesting!

Carz I - Can Ford Make the Fiesta Cool?

One of the car sites called it “the ultimate social media experiment.” Basically, it’s giving 100 lucky people the opportunity to take a six-month long test drive. The car won’t be available in the US until 2010, so 100 German-built cars are being used for in the Fiesta Movement campaign.

According to Ad Age, about 4,000 people applied online to take part in the program. The cars weren’t scheduled to be delivered until the first week in May, but the happy recipients are already blogging, Twittering, posting videos to YouTube—in other words, doing exactly what Ford wants them to do!
The home page of the Fiesta Movement site is a live feed of photos, Tweets, blog posts, whatever! It’s fun, and the users provide a spirit totally absent from the typical corporate site. Each “agent” has his or her own page to display all their content. There’s also a page for monthly “missions” starting in May. Road rallys, other events? It will be worth watching what they do to keep the interest up and the buzz alive! Of course, there are opportunities to share any/all of this content and a registration page if you want to be kept informed (lead generation, anyone?).

It will also be interesting to see what Ford does in 2010 when the Fiesta is introduced in the US. Will they have a large, traditional TV advertising campaign? Or will they continue to feed off the social media foundation they are laying?

The auto brands that aren’t busy just surviving are doing interesting things to reach people in more direct, personal ways. They have long known how to generate and nurture sales leads through the conversion cycle. They are learning how to generate leads in social media. I’m willing to bet that the ROI on the social media investment (cars included) would compare favorably with that of traditional mass media advertising. Ford won’t tell, but time will. If we see more social media campaigns as the focal point of marketing strategy, we’ll know it’s not only working but that it’s cost effective.

The message seems to be getting around the industry—more to come!

Are Behavioral Segmentation and Self-Segmentation the Same?

Last week an Ad Age article with the headline “The Death of Consumer Segmentation?” caught my eye. I consider segmentation a fundamental tenant of marketing, just as catchy headlines are a tenant of journalism. Anway, I read with interest. I’ve been part of some of those really big segmentation studies he talks about as well as many smaller ones. All produced value in an earlier era. In my opinion, their day has past.

Michael Fassnacht’s three key points were:

1. Static consumer segments have little value in a rapidly-changing environment
2. Consumers are never part of just one segment
3. By controlling the communications they receive, consumers have control over marketing activities.

The key take-away: big segmentation studies are out; consumer self-segmentation is in. He also uses an interesting term, “enabled self-segmentation;” I’m unclear whether he meant that to be synonymous with “self-identification,” which he refers to in the preceding paragraph. He ends with a section on how marketers can enable consumer self-segmentation, which is reasonable but I didn’t think went far enough.

I looked at Fassnacht’s own blog and found a couple of interesting posts. I’d recommend his reflections on the election (Binary Thinking, November 9, 2008) in which he rightly states that human beings are not one or the other in a given situation, they are highly nuanced. I looked further and found a recent post describing "micro analytics," which I though was important. The key steps, developed by Huayin Wang, are:

1. Treat UGC as the raw gold of data information. Find the right methodology to score the individual UGC pieces by relevance and relationship to each other. This kind of quantitative exercise will enable one to decipher patterns within the large universe of UGC, either on Flickr, YouTube, on blogs, etc.
2. Identify the right UGC content clusters to understand marketing opportunities. This will enable one to isolate potential opinion leaders within a certain content grouping as well as unveil unleveraged perception spaces for a particular brand.
3. Build a persuasion platform that uses the different attributes of each UGC element for an interactive program, all based on the principles of behavioral targeting.
4. Analyze the modified UGC landscape after a sufficient period of time to understand if the interactive marketing program has created any positive impact for the brand.

Wonder how many companies are doing something like that--not many I'll bet! It makes wonderful sense, and it's also based on the analysis approach used in the really big old marketing segmentation studies. It just uses behavioral data, not survey data--a huge step forward.

The situation is, as I see it, that the marketer can use this approach--self-segmentation uncovered by micro analytics--for analysis of content data collected from across the web, provided by unidentified subjects, similar to anonymous visitors on a website. Yes, you could link a Facebook behavior to a member (a person becomes a fan of a brand page, for example), but would it be worth the effort? I sincerely doubt it!

But there's an even simpler solution that few companies (except publisher sites with an array of newsletters) seem to be practicing. ASK THEM! In other situations, I've called that expanded permissioning. Ask registrants what they really want to get from you and how often. That would let them self-identify, at least to the extent you offer options/segments that are relevant to them.

Then take the next step. You might not be offering exactly what they want--chances are good that you are not. How do you ask them or analyze their activity on your site to find out what else they are looking for? The answer is--you set up ways to Listen--in ways I've talked about before!

That sets up a virtuous cycle in which the marketer first asks then uses analytics for deeper understanding. Time-consuming expensive traditional marketing research need not apply!

Social Media Countdown to the Super Bowl - Pepsi

Read the earlier installments here.

A couple of weeks ago Pepsi sent me an email (I’m on their list) and told me I could get free tickets to the Super Bowl. The email takes you to a site called Dear Mr. President that’s populated with videos from celebrities, many of whom like Will.i.am were highly visible during the inauguration itself. The idea is a group letter to the new president, and viewers are asked to submit their videos.

The videos are submitted on YouTube, so I went there and took a look. There’s obviously a lot of other stuff in the Pepsi channel, but it looks like over 3,000 videos have been submitted for the “Dear Mr. President” project.

If you don’t want to make a video, you can submit text on Tumblr. This is a site I’m not familiar with, but it looks like a collaborative blog. Interesting. But the contest doesn’t end until February 9, so it isn’t going to be over by the time of the Super Bowl. However, when I clicked on the basic link, I got a popup saying I had been entered. Maybe I could win Super Bowl tickets or maybe a flip camera. It’s hard to tell. But it is clear that the winning videos are going to be posted on this site; I don’t think they are actually going to be part of the Super Bowl, although the Refresh slogan is being used in several ways to tie it all together.
While I was looking around I found another Pepsi Super Bowl promotion, pretty much by accident. This one is on a blog called “The Full Mommy” (cute, huh) and on a long list of other mommy blogs; the ones that that alert readers to coupons, promotions, etc. This may be a “reach out to bloggers” promotion; I couldn’t tell for sure but the rules on The Full Mommy site are interesting:

1. Leave a comment telling us your favorite Super Bowl Snack
2. Blog about this giveaway
3. Tweet the giveaway
4. Subscribe to The Full Mommy in a reader
5. Add our button to your site

A joint promotion between the site and Pepsi? It looks like it. You can get up to 5 entries by doing the further promotion; looks quite viral for both Pepsi and the participating blogs.

Put the two together and it’s especially interesting. Pepsi is doing traditional Super Bowl advertising (well, sort of; they’re doing one in 3D). They have related promotions which apparently are not actually going to show up in the Super Bowl itself. The Super Bowl Party Pack(s) will be awarded before the Super Bowl. The Dear Mr. President goes on until afterward. All of it is tied together as part of the Refresh 2009. It will be interesting to see if there’s any mention of these promotions in the Super Bowl, especially the halftime where Pepsi will be featured.

So that’s my update for this Friday. However, if you are still boning up for the Super Bowl, here’s an advertising report from TNS. If you find it interesting, I offer it to you with my sincere hope that you soon get a life!

So the Super Bowl countdown continues!

My CNN Debut by C.C. Chapman

The world is still buzzing about the inauguration. I'm still thinking about the social media impact. Yesterday I described watching on Facebook with my friends. C. C. Chapman was interviewed by the iReport team and that's a different, new media perspective. The video has the perspective of two iReporters--another of CNN's successful UGC/engagement initiatives.

I posted this using the Reblog function on CC's site. That's interesting, but I had to go back and get the link so you could see the video and CC's comments (CNN's embed isn't working today, just as the one for John King's didn't work yesterday).

Cool!

Social Media Super Bowl Countdown--Doritos

For several years marketers have been integrating first the Internet itself and more recently social media into their overall Super Bowl advertising effort. Obviously, this is an attempt to get more mileage from the expensive TV ads themselves. While all ads require planning and preparation, social media campaigns have to be rolled out well in advance of the big day. A number are underway, and I’m going to do Friday posts on them between now and February 1.

Let’s start with one of the usual suspects. Doritos has run contests soliciting UGC for their ads for the past two years and the 2009 contest is in its last stages. In their own words, “Here’s the deal:”

"Doritos® is giving people nationwide a chance to have their commercial aired during the Big Game. As an added bonus, we’re giving away $1,000,000 if the Doritos® spot takes #1 on the USA TODAY Ad Meter (see official rules). But who will win? That’s where you come in. Visit the gallery page and vote on one of the five finalists. Your vote could win you a pair of tickets to Super Bowl XLIII. We’re giving away a pair of tickets every day. So come back and vote every day through 1/25/09."

I’ll avoid making a comment about how that sounds like voting in Chicago, and point out that their campaign reaches out to a lot of people. That’s what a social media campaign should do; it involves both the creators of content (the ads) and the viewers of content (the voters). Good going!

For more details, and to view the 5 finalists, which were posted on January 7, visit their site. Notice that the SnackStrong site is, in fact, the Doritos home page. And you may want to turn down the volume on your speakers!

"Every Cup Has a Story" - Cute or Strategic?

An interesting example of a marketing program built around user-generated content was brought to my attention by a Canadian student—thanks, Sarah! I wasn’t familiar with the Tim Horton’s chain of coffee shops, which is huge in Canada. It beats out McDonalds for breakfast traffic there and has a growing number of shops in the U.S., mostly in the Midwest.


It’s their current campaign that is interesting in a couple of ways. It’s called “Every Cup Tells a Story,” and they’ve set up a community page on their site to host it. The stories are tagged and searchable. I clicked on dogs, and then on Duke’s picture to see his story. All very cute and sweet! From a community point of view, note that comments are moderated—good idea as far as I’m concerned. From a marketing point of view note that the story page has several “share this” options as well as a GPS store locator.

Since they seem to be into social media I did some surfing around. There are a ton of Tim Hortons commercials on YouTube, most of which seem to have been created by fans. I didn’t find any recent “real” ads, so I moved on. It was on Facebook that I hit a mother lode! A search for “Tim Horton’s” turned up over 500 groups. Most of the ones I look at seemed to be the typical fan group of one kind or another. However, the second one on this list, “Biodegradable Cups at Tim Hortons” looked interesting, so I clicked through. It’s an advocacy page, urging an environmentally acceptable solution to the problem of coffee cups as solid waste.

A frivolous issue promoted by a college student, you say? The group has over 10,000 members, so there must be something going on. There is—a big push in Toronto to do something about the volume of solid waste that’s being generated by fast-food outlets of all kinds. As one of the largest, Tim Hortons is a focus of proposed regulations. Note all the related stories and the comments listed with this article from the Globe and Mail newspaper.

This really got me to thinking. Is the “Every Cup Tells a Story” a creative way to put a positive spin on the waste disposal issue? It seems more than coincidence to me! The waste disposal problem is real, and Tim Hortons assures us they are working on it, but as far as I know there’s not yet a biodegradable coffee cup. The campaign is a bit of the warm fuzzies in the midst of the waste disposal controversy.

It would be a good campaign on its own. If it’s also a way to blunt public criticism—hopefully while they continue to work toward an ecologically-sound solution—it is brilliant!

The Impact of Social Media

Yesterday the Razorfish newsletter arrived. The October newsletter is not yet up on their archive page, but I imagine it will be soon. There are a number of interesting items, but the big news is the publication of their 2008 Consumer Experience Report (get the pdf here). Fred Aun has done a nice summary on ClickZ that covers some sections of the 84-page report, especially mobile and widgets. I wanted to look at some of the general marketing issues that are highlighted.

It’s important to point out that this isn’t a representative sample of the Internet-using population. They call their sample “connected consumers” who have broadband access, spent at least $200 online last year, visited a social networking site, and consumed or created some kind of digital media. The respondents were distributed geographically and by gender. Most of the respondents were between 18 and 55. Two of the findings about basic behaviors surprised me:

1. 91% of their sample use one of the 5 large portals—Google, Yahoo!,MSN, AOL, and Ask.com--as their start point. I thought Facebook and MySpace would be part of that list. Two reasons they don’t seem to be. One is that it’s not obvious you can easily use either as a portal page. Perhaps more important is that people are customizing these pages with a variety of content that’s not similarly accessible on the social network pages.
2. The second was the age issue. According to the report: “Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments." (p. 21)

Their results support and add to other data that emphasize the importance of UGC in product purchase, even though 76% of them are fine with brand advertising on social network sites. They are influenced by what they see on those sites; 40% have made a purchase based on advertising and 49% have purchased based on a user recommendation on a social media site. Search is still king when consumers start looking for a product or service online. However, UGC is key in the decision to purchase. According to the report: “peers are the largest influencers when determining when and what to purchase. The large majority of consumers (61%) rely on user reviews for product information and research, with a much smaller group (15%) preferring editorial reviews.” (p. 19)

How should marketers go about designing consumer experiences in this environment? The report gives 5 recommendations:
1. Share the spotlight. People are coming to the networks because they want to participate. Put the emphasis on the customers, not the product.
2. Leverage the platform, not just the site. Let people post, share, and embed—distribution of content is the aim. Hording content doesn’t make sense in this environment.
3. Embrace the network, but beware of the network effect. The report points out that social activities take awhile to catch on and spread.
4. Make it interactive and plan for multiple levels of participation. Their assessment of levels/types of participation is interesting.
5. Don’t forget the business model. They point out that advertising has not proven to be the key to monetization of social networks. New business models are needed. (pages 21 – 26)

There’s so much more, but I’d like to end with two important thoughts. The first is that people really want to participate, to contribute. Welcome their contributions! The second is the importance of distributing content widely. In the words of the report:

Distribution Trumps Destination: All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations, at least as far as consumers are concerned. We’ve found that they don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world. (p. 24)


Getting your content out there is critical. How great is it when consumers put that content on their personal pages, on their social networks, and share it with their friends? The question for marketers is “where does content that compelling come from?” The answer seems to be “from users.” Then the question becomes, “how and where do we seed with marketer-initiated content that will generate great user content?” That’s the marketer dilemma of Web 2.0!

Want to Wiki?

A few days ago I noticed a reference to an article by Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review. He’s a thoughtful observer of the business scene, so I wanted to read “The Contribution Revolution.” In spite of the fact that I teach at Harvard, I can’t get access to their educators site (read that “free for review” stuff), so I looked around hoping I’d find a summary somewhere.

I found something much more interesting! Cook has posted the article, complete with an incredible number of links to examples and resources, on a PBwiki. (This page has the article enhanced with links, the one originally published in HBR, and a podcast with Scott Cook.)I was familiar with the PBwiki service through a friend, who decided to try it out by posting a resumé there. It look fine, but I think he took it down when I pointed out that it could be edited by others! So I remembered it as an interesting free service (for a wiki with 3 or fewer users) but I hadn’t gotten around to really checking it out.

First, the article by Scott Cook. You simply have to read it—for the content, for the resources, and for the interesting use of the wiki technology. He has a concept of user contribution systems that is useful and that is borne out by the success of Intuit’s Tax Almanac and the TurboTax Live Community. The community is reached on the TurboTax Support page where there’s also a blog written by TurboTax employees. Not all their UGC efforts have been successful though, and that’s another piece of learning that you’ll take away from reading the article.



I was also intrigued by the fact that he put the article up as a wiki, so I joined. I’m now getting emails when users make an entry. I’m underwhelmed by that, but if it were my wiki, I’d want to know. Cook has implemented a number of features on the Contribution Revolution wiki. There’s a sandbox where the inexperienced like me can practice before we try to edit. When I publish this post, I’m going to upload it to the "Company Examples of USG folder". That will be my first contribution, but I have a feeling I’m going to be coming back to this wiki often for both its resources and its content.

PBwiki offers services for businesses, academic users and individuals. A superficial look doesn’t show any differences between the wiki features available to each group. It looks to me as if they’re using that as a way to point out the ways in which each group can use wiki technology. That’s fine, because the knowledge of most of us is probably limited to reading Wikipedia! There seems to be growing sentiment that wikis are going to be most useful for business applications as an important type of collaborative technology. PBwiki has a number of white papers; if you’re new to the area, check out “How Wikis Enable Enterprise Collaboration.”

I wrote about the GM wiki, on which they’re trying to get the public to help write the history of GM, a few months ago. I haven’t checked recently, but when I looked at visitor stats on Compete.com, it had a large initial spike and then very little traffic. I wonder if many people are interested in contributing to a history of GM, especially in the current economic situation. I’m not a member of that wiki, so I can’t get inside to see whether there is noticeable activity. Control of who can edit is a feature of all wikis I’ve seen.

Scott Cook’s Contribution Revolution wiki is a fascinating example of wiki technology in action. It also provides a wonderful opportunity to first observe and then participate in a non-threatening environment. There are plenty of opportunities to comment, just like a blog. That’s an easy first step.

None of us will understand the potential of various social media techniques for our own organization until we participate in each one. That will mean some stops and starts, because some sites you join, some technologies you investigate, will turn out to be not relevant. That’s fine. But you won’t find the relevant ones unless and until you become active in the space. Scott Cook is only one CEO setting a good example of participation in the social media space!

What Should Marketers Be Measuring?

Last week I missed a webinar conducted for Awareness Networks by Jerimiah Owyang of Forrester. He’s one of the most thoughtful observers of the social media scene, so I took some time over the weekend to catch up. (You can download both the webinar and slides from this page.) That also reminded me of a white paper from Coremetrics on measuring social media (download "Winning in a Web 2.0 World" from this page; they have a webinar by that title coming up soon) that’s been languishing in my files for too long. I thought I’d try to pull together some metrics issues from the two. They take quite different approaches.

Coremetrics focuses on Web 2.0 technologies, roughly divided into User-Generated Content and Rich Media. I’ve selected a few Coremetrics that are most relevant to the content of this blog. You can see the full list on pages 11 and 12 of their report.
Blogs are now considered “mainstream.” How do we know whether they are contributing to our program? First, traditional traffic measures, which are easy to obtain from the blog platforms or metrics programs. Who is adding content could help identify influentials. Since Coremetrics offers an integrated measurement platform, the paper discusses in some detail the issues of following visitors through multiple sessions in multiple media to achieve a conversion. That’s important, but more difficult than simple traffic measures. User reviews need similar measures of traffic and conversion paths. If you look carefully at the Social Networks entry, there are two issues here. One is traffic generated by social network sites/brand-related activity. That’s an entry metric that needs to be carefully filtered to understand traffic sources. The other is results of ads on social network sites which are generally best monitored by ad-specific landing pages.

This is helpful, but how does the marketer know where to start, which of the many techniques and channels to choose? Jerimiah Owyang gives a strategic overview.

His strategic objectives, which are pretty much in order based on a marketer learning curve are:
• Listening comes first. Spend some time hanging out where your customers hang and listen to what’s going on. Techniques of reputation management provide a formal programmatic approach. Tools include Google Alerts, blogs, discussion boards, Twitter and FriendFeed.
• Speaking comes next. We marketers are good at that. Just be sure you’re using traffic, audience and content measurement techniques to know what’s working.
• Energizing may be essentially the same as engaging your audience. Get them to use apps that deliver content and attract them to your site. Try spinning the wheel on Axiom’s PersoniX program site to see a B2B marketer engage potential customers. The easiest metrics are participation/interaction/click-through measures. Following what they do after the initial interaction is the subject of the Coremetrics whitepaper.
• Once you identify the activities your audience is interested in (not necessarily the same as the ones the marketer thinks they should be interested in), Support them. The recent post on the new Harley-Davidson social networking pages is a good example of support. Support also lends itself to traffic measures. Following those through to conversion requires more complex metrics.
• Then encourage them to contribute content, ideas, suggestions. Owyang calls this Embracing—draw your users into the community fold. Make them a part of the community. Give them a feeling of ownership by making them active participants. Traffic/participation measures are important here. Can you follow ideas/suggestions through to successful activities or products and measure the ROI from the activities or products?

On the surface these two approaches to metrics—technologies vs. objectives—look rather different. When you scratch below that surface, you see the same basic sets of metrics, which are essentially based on the techniques you use to achieve the objectives.

The take-away for marketers is not to be swayed by the siren song of technology. Good objectives always come first. Then choose technologies that:
1. Design marketing programs, using appropriate technologies, to achieve the chosen objectives
2. Provide measures of the degree to which objectives are being achieved.

Interesting that good marketing is the same, whichever channels are being used. Without good objectives, nothing else matters much.

Succeeding in the Blogosphere

There are a number of recent reports that shed light on what’s going on in the blogosphere and how to succeed there, especially for business bloggers. Time to take a look and try to bring some of them together.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 surveyed bloggers themselves as well as analyzing its own stats. The stats on the number of blogs make it clear that the blogosphere is huge and active. A lot of blogging is personal, but business blogs are quickly assuming a prominent role in the communications strategies of companies large and small. This chart shows some of the downsides for the business blogger, but the outcomes are generally positive and include industry and enterprise visibility. That should encourage employees to blog.

The report also makes it clear that products and brands are important subjects of posts for both personal and business bloggers. The degree to which bloggers consider blogs an important and valid source of information is striking. Ok, they are biased, and you do have to consider the source of your information before deciding to trust it. People are, for better or for worse, placing considerable trust in the information they acquire. More about that tomorrow. The report has a lot of information; it’s worth a read.

How do businesses make the blogosphere work for them? Two recent studies from Compendium Blogware provide strong recommendations.

The first is a whitepaper about blogging for search. The rules for making your blog posts visible in search results (organic results are the most effective, good news for those who can’t afford a lot of PPC) are the same as they are for web sites. You just have more control over how you do it on a blog. The basic rules are to use keywords in post titles and content. Links can be helpful. Keeping content current, while not eliminating the old, is an advantage of blogs over websites. Blogs need to be active and they need clear focus. I’d add that tagging can be very useful in bringing in traffic through search.

Why is that traffic so important? It’s the best acquisition method, bar none. It brings unique new visitors to the blog and site. The other whitepaper uses Marketing Sherpa data to look at the critical relationship between blogging—to acquire new potential customer contacts—and email for ROI—read that conversion. That relationship alone is enough to encourage corporate blogs, although it’s important to note that acquisition of potential customer contact information doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be carefully designed into the overall communications program. The report points out that there’s also a benefit in terms of content. The business has to produce a lot of content for its blog. Using content wisely between blogs, email, and dynamic site content can leverage the value of that content.

The value and credibility of traditional advertising approaches seems to be on an irreversible downward slide. The value, credibility and consumption of user or employer-generated content are all on the rise. What marketer doesn’t want to take advantage of a more cost-effective channel of communications that has greater credibility with the target audience? That’s the value of business blogging in a nutshell.

Role of Content in Customer Experience

Occasionally an idea or piece of data comes along that says, “Wow, you need to change the way you think about that!” That happened to me a couple of days ago when I read the CMO Council’s new report “Customer Affinity from Optimized Content Delivery.” I like the concept of variation in customer experience a lot more!


Customer experience is an important concept. Trying to provide exceptional customer experience requires integrated marketing program development and consistently superb execution. Customer experience in the retail environment has received considerable, well-deserved attention. Customer experience on the Internet has focused on customer experience on the website; if that goes awry, nothing else matters much.

Forrester has a good framework for evaluating the success of customer experience on a website that they were kind enough to let me use in the website chapter of my Internet marketing text. The complete assessment tool has 25 items. They factor into 4 categories:
• Value
• Navigation
• Presentation
• Trust
The navigation factor deals with elements of site navigation design while presentation focuses on the way content is presented on the site. The trust factor has to do with efficient performance of the site and protection of customer data. The value element is the only one that specifically mentions content with one item, “Is essential content available?” They seem to suggest that it’s not the amount of content, it’s content that meets the visitor’s needs; that makes sense.

It occurs to me that Forrester developed this framework in a Web 1.0 world. The CMO study (download from this page) focuses more on channels and integrating experience across all channels (see graphic). Each category has multiple items. They found Home Depot scoring highest across all categories. The report presents all the assessment items. You could use it to benchmark your own activities against a leader.

What the report makes clear is that the world of Web 2.0 has blown the content issue wide open. It’s not just user-generated content. It’s the expectation that the visitor will find all the content she needs—including customer ratings--to make a decision when she visits a site. It’s the expectation that the visitor will find content to engage and entertain—including videos and games--when he visits a site. Content is more than simple product information; engagement, maybe even entertainment is important.

The CMO study has several key findings. I’m going to excerpt the two that speak most clearly to content and comment on two others.

Finding #3 Immediate Experience with Content Trumps Brand History
The study points out that recent experience—good or bad—tended to overwhelm previous experience with the brand. Take-away: One bad experience can undo all your good work with a customer, either consumer or B2B customer.

Finding #6 In Times of Flux, Content Consistency Cannot Go Untended
Companies that undergo mergers or acquisitions or that rebrand have to pay special attention to the consistency of their messaging in all channels. Take away, in their words: Marketers must implement tools, solutions and stop-gap measures that address content accessibility, consistency and accuracy.” (page 10)

In fact that’s their first finding--something that I hope we all keep in mind on a daily basis--the importance of consistency in our brand promise and messaging, whatever the current situation.

The finding that perplexed me was that corporate events needed to be more than corporate logo holders. I’ll let them try to explain that one in their own words:

"when it comes to corporate events, trade shows or even sports sponsorships, live events become little more than expensive logo placements. The integration of the brand promise and the event is often second to the public stature and visibility of the event."

Ok, the event needs to be something that meshes with our brand promise, not just a Super-Bowl-type visibility exercise. The report points to Red Bull and their Flutag game as an example of supporting the brand promise, the energy drink that “gives you wings.” Both the website and the game site are worth checking out—if you have people nearby, just be sure you have the volume turned down!

We all know that Web2.0 activities have an insatiable demand for content, the good news being that customers can create a lot of it for us. The idea that content is an integral part of excellent Internet customer experience is a little more challenging. What do you think?

What is UGC Saying About You?

The recurring nightmare of any marketer who has programs in the social space is user generated content that reflects poorly on her brand. The Internet is awash with posts, comments, reviews, photos, videos and more. How can marketers use positive UGC to their advantage while mitigating any damage from negative commentary?

Most of us do it simply—from moderating comments on blogs to using Google Alerts to see what others are saying about us/our brands. These solutions tend to be labor intensive, but they work for the small publisher or a brand that’s not too much in the public eye. When the volume of Internet buzz becomes great, however, protecting the brand’s reputation becomes a massive project.

The issue becomes even more complex when the marketer wants to advertise on social networks, which will be a growing activity according to eMarketer (August 29, 2008). How can he keep up with UGC on far-flung sites? It’s even worse when the ads are placed on networks, making it difficult to even entirely know where ads are being run.

Enter a firm that promotes a comprehensive moderation product. Keibi has a product that helps online communities identify and moderate questionable content. Content includes videos and images as well as text. They also offer moderation services.

In a lengthy presentation from a recent conference Keibi points out that moderation can be done at three points:

• Moderate all content before it is posted
• Moderate only user-flagged content
• Moderate most or all content (after posting) each day (slide 31).

Each level obviously requires a different level of effort and amount of human resources.

They stress the importance of well-thought-out terms of service. Enforcing the terms of service provides a safe environment that gives a good user experience and makes advertisers comfortable with your site (think Facebook and the difficulty it still has in monetizing its huge traffic; slide 44). Part of the presentation deals with legal issues affecting content (slides 44 – 63).

Finally, there’s a case study of Piczo, a teen communications site that has had success in creating a trusted site using these tools. From this chart (slide 68), they have the active cooperation of their audience, and that’s clearly a plus.

The entire presentation can be accessed from this page. Slides 18-44 are the most relevant for most marketers. The earlier slides give an overview of social networks. If you want a comprehensive overview of advertising issues associated with social media advertising, try this recent IAB publication. They list a number of kinds of advertising on social networks:

• "Overlay” video ads that appear part way through the video and cover only a small part of the screen
• Conversation targeting, essentially souped-up contextual targeting
• Building your own community; wonderful if you have a willing audience and the time and resources
• Brand channel (on a site like YouTube)
• Brand profile (think the Boone Pickens Facebook page)
• Brand wrappers, which are sort of templates under another name
• Widgets in all their many variations

There may be more, but you get the idea. Social networks are where people are today—all ages, but especially the young. Marketers need to be there also. Products like the moderation suite from Keibi are needed to give them confidence in being there!

Behavioral Redux

If anyone doesn’t believe that the Internet is still evolving with astonishing speed, try this. Just as I finished yesterday’s post on behavioral targeting, I noticed that a start-up in that space had received another round of venture funding. Lotame™ is another attempt at helping social networks monetize their business and marketers reach denizens of the networks. This ad was posted on the founder’s blog. It’s dated May 7, so there may be more than 28 million people 3 months later! According to Marketing Charts, MySpace had 75.2 million unique users in July and Facebook had 39 million. That’s a big pool of potential acquaintances for Lotame and customers for marketers! The question continues to be how to reach them in a manner they find acceptable.

Lotame founder Andy Monfried says that the tools developed for Web 1.0 don’t work in the UGC environment of Web 2.0. One reason is that websites no longer define content. That’s a simple but profound idea.

The proprietary technology the firm has developed is called Crowd Control™. Exactly how they do it is unclear—no surprise. The best hint is that the technology “allows us to aggregate behaviors unique to each page within user content.”
Here’s a link to their video page. There are a number of interesting snippets, but they describe the basic process as collecting, analyzing and leveraging data for marketing decisions. That’s what we’re all trying to do. The take-away from studying this site is the importance of behavioral analysis. In the social media space, it’s not about the site the user is on. It may not even be about the particular page. It could be the functionality on a particular page that provides the common thread that identifies a target market.

That describes analytics at a very micro level. Is that what’s necessary to connect with a Web 2.0 audience? And when we connect on issues that are relevant to them, will they pay attention?

Those are key marketer questions in the Web 2.0 world!

Add Amazon to the List of "Going Green"

I’m an Amazon affiliate (“associate” in their terminology) and every so often I get an email from the program. My use of the associates program is limited to a direct sales channel for my textbook, so the emails usually are read and discarded. This one interested me—both because of the subject matter and because Amazon generally does these things so well. That seems to be true of Amazon Green.

The email is encouraging me to download a banner that promotes the program. If I download it using my associates ID number, I can add it to the items that generate referral fees. They seem to have two basic banner messages Go Green and Green Lighting as well as the various formats illustrated in the email. That probably reflects product issues, and I’d expect the number of product-specific banners to increase over time to better reflect the affiliate’s website and increase the probability of click-throughs.

When you investigate the Green 3™ program, you see it’s customer oriented. The customer can select products for the program. A purchase is required to “vote” on products—fair enough. They have over 1,500 products on the list and over 6,000 “votes” (unique customers or total of votes cast; they don’t say), so people are participating. Most of the items on the page are typical Amazon promotion, “Green Three™ Frontrunners” for example. But there are also links to resources like the federal government’s Energy Star page.
There is also a blog—of course. The description of the program on the blog is interesting. Wonder how they chose the “team of Amazonians” to participate in the Green Scene program? The blog is active and informative and you can put it on your Amazon daily page if you wish. Each blog entry has a feedback opportunity: “Interesting? Yes or No” Nice touch. On another page I found a link to a FAQs page detailing what Amazon itself is doing to be more green—they don’t miss a beat.

This doesn’t seem to be “greenwashing.” I wrote a post for eBrandMarketing not long ago in which I trashed Target for one of the most blatant examples of greenwashing that I’ve seen. Amazon’s program is promotional, it’s intended to sell more products, but the information seems legitimate. And it is set up to engage employees, customers and affiliates.

I’d suggest that a project like this—if it’s really “walking the walk” not just “talking the talk” can be highly engaging to three key groups--your employees, your customers and your affiliates. How do you describe “triple win?” That’s what it looks like!