hello marketing

test

2009-01-01T17:17:00.001-06:00

test 1

LinkedIn Company

2008-03-22T20:41:00.004-05:00

LinkedIn has announced the development of LinkedIn Company pages, which allow members of a given organization to create a page for that organization and link their profiles to it.

This development is encouraging because LinkedIn is the leading social network for professional networking. Company pages could be effective tool in helping people within an organization network both internally and externally. Internal networking can be facilitated by providing a map of the organziation's social network; externally networking can be helped by allow staff to see the backgrounds of their colleagues, whom they might contact in order to find resources outside the company.

For higher education (my field of marketing), LinkedIn may provide an especially valuable role. It already can serves as a recruiting platform for students, faculty and staff. If LinkedIn ever gets its API in place, tools and programs could be developed that allow an institution to create more connections among each group: students might be connected to alumni mentors and faculty advisors; alumni might be connected to other alumni in their professions; faculty with other faculty in their field of scholarship. Insitutions might be able to get more information about the career paths of their alumni, helping to round out research into the impact the education. New graduates might be able to use the network to find jobs through alumni. Internship searches might work the same way. Faculty might reach out to research subjects in particular professions.

LinkedIn appears to be trying to following the footsteps of Facebook, seeing the success that the Facebook's Pages application has brought to the network in terms of attracting advertisers to the network. Facebook Pages were announced in November 2007 and already there are ton of organizations using it (in higher education, there are 500+ Pages, which is the highest count Facebook will provide in their search results).

The only thing missing is LinkedIn's API, which they have said that they want roll out but there hasn't been much progress announced. Hopefully, they will get it going in 2008!

Resumes and recruiting 2.0

2008-03-12T21:07:00.006-05:00

I today's reality-tv soaked environment, it should be no surprise that folks are experimenting with user generated media as a vehicle for reaching out to potential employers. After all, shows like Top Chef require applicants to submit video auditions in order to apply to the show.

Now, we have some folks experimenting with the video resume:

Clearly, the form is still finding its way, but the idea is intriguing and not without precedent. Certainly, actors and entertainers would be a natural fit, as would visual artists. Animators, motion graphic artists, broadcast journalist and videographers are already posting their reels for review, and it won't be long before photographers, artists and graphic designers compile their portfolios into clips.

As for the rest of us? Video might be an interesting way to break through the clutter, if you can move beyond the "talking-to-the-camera" shtick. Think of it more as a linear presentation and the form can take on new meaning.

Powerpoint might be used to make creative graphics and combined with photos and voiceover (plus video) of the candidate talking about their experiences and qualifications. If used effectively, the video becomes a way to convey communication skills, presentation capabilities and plain old passion for your work.

And, unlike an interview, there's always a second take.

Combine this video with a blog, a LinkedIn profile, a professional social network profile, relavant social bookmarks and/or shared search items and you have the makings of Resume 2.0.

Design and the Elastic Mind

2008-03-05T22:36:00.004-06:00

I love the title of this new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art: "Design and the Elastic Mind". The exhibit is an example of how folks are trying to use design to capture technological and scientific change and "convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use."

Interesting to see how many try to come up with their own solutions verses those who tap into existing tools via mash-ups.

The Goolge Maps blog has a nice list of items in the exhibit that incorporate Google products:

You can also read a review and see a slide show of the exhibit at the New York Times.

Design meets business

2008-03-01T07:08:00.011-06:00

I recently attended an intriguing event called Design Meets Business, sponsored by business bookseller 800CEORead (which is located here in Milwaukee). The event got me thinking about the business impact of design, particularly as it relates to interactive design and marketing.

Typically, most such discussions focus on how design creates branding. The lesson is usually bad design makes a bad impression on potential customers. Certainly, this is a important aspect of design, but there is another aspect of the discussion that I think warrants attention: the idea that design creates meaning in business.

Before the invention of the Web, people have been discussing the idea of the information society and knowledge workers. Within this discussion, came concerns about information anxiety--the idea that we are confronted with a gap between data and knowledge and we suffer as a result.

The danger is only exacerbated by the emergence of the Web, which first was a Murky Way of information and then added a cacophony of voices to the mix in "Web 2.0". How we find/create meaning among this sea of data is subject of much discussion (Glut, Everything is Miscellaneous, Wikinomics, Made to Stick, Cult of the Amateur).

Design plays a key role in this world. One might argue that Google's simplified interface was just as important as it's savvy search algorithm for the company's emergence as a market leader. This in a field that was crowded with competitors at the time of Google's launch.

Not everyone is trying to create the next great search engine, however. Most organizations are simply try to make sense of all this information--on the web, in databases, reports, analysis and so forth. The ability to make sense of information, to understand what you know and what you do not know, is critical to success. At least one economist has noted that the ability for an organization to manage uncertainty is the number one distinction that separates things that succeed from those that fail.

Here is where design can help. Information design (and its subset of data visualization) is a specialty of growing importance. Essentially, the idea is that how you present data is more than aesthetics; it is how you create meaning. It is the transformation of data into information.

Information design is sometimes derided as nothing more than charts and graphs. Certainly, an effective use of charts, graphs and maps can facilitate understanding. However, there is more to it than that. Information design can and should offer perspective and context. This can take shape as either a recurring presentation of the information in the same form, which allows users to identify patterns and make decisions based off their experience.

More effective is information design that builds perspective and context into the visuals. Perhaps this is historical perspective, peer comparisons, or an identification of the level of uncertainty.

Some of the best examples are interactive information design, pieces that allow not only offer visual data with perspective, but also allow the user to adjust settings and witness variations over time. Witness examples any time at the New York Times interactive section.

As the amount of information grows (and more and more voices join the conversation), it becomes even more critical to separate signal from noise, to create meaning from chaos.

In such an environment, information design will play a critical role in determining the survival of the fittest.

Lessons from Mitt

2008-02-12T21:20:00.004-06:00

DigiNovations is a video production firm that produced MittTV, a web video channel for (former) Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Michael Kolowich, producer for the channel, posted his list of 10 lessons learned in developing MittTV.

No matter what side of the aisle you are on, he offers some interesting observations about using web video. Some are obvious (you can see what people respond to and adapt your content accordingly; you should consider back-end production needs); some are not so obvious (longer length can work, at least for some audience members; YouTube was weak on producing "call to action"; build audience through active outreach to bloggers, press, and RSS feeds).

Tips for online video strategy

2008-02-09T15:43:00.000-06:00

It's no secret that online video is currently experiencing tremendous growth:

Almost half all Internet users have been to a video sharing site in 2007, which is double the amount who said so in 2006
Over one in eight of all users were at a video site "yesterday" (nearly double the rate of 2006)
US Internet users watched over 10 billion videos in December 2007, making it the largest rated audience since one research company started counting

And so on. There are many research reports showing the growth in the rate of consumption of online video, but this is not unusual for new technologies in interactive media. We are used to seeing reports that tout 200% increase, etc. of some newfangled thing. What is compelling about online video is the size of the audience, the mass in mass media. Like email, online video is rapidly on its way to a pervasive audience. Moreover, in terms of raw audience size, online video is catching and passing other ballyhooed technologies along the way--blogs, rss readers, and social networks (these technologies certainly serve valid roles and have sizeable audiences of their own, but it appears that online video is set to have a wider appeal in terms of the sheer number of all people on the internet who engage with the media in some way).

The question, then, is what to make of online video. How to use it, what to use it for, how is different from other forms, or is it not different?

The are clearly a variety of ways to employ it. The first and most obvious is to post it to your web site. This is actually not a new feature, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The second is to use video for sharing sites such as YouTube, Crackle and Revver. Sometimes a video can be used for both, but I would argue that it is a more effective strategy to treat each as distinct strategy. A third is for video advertising, video clips that get placed in banner ad space, but this is such a new space that there doesn't exist a lot of available advertising inventory so chances are the average marketing won't be using it anytime soon.

Following are my own thoughts for using video in each strategy:

On-site Video (video that is targeted to an audience that is engaging content on your web site)

Create video that occurs within the context of a web page with copy around it. While video is great for bringing a story to life, it's not so good for search engine optimization. Copy and content that is related to the video will make sure that your page can be found by users who are looking for it with a search engine.
Place the video inline in an article--do not link to a video that is on a separate page. It's a funny thing, but users don't like to click away from a page. I've seen this with email newsletter forms and information request forms--as soon as they are placed inline, user engagement goes up significantly.
Keep the composition simple. Simpler layouts and compositions make for a clear message.
Push to use type and motion graphics in your video. Make friends with an After Effects guru and use them for all they are worth. Not all subjects lend themselves to video, some need to be illustrated. More importantly, if you want to use web video on a timely basis, you won't have time to schedule (or afford) new video shoots on a regular basis unless you have a nice budget or an in-house team.
Tell a story! Make sure the video has a beginning, middle and an end. Use mystery, surprise, and suspense. Build and then relieve tension to craft a story that has appeal.
Pay attention to music. Use it when appropriate, scrap it if it is not. Good music selection can truly take a video to a whole new level. If it is not good, don't use it. Nothing undermines the story more than bad music (there is no middle ground, mediocre music is bad music).

Off-site Video (video that is posted on a sharing site)

Use buzz tactics to create content that fosters sharing of the video. One of the best overview of crafting word of mouth messaging is provided in Emanuel Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz. In creating stories to foster word of mouth, Rosen offers up several tactics that can be adapted to nearly any business model: Sneak previews, create mystery or sense of scarcity, provide inside information, get beyond the obvious, be outrageous, give people a here, and/or use events to create buzz.
Seed the video: This is where having an email list comes in handy. Once the video is posted, send out a link and message to your newsletter list, your friends, your family.
Keep it short: Online video is a "snack", a timekiller, something people do to avoid doing something else or while waiting for something to begin. In one of the studies above about viewership, the average length of videos watched was a little less than three minutes, which is similar to the length of the average music video or song. Use this as a guide for the length of your piece.
Keep the composition simple. Even though YouTube can now go full screen, most folks watch the videos in their original windows, which is a small space in the overall content pane.
Use motion graphics (see #4 above for previous reasons). Plus, motion graphics will allow you to create a custom "look" for your video, something that will help your piece stand apart from the crowd.

As you can see, there is some overlap between the types. I mainly split them into different camps to highlight a few of the tactics that more audience specific, particularly the content strategy. In general, I think of on-site videos as offering some complement to content that is around them, while off-site videos have to stand alone and therefore must tell a more complete story.

That's it. So far. If you have ideas, suggestions, feel free to share!

Myth of the Influentials

2008-01-29T20:23:00.001-06:00

Following up on my post about the Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds study.

Fast Company has picked up on the discussion, in an interview with Duncan Watts that asks "Is the Tipping Point Toast?". In it, Watts challenges the concept of opinion leaders, particularly the notion that a select number of influential individuals can generate a social epidemic. To do so, he set up a virtual society of 10,000 people who were programmed to be able to influence others, to have varying levels of receptivity to influence, and to have a variety of social connections. Ten percent of the group were made Influentials--meaning they had 40 times the connections of the average person.

He then tried to start a trend in the society and followed how far it went. Thousands of times over.

The experiment generated several hundred cascades (i.e. word of mouth success!). However, the influence of the Influentials was found to be mitigated. A contagion was more likely to be started by the average Joe than an Influential, despite the difference in connectivity. That is, your chances of getting something started are just as likely or more likely if the trend is started by a non-Influential.

That said, the experiment did find that trends that were started by an Influential spread farther than those started by the average person. But these were less likely to get started in the first place.

Watts argues that they best way to start of word of mouth campaign is not to waste time and money targeting a specific group of people. Rather, he advocates "Big Seed" marketing (see his article in the May 2007 Harvard Business Review for his discussion). Essentially, the idea is build a campaign to include word of mouth effects (beyond the ubiquitous forward-to-a-friend) and promote the campaign to as wide of an audience as possible--because you don't know exactly who will start a the trend, the optimal strategy is reach as many as possible.

The ideas presented by Watts have not gone over well with Malcolm Gladwell and Ed Keller, two authors who have benefited greatly from the idea of opinion leaders (see The Tipping Point and The Influentials). Nonetheless, Watts' simulations shouldn't be so readily dismissed as "academic" (as Keller responded).

For one, at least one practitioner who makes living building word of mouth campaigns in the real world has questioned the influence of the Influentials.

Dave Balter, one of the founders of BzzAgent, dedicates a chapter to the "myth of the influentials" in his book: Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. In it, Balter asserted that everyday, average people can generate word of mouth regardless of their "opinion leader" status. He also noted on at least two campaigns that the profile of individuals who generated the most results were not the ones originally targeted in the campaign.

Another point made by Watts is the idea that you can reverse engineer a trend to understand what started the trend. This completely ignores what happens when something fails, you only see what happens when something succeeds.

Moreover, the success bias ignores the impact of timing. What is successful at one given point in time will not succeed in another because the context and circumstance will be different.

Essentially, his conclusion is that trends are random. Something that those who sell services, knowledge, or ideas based on the ability to create word of mouth don't want to hear.

Word of mouth strategy

2008-01-19T07:46:00.000-06:00

In my last post about the Watts and Dodds study, I asked the question (to myself, in all likelihood):

1) If you are building a word of mouth or grassroots communication campaign, do you to take a targeted approach and try to focus on opinion leaders? Or, do you take a scattershot approach and try to reach as many people as possible? (Assume you can't do both, given that your resources are limited).

There are advocates of both approaches. Proctor and Gamble has built in house programs (see Tremor) where opinion leaders are identified, qualified and then engaged through sampling, seeding, referrals, etc. For those without P&G's resources, there are agencies such as BzzAgent that offer a database of opinion leaders for rent, folks who can be targeted with sampling and other programs in an effort to build buzz in support of a product or service.

Others approach it from the direction of customer interaction. Brains on Fire, Church of the Customer, and countless other writers, consultants and gurus assert that the way to generate word of mouth marketing is to be nice to the people that talk about you.

Still others (promotion marketing agencies) maintain that word of mouth uses traditional promotion techniques like seeding, sampling, and so forth.

If you are trying to employ word of mouth for marketing or communication purposes, one of your first steps is to figure out which approach to take. Identifying opinion leaders can be a time consuming and expensive process as you try to build a database of influentials. Going with a service runs the risk of targeting opinion leaders who are not truly leaders in your core market--not to mention the fact that the agency may not even have folks available if your business is in a specialized market. So, how do you optimize you decision?

I think the optimal approach is to create a hybrid approach. Build your own database of opinion leaders--folks from your market and your customer base.

Instead of trying to profile them, let them self select into the database by offering things they want and respond to: information and identity.

Influentials overrated?

2008-01-12T11:56:00.001-06:00

A newly published study has raised the question about the importance of opinion leaders in word of mouth marketing and communication. Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds conducted a series of computer simulations that suggest that influentials (a.k.a. opinion leaders) may not be the most important element in determining whether an message spreads throughout a network. Rather, they found that "large cascades of influence" are more likely to be driven by a critical mass of easily-influenced individuals. Influencees rather than Influentials.

This study raises some interesting questions:

1) If you are building a word of mouth or grassroots campaign, do you to take a targeted approach and try to focus on opinion leaders? Or, do you take a scattershot approach and try to reach as many people as possible? (Assume you can't do both, given that your resources are limited).

2) Isn't this obvious information, that you need a critical mass of easily-influenced individuals for a cascade of influence? Or, does the study offer a valuable new perspective?

3) Can you actually do anything to affect a critical mass of easily-influenced individuals? Or, do you hope that you roam the range looking for a herd?

I hope to tackle each of these questions in forthcoming posts! Feel free to join the conversation.

Who am I, what am I doing here?

2008-01-12T11:39:00.000-06:00

As someone engaged in the actual practice of interactive marketing, I am interested in what works. There are lots of folks who say they know what works, but I've noticed that few of them are on the client side--working for an organization that is trying reach its market and accountable for bottom line performance.

Those who are selling services (i.e agencies), products (i.e software and web sevice providers) and ideas (i.e. consultants and authors) in the word of mouth marketing space are often hard to pin down when it comes to evaluating the success of their services, products and ideas. Instead of performance metrics, they give you case studies, presentations, and white papers populated with fuzzy math. To be fair, these folks are not on the inside and thus don't have access to the appropriate data. And those who are on the inside often don't have access to the data or can't share it even if they wanted to.

This blog is my attempt to understand more about my field, my place to think out loud. My focus is not about tactics, but more about strategy.

My goal is to post once a week. We'll see how well I hit my numbers.

Academic research into social media

2007-12-01T22:09:00.000-06:00

The current issue of the Journal of Computed-Mediated Communication has a special theme organized around research into social networking sites (SNS's, for the acronym collectors). There is a nice overview of SNS history and scholarship and some interesting articles, including one about the differences between users and non-users of SNS.