Advertising v3.0 by Chris Schaumann

Universal McCann 

Research findings from September 2008, 29 countries, 17,000 internet users exploring how the web and in-particular social media have made it incredibly easy to source and share personal opinions. This has created a revolution in where we source information and what we trust that has massive impacts for the role of professional media and marketing communications.

The result is an influence economy that is forcing everyone in the public realm including the owners of products and brands to become more transparent, open, conversational and honest. They have to rethink the way that influence is distributed and the role of marketing communications in an information landscape dictated by consumers.

• Anyone can influence anyone
• Friendship is no longer local or face to face
• Everybody is an influencer
• New super influencers rise above the mass
• The new inflfluence ecosystem has fundamentally changed how we buy products and services

 Download the electronic version of 'When did we start trusting Strangers' Report.

SnapAds: Survival Of The Fittest Meets Madison Avenue

Snapads has created a system that dynamically adjusts the appearance of banner ads over time to maximize engagement.
And it seems to work - a three day trial campaign for a recent film saw an increased clickthrough rate of 1922% over three days (not a typo).To create a campaign, advertisers provide SnapAds with a special Photoshop file containing a number of specially-tagged layers with all of the art and text assets they’d like to potentially display in their banner. Advertisers can create rule sets specifying which layers are allowed to appear together, allowing them to ensure that SnapAds never generates an ad that is nonsensical or potentially offensive. Once all of the rules and assets are in place, the platform can get to work.

FEED: The Razorfish [US] Consumer Experience Report 2008

• 91% of these consumers use one of the five major Internet portals—Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask.com—to start their online experiences.
• 28% use Twitter, a relatively new communication tool, with some frequency [$500m takeover bid by Facebook rejected]
• 41% use tag clouds with some regularity
• 52% use RSS feeds with some regularity
• 52% have shared bookmarks with others through services like del.icio.us
• 55% use widgets on the computer desktop with some frequency
• 62% use widgets on Web sites such as Facebook or iGoogle
• 81% read “Most Popular” or “Most Emailed” links with some frequency

The centralized analog model is disintegrating in our new online, networked world.The real value for advertisers is the role of social influence in persuading consumers to purchase. Nearly half of all respondents (49%) indicate they have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media site.

Though Facebook and MySpace are still seeing record global traffic, their year-over-year U.S. growth rates have peaked and are on the decline.

Interaction Levels

• Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
• Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
• High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
• Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s "economy”

Thinking beyond the message to create services requires a different strategic lens!

People aren’t reading our Web pages; most of our tediously crafted relics of desktop publishing and ubiquitous Web 2.0-ness sit
inactive, gathering digital dust like awkward, long-form textbooks in languages that no one really speaks anymore.
Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions.

 Download the electronic version of Consumer Experience Report.

Slideshare.net

75% of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes in the next year.
But 50% of those campaigns will be classified as failures.
- Gartner, October 2008

 Download the electronic version of Social World.

Global Voices Advocacy

Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Cross-posting for Advocacy, An Introduction to Effective Social Media Integration. This guide offers us a brief introduction to how to use cross-posting for online advocacy campaign. It reviews different web 2.0 tools, showcasing successful examples where cross-posting has been used for advocacy. The guide also includes the pros and cons of the cross-posting technique.

 Download the electronic version of Advocacy 2.0 Guide.

Chris Brogan.com

[Chart by Brian Solis]

He found 20 different ones that might be interesting to you. It never hurts to get a few different perspectives. In all cases, the first link is to a PDF file, the second link is to the site where it’s hosted.

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing - David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple - MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing - Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook - Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets - SEOBook
6. Get Viral Get Visitors - Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies - Dynamic Copywriting
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan - Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs - Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics - Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter - Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging - Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media - iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media - SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence - Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability - Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program - CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? - Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media - PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed - Edison Media Research

Resource Library - Eyeblaster Creative Zone

During the holiday season, online media gives you twice the time of a TV ad to get your message through. Combine that with the added advantage of interactivity, and you have a tangible audience engagement with your brand – which helps drive conversions.
Select campaigns showed over 30% synergy as Search clicks were revealed to have been preceded by Display impressions.

 
[Also available: Europe, North America and Japan]

 Download the electronic version of 10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession.

Recession? Digital Media World says- “No sweat” « Pixel Plans-Blog On Digital Media Trends

Despite the damage inflicted by the financial crisis, turnover with advertisement banners, sponsored links and other online advertising format will grow.

Social networking sites thriving (login required) in tough times.

More related articles:

• How brands thrived during the Great Depression
• Advertising in a Recesssion
• How To Survive Crash: Spend More On Ads
• Why should you increase your advertising budget in a recession?
• IBM: The Recession's First Recession-Proof Company

 Download the electronic version of 10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession.

Groundswell

Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies. Forrester can quantify the number of online consumers within these groups using their consumer surveys.

 Download the electronic version of Social Technographics Presentation

"Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era" by Danah Boyd, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The study of socio-technical phenomena is about understanding the intersections between technologies and social practices. Researching socio-technical phenomena prompts questions like:

• How does technology inflect old practices in new ways?
• How do people adopt and adapt to the emergence of technologies?
• How do technologies configure people and how do people reconfigure technologies to meet their needs?
• How do these dynamics play out on individual, group, and societal levels?

[ looks familiar? check: How technology's accelerating power will transform us ]

Networked publics connect people through networked technology and create public spaces through networked technology in which people can come together. User-generated content is a core part of networked publics. People don't just consume together - they produce together. And, ideally, they consume and produce as part of everyday participation. Four unique properties of networked publics lead to three important shifts in dynamics.

• Persistence: What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronous interactions, but not so great when your boss gets to read what you wrote in Usenet back in the 80s.
• Replicability: You can copy/paste from one place to another, taking a conversation from IM and making it available via social network sites. This is also the crux of bullying and how politicians take everything out of context.
• Scalability: The average blog has six readers. Just because things might be public doesn't mean that they automatically will be read by all people across all space and all time. What scales is variable and, often, it's often what you least want that is most visible.
• Searchability: My mother would've loved to scream grep into the air and suss out where I had run off to. She couldn't; I'm thankful. Today, through social media, people are tremendously searchable.

These four properties fundamentally shape three different dynamics that alters how people interact in social media environments.

• Invisible Audiences: I can look around here and see who is in the room, but I have no idea who is on the other side of that camera. While I'm at M.I.T. and can make Unix jokes because y'all know what I'm talking about, I have no guarantee that the invisible audience is coming from the same perspective. Online, people have to always negotiate these invisible audiences and that can often be tricky.
• Context Collisions: Part of what makes invisible audiences tricky is that they often represent different social contexts. The properties of networked publics collapse contexts and force people to address social situations with different - and often conflicting - social contexts. This is very tricky.
• Public and Private Convergence: Public and private are usually framed through spatial metaphors with the home being private and everything else being public. Social media confounds this and public and private turn out to be more about control than anything else. Still, it's a matter of collectives and the properties discussed earlier complicate people's ability to control the publicity of any given situation when others around them have a different perspective.

These dynamics have significant social and cultural implications. They radically alter how people work out identity in relation to those around them. They introduce new structures for social interactions.

View the electronic version of Video Presentation.

 Download the electronic version of Significance of Social Software.

How Can PR Pros Monitor and Measure the Impact of Online Media: Blogs, Social Media and Buzz?

Establishing the right metrics Metrics being used to measure the impact of campaigns using corporate blogs depends on the organization.

• For corporate blogs, some are using the "conversation index," which is the ratio between postings and comments. Others are using a more complex combination of rankings, comments, links, trackbacks, time spent at the site and number of visitors.
• External blogs are being measured by the percentage of key corporate messages they contain, what percentage of these messages are positive or negative, and the shape of positioning on desired issues.
• On YouTube, communicators are looking at the degree to which their own content is being picked up, as well as the tone of other videos about them.
• On FaceBook, pros look at the types of conversations in which their brands are mentioned, and the number of friends and groups that their brand is involved in.
• On Twitter, they are keeping track of their brand via TweetScan and they are monitoring via their own Twitter accounts about them.
• Word-of-mouth - or digital buzz - is being tracked by what people are saying anywhere they can using products like Radian 6 and IceRocket.
• Interaction (on conversations) with corporate customers are being monitored with regard to exchanges, positive or negative trends, watching for emerging problems, counting the conversations, and looking at the percentage of positive and negative comments
• With regard to search engine optimization of press releases, Paine explains effective measurement involves looking at the amount of pickup, as well as creating unique URLs to track the actions people are taking.

Once these online media types have been measured, "what you do not want to do is equate it to advertising or traditional media. You need to define the purpose and goals of the social media program first, and then measure accordingly. So if you are doing it to improve customer service, you need to measure improvement in customer satisfaction. If you start an internal blog to improve employee morale, you need to measure retention, turnover and employee engagement. If you start an external blog to measure engagement with customers or constituencies, you need to conduct a relationship survey to determine whether or not you have changed or improved the relationship."

A growing percentage of consumer behavior is being shaped by what they see in search results. And, according to Bell, social media or word-of mouth needs to be compared to empower marketing communications executives to make budget decisions. As a result, "We use a custom model each time to establish value - it's accurate, but painstaking."

 Download the electronic version of Measurement 101.

 Download the electronic version of Digital Media measurement for PR.

Consumer Behavior Study Confirms: Cause-Related Marketing Can Exponentially Increase Sales

As the term “cause-related marketing” reaches its 25th anniversary and a sea of pink ribbons washes over the U.S. this month, a new consumer behavior study confirms that cause-related marketing can exponentially increase sales, in one case as much as 74 percent, resulting in millions of dollars in potential revenue for brands.

The 2008 Cone/Duke University Behavioral Cause Study, released today by Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, validates for the first time that cause-related marketing can significantly drive actual consumer choice.  

Substantial cause-related sales lift for two of the four consumer packaged goods categories tested:

• 74% increase in actual purchase for a shampoo brand when associated with a cause
  • (47% of participants who saw the cause-related message chose the brand while only 27% of those who saw the generic corporate advertisement chose the brand)
• 28% increase in actual purchase for a toothpaste brand when associated with a cause
  • (64% of participants who saw the cause message chose the target brand vs. 50% who viewed the generic corporate advertisement)

The McKinsey Quarterly

The rapid growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. Marketers are failing to tap the digital world’s full power. The inability to make accurate measurements of digital advertising’s effectiveness across channels and consumer touch points will continue to promote the misallocation of media budgets and to impede the industry’s growth.

The measurement challenge
Respondents whose companies are introducing rigorous measurement techniques report a higher level of satisfaction with digital marketing. In fact, 55 percent of them are cutting their expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts, compared with only 43 percent of the respondents whose companies don’t measure the impact.

In response to a question about how budgets are allocated across different media, 80 percent of the respondents say that their companies either use qualitative measures—that is, subjective judgments—or simply repeat what they did last year.

The European broadband study showed that 60 percent of online purchases involve an offline touch point.

Emerging solutions

“If we can’t measure it, essentially, we don’t do it.”

As for allocating ad budgets, leading marketers are now using metrics that permit comparisons between offline and digital spending. One marketer used a method called RCQ (for reach, cost, and quality) to optimize its allocation of spending among ad vehicles. It also includes a quality factor based on changes in engagement, attitudes, and behavior.

The campaign, targeting online customer segments, sought to maximize the ROI of each individual ad opportunity by serving whatever ad most promisingly combined likelihood to convert with profitability of conversion. After the company segmented its customers by the sites they visited online, it could use each person’s past behavior to deploy the most appropriate ad vehicle—e-mail, graphics-rich media, or video. This strategy raised conversion rates by 50 percent.

McKinsey research on telephone users’ social networks suggests that even they can be measured to allocate marketing budgets more successfully. One telecom company, for example, has learned how to retain phone customers by assessing the strength of the relationships among them. The company used call patterns, changes in call volumes, types of payment (prepaid or contract), handset types, and other traits to identify customers likely to leave for another carrier. Meanwhile, it constructed a diagram of their social ties, derived from the people they called, the people those people called, and how often. In general, the more closely anyone was tied to someone who unsubscribed, the more likely that person was to unsubscribe in turn. In this way, the telecom company improved its churn prediction model by 50 percent. Moreover, by identifying the most influential potential churners and working to retain them with new services and price plans, the company not only retained a quarter of them but also reduced the churn rate within their social networks by almost 40 percent.

Welcome To Contagious

Contagiousness isn’t just buzz, it’s a way of building brands sustainably through great experiences that get people talking positively about the brand.
In our definition, the role of contagiousness is to ‘change the conversation’ and the brands that do this best are ‘conversation leaders’.

Eight Rules to Flourish in the Contagious Era:

1. You’re part of the conversation, whether you’re managing it or not.
2. Everything you do creates conversation, whether you think it’s marketing or not, and whether you know it or not. The single greatest driver of
   positive recommendation is ‘experience beyond expectation’.
3. Changing the conversation to your advantage is what grows your business. Brands with the most recommendation in their category grow 4x faster than the category average (London School of Economics). Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth (Bain Consulting).
4. Most of what is currently positioned as buzz or word of mouth is completely worthless.
5. You have to be talking about something that really matters to people to really change the conversation.
6. Great brands lead the conversation by having a point of view that transcends even the category.
7. Broadcast marketing can change the conversation too, but to do so you need to apply a higher standard. 
8. Symbolic actions have immense contagious power, if they crystallise a powerful vision.

 Download the electronic version of Full Article free of charge. 

 Download the electronic version of Social Media / Methods & Metrics Extract free of charge. 

How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United - NYTimes.com

Advertising Age - DigitalNext

Some marketers have rushed to embrace any and every new digital tactic.

This has resulted in a scenario where some digital tactics are dangerously close to "jumping the shark." Everyone is doing them, so they're not original anymore. They generally are not done well (i.e., in a way that builds brand equity, awareness or sales), and they may be so commonplace that rather than making a brand seem current or hip, they have the opposite effect.

Here are my [Mark Cregar] top five:

• The Social Network Page
• The Second Life Storefront
• The Online Ad Contest
• The Social Network
• The Online Branded Entertainment Series

Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy - International Herald Tribune

"A single page that like a social gazette from the 18th century delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. A stream of everything that's going on in their lives," as Zuckerberg [Facebook] put it.
In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."

Each so-called tweet [Twitter] was so brief as to be virtually meaningless. But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. The ambient information becomes like "a type of ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

"Merely looking at a stranger's Twitter or Facebook feed isn't interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it's a novel." - Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of "co-presence" has been around for a while.

"I outsource my entire life, I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary.
In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

WSJ : Business Technology 

Many businesses have launched corporate blogs in an effort to better communicate with customers and capture a little Web-2.0 mojo. But Huffington Post they ain’t: Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value.

The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers:

• Build conversations
• Engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.

They’re not handling that challenge well: a Forrester study found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

Forrester doesn’t recommend that businesses give up on blogging, however. Instead, it suggests that they spice the blogs up. Most B2B bloggers publish irregularly, don’t stick to it for very long, and rarely inject personality into their posts. That’s a formula for failure. In order to make a blog lively, a business has to offer visitors something more – musings from an executive, insight into how a product decision was made, something funny.

A NoahBrier.com project

TNS > Published research > Digital Media study

A new study jointly published by TNS and Digital Media magazine reveals the brands whose digital presence is strongest in the minds of consumers across Asia.

Top 5 digital advertisers ranked in order of awareness:

The study also reveals:

• Websites, banner ads and pop-ups still recalled most commonly though consumers are sceptical of pop-ups and banners
• Recommendations from friends and family are still considered most trustworthy
• Emerging digital formats such as in-game and ads via mobile handsets have some way to go before establishing consumer credibility

 Download the electronic version of Full Report free of charge.