MarketerBlog

Glass Half Full Or Half Empty? Forrester Report on Interactive Media

Steve Rubel rightly takes the “glass half full” position in yesterday’s post about the new Forrester report on interactive marketing. Despite a headline  on ClickZ which says the report shows that marketers are sticking with “proven” interactive media, the statistics show a different story. From Micropersuasion: 

• Ÿ 50 percent use or plan to use blogs or social networks
• Ÿ 47 percent use or plan to use RSS
• Ÿ 43 percent go or have gone mobile
• Ÿ 28 percent are doing or plan on doing advergaming or in-game ads

Regardless of ClickZ’s emphasis to the contrary, the astounding fact is that half of marketers are testing these new tools within their first year of inception. That represents an enormous shift from “Web 1.0” when it took several years for marketers to wholeheartedly embrace the Internet and online media as part of the overall marketing mix.

Steve Rubel’s interpretation of this importance of this is spot on:
 

“Marketers are going to have to shift from pushing messages out to guiding/facilitating peer-to-peer conversations.”

Maybe Web 2.0 means that marketers are learning to pick up the pace, and let consumers lead, to stop talking and start listening.

That alone would be revolutionary!

 

Technorati Tags:

CGM, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0

Round-up: State of the Blogosphere, Nike CGM and Desperate Search Engines

After a period of shameless distraction from MarketerBlog, I’m back in the saddle and getting caught up. Today’s post is a round-up of several things I found of interest.

Dave Sifry posted his quarterly State of the Blogosphere report today. In addition to the astounding statistics that Technorati now tracks over 35m blogs and that the blogosphere is doubling every six months, there is good news in terms of blog retention. The report says that 55% of bloggers continue to blog after the first three months, up from 50.5% last quarter. Not only is this indicative of the stickiness of blogging activity, it also might indicate that people are finding real value in the conversations. That’s good news for marketers as we look for ways to join in those conversations. And as Mack Collier notes, at the very least it indicates healthy growth of the blogosphere. 

Last month Nike and Google joined forces to launch a social networking site for soccer fans worldwide: Joga. According to an article in ClickZ, they are now launching a new “Internet TV” channel called JogaTV. JogaTV will automatically download new content each week, notifying users when it's available. It seems like old broadcast habits are dying hard at Nike, who started the Joga site in an effort to engage in consumer generated media. If this were a true CGM site, Nike would be cultivated user created content, versus shoving their own down the pipes. Still, it’s early days and maybe they’ll figure that out and make the switch sooner rather than later. 

Late-to-the-CGM-party Microsoft is now hopping onto the Social Search bandwagon … or at least they will be when they release their unnamed social search tool on a yet-to-be-determined date in the near future. According to a report in BusinessWeek, Microsoft is planning to launch a question-and-answer social search tool in the coming months. Given the continued growth of search marketing and MSN’s persistent drop in market share, it makes sense that they would try to ride the next trend to gain momentum. Call me crazy, but social search just seems like another way to automate referrals from trusted sources. In order for it to work, you have to have the trusted sources (e.g. friends, family) in the network. Until Microsoft creates reasons for people to engage in social networking on its sites, the success of its social search engine will be limited. 

Finally, there’s a great article in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about cautious consumer packaged goods marketers finally making substantial commitments to online advertising. General Mills intends to double its online media budget this year, while Kraft plans to double the number of campaigns. The article credits a relatively new research service called Consumer Direct with the growth in CPG marketing online. Consumer Direct is a service provided Yahoo! in collaboration with AC Nielsen. It allows CPG marketers to see the impact of Internet advertising on sales through the use of a custom version of Nielsen’s Homescan panel which includes tracking of consumer behavior on Yahoo! as well. Having participated in a somewhat elaborate experimental program of this nature in the late ‘90’s, I know this is a big deal for the CPG companies. The question I would ask is when Nielsen will expand tracking beyond Yahoo’s site and into CGM. Given their acquisition and consolidation of Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics earlier this year, it seems like a logical next step and one that will bring CPG’s that much closer to their consumers. 

Technorati Tags:

 

Blogosphere, CGM, Joga, Marketing, Social Networking, Web2.0

Consumer vs. Marketer Control? Stimulated vs. Authentic CGM? Time to Stop Talking and Start Listening.

Sometimes I love the self-referential debates in the blogosphere. Last week I, apparently along with the rest of the marketing-blog universe and the New York Times, posted about the Chevy Tahoe foray into “CGM”. The campaign sparked a series of reactions from outrage to kudos across the community. The Church of the Customer Blog hosted a lively debate on the topic. Of course GM responded with typical marketing double-speak. (And really, did we expect them to do anything else?) 

The overall discussion of “authentic” versus “stimulated” CGM and whether the consumer is in control was on insightful. Jim Nail provided a thoughtful postscript on the whole incident today. But I would offer an additional idea for consideration. 

One of the greatest distinctions between old-school marketing think and “Marketing 2.0” is the idea that the consumer leads, instead of the brand. What this means is that brands and marketers need to listen first, then act. Americans love cars and driving. We’re a big country and our choice of car and path somehow speaks to our pioneering, adventurous spirit. There are thousands of car clubs and blogs. I bet if Chevy had done some research and had listened first, they would have learned that there are Tahoe fanatics out there who could effectively speak on behalf of the brand. These folks are likely making their own “authentic” CGM … and at the very least have real credibility with other consumers. Next time, Chevy might want to listen first, then post. 

Additional note: kudos to Mack Collier and the guys at Beyond Madison Avenue for their 100,000^th visitor . I’m a big fan of the blog and happy to enjoy their success.

 

Technorati Tags:

Advertising, CGM, Chevy Tahoe, Citizen Marketing, Marketing, Social Networking, Web2.0

The New New Thing: Collaborating with Consumers

Based on a report in today’s New York Times, Chevy is learning the hard way what it means to engage in consumer generated media. Last month the company started a campaign to promote the Chevy Tahoe, by asking viewers of “The Apprentice” to create their own ads. The company received some criticism by members of the Marketing 2.0 community for not really engaging in consumer generated marketing. One critique suggested that the idea was “strategically flawed at birth” since the promotion led viewers down the path of building an ad with Chevy video assets, versus targeting loyal Tahoe evangelists to create their own ads. 

“The lesson here is: If you're going to give up control, don't do it halfway, trying to game the system. The congregation is smarter than the carny. Appeal to the evangelists.”

 And sure enough, Chevy was blasted with ads critical of the Tahoe (and SUV’s in general). A spokeswoman for the company, Melisa Tezanos, acknowledged the possibility of this type of reaction.

 "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions," Ms. Tezanos said. "You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

 Dawn Hudson, president of chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America expanded on this thought.

 "One of the reasons we're being cautious is there's a blurring between advertising and content."

While one could argue the point about whether Chevy’s program was strategically sound, the reality is that big brands across the country are starting to dip their toes in the choppy waters of consumer generated media and viral marketing. And just as with the introduction of the Internet as a marketing tool, it will take some time for them to learn where and how to engage in this new form of customer interaction. Some advertisers like Chevy and Mastercard are experimenting with consumer created advertising. Others are using contests and promotions to engage valued consumers in the process of developing PR programs for new products.

It’s no surprise they want to get on the CGM bandwagon though. According to a report in today’s Washington Post, while overall Internet audience growth was a mere 4%, MySpace experienced 318% growth over the last year. In “old media” terms, the eyeballs are moving … from traditional media outlets to places where self expression and common interests are dominant themes. And while the economic models remain largely unproven for sites like YouTube, there’s no question that marketers (and investors) see their potential. Last week’s rumored valuations of Facebook are just the latest round in the Web 2.0 venture sweepstakes.

The next new thing will be for marketers to understand how to actually engage in conversations and cultivate customer loyalty, versus stimulating trial and awareness.

Stay tuned to YouTube.com and all the other forms of CGM. I’m willing to bet that the best new ideas will come from brand enthusiasts instead of corporate marketing departments.

 

Technorati Tags:

 

Advertising, CGM, Citizen Marketing, Marketing, MySpace, Social Networking, Web2.0, YouTube.com

The New Way to Customer Engagement: More Big Brands Jumping on the CGM Bandwagon

Sony, MasterCard and Home Depot are the latest Fortune 500 marketers to enter the CGM marketing bonanza.  The Detroit Free Press reports today that these companies are using consumer created advertisements and promotions to help combat growing resistance to mass market advertising. 

"More and more consumers are choosing what messages to receive with video-on-demand and opt-in e-mails," said Roger Adams, Home Depot's senior vice president of marketing. "We want to allow consumers a chance to vote on what they receive in mass media as well."

It looks like Al Gore’s new gig is paying off.  Sony Electronics, Toyota and L’Oreal Paris are asking viewers of Gore’s Current TV network to produce original TV spots for their respective brands.  Current TV viewers are a great target for this kind of CGM marketing effort – they already produce enough content to fill 30% of Current TV’s on-air broadcasts. 

"In effect, we're allowing our consumers to tell us how they want products sold to them, not the other way around," said Mike Fasulo, Sony's chief marketing officer.

Meanwhile the Church of the Customer Blog has an interesting claim about big brands on YouTube.

“Are you the brand manager for a well-known and popular product? If so, go to YouTube.com right now. 
Go ahead. We'll wait.  Now type your product/company/brand name into the search box. Chances are better than even that something about your company will turn up.”

And Time Warner is taking a new approach to development of its next network.  It’s developing a channel that would offer viewers on-demand access to hit shows from broadcast networks such ABC, CBS, NBC, and even competitor Fox.  The new service would allow content producers to reach consumers who are ‘time shifting’ TV viewing. 

"It's just another outlet for customers to do time-shifting," Harrad said. "It wouldn't necessarily substitute for and could complement DVRs (digital video recorders)."

These programs from big brands and mainstream media companies are just more evidence of the growing momentum behind the on-demand economy.  The question is:  when will consumer generated become the “norm” and mass marketing the exception?

Technorati Tags:

Advertising, CGM, Citizen Marketing, Marketing, Social Networking, YouTube, Web2.0

Cannondale Blog: Savvy CGM or Missed Opportunity?

There are several recent profiles of Cannondale’s community blog strategy.  The cycling community is one of the most avid among sports enthusiasts.  It crosses an array of demographics, and is known for its intense interest in the sport, the products and new technologies. Unlike other sports, cycling is highly participatory.  Most racing fans also cycle on a regular basis. 

Cannondale wanted to tap into that affinity and began corporate blogging a little over a year ago.  The company has two blogs, a general Cannondale blog (The Brad Blog) and one for race enthusiasts.  Janet Maurice is Cannondale’s Webmaster. She explained their approach in a recent article in BusinessWeek.

“She explains that the staffers will not necessarily be blogging in the traditional sense, but they will have unfiltered access to update the site with news, photos, press releases, etc. A special section of the site has been added (Cannondale Community) to aggregate the news and information from across Cannondale and also includes the posts made to the two established corporate blogs. There is even a single RSS feed to help you keep track of all of the happenings at Cannondale.”

So how effective is it with the community?  A recent search of Cannondale on Google Blog Search yields 14,504 results, with the Brad Blog at the top.  A similar search on Technorati yielded 5,607 blog posts, and Alexa reports that the Brad Blog rank is 884,253. 

Cannondale deems the program a success, and has plans for future corporate blogs.  But it’s not clear that the cycling community has truly embraced this. A Technorati search for the term “cycling” yields 159,721 posts.  The real measure of success will be how much the cycling community embraces and interacts with the Cannondale blogs and whether it spawns other forms of Cannondale CGM. 

I know at least one savvy  tech-cycler who is skeptical of this approach.  (Full disclosure:  he’s a senior game developer and my brother, so that probably impedes his objectivity on two counts.)

“It doesn't have the "feel" of the things that I personally read a lot of, which tends more toward rider experiences with stuff rather than the misc. babble + marketing.”

Looks like Cannondale has some work to do before they really grok CGM. 

Technorati Tags:

Blogs, Cannondale, CGM, Marketing, Web2.0

Rules Of Engagement: Or Are We Still Just Dating?

Today’s New York Times has an article about the “new rules of engagement” for building brand awareness. The article covers a recent conference of Madison Avenue types as they extol the virtues of their new customer engagement models. They “talk the talk”, but based on this article it’s not clear that they “walk the walk”. 

Joseph T. Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation made several astute observations about the new approach by Fortune 500 advertisers. 

"It's turning the mental model of the industry on its head," he added, compared with previous benchmarks like awareness and recall, which are longer-term and have a rational basis.

 Another big difference is that engagement "happens inside the consumer, not inside the medium," Mr. Plummer said. "All the measurements we have now are media metrics: ratings, readership, listenership, click-through rates."

 "What we need is a way to determine how the targeted prospect connected with, got engaged with, the brand idea," he added. "With engagement, you're on your way to a relationship instead of just a sales transaction."

But the examples discussed in the article were little more than consumer promotions using new media channels, and linked to existing ad campaigns. Campbell Soup Company uses its recipe site to distribute its jingle "M'm! M'm! Good!" Subway’s site provides additional information about Jared Fogle, their miracle weight-loss customer.

To effectively engage consumers and build relationships, marketers need to put their brands in the context of the customer’s experience. Most people give little thought to the soup they buy or the lunch they eat. But when marketers find ways to tap into customer zeitgeist, they open the doors to true consumer engagement. Consumer Generated Media offers unprecedented opportunities to do just that, whether it’s by using blogs to derive market insights or encouraging passionate users to create viral videos. 

Of the examples in the article, Wendy’s International is the closest to that type of real consumer engagement. Wendy’s has created Smart Square, a character based on the square hamburger, which was quickly adopted among the MySpace community. If members of the MySpace community start creating their own viral videos with Smart Square, then they’ll know they’ve got a hit on their hands – and a truly engaged consumer.

Technorati Tags:

Advertising, CGM, Marketing, Social Networking, Web2.0

Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile, or Chevrolet for That Matter

AdAge has a story about GM’s new contest to create an online ad for its Chevy Tahoe. The promotion, a link to GM’s sponsorship of “The Apprentice”, offers viewers the opportunity to win cash and prizes for creating a winning 30 second spot. 

As AdRants points out, this isn’t really consumer generated media. Instead of asking people to submit their own videos, Chevy has set up a site where people can click and drag commercial components together to create a canned spot. 

That said, GM is turning consumer generated media on its head, and inspiring brand enthusiasts to create their own ads, which they hope will, in turn, inspire purchase and loyalty to GM.

They’re not alone. According to Steve Rubel, PodGuide.tv shows some major national advertisers that are experimenting with video podcasts, including Nike and American Express.

“This is a start. The next big step for advertisers is to use their video podcasts to encourage the community to co-create and participate. For example, what if Nike urged the YouTube community to remix these podcasts into new creations? It could run the best submitted videos in the feed and encourage viewers to vote on their faves. It could even give the winner a directorial role in Nike's next TV ad. That's what's going to make these campaigns more attractive.”

While it’s exciting to see big brands start to embrace CGM, the possibilities for smaller organizations are even more intriguing. Podcasts, vlogs, and blogs all offer ways for small companies to market and sell directly to their customers. They require little in the way of infrastructure or financial investment, and the potential rewards are enormous.

 

Technorati Tags:

Advertising, CGM, Marketing, Social Networking, Web2.0

Sony BMG Product Shills: Dumb and Dumber?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Sony BMG comes up with another zinger. Not content with the maelstrom of bitterness they created over the Rootkit scandal last fall, they’ve now moved on to shilling product promotions via unpaid interns. Today’s New York Times (subscription required) reports that Epic Records, a Sony BMG company, has posted an ad on EntertainmentCareers.net for its “social networking” program.

 
“Do you blog, have lots of friends at your MySpace page, and love music? Epic Records is looking for skilled, motivated interns to promote artists on social networking sites like MySpace, purevolume, Facebook & others.”

And in return for losing credibility with their peers, the youth of America can learn how to promote propaganda while getting college credit. What a deal!

These guys (Sony BMG and its subsidiaries) are so busy making noise that they can’t hear the obvious.  The communities on MySpace, Facebook and others are among the most digitally astute and have tremendous cynicism towards marketing and advertising. They’re twice as likely to turn off ads as their parents. They’ll smell product shills a mile away. Instead of trying to co-opt these communities, Epic Records should listen and learn from them. 

Technorati Tags: 

Marketing, Blogs, Stealth Marketing, sony bmg

Get Real: Authenticity and Consumer Generated Media

You know, the thing I always love about the Ad guys – they’re great at faking it. Two stories hit the wires yesterday about faux-consumer generated media campaigns. 

The first was about Guinness who launched a corporate blog this week. The story appeared on both MicroPersuasion and AdRants, though Hugh Macleod has the best review. And it’s a darn good thing too, since the site prevents anyone who says s/he is under 21 and/or in the US  from reading it. Hmmm, now there’s a security approach – let’s use self reported data to qualify users. Based on what I’ve seen, it sounds like the Walmart corporate blog is more heartfelt. 

My former colleagues at McKinney & Silver have engaged the Viral Factory to create a campaign which is more than a little misleading. The campaign is for a little-known cellular company called Oasys Mobile. It promotes the “aphrodisiac” powers of its ring tones, using a fax sex therapist, faux commercials and even a bogus Wikipedia entry. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that the Wikipedia entry was taken down after Wikipedia realized it was a fake.

These campaigns go in the category of seriously not getting it. By creating phony consumer generated media the companies are trampling on an essential element of word-of-mouth marketing: trust. Sure they may get a few thousand downloads for jokes – but how much will that impact sales and what will it do for the brand? 

In both cases the organizations would have been better served by finding existing communities of beer or ring-tone lovers and tapping into their networks of conversations. But in order to engage in a conversation, you have to learn how to listen. These campaigns show that marketers can still be a little hard of hearing.

Update:

Wow! I love the blogosphere.  No sooner had I hit the “save” button in TypePad when I got an RSS update from Shel Israel’s blog saying he had mistakenly attributed the Pherotones story to the New York Times, when in fact Scott Baradell at Media Orchard scooped the story almost a month ago.  So here’s my corrected attribution, with kudos to Mr. Baradell for breaking the story and for handling the snarky McKinney/Faux Sex Therapist comments on his blog.  He sums up the situation brilliantly: 

    ‘When people stop calling it "marketing" and start calling it "lying," you've probably made a mistake, gang.’

I couldn’t agree with you more.    

 

Technorati Tags: 

viral marketing, Marketing, Blogs, Stealth Marketing