Influential Marketing Blog

Blog Marketing Skill #1: Master the Ego

Blogs are all about ego.  Anyone who disagrees is just kidding themselves.  Of course, ego is a word that comes with all sorts of connotations.  Many people assume it is bad.  To a degree, marketing has always been about ego, because it is a necessary element of each of your personalities.  However, here is the biggest flawed assumption about ego: having an ego is not the same thing as being egotistical.  Ego, in itself, is not bad - it's natural.  The reason I am reminded of this fact now is that Guy Kawasaki recently launched a site called Alltop.com that has been generating some great (and heated) conversation online.  The site is essentially a simplified aggregation of blogs categorized in a several different categories including fashion, green, celebrities, and "ego" among many others. 

The conversation basically breaks into three points of view:

1. This is nothing new and is available through other tools like Netvibes or PopUrls
2. This fosters the kind of A-lister vs. other bloggers rhetoric that Guy himself has railed against
3. Offense at being included in the group provocatively titled "Egos"

Personally, I think the site offers one of the simplest UI models that you can have, whether is just took a day to build or is more complicated than that.  I wish our Blogfeeds http://blogfeeds.ogilvypr.com (a similar concept to Alltop) were built on an interface like this.  But obviously there are probably other solutions out there to accomplish this as well.  Which really brings me to the title of this post ... blog marketing skill #1.  Whether you are a blogger or do outreach to bloggers, you will rapidly have to learn that ego is all important.  I would argue that many of the most commonly cited blog outreach campaigns where products were offered, such as the Microsoft Laptop Giveaway or the Nikon D80 program as two case studies were mainly criticized negatively by those who had bruised egos from not being included.

What Guy knows about blog ego is that having one of his categories for the site titled in this way is sure to stand out and get people's reactions.  Along the way, his site (which may very well be only slightly different from other competitive sites in terms of functionality) gets a lot more attention, conversation and traffic.  Since the site's launch, Guy has also been actively commenting on posts, and inviting bloggers to share their thoughts (full disclosure, he also sent me a note - but I had this post half written over the weekend anyway).  All of this adds up to what anyone would have to consider a successful launch into the blogosphere of a new service.  He has used his reputation to build a buzz, got some top "egos" writing about the site and created just enough controversy to make the site memorable.  Don't let ego get in the way of letting you see the obvious marketing lesson here.

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity.  Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long?  As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point.  Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used.  This post is a compilation of the lessons I learned about Twitter and an inside look at the appeal of microblogging and why smart marketers should pay attention to this trend and some ideas for the possibilities it offers. 

1. Broadcast Yourself For Real. This may be YouTube's tagline, but it really applies more to Twitter.  As you start sending these messages to update what you are doing right now and gain "followers" - you start to feel like you are broadcasting yourself.  When you're Twittering, you're on the grid and sharing your thoughts and actions real time.
2. Replace Invasive Instant Messaging. I don't use instant messaging at work, because it is interruptive.  Even when you set your status, you'll often get instant messages that are hard to ignore.  Twitter has the same qualities of instant messaging, without the interruptive qualities.  As a result, it lets you send quick short instant messages to people that they can view and answer when they have a moment.  I found myself quickly using direct tweets the way I might use instant messaging to ask a quick question to one of my contacts.
3. Build An Entourage Quickly.  With the easy import feature from Gmail and the relatively low barrier for following someone, I was up to more than 70 contacts in my Twitter account within 5 minutes of starting to use the site.  Not bad for a quick payoff, considering how long it would take to build a friends list of that many people for a new user of any other social network like Facebook or Linkedin.  Even better, the vast majority of people who you follow will start following you right away.
4. Get Satisfaction by Venting. Throughout the week last week I found myself occasionally annoyed at a stupid ad or a flight delay.  I would never "waste" a blog post on these topics most of the time, but found myself twittering them with great satisfaction.  Somehow, just sharing the negative experience of having to walk all the way to the last gate in the B terminal at O'hare made me feel better about it.
5. Always Find Out What's New.  With Twitter, I knew right away when Matt posted a photo of the guys from our panel at Promo Live, and when Gordon Moore finished his chat at IDF.  The running commentary of the latest news from my contacts was actually really useful and somewhat addictive.  Longer term, at the very least I'll be sending a Twitter update every time I publish a new blog post.
6. Fills A Gap Left By Blogging. Now that I have gained a few thousand consistent readers, I find myself considering more carefully what I write about.  The people who subscribe to this blog invest their time and expect to find something of use ... and there are often times when I abandon a topic because I don't have a strong point of view about it.  My blog has never been about pointing out things out there without some commentary.  Yet sometimes there is something that is interesting which I would just like to share a link on, but not necessarily write about.  Twitter is the perfect way to share those links and a quick thought without spending a whole blog post on it.
7. Highly Useful for Live Blogging. There are several events in the past few months that I have had the chance to attend and live blog.  For most, my live blogging consisted of taking notes during sessions, coming up with a point of view and posting a blog post on it.  This is what I did at the CCR event, and the Ogilvy Verge event.  At Intel's IDF and Promo Live, I tried using Twitter for live blogging instead and found it to be really useful because you can get your thoughts out much more quickly, you can really do it real time, and it forces you to focus on capturing the really key points.  I'll be Twittering many of my other upcoming events now as well.
8. Facilitate Meetups.  When I was heading to a media event after the first day of IDF, I was looking for bloggers to invite to the event.  Luckily Karl from ExperienceCurve spotted me on Twitter and suggested we meet up.  This is one of the earliest benefits that I realized some time ago about Twitter, but it was really nice to see it in action.  Imagine this blown out beyond cities to destinations and you can really visualize the potential power of Twitter.

So what does this all add up to?  For me, Twitter is a compelling platform that can easily become addictive once you start to use it ... a quality that many great sites share.  The marketing opportunity here is super simple:

1. Start following people that care about what you do
2. Respond to their messages where appropriate to start dialogue
3. Send consistent and substantial updates of your own
4. Use Twitter as a platform to inform your followers of news they might care about

Today the end of my week long experiment, I'll be continuing to use Twitter and I'd suggest you give it a go as well.  Now I need to go and send an update to my group letting them know this post is live ...

5 Web2.0 Sites That Don't Forget About Usability

Several years ago I wrote a two hundred page thesis for a Masters program all about user interfaces.  The premise was that simplicity and usability were guiding principles to making any online site successful (seems obvious, I know, but it didn't use to be).  Since the late nineties, the importance of usability had slowly been getting more and more important.  If the beginning of the web was about presence (look, we have a website!) then in the late nineties and early 2000s, the focus shifted to improving that experience and making it more usable and intuitive.  So, here we are in 2007 and the new buzz is Web2.0 and interfaces that are focused on helping people to collaborate with one another and network.  The largest social community online is MySpace - and every month new sites are launched promising the latest and greatest in technology to make your friend circle wider, your life more productive or your blog more popular.  The only problem is, many of these sites are losing focus on the power of having a good and usable interface. 

MySpace is the easiest example of the devolution of user interface quality, but neither Facebook or Second Life offer what anyone could call an easily usable experience (though after using each for enough time, most users likely get over it).  I see new sites every week with basic usability problems such as poor navigation, unclear menu items, confusing design, unreadable text, and extra steps.  So it's easy to wonder if, in the craze of Web2.0, we have lost sight of the importance of a good user interface?  Thankfully, there are a few sites that still have great interfaces, and they seem to be getting recognized for it.  Here are just a few (of the hundreds I have seen) that I would single out as being great examples for anyone out there putting together a site and needing a guide on interfaces that work:

1. 37Signals - The company behind services like Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack, they are probably the ultimate company to watch in terms of creating an amazing interface that makes it easy to work better.  Basecamp is the one site and service that I have recommended to the most people - and one that I am using extensively to coordinate research for my book.  They even have their own book on building successful web applications.
2. Wufoo - I have written about this site before, but it's worth mentioning in this list only because they make something that used to be extremely tough (creating forms for websites) into an easy drag and drop experience.  Wufoo makes forms sexy, and adds good reporting on the backend. 
3. Harvest - As someone who has spent years working in agencies, I am used to timesheets.  No aspect of agency life is as universally hated - but the reason most people despise it is because of the systems companies have in place to track it.  Harvest is an alternative that offers an easy to use interface to track time, and reinvents this hated task into something much easier to do. 
4. Picnik - A relatively new site, Picnik is already getting rave reviews from all kinds of sites, including one of the most influential ... TechCrunch.  The site lets you edit your photos with easy fixes and save the edited versions.  Offering a much simpler interface than Photoshop, the site has lots of little features (like a running tracker telling you the pixel dimensions of your edited image) that make it a pleasure to use for editing photos.
5. Flickr - This is the only site that makes my list of great interfaces which you might call "mainstream" with millions of photos, dedicated users and a growing community.  The site is not only one of the largest photo sharing communities online, it also offers lots of tools like photo clouds and tags to search and organize images.  All that stuff is great, but what makes it really useful is that it can be used by all members of the family - even the non-techie ones.

What each of these sites have in common is an understanding of what their users are trying to do and an interface designed to help them do it.  Web2.0 shouldn't just be about finding new ways for technology to let people collaborate.  It should also mean that we don't forget all the lessons we have learned over the last ten years about how people use the web and the importance of usability.

Live Earth Includes DC, Thanks To The Native Americans

Today might be the largest simultaneous social marketing event ever staged - as Live Earth concerts light up stadium stages on 7.5 stages on 7 continents.  In case you're wondering, the "0.5" stage is right here in DC.  The concert taking place now is at the American Indian Museum after they offered their venue for a "Mother Earth" version of the concert.  Why this venue instead of the preferred larger one on the steps of the Capitol in DC?  Mainly because partisan politics from Republicans who believe global warming is a "hoax" (led by James Inhofe) threatened to keep the DC event from happening and blocked it from taking place in Gore's originally preferred venue.  Regardless, the event is here in DC and I will be heading out to see it live and share photos later tonight.

In the meantime, there are live video streams and information available at http://liveearth.msn.com/ as well as a full schedule of artists and shows.  Despite this live satellite feed - I can't help but wish for more integration of social media so I could share in people's experiences of the shows real time throughout the day.  There is a Live Earth blog, but it is authored by a single individual who is going to the concert in NY and watching the rest online and on TV like the rest of us.  Even the Unofficial Live Earth blog is mostly updated by a single person.  Michael Prospero from the Fast Company Blog is promising to live blog the New York event, and I am sure there are other similar individuals at the other concerts doing the same - but there doesn't seem to be a way to collect this aggregated conversation in a single location, which seems like a big missed opportunity. For a global concert event across 8 cities - one person is never going to be able to share the entire experience of the event in a comprehensive way because they cannot be in more than one (or 2) places at once.  If there was ever a moment where I might actually care to read Twitter updates from lots of people I don't know, this would be it. 

Regardless, watching these events unfold live around the world is addictive and I've been spending much of a day where I intended to work on my book watching the films and concert performances in HD on TV.  The campaign has a very simple call to action and plenty of easy ways for each and every person to make a pledge to "answer the call."  Every social marketing campaign should be so relevant and have such a clear way for anyone participate.  If you haven't seen any of the shows, be sure to visit the Live Earth site today - and stay tuned for a report from the DC event and hopefully some live photos from me later this evening.

Update Rant - Can someone explain to me why the sound and video crew covering the DC event are the only ones that don't seem to understand how to get a good camera shot (without sun flares or blue overtones) or how to get microphones to work where you can actually hear the singers performing?  There's a big step down in quality of the TV broadcast between the DC event and all the other events I have seen so far ...

US Government Uses Blog Summit to Foster Discussion on Pandemic Flu

Consider this a fair warning - this week I will often be blogging about client work as I contribute to the Climate Response Blog.  As I head to London for that event, simultaneously our team has been spearheading a bold new initiative for the Department of Health and Human Services designed to engage bloggers in a discussion around the potential threat of a flu pandemic.  The Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog launched late last week with 16 contributors from health, community, business and faith-based sectors including Pierre Omidyar (founder of Ebay), Nedra Weinriech (author of the Spare Change blog) and many leading authorities on pandemic flu.  The blog convenes these thinkers and other participants for 5 weeks, leading up to a Leadership Summit event in Washington DC.

Though the topic is pretty grim, many experts say a flu pandemic is impending and not a question of if, but of when.  The blog is an interesting experiment from a government agency on bringing influential voices together and thinking outside the powerful walls of Washington.  The blog summit runs through June 27th and will likely stir up some great discussion online both about the topic and about the fact that some government agencies are finally getting smarter and more innovative about fostering discussion and using personal media to spread awareness about an important issue.

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How 7 Basic Human Needs are Driving the New Social Web2.0

I recently read a insightful piece from Ben Hunt about the future of the web2.0 social experience.  It was particularly relevant as I am heading to the Web2.0 Expo here in San Francisco today and will have a chance to see many new technologies later this evening at the "Booth Crawl" event at the opening of the Expo.  Thinking about the future of the social web can be overwhelming - particularly if you look at the quantity of new sites and technologies that are being launched each day.  While we may not suffer from the same overfunded hype of the early 2000s, hype is certainly alive and well and I will likely see quite a bit of it tonight at the Expo.

Yet for most, Web2.0 is about the next evolution of the Internet and how it is becoming more useful for everyone.  Yes, there are lots of cool technologies, and the search for the "killer app" that Hunt brilliantly deconstructs in his paper is important.  The underlying theme, however, is how new services are helping each of us to solve some of our most basic needs from the Internet.  In my opinion, these include:

1. Search - There is no doubt search engines are the dominant tool for finding information online.  More recently, the search for meaning is about more than using powerful algorithms to offer hundreds of thousands of search results.  The social search revolution is about how people are helping other people find information.  The most innovative Web2.0 tools for search are the ones that combine sophisticated algorithms with the ability and dedication of individuals to help highlight, describe and categorize information.
2. Discover - If search is about actively seeking information on a specific topic, discovery is about uncovering information that is likely to be relevant for you presented to you based on your browsing history, habits, related content, or relationships and declared interests.  The popularity of StumbleUpon as well as the millions of people using social bookmarking tools such as Digg and del.icio.us point to the rising use of sites, tags and recommendations to discover new websites or web content.
3. Connect - Managing relationships through contact managers such as LinkedIn is not a new activity online, but there are new tools that are helping each of us to get smarter about how these contacts are managed and make them more useful.  A core concept that Hunt talks about which is now starting to appear is the idea that not all relationships should be treated equal and there needs to be a way to rate the strength of a particular relationship.  When contacts are measured in terms of degrees, connecting to others through your network becomes a much more valid exercise, and one more likely to mimic offline behaviours that take the strength of particular relationships into account. 
4. Protect - As technology enables more innovation, it can also have a dark side with hackers, phishers, and spammers.  Web2.0 has not just been about finding better tools for communication or information, it is also about new thinking for protecting each of us from the dangerous, or just plain annoying.  As more of our digital lives, transactions and communications move online - this area will continue to be vitally important for keeping the Internet a trusted and credible channel to conduct these activities.
5. Publish - Central to the rise of social media is the ability for individuals to easily publish just about any type of content from blogs to podcasts to online video.  This includes publishing in the sense of contributing to dialogue online through reviews or comments.  New services are likely to help make it easier to publish as well as better tools to customize your efforts.  Also, there will continue to be more new sites and social networks on which to publish your content on just about any topic.    
6. Organize - Whether it relates to organizing your personal life through "lifehacker" style tools such as personal calendars or to-do lists, or organizing your bookmarks and saved content, Web2.0 innovation continues to produce many tools for doing so.  On sites that offer access to content published by others or through sites that could be considered "aggregators" (for RSS feeds or other content), organization is a core principle that is seen as another key human benefit.
7. Share - This is a broad concept that includes each of our desire to share our thoughts and expertise, as well as the cause related side of this which includes sharing wealth or supporting causes one believes in.  New tools for giving, and new sites for sharing expertise fit into this category.

There may likely be other core needs that could be included on this list, but thinking about Web2.0 in terms of these categories will help me to evaluate new sites from the show as well as new thinking and opportunities for marketing.  Check back tomorrow for a recap of some highlights from the Web2.0 Expo as well as a list of examples of sites and services that fit each of these categories ...

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Are You Marketing Your Product Backstory?

Several weeks ago, I noted an interesting story about how Dole is offering "farm codes" printed onto stickers that are placed on organic bananas offering consumers the chance to get to know more about the farm that grew the banana by visiting www.doleorganic.com.  On Dole Organic, you can see such information as a description of the banana plantation, photos of workers, and Google Earth images.  Despite the site's average design and limited functionality (no ability for users to interact with the content or add their voice) - the effort represents a great example of new thinking that product marketers are using to capitalize on the global trend towards ethical consumerism.  As more and more attention is being paid to the manufacturing or acquisition process for products, as well as the carbon footprint behind these processes, offering insight into the backstory for how your product is made is becoming more and more necessary.  Certification programs like Dole's Farm Code effort, or the international movement to create a certification for conflict-free diamonds are just two examples.  Soon, the "Made in Tiawan" stickers so often seen and ridiculed through the 80s and 90s may be replaced by reports on the factory, images from the floors, and interviews with the workers.  Social responsibility and ethical consumerism is not just about buying green products, but also understanding the process that they are created with and choosing based on this information.

Yet product backstories have more potential than just offering environmental or societal impact assessments for products.  Backstories are a cultural trend.  More and more films are taking a different approach to the traditional beginning to end timetable for telling a story.  Lost is perhaps the best example of the rise of the backstory, as the hit television show has used the engaging format of weaving a backstory of one of the show's characters into each episode to allow viewers to learn more about each character.  The backstories fill in the details and deepen the emotional connection of a viewer, or a consumer.  You might say it's a stretch to say we will care more about our bananas after having seen images from the farm ... but on some level, it has an impact.  Having worked with BuzzAgent (a word of mouth marketing company) on a number of campaigns, I know that when it comes to WOM, the backstory is particularly important.  Knowing more about a product or company's origins make you more likely to tell others about it.  In many cases, the backstory becomes the marketing story.  Most marketing today focuses on product attributes and uses or creating a need for consumers to purchase.  What if more of our efforts focused on a product's backstory?  At least one marketer is betting that's the way to sell a whole lot more bananas.

Update (06/06/07): Dole also has a blog about this effort at http://doleorganic.blogspot.com/

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Marketing Ideas From Under the Radar 2007

One of my main beliefs about blogging and marketing is that the title always matters.  It matters in selling a book, driving clickthroughs on blog posts or emails, on placing effective keyword marketing, and the list goes on and on.  For just about everything you can do with marketing, choosing the right title is a big deal.  So anything you see about the Under the Radar 2007  event going on today is likely to peak your interest if you are a compulsive seeker of new ideas online.  The title of this event promises to expose new ideas and sites in a way that Demo 2007 did (without the great title).  The scope of this event is far smaller than Demo, though, as it only covers innovations in relation to the office of the future.  In addition, many of the sites featured in the event seemed pretty ordinary - as others have also noted.  Regardless, here are a few sites I think are worth taking a look at as well as some ideas on their potential uses for marketing:

Teqlo
This is a site I have been tracking for some time, but offers a great tool for creating mashups of widgets.  The site features an example of mapping product search with ebay and Google maps to create localized search tools.  There are lots of other unexpected applications, like mapping weather forecasts to upcoming sporting or music events on a site like Upcoming.  Just as Yahoo's Pipes effort allows you to mash your own content feeds - Teqlo has tons of potential marketing applications for taking the widget trend to the next level.

Stikkit
Winner of the Technical Achievement Award at the SxSW web Awards last week, this site takes a concept that others have tried and uses some smart technology to make it useful and easy for developers to build on top of.  Using these online screen-based stikkits to appear as permanent IM windows of tasks and other notes has lots of potential, especially in the new 3D interface models of screens used in Vista.

Wufoo
Creating forms has always been a big part of site development, but there are surprisingly few widget-style tools that let you create these forms easily.  It's an obvious idea, after all tools exist to integrate polls, video, lists and lots of other pieces of content.  Yet Wufoo seems in a class by itself when it comes to simplifying the usually complex art of inserting forms into sites and collecting data, as well as receiving it in a format that allows you to actually do something with it.  In truth, it's really the reporting that makes this a marketing tool worth considering.

For other roundups from the event, check out the following links:

• http://www.undertheradarblog.com/wp_blog.html (Official Event Blog)
• http://mashable.com/2007/03/23/under-the-radar/

The Ultimate Social Network You Haven't Heard Of

Ok, maybe you have ... and it just might be Flixster, a social network dedicated to film, actors, Hollywood and movie fans.  The obvious question you could be wondering is how it can be "the ultimate" when there are so many other social networks that have been around longer, pull more traffic, have more users and generate more buzz?  The main reason is because after using the site, you realize that they have taken what seems like every trick from every other social network, and integrated it into their own site to add to a user's experience. 

For example, visiting an artist's profile page with it's aggregation of images and videos has a look that reminds you of a cross between a Technorati search and a MySpace profile page.  In fact, you can select a skin for your own page or add one to the system - just like you can with MySpace.  Users of Netflix will recognize the rating systems for DVDs, however Flixster extends this to films that have not yet come out and includes links to trailers.  The site has lots of images of actors and actresses - with a built-in scale for rating taken right from the pages of HotorNot.  You can browse for specific actors, or use the Random feature to find a random page, the same powerful philosophy behind services like StumbleUpon and much of curiosity marketing.  Each image and video trailer also has code included below it to cut and paste into your own blog post or other content (just like YouTube).  Users can submit news stories about actors as links and other users can vote for them just like Digg and any other social news site.  Oh, and you can comment on everything - photos, images and news stories. 

The social network element of the site is equally engaging, with the ability to search for people who like the same types of films as you (based on the results of their Movie Compatibility Test) and get in contact.  The Movie Night Planner also lets you and a group friends share movie choices you would like to see, evaluate times, and rate the films based on trailers.  I have railed in the past against the suckiness of some movie theater websites.  Flixster is the exact opposite - a social network dedicated to movie fans with just about everything a movie fan could ever want all rolled into a single interface.  About the only thing missing was the big movie advertising.  That gap probably won't exist for too much longer.  Sony's cool new Face of the Fan - SpiderMan Movie Network promotion could be a great first candidate ...

10 Secrets of Successful Online Community

This past weekend I was moderating a panel at CommunityNext, a smart event focused on everything about online communities coordinated by Noah Kagan.  The event was a fun gathering of extremely smart folks from some of the hottest online communities today - and panelists/speakers shared many great thoughts on topics ranging from how to be more awesome, to the genesis behind HotorNot.com.  Through the day, I took several notes and during the flight back to the east coast, started to aggregate the day into some central lessons about online communities gained from listening to many of the speakers, as well as looking at what is making many of the sites from attendees stand out.  Here's my list of 10 lessons that I took away from the event, as well as a few great sites that are worth visiting for further exploration:

1. Avoid being just "niche" - Over and over from founders of online communities was the desire to do away with the word "niche."  It seems to stem mostly from the assumption that niches are small things, whereas each of these online communities is spent bringing together anyone with the same passion - not just people from "niche" groups.  The lesson here seems to be - don't think small.
2. Listen to your users - If there was one thread heard over and over throughout the day, it was the power of listening to your users.  Each of the featured sites had amassed significant numbers of passionate individuals who provide their time and energy to the site and the community.  They are highly likely to share their opinions, and most likely to appreciate and publicize it if you actually listen to their opinions.
3. Use accidental marketing - An interesting panel question Guy Kawasaki asked at the end of the day focused on the fact that members of companies on the founding panel didn't seem to need or value marketing very much.  In a telling response, Max Levchin of Slide shared that they didn't do any marketing because "the service already was viral."  Well, I would argue that viral has to do with word of mouth, which some would consider marketing - but the interesting thing was that most founders didn't seem to feel there was a way to plan marketing, it just happens.  Not sure I agree with this view, as I think smart marketing has a lot less to do with ad buys and a lot more to do with doing things that are noteworthy ... but it was interesting to hear their experiences nonetheless.
4. Get smart on recruiting - Everyone is recruiting, and many of them are seeking the same types of people ... but the theme of the event seemed to be positioning your community as a great team to join.  It was an interesting angle on "sales" - as usually these events are focused on sites recruiting either members or advertisers.  Here, I think any of the online communities would have been happy to find the right person to join their team out of the event.
5. Foresake VC funding - I felt a little bad for Guy in the last panel as he heard from company after company that each had avoided taking venture capital funding.  Of course, there is still a big place for VC and leveraged correctly, it can really mean the difference between success and failure.  But there was a vibe running through the event that most folks starting online communities would do anything they could to avoid taking VC funding.  It seems to have become a last resort.
6. Have a passion - This was one of the points made very early on by Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan in their opening presentation about Brand Utopia - and repeated throughout the event.  Passion in what you are doing may come from different places as founders of online communities shared.  For some, it's a personal passion.  For others it comes from seeing the way that users embrace a service and feeling connected/responsible to those users.  Either way, passion is a prerequisite.
7. Master the emotional return - One of the best points made by Premal Shah as he talked about Kiva was that the model and concept of the site had mastered the art of providing people with an emotional return as an incentive that was far more important than a financial one.  For those unfamiliar, Kiva is a site that allows people to provide microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.  Of course, everyone needs to make some money.  But a successful online community is one that can consistently provide that emotional return to users.  That's the most important ingredient - and if you don't have that, then the financial aspect will not last that long. 
8. Don't lose the fun - James Hong of HotorNot.com was the chief brand ambassador of fun on the final panel of the day, and his site reflects it.  In an entertaining way of describing the mission of this site, he noted that it was to "waste as much of corporate America's time as possible."  It's a classic rebel mission, and one focused on fun as a paramount concept.  The fun factor can be the toughest element to keep as a site grows.  James has a lesson for any online community worth heeding.
9. Keep it real - From using error messages with personality, to not being afraid to have a voice as part of the community - keeping it real is a big deal.  Part of the appeal of many communities is the personal story behind it and the founders.  That's what gets people engaged to start with, and that's what keeps them engaged throughout.  Communities are made up of real people.  To succeed you have to start real, and stay that way.
10. Be better than you - I kept this point last because I thought it spoke well to the future of online communities and how they must always be evolving.  The guys from Threadless were probably received as the most popular of the day (aside from Guy Kawasaki, of course) - and one of the most entertaining of their slides was the growth chart which plotted time on one axis, and awesomeness on the other.  Over time, they have basically gotten more awesome.  But a key ingredient in that is always improving - because any competitor gunning for you is aiming to be better than you.  So you have to aim for the same thing. 

Hopefully, these lessons are useful for those of you who weren't able to attend the event.  For those who were there, I'd love to hear if you think I captured the essence of the event or there are other lessons that stood out for you.  As requested by Noah, I am tagging this post "communitynext2007" and request any others who write follow up posts to do the same.

And a Few Sites/Ideas That Stood Out ...

• Kiva.org - Speaking to Premal about this site, it's tough not to get caught up in the idea and promise of Kiva.  Not many online communities can truly have the power to change the world.  This is one of them.
• AnimalAttractions.com - Surprised to find another attendee from DC, I shared a drink with Dan and talked about the great concept behind his site ... helping pet owners to meet one another through their shared passion.  A brilliant idea that is themed after interactions that already happen in real life - if you're single and have a pet, you need to visit this site.
• Iparklikeanidiot.com - This is quite possibly the most useful site I have ever visited, from the creative folks at Skinny Corp (also behind Threadless.com).  For anyone who has felt the wrath of not being able to park in a spot due to someone else's stupidity, just order a set of 20 of these (low-tack) stickers and slap one onto the offending car for the ultimate revenge.  Love it!
• Loopt - Taking the concept I just wrote about in my post on "Beaconvertising" even further, Loopt has a cool concept for helping friends to find one another in the same space using principles from IM.  The service lets you find a friend that is within a set distance, locate a place nearby to meet, send IMs and lots more.  I wish I had this when I was in college (and had 100+ people to add to my list) ... but even now (when my list is much shorter) there is still great potential in this.
• DeviantArt.com - Probably the most mentioned favourite site of people at the event, aside from Flickr, DeviantArt is worth a visit for this reason alone.  The site has artists of all types uploading some very high quality stuff and offer an almost addictive experience once you get there.  They couldn't have gotten better buzz from the event if they had been a sponsor ...
• MyChurch.org - Joe Suh had this great idea to connect some of the 300,000 Christian churches nationwide into an online community and created a comprehensive set of faith-based tools to help churches connect with one another and share knowledge and community events.  As he starts to recruit more parishes and get more members - this will be a force to watch.

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Yahoo! Pipes Offers The Next Evolution of Marketing with RSS

RSS is one of those technologies that has a relatively enigmatic name for a very simple concept.  The idea that you can provide a feed of content that others can subscribe to is the ultimate simplicity.  Yet so far, RSS has been used primarily to push content that is offered by one group to many subscribers.  The power of RSS is mainly in the fact that I can pull multiple feeds from very different content providers into a single location.  My RSS aggregator has news from MarketingVox, the NY Times, my upcoming Netflix movies, and tips from Lifehacker (among lots of others) all on a single page.  That's powerful stuff.  But what if I want to have an even more customized view?  There are plenty of services like Squidoo and Rollyo that have pursued an idea that in the past I have termed "human filtered search."  Whatever you call it, this is the growing trend of people filtering content for other people.  It's the idea behind those sites, as well as the basic concept behind social news sites like Digg or iceRocket. 

Yahoo's recently launched Yahoo! Pipes service offers what may be the missing piece to help RSS evolve into an even more useful tool.  Mashups, already hugely popular for music, involve taking unique bits of content and putting them together to create something new.  Until now, mashups with RSS have been limited mainly to people using extended tools like OPML to create single RSS feeds out of multiple feeds.  What if you could go even further and filter RSS feeds to include parts of content from multiple feeds, and present this all together in a single interface?  You could aggregate data to help customers with product searches, mashup online reviews into a single feed, offer ongoing updates on product buzz and help your brand ambassadors share their affinity for your brand through multiple sources of content.  Yahoo Pipes is a great concept that could just redefine the way that RSS can be used for content aggregation, as well as for marketing.

Some useful resources to read more:

• O'Reilley Radar - In depth coverage of creating pipes and potential for uses
• Yahoo Discussion Forum - See the conversation about Pipes (and user suggestions)
• Technorati WTF - Blog buzz about Yahoo Pipes
• Robin Good - Great in depth coverage about Pipes with lots of resource links

technorati tags: yahoo pipes yahoopipes marketing rss opml mashup socialmedia rohitbhargava

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Chalkvertising: Watch Julian Beever Create One of his 3-D Pavement Drawings

As a follow up to my earlier post about our campaign for Aveeno working with Julian Beever, we just posted a video on YouTube showing how Julian creates those amazing 3-D pavement drawings of his.  You can see all of his previous work in a Flickr Gallery, and the video is below:

Google Celebrates Australia Day With An Aerial Maps Mashup

For those that haven't been keeping up on their Aussie daily news ticker, today is Australia Day - and to celebrate, Google has launched an innovative campaign where they have been photographing Sydney Harbor from the skies through the course of the day and posting images on a mashup site for anyone to see.  The site tells people about the times when they might see the Google branded plane flying overhead (it has permission to fly low to capture high-res images) and asks them to create formations or hold up signs that may be seen from the plane.  Forget bringing tiny signs to football games, now you can get onto a mashup to be seen around the world.  It's a fun campaign idea and is already getting some significant buzz in Sydney as people get ready for the plane in all sorts of ways.  The article even points to a group from the Nature Conservation Council in Bondi Beach that gathered over 50 people to make a human sign reading "Vote Climate."  How about this for the next evolution in social marketing?  Maybe the next time there is a five car pileup on a major US highway - you will see a group gather to create a human sign to target all the news "vulture-copters" that descend on the scene to provide 24-7 aerial coverage.  Their message?  "Drive Better."  If only someone was dedicated to that cause ...

Update (01/29/07): As it turns out, the execution of this event may not have been exactly what Google was hoping for as they were forced to alter the routing of the plane from air traffic control and were forced to leave some people disappointed.  David Utter has a good summary of the story over at WebProNews.

A Recap of 2006 on Influential Interactive Marketing

Let's start with a warning ... this is the "clip show" post where I recycle a lot of old material so if that causes you extreme pain, please close this window now and come back tomorrow.  For all the rest of you, it's the holidays and a quick glance around the marketing blogosphere will show that these clip show posts are in right now.  With nearly 400 post on this blog already, there is lots of content to choose from ... allowing me the luxury to conveniently ignore those posts from the past year that are outdated or that I just don't like anymore.  Here is a sampling of the rest:

Concepts & Ideas:
This is a collection of concepts and ideas that were introduced or discussed on this blog and then travelled virally to other blogs and were discussed elsewhere in media.  A good collection of ideas, many of which I still hope to implement on a client campaign (but haven't yet).

• Soundbombs
• Virtual Hugs
• Placecasting
• Widget Marketing
• Text Messaging Customer Service
• Tagging with Domain Names
• Social Media Optimization
• Automated Blog Translation
• Photopedia
• Human Search Filters

Rules & Guides:
These are a group of "Guy Kawasaki style" posts written in list format as guides to various topics from SMO to viral marketing.  It's a format I have always liked and you will probably see many more posts in this format going into 2007.

• Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media
• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization
• Signs Your Viral Marketing May Flop
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers
• Golden Rules of Blog Etiquette

Presentations & Published Work:
Links to presentations given at industry events as well as guest contributions to other blogs.  There is some good powerpoint link bait in here, useful for those who are interested in any of these topics but couldn't make it to the events referenced.

• 7 Rules for Getting into Search (Search Engine Strategies Conference)
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers (White Paper)
• The Human Side of Search (Search Insider Summit)
• Guide to Blog Marketing (SixApart Seminar) 
• Finding your Personality in Personal Media (Guest Column on Strumpette)

That's it.  Look out tomorrow for an all new post about what I think the top ten marketing ideas to watch will be in 2007.

Quantcast Offers Free Audience Data on 20 Million+ Sites

Yesterday I had a chat with Konrad Feldman, one of the co-Founders of a company called Quantcast that quietly launched an online measurement tool about two months ago which is currently in beta mode.  The tool is one of the first free resources I have seen focused on offering a complete picture of audience composition for just about any site.  In the past, I have found Alexa.org (the main competitor for free data) to be notoriously unreliable, and other options such as Nielson Netratings and Comscore are wonderfully thorough - but often out of the price range for many smaller organizations and clients (and therefore not as widely used).  The beauty of Quantcast's solution is in the dashboard view (see screenshots below) that allows you to now compare sites large and small to one another.  In speaking with Konrad, a key challenge he noted for advertisers is finding large pockets of a particular audience on sites beyond the top tier media properties.  For smaller publishers, the corresponding challenge is that they cannot field a large sales force to promote their sites and therefore must rely on online channels.

Good media planning is an art - but when it comes to interactive many media planners are taking the easy way out ... simply skimming the surface, picking the largest sites in a particular category without much thought.  Aside from the inventory glut this is creating on the largest players, it is also leaving a large number of sites either ignored, or only approached by the saaviest of interactive media planners.  The mission of Quantcast, as Konrad described, was to even the playing field by allowing advertisers easier access to consistent data, and giving publishers more visibility from advertisers and the chance to be judged based on metrics and quantifiable data.  Taking Quantcast for a spin, it's obvious there is lots of potential in this tool.  As Quantcast gets more sites to become "quantified" by registering their site and adding a tracking GIF - this data will continue to improve.  In the meantime, the site is already a very useful tool for anyone looking to better understand audience figures across a range of sites and verify the inflated numbers some sites have put out to entice advertisers.  Keeping publishers honest and helping advertisers think outside of the box ... seems like a great combination to me.

Note: For a more PR centric view of the potential uses for Quantcast, check out my post on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.

Screenshot of Audience Data for www.dooce.com:

Screenshot of Comparison Data for ESPN, Paypal, MTV, Macys and Target:

Screenshot of Audience Data for YouTube.com:

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Joining the 9 Rules Marketing Community

9 Rules is an online network of blogs dedicated to uniting bloggers passionate about their efforts in many different categories.  For more than a year, I have been an active reader of many of the blogs in the network; particularly in the marketing community.  Folks like Cameron Olthuis and Karl Long.  One of my favourite marketing personalities (and heroes), Guy Kawasaki is also part of the network.  Several weeks ago I submitted my blog for the first time as part of 9 Rules' Round 5 open submission and yesterday I learned that the Influential Interactive Marketing blog was selected to join the network.  I added the customary leaf to my sidebar and will soon have my blog listed in the marketing and business communities on 9 Rules. 

I'm looking forward to contributing to the community and getting familiar with all of the bloggers in the marketing community as well as in the other 32 communities. Congrats also to Lee Odden, Eric + Lee, Andrew Wee, and Richard Ball - who all joined the 9 Rules marketing community in Round 5 as well (apologies if I missed any new marketing bloggerss).  Be sure to visit the 9 Rules site and add some new ones to your reading list for the new year ... I will definitely be doing the same.