Splintered Channels

BMW Mockumentary: Walking the Line, or Much Ado About Nothing?

Has BMW gone too far with a recent viral market stunt to promote the BMW 1 Series?

Despite a chilly response from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMA), the campaign has succeeded on several fronts: positive coverage in the auto biz trade press, blogosphere chatter, viral distribution among a younger demographic.

The campaign centered on an online video mockumentary (produced by GSD&M Idea City) that chronicles the adventures of a small Bavarian town attempting to use a giant ramp to literally launch the new BMW from Germany to the U.S.

The controversy, if there is one, stems from a BMW corporate decision to let the campaign run for several weeks without acknowledging that the video was created by BMW. According to WOMMA, the number one rule for marketers engaged in guerrilla tactics is to be upfront and transparent about the identity and the origin of any campaign communications. The danger in not being up front is the risk of damaging trust and tarnishing the brand reputation, even the possibility of instigating a consumer backlash.

The BMW campaign was so obviously a spoof that the risks in staying mum for a few weeks were very low. But it does raise an interesting question about the nature of guerrilla marketing and the responsibilities that fall on the brand to be transparent. The very nature of guerrilla marketing requires tactics that result in the unexpected, surprise, a certain degree of under-the-radar planning and execution.

How transparent do you need to be when it comes to guerrilla marketing? When BMW was called out and questioned directly about their involvement of the campaign, should they have come clean? Probably. But the next question has to be would the BMW campaign have been less successful if the video included a corporate logo watermark or "sponsored by" disclaimer? What's the threshold standard for transparency?  I think it's obvious that applying the strictest standard for transparency would have taken something away from the impact and humor of the creative.

Standards and ethics are critically important, especially as word of mouth marketing tactics becomes more commonly used by brands trying to reach audiences through a hyper-fragmented media environment. But it's also important to acknowledge that there's definitely some gray area that needs to be explored to extend these standards to allow for creative marketing campaigns that are successful exactly because they catch people off guard, defy expectations, and get people talking.

You can read more about the campaign from Stephanie Kang's article in the Wall Street Journal.

The Widget Bell Curve

No matter how you slice it, the numbers are compelling. MySpace now has over 110 million users and Facebook just passed 65 million. And the demographic profile is prime with the majority of users falling into the 18-35 bucket.

Not surprisingly, brand marketers are taking notice and scrambling to figure out the best way to take advantage of social networks. They are already dumping $1.6 billion a year into display advertising through these sites. But, as a new report in BusinessWeek illustrates, widgets are clearly the new black for social networks and advertisers are placing bets that they can crack the viral channel.

Widgets come in all shapes and sizes. Most are created by developers who use open APIs (Application Programming Interface) which social networks provide to encourage platform growth, commerce and ecosystem development. These mini-applications are interactive, customizable, can be added to users profiles in social networks, and most importantly, shared with friends, family, schoolmates, and work colleagues. These range from personality quizzes to music jukeboxes to dating services to stock tickers. And increasingly, these widgets come from brand marketers and are tied into broader advertising campaigns.

While there is a rapid proliferation of social network widgets, only a very small fraction ever go viral. For example, of the 17,000 widgets available to Facebook users, the number that have achieved over 1 million users ranges in the hundreds. BusinessWeek reporter, Rachael King, explains that the adoption of widgets through social networks looks like a steep bell curve where initial rapid adoption tends to drops off quick after the enthusiasm dies down.

So what kind of widgets go viral? It seems to me that the answer is a function of awareness, motivation, and ease of use. Sure there are widgets that are so funny or utilitarian that they catch fire with little or no strategic effort. But from a brand marketer perspective, careful attention to these factors is critical is you're going to have a shot at success.

• The right users need to be aware of the widget. A mix of marketing communications needs to be used to raise the awareness of the widget among key influencers or "connectors" who will use it and promote it through social networks. The widget obviously needs to resonate with these targets, but getting a handful of advocates on board will help stack the deck in your favor.
• The widget needs to answer basic motivations. The act of sharing a widget seems to be rooted in one of two motivations: 1) Users want peers to experience what they experienced through the widget, which results in approval, praise or positive recognition; and 2) Sharing the widget either directly results in, or improves the user's chances of, some kind of tangible material benefit.
• Sharing the widget needs to be easy. Regardless of the motivation, cracking the viral channel requires that barriers to entry are extremely low. Ideally, widgets should be directly tied into a communication feature that leverages the friends/contacts database associated with the social network profile. This makes sharing the widget a click away.

It turns out that launching a widget that takes advantage of these considerations is incredibly difficult. But widget campaigns that take off really represent the gold standard for brand markers signaling active engagement, evangelism, and market dialog.

New agencies are popping up to help brand marketers develop and launch widget campaigns through social networks. Former SVP of Arnold Worldwide and a founding member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Jamie Tedford, has a new startup, Brand Networks Inc., which focuses on a combination of strategic consulting, widget development, and "Tokns," their redeemable social network currency. Tedford has already signed up clients such as Puma, Monster, and Houlihan's, reflecting a broader trend among brand marketers looking for innovative new approaches to tap into social networks.

While eMarketer reports that widget ad spending will only reach $40 million this year, it's clearly just the tip of the iceberg.

B2B Public Relations & Blogs: Policy, Resources, Process & Promotion

A recent survey of business reporters shows that over 80 percent say they use, or would use, blogs as a primary or secondary source of information for news stories. This is a pretty serious wakeup call for anyone doing B2B PR. If you don't already have a social media program in place, it's time to get started. But while the mechanics of launching a blog are straightforward, there are a number of questions to ask and strategic decisions you need to make in order to ensure a successful blog initiative.

Blogs have now become a regular part of the communications mix for both small businesses and major corporations. There's even a Blog Council that launched last week to promote best practices in corporate blogging. Charter members include AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

Corporate blogs come in many different flavors and typically vary across a few dimensions: 1) the degree of legal / corp comm control, oversight, and review associated with the blog posts; and 2) the level of involvement from executives / employees. For example, will it focus on C-level communication, like GM's Fastlane, or will it aim for a broader set of employee perspectives like HP Blogs or Microsoft's Channel 9? Where you fall on these dimensions depends on your organization, culture, resources and commitment to the initiative.

At the most basic level, adding a blog to your website provides an outlet for distributing company news, but in a way that invites a two-way conversation and deepens community engagement with your brand. At a slightly broader level, the goals of corporate blogs can be to: 1) provide a new venue for participating in broader industry dialog and debate over key trends and innovations; 2) elevate the visibility of key executives and bolster their thought leadership position; and 3) encourage an authentic conversation with other "influentials" in the space about market developments.

The mechanics of launching a blog are straightforward and there are a number of on-demand services you can use to design and publish a blog in a very short amount of time (e.g., Typepad, Blogger). But each of these services comes with a wide array of community features you can turn on or off that dictate the extent to which you will enable public dialog and debate about your products and services. The options you choose will require different levels of involvement and attention across your organization. And here's where the heavy lifting comes in. The hardest part of launching a blog is setting policy, identifying resources, determining process and promotion.

I've put together a few notes based on questions I've received from Splintered Channels readers. The recommendations below are by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but I think they provide some good questions you should ask yourself before you get started with a new blogging program.

Setting Policy

There are several questions you should ask yourself to help develop a set of policies for your blog initiative. And don't feel like you have to do all this on your own. The earlier you involve a broad set of stakeholders in this planning, the more successful you will be in mobilizing support for the initiative (e.g., HR, legal, corp comm, PR, product marketing).

Transparency & Disclaimers: Whether you have a single corporate blog or a series of employee blogs, whether the blog resides within a corporate website or as a stand alone experience with its own identity and domain, it's important that you be as upfront and transparent as possible with your readers. Make sure to develop a standard disclaimer you can display on your blog(s) which indicates the nature of the blog - namely, who is writing the blog, does it provide official corporate position, are comments moderated, do you allow trackbacks, will you publicly respond to comments?

Code of Conduct: Employee blogs will naturally include a blend of content with commentary and personal reflections, as well as industry observations and references to various corporate developments. Given the sensitivity associated with information available to employees and the viral nature of communication in the blogosphere, it's important to develop a simple code of conduct that employees agree to before blogging. This list is not exhaustive, but it should include at least the following: 1) avoid topics that might compromise trade secrets, intellectual property, management issues and lawsuits; 2) disclose conflicts of interest; 3) if blog posts include inaccuracies, corrections should be posted in amendments or new blog entries, instead of deleting prior comments, etc.; 4) cite appropriate references and provide links to sources; 5) monitor comments and trackbacks on a regular basis, respond and delete SPAM; 6) blogging should not interfere with other job responsibilities.

Rules of Engagement: Another important policy to settle on before launching a blog is how to engage with readers. There needs to be an upfront commitment to monitor reader comments and trackbacks. You will need to determine whether you will automatically accept and publish comments and trackbacks, or if you will review and approve each new submission before they included in your blog entries. Along with reviewing comments and blogger trackbacks, a policy needs to be established that makes readers aware that you reserve the right to not publish comments or accept comments based on the appropriateness of the content. These policies on comments, trackbacks and the right to refuse to publish comments that include inappropriate, profane or defamatory language, should be stated upfront along with any disclaimers.

Identify Resources

Launching and maintain a blog is no trivial undertaking. It requires a dedicated and ongoing resource commitment to develop a blogging program that can help achieve corporate communications objectives. The level of commitment will obviously depend on the type of blog you're launching and these map to your objectives. As described above, there are a number of different kinds of blogs you can launch - e.g., an outlet for distributing press announcements and corporate news, a way to open a new line of communication enabling key business leaders to participate in broader market dialog and debate, a means for the organization to be more responsive to customers, a way to nurture online communities and brand evangelists.

The type of blog initiative you undertake will determine the level of commitment and involvement required of various parts of a business organization. But regardless of the resources you tap for the blog initiative, it is absolutely essential that there is a lead advocate that can enlist support and command accountability associated with the tasks needed to launch and maintain a blog. It's also important that the advocate maintain a schedule for the delivery of blogging tasks.

If the blog is designed to be an additional distribution outlet for press announcements, the responsibilities of maintenance, review and comments should fall on the lap of the PR agency or corporate communications desk in charge of traditional media and analyst relations. If the blog is designed to be an outlet for executives to bolster their thought leadership position, it also helpful to involve your PR agency or corporate communications personnel, as well as get buy-in from the legal department - in some cases this may require a process that gives the legal team an opportunity to eyeball posts before they are published.

If your blogging initiative is focused on growing an online community of brand evangelists, it's a good idea to seek out individuals from product marketing and direct customer service who would be interested in participating. You should consider a process whereby individuals rotate through responsibilities for posting to the blog and responding to comments. Weekly or bi-weekly editorial meetings with employee blogers can be helpful to brainstorm ideas and identify who will be writing what for the week or month, depending on your schedule.

Again, these responsibilities should be executed with the oversight of an internal advocate, or lead, with a set timetable, expectations and accountability, typically originating from the marketing communications department.

Does having regimented resources and formalized process detract from the authenticity or the social, interactive nature of blogging? Not necessarily. Actually, being upfront about the "owners" - those responsibility for delivery and execution - and the resources, expectations and degree of interaction with your readers will all free you up to be a better blogger and help you achieve corporate communications objectives with this channel.

Determine Process

When identifying resources, you should go in with a set of expectations with regard to process. Process is determined in large part by the policies you settle on and the resources you identify. Once these steps are completed, ask yourself 1) who will be posting to the blog and when; 3) what kind of review will be required (if any) and how will the parties in charge of the oversight execute their responsibility; 4) who is the ultimate business owner for the initiative?

While this may seem an unnecessary amount of formalism for a social media initiative, settling on process before you get started will help ensure a much smoother launch for your new blog initiative. That said, it's also important to be flexible and adaptive, constantly striving to make improvements to become more responsive and efficient.

From an editorial perspective, corporate blogs generate three broad buckets of content: 1) news about the business; 2) reflections on broader industry trends and developments; 3) aggregated links / references from other industry sources, with some context and editorial perspectives. The best corporate and employee blogs maintain a fairly regular schedule. Blogs don't need to be updated every day or even every week to generate a significant following. But there should be a regular drumbeat of blog posts, whether that's weekly or monthly.

Nothing says the responsibilities associated with blogging need to originate from one or two individuals. Actually, the most successful blogs I have seen are actually the result of a distribution of labor. Sometimes the labor is divided up between research, writing, and posting. Other times, it's simply a matter of rotation among several individuals who have their pulse of developments within the company as well as a good sense for broader industry trends which provide for editorial context that make corporate news interesting and relevant to more people.

I have also found that the best corporate and employee blogs, which develop a following, tend to have personality. The editorial content doesn't have to be snarky or confrontational, but some voice, tone and style needs to shine through. I believe this needs to be part of the "process" you identify for your blog initiative because you can establish a rotation of formal business news, personal reflection, anecdotes and passing observations, which may or may not directly align with corporate communications objective, but nonetheless introduce readers to perspectives that make the dialog more human.

Promotion

When launching a new blog program, I recommend not focusing too much on "promotion" as much as on the quality of the content and developing a process that produces a regular rotation of new blog posts. Building a following and generating new traffic is a fairly organic process and it takes time. You should set expectations on the order of at least four to six months for generating traffic. That said, if you follow some basic guidelines, you will have a good shot at building a significant volume of new and return traffic.

If your blog is primarily designed to be an channel for communicating with businesses reporters, it should be prominently featured in the corporate news area of your website (the same survey referenced above also indicates that 74% of business reporters look to corporate websites for story ideas).

Reporters are also likely to enter your company's name into search engine queries. And, as you're well aware, your corporate website will not be the only hit in the search results page. You should make it a practice to check in on your website's search performance. Luckily, social media channels, like blogs, are fantastic optimizers when it comes to search engine results. They embody all the key characteristics that determine ranking in search results. 1) blog posts are saturated with relevant keywords, 2) they include links to and from relevant sources; and 3) blogs include frequently updated content.

When you think about promotional strategies, think about your audience in terms of niche communities (e.g., reporters, analysts, industry leaders, prospects and customers - even subsegments within your customer base). Think about the vernacular used by these communities - what's the language used to describe relevant products and services? These considerations should dictate the topics of your blog posts and the terms and phrases that make their way into your blog posts.

Aside from promoting your blog through your corporate website and through search engines, the single best way to gain readers is to participate and engage in a dialog with other bloggers, news sites, and online communities that are similarly focused on your industry and relevant market trends. Specifically, develop a "blog roll," a list of favorite blogs and sites that your read on a regular basis. But don't just read these blogs. You need to post comments to these sites with perspective and context that brings value and insights to the online community that has grown around these outlets. Feel free to reference your blog in these comments, but avoid blatant self promotion. Keep your eye on the ball and make sure you're focused on the conversation and broader market dialog. Are you adding something valuable to the conversation?

If you decide to base a blog on a post or news item you have read at another site, sometimes you can take advantage of a trackback, which is a feature of blogs that enables you to add a link to your blog from a post on another site you're referencing. Again, use the feature judiciously and make sure you're adding something to the conversation and bringing something to the table for the online community.

When members of various niche communities read the comments to blog posts that you have submitted, or when they follow a trackback from a popular blog back to a post you have added to your blog, you will begin to generate traffic. If your blog has high-quality, relevant content, you will generate return readers - readers who may also submit comments to your blog posts or trackbacks to your blog based on their reactions to your commentary and perspectives.

Eric Schwartzman, of Schwartzman & Associates, says that everything you need to know about blogging etiquette you learned in preschool. And I completely agree. If you want people to play nice with you, you need to play nice with them. Again, the best way to generate readers for your own blog is to read other blogs, contribute, engage, and interact with the online community.

You can also take advantage of blog search engines, like Technorati (and notification services like Pingomatic), as well as social bookmarks, like del.icio.us, to flag your content for relevant communities. And it's also critical you make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed using built in features of your blog platform (e.g., Typepad) or services like Feedburner. But these are all really secondary to the primary and most effective promotional tool at your disposal - participation and engagement in the online community.

If you're going to put all this up front work into your new blog initiative, you'll obviously want people to read it, especially the business reporters you're targeting to get the word out about your products and services. Blogs are all about authenticity and dialog. The social media landscape, however, necessitates a strategic perspective. For marketing professionals new to blogging, I hope some of these notes are helpful as you embark on new social media programs.

Tags: blogging marketing PR

Total Recall: Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising Beyond the Click-Through

How should we measure the impact of online advertising? A good question considering the ubiquity of contextual and search advertising, increasingly rich display ads, and rapidly expanding use of video pre-rolls, which together will total close to $19.5 billion in 2007. According to Professor Chan Yun Yoo, at Kentucky's School of Journalism, it's really a question of memory, recall and brand building, as opposed to a simple "click-through" measurement exercise.

In a recent round of research, Yoo suggests that marketers using online advertising should look at two distinct memory models when answering this question: "explicit" and "implicit" memory. Explicit memory involves retention of specific information contained in advertising, such as product features, endorsements and tag lines. Implicit memory, on the other hand, is a summary impression that is only evoked during subsequent encounters with the brand. What he finds is that regardless of whether a consumer pays attention to an online ad or clicks on it, the ad has a significant impact of implicit memory and subsequent brand judgments. Therefore, impressions based on exposure to online ads can be just as important as click-through if marketers expand their ROI expectations to include brand building. 

The brand building impact of online advertising is given a lot of lip service, but there have been few attempts to develop a framework to analyze this dimension of interactive marketing. With his research, Yoo concludes that advertisers and marketers should use impression-based metrics in conjunction with performance indicators like click-throughs to determine the effectiveness of online advertising.

But this line of thinking begs several important questions for marketing professionals. For example, how should we go about measuring "brand building" that results from exposure to online advertising? Which form of recall based on these different memory constructs has the strongest impact on behavioral intentions, which is at the end of the day what we really care about. And, if one form of memory is a more powerful predictor of purchasing behavior over the other, can we manipulate it? 

On the first question, the first step should be to clarify what we're talking about when it comes to branding - a notoriously squishy concept. Most often when we talk about branding we really mean brand association, e.g., traits, attributes, features, solutions we associate with a particular brand. There are several measurement approaches available to get at the the brand building effects of exposure to online ads. Analytics packages and various ad tracking services (e.g., AdIndex) can be used to segment website traffic into different groups, one exposed to online advertising, another control group that isn't exposed. With this technique, a sample from each group is intercepted with a survey as visitors leave the site. The survey uses a battery of questions to measure brand association and simple means tests are applied to look for significant differences between the groups. Selection bias and other measurement problems aside, marketers can gain access to general information about brand impressions and add a new ROI metric for online advertising beyond the common ratio of impressions to click-through. 

The other questions are more complicated and harder to get at. It's unclear from Yoo's research which memory model is more important for determining behavior, or how the two interact to shape, for example, purchasing decisions. However, there is some research from related fields that suggests more focused attention and recall of specific brand information is more likely to result in behavior. And attention motivation is typically associated with personal self-interest or a trusted or socially important reference group. This obviously supports word-of-mouth marketing strategies. And by extension of Yoo's research, exposure to online advertising could condition subsequent brand exposure via recommendations and endorsements. The most powerful ROI for online advertising may actually be to prime the pump for word-of-mouth brand communications - a good question for future research by Yoo and his grad students 

Tags: advertising marketing

The State of Pre-Roll Advertising

Earlier this week, Google announced that it would start running "overlay ads" on some of its YouTube video content. Overlays are an ad format that essentially provide a clickable layer of ad creative on top of a portion of the real estate of a video player screen. While there is some debate over the origins the format, it's clear that the ad product innovation is gaining momentum and adoption among broadband video publishers and advertisers. Google's announcement will undoubtedly drive broader acceptance of the ad format in the quest for less obtrusive advertising with higher conversion rates. But does this development signal the twilight of pre-roll advertising?

Not anytime soon. Pre-rolls are working, despite the many shortcomings they embody from an end user perspective. They provide a very easy way for traditional advertisers to get in the broadband game, while at the same time giving publishers the ability to capture premium ad dollars. Several developments advocated by industry leaders are helping to alleviate some of the problems associated with pre-roll implementation, such as time-based rotations for ad insertions. That said, formats like overlays will continue to gain steam and adoption, providing exciting new opportunities for marketers to engage with targeted online communities.

Earlier this week, I was asked by Shoot Magazine to contribute to a round up article on the state of pre-roll advertising. Here's my take:

Over the past several years, the dominant 15 to 30 second pre-rolls with companion banners have provided an easy on-ramp for brand marketers to expand the reach of ad campaigns through broadband media distribution. However, this format has a number of shortcomings. Insufficient inventory has resulted in "creative fatigue." Media buyers often snatch up all the available inventory on a video site or channel for entire 60 day runs where the same ad creative shows up every other clip. As consumers sample, or "snack," from clips on these sites, saturated ad rotations can result in brand overexposure and audience attrition. Another problem is that the economics of pre-roll advertising are ill-suited for increasingly popular mid to long-form content, such as broadcast and primetime network programming.

Brightcove has responded by developing policy solutions and innovative ad formats that address these shortcomings. For example, implementing time-based ad insertions versus pre-rolls on every other clip avoids the problem of creative fatigue. Here, end-users only receive an ad unit after watching a certain number of minutes of video content, regardless of how many separate clips they access. It will also become increasingly important for buyers to agree to provide multiple ad creatives with their campaigns to ensure a fresh rotation of advertising against broadband inventory. In some cases, programmers should also provide "carve outs" of their inventory for ad networks to place additional rotations of advertising within their broadband content.

Brightcove is also introducing a number of new, less obtrusive contextual ad units that complement longer form broadband content. These include clickable "overlay units," which appear for a few seconds during a video stream in the lower third of the video screen. We are experimenting with other Flash ad units that appear in the context of the video player experience which can be triggered by cue points during the video stream. Introducing new Flash-based, interactive ads into the viewing experience provides new opportunities for deeper sponsorship integration and audience engagement.

Click here for the full article. Other contributors include Alan Schulman from imc2, Tracey Scheppach from Starcom, and Tod Sacerdoti from BrightRoll, among others.

Tags: advertising broadband video brightcove google

Blended Distribution Strategies & New Marketing Opportunities

Last week, Phil Leigh, host of the video blog "Digital Media Thought Leaders," posted a two part interview I did on broadband media distribution and marketing. In the interview, I touch on a number of strategies I believe are necessary for content owners to run a successful broadband video business and for marketers to take advantage of the fast-changing and self-selecting consumer media behavior.   

1. Expand distribution of video content beyond branded destination sites. There are a number of technologies available to content owners which can be used to enable bloggers, MySpace page owners and Facebook account holders to embed single title video players into their webpages. Viral distribution like this can quickly expand distribution through communities of interest and word of mouth promotion. Centrally managed viral distribution strategies offer a powerful opportunity to blast performance-based advertising through micro channels and niche communities.
2. Package premium content and provide select video lineups to approved affiliates. Building a premium affiliate network for content distribution provides a brand-safe context for more traditional forms of advertising, such as targeted, genre-based pre-rolls, which are part of larger, integrated campaign runs.
3. Embrace industry standards. There's an enormous number of exciting new ad products hitting the broadband video space. But without consistent industry standards, an already complex process becomes unmanageable. Remember, for broadband advertising to work, all of the following parties need to be working seamlessly together: a) publisher/programmer; b) ad operations; c) creative agency / media buyers; d) ad serving platforms; and e) broadband media distributor. At this very early stage in the development of broadband media sector, it's important to make it as easy as possible for cross-purpose creative and IAB-endorsed ad formats to be used, enabling marketers to participate in the distribution of broadband video and tap new avenues to reach online communities. 
4. Support your community. Whenever possible, solicit, capture, package and distribute consumer-generated media. This is an old Splintered Channels theme, but worth stating again. Instead of sending your community to YouTube to contribute content around a campaign, harness the power of community to generate new, exciting, and authentic experiences for your own online properties. And, I argue that mixing professional and amateur media content provides a compelling new form of editorial content and venue for advertising.

Click here to access part one of the interview and here for part two.

Tags: marketing broadband video advertising

Government Agency Uses Blog for Critical Public Health Initiative

In May of 2007, the US Department of Health & Human Services launched an unprecedented public health initiative focused on helping citizens prepare for a possible influenza pandemic. Notoriously complicated and prone to strong political and public reactions, the government agency enlisted the help of Ogilvy Public Relations to develop a strategy to raise awareness and encourage a dialog over this critical public health issue.

Spearheaded by Ogilvy strategists Alison Byrne Fields and Rohit Bhargava, the public health initiative took advantage of "live blogging" as a way to increase the transparency of health policy discussions between public, private and government sector leaders, and invite citizen participation in the dialog.

I believe this is a first of its kind for a large-scale government communications program, but it will inevitably serve as a model for public participation in important government policy initiatives that span a number of issues from public health to national security to environmental regulation. You can visit the archived content from the Health & Human Services initiative at the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog.

Ogilvy's use of blogging for the public health initiative obviously reflects the broader trend over the past few years towards increased transparency and dialog in marketing communications. But, blogging in the government sector raises a number of interesting considerations and tactical questions. 

For a relatively niche community interested in the subject matter, how do you mobilize public participation? And, what should the goals of a blog like this be with regard to participation?  Finally, why "live blogging" - which implies blogging around a particular event, rather than setting up a blog for an ongoing dialog which isn't time bound? 

I put these questions to Ogilvy's Alison Byrne Fields and here are some of her responses:

"The ultimate goal is for the broader public to prepare for pandemic flu. At this stage in the program, HHS is engaging leaders from health care, community and faith-based groups and employers to communicate to their patients, communities, congregants and employees about the importance of individual and family preparedness.  It is worth noting that the work we are doing within social media is just a part of a much larger initiative.  One of the most interesting things about this project has been the discovery of a very large and vibrant (and knowledgeable) online community of people who are building a grassroots movement to encourage pandemic flu preparedness.  (It’s call flublogia and they refer to themselves as flubies)."

"We did market the blog and, inevitably (and thankfully), there was some organic word of mouth that occurred.  Our outreach was targeted at online “influencers” within the four sectors that I identified above: the blogs and sites that those people read regularly and whom they trust."

"[T]he purpose of the live blogging was to let people who were not in attendance to know what happened.  As far as the life of the blog, it will be closed to comments on the 27^th and archived on http://pandemicflu.gov, the government’s web site for all things pandemic flu.  There is talk about future blogs (or a different version of this blog), but there are no definitive plans at this point."

Overall, this is a very exciting development in government and advocacy communications. However, it's a shame that this blogging initiative is constrained to a particular "PR campaign," and not the launch of an ongoing and supported communications platform for dialog and policy innovation.

Tags: ogilvypr marketing PR

Social Search vs. Guided Search

Over the past year or so, a number of new people-guided search engines have launched, most recently Mahalo (see a good round up at Mashable). In the tradition of About.com, these new search engines attempt to augment machine-driven search results with reviewers, guides, experts and social networks. At the same time, the major search engines, in particular, Yahoo!, continue to advance social search initiatives through acquisitions (e.g., del.icio.us, Flickr) and integrations of search results with social media inputs.

It seems to me that a key opportunity continues to elude both established search engines and startups. This opportunity sits at the nexus of geographically oriented social networking services (think Yelp, Vox), mobile tagging of localized information, community-ordained expertise (think Squidoo's lens masters). Keep a lookout for killer social media mashups that leverage Google and Ask APIs to blend these elements with street-level maps and search.

From a marketing perspective, this form of localized, community intelligence mixed with social search will truly turn a page in the evolution of paid search advertising. Whoever cracks this nut will set the stage for a tremendous advancement in commercial applications for social media and consumer search behavior. 

Tags: mahalo squidoo social search marketing

Steve Jobs & Bill Gates Video from D: All Things Digital

Never thought I'd see the day. Great fun watching Steve Jobs and Bill Gates chat with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal.  Check it out on the Brightcove player:

Tags: apple steve jobs microsoft bill gates

Manufacturing CGM

There was a time not too long ago when "CGM" and "UGC" were terms used to describe a broad category of digital communication originating with consumers about products and services. From discussion forums and review sites to blogs and social bookmarks, CGM represented a market dialog over brand reputations. At about the same time that these terms gained popularity (2H '05?), a kinder and gentler marketing sensibility started to take hold - one based on the idea that marketing departments need to listen, participate, become more transparent, take some lumps, and work hard to bring the market dialog into alignment with product development and brand marketing.

In the post-YouTube era, however, these terms have become much more narrowly focused to represent short, amateur video clips (pirated or otherwise) shared through ad-supported hosting services. And in a perfect storm of marketing dollars looking for opportunities to aggregate fragmented audiences, an overly exuberant market, and consumer hobbyists enjoying easier and higher quality video technologies, Madison Avenue has taken notice. Now associations for advertising professionals are hosting conferences on CGM and "creative shops" around the world are pitching contests to motivate consumers to submit video content that mention a product or service.

And now with exquisite predictability reporters on the beat are churning out story after story calling into question the wisdom of brand marketers who are launching CGM campaigns and getting scoops about how hard and expensive it is to harness the power of UGC for marketing objectives. The coverage in the major dailies over the past two weeks is impressive, not to mention all the writing in the trades. 

New York Times: The High Price of Creating Free Ads
Wall Street Journal: Anheuser Gives Web Channel Another Try
USA Today: KFC Mines Consumers' Videos for Ads

It seems to me that we have traded in what was once so compelling and powerful about CGM-driven marketing strategies - a model rooted in at least a modicum of authenticity which empowered customers to articulate and repackage value propositions based on real experiences and in a vernacular much more resonant than a piece of high-production advertising or marketing collateral. Now, for brand marketers, CGM is a hammer and every marketing objective is a nail - in particular, reach objectives. Unfortunately, CGM does not equal viral distribution. And under the dominant paradigm it rarely even involves message. 

Last week I had a conversation with a leading market research firm and the person I was talking to mentioned that they had recently been commissioned by a professional association to conduct a research program to determine if the explosion in CGM-driven brand marketing campaigns would siphon advertising dollars away from creative agencies because of the "low cost of production." We sure have come a long way in the last couple years. 

Tags: marketing advertising

What's After What's Next?

I try not to make too many armchair predictions, but after the New York Times reported Cisco's recent acquisition of social networking service Tribe.net, I'm throwing caution to the wind. There seems to be no question that this will be the year of the white label social networking service. For the remainder of this year and into 2008, I see several important trends taking root. 

First, media owners will increasingly understand that they can mobilize their own fans and brand evangelists to organize, promote and market through existing channels, without hemorrhaging eyeballs (and adverting dollars) to YouTube and MySpace. We will see an increasing number of mini social networks pop up around programming, events and niche interests. And new white label social networking services will be used to harness the power of fans and cross promote new programming.

Second, it's undeniable that CGM, in its many forms, has changed the media landscape leaving marketers scrambling to figure out how to reach and engage splintered and self-selected audiences. Brand managers everywhere have asked their agencies to figure it out - "why aren't we on YouTube?" Both sides of the agency house have undertaken their own strategies to answer this question: media buyers are doing ad insertions and contextual advertising at the major social media sites; and creatives have hatched elaborate CGM campaigns to recruit consumers to upload homespun ads into YouTube with the hopes of sparking the next viral video craze.

As my colleague Adam Gerber often says, "context is king." This year agencies will stop doing CGM just to do it. Instead they will seek out opportunities to recruit and blend professional creative with amateur content harvested from brand evangelists. Instead of navigating the circus that is YouTube, brand marketers will use white label social networking services to provide deep and engaging experiences that repackage CGM and professional programming in new and interesting ways.

Third, you can expect to see an explosion of startups provide the plug-and-play social network for media owners and brand marketers. (Just like online video editing, white label social networking software and services will be a significant force in Silicon Valley this year).

I know what you're saying: "You can't buy social networks." And I agree. But these white label solutions give media owners and marketers an opportunity to augment and amplify the integrated and multi-channel campaigns which they already have in motion to activate like-minded individuals. Social network just give consumers an outlet to express themselves and participate in a community.

Finally, I think we will see an increasing number of larger destination sites disaggregate themselves and channel down into niche sites for various communities of interest. (Think Yahoo!'s launch of Yahoo! Food http://food.yahoo.com, MTV's micro-programming initiative, YouTube's launch of "You Choose" http://www.youtube.com/youchoose). The next logical step is to offer this niche content as a widget that can be integrated into blogs, MySpace pages, and other sites, providing opportunities for consumers to participate and submit CGM to these niche channels. White label social networking services have an opportunity to leverage this trend in disaggregation among major portals and social media destinations and provide a distributed widget-based opportunity.

We're already seeing this to varying degrees, so I guess my armchair prediction isn't very daring. But, I do think it represents a new phase of growth for both Internet video and online social networks. 

A Wake Up Call From Big Blue

In a new report released by IBM's Institute for Business Value, the technology giant urges commercial media owners pursue distribution strategies that engage with communities driven by user-generated content. But this means much more than simply advertising on YouTube or paying film students to make commercials. IBM is recommending media owners loosen their iron grip over commercial media assets, "give control to get share." 

Not a revolutionary idea, but notable given that it comes from one of the most conservative and brand conscious organizations in the world. The report also brings into full view what savvy marketers have been saying for years now about the false threat of social media for commercial content businesses. The cultural trends afoot are allies not enemies.

For example, it's undeniable that one of the fastest growing trends in digital media today involves consumers remixing and mashing up content to post on social media destinations and share across social networks. Earlier this week TechCrunch posted a great roundup of online video editing tools - a category that didn't really exist a year ago and is now experiencing explosive growth. These tools are getting cheaper, more powerful, and integrated into social media destinations everyday. Commercial media owners have an opportunity, a business imperative in my opinion, to participate in the remixes, mashups - the broader conversations which are already taking place in the market today - and in many cases with ripped version of their content already. By relinquishing control... scratch that... by actively distributing high-quality commercial content for remixing and mashups, media owners can tap remix culture as an avenue for the promotion of their programming and brands.

All that said, the onus once again falls on the media owner to let their guard down, develop a thicker skin for the nicks and tarnish which will inevitably form on their brand assets along the way, and participate in the conversation instead of figuring out a way to protect themselves behind closed doors.

IBM's report will not fall on deaf ears. Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it will enable readers to submit video clips which will be repackaged and distributed across their weddings and celebrations pages - a precursor to future mashups of newspaper and reader-submitted content. And earlier this week, Adobe - owners of the ubiquitous Flash technology - announced a video remixing tool with Photobucket that will provide an opportunity to quickly ramp mashup behavior for a fast-growing market segment of consumers who want to express themselves through multi-media on the Web, but haven't had the tools. 

FeedPowered Ads Set Creative Free, Scream for a Mashup

Yesterday, RSS marketing company Pheedo announced an innovative new ad product they're calling "FeedPowered Ads." It's a powerful model: publishers in the Pheedo ad network can embed an RSS-powered ad unit into their website/blog, new content is pushed to this dynamic real estate, including links, copy, and thumbnails. The true innovation here is the integration of a number of social book-marking services that the advertiser selects for inclusion in their ads, e.g., "add to del.icio.us," "add to digg." The promise of the new ad product is to unlock some of the creative muscle poured into official, branded destination websites, redistribute the content through the Pheedo network, and most importantly enable marketers to participate in broader discussions and word of mouth promotion through social networks.

This is especially significant considering that the first stop for consumers looking for information about products and services tends to search engines. And search engine results give preferential treatment to social media content - blogs, review and recommendation sites and discussion forums (which are all link-rich, frequently updated, etc.). Consumers are often intercepted by this content before they ever get to the flashy, official, branded websites or microsites. Being able to repackage branded content and push creative through blogs and other social media sites, and spread the word using tools like del.icio.us and Technorati tags, is a powerful idea.

I emphasize that this is the *promise* of the model and it's still very early - after all, this is version 1.0 of the FeedPowered ad unit. The impetus is on Pheedo to quickly evolve the ad product to a number of additional IAB-sanctioned unit sizes and integrate rich media content. As it stands today, having an RSS feed from YouTube in the ad unit does little more than promote click-throughs to YouTube, where the viewer may or may not tag and share the content. (You want to see the content before you digg it). The key will be to enable advertisers to push content through the feeds which result in rich, in-line video experiences.

To me the new Pheedo ad product screams for a mashup with an Internet TV service with deep roots in brand marketing. You can imagine a distributed widget pushed out through the Pheedo network that enables brand marketers to target video content to specific publisher genres. Imagine a feed from Kohler's Internet video channel adding new video titles directly to Pheedo ad units placed on DIY and home improvement blogs, websites and review services. Or the recent Haagen Dazs CGM campaign, "Scoop," repackaging video submissions and pushing the content out to gourmet websites and blogs for foodies to recruit additional consumer video submissions. In this context, the rich media content is experienced within the website or blog, which would trigger tagging and sharing on the spot - assuming the content is compelling and relevant.

Looking forward to seeing how the ad product evolves. It's definitely on the right track.

See Pheedo blog post
See related coverage in TechCrunch and BusinessWeek

New TV Measurement Sample Signals Boon In Ad Dollars for Cable Networks

The New York Times reports that Nielsen Media Research will introduce a new sample of college students into the measurement mix to establish ratings for television programs.

It seems amazing that it has taken this long to introduce the college population in the Nielson measurement regime, especially considering pressure from paying customers such as MTV Networks, Fox, ESPN, WB and Turner. Market researchers are already predicting a significant bump in ratings for shows like "Family Guy," "America's Next Top Model" and "Drawn Together." I'm sure there will also be surprises for cable networks with obscure reruns and cult hits such as TV Land, IFC and Food Network.

With these numbers, the cable networks will be able to demand higher premiums from media buyers tasked with reaching the valuable twenty-something demographic. As ad buyer Brad Adgate reminds us, "If you can get them using your product at age 20, they could be using it for the next 60 years."

While a significant advance in measurement, I see a number of challenges ahead for Nielson and their methodology. I have written elsewhere about the possibility of introducing bias, or a "Hawthorne Effect," by using portable people meters to gauge viewing. Using obtrusive measurement techniques and observations can alter the behavior of the subjects. In this case you may end up with college students selecting programming that reflects perceived "social desirability," as is often reported in studies of civic and political life. There is no question that certain age groups and social contexts are more susceptible to various Hawthorne effects. I see the college age group to be a prime candidate for this kind of bias.

The New York Times calls out other challenges such as background viewing while surfing the Web, playing video games, socializing, and - heaven forbid - doing homework.

While the new sample undoubtedly helps provide a more accurate picture of television viewing overall, potential pitfalls associated with the portable people meter call for increased triangulation and validity checking with surveys and other forms of self-reporting.  Who knows what other interesting viewing patterns are afoot in college life.

-- Josh Hawkins

Presidential Candidates Tap Internet Video To Launch Campaigns

Today, Barack Obama officially announced his Presidential bid on Brightcove.  Last month, John Edwards similarly launched his campaign by posting a video to YouTube. This could be the year Internet video disrupts the political television advertising industry, potentially spawning a new, direct-to-voter revolution in political communications.