MarketerBlog

Catching Up: Notes from the “Marketing 2.0” Frontier

I’m trying to get back on track with MarketerBlog after a big client launch last week. Here are some belated notes on items of interest from the last week or so.  

Matthew Hurst has a post in DataMining today about the new deal between Paramount and Technorati to promote films using cross-links from blogs. The films included in this program are mostly independents, with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” launching the first effort. I agree with Matt, it will be fascinating to see how this plays out, and whether it takes for more “mainstream” films. 

There was a great article in the New York Times last week about an “ad agency’s worst nightmare”  -- consumer generated advertising. Mr. Gore’s other project, CurrentTV was featured in a description of a recent ad creation contest. Sony comes out sounding like the “get it” in a serious way. According to the article, Mike Fasulo, the chief marketing officer for Sony Electronics said consumers were demanding that marketers allow them to define brands on their own terms.
 

"The trick is that you have to let go," Mr. Fasulo said. "We're used to dictating our messages and we're used to being in control."

Amen to that! 

An article in MediaPost last week profiles a new company, ViTrue, which provides a platform for marketers to solicit and acquire consumer generated ads. Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue Inc, was quoted in the article as saying that what makes ViTrue's platform different is that it provides marketers with standardized tools for doing that on a larger scale. At the core of that system are "review and approve" modules that allow marketers to post specifications for ad campaigns and to enable the marketer, or its agency to quickly review ads and post them on-the-fly. He offers some great perspective of this shift.
 

"The genie is out of the bottle,"Bradford says. "Consumer-generated video is here to state. We're just trying to give marketers and agencies a way of taking advantage of it."

CNET had an interesting article about the shift to online media and some observations about the long-term sustainability of the ubiquitous ad-based business models. Despite substantive growth in online media, financial types are getting antsy about the growing dependence on this as a business model. Scott Karp put it more bluntly, labeling it a “doomsday scenario”.

 
“You can see the pattern emerging. The network effect turns everything into a media platform, while at the same time obviating the need for media as a marketing vehicle because brands can use the network itself as a marketing vehicle.

So, you have the new media/technology industry orienting its collective business model toward advertising…at the precise moment when the paid media advertising pie may be on the verge of shrinking. 

A recipe for disaster if ever I heard one.”

Ouch, Scott!

And last but not least, we can always count of Jeff Jarvis for astute, if sometimes phlegmatic, commentary on the state of the Web 2.0 state, and the attention/relevance deficit disorder we all seem to have.

 
“We still squander attention on irrelevance. But I think it is improving.”

 
That’s worthy of Oscar Wilde.

 
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CGM, Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0

The Interaction Economy: Community 2.0

Mack Collier has a great post on his blog today about the distinction between ‘understanding’ customers and true customer engagement. His comments inspired me to think about the topic, and perhaps take it a step further. 

Back in the old days of Web 1.0 we talked about community incessantly. Of course at that time the closest thing to community was you and the other geeks on the discussion forums, though AOL and iVillage and a host of others tried to claim their right to the moniker. The reality of the first iteration of the Internet was that it was more akin to broadcast that conversation, and that the only true interaction was email. Today all that’s changed and new ideas for communities and micro-communities are sprouting up faster than the VC’s can pour dollars into them. So what does all that mean? 

According to Merriam-Webster the word ‘community’ has a number of meanings, but it centers around interaction and common interests. 

1 : a unified body of individuals: as a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself <the problems of a large community> c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons> e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community> g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community>

Wikipedia takes a simpler, somewhat more scientific approach with its definition, but it comes to the same place: interaction and common interests. 

A community is an amalgamation of living things that share an environment. The individual living beings can be plant or animal; any species; any size. What characterizes a community is sharing interaction in many ways. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs and a multitude of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the degree of adhesion within the mixture, but the definitive driver of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common. This is even true in biological communities.

The technologies and behaviors which come together to shape Web 2.0 have in some sense given us the ability to truly have digital communities. Web 2.0 enables segments to form around concepts large and small. These segments are based on behavior and interests rather than demographics and geography. 

What this means for marketers is that we must learn to put our products and brands in the context of these various communities. If as Mack suggests, we join the community and engage in the conversations (and if our products are worth a damn) they’ll sell themselves. Better still the community will help design the products. This is a huge paradigm shift for mass marketers, but if the success of sites like MySpace and YouTube are any indication, it’s one they better get used to. And like Scott Karp says, metrics and monetization will be very different. 

‘What if the best marketing 2.0 strategies for leveraging the social media network are essentially free, and having the audience DOESN’T mean you can “monetize” it.’

Maybe it’s time to get out the dictionary and look for a new definition of success.

 

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

New Wisdom, Collective Intelligence: Is the Old Guard Finally Getting It?

The blogosphere is buzzing this week about Web 2.0 articles in mainstream media. The catalyst is a piece in the current edition of Newsweek titled “The New Wisdom of the Web”. The article is a thoughtful exploration of the intellectual framework and user dynamics of Web 2.0 as well as some of the early successes among Web 2.0 companies. 

Though Newsweek recasts it as the “live web” (an unfortunate moniker at best), and the blogosphere derides it as “ironic” this examination of various elements of Web 2.0 is well done and should serve as a great primer for those not already engaged in Web 2.0 or consumer generated media. Some of the more salient observations are about shifts in user behaviors, from the domination of online news among the “non-arthritic population”, to the phenomenon of citizen journalism empowered by Flickr and others. 

Some mainstream media outlets still struggle to embrace Web 2.0. (When is the Washington Post going to devise a successful blog strategy?) But it’s clear that others are making great strides. Today’s New York Times reports on Heavy.com, and its brilliant combination of micro-segmentation strategy and user generated content to market Fortune 500 brands like American Express and GM to the 18 – 34-year-old-market. And BusinessWeek has an article about the surge in mobile advertising, and the use of SMS text messaging for consumer promotions. 

So what are the keys to success in this new world? It sounds alarmingly familiar: listen to your customers, don’t treat all customers alike, allow for customization (what I want, when I want it), and market and sell your brand in context. It sure sounds a lot like Web 1.0, or for that matter savvy one-to-one marketing to me. As one of these articles says, Web 2.0 “fulfills some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the ‘90’s”. Maybe now we’ll get it right. 

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CGM, Live Web, Marketing, Newsweek Social Networking, Web2.0

Capital Comment: DC 2.0, a Bi-Partisan Inauguration

For those of you who think that  Washington is nothing-more than a collection of political wonks, last night’s inaugural DC 2.0 event might change your mind. The idea was the brainchild of Stowe Boyd, Dion Hinchcliffe and Ken Yarmosh. They recognized that the post-bust, revitalized technology community in the Washington Metro area isn’t solely focused on security applications for certain three-letter-agencies, nor is it merely the progeny of former AOL and  Telco executives. So they brought together a group of dynamic entrepreneurs, venture partners and others interested in Web 2.0 and its implications for business and technology for an evening of discussion and networking.

In addition to conversation about structuring the concept (something between a Mashup Camp and a conference) there were demo’s from six local early-stage companies. Steve Fisher did a great job of covering the event in his blog, so I won’t replicate the details here. Suffice it to say that it was an energetic and insightful group, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with them to bring together the Web 2.0 community in the Washington Metro area.

Update:
Stowe Boyd  just posted about the event on his blog.  Check out his blog for more information about DC 2.0. 

Technorati Tags:

DC 2.0, Social Networking, Stowe Boyd, Web2.0

Internet Killed the Video Star … or is it Advertising in General?

I don’t live in Manhattan but I make the New York  Times my first stop for news over my morning coffee. During the past two days the Times ran several articles on the explosion of Web 2.0 activity and media deals. The Business section might as well have been renamed “Good Morning Silicon Alley” this week. And the topic even made it into yesterday’s Sunday Styles section, with an article on the resurgence of Silicon Alley (social and otherwise). Why all the interest from the Gray Lady? 

Simple:  it’s about “eyeballs”. The New York  Times, along with all the other media giants, are chasing their advertising dollars. They’re watching their offline audiences and readership diminish and looking for ways to replace those audiences and protect that advertising revenue. Yesterday’s articles included a piece on “Slivercasting”, e.g. production of video content with special interest appeal to niche audiences. The companies profiled ranged from small producers like TrioTV.com, to Discovery Communication’s Cosmeo, the home version of an online video encyclopedia that Discovery already sells to schools. Today the Times continued its coverage with an article about traditional media companies’ renewed penchant for devouring some of the more popular online companies.

The Times rightly observes that now is an opportune moment to make these types of deals.
 

“Just as the advent of cable television carved up a once-concentrated block of network TV viewers, so has the Internet — with its literally millions of Web sites — created highly fragmented niche audiences.”

 
They acknowledge the inability of mass media to appeal to these niches, the inadequacy of traditional advertising mechanisms in attracting young audiences (and buyers), and the growing interest in engaging in social activities online. Their coverage would have you believe that this is the next step of media and advertising evolution. But what’s going on is really much more than that.

Scott Karp captures the situation in his post on the proliferation of media and the problem of too much choice. 

“Everyone between the ages of 30 and 65 grew up in a mass-media, mass-marketing, mega-brand culture. There was a limited number of choices in media, products, and services.”

 The first stage of the Internet as marketing and commerce engine was to offer greater choice through a broader array of media and commerce options. The next step was to put control in the hands of the consumer, via on-demand services and filtering tools. Karp argues that to be successful, Web 2.0 must now help us figure out exactly what we want. He says that in a world of infinite choice, we need help figuring out what to buy and use.

This moves past Seth Goldstein’s Attention Economy (as important as that is) and is closer to Doc Searls’ Intention Economy. It goes beyond maximizing use of media (whether online or offline, direct response or advertising) towards an environment where buyers and sellers are connected directly, and where ideas come from trusted resources (e.g. friends and family) instead of glossy advertising. It’s more akin to what’s happening with eBay and newcomer Edgeio, than it is to Google Adsense. And while the traditional media companies and advertisers may not have figured it out, they know that whatever this becomes, it brings enormous change to their multi-billion dollar industries.

 
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Advertising, Attention Economy, Intention Economy, Marketing, Media, Media Economics, Silicon Alley, Web2.0

Social Software: The Philosophy of Modern Conversation

I have a confession to make. I actually studied philosophy and other arcane subjects known as the Classics in college. I spent four years enthralled with the works of some of the greatest thinkers in Western Civilization. I struggled through calculus and Kant, and was delighted by the elegance of the Socratic dialogs and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. You might ask how this education prepared me for a career in technology, much less a perch in the blogosphere. Reading the reviews of speeches given this week at eTech I was reminded of the answer. I didn’t master any of those subjects. I learned how to think, and how to have a conversation. 

Scott Karp has a substantive post this week on the absence of meaningful conversation in the blogosphere. He compares most blog posts to an array of vapid corporate meetings, and makes the case that more attention needs to be paid to the process of the conversation, not just to the velocity.

 
“Conversation is a process — but the most useful conversations also have a sense of progress and, in rare instances, a destination.”

I understand his point. But after reflecting on the many, many hours I spent in quiet, old, musty classrooms, struggling to understand the flow of the conversation from Kant to Hegel, I suspect there’s something else at work in the blogosphere. In some ways it is eminently superficial, and in others quite profound.

What’s important about the momentum behind blogging and other forms of social software is not the “software” it’s the “social”. These tools and technologies are enabling new forms of conversation on a global scale. They’re empowering individuals to express themselves in new media. And they’re facilitating the flow of information beyond social and political barriers. In sum, they’re forming the technical foundation for the democratization of information.

Day to day I beat the drum on some of the pragmatic reasons for the importance of this shift. Reading an excerpt from Clay Shirky’s ETech presentation reminded me of their nobler antecedents. This shift has the potential to inspire imagination and real change – from the bloggers in Iran and China to the new successes of Mom & Pop shops in Shreveport and Los Angeles.  Let’s hope that we remember that reason for excitement and inspiration as we continue to explore, argue, and innovate.

So with apologies to those who aren’t as enamored of philosophy and great old books, I’ll close today’s post with a rather long quote from Mr. Shirky.

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan advanced the argument that humans in our native state lead lives of such chaos that we need a monarch to impose control and without it our lives would be nasty, brutish, and short. If from time to time tyranny happens, (it’s) still better than the alternative.

Rousseau wrote later that might is not right. (The) leader must support (his) subjects, and subjects have (the) right to agitate against leader if they're not being well served.

This is the direction that the conversation around social software is taking. Hobbes would say that Dave (Winer) had the right and all was good. Rousseau would reply, "no he didn't, software systems that don't allow the users to fight back are immoral."

Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

Please come join us to edit, alter, delete, improve.

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Blogging, Clay Shirky, Democracy, ETech, Marketing 2.0, Social Media, Web2.0

Fake Videos and Genuine Successes

Last Friday Adrants reported that McKinney & Silver extended their Pherotones campaign, a thinly disguised promotion for Oasys Mobile to viral video with a clip seeded through Emily's Eatmail. “While ringing cell phones in the middle of a wedding ceremony certainly cause reaction, the reaction to this ring tone...excuse us...pherotone causes a different sort of reaction with the groom.” I don’t know how many downloads they’ve had to date, but I hope it exceeds the number of gullible clients served. 

Today, various bloggers reported the unveiling of Edgeio, a blog-based classified listing service which uses tags as its categorization structure. As Om Malik noted, much has been written about this already, but it’s not just hyperbole. Edgeio gives individuals the ability to distribute and control their own content. Edgeio aggregates and organizes content, but doesn’t require that it conform to the rules of a particular transaction platform like eBay or Craigslist. In short, it connects buyers to sellers directly, without a third-party intermediary. That sure sounds like the basis for a genuine “Web 2.0” service to me. 

Finally, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that CBS is launching a new service which will enable customers to receive news alerts via their cell phones. According to the Journal, the service will include content from CBS News and "Entertainment Tonight" for monthly fees of 99 cents and $3.99, respectively. CBS noted the alerts will be available for all mobile phones and wireless carriers next week. Today’s New York Times (subscription required) reports that the News Corporation has created a mobile entertainment store called Mobizzo and a production studio to focus exclusively on developing cell phone entertainment in much the same way that 20th Century Fox creates movies and television. Given analyst predictions that the number of cell phones will double in the next five years to more than 5 billion phones, both moves appear to be shrewd strategies for tapping into an enormous market opportunity. 

While these may appear to be completely unrelated, in fact they’re all part of the continued momentum towards differentiated and distributed content and the on-demand economy.  Each of these services offers users the ability to get exactly what they want, when and where they want it. For all the critics, the ideas and concepts behind “Web 2.0” seem to be taking shape in a variety of new offerings. 

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Edgeio, Stealth Marketing, Viral Marketing, Web 2.0

A Billion iTunes Served: Another Giant Step Towards The On-Demand Economy

Yesterday’s stunning announcement that Apple hit the 1 billion mark for iTunes downloads was greeted with fascination by the media. There were articles in the blogosphere and the trades, and even stories on the national evening news broadcasts. It’s not surprising that they’re interested. It’s one of the single greatest indicators that media is shifting from its artist-label-channel-package legacy to the new on-demand model. While the technical formats and audience demographics of music made that industry a logical candidate to begin this shift, video and print aren’t far behind.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a post earlier this week on Edgeio , which he describes as “the classified system for the distributed future”. Jarvis makes the points that the future of media is distributed, that control will shift from the content producers to the attention and transaction owners, and that all of this will be enabled by tagging. “They [tags] help organize the world and its relationships.” 

That might appear to be a bold claim, but when you look at Apple’s share of total music sales (top ten, just behind WalMart) and its dominance in the download market (70%), it doesn’t seem like such a stretch. Last month’s simultaneous theatrical/direct-to-DVD release of “Bubble”, and the cable-channel-disaggregation hearings on Capital Hill were portents of changes to come for film and television. 

While Seth Goldstein and others focus on the concept of attention and the “Attention Economy”, I would argue that we’re moving to an “On-Demand Economy”. Greater availability of broadband combined with cheap storage and memory gives us the ability to purchase nearly every digital item on a by-the-drink basis. This is happening in the consumer market with music and video, and in the enterprise market with on-demand CRM and ERP software. 

The interesting question is how old-line companies, which still account for the vast majority of GDP in this country, will adapt to the new model. Newspapers and cable companies are hurling towards it, kicking and screaming all the way. To date, signs of innovation are scarce. 

With all due respect to the unique talents of Mr. Jobs, let’s hope that there are a hundred innovative leaders like him, to guide us through this period of market transformation. 

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Web 2.0, Edgeio, iTunes, Apple, Media, Attention Economy

Web 2.0: No More Mr. Little Guy

Today’s New York Times has a great piece about the impact of web services on small businesses (subscription required). The article provides an insightful profile of how this next generation of web development empowers small businesses to compete effectively – arguably more effectively – than their larger, process-laden counterparts. 

While the article describes the role of Salesforce.com and other on-demand software services, it misses one of the critical forces behind this momentous shift. Web 2.0 has opened hundreds of thousands of “many-to-many” markets. These markets are dynamic, innovative, and constantly in motion. They are truly consumer driven, empowered by various forms of consumer generated media. While Salesforce.com and other software-as-service tools are doing their share to transform the ways businesses operate, consumer generated media introduces a new world of market opportunities. As consumers continue to opt-out of traditional marketing, this new approach will move from experimental to mainstream to imperative. That’s the real momentum behind the reversal of business growth from trickle-down to bottom-up. 

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New York Times, Small Business, Entrepreneur, CGM, Consumer Generated Media, Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Graphic Reality

This graphic is all over the blogosphere today, but I couldn't resist posting it here.  What a stunning visual epresentation of the state of Web 2.0.  No wonder it's hard to keep up!