Tapping into your customers and your community to co-create content can be an excellent strategy for building engagement with your brand.

Let me emphasize the important word in that phrase: can.

Because sometimes, it just seems to go all wrong.

Like when Chevy invited customers to create their own Tahoe commercial, and people responded with taglines like, "$70 to fill up the tank, which will last less than 400 miles. Chevy Tahoe."

Unfortunately, CNN missed the lesson on how to appropriately work with communities to generate content with their new T-shirt generator that let’s fans create custom T-shirts out of real CNN headlines, or upload their "headline." CNN can now rest assured knowing that there are T-shirts in the wild proudly displaying the iconic CNN logo above the headline: "I prefer MSNBC."

Bonus points for the first person to submit a Viget headline to a CNN T-shirt.

[Update]

While there are plenty of great examples of excellent co-creation and customizing content, one of the newer entries to the field is Moleskine, who is offering customers an opportunity to upload their own design and have it laser engraved on their book. Perhaps altering the historic design of the Moleskine is an abomination to some, but others will no doubt find the personalization a wonderful enhancement to an already storied product. Great way to blend a strong brand with a personal touch.

Someone recently friended me on Digg, and has been shouting at me ever since. I didn’t know the guy, but I thought, “Hey, why not? I’ll friend him...he seems to have dug some similar stuff as me.” Next thing I know, the guy has made it his life’s mission to shout me to death. He’s passed along wonderfully insightful comments such as, “Very Impressed by these” and “Very Unique Art Work.” Perhaps the best part is that he friended me twice with two separate profiles...twice the spam? Awesome. That guy got blocked within days.

Classic.

Social media is a new generation of advertising and marketing, designed to enable conversations and build meaningful community. What we have here is an individual who is using new media, in an old way.

The old way: Want someone’s attention? Shove it down their throat.
The new way: Want someone’s attention? Earn their trust through meaningful participation.

Anyhow, I just found that to be a good example of the confusion of digital marketing and reminded me a bit of that cell phone analogy I mentioned the other day.

The shift from the “old” way of marketing to the “new” way is not like the shift from radio ads to TV ads--same idea just a different medium. Social media is built on an entirely different foundation and we can no longer operate within the same guidelines.

I’m thinking about creating a support group for those who have suffered at the ignorant hands of social media spammers, would anyone be interested? I invite you to release your baggage and find healing…

This morning when I opened my reader I had a few folders that had the nice little “1,000+” number next to the folder. How, depressing. I began to read through the posts one by one and marking them off as ‘read.’ One hour later I hadn’t made a dent in that annoying little “1,000+.” By the way, thanks for putting that number in fire engine red because I wasn’t already aware how out of control it is. Anyhow, in each of the folders where said number appeared, it’s usually just one blog that is the culprit and it got me thinking....is it possible to blog too much?

I decided to ask the Google machine. Well, turns out I’m not completely off my rocker because the first search result was a post by Seth Godin entitled, “The Noisy Tragedy of the Blog Commons.” In that post, Seth laments the Tragedy of the Commons in relation to blogging. In a slight twist on the definition of the commons, Godin asserts that we’re actually over saturating people because we can.

I want to subscribe to blogs that make me wish for more; not blogs that make me wish they’d stop writing. I want a blog that is selective in it’s content; not a blog that publishes everything it can get its hands on related to it’s industry. I mean honestly, who has time to read 100 posts a day from one blog alone? I know I can tag my information, I know I can just scan headlines; but why not do the tagging for me? Why not scan the headlines for me? Why not produce only the best of the best content, and leave the rest for the pageview & blood thirsty ego-blogger? Obviously there are some exceptions--take TechCrunch or AdAge for example....and there are your friends blogs that you read because you care about your friends. But my favorite blogs are still those that censor information for me and tell me what I need to know.

I think the Microhoo situation was a good example. That was the shot heard round the blogosphere. Everyone wrote a post (if not multiple posts) regarding the takeover, but I read very few blogs that actually had something good to say. Perhaps people felt the pressure to write about it so as not be deemed irrelevant.

But therein lies the rub for me…

Continue reading "Is it Possible to Blog Too Much?"

UPDATE PT. 2Thanks to Joel, you can now view the commercial I was mentioning at his blog here. Thanks Joel!

UPDATE: Thanks to Muriel’s comment, here is the link to the DirectTV commercial series I was referring to. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the exact spot, but it does have some others that are in the same vein and equally as funny. Hopefully they’ll be posting the “Blog it Out” spot soon.

Direct TV has a new TV commercial series out featuring John Micahel Higgins and a chunk of the Christopher Guest Crew (Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show etc.). I bring that up because not only did the most recent commercial I saw make me laugh out loud; it was incredibly poignant.

The group is sitting around a drab executive style oval table, and they all look bored to tears. They are playing the part of the unnamed cable company executives. Higgins begins by stating that cable TV is losing it’s steam and something must be done. Rather than changing their policies, he says to the crew “We’re going viral. We’re gonna get online and start blogging it out.” I wish I could find that commercial on YouTube--if you find it, please let me know.

Anyhow, that is just a perfect picture of a typical view of digital marketing and social media. Someone, somewhere, heard of social media and decided they needed to be leveraging the new shiny toy. It was clearly not in Higgin’s original business plan to utilize digital marketing. Digital marketing is not a quick fix or a limited one-off; but rather a long-term invested approach of discovering where your customers are, and finding relevant ways to join their conversation on their terms

A recent study by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Association of National Advertisers suggests that fewer than 1 in 4 of the participants in Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010 consider their organizations digitally savvy. Furthermore, AdAge reports that,

While every marketing executive recognizes the pervasive pull of the internet, most allocate only 5% to 10% of their ad budgets to digital media.

The article goes on to say,

Leading marketers such as Nike, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are indeed recognizing that digital and interactive are no longer niche capabilities; they are a requisite skill set for all marketers.

Currently, the way in which legacy marketing treats digital marketing is akin to buying a cell phone for the sole purpose of replacing your land line: You never take the phone with you. You leave it at home, you plug it into your answering machine, and you bolt it to your wall. You now have your shiny new toy and you’ve now become ‘relevant.’ Great concept, but missing the point.

The issue for Higgin’s crew in the Direct TV commercial is that is that not only was it too little too late; but the culture supporting the “blogging it out” is not conducive to blogging.

Continue reading "“Blog It Out” - The Confusion of Digital Marketing"

With engagement the new name in the metric game for marketers, brands are rabidly trying all that they can to build sites that foster any level of engagement with their customers.

Some are well-suited to creating their own community, while others would be wise to invest in leveraging pre-existing social networks like MySpace or Facebook. (Mashable has a post up listing several recent initiatives, including social networks from Reebok and Disney.) Recently, even musicians like 50 Cent and Kylie Minogue have begun focusing their efforts beyond MySpace to create their social networking platforms.

Coca-Cola is one brand that has been throwing a fistful of darts on the social media wall - hoping for something to stick. After failing to see the value in last year’s viral sensation “Diet Coke and Mentos,” and somewhat lackluster experiments in Second Life among others, they’re gaining some traction in their latest blog. What Coca-Cola is learning, as are other brands that are joining the conversation with their customers, is that it requires a longterm commitment to nurturing those relationships. Relationships, that quite frankly, need to built on their customer’s terms.

Continue reading "Getting Social With Big Brands"