Posted on July 22, 2008
Room 214 Hosts Startup Drinks this Thursday!
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Hey everyone I would like to remind all of our readers and friends that we'll be hosting Boulder Startup Drinks this Thursday, July 24th from 5pm till the Keg is gone. Come and talk about your startups, discuss word of mouth marketing, SEO, blogging and podcasting or anything thats in your heart. Beer is free so come by and say hi! The address is 3200 Carbon Pl Ste 103, Boulder CO 80301. If you have trouble getting here and need directions call me at (303) 444-9214 x 105. See you there!
Posted on July 15, 2008
Twitter Search - Connecting the Connected
BY JAMES CLARK
Nothing like a fresh $15 million in funding to drive some acquisitions.
Twitter announce today that they have acquired Twitter search application Summize, (you'll notice the Summize.com link redirects to search.twitter.com).
The juice is in the Advance Twitter Search, where you can find Tweets based on: Words, People, Places, Dates, Attitudes and Posts Containing Links.
For anyone tracking reputation monitoring on Twitter knows an Advanced Search functionality is critical to having any kind of success in being able to respond quickly and maintain a open and current dialogue. Too much leads to communication paralysis.
Connecting Connected People
The coolest function that Twitter brings on the integration of Summize is the ability to search Places.
Now this is a real community builder function that goes beyond online communities.
Here's a view into all Twits being posted about Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain No Reservation show from New York City.
With the idea of organizations pushing into real community interaction, great ideas start percolating about what can be done by using online communities to create real offline relationships, or in-depth niche online communities.
Posted on June 24, 2008
Ask Not What Social Media Can Do For You
BY JAMES CLARK
......as an organization full of bright and competent people Ask What You Can Do For Social Media.
What knowledge does your organization have that can add value to the conversation?
What assets can you produce that are exciting and engaging to the groups gathering around a subject?
Approaching Social Media with a traditional online marketing mindset which is drive toward some conversion can be dangerous.
Too many companies look at the power and leverage of social media and start asking what can they get out of it, rather than considering what they can do to add value to it.
Finding The Right Approach
The idea is find the common interest threads that run through your audiences and then create content that appeals more on an emotional level then a product or service level.
What does this mean? It means losing the marketing speak about features, benefits and services and going to the places where the consumers have passion and providing support and input on those passions. I wrote a recent article on the theory of engaging in consumer "passion threads" and believe tremendously in the idea of getting out of the market segmentation business and getting into the passion business.
This is essentially taking the idea of sponsorship and social causes and creating an authentic social media conversation around the passions your potential consumers are pursuing.
To create a viral campaign, one needs to understand the emotional triggers, cool factor and belief behind a project or program.
Make The Assumption That All Employees Are Involved In Social Media
Now ask yourself, would the company's employees voluntarily reach out to their own networks to promote a cause, campaign or event the company has put marketing efforts behind? If not, then you need to ask yourself: Why not? Even better ask your employees why not. Find out what could the company do to motivate them to tell their friends, share an application, attend an event or promote a cause?
Be Creative
Consumers want original, authentic and entertaining content to engage with. By understanding what their passions are you will be more likely to create content that inspires and invokes action. This means you might be producing content that is not only about your product or services, but connects with your customers on an emotional level.
It could be as simple as a great Facebook application, a podcast series, man-on-the-street videos, or sponsorship of local ride naked events. Be careful with that last idea.
Posted on June 18, 2008
3 Reasons Top Brands Are Absent From Online Sponsorship
BY JAMES CLARK
I won't make you read the entire article for the 3 Reasons. Here they are:
- Agencies providing online advertising for top brands have no clue how to target online influencers
- Online advertising skill sets are vastly different from traditional MSM advertising
- Ad agencies lack understanding of the social web, and still see online advertising as display or pay per click only
Point 1: Using Influencer ID Tools Will Deliver The Audience Targets
Peter Whoriskey of the WaPo had a great post, Brought to You by .... Anyone? on how major brands are slow to move their sponsorship budgets to the web. In the article there were some great quotes that struck me:
Penry Price, Google's vice president of North American advertising sales, noted that while it is relatively easy to do demographic targeting in other media, it is more difficult to get precise information about online audiences for a given Web site. Consider, for example, an advertiser trying to reach young women interested in fashion.
"We know they're online, and they may be online more than they are watching TV or reading magazines, but there's no easy way to find them right now," Price said. The process of adapting to online media is "a fundamental challenge for the entire advertising industry."
Okay, Penry, Google VP of ad sales for NA, is right in regards to audiences for a given website, but the fact is the technology does exist today to target young women in fashion. Penry's quote reinforces the point that ad agencies have no clue how to target online advertising to influencers. They are still stuck in the MSM mindset that the site owner will provide the audience stats. There are other means at getting at this data. It takes work, but it is doable.
Coming from the word of mouth marketing and reputation management field in online marketing, we are often shocked at how few online advertising strategies focus on influencer targeting. By leveraging subject matter influencer identifcation tools such as Collective Intellect and Umbria, we actually can narrow ad targets to those sites, blogs and forums where young women interested in fashion visit.
But, again, it's not just the fact of finding those blogs and running banner advertising and sponsorships. It's about creating content that will put your company right in front of those niche audiences.
New analysis tools are there to dive even further into creating deeply targeted campaigns that connect the common threads of your audience. What does this mean? It means that a company just doesn't target fashion blogs. What they need to do is find the common "tribal" thread that runs through that entire target audience of women and fashion.
So imagine the analysis about young women interested in fashion also tells you that these individuals have a high affinity for social causes, discussions on urban travel destinations and a love for Coldplay.
NOW YOU HAVE A CAMPAIGN PLATFORM, not a just a target demographic to push your advertising to.
With this kind of research and understanding of the audience, big advertisers can truly connect through the "passion threads" of their target consumer. By connecting on a deeper, more meaningful level big brands will see greater acceptance, success and visibility online.
What Does A "Passion Thread" Campaign Look Like?
Sticking to the young women and fashion target, imagine a campaign idea that promotes user generated content involvement spearheaded by a fashion icon, donates a certain dollar amount to a major social cause for every UGC upload and awards a grand prize of an all expense trip for four to New York City to see Coldplay live in concert.
So now the targets and messaging go beyond the fashion blogs and sites. You have a common passion thread in multiple niche markets (social causes, music) that gives you the ability to run sponsorship on sites outside of the fashion world and influence and connect with other passionate users.
"If you are responsible for a brand that has been around for 50 years, you clearly are more cautious," said Kelly Twohig, who manages digital investment for Starcom, a media agency. "You have less license to innovate."
I think what Kelly is really saying in regards to less license to innovate is that you just can't take uncalculated risks. So by doing the influencer research upfront and presenting the data about the passion threads, and building the campaign and online media buying targets to tie those passions together, one can signifcantly reduce the risk and increase the probability for success. That's what the client is looking for.
Point 2: New Skill Sets Needed
Another issue is the skill sets required in online advertising. It's not the same game as traditional main stream advertising. There needs to be integration with the interactive team, development of a community manager role, definition of an online conversion, split testing mechanisms in place to make adjustments on the fly, online tracking and sentiment analysis.
I've heard the horror stories from large branding agencies that dived into online advertising only to find out they struggle to understand how to bring all of the necessary tracking, split testing and data and sentiment analysis together to define what would make the campaign a success or not.
For one thing, the largest chunk of money spent for online ads is in search advertising, those little text ads that run beside search results. These ads do not directly benefit companies putting information online. Instead, the money from search advertising is reaped by the search engines -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- that run them.
Listen, PPC search advertising is pretty easy. Yeah there's a science to it and it takes time and attention, but the goal of any brand advertising is to increase awareness and positive sentiment about a brand. So by default keyword PPC advertising is just one of many tools, but it stil dominates the majority of the budget.
Point 3: Embracing the Social Web. Beyond Banner and PPC Advertising
In the WaPo article, Rob Wrubel, chief executive of the online ad company that works for University of Phoenix, the nation's leading buyer of online sponsorship states that he:
...wants to encourage faculty members to have blogs so that when a person searches on a given subject, the results might lead them to the University of Phoenix. He speculates that the company could produce reality-TV "webisodes" involving people going back to school -- a way to find and engage the target audience.
Bingo. Rob has the vision for what is next and what will drive immersion for online branding. I've been saying this for a while, that the most effective online branding tool for companies would be to have their employees actively engaged and involved in social media.
The employee base is the most valuable and underutilized tool in the marketing shed. The more the employees get involved in the medium the more connections there are to spread the word about the organization or campaign. Not to mention the more insights the employees can deliver to the marketing team. I've posted my position about companies embracing employees engaging in social media on the Endless Wormhole blog.
The next wave is about understanding the common threads of your audience and creating content that is relevant and important to them. Brands need to start thinking of themselves as content publishers and looking at ways to increase there social web footprints through employee participation in social media sites, blogs, podcasts, online customer support, events, etc. It's all there, waiting for the taking.
Posted on June 15, 2008
Netflix Feedin' me RSS with FeedFlix
BY BEN CASTELLI
A few months back Stepan showed me interesting new service called FeedFlix. It uses the power of RSS to parse data out of Netflix RSS feeds in order to aggregate and show you some of your basic Netflix user stats. For example I hold onto a movie for an average of 11 days before returning it, average .875 DVD returns each week and 2.33 DVD returns each month. I have been seriously slacking on my Netflix watching recently! In fact according to FeedFlix I am spending $6.08 per movie at this rate… not so hot.
As of now, FeedFlix is still pretty basic in terms of social networking, but it really opened my eyes to fact that Netfix actually had personal and public RSS feeds.
