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"

Social media influencers may not have the sway they once thought they had over their digital fans.

A study this week reported that “self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.” In other words, while some pseudo-online celebrity bloggers may have earned a respectable legion of followers and have further earned the right to carry the mantle of being a full-blown media outlet; their influence doesn’t equal that of your good friend dropping a solid recommendation on Twitter. 

Continue reading "Social Influencers Can Be Anyone, Anywhere"

For social media marketers, one of the challenges has always been metrics. How do you measure success? While we at Viget have a secret sauce of our own for such things; the social media industry is still not as data driven as some would like.

Recognizing this criticism of social media and all things viral, YouTube has just unveiled YouTube Insight.

In their own words:

Finally, we have some answers. Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

In the same way Feedburner’s internal analytics have made it an invaluable for anyone with an RSS feed and essentially crushed the competition; YouTube Insight will further distance YouTube from their online video competitors.

Check out a screenshot of the interface.

Well done YouTube. Well done Google Analytics.

Listening as marketing - it’s becoming a weekly theme around here.

Yet another big brand is exploring new ways to leverage social media tools to better listen to their customers: Intel is launching ITopia next week. ITopia is designed to enable IT professionals to talk directly with Intel engineers and will also include community sites for IT pros to connect directly with each other.

Continue reading "Intel Gets Social with ITopia"

David Pogue of The New York Times wrote about a recent conference where attendees were asked why they weren’t taking advantage of Web 2.0. The responses were not out of the ordinary:

The audience loved that one; within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. “Not enough money.” “Don’t understand it.” “No technical resources.” “Not enough manpower.” “No visible return on investment.” “Fear of ridicule.” “Fear of slander.” “Fear of permanence.” “Fear of the public running amok.”

Continue reading "Get Over Your Fear"

Lately, I’ve been exerting mental energy over what it takes to ensure a marketing campaign, no matter the medium, is sustainable. The word “sustainability” has come to mean something different to everyone it seems...it has been hijacked by the evil buzzworders.

We need a sustainable definition of sustainable.

This morning while reading Brains On Fire’s latest post my brain literally lit on fire when both sustainability and hockey were addressed.

A few days ago, Geno from Brains On Fire summed up sustainability as being real

“when the community...can continue without having to stimulate conversation and the overall movement with continued funding to stimulate conversation.”

You should go read that post.

The idea here is something we’ve been blogging about as of late. It’s the idea of relational marketing. Conversations are taking place, it’s just a question of where and how to participate. A truly sustainable marketing initiative occurs when the creators are no longer required to catalyze conversation--be it through funding or other means. A campaign is sustainable when conversations spark other conversations, which spark additional conversations, and before you know it the “campaign” has become a living, breathing brand.

So why hockey?

Continue reading "Hockey is Sustainable"

First there was Dell, then Starbucks and now there is Chrysler.

Chrysler is preparing to launch a private, online discussion forum to gather customer’s opinions on everything from product design to marketing. The forum is set to launch next month, and Advertising Age reports that with the new site,

Chrysler expects to have an advisory panel of some 2,000 people willing to participate online once or twice weekly, VP-Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl Meyer told Advertising Age. “It’s a different way to be close to our customers and our future customers” without doing physical focus groups, she said. “We call it on-demand customer collaboration.”

Chrysler clearly understands they need to bridge the disconnect between their company and what their customers want. I applaud Chrysler for taking this step; but keeping the discussion limited and private seems to be a missed opportunity. Unless this is the first building block of constructing a larger social media initiative, they may end up selling their own efforts short.

Nevertheless, score one more for the big brands coming around to realize that the web is a powerful listening tool. 

Is dialogue leaving the blogosphere?

ReadWriteWeb has an excellent post regarding a shift in online conversations moving from blogs to just about everywhere but the comments section. Whether it’s on Twitter or attached to a social bookmarking site or even a lifestreaming service, there are more ways than ever to participate in online conversations. 

Continue reading "Digital Conversations Find New Outlets"

As part of Howard Schultz’s return to Starbucks in effort to rejuvinate the flailing brand, the coffee giant is trying something it has long refused to take part in - a social media strategy. This week they launched My Starbucks Ideas - a forum for customers, fans and critics of Starbucks to share their ideas on how to improve the Starbucks experience. Similar to Dell’s IdeaStorm, My Starbucks Idea marks their first foray into engaging in an online conversation with their customers.

Earlier this year, Jesse Kornbluth had written in the Huffington Post:

It’s interesting that Schultz professes to love Starbucks customers but has no apparent interest in hearing from us. How’s that, Howard? You’re going to thrill us without getting our input? Do you really think focus groups, consumer research and executive offsites will tell you what you need to know? What, exactly, do you think the Starbucks website is for?

So perhaps Starbucks is finally waking up to the fact that there are millions of customers with great ideas for making Starbucks a better third place. And while it’s encouraging to see Starbucks taking steps in the right direction, My Starbucks Ideas will only succeed if customers see a genuine response and action from Starbucks. 

I just put down Advertising Age’s issue on the Digital A-List. If this issue is any barometer of how digital marketing is evolving, the lines between technology, entertainment and business goals are continuing to rapidly blur. Profiling the year’s best interactive creative work and the people who make it happen, it is this convergence that is defining the digital future:

“Our belief is that marketing and product have converged. The consumer doesn’t separate the marketing experience from the product experience.”

Rather than merely relying on clever creative work, brands are blending form and function to create branded utilities that effectively utilize social media to create community and brand loyalty. As one agency executive said, “The new ‘viral’ is going to be a business solution for clients.”

This whole new approach means that brands and agencies need to begin developing a marketing-as-service strategy:

In other words, marketers can build websites that do cool, useful stuff...examples include Johnson & Johnson and its BabyCenter, a deep repository of information about raising a newborn that’s a clear competitor to Bonnier or Meredith, the publishers of Parenting and Parents magazines respectively. Nike Plus, whose sharp interface connects runners all over the world, is a real threat to any traditional media owners who wants to engage with that running population.

It’s time for marketing agencies and the companies they represent to think different. Perhaps something a bit more radical like Jakob Nielsen’s perspective:

“The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.”

This represents a powerful shift for brands and agencies. Those that tackle this change with creativity and a marketing-as-service strategy that engages their audiences through useful and functional online experiences will be the ones that define success in this convergence of product and marketing.

Here’s a great quote from a recent Seth Godin blog post:

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

I love this idea.

While this is applicable to marketing in general; I think this fits especially well with social media marketing. Leveraging a relationship between your analytics data and your social media will enable you to quickly create new tactics while maintaining your original goal.

This morning’s news of Bear Stearns’ firesale to JPMorgan Chase brought on renewed fears of an economic recession. Regardless of whether we’ve hit a full-blown recession or not, marketing budgets tighten when the economy sputters. And what dollars are spent, need to be more on target than ever before. However, a recent Forrester Research report announced that social media efforts will survive tightened budgets more than traditional media spending. 

For the savvy social media marketer, the recession is an opportunity to showcase the real value of social media instead of traditional ad spending. Social media provides a direct relationship between the brand and consumer by leveraging more affordable and measurable online tools that move the consumer from a position of being blasted by generic one-way advertising, to “motivating consideration,” a process that is perfectly suited for social media applications like blogs and social networks.

David Armano of Critical Mass, posted this presentation about the 10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession:

And when the economy finally emerges from this downturn, hopefully social media will have undergone the maturation it needs by eliminating the hype and fads in favor of strengthening the tools and strategies that show results.