Platforms Optional

Anonymous Social Collaboration and the Disposable Network

2011-04-15T14:45:00.002-05:00

Recently I posted my fave SXSW start-ups. These included Color -- which had barely started up at all before raising $41M in VC funding -- and instant messaging mobile apps such as GroupMe and Beluga.

Color has continued a slow road to hype. Beluga sits patiently waiting for its new owner Facebook to make the next move. GroupMe hit the PR circuit to convince advertisers to sign on.

These companies have more in common than just being group collaboration mobile apps. All have a finite dimension to their social communication. Your Color experience is defined by your location (up to 100 yards around you), while GroupMe/Beluga limit the number of people participating in group pods. This provides an automatic filter to the social experience, preventing the amount of content / communication from getting out of control. It is a nice dose of order to the usually chaotic never-ending social sprawl.

Color's localized photosharing premise is useful within personal social environments: backyard barbeques with friends, in the office with coworkers. Not so sure about using it for bachelor parties. I also see an opportunity for larger public gatherings, such as sporting or music events. These provide context from a location standpoint (everyone physically around you) and a moment-in-time standpoint (everyone at the same event as you).

One drawback is that it's all (literally) crowdsourced content. Sure it might be interesting to see everyone's photos from the south stage at Lollapalooza, at least the first 50 of them. But what if you throw in some backstage photos from the bands? Then you have content with high social currency, plus a nice call-to-action for concert goers to download the app. Don't forget, Twitter seemed to have little redeeming social media value until the famous people started using it.

GroupMe is already taking this approach:

The company created a product called Featured Groups, which works a bit like Twitter's promoted trends in that it suggests topics around which groups can form -- such as Coachella or Bon Jovi -- and appears under a "featured" tab in the GroupMe app. If users form a group around those brands, they can opt in to get special offers, enter contests, sneak previews and event reminders. Since GroupMe's group limit is 25 members, group size stays manageable and based on a user's real-life friends, an important distinction from Facebook pages and Twitter follows, which can grow into the millions depending on the brand's popularity.

GroupMe/Beluga's main issue is that you are constrained to communicating with people you already know. Your established social networks (Fbook friends, iPhone contacts) are the starting point for creating these small groups. Which works out great if your Lollapalooza friends are all off watching different bands. Not-so-great if you they are standing right next to you the entire time at a baseball game.

These apps have one other thing in common: they are disposable experiences. Color's photosharing stops after the last Lollapolooza encore. GroupMe/Beluga chat pods deteriorate once the group doesn't need to communicate as frequently. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The interactive space set a premise long ago that content should be immortal, even in social media. Every Facebook photo, witty tweet, building check-in, and restaurant review is archived indefinitely. Sure you could delete them anytime, but there seems to be inherent social pressure to keep them. It will be refreshing to leave your social media activities behind with your ticket stubs and used beer cups, guilt-free.

Unfriending the Social Media Director

2011-04-08T16:07:00.012-05:00

I love it when fuzzy Dotcom buzzwords become the recruiting job title du jour = New Media Director, Emerging Media Specialist, Technology Evangelist, Digital Innovations Manager. The variations are endless!

I have nothing against specific 2.0 job descriptions. Community managers, mobile marketers, and new channel analysts all have important duties to perform. It is the job titles that don't convey a sense of purpose that drive me crazy.

Currently the most overused title being tossed around is Social Media Director. I stopped counting the number of recruiters pushing this over the last six months. Every company seems to have realized that they can't function without one, must have one, and need them right now.

Here's the most interesting issue: none of them can find qualified candidates. The recruiters are certainly confused. Should they find them at digital agencies? PR agencies? Client-side marketing departments? Is it a strategic, executional, or technical role? Do they report into the PR Director, the VP of Marketing or (God forbid) IT? Senior or mid level?

I love asking exactly what the position manages. The most popular response: "Well, you know, the company really expects this person to define that as part of their on-boarding." Runner up: "Well, um, you know, Facebook and things like that."

Therein lies the issue. If you can't explain the job title's responsibilities, then the title itself is too vague. It reminds me of the Days of the Webmaster (for those of you as old as Interweb dirt). Back in the early Dotcom years, anyone involved with a company's website could be the Webmaster. It didn't matter if you were the technical guy in IT who ran the site, the quasi-artistic woman who designed and hand-coded it, or the poor deer-in-the-headlights project manager who had to keep it updated.

Website Owner = Webmaster

Back then it wasn't embarrassing to have Webmaster printed on your business cards. Trust me, I was one of them. But it also was a pain in the ass explaining to your co-workers exactly what you did all day. "You know, website stuff." It was soon replaced by a variety of titles that actually explained your role = Website Technologist, Web Designer, Content Manager. I am waiting for this evolution to hit the whole Social Media job market.

For instance, Director of E-Commerce is more than a job description. It also explains how your employment success is measured = sell stuff online. There is no reason that these social media job titles can't perform the same duty. Social Commerce Manager makes a lot more sense.

Sure it still may require you to oversee all the quasi-social platforms that can't find a home within your organization. But at least you establish a context for how they should be utilized. Twitter unable to generate revenue right now? Maybe you don't need to worry about tweeting so much.

My bet is on a completely new title = Director of Advocacy. This role definitely expands beyond social media. However, its core essence is rooted there. Why do most marketers find promise in Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and niche community web sites? Why do they spend money on social media listening and flood any industry conference session with the word Social in it?

We are all chasing the same Marketing Holy Grail = consumer word of mouth. The chance to influence consumers, have them talk about us, and track the impact those conversations have on our brands (and sales). Social media has become the easiest way to participate in this magical process.

But Word of Mouth itself is a fuzzy marketing term. I believe it is the bastard step-parent of Viral Marketing. Both promise "free" promotion of your product or brand. Both require a cross-your-fingers-and-hope-they-do-spread-it approach. True, WOM can be jump started with marketing programs. But as many of us interactive marketers have been saying for many years = You can't make something go viral. Just like you can't make something go word of mouth.

But I believe Advocacy is more than just a word of mouth initiative. It is a formal strategy encouraging consumers to say positive things about your products and (more importantly) generate positive content that can be leveraged in marketing programs. Online is a very efficient channel to identify the consumers most willing to talk about you positively. It also is an efficient channel to aggregate the content that they create. Most importantly, it is an efficient channel to promote that content and reach non-users who may be influenced by it. This Advocacy Loop can be built on the backbone of social media properties and consumer behaviors.

I recently presented a case study on Brand-Distributed Consumer Advocacy that demonstrates just that. It is a small example, but enough proof that social media has a very important role.

The best part is that the Director of Advocacy cannot be pigeonholed into just being the Social Media Guru. To be successful, advocacy must be leveraged throughout your owned/earned/paid programs online. It should be utilized across not just online channels, but offline as well. All with a very specific goal in mind.

At least that is my current pitch. It usually results in very short recruiter conversations. But eventually companies will realize it as the natural next step. If not, then I already have my Social Webmaster business cards ready to send to the printers.

The Interweb Unanchored – Decentralization of Brands Online

2011-04-07T00:10:00.004-05:00

My parents are from the generation of Americans who still use the Yellow Pages. Not YellowPages.com or the mobile app, but the actual physical printed Yellow Pages which is as thick as… well… a phone book. Ask them for a neighbor’s phone number or local restaurant address and out comes the Big Book of Information.

They aren’t Luddites. They have a computer and online access. If I offer to look it up on my iPhone, it’s almost a race to see who can find the answer first. And to be honest, the yellow book is fairly effective. It may not always be up-to-date, but it is faster than walking to the computer and looking it up online. It is just about as fast as typing into a smartphone. Same content, different access points.

Despite its efficiencies, most people younger than my parents would never think of pulling out a printed resource = phone book, encyclopedia, dictionary. I have been thinking about this a lot recently as I contemplate the future of the Interweb, specifically the role of branded websites. 15 years ago every brand needed a web destination. In the early days there wasn’t a solid rationale, but everyone was doing it and those URLs were going fast. The Dotcom Virtual Land Rush from 1995 – 2000 saw most companies establishing their online turf, investing a significant amount of money into making them a nice place to visit.

People looking for information about your company/product/service? Send them to your website. Want consumers to enter a sweepstakes or get a coupon? Promote that URL on the package. Selling stuff? Remember to add the https to your links. Running online banner ads? Better have a place to send people if they click on them.

The last 5 years has seen a decentralization of Brand Spaces online = social networks, user-generated content, mobile devices, networked TVs and video game systems. These force companies to contemplate life beyond the grounded, controlled brand website. First step was creating mini-brand destinations = Facebook fan pages, mobile sites, Twitter feeds, Youtube channels. But the amount of user-generated and socially-connected content is quickly overwhelming brands and paid search keywords won’t fix it. Brands cannot just stake out land plots and hope consumers stumble onto them. Relegating consumer conversations to your Facebook tab will have limited impact.

I watch people younger than me interact online and it seems the very idea of brand destinations are alien to them. They still want to interact with brands, but on their terms via some type of marketing osmosis that we are just starting to decipher. But it is apparent that they expect brands to find them, not vice versa.

Although there is still a need for branded areas to aggregate content, distribution of that content is becoming crucial. Social networks have paved that path. At some point search engines will have to focus on delivering content to users, not sending users to the content. Mobile and other access devices in the home don’t require entire websites formatted to fit their screens, just their content. Your brand site will transform into a data repository feeding the rest of the Interweb.

Brand sites are destined to become Yellow Pages 2.0. Many companies will fight this trend and pump dollars into maintaining them, redesigning them, and attracting people to them (and wondering why their traffic continues to decline). Your Facebook tabs and Youtube channels are next. I give it 5 years for the transition to become apparent. In 10 years, the only people visiting brand sites will be old people like me. Start planning your exit strategy now.

Celebrating a Shark-Free SXSW 2011

2011-03-25T09:29:00.035-05:00

So I finally recovered from SXSW -- an entire week filled with meat, free beer, marathon interactive sessions, and great loud music. I was a bit concerned going into this year's festivities. Attendance for the interactive portion was up 40% to 18,000 people, anyone reserving a hotel room starting in January was stuck staying 30+ minutes out of town, and big brands were sponsoring everything from the convention center to free taco trucks. If SXSW was going to jump the Miller Lite shark in a Chevy Volt full of Pepsi Max, then this was the year.

Fortunately Austin didn't disappoint. More crowded? Yep. More parties with free music and beer? Yep. More trouble finding a lunch spot that didn't require a 30 minute wait? Yep. The only thing geekier than walking around Austin wearing a SXSWi lanyard? Wearing one while standing outside the pop-up Apple Store to buy a brand new iPad2.

I found the conference sessions just as stimulating and interesting as 2010. The post-session beer sessions with my interactive peers were the perfect nightcap as your brain swelled from innovation overload.

For the second year in a row I avoided most of the advertising/marketing sessions and went for the fringe topics = nonprofit social advocacy, location-based APIs, user-generated gaming. Discussions about crowdsourced digitization of historical photos -- in a room full of museum curators and librarians -- was relevant to any marketer: How do you manage user-submitted content efficiently, without micromanaging the process but ensuring quality?

Sometimes you ended up debating sock puppet-based transmedia marketing experiences (Ethics of Pervasive Fiction). Or enjoying IT banter around cloud computing services (who knew Salesforce.com was so funny?) The most annoying emerging trend was digital slackers taking pictures of PPT slides via their cellphones. Too...hungover...to...write...things...down...

Most of these sessions provided unique insights into how non-marketers are using the Interweb. Many which can actually be applied to marketing strategies. You realize that a whole bunch of people still leverage the interactive space for non-advertising purposes. It was nice to gaze at other industries' digital navels for awhile.

So here's my roundup of the cool hip new start-ups, trends, and movements. Impossible to uncover them all, but enough to reassure me that innovation has not stopped at Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

Geo-Event-Based Anonymous Social Media

Color (iPhone / Android) is part of a new emerging social category. Here is a summary:

“Rather than friending or following people, a Color user simply posts pictures. Users see pictures posted recently and nearby their current location. This concept seems fitting for events -- say, a sports game or a wedding -- where lots of people who don't necessarily know each other are taking photos of the same thing. If Color is used by a statistically significant percentage of folks, nearly every location that matters on earth will soon be draped in an ever-growing tapestry of visual cloth."

They caused a minor disturbance due to a recent VC infusion of $41 million.

Group Instant Messaging

A new make social networking simple movement is brewing. These apps allow you to create group message lists that don’t require sending/receiving SMS texts (they are sent via the apps). You can easily add people from your Facebook/Twitter/phone contact lists. Sounds really basic, but I found they were useful in Austin to keep track of people and coordinate meet ups. They also allow group members to invite others into the "pod," thus allowing an interesting two degrees of separation social network to form.

Probably not something you would use all the time. Can suffer from “chatroom clutter” if too many people are invited to participate. They require everyone to have the app installed, which is the biggest weakness. The leaders:

Beluga
“Beluga offers a mobile app and web service that enable simple, instant, and rich group messaging from your phone. Use Beluga to plan a night out or just share updates and photos with your close friends and family. Like SMS, it’s instant. Like email, everyone’s in on the conversation. Best of all, it’s private.”

They were just bought by Facebook

GroupMe
“Start groups with the people already in your contacts. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it—it’s like a private chat room that works on any phone.”

The Democratization of Video Game Creation

GameSalad
GameSalad believes that video games have become too complex and expensive to create. They developed a visual game builder that allows anyone to make their own video games, without understanding programming and graphic production -- object-oriented gaming. Could result in a new breed of amateur games that redefine the industry. Or just a bunch of crappy games that no one wants to play.

Crowdsourced TV

CurrentTV's Bar Karma is a fully-produced TV show whose episode plots are determined via crowdsourcing:

“You decide the creative direction for Bar Karma, and that process starts right here. You can contribute to anything from the episode's overall story down to what the characters are wearing. It's up to you. Impress the Bar Karma producers and community with your suggestions, and your name just might end up in the credits.”

The plot is developed based on user submissions and alterations. CurrentTV then selects the final plot and produces it. The Storymaker plotline builder was developed by the guy who created The Sims and Spore.

Geo-Location Mobile Gaming

I found the start-up mobile game company Dokogeo really exciting. They hosted the session titled Beyond Check-Ins: Location Based Game Design (presentation audio).

They have two games that mash up physical space with game play, in ways that are much more interesting than a basic Foursquare-style “check-in for points” game. Both utilize Google Maps and your phone’s GPS to incorporate your physical location into the experience.

Seek N Spell is an app that mixes up Scrabble, scavenger hunts, and tag. After downloading a Google Map of your immediate location, the game drops letter tiles around the area. You then race from spot to spot, picking up the tiles and spelling words. The person who spells the most (and longest) words wins.

Dokobots could define a huge new “endless game” trend. It is a geocaching Tamagotchi game that covers the entire earth with game pieces. Here are two good summaries = 1 | 2.

You walk around collecting robots and batteries from the live map based on your actual GPS location. Your robots travel with you, you can take pictures with them, mark locations that they have “visited”, etc. Then you can drop them off at any time. If someone else picks up that robot, then they can see all of its pictures and travels. You can also track the robots that you dropped and see how other people used them (like those traveling garden gnome photos).

I found it easiest to pick up objects while driving around in a cab, but walking is just as rewarding. It just launched three months ago. I find the concept fascinating and something that my kids would become instantly addicted to.

Collaborative Creativity

4Chan creator Christopher Poole's keynote speech also made your brain hurt (summary | presentation audio). If you haven't checked out the site, then do it from home. It's not safe for work, kids, small animals, or anyone on probation. But the idea of real-time user-generated disposable Internet memes is about as pure as the Interweb gets. He also unveiled his new slightly-less-likely-to-get-you-arrested collaborative site called Canvas, which is currently in invite-only beta.

A bit more safe for work is the collaborative time waster Fridge Magnets. It is a visual chat room where you try to build words out of letters, while others on the page try to do the same. Sometimes playful, sometimes aggressive, sometimes downright creepy.

The Music Industry Isn't Dead Yet

Yes, there is still music at SXSW. You have to tolerate stepping in drunk hipster as you rush from bar to bar, but it is worth the hassle to see awesome bands who you have never heard of. Here's my shortlist of great live shows:

Without a doubt the event will be even larger next year, but I still recommend attending. Just bring your shark jumper, book your hotel room this July, stay away from the street pizza, and see a couple bands while you are there.

Need More Puppies!

2010-11-30T08:16:00.004-06:00

2011's Mobile Killer App

2010-11-24T09:19:00.016-06:00

It's the time of year when everyone publishes their 2011 Internet Predictions. I might as well start with Mobile.

2010 has actually been the Year of Mobile. First, this requires that we stop making fun of everyone who predicted it last year. Second, it requires that we actually figure out how to fit mobile into our marketing programs.

The Mobile Hype of the Year award was easily won by location-based social networking: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter Locations. Some marketers experimented with it, while the majority waited to see if anyone would actually use it.

According to Pew, only 7% of mobile users check-in anywhere. This isn't the mass audience required for mobile to be an effective marketing tool, although it hasn't stopped the Location Czars. Yelp now allows businesses to offer special promotions/offers to users who check-in. Foursquare is playing the loyalty card angle. Gowalla offers custom sponsorships of digital rewards. Facebook is testing Deals.

What about QR codes? These are the little square symbols showing up all over magazines and outdoor advertising. They are big in Japan. The idea is simple: take a picture of the symbol with your phone, send that image to the Interweb, and receive specific content back (video, text, link to mobile site). At least it sounds relatively simple until you realize that you first need to download a QR code reader to your phone -- of which there are many apps to pick from.

It doesn't help that Microsoft developed their own custom QR code format requiring their own proprietary mobile app, which they are aggressively promoting through print media partnerships. Anyone who lived through the Netscape/IE/AOL browser wars in the 90s knows how this will end. Nothing drags out technology adoption and stifles consumer usage like competing technologies that all do the same thing.

Consumers are Technolazy. They don't want to learn how to do something new. They don't download and install things without a real good reason. It isn't a surprise there are no published case studies on QR marketing programs. Its most effective result is freaking out your competitors and making them spend time rushing to launch their own QR-enabled print ads.

Mobile commerce has its place for some marketers, but only 20% of retailers currently offer it. Recent research shows that mobile has its largest opportunity in the aisle as a final point of purchase influence:

More than one third of smartphone-carrying consumers (who represent 24% of all U.S. consumers) are ready to use their mobile devices in ways that transform how they shop everywhere and, in particular, how they shop in retail stores.

New behaviors facilitated by mobility, all of which can take place in stores, include searching for price and product information, checking merchandise availability, and comparing prices at nearby stores, browsing product reviews, and purchasing goods.

Consumers using multiple channels sequentially as they move from Web to store will give way to concurrent omnichannel behaviors as consumers bring their comfortable use of m-commerce with them into the store. These new behaviors will exert pressures that weaken the store's immediate influence on purchase decisions "at the shelf."

Influencing in-aisle purchase decisions is the Holy Grail for marketers and the reason so much money is spent on shelf talkers, hang tags, and end caps. Mobile offers the ability to deliver content to consumers in-store, without being subjected to the retailer's promotion restrictions and costs. Marketers should focus their mobile efforts on delivering branded content in this environment.

The majority of mobile users plan to leverage their phone to compare prices and read product reviews. This could provide enough value for even the Technolazies to try it out. There are already a couple apps available to scan UPC codes and receive competitive pricing, although they also suffer from the QR Code Clutter adoption barrier.

Amazon just upgraded their iPhone app with UPC scanning/price checking capabilities. eBay recently acquired RedLaser, which will allow their apps to do the same thing. Enabling existing apps with these features will be much more successful, since users won't need to download anything additional. Their success is only limited by the number of users who have them installed.

Which brings me to the Killer Mobile App for 2011 = Facebook. Yeah, I know, Facebook was the killer mobile app of 2010. They already have the largest penetration and usage of any mobile app. Their users are already accustomed to interacting with the real world via their phones (taking pictures) and uploading images via the app. Introducing new techno-functionality is as easy as the next app upgrade.

Facebook is in a unique position to push any mobile technology they want. It doesn't mean everyone will use it. How many of your Fbook friends have checked into a Place recently? But enabling a consumer behavior that is already ingrained -- in-aisle mobile information -- is much easier than trying to create new ones.

In order to avoid being trumped by the Next Big Internet Thing, Facebook must expand their reach beyond a big website. Don't scoff, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, and GeoCities all thought they were irreplaceable also. Mobile is a natural for reaching consumers beyond their computers. Facebook is a natural for reaching consumers with mobile.

Facebook has been very public about their intent to not rely on advertising dollars as a revenue source. Even less so for mobile advertising. Mobile commerce could become Facebook's killer revenue stream. Maybe direct sales (but probably not). Maybe commissions based on mobile shopping referrals (more likely). But offer marketers the opportunity to influence purchase behavior in-store? That provides a social ROI that would actually be worth spending money on.

Relegating Banners to the Kids Table

2010-11-19T07:30:00.001-06:00

My former colleague Scott Johnson and I have an ongoing competition to determine who hates online banner advertising the most [Scott's latest volley, mine]. We love online media. We just think banner ads are an archaic format for advertisers. It's amazing how little they have evolved since 1994.

Everyone seems to take it for granted that banners must be the cornerstone of an online campaign. Media agencies assume they are expected to buy them, marketers assume they are expected to pay for them, creatives assume they have to animate them. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, they are like the guy who keeps showing up at family holiday gatherings over the years. He's always been there so we keep letting him in the door, even though he may not be related to anyone and we really hope he doesn't sit next to us.

It doesn't help that our industry is built on the backs of banners: publisher site revenue, 3rd party media reps, ad networks, rich media vendors, measurement companies, behavioral targeting specialists, real-time reverse-auction bid systems run by rocket scientists... The list goes on. Heck, even Google recently placed bets that banners will drive their business forward.

All in the face of declining clickthrough rates (see Mr. Johnson's bashing) and plummeting CPMs. According to Adweek, 1.3 trillion banner impressions in Q3 this year? That's a whole lot of clutter. It is good to know that the "success" of this influx of banner media is exactly why CTRs are so crappy:

According to “Standard Banners—Non-Standard Results,” it was the success of online display ads that caused the drop in clicks to begin with. As users saw more and more ads across the internet, many continued clicking, but not fast enough to keep up with the expanding inventory. Clickthrough rates fell steadily until reaching an equilibrium.

This is the most blatant banner denial that I have seen in a long time, but at least the research report came with charts. I still hold to my theory that the majority of online consumers ignore the non-clicked banners anyway.

Behavioral targeting has long been touted as the savior for banner media. Hey, if we can at least serve you banners that we think you are interested in, then maybe you will actually acknowledge their existence. Unless, of course, we aren't allowed to (courtesy of the NY Times):

After “do not call” lists became popular, more than 90 percent of people who signed up reported fewer annoying telemarketing calls. Now, privacy advocates are pushing for a similar “do not track” feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities.

Online privacy issues are as old as the banner ad. They have been a constant drone in the media and something most consumers claim they are concerned about. Facebook's recent user data leaks only add fuel to the topic. For most of us, the need to delete browser cookies or reject Facebook application requests is greatly outweighed by our desire to play Mafia Wars and not have to remember website passwords.

But give me a chance to opt-out of having anonymous site usage info collected by marketers? Not exactly sure what that means, but I also hate telemarketing calls so sign me up! Those ad units would probably set a record for engagement rates. Which in turn would guarantee the death of behavioral targeting and all the companies whose revenue flow depends on it.

But what to do with all those media dollars? How about using it to pay media sites to create branded content for you. Not just sponsored content, but content created from your creative brief. And guess what? Those same media sites are pretty good at distributing that content for you as well, which gives new meaning to the term added value. I hate banners less if I'm not paying for them.

The demise of banner advertising is coming. Scott and I aren't the only ones who think so (requisite Wired link, read the last paragraph). You can huddle in your bomb shelter with your stockpile of backup GIFs and pretend it isn't happening. Or join us in our revolution. The future will not be clickable.

The Simple Challenge

2010-11-17T17:45:00.001-06:00

Pssst! Listen up. Here's the most important lesson that I've learned in the last two years on the client side:

Interactive marketers make things
way too difficult for themselves

We have a tendency to put together complex digital strategies that beget complex user experiences, which in turn beget complex creative solutions, which then require complex measurement programs. All in a channel that is already overwhelming for the traditional marketers who pay most of our bills.

It's no wonder brands haven't migrated more marketing dollars online. It is just so damn complicated to explain. I worked with a great offline GCD awhile ago, who I started dragging to client interactive presentations. His summary of our Interweb world converted me:

When I present a print ad concept, I don't have to first explain
how paper is made, how a print press functions, and the

200 different ways someone might read a magazine.

If you can't present your digital strategy in 5 PPT slides, then it is too complicated. If it takes 10 minutes to describe how an interactive ad/game/viral social app will work, then it is too complicated. If your online promotion requires more than 2 clicks to engage with, then you need to make it more simple. If your measurement dashboard is set at 8 pt type to fit on the screen, then simplify it.

Don't worry, simple doesn't mean you aren't doing your job. Your clients will love you for it. It makes their lives more simple as well: They can actually explain it to their boss. They can cut the creative review meetings in half. The odds of consumers actually engaging with it (and not publicly bashing it on the brand Facebook wall) will be much better.

As an agency, your life will be more simple also: Less production hassles, less account management anxiety, 10 minute measurement report meetings. And you will probably get paid the same amount for the project.

Here is my ultimate personification of simple. No instructions required. Takes 30 seconds to figure out. Completely addictive.

Try it out

Public Displays of Promotion

2010-10-27T15:00:00.012-05:00

There are a few common truths when it comes to social marketing promotion programs:

Consumers love free stuff
Free stuff is a great way to attract consumers to your social spaces and reward those already connected with you
Consumers get mad when they can't get their free stuff
Social media is the perfect place for them to complain about it

There is nothing more painful than watching a brand's social promotion go awry. Between my own programs -- and following other marketer's promotions -- it seems any type is fair game. Online coupons, sweepstakes, and contests all have the potential to attract the haters.

Sometimes online coupons don't print correctly. Sometimes consumers are too dumb to enter a contest correctly. Sometimes (actually more frequently than you expect) your well-planned and orchestrated promotion is just too complicated for consumers to interact with.

Whatever the cause, social media provides a very public space for them to express their outrage. It doesn't help that places like the Facebook Wall overtly encourage other haters to pile on the criticism. Misery loves company, crowdsourcing becomes crowdcomplaining. Compounding this is the fact that your VP of Marketing can watch it unfold in real time. Assuming they even know that you have a Facebook page.

These Public Displays of Promotion require marketers to take extra care when planning and executing programs. You must be ready to deal with the vocal minority of complainers. They will show up eventually.

The following are my Guiding Principles for Managing Social Promotions. They are tuned towards Facebook, since that is where we execute the bulk of our programs. They can be adapted to any place where you can be publicly flogged.

Preparing

Your program will spawn haters. Doesn't matter how simple or straightforward it is. Someone will find something to complain about. Ensure you have clear user guidelines and T&Cs on your Facebook page that state what types of user comments can be deleted.
Prep your Consumer Relations team about the promotion, even if they are not involved in moderating your Facebook Wall. A pissed-off consumer's resourcefulness is amazing when it comes to getting free stuff. 1-800 numbers or Contact Us email addresses are only a quick Google search away.
Pre-announce a promotion start date at your own risk. You will quickly attract an angry mob if that sampling form isn't ready at 6 AM on the day you promised.
Establish clear roles for watching your Wall after a promotion starts. Especially over the weekend. Murphy's Law states all online coupon inventory shall be depleted on a Saturday afternoon.

Activating

If you pre-announced the promotion date, then launch it at midnight the night before. Seriously. Making it live "sometime that day" won't cut it. There must be a promotion countdown ticker synced with the atomic clock somewhere.
Don't launch it on a Friday, unless you have a robust process for managing issues over the weekend.
Keep It Simple. No multi-step processes or fancy interactive modules.

Managing The Impending Chaos

Be prepared to address common user issues or complaints. Deputize the person or agency managing your Wall to respond immediately to these. It often will halt comments from other upset users.
Don't delete any complaints unless they violate your user guidelines (see Preparing above).
Often the community will police itself, and other users respond to complaints before you do. Watch these conversations to ensure they don't turn into a good old fashion flame war.
If complainers pile on, then limit the public exposure on your Wall:
--Change the Wall default view to Brand Only until the fury dies down. Users can still select the option to also view what other Fans have posted, but this will limit most of the views.
--Prepare a group of new Wall posts to flood it after the conversation dies down. This will push negative posts off the first page view. People can still view them, but they need to make an effort to see them.
Remind your boss, Consumer Relations, PR agency, and family members that this is only short term and will pass. Usually in a day or two. If they really freak out, then find a couple other marketing promotions on Facebook where the exact same issues are occurring. It happens on almost all of them.

Closure

Write a status post announcing the promotion is finished. This helps prevent late comers from posting about how they can't find it. This happens often when coupon blogs continue linking to your page post-program.
If late comers do complain, then respond with a comment explaining it is finished. This can help prevent piling on.
If you are announcing the winner of a contest, then be prepared for the entire complaint process to start all over again. Some people just hate it when others win free stuff instead of them.

Is that a CTR in your pocket, Or are you just glad we noticed you?

2010-10-18T08:55:00.011-05:00

Rhythm -- the self-reported largest mobile video ad network -- recently published an overview of mobile advertising metrics (download here).

It contains comparisons between types of mobile ad units, including user response across Apple devices and Android phones. These are basic benchmarks, but useful as mobile advertising moves beyond static banners into rich media and video. Of course, you would expect charts from a mobile video ad network to portray mobile video positively...

A sign that we may be headed down the same beaten path of misguided metrics is Mediapost's article, which focuses on the most irrelevant part of the study = Clickthrough Rates. The last thing we need to burden Mobile Advertising with are the scarlet letters C--T--R. Of course CTR is high (at least compared to its old, sickly online relatives). It's a new advertising medium and benefits from limited ad exposure. People are bound to click on them out of sheer curiosity.

CTRs are always high in the early days of a new interactive ad channel. Guess what, it's nowhere but down from here. CTRs naturally decline over time, leading marketers to pine for the days when they delivered results on the left side of the decimal point. Focusing attention on them now does nothing but set Mobile up for disappointment in the long run.

Social Broadcasting For Dummies (everyone but you)

2010-10-11T23:30:00.005-05:00

A recent global study (here's the summary) has encouraging news for trying to monetize the value of Facebook brand pages:

92% of Fbook fans of brand pages would recommend those brands to friends
Over 33% "want to buy this brand's product more"

Awesome stats, until you do the math. Let's assume your Fbook page has 100,000 fans. Yeah, yeah, I know Starbucks and Coke and Oreo have millions of fans. But take a look at your competitor's Fbook pages, slap your face a couple times, and get real.

Let's also assume the average Fbook user has 130 friends. But of those 130 friends, only 50% are truly personal connections/peers (or at least in the same target market).

Advocacy Impact:
(100,000 x 92%) x (130 x 50%) = 5,980,000 potential influencees

Which are decent Word of Mouth results, although this assumes that all 92% of your fans will proactively recommend you. When is the last time you did this on your personal Fbook wall?

This is the point where WOM measurement goes all fuzzy and leap-of-faithy. After a user joins your fan page, the odds of them "liking" or commenting on your page regularly is fairly low. Resulting in even lower chances that their Fbook friends notice the connection with you. Meaning the reach and frequency of these WOM impressions could be much smaller.

So let's dissect a more direct measurement = Purchase Intent. It's great that a third of your Fbook fans intend to buy your product. But at the average fan count (my best guess is between 30K - 300K per brand page), this isn't exactly the type of sales numbers that excite most CFOs. Since your fans are primarily already users of your product, we are really talking repeat purchases -- not new user acquisition. So the sales impact is even lower.

So what's a poor social marketer to do? Pump more money into acquiring fans, in order to increase the final output? Then you run the risk of having to justify that investment. The dreaded Fan ROI discussion. Online advertising faces enough scrutiny when we micro-measure it on hundreds of data points. Imagine defending your social media spend with hypotheses and best guesses.

How about guaranteeing that these advocates reach millions of potential consumers, based on established distribution channels? Measured by criteria and research tools already accepted industry-wide?

Recently I presented on leveraging branded social spaces to generate advocacy content, but leveraging paid media to distribute it and reach a wider audience. Resulting in a much broader impact that can actually be measured: Brand-Distributed Consumer Advocacy.

Hopefully it goes beyond cramming product reviews in banners (although that's a good start). Use standard reach/frequency to measure its exposure. Apply standard Dynamic Logic/Comscore brand effectiveness studies to really measure its impact.

In my perfect world I never have to justify the value of a fan, and the number of fans is irrelevant. Instead the focus should be on the amount of advocacy content they generate and its impact outside of Facebook's walls.

Just get ready for a whole new list of buzzwords such as CPWOM (cost per thousand advocate mentions), behaviorally-targeted sentiment, and influence intent. Online marketers never pass up a chance to complicate the simple.

Kill Me Now

2010-10-11T22:59:00.005-05:00

Courtesy of AdWeek:

Will People 'Keep' Banner Ads?

AdKeeper preps service that lets users "clip" banner ads for viewing and sharing at their convenience.

"Marketers and regular people like ads."

Putting Lipstick On An Ad Banner

2010-09-29T11:27:00.012-05:00

Google has apparently milked the Long Tail of search advertising all the way to its itsy-bitsy tip. Their declaration this week to begin dominating display advertising (WSJ, NYT) was most interesting for its yawn factor.

The highlights of the announcement:

Banners with video!
Banners with video charged as cost per view!
Banners with video that expand and are charged as cost per view!

They could have just bought VideoEgg. Oops, too late.

Their social activation of ad units received the most hype:

In five years, Salzman said 75% of display ads will be “social,” meaning people will be able to comment on them, share them with friends on social networks, or “subscribe” to them, implying that users could sign up to receive notices of when similar ads are available to watch.

Which might be a great way to keep those Superbowl TV spots chugging along post-game. But seriously, you expect me to become a fan of your banner ad? Assuming I even notice it to begin with? It better be damn good. Or at least appealing to the eye:

During a presentation during the IAB advertising conference, Google executives said the medium will become much more engaging. In past years, display ads were “static” and it was “tough to engage Madison Avenue’s most creative minds,” said Barry Salzman, a Google managing director for media. Now “display is bringing ‘sexy’ back.”

Ask any Art Director for their opinion about creating banner ads. Sexy is not the four-letter word at the top of their list.

Facebook has traction with their whole "your friends like this company" automated recommendation ad unit. But that's in a closed social environment where people are used to liking things out of habit. And they are raising their hand to be connected with your brand, not your 25K 3-loop animated Flash rectangle.

It is reminiscent of Digg's announcement last year allowing users to vote on their favorite banners. An initiative that hasn't been publicized much since.

The Internet doesn't need sexy banners. In my opinion, it doesn't need banners at all. There are much more creative (and effective) ways to spend your online media dollars. As more marketers and site publishers figure that out, display advertising's long tail will eventually get clipped. As will a wide variety of advertising revenue streams. Even the sexy ones.

Google Makes the Interweb Faster and Lazier

2010-09-09T13:32:00.020-05:00

Wow there's a lot of hoopla over the announcement of Google Instant (positive, neutral, and downright indifferent). Auto-populating content based on what you half-type isn't really new. I blame my iPhone's autocomplete spelling function for completely destroying my ability to type on any other keyboard. Now we can apply the same principles of devolution to finding stuff online.

Google's concept around saving "350 million hours" of user time a year -- since we won't wait 2-3 seconds for every search result to appear -- is what has me worried. Over the years we have jumped from dial-up modem speeds to faster dial-up modem speeds, from broadband to faster broadband. Now we are moving from real time to faster real time.

Which is great progress for someone who's been around the Internet awhile. But to users like my kids, who are just starting to interact online, it becomes a starting reference point. Everything else is going to seem slow. Even if it isn't. Instantaneous is the new Fast.

What's faster than instantaneous? Not having to take any action, starting a whole new race into predictive content. Why go through the whole pain-in-the-ass process of actually seeking information? Shouldn't the Interweb just provide it to me when I need it, before I realize I need it?

Predictive Content has been online marketing's holy grail for a long time. From Amazon.com's "you might like" shopping lists, to behavioral targeting of ad banners, to Facebook's "your friends like this" recommendations. Everyone wants to provide you with information that they think you want.

So what happens when we solely rely on this type of content? The Interweb definitely feels faster. And easier. And slothier. On an extreme, it's dangerously close to eliminating Free Will. Or at least Searching Will.

There's already an entire grey market of companies reselling your website browsing cookie data to ad networks. Combine this with all the Facebook "likes" you are clicking across the Internet. Add a healthy dose of "we know you like this, and these other people like this also, and they browsed here, so you must be interested in the same things" logic.

Which is all good and fine, until we reach the point where we don't actually take independent action online. We lose our autonomy when we stop proactively seeking content. When I start consuming the same content as my peers -- just because it is fed to me and easier to consume -- then these predictive algorithms lose their edge. The content they recommend gets marginalized. Our cookies get fat and lazy. Our social content becomes generic groupthink. And the Internet will start to feel so, well, boring.

The big question is at that point, will any of us remember how to actually find content on our own? If only there were a web site for that...

A Love Letter

2010-09-05T12:11:00.006-05:00

Dear Interweb,

I really love you, but lately we don't seem to have a lot to talk about. Maybe we are just getting old. Don't get me wrong, the last 15 years have been great. We made it through some rough patches. That whole Web 2.0 craze was a much-needed energy boost and brought sparks back into our relationship.

We haven't had much in common so far in 2010. Mobile QR Codes? iPad ads? Facebook Places? Really, that's the best we can come up with?

SXSW was a great diversion, full of stimulating conversations and non-advertising industry memes. Crowdsourcing was a hot topic. Especially how the democratization of content will doom the creative process (Andrew Keen, Sean Lennon). So that was a bit of a buzzkill.

Plus no one seemed to care enough to embrace the QR codes on every conference badge. Beware the technohype that can't catch on with 14,000 Internet geeks. I did sit next to Bruce Sterling at a small session, and stand next to Jaron Lanier at a urinal. Unfortunately FourSquare doesn't have geek street cred badges for those.

I know it's been a year since I last talked to you on this blog. I have been talking about you (NY Digital Media Summit, Social Commerce Summit, IAB Mobile, Blogwell). So don't think that I don't care.

I pledge to find more interesting topics to discuss, defend, debate, and demean. This just needs to work both ways. I"ll try harder if you will.

No Shit Sherlock headline of the day

2009-11-20T09:08:00.001-06:00

Most Mobile Users Indifferent To Or Don't Want Ads

"Most people don't want ads on their mobile device, but you have a huge chunk of people that are really neutral," said Heather Way, a research analyst at Parks Associates. "I think if anything it's a positive thing because you don't have people saying 'no.'" She added that the question is whether marketers will be able to sway mobile consumers over time with more targeted ads.

Next Up: Hanes Sues Webshots Regarding Underwear Party Photos

2009-09-16T18:01:00.007-05:00

So here's the equation it takes to get Second Life back in the press:

Virtual Goods / Porn * Bootlegs = (Digital) Copyright Lawsuit

Second Life Sued For Allowing Sale Of Impostor Virtual Goods
Entrepreneur Kevin Alderman, who sells virtual erotic goods in Second Life, said in court papers that Linden Lab allows other virtual marketers to offer knock-offs of his "SexGen" beds and other products.

"Eros's virtual erotic SexGen products sold for use in Second Life have been counterfeited, cloned, and ripped off countless times by a multitude of Second Life residents," the lawsuit alleges. "The manner in which this has occurred is akin to the knockoff handbags and purses sold near Canal Street in New York City. Some of the bags are stolen, but actual brand-name handbags sold at deep discounts, while many others are knockoffs that merely use the brand-name makers' designs and trademarks."

This is like busting a guy in an abandoned mall parking lot for selling 1991 Farm Aid bootleg t-shirts. He probably sold 3 of them, which were worn once to a retro party and then stashed in the back of a closet.

Wait until the lawyers discover the exchange rate for 3.5 million Linden Dollars.

The Ad:Tech Analysis That The Man Doesn't Want You To Read!

2009-09-03T09:50:00.005-05:00

So the 2009 edition of Ad:Tech Chicago just wrapped up. As with most conferences, it offered moments of inspiration, periods of confirmation, and lengthy bouts of “dammit I could do better than that” as you realize 10 minutes into the session that you picked the wrong one.

For those who couldn’t scam a free pass, here are my notable discoveries:

1) Enough With The Data Affirmation!
Geezus our industry loves to remind ourselves of our awesomeness. Usually through the fine art of growth charts documenting the increase in media dollars moving online, the increase in using social network time spent, the increase in TV viewers watching online video, the increase in marketers thinking about eventually using mobile… Some of the sessions could have been retitled Historical Overview of PPT Chart Formats. Problem is we already know online will keep going up, no matter what the context or empirical values. It’s forecast navel gazing at its most redundant. Next time, how about putting a big Thumbs Up icon on the first slide and move on.

2) There Should Be An Arrogant Bastard On Every Panel
It makes the session interesting. Plus our industry doesn’t have enough vocal skeptics, those who don’t think every dotcom trend is the next big thing. That’s what keeps the other marketers treating us like some weird cult. I was waiting for one person to declare that most brands don’t need a Twitter strategy right now. Or point out the percent of consumers who would actually use your iPhone app is about the same number who click on your banners. I would have helped deflect the vendor schwag being thrown at their head.

3) Case Studies Seeking Objectives, No Fuzzies
Way too many case studies started with what they did, not the reason they did it. Assuming there was a strategy to begin with. Here’s a hint: running rich media banners on a teen social network is not a case study. Incorporating your brand into social conversation to increase product advocacy is. [Note to Ad:Tech -- that would have been a good one.] It made me realize most case studies are not really relevant to most of the people in the room, unless they happen to be a direct competitor. My proposal: throw out the creative examples and the results, and just talk about The Why. That’s what is most applicable to the audience at large.

4) Data Can Kick Your Ass
Literally. The Media Metrics panel drifted dangerously close to a beat down between two analytics companies. Never have I heard so much word of mouth post-session, especially one about data analytics. See #2.

5) Social Media Is A Means, Not An End
There was a lot of conversation about budget allocation for social media. Per #1, Social Media Spending is never going to increase exponentially because that’s the wrong metric. If you execute your programs correctly, you shouldn’t have to shift your marketing dollars to Social Media. It should be a natural extension of your efforts.

6) Future Buzzwords Today
There was a disappointing lack of new buzzwords, which are usually an indicator of innovation and evolution. More buzzwords = more new things. So in the interest of career self preservation, here are a couple new buzzwords looking for definitions. I would be happy to host a panel about them next year:

Social Coupons
Word of Eyeballs
Cost per Sentiment
Social Preroll
Digital Anthill
Behavioral Friending
Viral Unfriending
Antisocial Network
Mobile Bangtail
User Generated Crap

Digg Our Portfolio and Read Our Cafeteria's Yelp Review!

2009-08-14T20:46:00.004-05:00

There's nothing more obsolete online than the advertising agency website. In the ad biz reputation is everything. It's who you know and who knows you. Or at least someone who knows someone who knows the guy who used to work with you and thought you two should meet.

If you rely on your agency website to generate new biz leads then you are doomed. If you rely on your website to attract good employee talent then you are doomed. Rely on your website to express your agency culture, competitive difference, and creative philosophy? Doomed.

At best these sites are Creative Directors Gone Wild expressions of navel-gazing ego-filled self-flagellation that confuse the hell out of the average visitor. At worst they are built by the PR interns and a couple freelancers between pitches, barely worth the cheap hosting space they occupy.

Which makes the recent Adweek article -- that agency sites are going Web 2.0 in an effort to impress everyone else -- even more ironic:

Agency sites, once a sea of client work and clever copy, increasingly are experiments in social media and other Web 2.0 technology. The goal of an agency is not only to show potential clients its ability to create state-of-the-art experiences with site navigation, aggregation and customization, but to create forums for consumer insights about the shop and its work.

First of all, potential clients could care less about your site. And if they did visit it, then a whacked out 2.0 explosion is bound to ensure they step away slowly never to return. So I call bullshit on this:

"For clients searching for an agency and doing their own research, the Web site is very important," says David Beals, president and CEO of new-business consultancy Jones Lundin Beals. "It's a first peek of what the agency is about, what they stand for. ... If a client is very into social media or networking, an agency can send out that signal through their own Web site."

If I have to go to your website to understand your relationship with social media, then that pretty much answers it.

Clients select agencies based on their street cred, their creative reel and, just sometimes, their actual strategic recommendations. Even an awesome agency iPhone app can't change that. Reducing your site to 140 characters or less? That's a start.

Microspam = Macroprofits

2009-08-13T15:10:00.008-05:00

I still hold true to my theory that Twitter’s future is as a content repository, not a communication tool. Let’s face it, the majority of Twitter users are pumping out personal content with minimal knowledge if anyone actually reads it. It’s always a surprise when someone retweets or direct replies to my posts. After awhile you forget there are actually Twitter people following you.

But match exponentially-growing content with the idea of live search, and suddenly something interesting is happening in Twitterville: contextually-targeted 1 to 1 real time communication. In 140 characters or less that teeters on the border of Microspam.

Earlier this summer I posted a tweet that mentioned "Tetris" [made it to the 8th level of Luggage Tetris]. Immediately I received notice that I was retweeted by @a_Tetris. Which, under closer inspection, is a Twitter account automatically reposting any tweet with Tetris in it. With 376 followers, not sure the overall benefit of that, but interesting use of technology nonetheless.

Similar thing happened when I used "moon" [gave permission for the kids to moon the Applebee's next to our hotel]. Oh Obi Wan imposter, your retro one liner was delightfully unexpected, even if you have repeated it 35,000 times.

A month later we were on a roadtrip and I tweeted about a roadside church sign [Alabama church sign of the day = Stop, drop & roll won't work in Hell]. Again, immediately retweeted by @Church_Sign, who reposts any church sign tweet to a limited group of devout Americana Christians.

I doubt these people are hitting Twitter Search every 5 minutes with their keywords of choice. Already there is a software business model evolving to support your every Twitter need -- similar to all the new service companies that eBay spawned as it grew in popularity [1, 2, 34567].

These are interesting uses of real-time responses to real-time content, under the guise of real-time communication. But what about all the dotcom entrepreneurs, up late trying to figure out How do I make money off this damn thing?

Oh, hello @JoniSloan, you may be a genius.

So today I posted a little Kindle-related wit [lady on flight carried a Kindle and a paperback, which kinda defeats the purpose]. Immediately I was reposted by @JoniSloan, who noted that she was reading a book on her Kindle and loved it. Included in her post was this short URL = http://bit.ly/NAizZ. I noticed she include six other @people in her reply, who probably also mentioned Kindle around the same time I did. A click of the URL sent me to Amazon’s Kindle purchase page.

A quick view of her recent tweets shows she reposts specifically about purchasable products. All accompanied by links to e-commerce sites, all tagged with affiliate marketing codes. So Joni is earning a few pennies for any purchases made by users who clicked her tweet links. All of the sudden you’ve got a Twitter business model! Microfiliate Marketing!

I’m not quite sure if this ranks as contextually-relevant Spam. Maybe when it reaches the point where every one of my tweets receives a slew of retweets, directly related to the number of nouns that I used in it. But for now it’s one of the smartest manipulations of Twitter since the fake celebrity account.

So here’s your test of the day. Tweet this and see what happens:

Just passed a church sign that said:
"Hell is playing Kindle Tetris on the moon.”

Democracy Has No Place In Advertising

2009-08-11T21:30:00.006-05:00

There's an old saying in advertising that if you want consumers to love your TV ads, just put babies and puppies in them. Which is kinda true. Everyone loves puppies and/or babies. They are fun to look at, especially when doing something cute like getting messy or making a funny face. Come on, you lovvvvve it!

This is also known as the Last Ditch Attempt to win a client over, after they have chewed up and spit out the last 5 creative reviews (the client, not the puppy).

But you are likely to get a big fat middle finger if you ask consumers directly if they like advertising. Of course not! The horror! Ads suck! Where's my Tivo cheat code for the 30 second skip button? [here it is]

Consumers don't hate advertising. They just hate the fact that advertising persuades them to buy things they weren't really thinking about.

Which makes the recent news that Digg will allow users to vote on ads -- and potentially tie back an ROI to these approvals -- completely hilarious. I mean, preposterous. I mean, probably unavoidable given our fascination with all things online collaborative:

Those votes don’t just affect where an ad shows up on the site, but also how much Digg charges the advertisers for each click; the more a readers like an ad, the less advertisers pay. That creates an additional incentive for the advertisers to create good ads, and for Digg users to actually read and interact with them.

The average CTR is a dismall 1 out of 1,000 users who see a banner ad. The chance that they will go one step further and express an opinion on that banner? Better get those baby wranglers on retainer. What's your Cost Per Approval (CPAval)?

The idea that a banner's likability should determine its cost (and ultimately its ROI) is like saying Google should charge more for funny paid text links. Sure your insurance link might get a thumbs up if it was in the form of a limerick, but does that mean it is driving more qualified traffic to your quote engine?

Then again, there is the recent debate that Bud Light's sales decline is directly related to its lack of funny.

As I have ranted previously, the problem with online advertising isn't the state of its creative execution. It's the fact that consumers have learned to completely ignore your "traditional" online ad units. Like or dislike is irrelevant when consumers are systematically ignoring you from the start. When the Tivo skip button is subconscious then even a Human Baby - Puppy - Kitten Incubator online ad is doomed.

"S-" is the new "E-"

2009-08-05T12:28:00.019-05:00

Remember back in the day when Cyber was the suffix du jour? We had Cybercafes, Cyberspace, Cybermalls, Cybersex. Cyber, cyber, cyber. Then one day Cyber became sooooo 1996 and we switched over to the more modest, less likely to mock, e-. eCommerce, eBanking, eBooks, eCRM, eCoupons, eMail, eToys, eBay, e, e, e. It became synonymous with "something you can do in real life, but on the Internet instead!" The fastest way to distinguish that your program or service was cutting edge and different.

Well, e is soooo 2008. Please welcome the new prefix 2.0 ... Sesame Street interlude here ...

s- !

Yes s, as in Social of the networking variety. Social media, with Facebook and Twitter as the poster children, is finally incorporating itself into standard online marketing strategies. Can't figure out how to cram your marketing into social media? Cram social media into your marketing! Just add an s to it.

(Once again Mobile gets dethroned so close to the finish. Bye bye m-, we barely new ya.)

Here's a couple s terms coming your way in the next fiscal marketing year:

sCommerce
Sure some marketers are tapping into social networks to enhance their purchasing experience [Jansport w/Fbook Connect] or promote their sales promotions [Dell, local malls].

But the new trend is cramming eCommerce into the social networks themselves. Bring the shopping cart, cash register, and UPS truck to the consumers, if you can lure them away from tagging old high school photos long enough to actually buy something. 1800 Flowers just launched an e-commerce page on Fbook. Other retailers are sure to quickly follow.

Does this position Fbook as the next Amazon.com? Can they actually charge enough commission to make a decent living? Too early to tell, but at least it provides something new to dangle in front of the investor community.

So what happens when Microblogging meets Micropayments? Who will be the first to figure out an eCommerce transaction via Twitter? [hint: Pizza Hut]

More importantly, will they create a funny name for it (twuys requiring twitcash)? Perhaps Paypal should buy Twitter to protect their eCash from sCash. The South Bay Community Network might just be sitting on a golden URL.

sMail
It's like eMail but less trackable! My Fbook inbox and Twitter direct messages are just as congested as my Outlook. Which means they are now prime candidates for marketing clutter.

Actually, I think limiting emails to 140 characters could be the most productive technology solution since charging for faxes per page. I have no problem implementing private tweets as the new corporate messaging platform. Even better if attachments are limited to 140KB.

sCRM
Finally, my favorite fuzzy acronym. CRM on its own has a hundred definitions and receives the most hesitant not-sure-exactly-what-you-are-talking-about headnods per capita of any marketing term. eCRM is often pitched as the solution if you don't have a CRM program.

Where CRM focuses on the lifetime value of a consumer, eCRM focuses on using the internet to cheaply maintain that relationship. All of which is very one-to-one. Where is the viral word of mouth influence in that?

But add an s to CRM and now we're talking viral. I envision sCRM as maintaining a relationship with consumers who have the highest likelihood to socialize your brand. Thus you could potentially reach a much larger audience through key influencers, without messing around with double opt-ins and database fields. Pyramid scheme relationship marketing. Amway would be impressed.

Of course, you need a plan for actually identifying those influencers and communicating with them. Which is how the new breed of sMarketing agencies are born.

sConclusion
Our industry loves buzzwords. Social continues to rank at the top of the hype list, destined to be ingrained in your marketing strategies for the near term.

So pick you favorite marketing term, add an s, and be amazed when your programs are recognized as the future of marketing.

No Shit Sherlock headlines of the day

2009-07-29T10:39:00.004-05:00

Courtesy of the IAB:

ESPN research shows consumers looking for convenience

Chicago agency can test multiple versions of banner ads at once

Thoughts & Reflections on Summer Vacation Part 1 – The Internet is a waste of time

2009-07-25T21:12:00.004-05:00

I love summer vacation trips – getting away from work, getting together with the family, introducing our kids to new places and experiences. I also use these trips to understand how technology and the Interweb affect our lives. Extended separation from your home wifi really defines how much all this interactive-emerging-media-streaming-video-status-posting impacts our daily lives. [read last year’s posts: 1, 2]

Or doesn’t impact it, as I have discovered during our annual treks to Vacationland, a group of lake cabins in the Michigan Upper Peninsula (the “UP” for those of you from the Midwest, “Northwoods” for those who grew up eating fried cheese curds for breakfast).

It’s a place secluded enough that there is only one phone for all the cabins. No modem plug, as if I’d even remember how to logon using a modem. No wifi.

Best of all there is no cell phone coverage. So a whole week without SMS texts, mobile Facebook access, iPhone web browsing. Might sound terrifying to you, but over the years I have found there is nothing more refreshing than watching the cell phone signal strength drop from 3 bars to 2 bars, from 1 bar to NO SIGNAL. Digital solitary confinement at its best.

It reminds me how we coped with our lives pre-24/7 information. Need to know what the weather will be like today? Stick your head out the front door and look up. Wondering about the most recent big world event? Funny how a morning newspaper provides enough information to get through your day. Need to catch up on what your friends have been doing over last 2 hours? Well, actually, no you don’t.

Every year I reflect on “What we missed without the Internet for a week.” This year it just happened to be Michael Jackson’s death. Or, to be more exact, all the confusion around the possible death of Michael Jackson. Combing through two days of Interweb content, it was apparent we missed quite an event. Ongoing news reports with up-to-the-minute details about how no one was sure exactly what was going on. Steady streams of Fbook posts and Twitter tweets confirming the same fuzzy confusion.

It seems a total failure of the whole crowdsource/groupthink promise: That a collaborative Interweb is a more efficient and productive Interweb. It can also exponentially contribute to a lack of information. I imagine the massive amounts of collective MBs and human minutes expended searching, contributing, reading, and responding to the big question mark around Jackson’s demise. Without any satisfactory results. This Pursuit Of The Truth became an augmented reality game of its own. The ultimate race-the-clock online scavenger hunt to find the answer first, but with no clear winner.

Watching big events unfold in real time is obviously part of our culture now. Online provides easy access to these events, plus a way for the average person to take part and contribute. For everyone caught up in the hype, it probably ranks as one of the biggest online events ever. For someone who spent the week fishing, swimming with his kids, and watching bald eagles; it seemed like a colossal waste of time.

Damn, I Got Dotcom Bubble All Over My Shirt Again

2009-07-01T08:47:00.011-05:00

Ahh yes. My Dotcom Bubble Burst itch just started flaring up. That minor buzz in the back of my head, hinting that we just might be glimpsing the end of the Web 2.0 ride. It may not be the massive implosion that rocked us in 2001, but at least the start of a Long Tail Slide back to status Interweb quo.

What causeth such visions? Nevermind the recession, here's my Dotcom 1.0 crash signs that the slowdown is nigh:

Dotcom companies are reorganizing, refocusing, and reducing. Poor Joost, once the emerging video on demand darlings, now reduced to B2B technology services. MySpace, the social media juggernaut, just laid off 30% of their staff and is shutting down whole countries.

Acquired dotcom companies are discarded like an expensive sweater that can't be resold on eBay. Yahoo has been quietly phasing out all kinds of acquisitions recently. eBay and AOL are setting up fire garage sales. Microsoft is looking to sell Razorfish.

There aren't any new dotcoms taking their place. The VC Guys have put away their wallets.

But hey, at least Viral Advertising is a full time position. Although leveraging Twitter for business purposes can also get you fired (sleep well, old marketer, your stagnant corporate methods are not yet dethroned by young punks!)

For those of you at the remaining Dotcom institutions; here's a couple signs that things may not be as good as they seem:

Freelancers stop getting paid on time
Delivery guy stops refilling the soda machine
Empty moving boxes pile up in the mailroom/delivery bays
Frequent messages from IT encouraging you to back up your files
Senior management starts going to all day meetings and avoiding public gathering spots in the office (kitchens, cafeterias, any open areas lacking 3 immediate points of exit)
Techcrunch just added you to their deadpool

Good luck and hopefully I'm wrong. But usually I'm not.

I Can't Believe The Username "Assman" Is Already Taken

2009-06-15T13:57:00.013-05:00

Late Friday night was Facebook's Username Landgrab kickoff. According to Facebook, within 15 minutes over half a million usernames had been registered. 3 million had reserved names within 12 hours (1.5% of their user base). Which means you probably missed your chance to reserve your actual name as your Fbook name.

The first question is Do you plan to register? I still believe it is not that important unless you are marketing a brand page (or yourself).

The next question is What name do you register? What is the next best thing to your actual name? Childhood pet? Street you grew up on? Fraternity nickname?

It is slightly amusing to random URL dive into Fbook and see what comes up.

Holiday icons [1, 2]

Obscure music references [1, 2, 3, 4]
Personal protest [1, 2, 3, 4]

Names only a techgeek can love [1, 2, 3]

The most expensive search term on Google - reserved by a lawyer, of course

And yes, the ones you picked drunk Friday night when you didn't realize it was permanent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Just wait for the HR recruiter to stumble on those. Perhaps Fbook has a viable revenue stream charging users to reset their accounts.

You know there is a freelance journalist scouring Urban Dictionary looking for the most outrageous ones that slipped past Fbook's watchful eye. Enough at least to fill a blog post or two and get crosslinked from CNN.com.

And mine? Well of course my real name was already taken. Me and the other 78 Stephen Strongs are out of luck. But watch out first-in-line StephenStrong. I'm doppleganging on you.

The Fbook Quarterly F*ck Up Is Here!

2009-06-09T18:48:00.019-05:00

I was just thinking it had been awhile since Facebook screwed up a Big Site Improvement launch. Well, wait no more! The custom username URLs are coming!

That's right. Starting late Friday night, you can bum rush the site (assuming it handles the stampede) and try to submit your request first for a custom profile URL. Facebook's blog announced it today:

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you'll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You'll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it.

So let's assume I'm not the first of the 80 Stephen Strongs on Fbook to reserve our name. What do I get next: stephenstrong276? or maybe theotherstephenstrong? Not since the bygone days of AOL username picking has my self-identification stress level been sooo high.

But wait a second, why do I need a custom URL? Don't my friends already know how to find me? Shouldn't anyone wanting to be my "friend" get connected via one of my linked-friend's pages? Fbook has been successful because it is a closed-loop network. Not the freewheeling "everyone be my friend" chaos that doomed MySpace.

Hmmm. Not even sure if I should care. At least not about my personal URL. But I represent over 10 brands for my company online. None of which have an Fbook fan page now. Some might justify it in the near future. Some won't. But I definitely don't want a cybersquatter claiming the names for their URL.

C'mon Fbook! I know you're thinking about all the potential advertising revenue and a way to protect the 95% of brands who aren't on you yet.

Oh crap. Really?

So that's it? A basic Contact Us form? As an added bonus, you can only submit one brand name at a time. So the process is this:

Fill out form
Submit
Back button
Re-enter personal info
Submit
Back button
Re-enter personal info
Submit
Repeat 10 times

And don't get me started that there is no explanation for the Registration # section. What the hell do you type in there? If you entered 123 for every entry like I did, then there's going to be some mass confusion in the old Fbook Customer Service cube tomorrow morning. [Update: it is for entering your brand trademark registration number. Good luck tracking that down in less than 3 days.]

But seriously, did they really have to announce this spontaneously only 4 days in advance? Can someone over there apply some common sense to these launches? They obviously haven't learned a damn thing from all their other Big Site Improvements. Most of which did not go over so well.

It's one thing to annoy and disappoint your average user. But marketers (the ones who could actually contribute to a revenue stream) don't have the patience for this type of thing. We're needy, pouty, and always expect to get our way when we bring the checkbook.

I'd hate to be the media sales rep trying to sell Big Industry on establishing an Fbook presence next month. Especially as he tries to explain why theothercompanythatsellsfriedchicken isn't such a bad URL to have. Much better than theothercompanythatsellsfriedchicken276.

Let the Backlash Countdown begin!

Do You Need a Bing Today?

2009-06-04T11:59:00.012-05:00

TechCrunch provides a Google Trends analysis of the recent search engine launches for Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft's Bing. Wolfram Alpha is fairly unknown outside the ubergeek circles. Bing will soon be unavoidable due to their massive brand campaign that just launched.

I saw my first Bing TV commercial last night. Primarily a manifesto video, it at least prompted my wife to ask "What is that about?"

Me: "It's Microsoft's new search engine."

Wife: "Why?"

Me: "Um, I dunno."

Wife: "What was wrong with their old one?"

Me: "Um, not many people were using it."

Wife: "Why not?"

Me: "Um, I dunno. Google?"

Wife: "That's dumb."

My wife assumes that somehow I am partly responsible for everything that occurs online: page takeover ads, Twitter, broken shopping carts, the sudden speed dip in our home's broadband connection.

This often puts me in the position of explaining (and defending) many things that I actually don't really understand myself. But I -- like any good marketer -- make it sound rationale. My wife -- like any good consumer -- calls bullshit on most of it.

So why does Microsoft need a new search engine? There's lots of opinions out there: rejuvenate their online advertising revenue, defend their technology street cred, rub just one more thing in Yahoo's face before buying them.

Whatever the case, my wife posed the obvious question: Do we really need another search engine?

I just completed 3 days of consumer focus groups, asking the average Internet user to visit a variety of brand websites. Literally 90% of the consumers started their online tasks at Google. Even when we gave them a brand name with a very-easy-to-guess URL. Even if they thought they knew the URL. A few even typed "brandname.com" into Google.

The other 2 people had to start at their My Yahoo page. Otherwise they were clueless about beginning their online tasks.

Which clarifies an important point: It isn't necessarily about needing another search engine. It's about needing another starting point. If you don't start at Google or My Yahoo, then you are probably launching Facebook and jumping from there. 90% of the interviews listed that as their favorite website.

Which is your starting spot: Search Engine, Content Aggregator, or Social Network?

Is there really room for one more? Especially one that duplicates the offerings of these top 3 home bases?

The only time Bing came up was when the interviewee started their search with the browser toolbar. IE redirected them to Bing.com search results, which resulted in the same conversation every time:

Consumer: "What is that?"

Moderator: "It's Microsoft's new search engine."

Consumer: "Why?"

Moderator: "Um, I dunno."

Consumer: "Can I go to Google?"

IFoundItFirst

2009-06-03T11:58:00.009-05:00

So you think writing semi-complete sentences in 140 characters or less is too time consuming? Welcome the next Damn I should have thought of that slacker trend:

Nanoblogging

One word status posts courtesy of Adocu.com

No need for pesky clutter like adjectives or punctuation. No room for adding mystery teaser short URLs. Forget out-of-context retweets. Just one word expressions of your current state of mind. Which for most Internet users is really all it takes.

Sure you could just post one word tweets on Twitter. But where's the competition in that? You'd just get a bunch of retweets from followers using up the other 130 characters available.

Parody 2.0 or Next Big Thing? Sometimes the silly ideas are the ones that actually survive.

Future Buzzwords Today = Macromicrobroadcaster

2009-06-02T12:52:00.014-05:00

Twitter reached that coming-of-age state where the marketing industry can't quite decide what to do with this unruly techno-teenager. Its popularity continues to rise at the same time the only social network with a revenue model is starting to fall.

While getting kicked out of China is always a good sign you're doing something right, discovering that only 1/5 of the popular crowd wants to hang with you doesn't help your street cred. Especially since you repeatedly run out of beer when they do show up.

Then comes the report that 10% of its users generate 90% of its content. Hmmmm, peer-to-peer communication platform or the next microbroadcast model? And what happens when the microbroadcaster goes macro? If the macromicrobroadcasters threaten to revolt, then you definitely hit a nerve.

This all leads to ongoing conflict for marketers. Should we care about it or not? Consumer revolution or marketing devolution?

iMedia recently published their analysis of Twitter marketing Winners & Losers. Ford vs Nissan! Dunkin' Donuts vs Starbucks! My fave analysis is Dell vs Apple:

Apple, on the other hand, appears to be missing in action. As one of the world's premier brands -- a technology brand, nonetheless -- its absence on Twitter is puzzling to me and many others.
Fortunately Apple's stock price hasn't been affected... A chart displaying the number of followers per brand would end the whole conversation very quickly.

The report eerily reflects the days when Second Life received the same scrutiny over its early marketing adopters. Then the hype broke and these marketers -- recently lauded as being soooo cutting edge -- were chastised for being duped into spending real world dollars on virtual branding.

6 months from now will not having a Twitter presence catapult you to the top of 2009's Smartest Marketers? Will the first Twitter TV show sponsor be rewarded for their savviness, or laughed off the trade show expert panel? Will you be collecting accolades, spinning excuses, or just waiting with 95% of the other marketers to see what happens?

Simple = Fun = More Fun = Fun You Will Share

2009-05-29T13:11:00.009-05:00

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

I love this. It's simple. Takes 15 seconds and zero instructions to learn to use. You can play with it for at least 5 minutes without getting bored. 15 minutes before you realize that you were supposed to be doing something else.

Too often we abuse technology to make our consumer experiences cool or cutting edge. Complexity kills you on the Internet. Too many added features and users just won't use them.

So strip down your rich media banners, your widgets, your embeddable tools, your viral streaming microsites. Instead provide what consumers have always wanted = simplicity.

(first person to turn this into an audio Tetris-style casual game wins)

Dear Social Media, It's KPI Time Or Else RIP

2009-05-26T18:00:00.003-05:00

So the IAB just launched their first POV on measuring social media effectiveness (PDF version here). The hope is to pull our industry kicking and screaming out of CTRs and CPMs into more robust measurement criteria.

As MediaPost notes, it's the Holy Grail for social marketers:

In other words, compared to old-time metrics like reach, frequency and the click-through, these metrics are deep, not only measuring whether people are engaged, but how they are engaging. It's like being able to measure the temperature with a thermometer rather than opening the front door and declaring it either hot or cold.

Imagine that you're an advertiser who sorely needs to understand social media. Then imagine yourself suddenly finding that you can not only monitor discussion around a certain topic near and dear to your brand but that you can also mention the number of people talking about it and their level of passion. Suddenly, social media goes from a huge, indefinable blob of conversations into something that has contours around which you can engage, plan and buy. That's huge.

Trying to measure a fuzzy nebulous environment such as social media is a daunting task. Here's a summary of just a few measurement recommendations:

Application and video installs.
The number of relevant actions, including newsfeed items posted, comments posted, uploads, poll votes, and so forth.
Conversation size, which measures the number of content relevant sites and content relevant links, and the monthly uniques spread across those conversations.
Site relevance, which measures the density with which phrases specific to a client concern are brought up among relevant sites.
Author credibility, such as how relevant the author's content is and how often it is linked to.
Content freshness and relevance, which defines how frequently an author posts.
The average number of friends among users of a specific application.
Number of people currently using an application.

And you thought explaining rich media banner engagement metrics was tough?

Marketers are continually screaming for simplicity when it comes to online metrics. The reason CPMs and CTRs still dominate is because they are easy to understand and measure. Hence the latest Key Performance Indicators (KPI) trend.

Yet they also find comfort in knowing that every online effort can be measured 1000 different ways. Just please put those charts in the Appendix so we don't have to go through them.

Who will provide the benchmark for Content Relevance/Posting Frequency (your CR:PF ratio)? Does a Conversation Size include paid media impressions, or is it only the "free" ones? Can you track those conversations back to a paid media stimulus, thus defining a Cost Per Conversation (CPC) efficiency? Did it increase purchase intent?

We repeatedly drive new online trends to the brink of complexity before pulling back to more attainable measurement criteria. Perhaps this is due to constantly justifying the existence of any new online marketing opportunity. Beat it to death with an avalanche of metrics, just to prove we can. Then once everyone is comfortable restrain it back to the two or three that really matter.

Unfortunately those two or three KPIs could be different for every program. Without a doubt they will change every three months as the social media space evolves. Which means all the ad networks and rich media vendors are safe for little bit longer...

The Local Pub Just Got Robbed & Its Burgers Really Suck

2009-05-26T13:06:00.008-05:00

Chicago NPR had an interesting interview with the founder of EveryBlock.com -- a micronews aggregation service that provides newsfeeds for events occurring in your neighborhood. Here is a description via the radio transcript:

"There’s a bunch of crimes that happened here. Wow there’s an armed robbery right on Briar. Someone reviewed the new cupcake place that just opened. What else is interesting – I can filter to foreclosures."

On the screen I can see there were six foreclosures filed on one day in April – a little glimpse into how the housing crisis is hitting this area. Tracking foreclosures may sound tedious, but it’s precisely by sifting and sorting small pieces of data that EveryBlock is creating such excitement. The site locates that data, on a given block, within the limits of a particular city, as fast as it becomes available. To Holovaty, any new information in the public realm - not just news stories but internet reviews, public records like crime stats and building per, or personal photographs - is news.

One-stop access to localized content/news isn't a new trend. Microsoft started up Sidewalk.com 10 years ago. AOL's Digital Cities was even earlier. But those sites were directly reliant on paying people to provide the local content; usually via newspaper content feeds or freelance writers. Those sites were only as good as those creating the content.

Now there is a flood of both professional and user-generated localized content online, the search technology to find and compile it, and the personal devices to deliver it 24 hours a day.

But what happens when the Always On Generation -- raised on a steady stream of Facebook updates and Twitter tweets -- applies the same voracious appetite for real-time content to news about their neighborhood? Will we become digital versions of those guys glued to their police scanners, waiting for a convenience store robbery car chase? Does having your iPhone beep when you pass a neighbor's house in foreclosure really make you a better local citizen?

And what about the declaration that anything is news? Does a cupcake restaurant review demand the same priority as a mugging down the block? Should video of a three alarm fire compete with video from your block party? The melting pot of public vs personal news will be very interesting to watch.

The latest trends in real-time social media have taught us the difficulty in turning off the information firehouse once it starts. Opening up the corner fire hydrants on a hot day may be fun for awhile, at least until your basement starts flooding. The real challenge is not drowning in your own front yard.

You Should Hear the Casey Kasem Podcast Version

2009-05-26T11:10:00.001-05:00

Is it just me, or does Ad Age eventually cram everything Dotcom into a broadcast model to comprehend it? Even though Viral Videos are soooooo 2007, they launched their weekly Viral Video Top 10 Chart for tracking online video popularity.

This allows agency Creatives to keep track of which clients allow their agencies to produce video beyond standard TV spots. Let's be honest, the main reason creatives enjoy creating online videos (with the intent to go viral) is because they are allowed to actually be creative. No 30 second limitations. No procurement battles over Director costs. No 6+ months of animatic testing to wring every last drop of brand effectiveness out to them.

This newfound Viral Video Freedom is quickly being pulled back into the traditional mindset. Used to be that viral videos = cheap production. Which in term = low risk. Which in term = minimal expectations for performance.

Got a viral video on Youtube with only 30,000 views? No worries, look how funny it is! And how cheap compared to broadcast! Plus it finally gave the client marketing team a reason for IT to unblock FunnyOrDie.com.

But now viral video production values are growing. The guerrilla-style hand camera video -- shot by a couple Art Directors -- is now more polished and has a soundtrack (and more often an actual Director). What used to cost $30,000 to produce now costs $300,000.

Measurement like Ad Age's charts give marketers the data to start comparing the total views with these rising costs. It won't be long before a Media agency starts assigning TRPs to them, jargon which brand managers actually understand. At which point the game is over. Because TRPs and CPMs quickly lead to direct comparisons with 30 second prime time slots. Which leads to marketers needing to justify viral video effectiveness. Which leads to consumer testing and guaranteed online impressions. At which point you've completely lost track of the initial purpose for the Wild Wild West known as Viral.

This doesn't mean that long-form online video is dead. I'm sure the Creatives will find another reason for an extended stay at Shutters on the Beach. Although after the 3rd round of viral video animatics, they may be pining for the days when 30 second spots were king.

Should You Pay For An Ad Impression That Doesn't Actually Leave One?

2009-05-12T16:13:00.019-05:00

Despite the astronomical number of banner ads that I have personally thrust into the Internet over the last 15 years; I still look forward to the day that banner advertising dies off. Disappears. Ceases to exist. Extinct to the point that CPM and CTR and 25K 3-loop with backup GIF become undecipherable words of a bygone era. Kind of like CGI-bin, server-side push, and <blink> tags. What are those you ask? Exactly.

I hate banner ads. Yeah yeah I know they are a necessary evil, carrying us through the recession, and the backbone of your online media program. I know they are practically the only online advertising standard that everyone can agree on. Some of you probably even won awards for them. But my main issue is this: no one pays attention to them.

Sure 1 out of 1,000 people actually click them (industry average CTR is now 0.1%). And your ad effectiveness research reveals that results greatly improve if you put the logo in every frame and the call to action at the top. And declining CPMs will reach the point where they are basically added value anyway. But it still doesn't change my POV that no one pays attention to them.

Seriously, when is the last time you clicked a banner ad? How many do you remember from the last site you visited, prior to reading this entry? Not including those damn repetitive Facebook text ads drilled into your brain after staring at them for 3 hours straight.

For kicks I installed the banner blocker AdBlock Plus in my Firefox browser. A simple installation that now eliminates banners on 80% of the sites I visit. I'm a two-fisted browser man, equally using IE and Firefox throughout the day. For the last month I've been heavily using the Interweb approximately 50% with ads and 50% without.

I've come to realize the funniest damn thing. I don't even notice that the Firefox versions of sites lack banners. I thought it would be such a liberating experience. But the only time I notice is when I'm actually looking for a banner (checking my brand media placements, looking for competitor examples). Then I realize there aren't any and switch over to IE. But otherwise it has no direct impact on my browsing satisfaction. Anything that animates in a square frame is automatically blind spotted and ignored.

So maybe mass acceptance of adblockers would drive our industry to its knees. Maybe it would force us to truly innovate and develop online advertising models that don't rely on mass spewing of animated images in a desperate attempt to get noticed. Maybe the smart marketers will recognize that adblockers are already embedded in our consumers' brains, no plugin download required.

For the rest of you, download the Firefox plugin and give it a test run.

Facebook is Gettin' Pubes!

2009-05-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

It seems our little Facebook has finally reached puberty, grown some hair in new places, and is ready to become an adult entity on the Interweb. Here are some recent grown up problems it is encountering:

Online Urban Legends have started hitting user status posts and are spreading like viral wildfire. For instance this one, which is the variation of a hoax that has been around since at least 2000:

Isn't that the same guy who hides used syringes under gas pump handles? It is interesting to watch the viral spread in real time, as other Fbook friends repost the same cut-n-paste warning. You know the drill. Someone posts it, others repost, someone debunks it, it shows up 3 months later with a slightly different plot. Two years later your parents warn you about it.

Phishing is also affecting Fbook email users. The last two weeks have seen a huge increase in Facebook email phishing attacks. Get a random link from your friend, click it, and go to a fake Fbook page asking you to log in again. Give up you username/password and within seconds all your Fbook friends receive the same email message/link. Then publicly apologize to all your friends, thus admitting your susceptibility to anything with a hyperlink. Rinse and repeat.

These phishers get extra credit for bundling password scamming with email spamming, specifically to a group who has been "protected" from spam via the closed Fbook network.

What's next? Viruses from picking your Top 5 Things No One Else Cares About? Those are just fun little quizes and games, right? Well -- unlike those Free Screensaver downloads that fostered widespread installation of annoying adware and pop-up ads -- these cute little Fbook apps have the potential to do a whole lot more harm. Have you ever thought twice about clicking Allow before playing with them?

Recent announcements that Fbook will allow these 3rd party apps to tap into even more user information is another sign of TechnoEvil to come:

The move would allow developers to build applications and services that -- with users' permission -- access user videos, photos, notes, and comments. The move would be a significant change for the social-networking site, which had previously retained tight control over the site and how developers interact with it.
To allow developers to take advantage of the free feature, Facebook users would have to give the companies access to their data, and users' privacy settings would extend to new services built, according to the report.

At least Fbook isn't in the habit of changing their privacy policies, which could provide these developers access to even more personal data after they are installed. Wait a second...

All it takes is one rogue developer to create an awesome fun-to-use app, which gets spread across the Fbook universe, only to have it turn into a private info carnivore. Maybe a virtual screensaver that pulls images from your friends' Fbook photo albums, but behind-the-scenes is also reading all your Fbook email messages? Or analyzing your status posts to determine when you will be out of town for an extended time?

But at least the damage would be contained to Facebook.com. Unless you consider Facebook Connect, which allows you to extend your Fbook personae to other websites. Primarily by logging onto those site with your Fbook username/password, allowing you to interact with your Fbook friends there, or push site content/actions back to your Fbook page. Red Bull has a good example.

Did we mention it will be leveraged to enable collaborative shopping on e-commerce sites? You know, the ones with your credit card information...

Sure this might all be unnecessary paranoia, but hackers love a challenge. Fbook's pristine natural private Utopia is just begging to be deflowered. Try not to get knocked up in the process.

No Shit Sherlock headline of the day

2009-05-05T13:32:00.001-05:00

Magna: '09 Won't Be Great for Mobile Ads

Welcome Back, Mr. Portal, Your Chair Is Still Warm

2009-04-23T08:55:00.010-05:00

Twitter has about worn me out. Trying to keep up with the 270 people I am following is almost impossible. I check my iPhone app twice a day, each time with over 200 tweets to read. Its relevancy is quickly slipping away...

Twitter is great at aggregating and collecting content, but terrible at delivering it. There are probably a bunch of people who I would be interested in reading. It just takes too much effort to stay involved.

Which brings me to the topic of Portals. For those Dotcom 1.0-ers, Portals are the butt of all Internet jokes. They originally were created as collection points for "stuff" on the Interweb (think early Yahoo and AOL). A good place to ground yourself as web content expanded beyond comprehension. It quickly went downhill from there.

Want some fast VC $$? Call your site a Portal. Got a bunch of separate sites that you need to somehow stitch together without really exerting much effort? Build a Portal site to house them.

As I predicted last month, Porn is always first to recognize a great online idea. The "legit" business always the fast followers. Pornstar Tweet launched awhile ago as a Twitter Portal for following Porn Stars. They aggregate porn tweets so you have one-click access to their daily lives.

Sports is another huge affinity group online. It didn't take long for someone to apply the same strategy to athlete celebrities. Please welcome Athlete Tweets!

Same strategy, different topic.

It may take awhile for these celebrities to figure out they are providing mass amounts of content for others to make money from. You can't license public communication. Perhaps at some point their agents will wise up, aggregate their own collection of celebrity talent, and bring them en masse to the highest bidder. Who will then charge a monthly fee for accessing the private public lives of the rich and famous.

Sounds like a revenue sharing opportunity in the making.

The Oceania Webcams Are Now Live

2009-04-17T08:54:00.009-05:00

From Techweb:

Google Maps Now Show Views From Webcams
The latest layer to be turned on in Google Maps is one for webcams. Just click on the “More” button on the top right of each map right next to the “Traffic” button. When you do that, it shows you thumbnails from different public Webcams around the world as tracked by Webcams.travel.
You don’t see an actual video, just the most recent still image captured by the Webcam. But this can come in handy when you want to actually see the traffic on a major highway yourself, or how the waves look like at the beach. While you are at it, you can also click on the other layers, such as Wikipedia entries, photos Youtube videos, and public transit.

From George Orwell:

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

At Least @WhiteHouse Isn't a Porn Account

2009-04-16T11:56:00.012-05:00

So someone finally figured out how to make money on Twitter the old fashioned way: Extort It.

Here is the brief synopsis courtesy of TechCrunch:

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk 956,186 followers) challenges CNN (@CNNbrk 968,489 followers) to a race to 1 million followers on Twitter

Larry King gets involved and takes the battle public on YouTube

EA gets involved and turns it into a marketing promotion

It is revealed that the CNN doesn't even own the Twitter account/name that has all these followers

That's right. Some average guy set up the account, programmed it to publish CNN's RSS news feeds, and quietly amassed almost 1 million followers. Not sure how that compares to CNN.com's RSS subscribers, but on Twitter it is fairly impressive.

Silly? Yes. Juvenile? Yes. Worth CNN spending money to save face and claim ownership of the Twitter name? No. Er, I mean, Yes!

Apparently CNN "bought" the Twitter account (or maybe just rents it, fairly unclear) in order to lay claim to the user base. Which is a bit mindblowing considering the events that provoked it. Even more so since CNN basically bought ownership of their own content, on a site that is still a relative blip in the webosphere.

It also signals the cybersquatting goldrush for branded usernames on Twitter. Better hurry up and register yours, even if you don't plan on using it. Fake celebrity accounts have already demonstrated how confusing things can get for consumers. Soon even @seriouslywearetherealcompanythatsellsfriedchicken will have a price tag.

In the Future, Brand Identity Guidelines Will Require Rate Cards

2009-04-16T09:58:00.009-05:00

Even though online advertising projections continue to rise, most media sales reps will confess that everyone is still very nervous about 2009 marketing budgets.

How nervous? Well, it is a well know fact in the advertising world that a company's logo is its most cherished asset. Creative Director Rule #1 = Don't @#&! With the Logo!

Online that means no animating, spinning, reversing or, God forbid, altering. True, Google has messed around with theirs for years. But that is in the spirit of their brand.

These days it seems anything is for sale. Desperate times call for desperate rate cards. Are you a left-behind web portal trying to maintain relevancy and fighting for every declining CPM dollar? Then maybeeee jusssst once...

Yesterday (Tax Day) AOL.com altered their logo to support TurboTax's online campaign, creating a hybrid halfbreed that only a cash-strapped mother could love:

Art Directors cringed. Media planners updated their Q3 RFPs. Sales reps hit their Excel spreadsheets trying to uncover the valuation for that stunt. What is the value of your site's brand compared to your advertisers? Even if it is only surrendered for one day? Or, worse yet, was it provided as Added Value to seal the media deal?

Publishers are constantly scrapping for untapped areas of their site to assign CPMs. Their corporate identity shouldn't be one of them.

What's Your RSS CPC ROI?

2009-04-06T13:57:00.019-05:00

Twitter users must come to terms with a unique outcome of their 140 character text blasts = they are completely disposable. That's my assessment after spending the last month in the tweetosphere.

I'm "following" 240 people. About 20% of them tweet throughout the day, 50% tweet maybe one or two times daily, the final 30% rarely. I log on to Twitter twice a day, each time greeted with over 200 posts to view. It's akin to self-induced bite-size spam. Yeah, I'm talkin' to you IamDiddy!

Unlike Facebook status posts --which are less frequent and encourage dialogue via attached Comments -- most Twitter users tweet and rarely look back. You might get a response from someone using the "@username" feature, but it is difficult to track them or build any kind of conversation.

The fact that Twitter is now being lauded as the Google Killer says it all. Google is about finding and accessing mass amounts of information. Requiring a search engine to sort through social content betrays Twitter's limited 1:1 communication value.

So how do brands capitalize on microblogging? You can push out custom online discounts like Dell or create brand ambassadors like Sharpie. But at some point your tweets are going to get buried faster than a Monday morning email newsletter.

Kudos to Intuit Turbotax for being the first to identify Twitter as a content generator, not a communication channel. They just announced that they will distribute their tweets via Google Adsense search buys:

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.

This provides a much broader audience and overcomes the tweet overload blindspots. The only part I don't understand is their campaign objective:

"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource?" When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.

Hmmm. Can you prove the value of those future Twitter followers (or the current 1,270)? Especially if the CPA is a 50 cent search link click? An email opt-in, er I mean Twitter follow, does not necessarily count as a conversation. Although it is the next CMO conversation waiting to happen, right after you explain why those 4,500 Facebook Fans are so important.

Got Doubts About the Future of Advertising?

2009-03-30T13:42:00.013-05:00

Here's the top 5 most-read articles on AdAge.com today:

Which shows where the average ad industry exec is focused.

However, if their online marketing strategies are driven by AdAge, then they need additional learning aides. Haven't we all agreed that you can't make something go viral?

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

2009-03-25T21:25:00.005-05:00

Makes you think those lessons learned from Bud.TV didn't quite sink in...

@stephenstrong Got That CyberDejaVu.com Feeling Again

2009-03-23T22:17:00.001-05:00

I find it fascinating when an online technology/trend achieves what I call the Doppler Hype Effect = the average American knows everything about it before they actually experience it. This usually occurs when the mass media mentions, refers, and explains it so often that even my parents can discuss it in conversation (and they are still on a dial-up modem).

This trend dates back to the beginning of the WWW. From 1995-96 you started hearing more and more about these websites that people accessed with a web browser. Being an AOL user wasn't exactly the end game. Apparently there was another Internet out there that AOL's browser couldn't even see. But over time everyone started feeling the itch to get a website of their own, even if their computer didn't have a modem. And you started feeling really awkward when everyone traded AOL email addresses -- except you.

This mass hype is an important part of consumer acceptance. It is easier to accept something when you assume everyone else is already doing it.

Internet history is ripe with examples of emerging technologies that were so hyped by the media that even a 10 year old could explain them before they went mainstream = email, chat rooms, instant messaging, search engines, e-commerce, personal web pages, webcams. Things we now take for granted were the untamed Wild West just 10 years ago.

Sending a complete stranger money based on a digital photo found on eBay sounds risky. But perhaps less so if 60 Minutes was just talking about the new craze of "Internet cyberBazaars."

Mobile phone carriers should thank American Idol every night for bringing SMS texting to the masses.

Every new Internet trend (fad?) launches in mass media with the initial How The Hell Does This Thing Work? articles. Then come the Look How Many People Are Doing This reports. Followed by Can You Believe People Are Making Money Off This? At which point it becomes part of our culture and common vernacular or quickly fades away, overrun by the next big hype.

This trend took a 5 year hiatus after the Dotcom crash in 2001. Web 1.0 faded away and new hypes were quickly dismissed in a flurry of VC-tainted catcalls.

Then came Web 2.0.

Remember all the reports about blogging and user generated content? New crazy sites like Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Myspace, Facebook? Most of which the average American could discuss at great length, despite never having visited any of them. The hype wheel made one big loop and is spinning faster than ever.

Which brings me to Twitter. The current King of Hype. Get ready, your mom will soon have lots of questions about it.

The Wall Street Journal recently explained how the hell it works. Everyone is talking about how popular it is getting. It hasn't quite reached the third stage of making money, but Twitter is now receiving more shout outs than a high school hip hop concert.

Yesterday the Sunday Chicago Tribune published an article on page 3 promoting comedian Michael Ian Black's Twitter-driven Fuck It list [follow him]. And this morning NPR ran a story on a Los Angeles Korean taco truck's popularity, thanks to its use of Twitter [follow that truck].

Earlier this month the Daily Show served up a hilarious overview of Congress Twitts:

The other talk shows quickly followed. Leno asking Whoopi if she Twitters [nope]. Jimmy Fallon challenging his viewers to follow this guy on Twitter [follow Jimmy]. Ellen explaining how Diddy and Martha Stewart compelled her to start tweeting [follow her and him and her].

Expect this self-feeding hype to continue growing, thus reinforcing that it must be the Next Big Thing.

Twitter is the cool club kid, jockeying to crash the big party that is our nation's consciousness. Skype, Digg, and Yelp are still hanging out in the parking lot waiting for their turn. Mobile Web has been there so long that he set up an RV camper. But Twitter is right at the club entrance, working the bouncers and pleading that they keep searching for his name on the list.

Hmmmm, your name ain't here. But everyone in line seems to know you. So maybe...

Damn, Hulu just bribed the other bouncer with a big Superbowl TV ad. You might need to wait until tomorrow night when you can get their attention again. So it goes. Maybe you can hit up Good Morning America or Time for a backstage pass. Because hanging with celebrities is the fastest way to the top.

Facebook: Freeware Going Nowhere

2009-03-19T21:35:00.011-05:00

Well, at least Facebook is consistent. Consistently pissing off its users with design and functionality overhauls again.

The recent changes are no exception. Big ones like rearranging the homepage out of a knee-jerk panic attack to be more like Twitter. And smaller ones like reformatting Fan Pages to look like standard user profiles.

Current users hate it. The mass amounts of new users signing up daily won't even notice. Training your eyes to reuse the site is one thing. Training your brain is another:

This is the user experience equivalent of a product recall letter. Their Head of IA needs to be publicly flogged via webcam.

The Fan Page reformatting actually has me the most worried, since this is where brand marketers have placed their bets. A few months ago Fbook screwed around with the location of widgets, moving them off a user's main profile page and burying them under a subtab. Branded widget impressions/interactions instantly plunged. Now they are taking the same liberties with the branded pages themselves.

Reformatting them to match user profiles has resulted in a loss of uniqueness. They just don't feel special anymore. Worse -- from what I heard -- Fbook didn't even notify the owners (brand managers, ad agencies, interns) until a few days before the pages were scheduled to change. Resulting in mad scrambling to assess them and relearn how to maintain the pages.

In general, Internet change is good. Sites that continue to innovate are the ones that survive and grow. Those that don't lose visitors and money to the pesky start ups with nothing to lose.

Hence the problem with Fbook. They got nuthin' to lose. Not revenue, not users. No matter what changes they make, people are not going to leave. They have too much time and emotion invested in their Fbook doppelganger. And brands/marketers? Hard to complain when you ain't paying a dime.

Fbook is the ultimate Freeware. No one gets charged for using it, not even marketers. Unlike Myspace, who charges wayyyyy to much for a branded "mascot page"; any brand can create a fan page for free. Distribute their widgets on the site for free. Send messages to their 50,000 "fans" for free.

Wikipedia defines Freeware as a free for all free-for-all:

The only criterion for being classified as freeware is that the software must be fully functional for an unlimited time with no cost, monetary or otherwise. The software license may impose restrictions on the type of use including personal use, individual use, non-profit use, non-commercial use, academic use, commercial use or any combination of these.

Screensavers, limited games, basic software applications. Freeware is as old as the WWW.

You download them, use them, and if you don't like them? Screw you, it was free! What more do you want?

Fbook carte blanche to do whatever they want with marketers. It's their site. Don't like it? Go ahead and leave. There isn't a media sales rep sitting in a cube sweating his ass off because you might.

This is their largest weakness -- acting like a freeware distributor. Offering tons of free stuff, hoping to sell a few ads on the side. Not really concerned if you delete the app 15 minutes after downloading it.

They are stuck in a loop of rapid prototypes, see if it sticks to the wall additions, and general controlled chaos. Which is fine if you are a 15 person shop trying to take down the big guys. But when you are the big guy, then you have to start acting like it.

Usability studies on new changes would be a good first start. Listening to marketers, the ones who will eventually support you financially (as soon as you get a rate card put together), is a necessity. At some point we will stop tolerating this 500 lb gorilla baby.

[Thanks to the guys at Colossal Squid for pointing out Fbook's similarity to the software industry]

@stephenstrong Got Twittered by a Porn Star: That's in our relationship safe-zone, right honey?

2009-03-16T21:28:00.029-05:00

The porn industry always takes advantage of new online technologies first. Often identifying and defining new trends before anyone other industry.

Bootleg file sharing? Check. Webcams live chats? Check. Pre-broadband video streaming-on-demand? Check. Affiliate marketing banners? Check. Pop-up ads, digital-rights management, social networking? Check, check, check. Porn was practicing the Long Tail before most marketers even understood the short one.

It isn't important that porn always seems to be a first mover online. It is important that it always seems to be the first industry making money from it. The only reason porn grabs hold of an emerging trend is because it generates revenue. And there are a lot of people trying to get rich off online porn. Think of it as the world's largest startup, constantly testing/prototyping/enhancing/evolving. Only the successful survive. Which makes porn the perfect litmus test for any alleged Web 2.0 business model.

Which is where Twitter comes in -- probably the only website more desperate for a revenue model than Facebook. If porn can't figure out how to make money from it, then kiss it goodbye.

So as an experiment (let me reinforce experiment) I "followed" a variety of porn stars over the weekend on Twitter. Most of them have a couple hundred followers. A few number in the low thousands. Nothing compared to Diddy (173K), Ashton Kuchter (368K), or Shaq (323K), but probably more than you.

The online version of the Red Light District flag down is widely practiced. Some of you might call it lead generation:

E-commerce CTAs appear as well. If you want to drive traffic to your online peep show Friday night, then targeting guys who are bored enough to follow porn tweets is a pretty good start:

It may end up that Twitter cannot monetize any of this, leaving the revenue models to the companies that support its users.

When eBay first started there were a variety of feeder sites that provided added-value services for users -- photo hosting, credit card processing, last-second bid topping. Twitter is no different.

Tinyurl converts web links into condensed URLs, saving precious character counts. Twitpict provides image sharing/instant tweets. Qik mobile video sharing is getting free word-of-mouth thanks to Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore posts. None of them are charging for these offerings yet.

There's even a Porn Tweet Portal that aggregates porn star posts, capitalizing on Twitter's open source content search.

Cursebird.com may actually be more risque. Sure you get the typical posts that would make a truck diver blush. But pornstars are people too. They can be just as boring as everyone else you are following:

Looking for hot photos? You are as likely to download a picture of their cute puppies or new car. Although it can be a bit surreal reading laundry day posts interspersed with on location blow-by-blows. Can being too normal online hurt a pornstar's street cred?

In the end, I decided to go straight to the source. Spamming a variety of them (oh, the irony) to uncover how they plan to leverage Twitter.

Which, based on their replies, shows we may have a long way to go:

Porn is everywhere online. What gives Twitter an advantage? First of all, it has an anonymous intimacy to it. You get an insider's view of the other 98% of a porn star's life, with some smut thrown in. Second, follow enough of them and you catch glimpses of intra-porn communication (if a retweet threesome is your kind of thing).

Lastly, it is a publicly-acceptable porn channel. Besides Twitter.com, you can read tweets and view links on your iPhone, Facebook widget, RSS reader, and eventually any web-connected device (hurry up color Kindle!) Those of you with Internet fridges can hold off bidding for those Jenna Jamson magnets on eBay.

My free advice to the stars? Start with micropayments. As soon as Twitter (or Twitpict) launches their own Paypal billing system, then you should be able to charge followers 10 cents for every naked photo click (charge 50 cents on weekends and after 10 pm). Exclusive coupon codes for discounted video content would help build a new customer base.

Use your public Twitter account for daily posts and new video teasers. Charge followers to access a private account for the real hot talk and behind the scenes details. Sorry, twatter.com is already being squatted and titter.com really is for kids.

Eventually porn will find the Twitter money shot. It always does. How many marketers are too embarrassed to lurk its progress and leverage the learnings when the time is right?

For the record, I avoided taking advantage of tasteless innuendo and bad puns throughout this blog post. I count at least 9 that come close [there's 1! --ed.] But be warned, it's realllly hard to find them! [2! --ed.]

Just Posted Photos From Nutella's High School Prom

2009-03-11T20:34:00.015-05:00

Always looking for someone to piss off, Facebook recently redesigned their Fan Pages. These are primarily used by brand marketers to rope off their social homestead. Weird thing is that they basically just turned them into standard user pages, complete with tabbed sections and status posts.

Kinda lazy if you ask me.

From a user experience standpoint, it can be a bit confusing since the only thing differentiating it from a human page is the user name and profile photo. Go one step further, and you can create a fan page that looks/feels like an actual user.

Hello Brian Nash, advertising guy who refuses to join Facebook. We just did it for you:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brian-Nash/54737649557
(Fbook users only, sorry)

And you have 60 friends, er I mean fans. Who actually are his friends in real life. So that's even more confusing. But if you didn't pay close attention, then you really would think it was Mr. Nash's personal page.

The other brand/human blur affects status posts. Brands with fan pages can now send them, which show up in your status scroll along with all your friends' statuses (stati?). So whoever created the Mr. Nash fan page can send status posts to the fans, which show up as coming from Mr. Nash.

The other side effect is that this actually opens up brand posts for users to comment on. Every fan can then view all the consumer feedback, I mean replies to that post.

This may seem like a great way to get consumers engaged with your brand. Only problem is Facebook is large enough now to mirror the general Internet population. There are a lot of idiots out there. You are protected from ever coming into contact with them unless they are your Fbook Friend (in which case you already know they are idiots and have accepted it). Opening up the status comments to any "fan" will turn Facebook into an AOL chat room circa 1998. Or MySpace circa two days ago.

It's been less than a week and I've already seen it in action. Check out the Herbal Essences page:
http://www.facebook.com/herbalessences
(anyone can view this one, even you Mr. Nash)

They have 59,000 fans and their brand status posts are harmless self promotion. Each one gathers between 40 - 100 user comments, more than a few that must be causing the brand managers to sweat bullets and keep their PR agency on red alert. Take a peek at this one.

A few negative user comments isn't the death of branded social media. But the other 58,900 consumers who are reading them? That is something to worry about. In the old Brand Fan Page Dimension, user comments were restricted to wall posts and were not broadcast across the site. Plus those were user-initiated, whereas now brands are almost baiting bored dumbasses to respond.

The good news is that the community usually self-polices itself, even when the topic is shampoo that smells nice. Unfortunately now it is being done publicly on one of the most popular sites of the Interweb.

I Call Dibs On Dot-Stupid

2009-03-10T12:50:00.012-05:00

This is officially the week for ranting about brand websites.

This one centers around custom website domain names that are only limited by your thesaurus.

A proposed expansion of domains means that by the end of the year there could be hundreds. Coca-Cola and Pepsi could request .soda or .softdrinks; Procter & Gamble and Unilever could sign up for .laundry or .soap; and McDonald's and Wendy's could get .burger or .fries. The potential for names and online branding would be limited only by the imagination of the creative marketing industry.

But what if you had to pay for every one of the new domains that relates to your brand? The initial cost estimated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit agency that oversees the distribution and policy of domain names, is $185,000 for registration plus anywhere from $25,000 to $75,000 in annual fees.

Which violates sooo many of my online marketing principles:

Your brand site is increasingly irrelevant. See my previous posts (1, 2). The last thing you need to worry about is creating a .com strategy

Consumers are more lazy online than in the real world. This has been the key to Google's success. Typing www.dietcoke.com in the browser takes too much effort. Just type "diet coke" in the Google bar next to it and then click the search results link

Google could care less what dots your com

Consumers are not only lazy, they have really crappy long term memory. Think they have a hard enough time remembering your product name? Imagine if they have to remember whether your web address is .soda, .softdrinks, .pop, or .coke. You might as well register all of them just to be safe (that will be $740,000 please)

It worked out so well for those .tv guys...

Do yourself a favor and save your cash for the next .mobi mobile URL firesale.

Here's One Way To Make The Logo Bigger!

2009-03-10T08:36:00.007-05:00

Nothing annoys me more than when our industry refuses to innovate. Take online banners. 10 years ago the CTR was 0.45% (4.5 out of every 1,000 people clicked your banner). 8 years ago it dropped to 0.3%, then 0.2%. Finally stabilizing for the last 5 years at 0.15%.

A recent presentation by Doubleclick at iMedia now claims the average banner CTR is 0.1%. That's 1 person out of 1,000 clicking on your banners.

So what should the smart marketer do? Focus on behavioral and contextual targeting to make sure that 1 person is a better qualified site visitor? Stop depending on banner campaigns to drive site traffic? Stop depending on site traffic as a justification your online marketing dollars are working?

Of course not. Hey, I've got an idea!

Let's make the banners bigger!

(I assume you read that sentence more times than the previous smaller ones.)

According to Adweek today, this is the solution to decreasing effectiveness and online media spends:

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ESPN and over a dozen more of the Web's most-trafficked sites that belong to the Online Publishers Association have agreed to run three new ad units that they hope will lure brand advertising dollars. The new units are:
The fixed panel, a 336-by-860-pixel banner that is wider than the standard skyscraper and follows users as they scroll down the page
The XXL box, a 468-by-648-pixel unit that can expand with video
The pushdown, a 970-by-418-pixel placement that takes up over half of the page before rolling up

As I expected, consumers avoid clicking on banners because they can't find them. If the home page interstitial [skip], exit pop-up [block], and page takeover ads [wait... wait...] aren't performing, then obviously we just aren't paying attention.

At some point the direct correlation between decreased effectiveness and increased ad sizes will reach a breaking point. Then we'll need to figure out how to cram the actual site content into the advertising.

23 Of Your Friends Approved This Rainbow's Taste

2009-03-06T11:49:00.029-06:00

http://www.skittles.com /

There has been a bit of hype around Skittle's decision to go completely Web 2.0 on their brand site. In effect deconstructing and rebuilding it with content directly from consumer generated sites:

Skittles, the Mars candy brand, has adopted its Wikipedia page as its home page in an effort to give more control to consumers. The effort, via Agency.com, is a total revamp of the site and includes other social media hooks, like a Twitter section for live chats and links to Skittles pages on Facebook and Flickr.

Might want to point out that the advertising agency Modernista already took this approach with their site last year http://www.modernista.com

I'm sure the justification wavered between the cost savings (Hey! Consumers are doing all the work for us!) and the legal freak out (Hey! Consumers are doing all the work for us!). From a consumer experience standpoint, it is a complete disjointed mess -- a direct reflection of the current disarray of consumer-generated sites.

Also hard to tell if this is a one-hit fad or if other brands will follow suit. In the end, they do get credit for being the first marketer to execute it to this extent. Any fast followers will be blatantly ripping them off.

This says less about the importance of consumer generated media, and more about the lack of importance of CPG brand sites. Except for the odd coupon or sweepstakes entry, there isn't much of a reason to visit Skittles.com (or most other CPG sites out there). Long gone are the days of sticky content and repeat visitors and funny microsites.

As Mediapost points out:

Skittles.com isn't exactly a top destination online. Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends respectively report the most recent month's Skittles.com unique visitors as 18,000, 15,000, and too few to track. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, Skittles.com's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

The reality is that consumers have very little need to visit brand sites these days. More marketers should just acknowledge that, put their sites on life support, and spend their money on other parts of the Interweb.

Twitter: The Devolution of the Casual Game Portal

2009-03-05T11:54:00.008-06:00

In January I posted about the first interesting marketing effort on Twitter = Flying Dog Brewery's Post & Win Some Free Shit microblogging promotion.

Since then, Dell launched a Twitter program to distribute follower-only deals via tweets. And Coupon Tweet utilizes Twitter's public search engine to aggregate tweets from any merchandiser posting coupon offers.

But perhaps the killer app is just around the corner. A variety of social games have emerged, per this post from Techcrunch:

Follow @TwitBrain and get served calculations on a regular basis (like 3 per hour). If you’re the first person to reply with the correct answer, you’ll earn one point and hopefully make your way to Internet fame (well, not really) by getting on the top 10 list.

Follow @BeatMyTweet and do the exact same thing, but this time with word scrambles. Warning: it’s ridiculously easy so be fast if you want to be one of the first 10 to reply with the correct answer.

Casual games have always been the rage online. Social casual games were the first true widget hits (still pining for Facebook Scrabulous?) The idea that this extends to microblogging is not so far fetched. Granted it is a slimmed down text-only version, but what other technology could have such a broad instantaneous reach? Plus it provides a real world reward for setting up a Twitter account. Just like American Idol text mssg voting catapulted SMS into the average American living room.

This could be the simple approach that makes Twitter relevant to the masses. It extends the social gaming aspect that gave Facebook its viral energy and provides a mass audience as well.

Microtimesuck may become the buzzword of 2009.

The Short Tail of Internet Hype

2009-03-05T09:03:00.002-06:00

It appears our industry has finally sweated out its dependency on widgets as the Holy Grail of social media marketing. Just in time to fall off the wagon and get handed a dimebag of iPhone apps.

"Come on, it's just a little branded iPhone game. Won't take too long to play. And it's freeeeeeee."

Of course, the iPhone's penetration in marketing departments is probably 5,000 times the average workplace. If you don't have one, then I bet your cubemate does. But all of the sudden iPhone apps are the new designer drug of choice.

Adweek reviewed a whole slew of iPhone apps in February. AdAge recently posted their special interest story: 10 Must-Have iPhone Apps for the Adman. Alas, Bullshit Bingo wasn't on it.

At a recent iMedia conference, the number of iPhone app developers outnumbered the widget guys. And most of the widget guys are branching out into iPhones.

There was also a contingent of media reps selling advertising space inside free iPhone apps (because that business model is working out so well for the widget guys...) And developers willing to make those ads for you. And rich media ad vendors wanting to serve them.

Interactive marketers have a habit of latching onto the newest hype, regardless of its potential for success. Remember viral videos? Second Life? Myspace mascot pages? All of these were flashes of potential marketing energy, greedily consumed and spat out when they didn't taste as good as they looked.

When a flashy shiny new internet technology comes along, we always gather around it and stare -- hypnotized by its brilliance. And we have a tendency to drag our "offline" marketing friends with us, imploring them to also check it out. Until they get bored and leave, shaking their heads and muttering "I just don't get it." Then the object runs out of batteries and we stumble away dazed, looking for the next blinking light to occupy our time.

The Dotcom crash in 2001 is the ultimate case study in embracing Internet hype without caution. Web 2.0 has brought this bad habit back to life. We find the newest social mobile video thing, convince everyone else to spend money on it, and then conveniently pretend it never existed if it doesn't pan out. Widgets will be the next case study in this long list. Twitter is on an upward curve. iPhone apps are just getting started.

We have reached that critical point in the Hype Tail where we need to ask the tough questions. How many people can we actually reach with this technology?(Spoiler alert = iPhones had a meager 6% penetration in Q3 2008.) Will they actually use it for more than 30 days?

All of these technologies have long term potential, if we let them grow out of puberty.

Second Life (or the virtual world 2.0 equivalent) will be back. Just ask any parent whose kids are obsessed with Webkinz / Club Penguin / Barbie Girls / Disney Fairies.

Facebook, despite its massive growth, is still a toddler learning to eat with a spoon. Twitter-style microblogging will eventually morph into a more integrated (and universally accepted) style of communication.

I truly believe that the iPhone-style application is the future for mobile technology. Just let it out of beta before milking it for every last drop.

Expect the Rip-Offs to Arrive In Time for CES 2010

2009-02-25T12:56:00.003-06:00

I heard it also requires a special type of battery that is not used by any other electronic device.

No Shit Sherlock headline of the day

2009-02-24T16:33:00.002-06:00

My newsreader must have gone through a wormhole last night:

Firing SQAD: Data Firm Sets 'CPM' As Online Ad Metric
In a move that will likely align the ROI of online advertising more closely with that of traditional media such as television, an influential source of media marketplace data this morning announced it will use Madison Avenue's long-standing CPM, or cost-per-thousand, metric as the "currency" for tracking online advertising.

"Since there is currently no industry-standard equivalent to cost-per-point in the Web display space, we elected to focus on CPM in the initial WebCosts release," Neil Klar, CEO of SQAD says of the company's rationale, which came after discussions with the AAAA's influential Media Policy Committee.

The Greatest Risk to Facebook's Success

2009-02-24T15:49:00.009-06:00

Defending Facebook's Right To Own Your Bad High School Photos

2009-02-16T16:08:00.010-06:00

Facebook set off its annual User Outcry Event, this time over an update of its usage policy providing it ownership of any content you upload to the site. Even if you delete it. Even after you cancel your account and leave the site.

Every year founder Mark Zuckerberg announces something that pisses off the Facebook masses. Whether it is notifying your friends whenever you do something on your personal page (eventually accepted and embraced), notifies your friends when you do something on other websites (the short-lived Beacons initiative), or just changes the design of their site (1.4 million users apparently still hate them over that). Not surprising 2 of these 3 are privacy related.

Personally I don’t see the point to the current outcry over the obvious: You upload your content to their site. They store it on their web servers. They allow you to share this content with others on their site. Just because you are emotionally attached to it doesn’t mean the site can’t lay claim to it.

Here’s a spoiler alert = There is no privacy on the Internet.

Facebook initially was a place to find and communicate with others. Now it has evolved into a place to share content as well. And most of this content is deeply personal in a puppies and babies scrapbook kind-of-way.

But let’s be honest: 68 million people used Facebook last month. Unless you are famous now – or fall into famousness in the future -- your stuff really isn’t that important to them. The long tail of vacation photos and 25 Things About You doesn’t stop at your profile page.

But there are some open questions. What about Facebook apps that import content from other sites? You can embed Youtube videos to show off your home movies. Use the Flickr widget to present your wedding photos. Import status posts from your Twitter account. Technically all this content resides on other web sites. Can Facebook lay claim to those?

The knee-jerk expectation is that they will use your content in their own advertising. Any ad agency will tell you that is sooooo 2008. Brands already troll YouTube to produce cheap TV ads (Vonage, KFC, Hampton Inn, Geico). That fad is over.

Maybe they plan on publishing a photobook of bad hair from the 80’s. Or sell t-shirts reprinting funny status quotes. It would be one thing if they wanted to own unique creative content – such as when virtual worlds World of Warcraft and Second Life tried to lay claim to virtual items created by their users.

So if they can’t really monetize your stuff, or use it as cheap marketing material, why do they want it? At some point it might be valuable. Any web site desperate for a revenue model needs to cover their bases.

Nothing dies on the Internet. Any content you put online can be found, archived, and stored by web crawlers. Retrieved at any time via search engines. The fact that Facebook saves your content, even after you delete it and cancel your account, means that at some point they could make it publicly searchable and even sell access to it.

This goes beyond just text (such as your status posts and About Me info). Photo recognition technology is here and companies like Google are ready to take advantage of it. Not to mention these photos are already tagged with your name by all your so-called friends. Just wait until your kids start searching for photos of you circa the year College Keg Party. This may be the most serious threat to your personal privacy. Those of you who participated in Cuss In Your Status Day can start sweating now.

Facebook users love to complain and faux protest whenever the mothership steps on their toes. Usually by starting up a protest group ON FACEBOOK. Which I guess means Facebook owns any complaints about themselves. Those self-serving bastards.

Will this cause a mass exit to the next up-and-coming social network site? I doubt it. Friendster is the best case study for this scenario. It lost a majority of its user base to MySpace in two weeks, primarily because their site kept breaking. But also because its users were primarily teenagers and twenty-somethings, who have no problem spontaneously jumping ship and starting anew.

But over the last year Facebook’s demographics has skewed to 30+ yrs old. These old timers can be very lazy online. Set up a new account on a different site and re-upload all my photos? That sounds time consuming. Re-friend 175 people? That’s a pain in the ass.

I predict the fury will be short lived and cause minimal long-term damage to Facebook’s user base. Soon we’ll all get back to listing our random iPod songs and the third sentence on page 56, inviting friends to our birthday party event, and revenge-tagging photos. But don’t be surprised if you see me wearing a t-shirt featuring your prom photo and that hilarious status post about Congress Stimulating Your Package.

iMedia Brand Summit Reflections & Forecasts

2009-02-10T16:49:00.017-06:00

So I just attended my first iMedia Summit as a brand marketer (as opposed to the agency side). Overall very impressed with the level of presenters and topics. Usually I attend interactive conferences and don't learn a damn thing. Not because I'm so smart. Mainly they just regurgitate the same case studies and industry insights that have been beaten into us over time. Which makes you feel smart but really just makes you lazy.

So rather than tweet away and recap each session, I thought I'd provide the insights that floated to the top. Performing 90 1-minute interviews with media sales reps (the Speed Pitching session) gives you a fairly good overview of where things are heading.

Ads in "Free" iPhone Apps are the Next Widgets
Encountered at least 5 vendors who are now selling ad space in free iPhone apps. Which just proves the theory that anything a consumer stares at longer than 5 seconds is prime advertising real estate. iPhone app hype continues to rise faster than iPhone penetration. If you buy into this then you better get a free iPhone for your CMO so he can review the creative.

Twitter is the Next Podcast
Remember when podcasting was going to be the next big thing? It was like radio, only with a more limited audience. Podcasting still serves a specific niche, but it really isn't the mass channel that was originally hyped.

I like Twitter. I think status posting (or microblogging if you want it to sound more impressive to your boss) is here to stay. But it doesn't make a mass marketing channel from day 1. The hype we thrust upon these new communication channels prevents them from really maturing and finding their place. Best thing you can do is ignore all those tweets and let them at least reach puberty.

Mobile is the Next Mobile
The longest-running emerging trend on Broadway. Soooo many mobile vendors. All still small and niche. None can explain what they do in less than 60 seconds. Most won't be around in 12 months. Rinse and repeat.

The Return of the Streaming Microwebisodecast (with product placement)
There are a ton of video production houses going rogue and starting to work directly with brand marketers -- bypassing the creative agencies and media shops (and their high budgets).

Special thanks to last year's Hollywood writer's strike for providing a new outlet for quality video creative. Which means brands are in charge of creating their own branded videos. Minus the hilarious agency creative team, big name director, and week-long stays at Shutters On The Beach. I wonder how long this trend will last...

Bigger Banners are Better but Consumers Still Don't Click Them
Research companies are still presenting the insight that bigger banners perform better in brand effectiveness studies. Geezus, no kidding. That was in my first Dynamic Logic report circa 2001. And the second. And the 157th.

Google/Doubleclick reports that the average banner CTR is now 0.10%. The norm previously had been 0.15%. That means that now 1 of every 1,000 people click your ads. As Google encouraged us: "This decrease seems to have stabilized." Yeah, because the water on my driveway froze solid, but luckily it isn't getting any solider. Is it even statistically possible to get below 0.10% of anything?

The World does not Need a 500K Banner (file size, not price)
Seriously, someone tried to convince me that a 500K square banner would be awesome. Now, a $500K banner I might be intrigued by. Maybe for next year's Superbowl.

Your Email Inbox is the Next Social RSS Reader
I now have email inboxes on Facebook and Linkedkin, at work, and at home. I need to be notified of friends' Twitter posts, Facebook wall posts, friend invites, Linkedin profile updates, blog comments, and when I am tagged in bad high school photos.

All of these create alerts that I can have routed to one email address. So rather than checking all these sites (plus my phone SMS, and my iPhone apps, and my Blackberry), I have them forwarded to my home email. Which is forwarded to my iPhone email. So while away from my computer I know everything going on in my social networks. No different than an RSS reader that gets updates from all the websites/blogs that I have tagged.

If I can get that RSS reader to send daily summaries to my email address then I will be completely decentralized centralized.

The Recession has not Hit the Swag Industry
My tally of free stuff:

Best Swag = free Zoot running shoes
Lamest = 5 inch stack of branded Post-it Notes
Most Repetitive = branded USB thumbdrives
Yummiest = chocolate-covered pretzels (eaten)
Sort of Yummy = fortune cookies containing sales call to actions (eaten as last resort)
Most Relaxing = wooden foot massager with peppermint lotion
Least Relaxing = branded Rubik's Cube
Vaguest = leather desktop holder for something (pens? business cards? wooden foot massager?) with embedded clock
Most Retro = large zip-up portfolio with my name on it
Closest to Downright Bribery = branded $30 Visa Gift Card. Or maybe it was a stimulus card
Most Useful = empty box with paid postage to mail it all back home

That's it. I'd definitely come back to the Florida Gulf in February next year. Despite my sarcasm, there was a lot of good information and insights. And some sort of drama at 3 AM on the 4th floor. But what goes on at iMedia stays at iMedia. At least until the webcasts are uploaded.

Reflections, Analysis, and Predictions on a Day of Filth: It was the First Annual Facebook “Cuss In Your Status Day” Dumbass!

2009-02-08T12:55:00.058-06:00

So last Tuesday driving home from work I had a minor revelation – no one cusses on Facebook. By “no one” of course I mean my social network friend circle. I have no idea what happens on the rest of the site. Facebook’s semi-private publicness is one of the beautiful things about it.

But I have over 300 friends, most of whom I actually know. And the bulk of them swear. Many of them swear a lot. But not on Facebook. Which got me thinking about the effects of social norms on virtual communities. And how words you would have no problem spouting in real life all of the sudden get restricted online with the same audience.

Maybe you have a few Facebook friends who might not appreciate it. Peers such as a coworker or neighbor; authority figures such as your boss or your mom. Or maybe that type of crassness is just soooooo “Myspace.” Facebook has always been the clean cut kid who makes his bed and wears an honor society pin. While Myspace is sneaking smokes behind the fence and hasn’t had to get a real job yet.

Whatever the cause, I thought it would be really fun to challenge my friend network to break habit for at least one day. It would give some of them the excuse to let loose. At the most it would force everyone to reflect on their own social network in a new context: If you can’t cuss in front of your Facebook friends then are they really your friends? I love passive-resistant angst. Burger King recently pushed the same buttons with their Whopper Sacrifice promotion (unfriend 10 people and get a free Whopper, but we’re gonna tell them why you defriended them).

The Birth Of Cuss In Your Status Day

So that evening I created an event for 3 days later: The First Annual Cuss In Your Status Post Day on February 6 and invited all 340 friends on my list. What the hell, worst thing would be that no one is interested. I mean, it’s just one of thousands of Facebook Events created every day.

12 hours later (9 am Wednesday) 825 people had been invited. This was split into 116 accepting the invite, 25 declining, 16 replying “maybe”, and 668 not yet responding (they were invited by someone to “attend” but hadn’t acted on it). So 59% of the people either saw one of my friends join it and followed them, or received a cold call invite from someone on the list. Definitely some viralability going on.

By noon there were 1,275 on the invite list (197 accept + 25 maybe + 54 decline + 999 not replied). 24 hours after creating the event there were 2,272 (422 accept + 83 maybe + 185 decline + 1,582 not replied). I noticed the percent of “not replied” was steadily decreasing. Earlier that day it was 81% of the total invitees. Now it was 70%.

So I sent a group email asking them to spread the word to their Facebook friends by email, event invitation, or posting to their profile page. The only people I couldn’t communicate to were those who “declined.” If you were sent an invite and hadn’t responded (1,582 people at this point) then I could send you a Facebook email, even if I had no connection to you. Which seems like a major violation of Facebook’s core premise. But I had an event to market dammit so spam away. I was surprised that I only received 4 emails back = 2 pissed off and 2 just wondering how I was able to contact them.

Meanwhile the Event page message board revealed a truly pent up desire for the Facebook community to express themselves. Or not. (Facebook users can view it here)

Click thumbnails below for full images:

I couldn’t tell if people misunderstood that they were supposed to save it for their actual status post on Friday, or maybe were just practicing. Either way it appears that I struck a common nerve.

So this dumb idea picked up steam and became an interesting case study of social viral word of mouth and virtual peer pressure. Like any dedicated interactive marketer I did the next logical thing. I bought some text ads promoting it.

For two years I've been staring at Facebook ads for making big bucks hourly, getting money from Obama, curing my acne, and buying things that Oprah recommends. What if you saw an ad for something out of the ordinary?

By Thursday morning the Event invitee list was up to 2,975 (67% not replied). By noon 3,773 (65% not replied). At 9 pm I had over 6,000 invited. My very small budget text ad buy wasn’t really performing well (average 44 cent max bid = 450 clicks, 0.06% CTR, 773,940 ad impressions, 26 cent CPM). So almost all of these invitees were spawned from my initial 340 invitations.

Cuss In Your Status Day’s Eve
Cuss In Your Status Day was almost here! So I decided to send one last email blast to the Event list (accepts, maybes, and not responded). I then learned that Facebook removes email ability once you go over 5,000 invites. So I had to delete 800 “No’s” and a couple hundred “Not Respondeds” in order to get under the limit.

Meanwhile the anticipation was killing a lot of my Facebook friends. There was a huge amount of potential swear energy being stored up for Friday. And it sounded like they were promoting it with their friends as well. The 6,000 official Event invitees were probably only a portion of the total number of Facebook users aware of it.

Which is where Facebook gets fuzzy as a marketing tool. I was ground zero for Cuss In Your Status Day. I know all my friends were aware and that some of them would take part. But I had only a minor glimpse into how their friends we reacting. And no idea what was going on with the 6,000 other Event Invitees and their friend connections. Were people talking about it? Ready to participate in it?

Cuss Day!
On Friday morning the carnage started.

I can only speak for my friends, but it started slow and built into one big messy collection of swearing. And not-quite-as-offensive swearing:

Some even celebrated with their profile photo:

All day. Non stop. Well, at least for some of us.

Some went all out with a flurry of adjectives worthy of George Carlin. Some apologized at the same time. Some did it once. Some went on all day. The F Bomb was definitely the swear of choice. It took 2 hours for the dreaded C Word to appear.

And by reading the status comments, it seemed like those off my friend network had heard it was coming. And if they hadn’t, at least thought it was a great idea.

And maybe it really was going on all over Facebook. Or at least parts of it not related to me.

Or maybe not.

One of the big questions for me (and others) was how many Facebook friends would be lost during this day of debauchery.

Seems like there was some defriending going on, but maybe not to the extent everyone was worried about.

I lost one “friend.” Haven’t looked into who it was and honestly don’t really care. I picked up 10 new friends, so that more than balances it out.

It was a crazy madhouse of cussing carnage in the morning and through lunch. Slowed in the afternoon and pretty much stopped by the end of the workday (at least in my group). Which I guess follows the same trend as online shopping from work. By evening it was pretty much over except for the real diehards. I had a theory that it would pick up again after people started their Friday night drinking. But maybe my social crowd is showing its age.

The Aftermath
I estimate maybe 20% of my friends participated that day. I didn’t have any expectations so I guess that is good. Many others who I expected to take part didn’t, which is the more interesting result. I assume from self-inflicted peer pressure, which I hope haunts them for at least a few more days. Or maybe they really could care less. I caught a few friends deleting their naughty posts on Saturday, probably after their left temporal lobe sobered up.

So about 285 of my friends lurked and tolerated my posts (and the posts of other friends we share). Or maybe they don’t check Facebook that often. It is a lot like inviting a crapload of people to a kegger party, getting wrapped up in the drunken fun, and then trying to remember the next morning who showed up. Actually, it was a lot like that.

Back on the Event page there was a total of 9,803 invitees by the end of the day. 30 times the original number I had personally invited 3 days earlier. And the portion of invitees who had not responded dropped considerably to 54% of the total. Which means at least 4,500 were actively aware of it. Not to mention the 774,000 media impressions from my text ad buy.

How many people actually participated? No idea. Unlike Twitter -- where user posts are mostly public and available on twitter.com to search (check out Cursebird.com) – Facebook posts are private. Which makes any success criteria purely anecdotal. This is what drives marketers nuts about trying to tap into Facebook. Facebook’s sales team should be pushing for an anonymous “buzz chatter meter” to sell as an extra measurement service. They have a proprietary lock on it that no other research company can fulfill.

An informal poll of my friends ranges from “not many cussers” to “a lot.” I bet an average of 10 – 15% of your total friend list is accurate. Which could mean I just need to publicize it more next year. Or maybe there’s just too much social peer pressure in virtual communities. But I bet if more people hear about it in advance (and assume their friends are aware as well), then they will have less trepidation taking part.

I didn’t see it get picked up in the press, which is easily resolved by friending some magazine editors between now and February 2010.

Seeking Corporate Sponsorship of CIYSD 2010
So I’m planning the Second Annual Cuss In Your Status Day for 2010. Interested? Sign up on our Facebook Group and I’ll notify you when it is scheduled:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=63177759136

Got thoughts, insights, or commentary on how Cuss Day affected your social group? Leave a comment here or email me at my new official address:

fucker@cussinyourstatus.com

And hopefully I’ll cuss you next year dumbfuck!

Coming Soon: Banners That Get Bigger When You Touch Them

2009-01-29T08:57:00.007-06:00

Kudos to Facebook. My 2009 Predictions completely missed their newest evolution of online advertising offerings:

Polling Banners

Geezus. Really?

The Adweek overview reads like an online advertising remedial course:

The polling ad is part of Facebook's second effort to integrate advertisers into the fabric of the site beyond standard banner units. Engagement ads look to mimic already popular activities on the site, like "fanning," sending virtual gifts and RSVPing to events. When a user takes an action with an ad, such as voting for which team will win the Super Bowl, Facebook sends notification of this to the user's friend network in their news feeds. Like those, the polling ad is priced based on impressions.

Hey! It is even Viral!

Eyeblaster and Pointroll launched the same ad unit 5 years ago.

I mean I get it. Advertising revenue is drying up and Facebook needs to prove it can make money. But anyone solving their social media strategy with regurgitated rich media banners will be disappointed in 3 months when the results PPT is delivered. Especially when consumer profile pages get flooded with random branded polls.

Although I'm sure the inevitable Cutest Puppy of the Day poll will be a huge hit.

Spending Some Time at the Information Superhighway Rest Stop

2009-01-25T08:36:00.011-06:00

My 4 year old recently received a digital camera for her birthday. It's a cheap one-step-above-disposable camera that takes crappy photos and even crappier videos. But for a preschooler it's pretty cool.

Yesterday I caught her on the couch with it making a bunch of electronic noise:

"Whatcha doing over there?"
"Playing games."
"Games?"
" My camera has games on it. Wanna watch?"
"Honey, I really don't think you should be playing games on your camera."
"OK. Can I play one on your phone?"

Touche already. Damn kids. Which forced the realization of a couple facts:

1) I had experienced my first digital generation gap moment

2) If it has a screen and a button, someone will figure out how to stick a game in it

3) It has been awhile since I played Bejeweled

My gut-reaction really was that a video game has no business being installed on a digital camera. Ironic considering my iPhone is bursting at the memory seams with games, apps, music, videos, and mobile photos. A phone that takes pictures? No problem. A camera that does anything besides take pictures? Heresy!

Technical convergence in consumer electronics is a funny thing. Back in the late 90's everyone was shoving the Internet into appliances. Surf the WWW on your fridge! Check email on your TV! Put a web browser in any room! None of these succeeded initially. Could you come up with a better doomed failure than a cobranded Gateway/AOL Internet touchpad? However, over the last 5 years multipurpose devices have slowly become the norm.

For me digital cameras are a one trick pony. I'm sure my parents felt the same way about their fridge. Soon my kids will bring home something else for me to scoff at, providing a soap box on which to stand and proclaim how it used to be: "We never had the Internet in our shoes!" (Oh, wait, yes we did.)

Every generation is destined to have their kids pass them by. The Dotcom Age occurred so fast that it chopped generations in half = those who had no clue and those who did. I came in right at the breaking point, providing a perspective that understands why the kids love mobile texting while watching TV on their computer -- and why their grandparents don't.

I've been waiting for a sign that the Internet Generation is finally jumping past my feeble brain. Now that I have a taste, I can't wait to see what comes next.

Free Research

2009-01-21T09:07:00.005-06:00

As the economy slows and operation budgets decrease, paid research is often one of the first line items to get cut. If you lose your login access to Forrester and Jupiter, there are some free sources to keep you up to date.

My free daily email from eMarketer is a great aggregator of research bites.

Pew Institute is another good source for free research. They have some very insightful reports regarding gaming trends for teens and adults. As well as CES PPT presentations on teen online/technology habits and Boomers online.

Best Call To Action of 2008 = Post & Win Some Shit

2009-01-18T09:24:00.008-06:00

So I'm a big fan of beer. The kind of geek who stands in front of the store beer selection for 5 minutes -- pondering exactly which 6-pack to buy -- until his wife finally quietly demands that I JUST PICK SOMETHING ALREADY!

Craft brewers ("microbrewery" is sooooo Beer 1.0) have some of the most loyal consumers in marketing. The ones who proudly wear branded t-shirts, hats, and sometimes even tattoos. Choose their restaurants based on the beer list. Drive across state lines to buy a limited releases not available in their area. Pay $8 for a 4-pack.

If you have heard of -- and preferably imbibed -- beers from Bell's, Dogfish Head, Flying Dog, Ommegang, Lagunitas, Rogue, New Glarus (JUST PICK SOMETHING ALREADY! ) then you know what I mean.

These brands are the perfect test case for guerrilla marketing. They can't afford big advertising campaigns, instead thriving off rabid fans and word of mouth. It is only natural that they take advantage of social media and online communities to talk to their consumers and reach new ones.

Denver's Flying Dog Brewery is a great example. They have their blog, Flickr stream, Facebook mascot page and fan page, YouTube channel, and even an open source community project for developing new beer recipes. None of these gather the number of users or views that would strike fear in the hearts of mass brewers. But for craft brewers every consumer counts.

My favorite initiative is a promotion they ran in December via Twitter. Using a new mobile-based beer review site (Beerdo); they awarded prizes if you posted a review for one of their beers. Here's the scoop, promoted via their Facebook page:

For the next two weeks any Flying Dog beer reviewed on Beerdo will be entered in a contest to win some Flying Dog shit. We’ll draw a name at random and the lucky winner will receive some awesome Flying Dog merch. We’ll also be giving out prizes to some of the more creative descriptions of our beer. Think of it as our Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus present to you.

Here’s how to rate a beer via Beero from twitter:

1. Create a new tweet.
2. Start it with @beerdo
3. Next, type the name of the beer you’re rating. For example, Flying Dog Doggie Style Pale Ale
4. To rate your beer, use 1-5 exclamation points (1 is low, 5 is awesome)
5. You can then use the rest of your message to describe the beer you’re drinking.
So your tweet would look something like this:

@beerdo Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter !!!!! This beer is as big as Hunter’s reputation, and I love the massive but balanced brew.

We’ll be monitoring all tweets with “@beerdo” and “flying Dog” in them, so make sure your reviews about our beers contain those terms.

We’re really excited about Beerdo for a bunch of reasons. One of those is that it’s a unique and innovative way to rate beers on the fly. So if you’re at a bar and trying Double Dog for the first time, it’s easiest to review the beer as you’re drinking it.

So tweet away, fans of Flying Dog!

The beauty is that this isn't a closed-system promotion. If I "tweet" about their beer, it is not only seen by Flying Dog but also anyone else following me via Twitter. Whether they know of Flying Dog or not. If I post 5 times about Flying Dog beer, then that is 5 brand impressions reaching a potentially new consumer. And if they are my friend on Twitter, then odds are they are someone who might enjoy a Snake Dog IPA or Horn Dog Barley Wine.

It also would make a great call to action when consumers are enjoying their product = bottle labels, bar table tents, coasters.

I continue to debate the marketing potential of Twitter. Not just their advertising revenue (or lack of), but also how brands can leverage it to support campaigns and drive loyalty. The use of status posts as promotion entry could be one of the first marketing tactics that makes sense.

I Doubt They Will Settle in Linden Dollars

2009-01-10T20:36:00.011-06:00

It is interesting when core parts of our online experience -- things that you always took for granted -- all of the sudden become a legal mosh pit of patent lawsuits and cease/desist press releases. It usually stems from a company realizing they own a patent similar to a technology now ubiquitous with the Internet. Something that the WWW could not live without.

It is basically extortion, since technology companies and individual users could not eliminate it without derailing the fabric of the WWW. They would have no choice but to pay a licensing fee or exorbitant settlement cost.

For instance, originally the only image file supported by web browsers was GIF. Or technically "Compuserve GIF" since it was developed for that early pre-AOL online service. As the WWW grew, all web pages used this format for their images. Unisys decided they owned the original GIF format and sued everyone to ensure that they got credit for it (to the tune of $10 for every graphic software package sold that supported GIF from 1994 - 2003).

The same thing happened over the MP3 format (Alcatel-Lucent won $1.5 billion against Microsoft, which was later overturned). Microsoft again was sued (and lost $521M) over the fact Internet Explorer supported plug-ins -- Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, Java Applets, Active X, etc. -- which are necessary to do anything beyond reading web text and watching looped animations.

Google got hit with a lawsuit over ranking paid search results based on bid price by Yahoo/Overture (the backbone of search engine marketing). It was settled when Yahoo granted Google a perpetual license for 2.7M Google shares.

And in the most bizarre -- and most potentially crippling -- British Telecom actually claimed in 2002 that they owned a patent on web hyperlinks. Even though they filed it in 1976, 15 years before the WWW was born. It would have required any ISP hosting pages with hyperlinks (um... all of them) to pay a license fee. Fortunately it was thrown out by the courts.

[Additional lawsuits submitted by readers include online shopping carts and browser frames. Thanks Manuil and Gavin!]

The trend continues with the recent lawsuit announcement by Worlds.com (small virtual worlds company) against NCSoft, over the use of virtual world avatars. It hints that this is just the beginning:

Stephen Roth, attorney at the law firm representing Worlds.com., could not discuss which other companies Worlds.com might draw into the lawsuit, but said the patent covers "many ways of managing avatars in the virtual world," and there are "certainly other companies that could come within the scope of our patent claims." Roth said Worlds.com has yet to request a dollar amount for damages. The amount set will depend on "reasonable royalties" related to NCSoft's sales for online gaming and monthly service fees.

NCSoft is also a little guy in this space and a good test case for Worlds.com. If they win, then the real royalties come from the Big Guys such as online gaming companies World of Warcraft and Everquest. It could also impact virtual world companies such as Habbo, Second Life, and There.com.

Even more lucrative (since they actually generate revenue) are kid-focused virtual world/gaming sites such as Club Penguin and Webkinz. Not to mention the marketing-driven virtual worlds from Disney (1, 2, 3), Barbie, MTV, and even Coke. And don't forget Nintendo's extremely popular Wii Miis.

Virtual worlds are widely viewed as the future of the Internet. Avatars are the GIFs of virtual worlds. It will be fascinating to see how this one plays out.

Friendship is Strong, But the Whopper is Stronger

2009-01-06T12:27:00.008-06:00

Damn Burger King is good. Just when you think they are getting lame (try the tired Madlibs microsite = Whopper Angry-Gram), they come up with something brilliant.

Such as the only banner that I have ever clicked on Facebook. It is for their new Facebook effort = Whopper Sacrifice. Basically if you "unfriend" 10 of your Facebook Friends, then they reward you with a free Whopper coupon.

Which captures the newest social network marketing trend = rewarding consumers for acting virally.

Kraft recently launched a Facebook widget to support their social cause "Feeding America." To help drive viral spread of the application, Kraft donates six meals to hungry families for each friend users convince to add the application. It added over 26,000 users in December, which is fairly good for a branded widget. Facebook users can participate here:
http://apps.facebook.com/kraft_feedingamerica/

Burger King, however, approaches it from a downright aggressive approach. When you usually unfriend someone on Facebook they are not notified. They could go days or weeks before realizing that they are no longer on your friend list. Unfriend them via Burger King's page and it actually notifies your ex-friends that they have been delisted. To add insult to injury, it also reveals that it only took a free Whopper coupon to persuade you to make that decision.

Of course, it also invites them to sacrifice 10 of their friends, thus encouraging the viral spread.

The assumption is that you have at least 10 people on your friend list who you don't really know, or who are so far removed from your actual social interactions that unfriending them would not have impact on your offline (er, I mean "real") world. But, as this great article from Wired on "never-ending Friending" points out, even unfriending complete strangers can be a tough decision.

Can you identify your bottom 10 friends?

http://apps.facebook.com/sacrifice/

There's an Android in My TV!

2009-01-05T08:59:00.005-06:00

Well, maybe not quite yet. But it is coming, if this blogger's sleuthing is true:

Android netbooks on their way, likely by 2010
Imagine the billion dollar market at stake here if Google can make good on this vision. Netbooks are basically small-scale PCs. For Silicon Valley myriad of software companies, it means a well-backed, open operating system that is open and ripe for exploitation for building upon. Now think of Chrome, Google’s web browser, and the richness it allows developers to build into the browser’s relationship with the desktop — all of this could usher in a new wave of more sophisticated web applications, cheaper and more dynamic to use.

Google has excelled at spreading their ad serving technology way beyond websites into mobile, print, radio, and even TV. Imagine when they achieve the same success with their system software.

An internet-enabled TV running Android and serving Google ads? Hmmmm...

Caveat Social Emptor

2008-12-31T12:13:00.014-06:00

With the new year upon us, it is time once again for the 2009 Internet Predictions game.

Before releasing my own personal wisdom, let's review the current environment. Specifically social media, since that has been the #1 Internet Hype of 2008.

In the last month:

eMarketer reveals that Social Networkers Aren’t There for Ads. But MediaPost claims Social Media Wins In Marketers' '09 Plans. Forrester warns that Consumers Don't Trust Corporate Blogs. But Buzzlogic claims that consumers trust ads on blogs more than social network sites.

Doesn't help that eMarketer adjusted their 2008 forecasts for MySpace/Facebook revenue. Which makes it seem like the sites are tanking, even though it really just shows that eMarketer's predictions in May were completely wrong.

Depending on who you trust, widgets are either vastly underutilized by marketers (AdAge = Bob Garfield Examines a Tool That Is Cheap, Easy and a Great Expression of the Post-Advertising Age) or a complete bust (AdWeek = Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard).

And even before the economy crashed, the days of unlimited VC funding for widget startups was declared expired. Start-ups tried the old game of using different words to describe themselves and avoid the taint (social entertainment applications?) Yet they continued to receive more cash.

Meanwhile social networks -- sensing the impending backlash -- try convincing marketers to support the consumer-generated bootleg brand pages already on their sites (MySpace Exec: Marketers Should Embrace Fan Sites). Which is like hitting the hyperspace button in desperation -- hoping you don't end up in the path of an oncoming asteroid -- since they don't make any revenue off these pages.

How do you explain such ying yang reports? Is it really that confusing to determine the state of social marketing?

Desperate times call for desperate analysis. Desperate analysis of an emerging medium provides too much leeway for personal opinion and uneducated guesses. Even for the professionals. Caveat social emptor.

Honey, Did You Tivo the Sunday Best Buy Ads?

2008-12-29T09:03:00.005-06:00

Convergence isn't always about solving the Next Big Problem by combining two distinct technologies. Sometimes it just takes a low cost of entry and a large industry struggling to survive.

Newspaper FSIs have a long successful history as a marketing sales tool. All major retailers invest substantial amounts of their advertising budget to reach consumers at the Sunday morning breakfast table. But the declining health of the newspaper industry threatens to decimate this once-dominant medium.

FSIs migrated from print to website a few years ago, and now most retailers offer a localized version of their newspaper ads for online viewing.

But now this advertising workhorse has made an even bigger leap into the future. This marketing channel is actually turning into a TV channel. Comcast recently launched Video On Demand Circulars for their cable subscribers. It's almost too bizarre to describe, so I will let them do it:

Video Circulars On Demand is able to take a retailer’s current pre-print advertising materials, convert them into video using our “OnDemand Publishing Platform” and make them available to consumers on their TV Screens. On Demand Publishing is an advertising tool that lets advertisers convert static ads into a slideshow-style video, which is then placed On Demand — allowing consumers to learn about products at their leisure. It’s like moving all of the content from your display ads, free standing inserts, catalogs, and direct mail campaigns to one place-on TV. The same way that you would order a pay per movie, our subscribers will be able to watch a free video about your store’s promotions.

So let's assume that consumers really want to watch FSI slideshows. And that they are willing to search them out "on demand," bypassing other VOD entertainment content in the process. Currently this walled garden doesn't even have a gate that allows you to purchase directly from your TV. The videos can be customized to provide local store info (Great Indoors example). Other retailers opt for a 1-800 phone number or custom URL.

Perhaps this will succeed as television sets become more interactive, allowing consumers one-click purchase directly from the videos. The convergence of video FSIs with IPTV would allow Comcast to customize the ads personally for each household. And perhaps, someday, our grandkids will laugh and shake their heads as we describe how store promotions used to to be printed and dropped on our doorstep every Sunday.

Stephen Joined the Group "Dads Supporting Moms Hating Facebook"

2008-12-24T12:32:00.006-06:00

Considering all the moms I know who recently joined Facebook, their vocal support of their friends (as demonstrated via an endless stream of good for you! and I know how you feel! and I wish mine were still sleeping! status comments), and their tendency to get slightly militant over issues like this; there could be a good old-fashioned flame war heating up:

Lactivists wage breastfeeding war on Facebook
There are plans for a virtual nurse-in from Facebook members upset with the popular social networking site for deleting pictures of women breastfeeding. That prompted a petition called "Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene." As word grew on the Web, the number of people signing up had tripled in one week to more than 61,000.

The online event is scheduled for December 27:

In protest to the discriminatory and unjust policy of Facebook administration classifying breastfeeding images as obscene content, on December 27th, 2008 M.I.L.C. is asking all of you to change your profile picture for one day, to one which includes an image of a nursing mom. This could be a picture of you or someone you know nursing a child, it could be a painting or image of a sculpture of a breastfeeding woman, it could also be a photo or image of any nursing mammal....We ask that you include the status line of "Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!"

What happens to a social network when your members hate you? Back in the day, they just left for another site. Now days, they use your site even more to express their distaste.

There are over 500 groups on Facebook dedicated to breastfeeding. Who would have expected this 3 years ago, when the site was only college students who [insert joke about breasts and fraternities here] instead?

Hell hath no wrath like a pissed off mom surfing the web at night after two glasses of wine. Trust me.

The Long Tail of Current Events

2008-12-24T10:39:00.005-06:00

Americans are always looking for a good topic to rally around online.

Take the Iraqi Shoe Thrower. A current event snippet, which 5 years ago would have quickly died down into a historical footnote and recurring punchline on Jay Leno reruns.

But these days it spawns a widening spectrum of social media and viral content. There are Facebook's Fans of Guy Who Threw His Shoes at Bush (111,000 fans and growing) and Lisa threw a shoe at you, throw one back! tag games. Parody videos on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4). Online games where the objective is to... well... you know (1, 2, 3).

Eventually these will burn out and we'll move on to something new. However, as with most things on the internet, they will never go away. The smoldering embers of this Iraqi's 5 minutes of fame live on. Just a few search results away from an additional slap at Bush's legacy.

CUGMOG, Coming in 2010

2008-12-24T09:38:00.007-06:00

Casual gaming continues to grow and receive positive press, per this recent Economist article. The consumer trend for online content is anything short, disposable, free, and entertaining = viral videos, Twitter status posts, Elf Yourself emails, Funny or Die bite-size humor.

Add collaborative to these social media times and you have the recent casual game trend of social gaming (i.e. Facebook's Scrabulous, Texas Hold 'em, zombie bites, snowball fights, and too many more to list).

Add user generated to social casual gaming and you may have the Trend of 2009 in the making. The major video game platforms announced months ago that they were opening their systems to amateur developers. Since then, Microsoft launched XNA Studios, an online community for Xbox independent developers. Nintendo launched their WiiWare site for downloading independent games directly to your console.

While this may provide low-cost alternatives for the hardcore gamer, casual user-generated online gaming is keeping pace. The Wall Street Journal has a good overview. Two sites of note are Kongregate and Playyoo. The latter of which pushes the envelope by adding "mobile" to the string of adjectives, thus positioning itself as the Trend of 2010.

Seems Kind of Web 1.75

2008-12-24T09:32:00.004-06:00

End of year rush to get as many buzzwords into one paragraph as possible:

Email Marketing Goes Social
Now you can create email marketing messages that subscribers can easily share to social networks. Silverpop's new white paper shows you how to create powerful email campaigns that can go socially viral. Download your copy from Silverpop today!

Remember back in the good old days when the "Forward" button was a viral enabler?

The Only Consumers Coming to Your Site are the Ones You Can't Market to

2008-12-24T08:25:00.000-06:00

Newest report from eMarketer:

More than four out of 10 children ages 6 to 11 have visited a Website they saw or heard about in a commercial or advertisement, according to a 2008 MRI survey. MRI said almost 10.7 million young consumers visited company sites after viewing ads. More than one-quarter of them were 6 to 7 years old, one-third were age 8 or 9 and 40.2% were 10 or 11 years old.

“MRI data clearly indicate that the younger set is pretty responsive to a ‘please visit our Web site’ suggestion,” said Anne Marie Kelly, senior vice president at MRI, in a statement.

Good News for All Senate Appropriations Committee Junkies

2008-12-11T10:52:00.009-06:00

So here is a novel idea -- can the the government supplement our billion dollar bailout with Google AdSense profit sharing? The Washington Post ran an article about Google publicly encouraging the government to make their sites more searchable:

A person using one of the search engines, for example, can't find Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against a given company, can't discover the picture of a specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian, and can't search by name for the details of a Vietnam War casualty.

Which, if you have ever tried to find information via a government website, isn't a shocker. They tend to be bloated, poorly designed, and difficult to navigate. Like most of the Internet. Only difference is that most of the Internet is indexable by search engines, so we aren't often exposed to their mess. We just Google a topic instead and head directly to the content.

Think about all the paid search links that Google can attach to these results. I expect government-related keywords would fetch a nice bid price. Especially the more niche topics. If the government were smart (stress on were), then they would negotiate a revenue share model.

Then my Google Paranoia sets in. They want to be the leader in finding all information. What happens when they are better at finding government data than our own government? How codependent will the government become on them? Are we one step closer to a "private Google" commissioned to keep track of confidential information behind the government firewall.

On its own this isn't a scary thing. But start cross-indexing their knowledge of government data with Google's other information repositories such as Google Earth/Streetview, Picasa face photo recognition, tracking individual web users via its ad networks, mobile GPS enabled Maps, OpenID...

Then again, maybe this is just crazy talk.

Hitting the Online Video Hyperspace Button

2008-11-22T10:50:00.008-06:00

It used to be, back in the day, that us old-timers used our video game systems to actually play video games. Playstation and Xbox continue to evolve into Transformer-style entertainment systems -- BlueRay DVD, live voice chat, streaming music, Netflix downloads.

Now comes news that Microsoft is producing custom video shows for Xbox Live:

The unique concept of masters of horror taking on comedy sees some of the world's greatest horror directors bring their comedic visions to life. The short film pilots will be available worldwide on Xbox LIVE from influential horror directors like James Wan (Saw, Death Sentence), David Slade (30 Days of Night, Hard Candy), James Gunn (Dawn of Dead, Slither), Lucky McKee ( May, The Woods), Andrew Douglas (The Amityville Horror), Adam Green (Hatchet), Peter Cornwell (The Haunting in Connecticut) and on-line director, John Clisham.

The collection is sponsored by the US Air Force. Ignoring the whole premise of horror directors trying to create comedy, this initiative puts one more dent into an already fractured media industry. (Update 12/08 = Nintendo has vaguely announced a similar initiative)

Broadband advertising has expanded from 15 second TV spot pre-rolls to a wide array of options. Online content production companies are everywhere these days (1, 2, 3), offering custom video programs on the cheap. Hulu has perfected the art of video distribution. Technology vendors continue to push mobile video. Video widgets ensure that you never have to leave your Facebook or Myspace page again.

Online video is supposed to kill TV. However, from a marketing standpoint, online is getting so fractured that it will become more difficult deciding where to spend the money. Not only do you need to decide if you want to create, sponsor, or just advertise around video content. Now you also have to decide what devices it should be delivered on.

In the end, the power lies primarily with those who have the best distribution system. There has always been a chicken-vs-egg battle online between the technology provider and the content provider. Ironically, owning both is not always the winning solution.

iTV Urban Legend Debunked!

2008-11-19T08:48:00.000-06:00

The CyberProphets (e-prophecies?) were right about one thing. You can now order a pizza through your TV. It will probably take 3 times as long compared to using the phone, as my wife will no doubt point out. But who says technology has to make everything faster and easier?

Now I just need to:

1) Get that latte coupon sent to my phone when I walk past Starbucks
2) Order Jennifer Aniston's dress by clicking her during a rerun of Friends
3) Have Amazon.com provide an accurate and unexpected Wish List recommendation

Then I will consider all my technology needs fulfilled.

Try the New Holiday Panhandler Version!

2008-11-18T08:52:00.005-06:00

Elf Yourself is back again. This time it gets the official Jib Jab treatment, which is an interesting switch considering how successful everyone claimed it was last year. Why dump the agency that brought you the idea and kept it alive for two good years? Maybe they are looking to make it more virable. (might help that they offered to do it for free)

Regardless, it will be a good test to see if Office Max can maintain the momentum for a third year. In an Internet world of always on content, marketers usually cannot resist the opportunity to keep their microsites alive well past their expiration date.

This turns the WWW into a living archive of old campaigns and brief successes. Yes, I'm talking to you Burger King, Xbox, Sega, CareerBuilder, Milk. Your 15 minutes of fame seems to have its own long tail.

Office Max has the sense to limit theirs to the holidays. At some point it will start smelling musty and dated. But, just like that crumbling childhood ornament, you probably can't resist pulling it out every year and hanging it back on your tree.

Go ahead, relive the memories.

The Prom Queen Finally Wants To Be Your Friend

2008-11-16T16:44:00.010-06:00

A few months ago I posted about finding an old college friend and an ex-coworker via social networks. Wired had a great article recently about the blurring relationships between current and past friends online. This "endless friending" will be interesting to watch with teenage users, who are building their friend list early in their life.

I, however, have recently encountered a different phenomenon = Regressive Friending. It involves becoming Facebook Friends with people I haven't thought about in 20 years. It probably has a lot to do with the high school reunion season, and the fact that social networks continue to gain older users. In the last 2 months I have been friended (and yes, I admit, proactively sought) the NCHS class of '88.

It started as innocent curiosity: "I wonder if I can find her, what he looks like now, where they work, etc." Lurking at the reunion without having to join the conversation. Then, as with all things social networking, it turned into an obsession. Befriend those you hung out with first. Expand into those who sat next to you in English class. Then move on to the names that you kind of remember, but couldn't really describe. Guess what, they all accept. And within a few days you will also be sought in the same manner.

Which, in the grand scheme of social networking, isn't a big deal. But it made me realize that most of my close friends from my past aren't on Facebook. Which means I now know more about my Facebook high school friends' day-to-day lives than my actual friends:

Annetta is making lasagna for the first time. Al ran a 4:30 marathon in Athens, Greece. Erin can't figure out what a "poke" is. Everyone loves their kids.

The ironic thing is that -- despite all these friend invites and accepts -- I haven't had an actual conversation with any of them. No "what you been up to?" wall posts or "remember me?" instant messages. Instead I get to listen into their daily Facebook status, sneak peeks at their pictures, and see which of their friends aren't in my network. It's almost exactly like high school.

So maybe, as the Wired article surmises, it isn't the best idea to approve invites from your past:

Fine, you can "Remove Friend," but what kind of asshole actually does that? Deletion is scary—and, we're told, unnecessary in the Petabyte Age. That's what made good old-fashioned losing touch so wonderful—friendships, like long-forgotten photos and mixtapes, would distort and slowly whistle into oblivion, quite naturally, nothing personal. It was sweet and sad and, though you'd rarely admit it, necessary.

I reflected on this last week when my brother's best friend from grade school swim team sent me a friend invite. Which, of course, I accepted. His kids did great at the swim meet over the weekend.

What? No Bullsh*t Bingo Social Game?

2008-11-11T21:27:00.005-06:00

So LinkedIn finally joined the Internet circa 2006 by providing embedded widget apps to its users. They have to be pre-approved by the site, similar to getting an app in the iPhone store. There are currently only 9 apps available. Which means either the approval criteria is really tough, LinkedIn is really lazy, or companies aren't rushing to take advantage of it.

LinkedIn has always been the sober, dress shirt & tie kind of site. Which is fine, considering it really is focused on business networking and loosely-veiled job searching (befriend a couple local recruiters and watch their new friend notices). But of the 9 apps, 3 are blog readers, 4 are workspace/document sharing, and 1 is the requisite Amazon fave book lister.

The blog readers are slightly useful, since they automatically found blogs by my network that I don't have time to track down. But an even more useful tool would be one that provides a visual perspective of my network connections. LinkedIn is very 1.0 when it comes to presenting user connections/degrees of seperation. How about a Visual Thesaurus-style map, allowing me to see who is 1, 2, or 3 connections away from each other and explore via click-n-drag. Cross-reference it with specific companies/industries of interest and you could get really fancy.