Now blogging and tweeting live from AdAge San Francisco.
Follow all of us bloggers on site with this one tweetscan link:
http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=%23adtech&u=
Refresh the page every once in a while and get the latest dirt from all the bloggers on site.
The most amazing thing so far was the Director of Nestle Consumer Services talking about Gerber's idea submission site for customers and how each submission goes straight to a patent lawyer. Wow. Mom's likely think they are sending in helpful advice and Nestle is just mining for patentable ideas. No one else sees them.
So, while I was in Florida I realized that I had mistakenly set a post up to publish while I was away without ever finishing said post. Pretty brilliant, eh?
So here is the re-post as I was meaning to make it.
"Social networking is not a platform, it’s not a destination, it’s a behaviour."
Katie is speaking out against this tendency of brands to worry about how they can get their brand into facebook or myspace rather than really leverage this emerging phenomenon.
I couldn't agree more. But let's break it down a bit.
Social Networking and this whole Age of Conversation has taken the continuing fragmentation of media and made it non-linear. If we thought the media world was fragmented before, we now have an unlimited number of forever forming and reforming communities within just one social networking site, let alone all of them combined.
Being on YouTube or Facebook doesn't guarantee viewership. It's the same with every social networking site. Understanding and engaging the communities within and outside of these social networking sites that matters.
So this raises a number of questions.
But as I sat and thought about this some more, I was taken back to an old associate, Stuart MacDonald, and a phrase he used to love to drop like a bomb in any meeting.
"Where's the value?"
Consuming media is wonderful. But it is a subset of activity that I participate in when I log into my personal spaces. I am also looking to create media, build relationships and have conversations. Ironically, these other activities generally result in my consuming media. Only the media I'm consuming is directed and positioned by how the community and those I'm interacting with perceive its value.
I'm going to go out on a limb. What if it is all about behavior? Could I not maximize my reach within twitter by looking to engage with all of the people on twitter that are speaking on a topic of interest to the engagement or campaign in question? And then follow this activity into other platforms?
Calling it a "Conversation Age" is great, but we can't personally engage in a conversation with every person, customer or prospect. And if this phenomenon is truly non-linear in nature, then that means we can't identify it in simple variables. We would have to apply the principles of chaos to marketing.
That means it can't be seen when looking at the number of visitors to a site, the number of conversation online, views of our media or even reach or brand equity measurements. These are the individual data points and alone they tell us a misleading story. We would have to be looking for patterns of engagement. Ways that these (or other variables) interact and present emerging patterns. Ultimate success would be when these patterns are stable yet non-linear in nature. Continuing to morph and adjust as they interact with emerging communities online.
Is system thinking coming to Marketing?
I've been tagged. Net Neutrality in Canada is an issue. One that has been quiet for too long.
Mark asks... "[W]hat about the thousands of bloggers who benefit from the free, open and un-throttled internet we’ve become accustomed to?"
Here is a news piece on it.
And here is my old post from our friend the Ninja.
But I think we are taking the wrong tact here. Someone just has to launch a scare campaign that the big bad internet providers are going to take away our PORN and I'm sure we will get the public outcry we are all looking for. ;)
Joost rocks and I've taken WAY too long to post about it.
The idea is to legitimize Peer to Peer. The way Skype did to free peer-to-peer phone services. And it's by the same two dudes. The content is legitimate in that it is from a central source as opposed to user generated or stolen content like on YouTube or other peer to peer services. I watched the funniest music video yesterday by Basement Jaxx titled "Oh My Gosh."
The question is, if Rogers and Bell can limit the sites on their networks (see net neutrality, above) then what is to stop them from blocking the ports required by Joost?
I love TheGoodBlogs. Vernon has done an amazing job. You may have noticed a little widget on the right side of my blog. Okay. I have a lot of widgets. Here it is to the left.
TheGoodBlogs take my stories and shares them on all the other blogs in my group (Marketing) that have deployed the TGB widget. In turn, I showcase the stories from other bloggers on my blog.
You may have notice that one of the items in the widget has an orange dot next to it. This is because I have launched my own personalized "channel". And I've put the blogs I read a lot in this slot. So I'm even able to control who I syndicate. Brilliant.
Tags: netneutrality, canada, swarm-it, TGB, thegoodblogs, joost, p2p
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Think sex sells?
brandsizzle would disagree.
Now run, don't walk to this article at the Brand Builder blog. Back to the basics, baby. A wonderful reminder during the Holiday blitz that it's about inspiring dreams in our consumers.
Course, my dreams tend to be about sex...
Think you know how a 20-year old relates to technology?
Gavin over at Servant of Chaos wrote an article titled "Life beings at 40 -- Second Life at 20". He raises the issue of a growing generation gap in how we use and view technology. But he does so with poetic brilliance. Take the following quote:
"We are not of the present because our victories are already in the past."
I dream of writing this well. Keep it coming, Gavin.
Wrap it up
That's all I have. What are you bringing to the potluck?
Image Credit: eleuki
Tags: technology, social media, generation gap
Meant to post all this last week. Took an impulse trip to Florida to watch the world UPA Ultimate Frisbee championships. Just got back to the cold frozen north last night. Joy. ;)
Follow-up on Loitering post
Last week I proposed that youth activity online could be viewed as a form of "loitering." In the same vein, Mark Glaser over at MediaShift speaks to the social media usage of youth. Great collection of stats about youth from a variety of sources such as Nielson, Pew, and eMarketer.
He references the limits on youth today and how social networking sites give them back their freedom of Expression. What I found most interesting were the references from Danah Boyd which identify online social sites as "identity development processes".
[To paraphrase pretty heavily...] Where blogging requires authorship, many of these profile building sites, like MySpace, allow users to cut and paste an identity together and even develop their view of self.
Wow. So much for dressing up like Boy George or Madonna like in my day. ;)
Game Dynamics
Why are some online properties so addictive? The folks at Shuffle Brain propose it's because of the implementation of game dynamics. See their powerpoint presentation for an insightful walk-through even without their notes. A must read for anyone developing or following "web 2.0" successes.
Certainly explains why I get so addicted to checking my Squidoo page and my Technorati ratings, feeble as they may be.
Do the Nike step (virtually).
Artist and Designer friend Bernice (aka TrickyDog) launches "nikestudio" on Second Life. Build and customize your own Nike shoes with your own designs and art.
Interesting example of Nike looking to bring value while still allowing for its brand. What I like is it doesn't attempt to "trick" users or exploit the conversation. And it potentially provides value, allowing users to design, purchase and sell their customized Second Life nike shoes. Read more...
UPDATE: I was swindled! Er... confused, rather. This was just a CONCEPT that Bernice came up with. But a brilliant one. Anyone know anyone over at Nike??
Polar Rose is a very interesting, if not potentially troubling, technology which allows for people to tag the faces of their friends and then share this data with others.
Certainly there is much talk about youth being less concerned with identity issues online.
But being an old-fashioned, decrepit old-timer at the no-longer-hip old age of 37, I'm not so cool having people I don't know be able to identify me because I showed up in some photo. Whether those photos come from "flickr, 23, Kodak gallery, or any other website" 1. Or, pray tell, some public camera on a street somewhere.
My friend Kate who first announced this on her blog, counseled that while paranoia may be a good thing, others have dealt with the PII issue quite adequately.
So I wrote an email to the CEO of Polar Rose, asking him to wade in on how they plan to deal with the potential PII issues. Or if PII was even pertinent.
So then I waited for a couple of days. To no avail. No response.
So now I have to ask Nicholaj in public. Maybe you will have better luck than me? His email is given publicly on their site as: nikolaj[aT]polarrose[dOt]com
Maybe it's a hoax? Maybe I'm just paranoid?
1 source: polar rose website: http://www.polarrose.com/
UPDATED: I've received an email and a comment from Nikolaj.
Much of the blogosphere I follow revolves around the ever changing practices and trends that are driving social marketing and word-of-mouth online.
And in such things, this week did anything but disappoint. The stories were varied but each showcased a different element of the same story; an indie musician getting national acclaim for his use of social networking tools, an experiment in social status via blogging, and a UK initiative to engage a particular community in a movie launch.
Many thanks to Kate for her post on Jonathon Coulton and his write-up by eMarketer. At first glance, Jonathon's blog is not all that unusual for the genre. He's a musician with humorful and even geeky songs. His site and activities showcase a number of web 2.0 tools and traits.
None of these features, on their own, are all that unusual. And I'll admit that all together they amounted to a professional and effective utilization of social networking and web 2.0 services. But there was this nagging feeling. Why was the author so enamored by this particular artist? Wasn't it just a little over the top?
Perhaps. Or maybe this is just another sign that we are in a web 2.0 bubble. Are we seeing less than effective behavior being rewarded? Check. Are we seeing utopian claims? Again, yes. From heavy long-tails taking over the medium to corporations tearing down the membranes between customers and employees.
Not that both forces aren't at play. But the level of hype around them together with the latest acquisition of YouTube with the subsequent scramble for a business case leads me to believe we are indeed inside a web 2.0 bubble.
So the question in a bubble, as everyone scrambles to get a piece of the pie, is what is just hype and what will withstand the test of time. And in some cases, the answer doesn't matter as hype generates press and even big results (short term).
Source: David Armano |
Case 2Now we travel over to Eric Kintz's blog regarding his experiments to better define the core practices and principles of blogging as measured by social status and traffic. The results of his ongoing experiments has led to a number of case studies each with some key learnings and potential rules.
1[SH] Yahoo drop in ad revenues might be a case in point of this. His articles go into a lot more depth with copious source links. Apologies to Eric for over-simplifying the issue. But what strikes me is the amount of effort required to "create value" as a blogger and to what end. I wouldn't lump blogging into a primal basic need of the human psyche (sleep, eat, shelter, etc.) So the reward for this effort likely comes down to social status or $$. Both of which bring whispers of sex, cars and rock & roll. Even in the midst of the "hype" of todays web 2.0 bubble, most marketers and big brands are not going to invest the effort, time or corporate restructuring necessary to take advantage of the lessons learned above. Hugh Macleod correctly, in my mind, refers to blogging as a "disruption channel" in regard to business adoption. [my article on this] So brands are not going to rush en-masse to integrate themselves into the blogosphere. What brands and corporation WILL demand is the ability to exploit the current online hype. The smart/innovative ones will go beyond this and look to leverage the growing micro-communities online. So this takes us to Case 3. |
Case 3Juzzie's latest case study on engagement marketing from his session at ad:tech London is concise, insightful and pertinent to this discussion. "Around 40,000 people from the local market checked out the Lightening McQueen character’s home page on Bebo. Over 5,000 of these Beboers included the movie trailer on their home pages, which was subsequently seen over 35,000 times. Some 2,000 or so Beboers also linked to the Lightening McQueen Character as friends, creating over 700 profile comments" He goes on to make some great points. I'll attempt to summarize a few.
"So the demand is outstripping the social networks resource to cash in the advertising dollars, which is why Google has been able to wade in like a Knight in shining armour or at least offer wads of cash while they try and figure out their business models." |
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Perhaps Doc Searl nailed it with his concept of emerging "intention economies". The basic concept being that we inherently identify our intentions or interests when we visit a site on a regular basis or via our activities within a community. With the 3 million plus reach of the xspace launch, one can only wonder how much of Google's bid for YouTube had to do with the size and strength of the inherent intention economies within. And the corresponding engagement marketing and advertising opportunities.
Let's not forget the recent investment in b5media which will both reward and accelerate its growth into an even more influential community of niches. Another sign that the market may indeed value and reward engagement marketing opportunities.
The bubble will burst. What are you betting on to be the best path?
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