The Quisenblog

Ah, 2009. Yeah, for the most part it’s been a year you’d like to forget. But though they may have been few and far between, there were some stellar things worth cheering about in the world of marketing. Here is a very short list of some of my favorites, arranged in a bronze-silver-gold kinda way. If you have your own list of kudos you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

Bronze: The Tourist Council of Queensland (Australia). This collection of tropical islands along the Great Barrier Reef is indeed a stunning destination. The “normal” way of promoting such a destination is to produce a stunning TV spot with great footage of all the cool stuff you can do there, then run the crap out of it on TV. The Council didn’t have a “TV budget” to work with, but it wasn’t about to let that get in their way. They created an online promotion inviting web site visitors to apply for the “Best Job in the World”—the position of “caretaker” of the islands.

In the words of their web site, “The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

This promotion was pretty much restricted to online and Social Media only, and generated more than 1.4 million application videos being uploaded to the Council’s site. Once the Caretaker was “hired,” fans were invited to follow his daily progress on his blog, creating year-round engagement. Most importantly, in a year when most destinations suffered double-digit declines, Queensland enjoyed its best tourist season ever.

Silver: The “smile” campaign from American Express. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a TV campaign with such a brilliantly simple concept, impeccable art direction and timeless music. Proof you don’t have to scream at someone to get his full attention.

Gold: All the contributors who made YouTube THE Social Media story of 2009. From Susan Boyle to the Evian Skating Babies to the Microsoft slip-n-slide to the lady who uploaded the home video of her sleep-walking dog (and to the creators of all the mash-ups that followed), the heroes of this emerging platform are many.

With broadband penetration now nearing 70%, and more than 88 million videos being upload just to YouTube every month, the computer and smart phone is becoming the “screen of choice” for many. Look for 2010 to be the “tipping point” in the video revolution, where video will play an important role across all Social Media platforms.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on who deserves to be named a “Marketing Hero of 2009.” Drop us a line.

And may you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Ramblings, Social Media American Express, Best Job in the World, Evian, island caretaker, Microsoft slip-n-slide, Rollerskating Babies, smart phone, smile campaign, social media platforms, Susan Boyle, Take Charge, The Tourist Council of Queensland, video revolution, YouTube

Now that 2009 is almost in our rear view mirrors, it’s time to look ahead to what’s coming in 2010. What better time to prognosticate about the days ahead.

Oh sure. We could go for the low-hanging fruit here and “predict” that mass media spending will go down, online and Social Media spending will go up, Facebook will pass 400 million users, yada yada yada. That might score us some cheap points, but really, that stuff is sort of a given. So, for better or worse, here are some of our fearless predictions about some less frequently discussed marketing and social Media issues:

1. Destination sites continue to lose their relevance. One of the most under reported stories regarding online use this year is that despite overall traffic online growing by leaps and bounds, visits to high-traffic sites like Dell, Nike and many others have been trending downward. Meanwhile, social sites like Facebook have skyrocketed. Take a step back and it makes total sense—most information-rich websites are not set up to foster an ongoing relationship with visitors. They’re pretty much “one-and-done”—you can get everything you need from them in a single visit and have no reason to return. Things like blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and some microsites are designed for people to visit them often, and to engage customers on a much deeper level. It is here where more and more of the online traffic will continue to flow.
2. The Video Revolution comes to Social Media. Video will become a more important part of every social media platform. Not long ago, if I mentioned “video” and “Social Media” in the same sentence, you’d immediately think YouTube, Vimeo or some other video aggregator. Today, with increased bandwidth abounding and the mobile platform (especially smart phones) expanding, video has become a much more important part of all Social Media platforms. Embedded “how-to” videos on web sites. Live-action video conferences and powerpoints. Video emails. Videos posted on Facebook. Even video in blogs (now called “vlogging”).
3. Behavioral Targeting continues to help marketers get personal. Improved analytics now give us a more complete picture of our customers, and puts their purchases into more relevant context. This will help us better target our efforts to ensure hitting prospects when they are at a “moment of decision” in the purchase cycle. Whereas we used to target professional women 35-54 as the likely target of our salad dressing, we can now narrow it down to shoppers who have just picked up two heads of romaine lettuce and who haven’t purchased salad dressing for a few weeks.
4. The emergence of the “Super Portal.” Right now there are many Social Media platforms to deal with. Keeping up with all of them can eat up a sizable portion of your day. But now, platforms are beginning to offer tools that make it seamless to share content and jump between platforms automatically and effortlessly. In the world of Twitter, for example, Tweetdeck and Hoot Suite make it possible to manage much of your Social Media profile from a single dashboard. This convergence of platforms is in turn going to free us up so we can have even more involvement in Social Media.
5. Great content remains the ultimate “game changer.” While a lot of factors play in to the virility of content, none is more important than having a great idea. Great content not only generates interest in the medium for which it was created, it also spreads quickly to other platforms and lends itself to being spread by the community and re-purposed and “mashed up” by the audience as well. All of which means more exposure for the producer. Susan Boyle, The Wedding Dance, and The Evian Rollerskating Babies are just the beginning.
6. Content on demand, when you want it, where you want it. This continues a trend of breaking the tether to a television or a laptop. The emergence of mobile is moving us even more into a totally “on demand” society. Comcast’s recent announcement that it will provide subscribers with anytime access to 27 channels of real-time programming through its “TV Everywhere” program (going online by year’s end) could provide a platform tipping point.
7. More information to marketers makes decisions harder, not easier. Tools like Google Analytics provide a wealth of data for marketers, but at the end of the day, data is just data. To make sense of it you need to understand the story that data is telling and what the opportunities are around it. Otherwise you will find yourself in the 2010 version of “paralysis by analysis.”

If you have any marketing/Social Media predictions for 2010 you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Social Media 2009, blogs, Comcast TV Everywhere, customer engagement, Dell, Facebook, Google, microsites, mobile platform, Nike, Super Portal, Twitter feeds, Vimeo, vlogging, YouTube

Here’s a scene that plays out over and over on a regular basis in living rooms across America. The specifics may change, but the overall dynamics are pretty consistent.

You’re sitting there with family or friends watching football or ‘Dancing With the Stars’ (or my favorite, ‘Mad Men’) on TV. Suddenly, a commercial spot comes on that you find entertaining (let’s use the “Shankapotamus” spot for E*Trade with the lip syncing baby as an example).

You get to talking about the spot, laughing about it, and decide to see if you can find it online. So you whip out your laptop, call up your favorite video site and view the spot a couple more times with your friends gathered around. You might look at other spots in the campaign, some long-form video on the ‘Making of Shankapotamus’ and maybe some viewer-created mash-ups of the spot. Then you decide, hey, your brother in Eugene might get a kick out of the spot, so you email the link to him.

So essentially, the creation and placement of a single 30-second spot resulted in way more views, way more engagement, and way more eyeballs than you have a right to expect from a TV spot alone. Part of this is due to the tools of Social Media—the ease at which it is to find, view and forward content. Part of it as well is due to the fact that the brand or its agency had the forethought to re-purpose the content online. But the “igniter” in this case was the creative itself. Without the content being fun and engaging, the search never would have happened in the first place.

Great creative has a life well beyond its intended medium. Create content and ads that people like and find entertaining, and suddenly you have an exponentially larger audience for your efforts. With unique video searches on YouTube at 88 million per month and growing, you get a sense of how large this potential “after market” of ideas is. Branded commercial queries are now the fastest growing category on video search.

The moral of this tale is that there has never been a greater business reason to demand break-through, viral-worthy content. Marketers who stick to the old ‘tried-and-true’ solutions that communicated clearly but offered the view little in the way of entertainment value (however you wish to define it) flat-out will not have the success in Social Media that marketers who continually create ‘talked about’ spots will have.

More than 40 years ago, famed adman Howard Gossage made the observation that, “People don’t pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to what interests them, and sometimes it happens to be advertising.” These days people not only pay attention to great content, they move it forward.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey New Media, Social Media campaign success, commercial spot, E*Trade, Howard Gossage, online audience, Shankapotamus, viral-worthy, YouTube

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The two kinds of online consumers.
Tuesday: Creating a Community, Part 1.
Wednesday: Creating a Community, Part 2.
Thursday: Social Media you can own.
Friday: Giving up control.

(This is the tenth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

In yesterday’s post, we talked about the power of online social communities with common interests of its members at the center.

Here’s a “ground up” example that might help illustrate how you can elevate “solutions” into the formation of a “community.” Let’s say you are the Brand Manager of Dial Soap. You already have a large number of customers who like you and who are loyal. So you say, so why not just start a Facebook page titled “Friends of Dial Soap”? You could, but chances are you wouldn’t attract attention beyond the audience you already have. (Actually the brand did just that (Dial Soap’s Facebook)…and has a whopping total of 53 friends. Out of a possible 300 million. Woo hoo.)

So try broadening your approach. Ask what it is that your customers like about you, or how you can help visitors solve some sort of problem. Remember, successful Social Marketers are those who understand what customers are trying to do and how their products and services can help them achieve this.

Knowing this, you might start a Facebook page titled “Protecting Families From H1N1 Flu Virus.” There. You have just set Dial Soap up as the solution. Maybe not the end-all solution to protecting families from the flu, but by setting up and enabling a community of people who can come together to share ideas, tips and thoughts on minimizing the chances of contracting H1N1. You could integrate news feeds from relevant health news sources into the page, along with interactive maps to follow the migration of the flu bug, health and immunization alerts and other relevant information. And yes, you’ll make it easy (effortless) for community members to find out more about Dial products and where to find them.

You could then use this Facebook page to sign up followers to receive a “Flu Tip of the Day” via Twitter, and link to YouTube videos you’ve posted demonstrating the correct way to wash hands, sanitize kitchens and virus-proof play areas.

In other words, you can use Social Media networks to tap into an audience (or create an audience) that is already out there.

Then, there’s the “Magic Multiplier” of social networks: once you’ve “friended” someone, your postings are visible on the “wall” of their page, making it easier for others (friends, and friends of friends) to become part of the community. A recently completed study found click-through rates on Facebook wall posts average around 6.5% (compared to the average 0.02% click-through rate on social network banner ads), demonstrating that social media users are more deeply involved in the content.

You can see how communities can build fast. In some cases, companies can build a sizable following strictly using Social Media networks. Nike and Apple have over a million fans on Facebook. Even the AFLAC duck has nearly 140,000 friends on Facebook and nearly 3,000 followers on Twitter.

Social Media networks are one quick way to tap into or build a community. There are other ways you can build communities as well. We’ll touch on some of those in our next post.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Social Media click-through rates, existing audience, Facebook fan pages, media platforms, social marketing solutions, Twitter, YouTube

(This is the first in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

A lot of folks who claim they don’t know a thing about this “Social Media” business are actually using it everyday, many times without even realizing it.

For example, whenever you check Craigslist to see if there’ve been any new listings of lawn furniture you’re engaging in Social Media.

Whenever you go to Cnet or some other site to research mp3 players, cameras or printers, and you see a host of ratings and reviews (both good and bad) from people who’ve bought the model you’re considering, you’re engaging in Social Media.

Whenever a friend emails you a link to a YouTube video and you’re so entertained by it that you view other videos from the same contributor or forward that video link on to someone else, you’re engaging in Social Media.

Whenever you accept a friend request on your Facebook page, you’re engaging in Social Media.

And whenever the florist you bought last year’s Mother’s Day bouquet from sends you an email offering 10% off on an early Mother’s Day purchase, guess what? Yep, Social Media.

In short, anything you do in the online space that allows others to converse, contribute, add to, distribute or give feedback on is considered Social Media.

In Social Media, our audiences are not just the “receivers” of our efforts, they are also the “medium” (by spreading our efforts forward) and in many cases even “creators” (adding their own spin on our information or integrating it into a greater piece).

A few misconceptions about Social Media campaigns: Social Media is not about getting selling messages out to as many individuals or groups as you can. Nor is its primary purpose to drive traffic to your web site.

Instead, successful Social Media can be described as a platform that is based on relationship, community and permission. At the core of every Social Media campaign is an implicit trust—the trust that you can help the customer solve something. It is taking part in a two-way (or multi-way) conversation (as opposed to the one-way communication of traditional media or an information-only web site) that all parties get some sort of value from.

To repeat, any time you use the online space to converse with an individual, group or community, and all sides extract some value from that encounter, that is considered Social Media.

As an exercise to demonstrate how natural and universal use of Social Media has become, I ask you to monitor your own use of the Internet for the next few days. Recognize what your Social Media encounters are, and what value you are getting from each one. Recognize the other participants. Are they people you know (either personally or through reputation), or are they totally random? When do you do the initiating? When do others come to you?

By the way, if you found this post of value, and would like to pass it on to others (yep, that’s Social Media too), just use one of the “share” links below. Feel free to submit questions (they will be visible to all visitors) and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Social Media cnet, craigslist, Facebook, feedback, multi-way conversation, ratings, reviews, YouTube

“Information Asymmetry” is a phrase first coined by economist George Akerlof back in the 1970s. Basically, it refers to the inherent imbalance of power (information) between seller and buyer.

Akerlof’s thesis is that in the earliest phases of a transaction, the seller has more information than the buyer does. Akerlof’s assumption was that a sale is not going to occur until the buyer has enough reliable information to make what he feels is an informed decision and be confident in it.

In interchanges that involve more risk (for example, buying a house or a car), the buyer may need quite a bit of information before he feels confident pulling the trigger. Other times it may not require much information at all (which brand of chewing gum to purchase at the check-out stand).

It goes to reason, therefore, that the easier the marketer makes it for the buyer to get the information he needs, and the more relevant that information is, the more likely a sale is to take place.

At its heart, Akerlof’s premise defines the basic role advertising (and indeed all marketing communication)—to get information the seller wants conveyed to the prospective buyer, thus speeding up the sales process.

Today, marketers have a wonderful tool to aid them in shortening this inherent sales cycle–the Internet. The Internet plays a huge role in balancing the Information Asymmetry dynamic. Buyers can find a plethora of information on any given product, service or category, and get it from the sources of their choice, whether the company itself, industry experts, other customers or what have you. And the depth of information available to consumers is indeed incredible by historic standards. Within a few minutes, a web user can not only find out what the factory invoice is on that new BMW he’s been eyeing, he can also get road test results, historical resale information, compare it to other makes and models and get competitive offers from dealers.

In fact, by some estimates, as many as 70% of all shoppers are “web first,” meaning they research (or in many cases purchase) before ever setting foot in a store.

In other words, the consumer is taking the initiative to balance the Information Asymmetry that used to be the exclusive domain of the marketer.

Does all this mean that advertising as we know it is in its last legs? Hardly. What it means is that as marketers, we need to put the information our customers are looking for in more places and empowering them to find it on their own. This doesn’t mean sending corporate press releases to every web site you can think of or uploading all of your commercials to YouTube thinking customers are just going to flock there. It means finding out what customers are already saying about you in cyberspace. It means finding the relevant thought leaders in your industry and making sure you and your products are on their radar. It means finding which sites, blogs or communities your customers are going to for information and advice and making sure you have a presence there or that at least your products/services are represented.

That’s where your customers are looking for you.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey On Customers BMW, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, informed buyers, web first shoppers, YouTube

Evian’s rollerskating babies. The Kid From Brooklyn. The “Will It Blend” video series.

Viral videos. We’ve all seen them. Is there a formula to creating a viral video millions will want to see? With around 70,000 new videos a day being uploaded just to YouTube, the odds against your viral video catching on are slim to say the least. But is there a method for creating a viral video that has an edge in capturing viewers’ attention? What is the “secret sauce” behind some of the most successful viral video campaigns out there?

In this video, Martin Lindstrom tries to find the answers. In his interview with noted viral video creator Mads Holman, Lindstom hits on the three main characteristics of a successful viral video strategy:

• It must embody a “talking point” that people can easily share with one another.
• It must be outrageous or sensational—something that is somehow “too much” for TV. It is this outrageousness that makes us want to share it with others.
• It must be able to be “serialized”—the concept should be able to lead to a series of follow-up videos that build on the same audience. One-offs may gain some attention, but tend to fizzle quickly unless something’s there to keep the interest going.

Lindstrom’s report points out that while the idea of viral videos has long generated interest from marketers (whoa, million of viewers FOR FREE!), very few have been able to do it right. While more than 30% of major advertisers worldwide have attempted to launch a viral video program, fewer than 5% continue to have a viral media strategy.

The good news about launching a viral video program? It doesn’t take a big budget, a big staff or a big infrastructure. The key is to think outrageous. Relevently outrageous (so your product or service doesn’t come out of left field). Make it easy to share and respond to. And above all, fun.

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Media, New Media Evian, Mads Holman, Martin Lindstrom, Rollerskating Babies, viral media strategy, viral video campaigns, YouTube

If there’s one form of commercial that begs for the “mute” button to be hit, it’s those awful infomercials with Vince, aka, the Sham Wow Guy.

His latest mind-numbing work is for some Popeil-like product called the Slap-Chop. Some enterprising film freaks took Vince’s formulaic “it slices, it dices” spot and did a terrific mash-up of it. You can view it here.

The interesting thing is I think the mash-up does a much better job of selling the product that Vince’s hard-sell stuff. Plus it doesn’t have you heading for the mute button.

What do you think?

Posted by Mickey

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Mickey Ramblings infomercials, Sham Wow Guy, Slap-Chop, YouTube