Branding

July 9, 2007

The Simpsons: The Ultimate Lesson In Branding

I was perusing the JetBlue Web site last week when I noticed something rather odd. It seems the entire site has been taken over by The Simpsons. No really, it's Simpsons crazy over there. Marge is sitting pretty on the home page, the Title tag is now Simpsons-inspired, each Simpsons character has been assigned to a JetBlue-friendly city, and the JetBlue blog is being manned by that creepy looking Montgomery Burns guy. As someone who has never seen a full episode of the Simpsons, even I realized that something is up.

That's right; The Simpsons are up to something!

Here at Bruce Clay we're big believers of "knowledge transfer", "group learning" and "geek wisdom sharing". Living this idea, I decided to consult Bruce Clay's resident Simpsons expert Aaron Landerkin (he also dabbles in IT) to help me understand what the heck was going on.

[Caution: When seeking information, it is best to approach Simpson-obsessed geeks very carefully. They tend to get very excited and spout off an endless supply of odd pieces of trivia not usually held by someone not living at home with their mother. We love you, Aaron, but seriously, get help.]

After receiving a "brief" lesson in The Simpsons from Aaron, I learned that The Simpsons is actually the ultimate lesson in branding for search marketers. Who knew?

Turns out there's a Simpson's movie coming out in a few weeks (you probably knew this; I, however, live in a cave) and the JetBlue promotion is just one way in which the entire world is being Simspon-ized. Normal 7-11's are being turned into Kwik-E-Marts where actual products are being transformed into Simpson items, Xbox has created an ultra-geeky Simpsons video game console and there's actual a Web site dedicated to the Simpson's world domination.

It may seem a little crazy to those of us on the outside but this, my friends, is branding. It's branding so impressive that even someone who has never watched an episode of The Simpsons realized that something was going on and was interested enough to inquire about it. That’s pretty remarkable, especially since I am so self-involved that I rarely recognized anything that doesn’t concern me. The JetBlue promotion also made me realize that even though I’ve never actually seen an episode, I can still identify Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.

The Simpsons has something your company needs: Recognizable Brand DNA. Marge, Homer and the gang are as recognizable as the scent of a Starbucks, which is exactly how ingrained your brand must be into your customer's life. In order to evoke a response, your brand has to be so natural to users that they recognize you in less than two seconds. If they have to think about where they recognize that blue-haired character from, you will have already lost them. They’re already halfway into booking their JetBlue plan tickets.

Similarly, don’t make them try and figure out what Ask.com has to do with the Unabomber. You probably won’t like the connection they make on their own.

What I like about The Simpsons’ movie advertising campaign is that it’s creative in a way that they didn’t have to be. My instinct tells me that they probably didn’t have to do much advertising for this movie to be a hit. There would still be droves and droves of Aaron Landerkins standing in line the day the movie opened, but they did anyway. And they did it in a creative way that people like me would notice. They didn’t just market themselves to fans of the show; they’ve made it so that even the person who has never watched an episode (but maybe secretly always wanted to) notices that something is going on.

Like I said, I don’t watch The Simpsons but I do fly JetBlue enough to earn more than my share of free plane tickets. By partnering with JetBlue they were able to find me. And I’m sure the customers walking into the converted Kwik-e-Marts across the country are going to notice that something is up, unless they live in a Susan Esparza-sized bubble. The Simpsons, a brand I recognize but don’t necessarily associate myself with, has found all sorts of unique ways to connect with people. I think that’s impressive.

Successful companies will always be the ones with strong Brand DNA. As a company fighting for eyeballs, what have you done to foster this? Would your customers recognize you if you showed up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time? Would they be interested enough to ask you why you’re there? How about potential customers? If not, you’re missing out on your ability to Simpson-ize your audience.

Oh, and to the person in charge of The Simpsons movie branding campaign, Aaron has a few requests for your ad campaign:

1. Where is the Duff Beer, and almost as important, where’s Duffman?
2. There should be a sponsored nuclear power plant somewhere.
3. Aaron would also like to see more location takeovers: Moe's Tavern and Krusty Burger would be a good start. There is already a baseball team called the Albequerque Isotopes, why not expand on that? (The team name is taken from the Springfield Minor league baseball team, the Springfield Isotopes, that was once rumored to move to Albuquerque.

I told you he was a geek.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 9/07 at 12:25 PM | Comments (1)
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July 2, 2007

Weekend Update

Map It!

Have you tried out Google’s now “map it” feature yet? The Official Google Blog let us know on Friday that if you say “map it” while using their GOOG-411 service, Google will map out your location and send you a text messages with directions, plus a link to a map.

If the feature actually works that sounds pretty sweet. I never quite trust speech recognition systems but that’s probably because I am completely unable to use them. Michael Gray tried it out and apparently Google isn’t Long Island-friendly (another reason to move to Smithtown, Michael) and the link to his map turned out to be unclickable. Sweet. Hopefully Google won’t leave too many users stranded or send them in the wrong direction. For now, I’ll just stick to printing my directions out ahead of time. Or calling one of my male friends who isn’t navigationally retarded. [Way more exciting than that is that you can drag and drop to change your route. You have no idea happy this makes me.--Susan] - I think I just don’t find maps as exciting as you do. Probably because I have a life.

SEOmoz Hits Million Link Milestone

Over in Mozzland, Rand shares his secret for obtaining a Yahoo-reported million+ links in just under three years. You’ve got to hand it to those Mozzers; they’ve been suckering us all into linking to them a whole bunch. I say we stop. Permanently. Huzzah!

(Just kidding, Rand.)

Rand breaks down his secret link building sauce into three parts: Content, community and timing. The most impressive thing about SEOmoz has always been the level of engagement present in their community, especially when participating with the Mozzers means you have to deal with Rebecca. Yikes.

Congrats to Rand and his team (minus Rebecca). Now if we could only get you guys to stop using that horrid “linkerati” term. Oh, and I hope Jane gets a cookie for all her Web 2.0 work.

Do People Trust You?

With all the talk about community, I thought it might be fun to remind everyone about Stanford’s Guidelines for Web Credibility. The Top 10 list is a few years old now and is mostly common sense, but it's important stuff that’s often overlooked by site owners. All the number one Google rankings on the Web won’t help you if users get to your site and decide you’re not trustworthy.

How do you create a trustworthy site? By showing users who you are and what you’re about. Build site credibility by letting users see real faces exist behind your Web site. Include an About page, make it easy for users to contact you, update content, avoid typos, don’t oversell, etc. It's common sense but a lot of it gets forgotten while you’re focusing on your search engine optimization campaign. The little stuff matters; don’t forget it.

If you haven’t read Stanford’s guide, check it out.
If you have, give yourself a refresher and make sure you’re not doing yourself a disservice by optimizing a site that users aren’t inclined to trust.

Fun Finds

Wikipedia puts search engine optimization on the home page. A sign of the apocalypse? Their Say Anything moment to the optimization community? I don’t know but it makes me itchy.

How to use StumbleUpon to promote your Web site. An excellent read.

Danny Sullivan’s kids don’t know what Internet Explorer is. It’s both beautiful and totally not fair. To fully appreciate Firefox, you really need to know what it’s like to have IE crash on you every 5 minutes. The mini-Sullivans are so spoiled.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 2/07 at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)
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Lessons In Corporate Blogging

Google’s Lauren Turner learned a hard lesson in blogging this weekend: Be careful of what you say on a corporate blog. People are listening and they do react when poked.

In case you missed it, our new friend Lauren helped break in Google’s Health Advertising Blog on Friday morning by referencing, and somewhat attacking Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko. She blasted the film and then encouraged health care companies (aka deep pocketed customers) to fight back against the film by advertising on Google. What was the response once the blogosphere got wind of Google beating down a film in an attempt to sell more ads?

Predictable outrage, mostly.

Lauren bravely returned to the scene of the crime less than 24 hours and offered up a follow-up post entitled My opinion and Google’s explaining that the opinion expressed was her own, not Google’s. Wisely or not, she also took the opportunity to defend her stance that using advertising is “a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue”. So, like, if you don’t agree with the film, buy more ads on Google!

Oye, she should have stopped while she was ahead.

Both Lauren and Google have suffered an onslaught of attacks since the two blog posts were published. An agitated blogosphere cried for Google to stay unbiased, for Google’s lawyers to screen blog posts more carefully, and some even wanted Lauren’s keys to the blog taken away.

Why? Because she expressed her opinion and perhaps a case of bad judgment? Dude, someone just dissected a $600 iPhone on purpose. Go burn that guy at the stake, not her.

Lauren’s only crime here was not realizing that when you post something on a corporate blog, you’re speaking for that company. As much as you just want to be speaking for only yourself, you’re not. You can disclaimer that post up and down, but if your words appear under a Google logo, that disclaimer means nothing. You are Google. You are Google’s voice, and as Neil Patel blogged last week, there is such a thing as bad PR.

My fear is that corporations will take this situation and overreact. They’ll start censoring who can blog and they’ll begin nitpicking which entries can be published and which need a re-write. I don’t think Google would ever subscribe to this idea of blogging, but it worries me that people are even asking for it.

A corporate blog is meant to be opinionated. If you’re not going to be expressing unique opinion, why are you blogging in the first place? To restate the events of the day? Wow, that’s…totally exciting. The objective a corporate blog is to let customers and potential customers know where you stand on an issue and what you believe as a company. It’s about attracting visitors with a common belief set, finding an engaged audience, leveraging that passion and that energy, and showing visitors that you’re the kind of company they want to associate themselves with. To do that you have to expose some of yourself and suffer the occasional misstep. .

Lauren sure did that this weekend.

You can’t blog safe. Successful bloggers are the ones who are willing to put themselves out there. Should Lauren have blasted Michael Moore’s film while hinting that you should advertise more with Google? No, but she shouldn’t be afraid of stating Google opinion either and the lot of you shouldn’t try to make her. Blogging entails taking a calculated risk every now and then and saying something your boss would probably rather you keep in your pretty little head. There’s a different between blogging smart and blogging restrained.

We’ve all had our corporate blogging faux pas (I’m still healing from my public lashing), you learn and you move on. I think Lauren learned a tough lesson here and it’s going to make her a better, smarter blogger.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Lauren. We hope you enjoyed your initiation because you officially have an audience!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 2/07 at 4:21 PM | Comments (0)
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June 26, 2007

Threadwatch, SEO Angels & The Day The Music Died

Threadwatch To Close Friday

Aaron Wall announced that Threadwatch will be closing down as of Friday, citing a number of different reasons for his decision. My favorite is when he blames it on the girlfriend he “got”. Got. Like a dog. Or some kind of flesh eating disease.

Though I’ve always been slightly fearful of Threadwatch (can you blame me?), it’s very sad to see it, and its unique style of humor, go. Where else are search marketers going to go to discuss all that is controversial in the industry? I nominate Michael Gray’s kitchen.

Perhaps in honor of Threadwatch’s closing (and perhaps not), BFF Tamar Weinberg reminded me to pay homage to the three SEO Angels today. Doesn’t Greg Boser look pretty? :)

Yahoo Celebrates A Day of Silence

Are you enjoying the quiet? Of course you’re not, it totally sucks!

Today, June 26, is the day the music died. Yahoo and Web radio broadcasters throughout the United States have turned off the music in protest of the proposed 300 percent boost in royalty fees facing Internet radio. The SaveNetRadio coalition organized the day, arguing that the fees scheduled to go into effect July 15 would jeopardize the future of Internet radio completely. True that.

As a result, instead of my headphones being filled with boppy ‘80s teen pop (shut up) there was silence. Everywhere. Instead, Internet radio listeners were directed to SaveNetRadio.org which instructed listeners on how to contact their congressional representatives to protest the exorbitant fees. If you haven’t made your voice heard yet, do it. I can’t go another day without my New Kids On The Block (I already told you to shut up).

We’re, Like, Totally Social

Just a heads up in case you’re accustomed to reading the blog through a feed reader and you don’t actually click through to the site (shame on you), but we’re upping the socialness here at Bruce Clay. Personally, I wanted to do it by getting rid of Susan, but Bruce thought it would be easier to just add friendly (and fun!) Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Del.icio.us buttons to the entry pages of the blog. We hope the touch of clutter makes you feel more at home and puts you in the mood to share! Go ahead. Bookmark something. I dare you.

Fun Finds

Have you been to Mashable lately? Take a look at the screenshot. Looks like someone is trying to steal my BFF. I’m watching you, Dennis Rakhamimov.

ClickZ offers Ten Great Marketing Insights From [Their] Summer Intern that are worth a read.

SEO Blokes wants to know who’s the nicest bloke in SEO. Todd Malicoat must be totally rigging this thing because he’s somehow in the lead. I’m sorry but Todd Malicoat is NOT a nice guy. ;) I voted for Matt Cutts because he’s super nice and I heart him.

[I know I promised you wedding pictures but someone, I won’t name names *coughSUSANcough*, has yet to deliver them. As soon as the person who shall remain nameless *coughSUSANcough* produces what she they promised, I will share them with you. It’s not my fault and I haven’t forgotten about you. Susan has.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/26/07 at 5:05 PM | Comments (5)
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June 22, 2007

Usability is about Connection

I think it’s time for us to share a moment. Let’s talk, shall we?

Ahmed Bilal asks over at Performancing Is Your Blogging Stressing You Out? My answer is an overwhelming, “oh God, yes!”

Some of my stress is simply a result of being relatively high strung. I’m what you would call Seriously Jumpy. If the central air clicks on in a quiet room, someone call the paramedics because I’ve had a heart attack. However, most of my life and blog-related stress is rooted in my sick need for you all to like and accept me.

Kim had a good post earlier this week entitled Who We Really Are, How We Connect and Why It Helps to Know and linked off to a color quiz that gives you insights into your personality by analyzing the way you respond to colors. Yes, it sounds like the kind of thing most likely found on MySpace, but the truth is, the answers were dead on. Susan and I both took it and compared results. The quiz honed in on things we probably already knew but were still waiting for someone to tell us. For example, Susan is a demanding, egocentric bitch (it really said that), while I long to be validated, loved and accepted (aren’t I adorable? Damn my parents for not hugging me more as a kid).

[If you’re starting to feel uncomfortable and asking yourself how this is relevant to search engine optimization, hold on, I’m getting to the point.]

Who you are as a person and the way that you connect to others affects your business, your site and your blog and you need to be aware of it. You need to know who you are and who your customers are in order to create a relationship with them. You want to be their friend, not just someone trying to spam them.

The forces of the blogosphere must be aligning because DazzlinDonna aka Donna Fontenot had a similar post asking: Are you my social network friend or just a social spammer. In her post, Donna mentions the hordes of friend requests she’s getting from Facebook and says she immediately shoots down anyone she views as trying to spam her. She talks about how we’re predisposed in the online world to cut out people we don’t know or who are ‘not like us’. (Is that really any different in the offline world?)

Guess what? Your customers are doing the same thing.

There are hundreds of companies vying for their attention, many of which are in your own industry. They’re going to accept the friend request from the company that they feel wants to be their friend, someone who they have something in common with. You’re giving off a myriad of social cues on your Web site that directly relate to who you are, or at least to who your Web designers are. You want to be aware of them in order to elicit some degree of control. Or at least be aware what you’re subconsciously telling people.

You also want to be aware of your audience. We talk a lot about creating personas and trying to visualize your audience, but I think this takes it a step deeper. Whether SEOs want to admit it, usability is becoming an increasingly important part of search engine optimization. And part of usability means creating sites that searchers will want to interact with (yeah, duh). Are you aware how your decision on things like colors and voice are affecting your site? Do you know how your users would score on the color quiz? Their wants, fears and characteristics?

As search engine optimization becomes more about marketing, these things are going to have a much bigger impact. It’s going to be less about keywords and more about themes and relationships. It’s going to be about transparency and finding the company whose personality matches yours.

Given that, it’s time for everyone to take a step back and see what’s around them – who they are, who their audience is, and what they have in common. Why should a potential customer accept your friend request? Know that you’re predisposed to do or feel X, how can you channel that?

Both Kim and Donna’s blog posts make an important point. It’s not just about optimization; it’s about forming a connection with users through words, designs and action. As Kim notes, it’s about “the human factors”.

Hopefully learning (or at least confirming) the kind of person I am will help me to become a better, less stressed blogger, though I doubt it. I’ll probably always be paralyzed by a blank Word doc because it represents so many ways for me to put my foot in my mouth and embarrass everyone.

Maybe I should just go get a prescription for my apparent social dependence so that I can write a blog entry without picturing you all pointing, laughing and throwing things at me. Or maybe I can get Susan to quit making me wearing that World’s Worst Person & Blogger dunce cap she makes me wear. Damn Susan. [It's a growing experience. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/22/07 at 3:12 PM | Comments (1)
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June 21, 2007

Ask.com Thinks You’re An Idiot

Why does Ask.com think I’m a vapid idiot?

If the battle of the search engines was a football game, Jennifer Laycock and I would be sitting in the front row of the bleachers clutching hands, decked out in our favorite Ask.com gear and jumping up and down rooting for our boys. And we’d look adorable doing it. But do you know how that football game would end? The score would be almost tied and then at the last minute, Ask.com would drop the ball, start running in the wrong direction, trip, or perform some other unthinkable move, causing Ask.com to lose in the most painful, degrading way possible. The crowd would storm the field and Jennifer and I would be left sitting in the bleachers. Alone and let down.

This is how Ask.com is making me feel lately.

Their release of Ask 3D was awesome. I was super excited when Ask.com’s Michael Ferguson gave me a private demo during SMX. Ask.com was out being innovative again and I was psyched. But no one outside of our little search bubble knows that Ask.com has done anything new because Ask is the king of failed advertising.

I don’t mean to harp on Ask.com, but good heavens, who is reviewing these TV ads and giving them the green light? Who does Ask think they’re audience is?

There’s a brand new chorus line Ask.com ad out called “Kato” that features exactly everything you hoped it wouldn’t -- a woman searching for beefcake-a-licios photos of the creepy Kato Kaelin. I’m sorry, but Kato Kaelin? Who in their right mind is searching for Kato Kaelin? He’s “just what you’re looking for”? Really?

I’ve seen the ad twice so far. Today Nathan Weinberg was kind enough to embed a video of it so you can see it too. Go visit Nathan and then come back here. Please.

Okay, so Nathan calls the video “way better” than the now infamous “Chicks with Swords” video, and he’s right, it is way better, but only better because it doesn’t objectify women. [I hardly thing objectifying men is a step forward. --Susan] -- But it wasn’t a real man. It was Kato Kaelin. He’s made a career out of objectifying himself. It’s not better in that it’s actually clever or witty in any way. It’s still Ask depicting their users as vapid idiot searchers only interested in getting their kicks by ooh’ing and ahh’ing photos of the opposite sex. We’re not intelligent people, we’re just lonely and on the Internet. That’s…sweet.

I get that they’re trying to be funny and lighthearted and warm and fuzzy-inspiring, but they’re failing. They’re failing so bad that they’re insulting the people they’re supposed to be attracting. Instead of me becoming an outspoken brand evangelists telling you how great Ask.com is, I’m sitting here fuming over their ads. When do Ask.com users get to search for something intelligent? Do we always have to be idiots?

And things may be getting even worse. Over at ClickZ, Zachary Rodgers tells us that Ask.com has paired up with Ask A Ninja for some new ads. Now, I’m a fan of Ask A Ninja but the idea behind these ads is worrisome. Zachary says that in one of the spots a ninja asks viewers to use Ask.com to find videos around made-up words like “ningiants”, “ninjuice”, and “nonja”. Here’s a brief synopsis:

"This episode was brought to you by Ask.com," screeches the ninja as a search term appears below his face in the video frame. "Go to Ask.com, type in this ninja word twice as fast as you physically can, and you'll either get a cool ninja video treat or a sword in your head. That's a pretty good deal. I'd take that risk, but I'm a ninja."

Great, now we’re searching for made up words and we’re talking about swords again. Why?

I miss the old Ask ads that encouraged users to use tools and feel human. Smart people search with tools. Search with Ask.com and be smart. Those ads were about making search better and empowering users with a better search experience. They weren’t about “instant getification” or half-naked chicks. [And they had Eli which made them a hundred times better than any other ad out there! Team Eli!--Susan]

I really think Ask.com needs to stop releasing ads that show their users as a bunch of idiots incapable of searching for anything but pretty pictures of pretty people. (And if we are going to search for “pretty” people can they at least be pretty? Kato Kaelin? Why not Tom Brady? Or Joey McIntyre. I’d totally get behind an ad campaign about Joey McIntyre.) Ask needs to find itself some powerful brand evangelists to spread their message for them and get users talking positively about them again. Right now they’re just a bad joke where the punch line is always about swords.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/21/07 at 12:08 PM | Comments (14)
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June 4, 2007

SEO, Meet SMM

I’m back from a most delicious lunch (served on real plates, no less! So much excitement!), Matt McGee is making horribly inappropriate jokes and it’s time for this afternoon’s SEO, Meet SEM session. Are you ready?

Danny Sullivan is moderating the panel with speakers Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works Inc.), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl) and Neil Patel (Pronet Advertising).

Danny starts off talking about the launch of Search Engine Land and how social media really helped the site garner attention and get off the ground. Because, you know, no one would have ever checked out Search Engine Land on their own. Danny who?

Up first is my ex-boyfriend Rand Fishkin. (Don’t worry, we’re still friends.)

Social media marketing is about going out to Web 2.0 sites and approaching them in a way that shows you’re going to contribute. Social media marketing can help you to rule the search engine results, control your brand, get link love, show the community that you’re a participant, get traffic and influence traditional media.

The top ten social media sites to help you gain traffic are (in order): YouTube. Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Yelp (a SEOmoz client), LinkedIn, Flickr (the comments section doesn’t have a nofollow. Rand says ‘that’s hot’. No Rand, you’re hot.), Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon, and MySpace.

Viral media is great because it gives you the ability to control your brand. It equals search engine rankings through links and growing your fan base. The best sites to help grow your brand are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Netscape, TechCrunch, Newsvine, BoingBoing, and Fark.

Up next is Neil to give us the rules of social media. Hold on, kids. It’s always an interesting ride when Neil is behind the wheel. ;)

Neil starts out by highlighting some of those things you can’t do on television in social media: Pay for votes, create multiple accounts or submit illegal content. These are all considered gaming the system and are very much looked down upon by Apply fanboys.

Three unwritten rules offered by Neil -- don’t self promote, don’t add biased information, and don’t ask friends for votes. I laughed when I heard that last one. I can’t tell you how many emails and IMs I get a day from my SEO friends who are so totally not asking me to Digg and/or submit things. That never happens. Nope.

Neil describes the social media audience as an angry, Mohawk-sporting baby who will spit food in your face if you poke it too hard. Neil offends about 80 percent of the room by saying the older Digg audience is in their late 20s. Hee! Aw, poor old people.

To sum things up, Neil shares his Golden Rules for social media:

• Add tons of friends – Neil says they don’t have to be your real friends. Hee!
• Participate in the community
• Use their features against them
• Create a social brand

Next up is Todd Malicoat. Hi, Todd.

The benefits of strategic linking with social media are that it gives you control over your anchor text, body copy, theme, and provides lots of opportunities for links from trusted sources.

Todd says that spam is determined by intent and extent, but size does matter. When you’re small it’s a “doorway page”, when you’re big it’s a “landing page”. When you’re small it’s “reciprocal linking”, when you’re big it’s “cobranding”. When you’re small it’s “social media spamming”, when you’re big it’s “social media optimization”. Black is really white when your brand is big enough to survive the fallout. Todd’s deep, yo.

The first step in Todd’s strategy for social media is to establish reputation neighborhoods. Sign up to everything you find. Test the sites. If they’re good, get them some links. Build a neighborhood of sites. Interlink them within reason. Vary anchor text and copy.

Build a hub on a social media site. Todd uses the horrendous John Tucker Must Die movie as an example. The people behind the movie built up the MySpace page to promote the movie instead creating a traditional Web page because it took less time to build up and get it ranking.

You can find topic-centric social media sites by using Google dorks, Keywords + "profile", Keywords + "web 2.0", and directories like www.go2web20.net.

Test social media sites for link value: find out if the site is indexed. Is it ranking? Is the theme good (is it a page you should be on)? Placement (how many links). Does the page pass link juice?

The benefit of social media is that it’s another tool for linking. You have to know when and where and how to use it. The caveats are that size matters. Intent and extent will determine if it’s a legitimate strategy.

Cindy Krum is up next to talk about using social media for brand management and awareness.

Cindy says the ubiquitous adoption of Web technology means that customers will demand a higher level of interaction with your brand. Social media is the fastest way to move your brand forward because it encourages customers to incorporate your brand with their identity both on and off-line. Social networking sites allow users to affiliate themselves with your brand in a way that is highly visible to their peers.

Secure your social presence by researching relevant social networks. Look at the major social sites, niche vertical sites, social logical sites, blogs and forums, and wiki-sites. Once you identify the sites, fine existing networks for your brand or your industry. You should have a strategy. Know how many profiles you’ll need and where you should direct traffic to. Determine who gets social profiles – brands, products, company icons, etc.

Consider social profiles portals to your brand. They foster a sense of shared experience and belonging. Spend time on design and maintain brand standards. Keep information fresh and current. Manage multiple social profiles in centralized locations. Leverage the email functionality, blogs and billboards.

Create SEOd profiles. This includes focusing on brand keywords, interlinking brand profiles with your main site, initiating friend-ing campaigns and drive traffic to the profile. This means using natural search traffic, PPC, PPP, banners, offline, etc.

Once you have a reputation you have to manage it. Use SEO to push detractors out of top positions. Send traffic to all of your positive pages. Participate in forums and groups for both detractors and supporters.

Empower brand evangelists. The best way to empower people who already care about your brand is to give them cool stuff. Stuff like widgets, profile layouts, surveys, graphics, games, videos, podcasts, etc.

Embrace convergence. Leverage your existing marketing efforts. Overly send TV radio and print traffic to profile pages. Release, promote and link to commercials on your profile pages. Link to information about the campaign from the profile. Use profiles to get feedback.

Direct traffic off-line. Host local meetups, offer in store only coupons, use social profiles as a way to integrate on and offline brand interaction. Direct traffic online. Create a social media section on your site. Promote all the cool stuff you are giving away on your profiles.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/07 at 2:28 PM | Comments (1)
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May 22, 2007

Ask.com: Rising or Falling?

My friend Jennifer Laycock asks a question over at Search Engine Guide that I can never seem to stay away from. It’s about Ask.com and whether our favorite little engine that could is on fire or just going down in flames.

Like Jennifer, I’m a big Ask.com fan, as is Susan. Their success is our success and their failures are Susan’s failures. Jennifer asks if they’re on fire of if they’re going down in flames. Personally, in regards to search I don’t think they’re going anywhere. They’re just kind of floating there and that makes me sad.

Jennifer breaks down some of Ask’s recent behavior:

“It's a frustrating journey to watch as it seems that every time they do something great, they follow up with something that makes me cringe. Earlier this year they scored humor points with a Google pen joke, but their follow-up went too far. Earlier this year they stormed the gates of local search with the very impressive Ask City product. Then they followed that up with the cringe worthy "information revolution" viral flop.”

It’s a frustrating journey for sure. Let’s also not forget the somewhat odd billboards that have been popping up, the multi-million dollar ad campaign in the works, and the forthcoming Edison algorithm update that we first heard about during this year’s Search Engine Strategies New York. It’s one step forward, one step back, and at that rate, Ask.com isn’t go anywhere.

I want Ask.com to succeed. They have a long road ahead of them, but nothing would make me happier than to see them getting closer to taking over that number three position and building themselves up. I hope Edison will help them do it. Funny commercials and branding won’t be enough, especially this round of commercials.

Last year we had Apostolos Gerasoulis and his adorable son Eli telling us how Google wasn’t better, it was just more popular. This year people are claiming to be “algorithm’d out” and that Ask’s algorithm is on the move. Everywhere you look there’s that damn word: algorithm.

I get where they’re going, you probably get where they’re going, but does everyone? I’m pretty sure algorithm isn’t in my mother’s everyday vocabulary. She hears algorithm and she’s having flashbacks of the tantrums I used to throw when forced to do my math homework. Ask.com needs to be targeting every day searchers, not just the sad lot of us who spend our entire day achieving our life long dream of being stricken with advanced carpal tunnel by the time we hit 30. (My right wrist is seriously sore today.)

Let’s be fair. Everyone knows that Ask.com’s tools are better than Google’s, Yahoo’s, or Microsoft’s. AskCity is awesome, their blog search kills, and the Smart Answer and query refinement tools Ask has been using for years are just now starting to be adopted by the other engines. When it comes to advanced search tools, Ask.com is in a league of their own. This is great, but their traditional search results are still lacking. Without a strong SERP, Ask.com will never become more than a specialty engine. You’ll use it when you need to find a local furniture store, but you won’t trust it for everyday searching.

I played around with Ask.com this morning to see what its results were looking like and I’m still not impressed. In fact, I’m disappointed. The results aren’t altogether relevant and there are old pages in there that shouldn’t be coming up anymore. What good are the promotions and billboards if you’re setting users up to be disappointed? Fix your index, then promote it.

Maybe Edison will be that missing link that makes Ask.com more relevant, more noteworthy and more competitive in search. Once I feel like I can trust Ask.com’s results, I will be first in line to switch over and blog about it. But it’s not there yet. I don’t think Ask.com is improving or falling. They’re just holding on while we all wait for Edison to arrive.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/22/07 at 4:08 PM | Comments (5)
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May 21, 2007

Tell me why you’re Different

It’s Monday, it's gloomy and I’ve got a question for you: If it’s our differences that make us unique, interesting and worth knowing, why do we try and hide them? As a site owner, why would you waste your entire home page telling customers how you’re just like everyone else?

You sell car parts too? You guarantee your low prices like everyone else? You’re located in the same neighborhood as all those other car places? Your site looks just like everyone else’s? Huzzah; let’s be friends.

Seriously, it’s all well and good and special that you’ve been able to match your competition, but that doesn’t make me want to buy from you. You have to set yourself equal and then you have to prove that you're better. I want to know why you’re different, better, and prettier than those other guys. Why are you worth my time? Why should I care about you? Your site text, and especially your home page, is valuable real estate. It should be chock-full of reasons why you’re different and therefore better, not stuff to bore me.

While I was stuck in traffic All Day Saturday (thank you Strawberry Festival in Oxnard), Seth Godin was once again penning a short blog entry that would leave me deep in thought.

Seth advocated avoiding the Just Another Meeting (J.A.M.) mentality. The one where you half ass your way into the conference room for your weekly Monday morning meeting (M3), spin around on your spinny chair a couple times (the same spinny chair you always sit in), and then shoot spit rockets at the wall while 8 of your peers agree that the best course of action for client X is the same course of action you take for every client. Don’t even pretend you don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. That process you pretend to go through in order to justify that you needed to have a meeting in the first place? Yeah, don’t do that. That method is broken.

Instead, Seth proposes the following:

“Instead of approaching that moment as JAM, maybe there's a different way. Instead of focusing on how similar this time is to last time, instead of realizing that the similarities demand similar approaches, maybe, just maybe, the team could focus on the differences. How is this opportunity different? What could we try that might have a radically better outcome?”

As a search engine optimization company, it would be easy for us to look at the sites for Client A and Client B, decide they both need some traditional optimization work, and then present them with carbon copy site assessments complete with best practices and little value. And though that would save us a lot of time, we don’t do that. We realize that the strength and power behind every site is in the details. It’s about focusing on and highlighting what makes you different and why you stand out.

When you design your Web site, or even your business model, don’t make it a carbon copy of your competitors. Yes, there will be some similarities; there needs to be. Some degree of “likeness” builds trust and credibility for your company. But realize that in order for you to be successful you have to offer customers something they can’t get anywhere else. Make your uniqueness the theme of your site and break out of your routine.

It’s tempting to follow the competition or use the same formula today that you used yesterday. If it worked last time then, by golly, it’ll work this time. And it might work, but it’ll probably be boring and it won’t make you better. It won’t give users a reason to buy from you, do business with you or even remember you. It will just show them you’re the same as everyone else. Yawn.

And I won’t lie to you. It’s very possible that you’ll try something new and fall on your face, at least the first time. Not every change you make to your site or the way you deal with customers is going to be positive. Sometimes there’s a good reason that old philosophies have lasted ten years, but you won’t know that until you dare to switch things up. Change your site design, craft your landing pages and ad text from scratch, find a new angle, etc. You won’t know what you can play with and what you should not touch at any cost.

Kill the J.A.M. approach and mix things up. When you go into next week’s M3 pick a different spinny chair and change your scenery. When you’re redesign your Web site, make a list of all the things you need on your site and then throw away the old template. When you’re dealing with customers, know ahead of time what makes your product different and approach them in a new way. You may not always get the exact reaction you’re after, but at least you’ll get a reaction. Bored, glazed over eyeballs are useful to no one.

You get above average results with above average effort. As Seth has argued in the past, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/21/07 at 3:47 PM | Comments (4)
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May 11, 2007

Employee Googling, Facebook Gets Classified and a New Ask Mobile

Googling Your Employees is Totally Okay

Three federal judges got together, googled themselves, found the whole thing amusing, and then decided to uphold a previous court ruling that said it was okay for employers to perform Google searches on potential employees.

The decision stemmed from a case concerning David Mullins, a federal employee who was fired after he misused a government vehicle and credit card, and falsified travel documents. After David committed his brilliant acts, his employer conducted a Google search and found that David had a history of acting like a jackass. He was then fired.

David cried to the courts that his employer violated his right to “fundamental fairness” by performing the search. The courts and those of us with a brain disagreed. David, you were fired because you are were a government employee who misused a government vehicle and created phony receipts. That’s generally looked down upon.

And another thing? Life’s not fair.

Facebook Lets Users Sell Stuff

I’ve become somewhat Facebook-obsessed over the past few months, so the news that they’ll be opening up free classified ads is very cool for me. It’s a totally great way to guilt trip my friends into buying my stuff. Huzzah!

The New York Times says users can choose to show their listings to only their designated friends or to anyone located in one of their defined networks (high school, college, company, geographic region, employment, etc). Classified listings can be made to appear on their profile pages or be sent out via their news feeds, which users immediately see upon logging onto the site.

I wonder if the new classifieds will take advantage of their recent Oodle or Jobster partnerships? Are job boards next? Did I mention that Hitwise reported that amount of time spend on social sites is three times that of news and media sites?

Coming Soon: Ask Mobile GPS

Search Engine Land comments on Reuters and the Wall Street Journal’s reports that Ask.com is gearing up to launch a new mobile service named Ask Mobile GPS on Monday, which will combine IAC properties like Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Evite and others.

Greg Sterling has a chance to demo the service and said:

I was impressed with [Ask Mobile GPS’] many features and capabilities. But the most interesting and impressive aspects of it from my point of view involved the integration your contacts, the application's content and tools and GPS: the capacity to send my location information very simply to many people simultaneously through my contact list.

No more having to try and locate street signs to explain to people where I am when I get lost and they need to come get me ASAP before the man with the shifty eyes makes his move? Sweet!

Fun Finds

Danny does an excellent job of defending search engine optimization. Again.

Seth Godin shows readers how the traffic-obsessed are misusing Google Analytics.

Nathan shows us how to run Outlook in iGoogle. Totally cool.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/11/07 at 4:55 PM | Comments (0)
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May 10, 2007

A Lesson In Reputation Management (& The Boston Red Sox)

10e20 had an interesting post this morning about managing celebrities online and using social media sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and the blogosphere to push down bad press and highlight positive news. It’s a rather logical principle: get high-ranking social media sites and blogs to link to positive news about you (interviews, bios, press mentions, etc) in order to push down the articles written by that guy who you call you a giant, self-absorbed idiot that one time. (Okay, three times.)

Utilize social media to control the conversation about your company, your client, yourself. Social media sites are a great way to manage a reputation management campaign because the sites tend to rank well in the engines and they encourage natural linking. By creating and managing profiles on social media sites it allows you to take control of the most important keyword you have – your name.

They also help you to clean up public relations nightmares as they’re happening, especially if you have a blog.

Famed Boston Red Sox pitcher and owner of the legendary bloody sock Curt Shilling made some controversial remarks about Barry Bonds on Tuesday during a radio show. He got caught up in the moment, said things he shouldn’t have said, and put himself into a volatile situation. It could have turned into a seriously ugly situation. To be honest, I was kind of waiting for it to erupt.

But it didn’t; Curt got out relatively unscathed thanks largely to the public apology Curt issued the next day on his blog. Yes, Curt Shilling is a card carrying member of the blogosphere.

In his post, Curt apologized for his remarks, acknowledged the error, and then discussed the issue in an articulate matter. He was genuine and sincere, and as a result he immediately changed the conversation. The news headlines weren’t about Curt mouthing off on his radio show; they were about how Curt took responsibility, how he’s communicating with his fans. That’s a much better conversation to have your name come up in.

His blogging also helped to maintain his public persona and paint Curt as a human, an all around nice guy who screws up just like everyone else. As I write this, 485 readers have left comments on Curt’s apology post, most praising him for taking responsibility for his words and apologizing. The handful still angry with Curt left remarks telling him so. Maybe they’ll feel better in the morning because Curt gave them a forum to express themselves. And if not, well, he’s no worse off.

Blogs and social media are powerful tools in helping small companies, large corporations and even celebrities take control of a conversation and spin it in a positive direction. It’s worth noting that after three months Curt’s blog ranks fourth for his name, with two official Major League Baseball sites and an ESPN profile ranking about him. That’s pretty powerful considering all the articles that have been written about Curt Shilling over the years. Three months and he’s already surpassed them.

Use blogs and social media to not only monitor the conversation that’s going on, but to control it. Is there a nasty article in the SERPs you’re trying to get rid of? Create a Flickr account, upload pictures associated with your company, and link out. Create a MySpace page for your company or yourself. Get on Facebook, on LinkedIn, etc. These pages typically rank well and are a good way to push down negative stories.

Have someone create a Wikipedia page for you and link out to positive resources about your company. The links from Wiki are nofollow, but the resource section provides users with a trail to find more information, which they can then cite on their own, fostering more natural links. [I don’t know how this is possible, but Curt Shillings doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. The stapler and dirty traitor Johnny Damon do, but Curt Shillings does not. Blasphemy. ](Thanks goes to Chris Winfield who alerted me Curt Shilling does have a Wikipedia page. I just can't spell. Heh.)

You want to make sure that when someone searches for your company, the top ten results are going to be positive. Or at least as positive as you can make them.

P.S.

I heart the Red Sox

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/10/07 at 3:55 PM | Comments (1)
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April 26, 2007

SEO: Advanced Q&A

We did it. We’ve once again made it to the final session of another jam packed show. And if that wasn’t exciting enough, we’ve finally reached an Ad:Tech session on search engine optimization, and Bruce is moderating it. Finally, I get to listen to a conversation I actually understand, all while proving to Bruce that I really do work while him and the rest of the Bruce Clay gang are in the booth. I swear they think I go back to the hotel and nap while they’re talking to clients and explaining our services. I’m busy; I swear it!

But anyway, here we are at the SEO: Advanced Q&A session. Bruce “Lisa’s Not Done Until I Say So” Clay is moderating with speakers Aaron D’Souza (Google) and Sandor Marik (CondeNet) both fighting for his attention, I mean presenting.

Okay, let’s get to it.

Bruce starts off explaining that this session is on SEO, search engine optimization. (I love that he defines SEO for the non-geeks in the room.) This is the first time Ad:Tech has tried a panel that is geared towards Q&A. This session will focus on three different SEO perspectives – a company (Bruce), an engine (Aaron) and an end user/large publisher (Sandor). Bruce goes down the line and introduces the panel members. For some reason I don’t get a shout out. Whatever, Bruce.

Bruce says the panelists have opted for audience-driven content. The panel will make short comments in things that impact search engine optimization. But the real intent is to let the audience ask their questions. He’s so generous, our Bruce.

The first topic Bruce touches on is spiderability. Bruce says your site absolutely has to be spiderable. He’s a big supporter of site maps.

For a search engines perspective, Aaron says that making sure they have access to a Web site is a really big problem. There are sites where it’s incredibly hard to find pages because they don’t have links and robots are bred to follow links. Aaron mentions the new Sitemaps.org that help site owners show the engines where the content is on their Web sites. Aaron calls it “a great thing” -- it makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find these pages. Site owners don’t have to worry about links not being present or about deep pages not being crawled.

Sandor says from the publisher's perspective Flash is one of the biggest challenges. For those just tuning in, the search engines can’t read Flash. Shocking, I know. There are many techniques to get around it but you have to have the knowledge on how to implement Flash in a search engine friendly way. You don’t want to throw away valuable content.

Next the panelists move on to the topic of duplicate content.

Bruce says that the Bruce Clay Web site gets stolen about two times a week and I giggle. It really does. He talks about clients who write articles, offer them through syndication, and then before you know it the syndication version outranks the original content. This is bad. He says there are ways around duplicate content but it is something you’re going to have to contend with. It’s hard for the engines to identify the originator of the content.

Aaron says when Google looks at duplicate content in the index, they try to group it into one big cluster so they can then pick out the most relevant version. The advent of things like RSS has made it much more difficult for the engines to take a time-based approach to say that Person A was the person who first published the content. Someone can get your content before the engines have indexed either copy. However, if your site has historically been the producer of original content, it is easier for the engines to identify (read: guess) that your site was probably first to publish.

There are both tools and companies that can help with monitoring for duplicate content, says Sandor. A site’s biggest challenge is that you don’t know if your content has been stolen or reproduced. Tools can help you find out.

If you’re producing original content, you really have to pay attention to duplicate content. Content is what drives your traffic. Since the algorithms are complicated, it’s quite likely that good content that ends up on a different site may outrank you in the engines. Sandor says it’s definitively top of mind for him.

Bruce says creates Google Alerts to monitor for duplicate content. Throw a few sentences of popular pages into an alert and each time another site uses that content you’ll get a URL to the offending site. Then you can track down that person and poke them with sharp sticks. Huzzah!

Next topic – Linking strategies.

Bruce identifies the three kinds of links: Inbound links (when others link to you), Interior links (when you link to yourself), and External links (you link to other experts). He says you need all three kinds of links to be accepted and well-ranked in the search engines. One by itself won’t do it. This is quite important.

Aaron thinks of linking as another signal to help them determine where pages fall in the rankings. There are so many different way of linking that its use of a signal can vary with time. It’s like with any other signal -- if the use of that signal starts to be corrupted then its importance diminishes. In other words: stop spamming, you cheats!

Sandor says figuring out the best interlinking strategy is a complex question. The considerations are somewhat internal.

For example, every page of Sandor’s site includes a link to all of their other Web sites. This is an internal branding policy that they think helps users discover their other properties. There have been lots of discussions about whether this hurts them from a search engines perspective. This is something they have to think about when they’re thinking with their SEO hat.

Next topic – Spam.

Bruce says he runs into constant fights with clients over spam. (I’ve seen these fights. Everyone wears sumo suits.) He says that sometimes BC will make edits to a site, send that info to the clients, and the webmaster will change our considerations to “improve” them and inadvertently end up spamming. Bruce says that some of that has to do with the way people learn to do search engine optimization in general. They pick up spam by listening to how other people do SEO. Spam just creeps in there. He uses the telephone example where you tell someone something, they pass it down, and along the line the message changes drastically.

Bruce says that best practices are the way to go. Over the past 11 years, the spam rules have changes over 80 million times. The biggest problem we face is that a lot of people implement things not knowing its spam. They’re innocent errors but they’re clear violations of best practices. Spam has to be paid attention to.

Aaron says when he first joined Google he entered into Matt Cutts’ spam group (hi, Matt!). Aaron lies and says that working with Matt has been fun. When people ask him what’s the difference between spam and a bad site, he says he knows spam when he sees it. It’s people who are doing things not because they are misinformed but because they’re evil. For example, JavaScript redirects -- that’s not being misinformed, that’s evil. These are things Google classifies as spam and they’ll penalize you for that.

Aaron lets us know that Google has started to integrate more info about when and why your site has been penalized into the Webmaster Console. When they think a site may have been hacked, they’ll drop an email to your webmaster. They’re trying to increase the amount of information.

Sandor says that none of his sites have been banned but that he has found questionable techniques even on his site. Sometimes people who work on sites are not well informed and they enter into shady areas. It’s difficult to know which techniques are really going to get you banned and what you can get away with. He recounts a funny story about when he found a section of one of his pages that was invisible to the engines. If you looked at the source code it said “hidden text for SEO” in the comment section. Heh! This was done by an uninformed developer.

If you have a good site with good content, you don’t need the spammy techniques. It may be tempting at times to spam, but for long-term results, it’s worth it to go the white hat route. Let’s hear it for the good guys!

Next topic – Social, behavioral and local issues

Bruce asks how many sites are seeing Wikipedia outrank them for their keywords. Lot of people raise their hand and I begin growling and foaming at the mouth. [Down, girl. --Susan]

Bruce says it’s just a matter of time before the engines understand behavioral factors. They’ll know when you search for “java” if you’re looking for coffee or the programming language (or the island! Vacation, anyone?) What we’re running into now is that future buyers (people who are now 15, 16 years old) don’t see most of the traditional advertising. They’re not setting brands in their brain. They don’t see who you are. Bruce looks at it as a layer of ice that’s melting from the bottom up. Five years from now you’ll find that your brand has melted away or eroding. You need to play in the social space so that future buyers get your brand in their brain.

Bruce talks about the number of traffic we get from sites like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. He says lots of his larger clients have staff on board solely for social networking.

Aaron says the new marketing technique will be satisfying user intent. If you have content but don’t know how to satisfy the users need, you have nothing. Being able to understand users’ intentions is going to become really important. That’s why social is exciting – we’re getting implicit signals from the users themselves about what they think is important content. Use that.

Sandor says social is a very interesting topic for publishers. It used to be that users were just an audience, now they’re becoming contributors. We need to find a balance for how to use this new content without letting it destroy the brand. An article with 200 comments is better content than the same article without the comments. It shows Google and the engines that this is interesting content.

From here, Bruce opens the session up to user questions. He says to speak loudly. Yeah, yeah, do that.

The first question-poser says that to get a site to rank you have to pick a keyword and build content around it. He’s working on a piece of content that focuses on several keywords and he wants to know how to get that piece to rank for multiple targeted keywords?

Bruce says it’s possible to get many keywords ranked on a page. The interconnectivity, how smart you construct your titles, etc, will help you to rank one page for several keywords. It’s about how that page is connected to other content on your site. Do you focus on these keywords or are you vague about everything?

Aaron says to look at the other pages ranking for your terms and ask yourself why your page should displace that page.

Another audience member asks Bruce if he feels there is corruption in the engines’ results?

Bruce says there’s no reason for the engines to risk their stature, position and reputation to help one site rank in the search results. That is the dumbest thing any search engine can do. Heh. He does believe results can be biased by gaming the algorithm. That’s what spam is all about. There was a case a few years ago when Yahoo admitted their algorithm was flawed and they began hard coding the top ten search results for certain queries. He doesn’t see that today. He doesn’t think the engines are fixing the results.

And that’s it. Lots of optimization knowledge covered in this session. My poor baby fingers.

On an unrelated side note, I want to say that hopefully Susan has treated you all to a Friday Recap by now. If not, I sincerely apologize for her suckiness. You’ve worked hard all week and you deserve a reward. If the girl hasn’t delivered, I give you my full permission to toilet paper Susan’s desk and steal her action figures. (Please don’t touch the stuff on my desk. I’ve been good). Thanks for tuning in to read the Ad:Tech coverage this week and I’ll see you on Monday when we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

[Lisa, today is Thursday. Stop threatening me with your loyal hordes and go take a nap. Folks, I promise there will be a pathetic imitation of Lisa's usual Friday recap tomorrow. There may even be puppies. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/26/07 at 5:40 PM | Comments (3)
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Tactical Search: Local and Mobile Search Engines

Stay with me, friends. It’s time for this afternoon’s Local and Mobile Search Engines session with moderator Kevin Ryan (Motivity Marketing) and speakers David Herscott (MEA Digital), Warren Kay (Yahoo! Search Marketing) and Ian Leuchars (24/7 Real Media).

Kevin starts with two math equations. He states:

Maps + Mobile phones = Dollars
Brands + Mobile devices = Dollars

That’s math? Apparently.

David says there are two issues with mobile. First, the user experience has been less than satisfactory, and second, the number of handsets that are mobile enabled is limited.

Warren says the early experience on the mobile device was simply a reflection of what was being delivered on the PC. Advertisers thought they could just export what they had developed for the PC Web and use it on mobile. However, like with most things, repackaged goods don’t work. Mobile is vastly different than the PC. The intent is different. On the PC, consumers are in a comfortable environment doing research. On mobile, they’re either at a destination or going to a destination. They need quick information.

Warren says Yahoo has a lot of assets that are valuable to the mobile phone. /plug.

Kevin asks if mobile is very category specific? Who are the early adopters and advertisers? What are you really doing with the advertisers?

Yahoo has two different ad models – a traditional graphical ad in its OneSearch and a traditional sponsored search ad. Is Yahoo ever going to break away from the “traditional” stuff and create something mobile specific? Warren says Yahoo’s seeing a lot of good momentum. They don’t expect a huge jump in ’07 but they see the light at the end of the tunnel, maybe in 2008. They’re getting advertisers like Lexus, Pepsi, Orbitz, choice hotels, etc. on board. Volume is low, but conversions are high.

On the marketing side, you need to really understand what a consumer is trying to do. They’re on a mission. If they had time to browse, they’d wait until they were near a PC and do it then. You need to figure out how to help them and give them a good user experience. Users use mobile as a conduit to start a conversation.

David says that whenever there is a new advertising medium, there are three types of early adopters: Big brands trying to test the waters, direct response folks on the hunt for ROI, and the porn folks. Heh, Kevin thanks David for bringing the conversation to a higher level. Apparently, porn generates 50 percent of mobile search. Good heavens people, adopt a kitten. (I have two if you want them.)

Kevin states that local search represents 10 to 30 percent of all queries. What are the barriers to entry for publishers getting into the space and for advertisers?

David throws more stats at us saying that 90 percent of the dollars poured into local search are from the small advertisers. What’s the opportunity for brands? Large brands need to decide how much they want to spend on this new opportunity. Okay. If I’m Brand A how do I know what my mobile or local budget should look like?

The hardest one is mobile, says Ian. One of the things you can do is simply to get started and use the data about your business to build a business plan. Get going by running one mobile-friendly ad. Use it to see what traffic is coming from mobile and what the queries looks like. Don’t spend a lot of money to get started. Don’t do a lot of desktop research. Dive in.

More stats: Warren says 1 percent of search budgets should be used for mobile. Make it an add-on to your existing campaign. Don’t create a separate campaign. It doesn’t make sense at this point in the game. You just want to be present and see what’s going on.

How are you measuring success?

Warren says it’s not about sales or ROI. It’s about consumer experience. We’re at the point where we’re just learning and testing.

To David, mobile is still early adopter, where local search is early majority. There’s actually earned metrics in local and you can spend more money. That opportunity is more real. Mobile’s not just about research; it’s really about testing to see what works.

To get excited about the mobile opportunity you have to look at how many mobile devices are out there. An amazing number of people have access to the mobile Web. He doesn’t know when mobile will hit critical mass, but he thinks advertisers need to find out how to provide relevant material. The opportunity is certainly there.

One of the things moving us forward in mobile is the Yahoo product offering, says Kevin. David says without products like that the question is not how many handsets are out there but how many new handsets are out there. There are a lot of old devices being used by people who can’t send a text message. These people are not mobile enabled.

Kevin shares that he’s a brand whore for Oakley and asks David about the testing they’re currently doing.

David says Oakley has a number of clients asking about both mobile and local. The bottom line is right now is how does local make sense for an advertiser? It makes sense in a number of ways. For a manufacturer not selling direct, it’s a stretch to see where local fits in. There are a lot of people doing searches for “golf equipment [city]”. That’s where the opportunity is. You can find retail locations. There’s clearly money to be spent there for advertisers.

In local search, you have to show the consumer the nearest outlet. You can give them directions to Starbucks and have them pass 3 on the way to get there. It’s an inclusion game. All they need to do is make sure the data is accurate on the Web. Companies like Yahoo work very hard to make that content available. You have to be comprehensive.

Warren: Do you think the big monetization opportunity for mobile is getting people to call? Does it have to be clicks?

Ian says no. The challenge for a marketer is that the consumer is way down on the purchasing cycle. If you’re searching for Borders, Barnes and Nobles is out of the conversation. There’s virtually no way for them to steal that conversion. However, if a user searches for “book store,” they have a chance.

Ian says advertisers should be cherishing these early mobile users and using them to learn what they want to know about the environment. They’re fantastic and definitely worth paying for. The data is valuable.

David talks about Google’s free 411 service and other similar services.

When we talk to our marketers about pay per call, says Warren, they look at us funny because we’ve been talking about the cost effectiveness of driving people to their Web site but you can’t always click. Sometimes users need to call.

You don’t have to spend a tremendous amount of money to start testing mobile and local. There are tons of opportunities. Every other week we have some new product to try.

David says one of the biggest challenges for agencies and advertisers is that the markets are so fractured. With traditional media there’s been a proliferation with the number of options but advertisers have more tools to manage.

Warren argues that local is no longer a nascent media. It’s a $3.5 billion industry and only makes up 10 percent of online ad spent.

Someone in the audience asks if the iPhone will change the world.

David says he hasn’t demoed it yet but he thinks it will be interesting to see what happens. It may speed up adoption but it probably won’t move the needle too far.

Kevin summarizes the session saying for mobile and local, metrics = tough, volume = not a lot. Ah, more math.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/26/07 at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)
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The Promise of Hyper-Targeting

Rex Briggs is moderating this morning’s The Promise of Hyper-Targeting session with speakers Scott Symonds (AKQA, Inc.), Heidi Browning (Fox Interactive Media) and Simon Atkins (adidas America).

Or at least I hope that’s what’s happening in this room. Drew Ianni went ahead and changed the room assignments again on me so I’m not entirely sure I’m in the right place. I really wish they’d put the session title on the big projector looming in front of me so I know if I’m safe or if I have to kick off the heels and hightail it across the convention center, taking down slow-walking pedestrians in my path. My tummy is burning with anxiousness.

I feel better now. Rex Briggs just walked into the room so I must be in the right place. I’m going to stop worrying now and enjoy my organic Z bar granola bar. I heart snacks.

Rex starts things off by asking the panelists to introduce themselves and share with the audience their favorite color.

Scott’s favorite color is UPS brown, Simon and his cute accent tell us his favorite color is red and Heidi ignores the color question altogether. She’s no fun. (My favorite color is blue.)

[30 minutes later: Heidi finally admits her favorite color is red. You can now all sleep tonight.]

The history of online marketing has been direct response focused so people have been chasing that. We need a new model that’s about finding affinities. There’s a tendency today to be redundant and chase the higher response rate. You’re not generating the interest.

Simon says (hee!) Adidas has always developed programs around targeting. They’ve now matured into where they’re looking at hyper targeted programs. Today Adidas is everywhere, they’re not just on the sports field; they’re reaching into high fashion, high activity and to everyday consumers.

[Note: I love that Simon is rocking the white Adidas sneakers today. Way to represent, Simon!]

Rex questions the panelists on the future of hyper targeting.

Heidi answers that hyper-targeting is the next evolution of targeting technology. It’s based on user expressed information. She talks about MySpace and how people log on everyday to tell people about themselves. The difference between hyper-targeting and behavioral targeting is that the latter can’t see the nuances between the segments (enthusiasts vs buyer). With hyper-targeting, advertisers can create those specific segments. You can find the people who define themselves by Jeep and look at their common interests. What are their emotional needs? What other brands do they identify with? What are their demographics? How can we find other people like that? How can we target them? Hyper-targeting allows you to distinguish between the different stages within the conversion funnel and market directly to people in those different stages.

Rex asks how quickly marketers are going to adopt this kind of behavior.

A lot of marketers realize that this is where the world is going, but others are resistant. They don’t want to change the way they’re thinking about their customers. Simon says you fundamentally need to have a shift in the way the marketing department thinks. Once you pass that hurdle, there is a great opportunity to be had by focusing on a very specific target. Start thinking about the upstream. Who is the product really for? You should have a clear definition in mind.

Scott thinks Simon is simplifying this just a bit. Not every brand is as likable as Adidas. As an ad agency, you need to steer and cultivate that. He likes the idea of using brand evangelists for projecting your brand. MySpace is a really good litmus test for an advertiser or a brand. When Scott talks to a brand he wants to find out what personality trait/utility is going to make them likable? Why would people pick you over someone else?

The opt-in factor is the hottest part of hyper-targeting. It all starts with relevant messaging. Users don’t mind advertising as long as it’s relevant and authentic to them. People don’t want brands to advertise to them; they want them to be their friends. (Aw.) One of the ways to do that is to use hyper-targeting to provide relevant messages and bring them to interesting places. With hyper-targeting you can go out and say, hey, we know you’re a friend of someone who likes X, why don’t you come and try it out? You have to combine hyper-targeting with community.

Rex brings up the community vs. control issue again.

Scott acts as the voice of reason and says that people will take these things and do what they like but you can control the toolbox if you make it compelling. Ideally, you have a brand people like. The surer you are of your fan base, the more open you can be with these things. Brands have a responsibility and we need to address that.

We’re once again talking about MySpace. Heidi calls it a living, breathing focus group for brands. Marketers can see how users want to be communicated with. What brands/messages are they gravitating towards? Learn to speak their language and give them what they want.

Scott says consumers being in control is not a new concept. People will be blogging about brands whether they like it or not. The message and conversation is there no matter what. Just accept that and join in. MySpace is amplifying this discussion. It’s something that’s sponsored, endorsed and pushed.

The friend concept is something marketers are beginning to get their head around. What’s interesting about the “friend” analogy is that friends are there through the good and bad. Your brand has to be there for users. People like to have that feeling of exclusivity. That’s how you draw them into a long term friendship and relationship.

Are there some products where hyper-targeting doesn’t work, Rex asks? Toilet paper, for example?

The panel says that it’s up to the marketer to understand who they are and figure out how they can present themselves. What is their persona? You need to determine if social networking is applicable for their target base.

Rex: If I’m a marketer and I have that community site, how do you find people who aren’t yet engaged with your brand? How do I get in front of them?

Heidi says that’s the future of hyper-targeting. You need completely customizable advertising segments. You can plug in your demographics’ social/emotional needs and use that to decide if what you’re planning is enough. Use the data to create a plan to ensure your message is relevant. You can also create “look-a-like” models. If you want to target soccer fans, what else are they into it? Maybe they like yoga and pizza. The last thing to do is talk to your brand’s influential people and engage them early on and get them talking about you as their friend. That’s how you take a whisper and turn it into a yell.

The lesson for the day: Stop whispering and go make friends. Go. Now. Get out of here.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/26/07 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
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Dreaming of Disruption

Are you dreaming of disruption? Do you call people late at night just hoping to disrupt their peaceful slumber? Do you spend your work days thinking of contraptions you can put over your coworkers office door to disrupt them and scare them half to death when they stumble in? Are you a mean, disruptive person in general?

I appreciate your honesty but that’s not actually what this morning’s keynote is about. It’s about the disruptive forces of digital technology that are transforming the entire industry. That’s why this morning’s keynote speaker David Clark (Joost) is here. As far as I know, he has no interest in your other mean-spirited activities. I, however, am appalled.

[Speaking of disruptive, if you’re reading this, are in the Bay area, and have access to some form of make-the-killer-headache-go-away medicine, I’d love you forever if you came and found me. It feels like chubby oompa loompas are jumping on my head.]

It’s another day at Ad:Tech and like all new days at Ad:Tech we start off with a few words from Chairman Drew Ianni. Drew’s talking about Kazaa and I got excited for a second because I thought he said huzzah. But he didn’t. Oh, well.

Time for David Clark to appear from the shadows. Good morning, David.

Drew says he’s been disruptive since high school and then starts talking about Dick Fosbury. Dick was the inventor of the Fosbury flop and showed the high jumping industry a new way to do things. He disrupted the norm and found a better way. His approach is still being used today.

Here’s the thing about disruption, says David, it’s too often associated with the term destruction. It’s used to explain a “better” world where only the new stuff is the good stuff. David believes that sometimes you have to let things stay the same. TV is one of those things, at least the parts of TV that make it a unique video.

You’re going to hear a lot of talk about how the Internet is going to disrupt and TV and that VOD may kill it, says David, but Joost disagrees. It’s forcing the TV to create better cinematic projects. Storytelling matters. It has mattered since the dawn of men, yet somehow it gets left out of every formulation of media. Well-told stories matter. Brands matter. Talent matters.

This is not easy stuff. TV is the most successful entertainment media invented, according to David. Joost is not betting against TV, however, they like the Internet too. It has what TV lacks – community, intelligence, accountability, etc. Plug yourself in from the right stream and you’re drinking from a firehouse. It’s incredible and addictive.

David says today we’re seeing a marriage of both. It will be the birth of a new medium. Viewers are already there.

What’s in this new world?

It’s founded on video content. That’s a no-brainer. With Joost, anyone with copyright ownership can create a channel and broadcast to the world. Joost has already received hundreds of thousands of emails from content producers wanting to set up a channel on Joost and the company has been around for about 10 minutes. The gates are coming down.

David brings up Ze Frank. Yey, Ze Frank! (I miss you, Ze.)

David says we’re going to see new kinds of entertainment models emerge. Your sister will ping you and you’ll be watching a show as it airs and chatting about it with her. [I do that already. It's how my friends and I watch American Idol. --Susan] We’ll be using widgets and interactive overlays to create new features and functionalities. Your programming guide will become your community. Channels are playlists. The wisdom of a crowd will help you navigate a huge range of choices.

Or something like that. David says these are just educated guesses. We don’t have a time machine. David’s just providing the technology to see what’s going to happen.

The key to changing our sport the way Fosbury did is to know what’s sacred and what is not. You do this by looking at things through your consumer eyes, not through the eyes of your boss or your marketing department. When you do this you will find that storytelling, control, quality, copyright and the opportunity to share with your peers is sacred. Everything else is up for grabs. David likes those odds.

So how’s all this going so far?

Joost is still in the early days of beta. They’re going to open up the platform to everyone very soon. Joost feels a lot like TV. That’s deliberate. Just like the first car looked like a horse buggy.

To David, Joost is great if you just want to sit back and watch or if you want to dive in and get involved. There’s lots of powerful stuff under the hood.

TV 2.0 is not going to happen overnight. One of things holding it back is an ad model that makes sense for both consumers and advertisers.

The consumer is now firmly in control. This has become such a cliché that we risk not understanding what it really means. For the ad industry this spells disruption. We’re an industry that hasn’t really had to deal with consumer control. It’s ironic but it’s true. The ad industry has been organized as a command and control center for several years. The architecture of the entire industry now needs to be rethought. We need to have the consumer on speaker phone, if not in the media chair itself. Advertising is not a product and it’s not entertainment. It’s designed to snatch you away and give you a pitch.

Clutter and fragmentation drown out brand messages. The number of brands fighting for your attention has doubled. Compounding the challenge, media has fragmented and users are overwhelmed with choices. As a brand advertiser, where do you place your bets?

Never has a marketer’s job been so difficult, says David. The marketing tactics of today were designed for the consumer behavior of yesterday. This is not because marketers are fools. It’s because new models have not emerged fast enough. The tired old models are still the most powerful we have. But things are about to change.

This is where the fun begins. Everything looks doom and gloom but all it takes is a little willingness to experiment.

It goes back to defining what’s scared. Marketing and communications is sacred, advertising is not. Reach is sacred, frequency is not. Invitation is sacred, frequency is not. It’s invitation over interruption, relevancy and engagement over impression count, ROI over CPM. Selling products and building brands is sacred. Everything else is up for grabs.

Marketers will have to teach consumers and consumers are still interested. That’s not going to change. The platforms that can unite them will be fine.

David remarks that Joost is announcing a series of new launch partners today, including Proctor & Gamble, Coke, Nike, Kraft, General Motors, Warner Brothers, Purina, Visa, Motorola, Taco Bell, Sony, Intel, etc.

And that’s it from David.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/26/07 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
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Mobile Advertising: Fact or Fiction?

Heidi Lehmann (Chair of the Mobile Marketing Association) is moderating today’s Mobile Advertising panel with speakers Kim Olson (Sprint), Omar Hamoui (AdMob), Michael Bayle (Yahoo! Inc.) and Jack Hallahan (MobiTV).

This session seems to be starting a little late. Methinks it’s because of the 100 or so overflowing Krispy Kreme boxes located on the tables directly outside the session rooms. What’s more important to you on a gloomy afternoon: a session on mobile advertising or stuffing your face with some glazed gooey goodness? (You’re drooling.)

Why is there suddenly so much excitement about mobile? Is it real or is it just hype? Today’s sessions is going to focus on the promises of mobile, the threats, and determine if the buzz legit? Hopefully, anyway. I’m sure we’ll find a tangent along the way.

Heidi first educates us on the four types of mobile media. There’s SMS, mobile interactive advertising, downloadable apps and mobile video.

In order to explain to what’s working and what’s not, the panel presents some case studies.

Kim says the things working the most are campaigns executed with a very strong call to action, an offer or something that is designed to engage the consumer, rather than just a logo.

She talks about a campaign executed by Pepsi during this year’s Super Bowl to promote various new soda can designs that tied in with their Super Bowl ads. They did things like run several different banner ads, allowed users to submit soda can design ideas, gave them the chance to win Super Bowl tickets for life, offered downloadable wallpaper, etc. The campaign lasted a mere four days and the clickthrough rates for the banner ran between 3-7 percent. They also saw a 50 percent conversion rate for people downloading Pepsi-branded wallpaper, and a 60 percent conversion rate of people clicking through to watch Pepsi videos. That’s nothing to laugh at.

Next, she highlights a campaign run by Jack’s company MobiTV. Aw, panel love.

Omar shares an example of a campaign Adidas ran for the World Cup that let users download all sorts of targeted World Cup media. In the end, Adidas got forty percent of their leads at 4 percent of budget. AdMob alone delivered over 180,000 visits and over 4 million advertising impressions.

He also talks about a campaign for Paramount that illustrated by simply personalizing an ad and asking user a question, it can lead to a significant increase in the clickthrough rate. You can test things at a low cost before committing to a high spend.

The panelists remind us that mobility isn’t always about the mobile phones. Look at mobile as it passes through to WiFi as it passes through to broadband, etc. Mobile is everywhere. Jack says that integrated interactive advertising is the next big thing to hit mobile.

He notes that in Japan consumers are already more engaged via mobile than PC throughout the day. How much longer until that reaches over to the States? This year? Next year? Only time will tell.
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Heidi asks about consumer experience. How is the consumer reacting to mobile?

Kim says that was clearly one of the most important things she had to focus on as a carrier when they were contemplating opening their services up to advertising. She cares very much about doing things that her subscribers want. She doesn’t want them calling customer service. Sprint spent a long time conducting tests and trials. One of the things she did was expose 600,000 users to display ads over a 30 day period and tracked calls to customer care for those subscribers to check for a negative result. The results were positive.

Kim notes that Sprint purposely started in an area that was the least disruptive to someone browsing on their mobile phone. With display ads, it’s totally up to the consumer on whether or not they want to engage.

Michael says there needs to be a convergence towards dynamic pricing models. It’s odd when you have publishers that charge $3.99 for a magazine, charge the same for the content on mobile, and then gives it away from free on the PC. He’s convinced that mobile needs to reflect the best of advertising and the best of what’s available on the PC to be truly effective.

Omar argues that a lot of what’s being attempted on mobile is very analogous to what’s being done on the Internet. The ad models are similar. A lot of the lessons that were learned online are being followed on mobile. At the same time, there are unique targeted ideas that are being used on mobile. The initial attempts at mobile are very much colored by what’s being done online. Advertisers are measuring things the same way.

Jack says what’s interesting is where we’re going to see each of these media channels cross over and help each other out. You’re starting to see the ability to take advantage of the crossover.

Heidi asks if you are a brand that wants to launch mobile advertising campaigns, what’s the best way to find out the most important considerations? What’s working the best today?

Omar says what’s really working right now is knowing what you want and what you want out of your campaign before you launch. Your campaign should not be based or tracked by a third-party. You should be able to measure it yourself.

Kim says if she was a brand trying to get into mobile she’d work with her ad agency and ask them to think about ways mobile can extend the campaigns that they’re already running in other media. There’s a lot of interactivity that mobile can ad to print or TV campaigns. You really need to think about mobile from the standpoint from how can we and what offer do we put forth that will engage the consumer. That’s what’s working the strongest. The purpose of the ad should be to engage the consumer. Don’t just put up a useless graphic.

Mobile is putting the fourth leg on the advertising stool. It lets you target the right customers at the right time in the right way. Think about how mobile is going to help you drive your brand message and put the message in front of customers when they’re in the position to actually be at your location.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/26/07 at 12:35 AM | Comments (0)
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April 25, 2007

Marketers' Roundtable

Abbey Klaassen (Ad Age Digital) is moderating today’s Marketers Roundtable panel with Mel Clements (The Coca Cola Company), Andrew Shih (Procter & Gamble), Andrew Markowitz (Kraft Foods, Inc.) and Ken Loh (Oakley).

Abbey starts things off questioning the boys about the state of marketing today.

Andy Markowitz says his company has structured marketing into different silos and the challenge now is convergence. Things are accelerating so quickly that while there will always be a best of class of ad agencies, he’s not sure what things will look like a year down the road. Media and creative will merge, but beyond that, who knows? What his company is looking for now is ideas. That’s the cost of entry. It cuts across all the media fragmentation.

Ken says it’s important to hire the agencies that have expertise in a particular area or niche. There are a lot of agencies out there that claim to be able to do everything but what he’s found is that you won’t get the best of breed by going to a one-stop-shop. You need a specialist. Oakley has fewer agency relationships than they’ve had in the past. They currently don’t have a lot of agency relationships. They’re trying to bring a lot of things in-house. Something they haven’t brought in-house yet, however, is their online marketing which they continue to outsource.

Andy Shih says P&G doesn’t have a singular standardized model. They experiment and have very fragmented agency models for their different divisions. The core function of the leadership is to bring the talent together among the different layers. At the end of the day, you go where the talent is. You don’t want to necessarily be stuck to a single model if it’s going to hamper your ability to find the best talent. Find the best players in each of the spaces and go from there. It’s the Jason Calacanis approach to marketing!

Mel says they have specific agencies for specific tasks. It’s about getting them to the table at the same time and working towards the same goal.

Andy M rants that it’s not a sustainable marketing idea to keep rolling out multi-million dollar ad campaigns. Ad agencies have to find a new way to attract consumers.

Abby asks the panel: How much are you devoting to interactive media? Does interactive have to hold itself to a higher accountability?

Ken says it easier to make a case for interactive because the metrics are all there in front of you. There have been discussions about shifting more money to online because it’s easier to see the results and hold campaigns accountable. You can prove that they’re working.

Mel says it’s not as much a shift to interactive as much as it’s an expanding of the world of media. If you’re doing a direct mailing that postcard should have a URL on it. We are expanding the role of what digital can do and what digital can touch. Ken says, to him, AOL is traditional media, as is Yahoo. They’re not new. New to Mel is mobile or Internet gaming.

Andy S notes that it’s important for his brands to know where consumers are. It sounds cliché, he says, but it’s true. People aren’t hanging out in the same place they were five years ago. You have to go out and find them.

Andy M fights for putting dollars where users are consuming media. It’s really that simple. If users are online, you have to go online. If they’re finding you through print, you have to be there. You can’t look at media as a bucket of dollars. Each type of media supports different objectives. It’s your job to understand those objectives and know what’s going to get you the most engagement.

Measure and accountability is hugely important. The players that best know how to drive the measurements have a competitive advantage over the others. Since the space is not developed, those that have the best data are going to win.

Mel has a difficult time measuring in-house campaigns because the campaigns change 2-3 times a year and it’s usually something he’s never done before. How do you apply benchmarks to that? (Mel uses the word conundrum and I want to go up there and give him a big bear hug.)

Standardization is really important to Ken. So is being consistent with how you utilize your data. It’s not going to be sports vs. a community section. You know conversion rates are going to be better on different parts of your Web site simply because they lend themselves to that. You have to use different metrics to measure different areas of a Web site.

Andy S says one of the reasons people aren’t investing more in interactive media is because there’s a difference in language between traditional and new media. Also, it forces marketers to try and compare apples to oranges.

You can’t sacrifice innovation for the sake of integration. Video online is not going to look like what it looks like on TV. There’s a different world out there; accept that. You can’t try and make the Internet look like TV just because that’s what you’re comfortable with.

Abbey asks the panels if virtual worlds are a big PR stunt or if it represents a new era of marketing.

Mel jokes that if he wanted to go find a bunch of people playing Dungeons and Dragons, he’d go out and find a bunch of people playing Dungeons and Dragons. Hee. It seems Mel’s not sold yet.

In a time when dollars are pressed, you have to leave a little bit of room for innovation but when it goes up against guaranteed clicks or impressions, it’s tough to justify.

Andy S says while he doesn’t expect his company to make a lot of money through virtual worlds, they’d be crazy not to be testing them. Three years ago, would anyone have predicted how big MySpace was going to be? If you don’t learn about the new things going on you risk missing the boat. As established marketers, we have an obligation to learn.

Abbey: Are there any technologies that have surprised you over the past year?

Mel says no. The general themes that succeed are built on certain principles. AIM is big because he can log on and tell people he watched American Idol last night and that Sanjaya did well. (This is the second Sanjaya reference in two days. What is happening to the world?) [Sanjaya is the American Dream. --Susan]

Andy S says the “a-ha” for him has come from learning just how differently the Gen Y-ers consume media and how different they are in wanting to connect out and create communities. He thinks the future is going to be much different as a result of these consumers.

For Ken, there isn’t a technology that’s a surprise. The Internet is a medium that is a constant state of change. People are always coming up with new ideas.

Andy M says YouTube took him by surprise. It really changed the way consumers became producers. It’s something that’s still changing the landscape. He says something we have yet to solve is mobile marketing. The biggest issue he sees in the mobile marketplace is that it seems extraordinary fragmented and redundant. Andy’s still waiting for the tipping point and he has no idea how to tackle that market.

Abbey asks how the panel is using community?

Nowadays community is expected, says Ken. You have to have it. If your brand has fan sites outside of your site and there’s no community on your own site, that’s a problem. You have to accept the good with the bad. You can’t have a community where you’re always going in there and censoring disparaging comments. Once you do that, it’s no longer a community. Things have to evolve on their own, based on interaction.

Mel calls it super, super important to reach out to people who care about your brand. If people are saying something about you they want to connect and you have to give them a way to do that. Well said.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/25/07 at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
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The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Really The Solution?

Pete Blackshawn (Nielsen BuzzMetrics) is moderating this afternoon’s media and branding session with speakers Scott Wilder (Intuit), Beth Thomas-Kim (Nestle), Paul Woolmington (Naked Communications) and Tip Rose (Resource Interactive).

The title of this session may be a little misleading because we’re not actually talking about advertising at all, at least not in the traditional sense. This panel is about the advertising beyond your traditional advertising. It’s about community and user engagement.

Pete starts the session off telling us something you probably already knew: There’s an erosion of consumer trust in traditional ad models. It doesn’t mean the traditional ad models don’t work; it just means they’re not as effective as they used to be. What we know with certainty is the issue of ad intrusion is getting even worse. Advertisers have to work smarter to win the trust of consumers.

Pete talks about some “zones” that allow for both a high amount of control, as well as offer a high amount of effectiveness. These zones include things like Brand Web sites, paid search campaigns, corporate blogs, human touch, RSS, on demand videos, etc.

Paul steps in saying that the dirty secret is out. The non-secret is that we’re moving from a world of interruption to an environment of engagement. We’re going from aggregation to interaction and unity. We have a consumer that is no longer ‘I’ shaped but “T” shaped, they’re broad and deep.

Beth works for Nestle and says her company “woke up” a few years ago and realized that their marketing efforts were having less and less of an effect. Their marketing efforts weren’t targeting consumers; they were targeting the marketers. Realize that your marketing department is not the consumer. You need to know who your consumer is to better reach them.

Tip advocated focusing on your retention activities and getting customer input. He says that online is the largest customer focus group you have. Pay attention to what consumers are saying about you and let them drive your product. Get your consumers more involved in the products they’re using.

Marketers today need to hear the naked truth, says Paul. Release yourself from the shackles of bias. Community is intrinsic to everything in his company and it should be the same way for you.

Beth agrees that community is the right way to go, but says there are two communities marketers need to focus on. There’s the external community and there’s the community that’s established from within the organization and the individuals working on the process. Everyone on your team needs to be on board with what you’re doing. If your company isn’t working as a community, it’s not going to translate to your consumer.

Tip agrees. Community has to have relevancy for what your brand is trying to achieve. You have to have a product that spawns that conversation. You can’t just say you want community for the sake of community.

The reason consumers gravitate towards brands with strong communities is because they understand that it allows them to have a deeper interaction with the company. They know that what they say gets fed back into the organization (or at least it should) and it helps them to feel like everyone is on the same team. It encourages them to become engaged with the brand.

Part of your job as a marketer is to present information to consumers in a way that it’s interesting enough to make them want to get involved. Make the community part of your project development process.

Tip says one of the first apprehensions his clients have is that if they let consumers speak freely, they’re afraid of what the consumers are going to say. This is a dumb thing to be worried about. Why? Because consumers are already talking about you whether you’re facilitating the conversation or not. You may as well join the conversation that’s already in progress and take in the insights. Tip says his company has seen a lot of success where your community will do your brand policing for you. They become your virtual consumer affairs. That’s the ultimate in consumer engagement, when they support and defend you so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Is a site with harsh criticism more credible than a site with no criticism?

I think so. I think it says a lot about a site who lets others use their site to voice concerns and complaints. It shows your confident about your product; it also shows you're listening. This is important. Beth says consumers that reach out to you about problems are doing so because they want you to fix it. They’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They’ll stay loyal through that process. You have own up, be credible and be open and honest.

Pete notes that even if it’s a subset of your overall audience, the consumers that are actively participating in your site communities are the consumers who have a higher propensity to recommend you to someone else. It’s worth your time to have a conversation with these people and turn them into brand evangelists.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/25/07 at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)
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The On-Demand Universe

The term “on-demand” is the “linkbait”, “long tail” and “web 2.0” of this year’s conference season. You just can’t get away from it. I suspect we’ll be hearing it quite often during today’s The On-Demand Universe session with moderator Brian Wieser (MAGNA Global) and panelists Warren Schlichting (Comcast Spotlight Advanced Media), Aaron Radin (CBS), George Ehinger (Revision3 Corporation), Bob Martin (Universal McCarnn). Just a hunch.

I’ve officially missed all the panel introductions because I arrived at 10:44am for a 10:45am session. Apparently that made me late and I have no idea which face belongs to which name. I apologize for my inadequacy.

The first question at hand for the panel is how quickly does an industry change? How long before we’re all living in a video on-demand (VOD) world?

The answer seems to be not as fast as we like. The industry structure is being held together by regulations. It’s not a given that just because we can do it, a new media platform will become successful and/or ad-supported.

Something interesting is that despite all the talk about VOD, studies done by Comcast show only a modest growth per household. Even though there’s been an enormous rise in the wealth of content available through VOD over the past year, there was only a 4 percent increase in VOD services last year. Only 2 percent of the market logs onto ABC.com to watch rebroadcast episodes of Lost or Desperate Housewives.

The panel asks: Do people actually want these services?

I think the answer is yes. People want to be able to watch what they want when they want it. We like to be annoying. One speaker noted that human beings like convenience. If content producers can give them every show that they want when they want it will create a great experience user experience. However, when it’s not convenient and the list of choices is incomplete than you have people waiting on the sidelines to get in. And that’s where we are right now. Users are watching VOD from the sidelines waiting to see what’s going to happen before they commit. Ultimately though, users will want that content because it’s content that’s tailored to them.

The question right now is what is the unique value that the VOD distributor is offering the consumer during TV viewing hours? Why would they watch video on demand instead of the prime time shows they’re used to watching? What percent of the TV viewing can be garnered by video on demand? That’s what we’re still trying to figure out.

One panelist remarks that his company’s goal is to get everything on video on demand. That is the goal. Until that happens, however, until VOD is everywhere, it’s not going to be adopted by anyone but the tech savvy consumers. The main problem with VOD is that everything you might want is not available right now.

Something the panelists noted is that there are now two primetimes where advertisers are trying to reach users through video. There’s the work day prime time and the traditional evening prime time. The new work day prime time is that group of people using broadband at work for eight hours of the day. They’re a bored, captivated audience pretending to be hard at work.

Advertiser’s have a lot of investment requirement when doing anything with new media. Things they need to be aware of include:

• Critical mass of unduplicated/unique reach
• Uniform technological standards
• What is the optimal creative formats
• Smooth buying process
• Is the data we need in place
• High-quality service and product standards

As an advertiser, before you get involved with VOD you need to decide what your goals are. What are you trying to achieve?

Another reason for the slow adoption of VOD is that there’s a high barrier to entry. Think about VOD compared to traditional banner advertising. What does it take to produce a high quality video advertisement vs. a banner? There’s certainly a lot more effort and funding needed for quality video than for a static banner ad.

And how many advertisers actually produce high quality video content? Not as many as those who can produce banner ads. Bob says that there’s an expectation from the media/sales perspective that this is wonderful. That may be true but we still have a long way to go in terms of standardization before we can buy this media and have it make sense in terms of ROI. Part of that process includes informing the viewers that there is more content out there if they want it.

What about the logistics of VOD buying and selling? Why is so difficult to get big businesses to sign on? The panel notes the following:

• Agencies with legacy T V business behave differently than agencies with legacy offline businesses.
• Zero based planning is uncommon. Buyers need benchmarks to justify buys. Right now they have none.
• Most sales organizations have commission structures favoring traditional media.
• There is resistance to change because it’s very difficult to give up the business and the profit structure that you’ve set up to date.

George claims that we can’t expect the creativity and the solutions to this problem to come from the CBS's of the world because they have things that will not allow them to become the quickest movers. It was kind of surprising to hear George say that. Not because it’s not true, but because it something I wouldn’t want someone from a large corporation to admit to. If you know you’re not the quickest mover because you’re hanging on to legacy marketing tactics, then you should be working to change that. That’s the only way you’re going to grow.

There are hundreds of new media alternatives today. Advertisers can choose to use broadcast, stream and download, push and pull, unwired or wired, home and portable, etc. With all these new platforms, nationally-oriented, brand-based advertisers need broad targets.

George says he would not want to be in the chair of the person responsible for reaching mass eyeballs in this world of fragmentation. I don’t entirely blame him. Things are getting tougher. However, I have faith. As the panel notes, advertisers found a way to overcome magazines, the assortment of cable channels, etc, so there is hope they’ll be able to find new ways to advertise in an even more fragmented space. We’re heading into a world where measurements for the advertisers around engagement and clutter are going to be very important.

Once we’re living in a pure VOD environment standards will be set to help advertisers localize their efforts. VOD doesn’t have to be the mass advertiser’s only solution.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/25/07 at 2:16 PM | Comments (0)
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Keynote Roundtable Panel: Content Is King! (Again?)

Happy Wednesday! You guys are totally missing out because I’m doing my happy I-got-coffee-and-life-is-good dance to the blaring Nelly Furtado playing in the ballroom right now. Take a second and imagine all the crazy shimmying in your minds, if you will. Huzzah!

Okay, knock it off. It’s time to get serious. Jon Fine (BusinessWeek) is moderating this morning’s keynote roundtable panel with speakers Jason Hirschhorn (Sling Media Group), Kourosh Karimkhany (Wired Digital), Suzie Reider (YouTube) and Caroline Little (Washingtonpost.com, Newsweek Interactive).

Before we get to the keynote, Drew Ianni is back to deliver some opening remarks and housekeeping details. He says that some of the session rooms have been changed due to overcrowding. Oh, no! I’m going to get lost again, aren’t I? More running in heels for me.

Drew shares some noteworthy terms he heard yesterday including:

• Video Snacking – Heh. I heard this all day yesterday and it made me giggle and slightly hungry all day.
• Web 3.0 – Thankfully, I haven’t heard this.
• Engagement – Are we still talking about Rand? That happened 2 months ago, people. Let’s move on!
• Mastering “The Art of Conversation” – Creating a brand dialogue.

Now that we’re updated on yesterday, it’s time for today. The keynote speakers are all comfortably seated on the blue couch and orange chairs that I’m stealing out of the conference hall Friday night. Don’t tell anyone.

Jon says if content is indeed king there are a lot of people in his neck of the woods not feeling it right now. The value of certain top tier content is not being recognized or monetized in the new media world. These new distribution platforms have also shown that professional content isn’t always needed.

It’s worth noting that today when we talk about content we’re not just talking about professionally written words. We’re talking about all forms of social media, but especially video.

Before the panelists are allowed to speak, Jon warms them that if they’re caught using the phrase “the consumer is in control” they will be seriously punished. Awesome.

Caroline starts out talking about her experiences working for Washingtonpost.com and says that her company has an unprecedented audience. Ad revenues are growing at alarmingly fast rate. Her goal is to make enough money in alternative forms of media so she can continue to build what is core to her mission which is newsgathering. And that’s newsgathering for all forms of media, not just print.

Jon asks if the power is with the content holders or the aggregators?

Kourosh says it’s still with the content holders. The aggregation is becoming less important because of Google and the search results. Having good old HTML on your site with good content is the surest way of getting content to your audience. Create the content and the engines will find it.

Suzie from YouTube says, like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other. Content and aggregators are in control because we need them both for the system to work.

Jason says content is still the King. Distribution without content doesn’t mean much but the biggest pockets on the Web are sites like YouTube, Yahoo, Google, etc. These sites aren’t creating content, they’re aggregating it. What’s genius about Google is Google’s platform is not Google.com. It’s everywhere AdSense is. Google doesn’t actually create anything but they’re involved in everything. That’s powerful.

Kouosh says where Wired gets the most value is making sure they’re ending up in the search results. Jason says a key factor is that not everyone needs to be a Time Warner. Sites are content to be smaller and getting less traffic. They know if you are doing a deal with AdSense or Panama, it’s not just about the big publishers. In aggregate, the small publishers mean something.

Suzie says the real question is what is content today? When you hear content people think of professionally created content. They don’t think of the stuff that’s on YouTube, but it is. That may be true but that just means all those people are wrong. All those YouTube cat videos are content. It doesn’t matter how you feel about cats.

Jon questions Suzie on the rumors that YouTube is experimenting with testing ad models and when they’ll “flip the switch” and make those live.

Suzie responds that YouTube cares a lot about their content partners and they want to reward them. YouTube is approaching testing in an academic way. They’re looking at the ad executions on the watch page (the page where the videos reside) to find a system that will not interrupt the user experience but will provide a revenue stream for these content producers. They’re testing very quick commercial intros at the beginning and than maybe one at the end. What they don’t want to do is interrupt the user experience. It’s not going to be a great unveiling, she says, it’s going to be an evolving process. Suzie says they’re being really careful not to screw it up, but content products may begin seeing ad models as early as this summer.

Jon says one of the reasons YouTube took off was the user experience. Will a bumper or pre-roll ad disrupt that experience?

Suzie says it might. She doesn’t think a :15 pre-roll in front of a :27 clip is going to be a great experience. YouTube is going to keep looking at it.

Jason argues that pre-roll ads don’t work because users are clicking expecting content and they don’t want to have to wait for it. Placing a bumper on a second video may work as long as users know where they are. No one has figured out a model that works yet. Advertisers need to be very flexible about what the units are.

Kourosh says he’s a big fan of YouTube and with that the love fest begins. He says Wired is a big supporter and they use it everyday. They have their own video solution but their journalists and editors prefer YouTube over their own. Aw, that’s nice.

Jason jokes that YouTube is cool but he’s selling Slingboxes out by the taxi stand.

Jon asks if advertisers are comfortable taking from what’s online?

Jason says they’re not because there’s a whole system built against NOT going down that road. However, what we’re seeing is that users care less about “quality” versus great, funny content. The utility that we’ve gotten out of SNL shorts has been the same as professional content. There’s a great farm club and they’ll pick talent out from there. Advertisers have to get with it and realize that they don’t control their brands online.

Jon asks Caroline what she thinks about Yahoo now partnering with 12 major newspaper companies to share revenue.

Caroline says that if you look at the people who have signed up with Yahoo they’re primarily smaller companies. The deals were originally built around jobs, now it’s changing. If you look at the larger newspapers (like Caroline’s), they haven’t signed up for big distribution deals because they already have fairly decent distribution. The smaller papers are looking at something very different than what we’re looking at.

Jason cautions that you also have to look at the long term. Who controls the sales in those deals? You have to protect yourself. It’s not about copyright; it’s about control and sharing.

Kourosh becomes the coolest guy in the room saying he’s totally comfortable with users mashing up Wired content. Wired allows users to take their content, modify it, and throw it up on their site as long as they link back and they’re not using it for commercial purposes. They realize their audience is actually smarter than they are in some areas.

Caroline doesn’t seem quite as comfortable as Kourosh with letting users take control of the content. That’s because she’s from a “big media company”. She believes there’s a scale with reporting and editing that is useful. If you’re a political reporter you know more than a layperson who just dabbles in it. I think there’s a role for reporters and journalists, she says. I think Caroline’s not making a lot of fans this morning, heh.

The difference with Wired and sites like Washingtonpost.com is that Wired really lays the framework for users and then let’s them take control over it. I think users respect that. I also think Wired has the perfect audience for adapting that kind of business model.

Jason says this stuff is going to happen the way it’s going to happen. Major media has put way too much effort into fighting it instead of letting the floodgates open and learning how to monetize it. I totally agree with Jason the approach Wired seems to be taking. Big media needs to wake up.

Caroline says there is a definite attitude in media NOT to send people off their site or link to a competitor and it’s a losing proposition; the Web doesn’t work that way. The major media still haven’t accepted things like blogs.

Kourosh says you make money from the conversation the same way you did before. The only thing difference is that these days the conversation is a lot more interesting than the static voice it once was. He shares a funny story where a Wired reported wanted to interview Jason Calacanis but didn’t want to do it through email (which Jason was fighting for) because the writer didn’t want to lose the conversation and the ability to go off on tangents. Jason blogged about it in the normal angry Jason way and proclaimed that Wired was afraid of email. Wire, smartly, used their blog to respond and before any knew it the conversation that was created was a lot more interesting than the actual interview probably would have been.

He’s right. That conversation is more interesting because it’s real. Not to use the popularity of reality TV analogy used in yesterday’s Blogging session, but there is some truth to that. It’s interesting to watch people react in their natural way. It’s always more interesting to see Jason Calacanis act out the way Jason does than to get him into a cold interview format over email. Which conversation would you rather ease drop in?

The lesson of the keynote is that video is content and that big media needs to recognize that people do want to have these conversations. Poor, Caroline. She’s taking all the heat for being part of “big media”. Jason wants to see traditional media companies taking the lead in these conversations. I think we all do.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/25/07 at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Email, SEM Events, Social Media, ad:tech San Francisco 2007