 August 29, 2008
For Home Depot, it appears to be a monthly feature (though this is the first time I’ve noticed the email); the subject line was "Top Customer Reviewed Products for August". It’s a great way for them to show off what others think are their best products. I think it’s great they’re doing it, although for the category it’s a little strange because this ends up as such a random assortment. I suppose, per this email, if you’re looking for an area rug, a mailbox or an airless paint sprayer, you’re in luck. The concept seems to work a little harder for LEGO since the product assortment isn’t as broad. Plus, when I’m looking for LEGO gifts, I’m more interested in starting with ratings. And I love the way they set it up, "Thanks to consumers’ ratings and reviews, it’s clear there are some LEGO sets no one should live without! Check out the sets fellow LEGO fans have most highly recommended." In addition to each item’s LEGO brick (their version of stars) rating, the email showcases quotes from the customer reviews. Many reviews are organized into "Pros" and "Cons," and certain reviewers are denoted as a "Top 250 Contributor" if they provide numerous, helpful product reviews. Beyond that, reviewers are ranked based on the number of reviews and helpfulness of each one. From a brief pass through the reviews, LEGO customers are about as thorough and detailed as the brand is. August 27, 2008
Ahh, how very Open of them. Now, they didn’t exactly hand over the keys to the Salon–they made a new set…for a new site. Yes, check out Open Salon, where "you make the headlines." The site is devoted to reader-contributed content, which site visitors can enjoy, comment on, tag, tip or share. A few compelling aspects of Open Salon:
Open Salon is still in public beta, but from the looks of it, readers–er, writers–are pretty happy. There’s a bit of chatter about the reality of getting money for your work, but personally I’m intrigued by the idea and the execution. I’m curious though about the decision to create a new property versus integrate its community writers with its staff writers–does this make them less Open? They do say that popular stories on Open Salon may get featured on Salon.com, though not sure what the frequency of that is. Well, even if Salon isn’t Open, Open Salon is. Check it out. Open yourself up. August 27, 2008
Last week, I spent a great deal of time talking to clients, partners and colleagues about mobile. Seems like everyone in the U.S. is interested in mobile experiences again. Why is that? The iPhone, The Olympics, Ralph Lauren’s new mobile site? I’m not sure, but I can tell you the space is hot. Problem is, mobile tends to cool down quickly when you worry about the customer experience. We want to reach the widest applicable audience and we tend to agonize over the stats. What percentage of mobile phone users text? What percentage have unlimited data plans? How many use the mobile web regularly? If we get past those numbers (and some of us don’t) we worry about how to engage them. Will the user text a number to a short code? Depends. Will they type in your mobile site’s address? Probably not. Here is something to remember…every single one of the roughly 254 million cell phone users in the United States have one thing in common. Their devices can send and receive voice calls. Start there. Look at great services like ChaCha and Jott. Think about expert assistance and point of sale shopabilty. Try using voice as a way to start an experience that leads to a text message, offer or the link to your mobile site. Hang on a sec. I gotta get this call. August 27, 2008
 Activating Messages on Social NetworksTagged as: O.P.E.N., networked, social webPosted by: Molly Metzger “Despite the buzz about viral marketing, most companies should not count on it to spread the word about their brand or product,” says Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University and iCitizen keynote speaker. He suggests combining the power of traditional advertising with “the extra punch provided by viral propagation”. This is the promise of social advertising: enabling campaigns to reach a larger population than they had previously had access to by encouraging reproduction and sharing of the message. The latest installment is Facebook’s new product called ‘Engagement Advertisements’ (described here by Jeremiah Owyang) that encourage members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans. It’s in trial but will be available later in the year. These ad units have a built-in mechanism for collaboration and sharing. But this only addresses one half of the equation of social advertising. Social ads can’t simply be easy to share. They are dependant upon disruptive, highly targeted creative that motivates users to share, often by serving as a social lubricant. Traditional calls to action need not apply. Need some inspiration? Look no further than the O.P.E.N. framework, particularly the networked quadrant. How can your social ad support one of these 5 networked experiences?
August 26, 2008
We’ve had quite a few requests these past few weeks for our perspective on Social Media for B-to-B brands. We field a lot of web 2.0 technology questions, but the dialog inevitably comes back to the value of social media. A recent Aberdeen Group report (free through 8/29/08 – chock full of interesting stats you can use), examines the social media practices of 360 companies. Those considered best-in-class for social media experienced an average 11% increase in Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), improved customer retention and year-over-year improvements in product development, blowing the rest of the field out of the water. For technology companies, the need to “communify” the digital experience is even more apparent. No sector has been more impacted by social media than technology, for obvious reasons. According to Forrester Research, nearly three quarters of IT professionals use web 2.0 features in a professional capacity. From code writing to documentation to problem solving, IT professionals have come to expect a certain level of accessibility and interaction with their technology providers as well as their peers. Here are just a few ways prospects in any industry might expect social media to add value to the complex selection & implementation process:
The last bullet can’t be overstated. Social media isn’t just a channel, it’s a change agent for best-in-class companies. The Aberdeen Group data suggests a key to success is the internal process that supports and capitalizes on customer-facing social media. Successful processes
The challenge for organizations we talk with seems to be this: Lead generation is still the digital strategy du jour — the big kahuna of online measurement. To capitalize on the value social media can bring, best-in-class brands are engaging customers at all stages of the customer lifecycle– not just the selection process. This is easy if you are a starting from scratch but a bit of a challenge for organizations built on delivering digital content in exchange for capturing leads information and funneling them to a commissioned sales force. Marketing teams in this boat will need to take a good, hard look at the real decision process and their role in serving their community in a broader sense. They’ll need to adopt metrics that quantify their participation in the entire, end-to-end process. Social media is an extremely powerful tool for building and nuturing relationships. If you are in B-to-B marketing, ask yourself this: How can we put our wealth of content and better still, our experts, into the service of our community, independent of lead generation activities? If you are like most of the b-to-b companies we work with, you have expertise to spare. What do you think? The technology part is easy. Is your organization ready to capitalize on the promise of social media? August 21, 2008
 Technology-Enabled Social Network, Old-SchoolTagged as: O.P.E.N., networked, on-demand, social web, technologyPosted by: Chris Berk
Right there on I-70, I was about to give up on the OPENness of my technology, when my wife suggested an alternative technical solution, “Why don’t you get out of the car, walk over to that truck, and ask the truck driver what’s going on? Doesn’t he have a CB or something like that? Can’t he just talk to one of his trucker buddies way up at the front of the line?” I coyly walked over to what must be one of the original, technology-enabled social networks – a truck driver and his CB radio! Of course the trucker knew what was going on – an overturned truck was blocking the highway. The more I thought about it, his CB radio network functions much as the web does, truly enabling an O.P.E.N. experience that serves the needs of its participants. Forget the iPhone, I need a CB. August 21, 2008
Chris Anderson is an expert meme splicer. The Long Tail, as a marketing strategy recently flattened into financial negligibility by Anita Elberse in the July-August 2008 HBR article, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?,” is now part of Anderson’s broader economic argument for the value (variously defined as revenue, reputation, consumer attention) of making much of your service or product offer free. Anderson’s splicing occurs by attaching both the long tail and the marketplace-of-free memes to our economy of abundance. Many would argue that by the time the Free meme winds its way through Wired magazine article to blog and “open source ideation” to best-selling business book (following the winning and not entirely free formula of The Long Tail), many of us will have finally read or reread Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture or Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, both of which Amazon reviewers by and large think cover the same conceptual terrain. But such is the nature of free information exchange. There is much that is derivative, but more people are exposed to—and contribute to the ideas in the long run, er, tail, er, run. And if you want to preempt the long tail of derivation, you can always, well, pay for premium content, that is, buy the book. Yes, indeed, we’re having some sporting fun with what admittedly are essential, galvanizing ideas, which marketers should decide are worthy of implementation or not. To be clear, Elberse’s HBR article doesn’t dismiss the long tail altogether; it is best, for instance, to offer a wide assortment of products—including niche ones—to your high-value customers because they’re “disproportionately active in the long tail.” (Her most shocking finding to me: those connoisseurs who favor long tail choices don’t rate them higher than the more popular, less esoteric products. So much for our extreme private delight in that rare find—the book, the song, the band, the blog—and its transcription into larger cultural currency. To social network theorists like Duncan Watts, it’s been proven again and again that the popularity of a cultural product and the pleasure taken in it or the affinity one feels for it are inextricably linked.) The debates around Anderson’s free stuff argument are in full swing. And to contribute to them, we need go no further than the recent auctioning off of that part of the spectrum freed up by the imminent national move to all-digital TV. You might have read some of the bloglines about these so-called white spaces of the spectrum. Invisible, intangible assets. Free like wi-fi sometimes is? Well… In order for Verizon Wireless to attract more customers for high-speed mobile internet access, they shelled out $9.4 billion on airwaves. Anderson argues that phones are often free so carriers can charge for services. But Verizon’s acquisition of the coveted C-block spectrum must follow “open access” rules, meaning the network must be accessible by any compatible gadget and any software application. Not all of which will be “owned” by Verizon, obviously. This is where “free” gets very complicated and comes off as the frontman for an extravagantly expensive business model. But then the recent spectrum auction aligns once again with Anderson’s free argument when you consider Google’s stake in it. They didn’t take home any spectrum licenses (they were outbid) but the open access rules (which, I hasten to point out, AT&T’s spectrum doesn’t require) suit them just fine. They’re happy to “provide technical support, including intellectual property, design, databases, etc.” And why not? More free internet access with all the bells and whistles=more ad revenue for Google! Stay tuned for Part Two of my free meme free associating, where I take on the three forces Anderson says are driving this new economy—“fremium”, third-party (advertising) support and the gift culture—and hazard some advice about where marketers should be headed. August 14, 2008
 Courage…Branded by NikeTagged as: O.P.E.N., creative, engaging, on-demand, retailPosted by: Dennis Bajec
This video micro-site gives me the chills. Especially when you see the likes of MJ, Arthur Ashe, Prefontaine, & Oscar Pristorious all in the same video. The levels of engagement are neatly defined as Watch. Discover. Discuss. At any time in the experience you can play the video starting at the point each athlete appears in the commercial. Nike sells the concept of competition like no other brand. August 12, 2008
Which brings me to the disappointment one of my colleagues experienced when ordering a Chipotle shirt online. She loved a shirt she saw on an associate in-store. He told her she could get it online. So she went to their site (which linked her to another site) and got the shirt. But she also got a very un-Chipotle-like experience. It’s fairly transparent in the experience that the Chipotle store is run by a company called HyPERCEPTION. And I don’t want to fault Chipotle for outsourcing–I’d much rather them focus on fresh chips and salsa–but the online store experience has their name on it, and yet doesn’t live up to the brand. For the most part, the store looks like Chipotle. But it just doesn’t feel or act like it. Not only is the language off-brand, the experience is clunky. A let-down. That cool, coveted shirt is reduced to CH-AM26CAMMBS Men’s Camp Shirt in Black. Product descriptions are generic bulleted lists. It doesn’t even have basic shortcuts like use-the-billing-address-as-my-shipping-address so there is lots of unnecessary typing. Ironcially, ordering a burrito online feels like time better spent. August 11, 2008
On occasion we find ourselves in client meetings with a very senior team shouldering a very inconvenient burden: convincing their CEO that the digital medium is not inert and uninvolving—that its ads are more than insinuating party crashers, that its Flash-fangled web sites don’t pale in comparison to 3-D store shopping, TV ads, magalogs, or even digital OOH advertising. “The web can’t make shoppers fall truly, madly, deeply in love with us. Period.” Thus speaks the CEO who knows from retailing—the merchant prince with skeptical eyebrow arched over all things dreadfully, dully digital. Yes, digital diehards, pioneers and recent converts, doubts persist about the web’s potential to involve us emotionally in a brand. If the argument were entirely without merit, rebuttals would hardly be necessary. But most of us don’t say “deeply moving,” “wildly inspiring” or “irresistible” quite as often as we’d like about our digital brand experiences. Most of us aren’t able to say, “That brand feels like me” often enough online. Hence the rise, one could argue, of consumer-generated content that makes the brand over in our own image. Brands that do make the emotional connection often employ humor, and among digital millennials, humor is king online, particularly sarcastic, knowing, parodistic, low-brow humor—emblematic of both the generation’s marketing savvy (they’re in on it) and the emotional peculiarities of a life lived virtually (and a private life lived publicly). Sarcasm and parody, after all, put some distance between “us” and “them,” don’t they. Music will dramatically change the emotional timbre, if you will, of the web. So will the continued rise of brands demonstrating corporate social responsibility—particularly those using the power of video to spur activism. But let’s give the devil’s advocate his due. A very thoughtful post by Sean X Cummings about the deeper emotional impact of the TV spot vs. the online banner ad, Is Digital a Hopeless Medium?, draws a series of sharp contrasts between the individual viewer/user’s respective psychological stances while online or watching TV. Online engages the cognitive cortex, TV the limbic system—allegedly the older, less understood part of the brain involving emotion, memory, learning/motivation. Though I’m unaware of any scientific proof of this argument, it seems at least superficially accurate. My rational drawbridge is down, in the way one says “my defenses were down,” when I’m watching a movie (or Mad Men) on TV, which makes it easier for emotions to cross the moat. Cummings also argues that digital is a “learn forward” medium, chiefly informational and individualistic whereas TV is a “lean back”, communal entertainment medium. Again, these assertions seem generally true, leaving the very communal and limbic MMORPGs aside. Leaving aside digital millennials’ constant connectivity and the digerati’s microblogging and lifecasting, which also seem inarguably if strangely communal to me. Leaving aside networked brands that are either transforming “traditional” online advertising into social media marketing or dramatically decreasing spend on straightforward interruptive ads because they recognize the web’s colossal community impulse. Leaving aside as well the imminent full-video web, which will make distinctions between so-called entertainment media like TV and informational media like the web (and first, second and third screens) superannuated. OK. Leaving aside quite a bit. Still, Cummings’s argument seems to contain a kernel of truth. An intuition, perhaps, about how difficult it is to describe, assess, appreciate the virtual community when members haven’t (yet) fleshmet. (I’m reviving this term because it’s deliciously, well, corporeal, and contrasts nicely with the hyperreal online.) It does seem a propitious moment to introduce a digital experience far, far from the banner ad that Cummings spends considerable energies critiquing. A digital experience emphatically limbic and communal, that springs from the living web—and all that it implies. Inert and uninvolving? Not for me, baby. |
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