Archive for January, 2008
Posted January 25th, 2008 by admin
At about 6:45pm on Thursday, January 24 a group of social media visionaries formed the first 2008 MITX panel discussion about the opportunities and implications of social media. The event took place at the Parris Lounge in Faneuil Hall, Boston.
The Moderator: Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group, Author, Marketing to the Social Web
The Fine Panelist: Tom Arrix, VP of Sales, East, Facebook; Pauline Ores, Senior Marketing Manager, Community & Collaboration, Global SMB Marketing, IBM Corporation; Suzanne Skop, VP of East Coast Sales, MySpace; Juan Fernando Santos, Chief Creative Officer, StudioCom; Jeffrey C. Taylor, CEO, Eons
The panelists state their claims
Suzanne Skop from MySpace believes that “social networking is not a fad”. She discussed how MySpace uses its “massive membership” to do “hyper targeting” and how more than 90 production companies approach them weekly in search of “branded community identities”.
Pauline Ores from IBM followed by discussing how the 100 year old company has embraced the collaborative power of social media within its own network. “For the first time we can engage people who are not our customers and start listening to what they have to say.” She also stated some of the main concerns of B2B corporations contemplating social media.
“My concerns are thinking ahead. Our efforts are all around the world and in a few years they are all going to connect so how do I develop an efficient metric and manage operations?”
She highlighted a very interesting distinction between B2C and B2B companies when it comes to social media. “In B2C you can hire an agency to set up everything. In our world, in B2B, people want to talk to the experts. It’s not as easy and they agency alone cannot do it.”
Juan Fernando Santos, chief creative officer at StudioCom, believes that observations are “less textual and more visual”. StudioCom creates virtual worlds and has successfully built virtual communities that have attracted millions of members. “People are looking for experiences online,” says Juan. “Before it was looking for a service or specific information, now we believe that the right place for a brand to be is to be the enabler and one of the best ways to do it is with visual media.” He spoke about how “mediated content generation” is changing brand-consumer interactions through the “hyper realism of the social media experience”.
Tom Arrix from Facebook began by discussing the effect of Facebook in participation of young voters in the presidential race. “In 2000 the Iowa caucus had 3% youth turn out. In the last 30 days 13% of Iowa youth came out to help Obama defeat Hillary. In New Hampshire the same elements swung on Hillary’s favor. This is starting to tell and amazing story about social media. From Facebook’s perspective, our platform is revolutionizing how people are communicating. In today’s home, the phone does not ring for High School students anymore. What’s going on in Facebook is pretty dramatic. We are different from Suzanne’s world [MySpace] with hundreds of millions, which is fantastic. We are a piece of technology that’s connecting people.”
Tom mentioned that each week they get about two million more users. “By the end of 2008 we’ll have over 200 million.” He also said that 40% of the Canadian population is on Facebook “and its not college kids”.
Jeffrey C. Taylor, founder of Monster.com and CEO of Eons.com, started off with “You gotta be in it to win it.” He then did a raise-of-hands vote to see how many people where on MySpace (40% of group), Facebook (97% of group), LinkedIn (97%), Webkins (he was the only one). He then told a story about adults taking care of their kid’s virtual pigs for 6 months after their kids get bored. “My daughter had 53 message windows open in her laptop. She had 155 words in 53 screens. Four hours of homework. Two hours is just keeping up with friends.” He asked her if she ever met people on Facebook and she said, “That’s disgusting!”
Jeff then focused on talking about Eons.com and the baby boomers. “Every single article in this town says im gonna fail, but I’m excited about how baby boomers are coming together. Every single person came to Eons without friends. They come by themselves and make friends in groups. On Facebook and MySpace you join groups because it looks cool but nothing happens. In Eons is all about the groups. Couples meet in a gardening group about tulips. My people are about relationships. You have to be 50 to get in my site. I’m 47 and I can’t get into my own site. People are meeting on Eons and automatically meeting offline.
Q&A Session Highlights
Q: At what point do content creators start saying, “we want to see some of the value we create? When do we start unionizing?”
Tom from Facebook: “I don’t think you should get paid to connect with your friends and call your mom.”
Jeff from Eons: “Making money is not the primary priority of the people putting out information.”
Q: A CBS Boston reporter asked, “What is the road traditional Media has to take to embrace social media?”
Juan from StudioCom believes that everyone, particularly younger generations, want content on demand. “Children just don’t understand linear media formats”.
Tom from Facebook: “I worked at CBS. Big media companies put the blinders that no one is going to touch broadcast. They are getting smarter though. They are getting shows online and pushing them out on YouTube.
Q: What will have to happen for the creation of more emotional moments to happen on the web whether is visual or textual?
Pauline from IBM: At Eons most people will eventually meet. So it’s not about duplicating reality, it’s about providing the connection.
The Wrap up thoughts:
Jeff from Eons: There is a new platform now. No one has figured out how big it really is. You see joy and laughter. People love it. I’m a big MySpace user. I would be a Facebook user but they kicked me out cause I marketed too hard. For 6 months I only had 16 friends and that was really tough.”
Pauline from IBM: “What’s old is new again. In small communities back in the day everyone knew your business. On Facebook I’m back in a little village. I get micro updates. My Advice: The community approach is “how can I help?” If you have something to contribute, you contribute. Asking where I can help is better than raising awareness.”
Suzanne from MySpace: “Im gonna end with performance. 70% of the ROI from social networking comes from the momentum or pass along effect. That is people taking a piece of your brand and putting them in their page and passing it along. Social networking is not a fad.”
Tom from Facebook: “As platforms continue to evolve, you can feel it and hear it from friends. It is changing how people act socially. Whoever is not in it…you have to get in at some point. This is the most effective way of communicating in the planet. The biggest challenge for marketers is being revolutionary. If you listen and learn you’re going to be smarter and drive more sales.
Pictures courtesy of Ryan Barrett
Posted January 22nd, 2008 by admin
I vividly remember a day back in 1997 sitting in front of my computer coding the GUI for a Web-based corporate research portal. It annoyed me that I had to find a way to package so much information into a 640 x 480 parcel of techno-real-estate. And as I longed for more square footage, I could taste my dreams as bigger and bigger monitors propelled me into a world of designing for an 800 x 600 screen resolution. I was in pixel heaven – and then came the Mobile Web.
11 years later, with a good 30-40 percent of my online time spent via my Motorola Q and iPod Touch mobile devices, I’ve got a persistent “déjà vu” feeling that takes me back to the “old days” of the Web.
- HTML Emails: The corner has finally turned on being able to send out graphically-formatted HTML emails as a standard. It’s not easy to consume HTML formatted emails on my Q – at times it’s nearly impossible and I lose out on that particular communication.
- Heavy Graphics/Formatting: Broadband internet access finally beat out turtle slow dialup and websites became a rich-media experience. These same websites are usually a mess on a mobile browser.
- Screen Resolution: Forget 640 x 480 pixels – a good Mobile GUI has to fit on a fraction of that real-estate.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a HUGE fan of portable content – I just find it fascinating that as mobile technology continues to evolve, we are finding ourselves solving problems that we thought we already solved.
While I’m sure I’ll continue to get a sense of déjà vu, I’m glad we now have a collective set of lessons learned which means only good things for our mobile web user experiences.
Posted January 17th, 2008 by Scott
Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information. – Michael Scott
This week one of the world’s most popular encyclopedias turned 7! It’s hard to believe that Wikipedia, which is often credited with jump starting the user-generated content revolution we all know as “Web 2.0,” went from a small experiment to one of the world’s most reliable resources covering a ridiculously wide array of subjects. As of January 14, 2008, the English Wikipedia had over 2,176,000 articles with over 946,000,000 words! That’s 371,271 new words added every day!
Now I wouldn’t recommend citing Wikipedia articles for your thesis or term papers, but if you wanted to find out who Chris Crocker is…… well that’s another story lol.
Posted January 11th, 2008 by admin
I caught an episode of “Access Hollywood” the other night. One of their feature stories was the re-launch of their companion website www.accesshollywood.com – Who cares, right? Well, Access Hollywood does…and BIG time (and they should). While I was intrigued by the length and depth of airtime given to this story, it was host Billy Bush’s voiceover commentary that grabbed my attention. In it, he described how central and integrated Access Hollywood’s website has become (in a very short time) to the distribution of entertainment news & media. What used to be a second thought to the on-air broadcast is now a rush to post content online.
And then while watching CNN’s coverage of the New Hampshire primary results, I literally had a “holy crap” moment: Suddenly my “viewer experience” became a seamless “user experience” because of the way CNN converged its online and on-air media.
The highly watched cable news network managed to pull this off in a number of ways:
- Purposeful Crossovers: The on-air broadcast of the results maintained a persistent running tally of votes framed around the visual commentary – if a viewer was watching CNN in HD, they’d get access to additional data points along both sides of the frame. Throughout the broadcast, host Wolf Blitzer would lead viewers to reference their laptops and check out CNNpolitics.com in order to drill down and hone into more granular real-time specifics. While lots of broadcast programs lead people to the web, it was the effortless, integrated, “live”, and complementary nature of the use of their website that grabbed me.
- Embedded Content: At certain points throughout the broadcast, CNN would feature segments from the various campaign’s live video feeds and direct viewers to CNNpolitics.com to tune into any of the candidate’s specific coverage for further viewing and analysis. Since the on-air broadcast only gave samplings of each campaign event, viewers were easily able to target their preferred candidate online and augment the on-air content. Although CNNpolitics.com was referenced constantly throughout the broadcast, it wasn’t disruptive – it felt right.
- Integrated Look & Feel: CNNpolitics.com was a natural creative extension of CNN’s “Election Center” set design and broadcast graphics. The two mediums visually became like one. Viewers who frequently turned their attention from being an online user to an on-air viewer felt a single, integrated experience.
The fundamental shift in the way in which we consume and interact with media has now tipped the scale from the after thought of “supporting Web information” to primary online content. We’ll be seeing many more examples of this in 2008 as TV continues to become an inefficient content consumption technology.
Posted January 11th, 2008 by Neha
I suppose I’m a Facebook snob. I created my profile on Facebook before the time of news feeds, throwing sheep or giving gifts of lipstick and penguins. The clean appearance of the profile appealed to me then.
I’ve been wary of the superwalls, graffiti and bumper stickers that are tacked on to chaotic profiles now. I diffidently adopt applications that align with my interests – like the causes application or the “Where Have I Been” travel map. I’m shamelessly careful not to clutter my page, even voting applications, groups and profile information off to maintain order.
Last month I received a Facebook gift from one of my favorite non-profit bloggers, Beth. It was a tiny pink and green gift box and in it, a donation to the organization of her choice. With each gift you buy with this Changing The Present application, you can make a donation to any of the non-profits that have teamed up with the application. I scoured the organizations to return the gift to Beth and introduce it to other friends of mine.
The application introduced me to Freedom from Hunger, a non-profit I donated to by presenting little pink and green facebook gift boxes to ten of my friends. So today, there is a box on my profile that displays the first gift I received from Beth. In my news feed, where I normally hastily delete any activity to minimize that box as much as possible, I have retained the information about my own Changing the Present gift giving so anyone who stumbles across my profile may find this gift – one that I find far more distinctive and meaningful than animated teddy bears and balloons.
This Christmas, my family and friends made donations to Freedom from Hunger in my name. My parents sponsored a program that allows 378 young mothers in a 3rd world country to be educated so they can help guide their daughters into a better life. The card that accompanied their donation and thanked me for my support was nestled under the tree in a large sage green box with a deep pink bow wrapped around it. Apparently, tiny colorful boxes on Facebook can lead to life-size change.
Posted January 10th, 2008 by Char Lyn
Last night at about 9 pm the Facebook app SuperWall had 3,090,929 “daily active users.” As I write this post, it has 3,551,493. That’s an increase of almost half a million users in less than 24 hours.
Why?
Some time in the last week or so, the SuperWall developers added a new feature: Forward (fast). Clicking this link at the bottom of a SuperWall post automatically posts the wall message onto the SuperWall of all of your friends.
A picture of a husky puppy dog has shown up on my SuperWall three times with the exact same message, “click forward….to see what happens!” Fortunately, I was warned by an office mate before clicking forward.
While this is will likely be a very successful campaign for increasing SuperWall installation and usage, it feels a little like a con. It’s to close to that bad type of virus that proliferates without the infector’s knowledge. The good viral campaigns are only passed with the infector’s full knowledge.
Posted January 10th, 2008 by Char Lyn
Mack over at the Viral Garden had a post yesterday that gave a great tip for using Google to monitor your brand in the blogosphere. He also underlined the importance of corporations leveraging the free market research available through blogs. However, I disagreed with the underlying message of his post, which implied that corporations don’t monitor the blogs and should always respond to blog posts about them.
Good marketers know when no response is the best course of action. Here are some examples:
- A truthful, transparent response will incite more negative posts.
- Responding may expose the company to legal action or increased regulatory oversight.
- Entering the conversation opens a floodgate that requires continued involvement beyond the resources of the company.
Still don’t believe me? Then you probably also think the customer is ALWAYS right. Now I do believe that you should do everything within your power to make a customer happy, but there are some customers whose happiness would drive you out of business. When those customers blog, no response is the best route.
Do you have other scenarios when a corporation shouldn’t respond? I’d love to hear them. Also feel free to comment about your vehement opposition to the content of my post. Just be aware that I may not respond.
@Jennifer Laycock Please don’t misconstrue my post in any way. I loved your post and subsequent comments. In your specific case, Panera’s best response may be to allow each franchise location to determine the log in time interval, in which case you could get the local manager to give you unlimited access.
Posted January 8th, 2008 by Kevin
Last week, Mack Collier, popular Social Media Blogger at The Viral Garden, continued his discussion on How to Launch a Successful Blogger Outreach Program in One Day. This edition of the conversation focused on how companies can approach bloggers if there is currently little to no online chatter about the brand. As Mack states, adding value for your audience can have an immediate impact on conversations about your brand. Some of you may be scratching your head and wondering what that means. How can you add value beyond the value your product or company currently provides?
Your first instinct may be to utilize traditional PR materials and redistribute them to the blog to increase exposure and drive traffic back to company news. Another idea may be to take previously distributed content and post it up on the blog to see if it generates a conversation. Don’t be disappointed when your audience doesn’t get excited about materials they can find elsewhere on your site or have seen before in the past.
Adding value means providing content, materials and conversation that expands upon your existing brand presence. Use this venue to let people inside the operation and understand what makes the company tick. I’m not suggesting that you give away the company “secret sauce,” but be passionate about the industry and ask yourself, “what do our customers need to know?”
If your company makes performance apparel for athletes that keeps you cool in hot weather, blog about all of the sports that could benefit from your offering. I’m much more likely to talk to you if I believe that you use the products and they work. Ask me what products I’d like to see you develop using your “state of the art technology” and you’ll have me hooked! Don’t paint yourself into a corner by focusing solely on the technology that makes your clothes superior and news from the company. Your customers don’t really care how it works; only that it does.
There will always be an opportunity to mention a new product, discuss the addition of a new team member or even announce that you had a great quarter, but the primary focus should be on getting the people to your blog and keeping them involved in the conversation. And most importantly, the conversation needs to come from a real person.
*Important Note: Start thinking about who you want your customers and potential customers to be conversing with before you launch the blog.
Posted January 7th, 2008 by admin
Set aside, for the moment, party affiliations, religious views, preferred candidates – and look at the facts about the presidential election so far: Mike Huckabee exploited unpaid media and won the Republican Iowa Caucus. Favored-to-win Mitt Romney spent almost 6 times more than Huckabee in TV ads, yet failed to capture the number one spot amongst Iowa GOP voters.
Some might say the large turnout of evangelical Christians swung the vote to Huckabee’s favor. While voter demographics was a large factor, one cannot deny the effectiveness of Huckabee’s Social Media Marketing versus Paid Media strategy. From YouTube to Facebook, Huckabee leveraged the Web and captured its online audience. His campaign recognized that the consumption of media has fundamentally changed and that spending millions of dollars on 30 second TV spots is a colossal waste of resources.
One could argue that many of the other candidates share similar social media properties and tactics. Clearly the voters of Iowa saw Mike Huckabee’s “product” (himself) as the kind of brand that epitomizes the fundamentals of social media – genuine, transparent, approachable, and human. The combination of a great product, transparent brand, and social media strategy is what got him the results in Iowa. Social Media tactics alone will not work if the product is fundamentally flawed. And while, I’m not personally a Huckabee supporter, I applaud the means of his achievements in Iowa.
Those who dismiss Huckabee’s social media victory by saying it’s a mere coincidence should look no further than Hillary Clinton’s latest tactics of rushing to increase her presence on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Her campaign strategists have seen how Barack Obama has dominated the under 40 demographic and now realize that “old marketing” has absolutely no effect on this vital target audience since their consumption of media goes far beyond network TV.
Let’s see what happens in New Hampshire tomorrow…
Posted January 4th, 2008 by Scott
2008 has finally arrived! Now it’s time to get up off the couch and commit to your resolutions. My first and foremost commitment is dedicating more time to my footprint in social media. Yes it’s true, I work for a social media marketing company and KNOW the value and necessity of taking part in the everyday blog-to-blog discussions and infamous social networks. But the truth of the matter is in 2007 I did the same thing that many others out there did, I OBSERVED. The start of 2008 is the perfect time to act on our “research” from last year.
I know what I need to do. Do you? If not, here are a few ways that you can get yourself and your business involved in online conversations:
1. Monitor the conversations going on about you, your company and your products. Utilize RSS feeds like Google Reader to help you monitor the day-to-day conversations.
2. Contribute to blog posts via comments, participate in online communities and forums, and share your own opinions within consumer review sites. Monitor your brand (Technorati and Google Blog Search can help with that) – if you’re being talked about, whether positive or negative, get involved in the conversation. Let your customers know their voices are being heard. Often enough some of the biggest critics will become advocates because you acknowledge their complaints.
3. Sign up and create profiles for all the major social networks (Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Since we live in a world where it’s not what you know but rather who you know, expand your network and reconnect with old friends and colleagues.
4. Take the plunge and START A BLOG! There are loads of platforms available (Wordpress, TypePad, etc.) where you can sign up and have your own blog up and running in minutes!
Keep in mind the web is rapidly evolving – putting off what you could do with social media today until tomorrow could leave you up to your neck in catch up work 
.
Best of Luck in ‘08!
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