Archive for September, 2009
On September 29 Nickelodeon launched the telenovela Isa(TK+) and the Guarida Azul Web site
Posted on September 29th, 2009 by -
Categories: Clients Cases - Guarida Azul
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Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash(Jason Falls)
Posted on September 22nd, 2009 by -
Categories: Advertising - Social Media
Advertising agencies around the country are trying to figure out social media. How do we do it? How do we sell it? Do we have to?
The answer is probably yes, you do have to if you want to continue to offer a full range of marketing services to your clients, and bill appropriately. Some agencies are doing a good job adjusting, hiring smart social media thinkers and getting smart about social media quickly. Others are still cocking their head sideways like a puppy trying to figure out a vacuum cleaner.
Sadly, many ad agencies never figured out Interactive, let’s call it Web 1.0. Now you add a layer of Web 2.0 or social media on top of that and many agencies and their respective creatives (art directors, copywriters, designers) and clients services folks are rendered dumb struck at the thought of all things digital.
Their problem is that there exists a culture clash between ad agencies and social media marketing. The difficulty is the result of both philosophical and tactical problems. The good news is problems can be solved. But it will take some work.
The Philosophical Problems
Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking. It can also be said that social media is a multiple-way communications method as brands can speak and listen, but also watch other consumers talk to each other. An agency’s creatives and strategic planners suddenly having to factor in listening and observing to their communications process after decades of just shouting from the roof tops presents a seismic culture shift.
Social media is also about building relationships. Advertising is about driving people to a buying decision. In fact, I would propose that in most cases, advertising has nothing to do with a relationship. It’s all about persuading someone to take action, not discussing the decision-making process and becoming a trusted resource for the person choosing. As Chris Heuer says, good marketing today doesn’t try to sell the customer on something. It tries to help them buy it.
Similarly, it can be said that the essence of social media, in many ways, is good customer service. I would propose that, with exceptions certainly, advertising agencies have never cared about serving the customer. They care about making the sale. Advertising is most often used to drive customers to purchase, not care for them after the fact.
So, philosophically, advertising and social media are very different. Creatives, client services folks, account planners and the like are being asked to undertake a new method of communications that runs counter to everything they’ve ever been taught.
The Tactical Problems
Peel off a layer or two in the social media and advertising comparison and you start to see some of the real reasons ad agencies struggle with social media. Please note that I offer these opinions as generalizations but not as blanket statements. There are lots of creatives, planners and the like out there who understand the social and digital worlds. While I’m sure I may furl a brow or two with this, I’m applying general truths I’ve seen through experience working for and with and asking questions about several advertising agencies over the last few years.
First, advertising creatives are taught and still primarily focus on TV, print and outdoor advertising. Despite the media trends, art schools either aren’t pushing students hard enough toward web-centric, or even web-inclusive, work; or many of today’s creatives are lost in filling their “book,” not realizing digital is the type of compelling art agencies are in desperate need of.
Also, art directors and designers are often focused on the art, not the experience. User experience, whether tactile and off-line or virtual and on-, creates compelling engagement with consumers. Art often times is just pretty.
Interactive or digital (website and application development and programming) professionals typically come from technology backgrounds driven by code and algorithms. They’ve got the function down pat but lack the creative side, or form, to produce effective work.
To make matters worse, creative teams of art directors and copywriters are sent to brainstorm and create campaign elements but Interactive folks aren’t invited to the creative process. The creatives don’t come up with compelling interactive because the web is an afterthought. The interactive folks don’t come up with compelling interactive because they aren’t trained as creatives or they were excluded from the conceptual development process altogether.
Client services and account planning isn’t taught to think web first and often just assumes someone in the interactive department will handle guiding those decisions. The creatives think someone in the interactive department will do it, too. The interactive department is under the impression the creatives are developing the concepts and wait to be told what to build. The ball gets dropped and interactive ideas are added to the concept at the last minute with little to know strategic tie to the overall concept.
Don’t you find it strangely ironic that while most people in the typical advertising agency these days know little about digital and interactive, not to mention social media, that every advertising execution contains one consistent feature besides the logo: The website address?
Another tactical problem is that social media revolves around content creation. Not only are ad agencies not capable or prepared to create the volume and type of content required to populate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube and more, but social media content must be nimble, quick, conversational and responsive. What little advertising content is produced has to be run through proofing 47 times before it sees the light of day.
Providing content for clients is also antithetical to the philosophical tenants of social media. If I’m engaging in a conversation about a product as a consumer, who is a more trustworthy person to engage with, the brand manager for the product or some account guy at the ad agency that represents the product? The client is always more qualified to be the person or persons engaging with consumers about the brand.
Content creation also doesn’t scale well and is problematic for billing. Let’s say you have 20 brands producing social media content and you hire two people to produce that content. Depending upon the brand, audience and strategy, if they’re doing a good job, they’re producing an average of a blog post, Facebook content, several Tweets and perhaps video, images or some other type of content for each client every day. Can you write 10 blog posts in a day?
And how about this billing scenario: Let’s say a full-time agency employee producing content for a client is working 10 hours per week on that client’s social media efforts. They’re billed out at roughly $75 per hour. At that rate, which is conservative in price and volume, you’re billing $36,000 per year for their services as an agency. At the same time, you can go out and pay free-lance bloggers $25 per post (and that’s on the high end in most circumstances) and produce a similar volume of content for $6,500 per year (a blog post per day, five days per week, which is an aggressive clip for many agencies). How will you answer your client when they call you with a big, “WTF?”
These are the major challenges that face advertising agencies as they transition to owning and embracing social media. There are others.
Solutions
Solving the problems does take time and resources. Education is going to play a major role. In order to expedite the list and open the comments for building blocks to add to these ideas, here is a brief list of what agencies can do to integrate social media into their service offerings and disciplines:
1. Embrace client websites as an opportunity to engage and build relationships with customers
2. Make content portable so customers can consume it where they choose, even on mobile platforms
3. Prioritize search engine optimization. People start their web interactions with search the vast majority of the time.
4. Learn that well-done search advertising and email marketing campaigns have conversion rates that dwarf those of your ROI numbers on billboards and TV spots.
5. Use social media tools internally to collaborate on projects.
6. Use those same tools to collaborate with your clients, extending the educational experience to them.
7. Read industry blogs.
8. Bring in social media consultants and educators to teach everyone, not just your interactive department, how social media can improve their productivity and outputs.
9. Incorporate social and interactive experience into the hiring requirements for client services and creatives.
10. Watch what other brands are doing on the social web.
11. Embrace the enthusiasm of your resident social media advocates by having them teach you social while you teach them strategic thinking.
12. Understand that mass media still has better reach but use that reach to build communities around your brands, driving consumers to brand engagement points through social media.
Now it’s your turn. What else can advertising agencies do to turn the corner on social media expertise? The comments are yours.
Superfeedr Blog : Time vs. Space : how do we apprehend information?( Julien-Superfeedr)
Posted on September 21st, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
Time vs. Space : how do we apprehend information?
There are several ways information comes to us, but they are either mostly either geographical or temporal.
By geographical, I mean that we basically lay-out information and draw connections between them : a map can help us understand how a city is organized, how a product is conceived, but also a conference speech is usually logically organized with bullet-points, transitions, etc…. Most of the web information is currently available on a geographical basis : a web-site is a collection of pages linked together, and even pages are “flat” : related information are usually displayed together. Comments are show under a main story, images are included in the body, etc… I fully agree to that extend with Chris and Jyri’s article about the web being document-oriented.
We mostly use the this geographical approach because the human brain also uses location to relate things together : our thoughts are linked and that is how we end-up remember things. Of course, we still have some sort of “index” which are the main things from which others are linked, like our name, the place we live in… but all that started to be connections from stuff we perceived and these connection became so obvious (our brain kept taking them), that we forgot how they happened1. Everybody started with a mnemonic to remember his phone number, but nobody needs it anymore after some time.
The real-time web is all about using time, instead of links. The connections between elements don’t matter so much anymore. Unrelated tweets stack up. Our brain is not so good at stacking things. It’s even pretty bad at that, because in a stack it’s hard to find links between things. One of the most common examples is names. How often have you been introduced to some people in a group, just to figure out 10 seconds later that you don’t even remember anyone’s name?
Do you remember the sequence memory game we used to play when we were kids? You hear a random number between 0 and 10, and must repeat it, then you hear a second number and must repeat both the first and the second… etc. It is usually very hard past 8 to 10 numbers. It’s modern counterpart is just remembering a phone number.2
The fact that our short memory is very bad (or at least worse than chimpanzee) can also be related to that as well : we have trouble dealing with short unrelated messages coming at a high frequency, or at the same time (like numbers on a grid).
As humans, we can deal pretty easily with complex information as long as we can tie things together and lay down this information in a geographical manner. Dealing with a river of news, with a tweet timeline is, on the end, quite stressful, because this information is time-organized.
I am not sure it’s one of the problems we faced with Notifixious (as there are many others), but I know for sure that we will either have to accept to lose parts of this stream of information or train computers to help us relate things in the real-time stream.
1 I really wish I could remember how I initially linked my name to me; this must have been a huge breakthrough!
2 The most common technique to split the number in 2 or 3 and ask people to remember a part each is a way to actually transform a stacked-information into something more logical, where we can draw connection between numbers.
How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet (Via Zee)
Posted on September 21st, 2009 by -
Categories: Research - Social Media
How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet
I’ve got to be honest, I hated writing the title to this post, it reminded me (and still does) of the many ghastly SEO blogs, sites and ebooks, each with their own disastrous approaches to supposedly helping you get to the top of Google. If you know me and/or read this site, you should hopefully by now realise I’m not a bullshitter and what I’m about to explain genuinely does work (sigh…again, this sounds like an informercial but I promise, I’m not selling a thing).
Anyway, here we go…
My personal site and blog has become a very important aspect of my online life. If I’m completely honest, it started with Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) when he claimed to be the most “important” Matt in the world because he ranked number one in Google for the search term “Matt”. That’s all changed now since “Where the hell is Matt” popped onto the scene, but nevertheless the ego inside me thought, “I must be the most important Zee in the world, must get to the top of Google…”
I launched my person site not 6 months ago, and have since reached the top 5 Google search results for “Zee” (depending on where you’re based)…So I’m getting there.
How?
The most significant tool, Posterous.
Posterous is a web application we’ve mentioned a number of times, and it’s no secret we’re big fans of the service, and with good reason. Posterous is essentially a blogging platform lets you post blog posts via email rather than being forced to use an online editor. The service also lets you autopost your blog posts through to other services like YouTube, Twitter, Friendfeed etc.
One invaluable useful tool that Posterous provides is their bookmarklet. A way to browse the web and in a matter of seconds post from your Posterous blog and then autopost to Flickr, Twitter and more.
The most significant piece of help Posterous provides is their autoposting to wordpress blogs.
It’s no secret that with Wordpress, the right theme, the right plugins and with the right content you can nail SEO and gain some pretty remarkable search engine rankings fast.
What You Need
On that basis, to do what the title says, you are going to need to have a:
- Wordpress blog (download) with with a relevant URL (I wanted to get high up the rankings for ‘Zee’, I manged to get zee.me)
- Well optimized Wordpress theme
- SEO plugins
- The right content (no links here, that is down to you.)
You will also need:
- A Posterous account/blog set up to post to Wordpress (takes no more than 3-5 minutes)
- The Posterous bookmarklet (drag it to your toolbar)
Finally, once you’ve got your Wordpress blog up and running, ensure you have the Wordpress to Ping.fm plugin up and running. Set it up to autopost to all your main social media profiles (note: you make this work better by NOT using Ping.fm, see the improvements section at the bottom of this post)
How It Works
Essentially, the way it works, browse the web, find stuff you enjoy and think is shareable/retweetable/diggable/enjoyable and use the Posterous bookmarklet to post it to your Posterous blog which should then in turn autopost what you just found to your own blog.
Once that’s done, using the Wordpress to Ping.fm plugin, all your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook etc..) should have received the tweet/post/share with a link back to your blog.
Why this Works
Quite simply, it’s no secret that one of the greatest determinants of your Google ranking are the number of links back to your site. If you’re sharing *quality* content onto your site, you should receive retweets, you should have other sites linking back to you and again, with the right content, you’ll see your site rise up the rankings and fast.
Ways to improve
(if you’re willing to put in a little more time, this is worth it)
- Don’t use the Ping.fm wordpress plugin, instead, use specific Wordpress plugins for each specific social networks. For example, Twitter has plenty of plugins that allow you to immediately tweet once you’ve posted. Friendfeed has it’s SUP plugin that immediately imports a blog post into Friendfeed immediately after its published.
- Install the Media RSS plugin for Wordpress. For sites like Friendfeed, you’ll see images actually appear in the stream rather than just links back.
- Post frequently.
via
Why corporate blogging is like selling uncut cocaine(David Spark)
Posted on September 17th, 2009 by -
Categories: Advertising
My company, Spark Media Solutions, is based on the premise that every business has the capability of being its own media network. Given the endless tools for cheap to free production and distribution of content, there’s absolutely no reason a business must rely on others to tell their story. Yet for some demented reason, it’s still unbelievably difficult trying to convince corporations to do just that. Tell your own story. Businesses ingrained with the culture of “corporate communications” feel far more comfortable going through the traditional channels of PR firms, journalists, and bloggers.
Why would you allow the fate and success of your company to be based only on hoping that someone publishes your story correctly? Why not tell your story yourself? All of the people that companies traditionally rely on to tell their story (e.g., PR pros, journalists, bloggers) are not on the payroll. They have no choice but to hear your company’s story through a chain of communications. The net result is your story is published and distributed second-, third-, or fourth-hand.
You can’t avoid it, traditional corporate communications is cutting up your story
When you go through the “traditional” routes of corporate communications, you dilute your story with every single layer, often delivering a watered-down product. Here’s a standard corporate communications process:
- Company pursues PR firm to represent company.
- Company discusses communications strategy with PR firm.
- Company educates PR firm on their products, services, and customers.
- While initial press release content may be approved by company, PR firm represents company and pitches journalists and bloggers on company’s products and services.
- Journalist/Blogger may take that information directly and write a piece on the company or just make a mere mention of the company.
- OR journalist/blogger requests an interview directly from a company or customer spokesperson and writes a piece. Original unedited interview is not published.
Why do corporations willingly give their audience cut information? For a cocaine dealer it makes perfect sense. The content (cocaine) is the product they’re selling. If they can dilute it, then they can make more and therefore sell more product. But for a company the information they communicate is the tool they use to sell their products and services. Of course they want that information out in as many places as possible, but when you play this telephone game with your company’s information, you’re putting your fate in other people’s hands.
Give your audience the good stuff, uncut
The reason I hear the phrase “We have no time to blog” is because companies think everything else they do is providing more value to the company than blogging could. They don’t realize how much more value blogging could provide than what they’re currently doing. And it doesn’t necessarily require more time. For example, content written in a private email can often be edited to make a valuable blog post. Since you’re writing it anyway, the effort is already being extended. All you have to do is shift the point of publication (email to blog) and distribution (SMTP to web/blog/RSS).
Paul Levy, CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has made a name for himself and his hospital with his blog “Running a Hospital,” where he talks about improving the operations at the BIDMC, reducing errors, keeping people healthy, and the overall state of health care in the United States.
I’m often told by C-level employees that they have no time to blog. Yet Levy seems to find the time. When I asked Levy about balancing his CEO duties with blogging, he didn’t think there shouldn’t be a distinction between the two. “If one of your jobs as CEO of an organization is to represent that organization before the public with traditional venues being newspapers, speeches, lectures, and the like, then use of social media is a logical extension of that corporate responsibility of the CEO. The outreach potential is excellent plus you can express your point of view not being filtered by reporters, or editors, or whatever,” Levy said. Read my full article and listen to my audio interview with Levy on how his public blogging presence has brought enormous benefits to the hospital.
Make your company blog the centerpiece of your efforts
This article is not designed as a call to fire your PR firm. Rather I want companies to see the enormous value of having their own channel, such as a blog, for telling your own story. It should be the first and foremost place where you should place your company’s communications efforts and dollars. Press releases don’t tell stories — blogs do. The second avenue for storytelling should be the corporate communications channel of PR firms, journalists, and bloggers. Of course you’ll want to distribute your story to as many people as possible. The point of having that blog first is so that everyone knows where the REAL story is, the uncut one.
“Corporate blogging” is not an evil phrase, as many have stereotyped it to be. Unfortunately, research firms such as Forrester are still promoting that stereotype. Read my article “Social media research is chock full of leading questions.”
via socialmedia.biz
20% of tweets about brands( Socialmediatoday)
Posted on September 17th, 2009 by -
Is the result of a Penn State study in the States.
Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people ‘asking and providing’ product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.
I initially found that % on the high side, though ‘providing product information’ is a definition that’s wide enough to include any tweets about a product or service – I went to this restaurant today, I bought this mobile phone and so on. I guess it is true that as a personal broadcasting system we do use Twitter to talk about stuff we buy or like / dislike a great deal.
Case in point I’ve – almost unconsciously – made some kind of comment about four different companies since the weekend.
According to the study authors, the large amount of brand data on Twitter can pretty much provide you with a sentiment map if you monitor and analyse tweets over time: What do your customers and non customers think about your product, what features are going down well / not so well, and how are your competitors faring.
One to add to our list for internal clients of ‘what is Twitter good for?’
7 Ways to Make News Sites More Social
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
Vadim Lavrusik is a digital media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is @lavrusik on Twitter () and blogs at Lavrusik.com.
Journalism is supposed to be a conversation, but often news websites don’t provide the tools for that conversation to take place. Implementing social media tools and allowing readers to connect to the organization through Twitter, Facebook (
) and other networks, can make it easier for users to engage with the news content and their community members. However, some fundamental tools that allow readers to share content through social media are not being utilized. A recent study that looked at almost 200 newspapers and TV stations with Twitter accounts found that only a third offered readers a way to share a story link using Twitter, while 80 percent provided a Facebook sharing button.
Making it easier for readers to comment, take part in live chats and in some cases even contribute user-generated blogs can enhance the conversation and strengthen the relationship between the news organization and its audience. Here are a few tips on how a news website can become more social and examples of how some news organizations are doing it. Of course this isn’t comprehensive, so we’d love to hear about some innovative examples and successes about your sites in the comments below.
1. “Connect With Us” Links and Directories
Though many news organizations have a social media presence, their websites often bury the links that would allow readers to connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Featuring these links prominently on a site can ultimately build a stronger presence on these networks and bring more traffic back to the site.
For example, CNN and The New York Times, news organizations that have a very large presence on social sites, do not feature easy-to-find links on the front page for users to connect. Of course these sites have a lot of content to feature, but offering those social connection links prominently can help create a lasting social relationship that brings readers back to the site.
Some news sites like The Wall Street Journal provide a Twitter link in their footer along with their other tools, which is a step in the right direction, but could be even more prominently placed. The Denver Post website includes a sidebar item titled “Follow the Denver Post,” which includes a link to its Facebook and Twitter pages and links to other connections.
And although most sites offer RSS feed directories, The Los Angeles Times went a step further by building a Twitter directory of its writers’ and newspaper Twitter accounts that also includes a stream of its various updates.
2. Twitter Streams and Showcased Tweets
Another great way to make a site more social is by showcasing social media content. Slate Magazine hosted a Twitter Wine Tasting event several weeks ago, allowing attendees to discuss the wines being tasted by using the hashtag #slatewine and following the @slatewine account.
Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg said the aim was to also allow readers from around the country to tweet from their homes, as they tasted the wines.
The tweets were then showcased through a projection at the live event and streamed live on the Slate website for readers to follow. Weisberg said it created an opportunity to engage with readers locally and nationally through the social medium. It also brought some unique user-generated content to the site and aided in news gathering.
However, publishing a live Twitter stream is something that many news organizations are hesitant to do, mostly because they cannot control the information that is published on their website. But Michael Turro, director of publishing technologies for a national consumer magazine publisher, said a fight for this kind of control may no longer exist.
“It’s a dire situation going forward and opening up and being social is a traditional publisher’s best chance at sustaining relevance,” Turro said.
As a result, some organizations are taking the middle ground by curating the best tweets. NPR asked readers to submit their best 140 characters in the comments section as a way to celebrate correspondent Scott Simon’s approach to 1 million Twitter followers. The organization received some 200 entries and will showcase their 10 favorites.
3. Live Blogging
Steve Buttry, complete community connection coach at Gazette Communications, said a great way to engage the audience and make a website social is by hosting live blogging through CoveritLive. It not only allows for instant information from a reporter who is hosting it, but also interaction with readers, Buttry said.
Blogs have long known the value of live blogging events. The popular gadget blog Engadget, for example, routinely blogs live from industry events, such as key note addresses at trade shows. Their 2008 live blog of an event at which Apple announced new Macbooks reportedly brought in a whopping 14 million page views.
4. Creating a Social News Network
Many larger news organizations, such as the Gannett Company, which owns USA Today, allow readers to connect with one another through the news web site’s own white-label social network. Other sites, such as the Washington Post, allow readers to register using Facebook Connect. One major problem in the uptake of these social networks, however, is that many of the sites require users to fill out a mass of empty fields to register and connect, Turro said. This is often inconvenient for the reader who now must remember and track yet another Internet account and network.
“If your aim is to build engagement with a user you need to be able to instantly provide that person with something familiar, something from their life on the web that makes them comfortable with your space,” Turro said.
Using tools like Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect, MySpace ID and Twitter OAuth are helping solve that problem, Turro said. Using these tools and integrating them within the site design, such as using Facebook widgets, to build up site membership can create a sense of community.
However, Turro said this doesn’t mean that news organizations should stop being active in developing tools of their own that are specific to their audience. For example, in addition to being extremely active on Twitter, the New York Times has a social network called Times People that allows readers to share stories with other followers in the network, among other things. The site also recently integrated Twitter into the network making it easier for people to sign up and share across platforms.
5. Social Share Buttons
Though a simple concept, many news websites are still missing share buttons or provide only limited options. The audience, however, uses multiple networks. Providing the tools that allow them to share and engage your content on their networks will ultimately help you by spreading the content and give the site more exposure.
In July, sharing widget provider AddToAny reported that social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook now account for more than a third of all media sharing. Making it easier for readers to share stories and other news media on social channels is an obvious way to allow visitors to be more engaged with content.
6. Enable Social Commenting
Similar to providing an easy way to connect to the site through tools like Facebook Connect, requiring users to register another account to comment on an article can be somewhat burdensome – especially for one-time visitors who stumbled upon an article through search.
Allowing readers to comment using their social usernames can be effective in building a thriving commenting community on stories, said John Cook, executive editor of TechFlash. This is why TechFlash, a product of the Puget Sound Business Journal, incorporated the Disqus (
) commenting system, used by Mashable (
) as well.
Cook said the system is more community oriented and allows readers to sign in using their Twitter, Facebook or Disqus accounts and sort comments by most popular. It also gives readers the ability to tweet comments, which allows the story to spread further.
“It really gives a lot more control to the readers and makes it easy for a discussion to take place,” Cook said.
As discussed by Mashable’s Ben Parr, it would also be interesting to see Google Wave (
) used as a commenting system, allowing users to discuss the content in real-time. Though it’s early, there is a lot of potential there.
7. Utilize User-Generated Content
Though there are many ways to facilitate user-generated content on a site, the difficulty is making it a user-friendly experience for readers. Integrating social tools that are already popular with readers is one approach that can draw readers to engage in calls for photos, videos, blog posts, etc.
Some large news sites have built their own communities for citizen reporters and reader-generated content, such as CNN’s iReport or The Guardian’s community page, which aggregates all the many ways a reader can contribute content and stay connected. Not all news organizations have the resources for such projects, of course, but can still benefit from using outside social tools.
The Austin American Statesman website recently asked readers to submit photos that would help document a “day in the sun.” To make it easy for readers to submit the photos, the Statesman created a Posterous account that allowed people to simply e-mail all the content, which would then get updated with reader photos after approval.
The Iowa Gazette allows readers to sign in using Facebook Connect and then asks them to submit news, photos and links. The paper uses Google Maps (
) to map out the various postings of news from readers. The site was able to use mainstream tools and customize them for the needs of their audience.
Involving readers in the reporting process can create a collaborative process. In a recent blog post, Dan Gillmor, the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, argued that news organizations should be transparent with the information they don’t know and provide a way for readers to help answer those questions. One way, could be by integrating Paul Bradshaw’s Help Me Investigative, a site that allows people to collaborate to investigate and share answers, within articles.
via mashable.com
The Guide to Viral Marketing(The Google cache)
Posted on September 15th, 2009 by -
Categories: Marketing
Since its public boom in 1996, the Internet and social media has mirrored human development in one important manner: we’re now in the middle of the awkward, hormone-ridden age of middle school. As sites like Digg, Propeller, and Reddit begin to blossom from niche political communities and into girls sought after by acne-ridden social media marketers such as ourselves, we must keep a few things in mind.
Like middle school, there will always be the “jock” marketers with epic mustaches always getting laid first and bullying you around. If you find yourself to be one of these 13 year olds admiring the upper lip fur of sites such as Cracked, College Humor, the Huffington Post, or the Onion as you stare at the social networks beauties from a distance, don’t give up hope. Like the jocks that ruined your life in middle school, these sites have just figured out the elements of viral marketing at a younger age. Perhaps their marketing team flipped across some late night Skin-a-Max during their first sleepover . . . but whatever they did worked. Sites such as this were able to figure out the anatomy of social networks years before the rest of the Internet.
How have these Internet jocks diffused themselves from the rest of the virgins in the schoolyard? It’s simple: they just put themselves into the mindset of a 13 year old. As the rest of you struggle to reach first base on these sites, these are the 6 simple rules that could help you cop a feel in the world of viral marketing.
Rule 1: Be Relevant to the Girl.
Relevancy to the audience is the difference between getting your first dance with Mary Jane Rottencrotch, or your first kiss from Susie Sweetlips. Every social network has a defined identity in politics, religion, intelligence, and tastes. If you submit 120 bland blog posts to Reddit with the hope of getting a little action, chances are you are going to end up in bed with Mary Jane Rottencrotch. And instead of the herps, Mary Jane prides herself in banning your IP address permantly from the site. Once this happens, all of your friends that wanted a piece of the action on the same IP (your office) will suffer the same fate. The same goes for the rest of the social networks. If you woo them with content that will impress then you might go home with Susie Sweetlips . . . and once you hit her front, it’s easy to score multiple times. Building a reputation as a site with outstanding content on any of the social networks will go a long ways in getting you in with the ‘popular’ front-page crowd.
Rule 2: Find Your Clique.
Like middle school, there’s a fine line from being confident and being absolutely annoying. Reddit and Digg spammers are in many ways similar to the friends that borrowed all your stuff yet never gave any thing in return. If you think friends on your account list automatically go through votes on your stories, then you’re living a lie. The way to establish relationships with friend on these social networks is to become active in their lives and to entice them to reciprocate. Simply clicking through the homepage and commenting on a story might give you a little karma . . . but actually delving into the lives of your friends on these sites will work 100 times better. Friends talk to friends, and other people notice you talking to their friends. Once you establish yourself as an interesting contributer then others will begin to take interest. If you think you’re going to get a lay from ol’ Susie Sweetlips by being the emo-loner in the corner then you’re insane. Be popular. Stay popular. Avoid Mary Jane Rottencrotch like the Devil.
Rule 3: Know when to be the Douchebag.
Girls like Susie Sweetlips find themselves drawn to the “bad boys” at a very young age. After they discover the daytime filth on MTV and VH1, their love will always find a strange attraction to the boys that have no fear in breaking the rules. Your content should follow the same guidelines. While it helps to write pieces that are informative and useful, it is also just as beneficial to focus on controversial issues at some rather frequently. For instance, sports blogs such as Deadspin and Kissing Suzie Kolber pride themselves in their NFL and NCAA content; however, their backbone is the stories that focus on the player’s moral wrongdoings. Deadspin was created after ESPN failed to report on Mike “Ron Mexico” Vick’s herpes, and KSK published scantily clad pictures of Peter King’s teenage daughter. While both sites are considered foundations of the sports blogging community, both found their fame in touching issues that were considered taboo at the time. To this day, you will still find a constructive balance reporting good and controversial news on both sites. While social communities such as Reddit rarely upvote sports stories, it is interesting to see which of Deadspin’s stories have hit the front page. The moral of the story: If Susie Sweetlips wants to know the facts, there are the established sites out there that her attention will be drawn into reading. If she wants a creative, sometimes taboo spin on any of these stories then you are the “bad boy” for her.
Rule 4: Always Look Presentable.
While I was in middle school this meant wearing anything that embellished the words “Abercrombie and Fitch”. In the world of viral marketing this means having a site that you wouldn’t be ashamed of showing your own mother. Just like middle school, image is just as important as your personality and the content that has been created as a result of your own thoughts. Susie Sweetlips would much rather kiss and empty, brainless site with a beautiful Wordpress theme than your horrendous Myspace layout. While you may be blogging about fashion and find the Gucci background quite stylish, it will get you more down votes than a Reddit story praising Glen Beck. Mary Jane Rottencrotch, on the other hand, has always been attracted to your stylish layout. Don’t settle for the lesser of the two girls in this scenario. Susie Sweetlips likes the site with the style and brains.
Rule 5: Be Mysterious.
One of the greatest secrets to viral marketing: it’s not about you. While putting your name on every story with viral potential is very tempting, it’s often wise to keep it a secret. For example, if you were to “shout” Susie Sweetlips a dozen roses once a week, she will more than likely be turned off by your desperation and plea for her attention. Alternatively, sending a shout from a secret admirer often evokes a narcissistic sensation in her not knowing who has sent the flowers. If you are a company attempting a viral, using a real name could prevent you from launching a different viral down the road.
Rule 6: Think Outside the Box.
If I haven’t stressed it enough in this article . . . BE CREATIVE, BE CREATIVE, BE CREATIVE! While the teenage shouting a dozen weekly roses at Susie Sweetlips is flattering, she will be more impressed by the kid that breaks the normal barriers. If she likes cats . . . teach Mr. Whiskers how to play the keyboard. If she’s a dog lover, train 3 of them to howl at the moon. While I can’t explain it, keyboard cats and 3 wolves howling at the moon got so much play from Susie Sweetlips that even Wal-Mart is selling shirts their shirts in the store. Papajohns went viral last week by offering all Camaro owners in America free pizzas in celebration of finding their owner’s old car. While this marketing was targeted specifically at Camaro owners, it still hit the front page of every social network because it was original. If you can find a way to create content that is the first of its kind, then you’re well on your way out of Mary Jane Rottencrotch’s league. No self-respecting social media user will down vote an idea that is thoroughly planned and perfectly executed.
Conclusion: Never Give Up.
So while we may find ourselves in the Internet’s awkward middle school years, just remember to never give up in your quest to make your idea viral. While Susie Sweetlips and her 100,000 hits may seem unattainable, if you use your head then one day your time will come. Eventually you’ll hit your growth spurt and find yourself in the same group as the 10-year-old Skin-a-Max studs. But when you get there always remember the 6 lessons that helped you in losing your viral marketing virginity. Most importantly, never forget the clique of friends that helped you along the way.
Filed under: Multichannel Marketing
B2B (or B2C) Using Social Media: Start with a Revised Funnel
Posted on September 15th, 2009 by -
Categories: Social Media
When I think of how many B2B organizations are using social media, you can group those uses into essentially five buckets. Before I could get to that in detail, I felt I needed to clarify and share a view on a revised sales/advocacy funnel.
The Funnel Lives!
Despite rumours regarding its death, the sales or advocacy funnel remains very much alive. It still serves as a logical way to organize your planning as far as it goes. What do you want people to do or know? From there you can build a measureable program to affect that opinion or behavior.
Awareness + Evaluation = Relevant Awareness
One suggestion – let’s collapse the funnel one layer for the sake of social media marketing. In general, we are not using social media marketing for the purest form of awareness building, the kind we associate with television ad buys. There is just no reason to settle for all of the waste of that type of marketing. The solutions for that in the online space are all traditional ad buys on places like Yahoo homepage, YouTube homepage and other big portals. In social media, we are inherently being more relevant and targeting through affinities – let’s reach folks who are passionate about playing golf, interested in virtualization for business, or who have tweens in their household.
Because we can identify relevant conversations online, we know where to reach a more qualified participant (audience, customer, consumer – all the names don’t do justice to the multiple roles we have all become). Now, we want to reach or engage them to the point that they learn a bit about a product or service. Simply knowing about it isn’t enough. The reason? We cannot shoot multiple impressions at people in social media. Awareness works through repitition – see that ad three times and maybe you’ll remember it (does ‘3′ do it these days or is it more like 7 or 10?) Effective social media marketing is always about relevance vs. frequency. Usually that means topically relevant and via a relevant source like a peer or a stranger with expertise. This is different than ad targeting. It is more about creating “pull” through genuinely being of interest to the person you are trying to connect with.
Let’s call it “Relevant Awareness” – combining awareness and evaluation, the top two layers of the funnel. We want to reach and engage with folks enough such that they learn a bit more and become interested, start down the path of consideration, or pass something along to a friend. Awareness by itself just doesn’t make sense.
Second Suggestion – the sales funnel outlines the steps from awareness to loyalty. The advocacy funnel was designed as a similar process tracking awareness to advocacy and is most used for cause or issue marketing. We need to combine them. Advocacy = Word of Mouth = Passing along something to a friend. Every program we do has a significant communication goal tied to activating some form of word of mouth. That could be sharing a link or content, posting a comment, tweet or review, a deeper ‘post’ like a blog post or creating and posting some form of multimedia. It’s all word of mouth. Revenue-generating customers are valuable but so are vocal customers. This word of mouth starts much higher in the funnel, as well.
A lot of folks have tried to re-mix the funnel. Sometimes they confuse the funnel with what Ogilvy-ites call the “customer journey” – that meandering path through our lives that lead us toward a purchse. The funnel seems too rigid to reflect that. Truth is, it’s not trying to. All the funnel is trying to do is document the commonsense truths of the basic pyschological and behavioral steps towards a conversion point and the magic happy land of loyal consumption beyond that.I have to know about something before I consider it. I have to consider it before choosing to buy it. What happens to affect those steps will continue to get increasingly complex.
Third Suggestion – if we agree that word of mouth in all its many forms including sharing and recommending is a behavior we are after and that it can happen well before purchase, then let’s move up “advocacy” higher in the funnel. As you get lower on the funnel, the intensity of advoccay can rise. Loyal customers are more productive advocates – they are invested in the choices they have made and, depending on category, more likely to tell others about their preference.
Let’s bring Advocacy up right after the Engagement layer of the Funnel. In social media marketing, we are constantly trying to connect with people who have an experience with a product – or something related to a product – to activate them to share their story. And we are also giving influencers experience with products and services to inspire conversation. Both are meaningful forms of engagement. In short, WOM is not something that comes solely after purchase. I could easily recommend a 2010 Taurus (Ford is a client) not because I own one (I wish) but because I learned a lot about it and drove one and am genuinely impressed by the car.
Changing the Funnel to articulate and value Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing could change how traditional marketers concept marketing and communications efforts. If you were constantly judging your strategy and tactics against a “drive advocacy” goal, you woudl likely make different choices. Anyhow, its a start. Next time more on B2B….