Influential Marketing Blog

How "Location Shifting" Could Reinvent GeoTargeted Online Marketing

There's a pretty simple idea that could transform the landscape of targeted online communications, but no one is doing it ... yet.  If you have ever done any online marketing that has been targeted by geography, you know that there are pretty much only two ways to do it currently online:

1. Based on IP address of where the user is accessing the Internet. Notoriously unreliable because of shared servers and inability to truly pinpoint a user's location.
2. Based on a profile that the user has created indicating where they live. This is much better with two big assumptions ... that people tell you the truth about where they are, and that they are usually there (as opposed to travelling).

For someone like me, this system makes it impossible to target me on a geographic basis. I am always travelling, often using Internet through shared connections in multiple locations, and my Facebook profile says I belong to the San Francisco network (intentionally), even though I live in DC.  My email address has the word Australia in it and I registered it while I was living in Australia and never changed my region. There are a lot of other consumers like me, making it tough for any business to truly target geographically by relying on such uncertain data. The one solution with promise involves using the mobile platform to geotarget based on where a person physically is. This is good, but still incomplete because it doesn't allow you to predict where someone will be.  What if there was a way to geotarget your messages not to where a user currently is, or even where they say they live, but to where they will be?

This is possible today, because more than ever before, people are now broadcasting where they are going to be and what they are currently doing through social media.  Look at a platform such as Twitter, where people routinely update their status to indicate where they are and what they are feeling.  Or a travel site like Dopplr, which I use to update my upcoming trips.  To a degree, this is private information - but many people publish it live for anyone to see.  Location shifting means geotargeting your marketing communications based on information about location that your consumers are giving you or posting online.  As a result, if smart marketers started using this information, a whole range of things could be possible:

1. Banks could verify that you are travelling and not have to cancel your cards because of suspected fraud
2. Marketers could send special offers to people who express a particular sentiment in a certain location (eg - someone Twitters that they are hungry in Manhattan, and gets a Twitter message back with a coupon to a local pizza shop)
3. Car services could automatically update their drivers who are waiting for pickups
4. Your friends could invite you to events through social networks based on where you will be and not just where you live

What else could be possible with location shifting?  Let me know if you think this idea works.

Plse Forgiv Typoes - Jott Fights Terse Reply Syndrome

For anyone who uses a Blackberry religiously, or works with those who do - you also know that there is a new language that has emerged for that mode of communication. Similar to text messages, brevity is a growing necessity with Blackberry communications and it is leading to people doing things like including a disclaimer at the bottom of their emails apologizing for the short replies, and possible grammatical and spelling errors of their message. Apparently having small keys is enough of an excuse to spell poorly and forget about periods or commas.  I wish we had that excuse when were were in school. Still, we have all seen this effect and to a degree have probably learned to accept it because there wasn't an alternative.

Probably, you don't even think about it anymore ... until a campaign like the "Terse Reply Syndrome" from Jott reminds you that those short mistyped replies are no way to communicate. Jott has a beta service that allows you to speak a reply into your Blackberry and it will type it for you. That alone is an interesting and useful service (assuming it actually works), but as a marketer you can learn a lot from their approach to launching it. The Terse Reply Syndrome (TRS) is a situation that most businesspeople will immediately recognize, whether they have been on the receiving or sending end of these types of messages. And we would all love to find a better way. The campaign works because it talks about a real situation of need that many business people will be familiar with, and presents a solution that allows you to use the same tools you are used to using. Their videos (shot in the style of a "when the moment is right" Viagra ad), promise "side effects" of longer more thoughtful replies, less thumb stress, and more free time.

This is where the message really hits home, because you can have better communications without giving up your Blackberry. Their useful blog offers further tips on how to effectively use their service, and it even works with lots of common social media tools. The service is in limited beta and free at the moment, but you should sign up quickly because eventually it will be a paid service. It's easy to imagine this is one of those few services where once you try it for free, you are probably going to pay for it.*  Smart marketing combined with a great and useful service. This is the type of Web2.0 service we could all use more of.

* Note - This post is about the marketing behind Jott. I haven't been able to try it yet as it doesn't appear that you can use it on a Blackberry that is issued from work when your employer doesn't pay for phone access (which my employer doesn't). If anyone knows a way around this, please share!

Marketing In The Age Of Disposable Email

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it. That alone isn't the reason I've had to give up my use of Bob's email, though. The reason is that I can't pick up those confirmation emails that you need to click on in order to activate an account.

Recently, I came across a site called Mintemail that has found an interesting solution ... disposable email. This is essentially what it sounds like - an email address that is good for four hours, usually just long enough to use to register for a site, get a confirmation email and pick it up. The service has lots of smart features built in, such as automatically saving the email address to your clipboard so you're ready to paste it into a form. Every once in a while, there is a solution so simple you wonder why no one else has done it first. I love seeing things like that and this definitely qualifies. If you have a form that requires your audience to enter an email address they are not interested in giving you, it looks like you won't be able to rely on the confirmation email to get you a working email address anymore. In the age of disposable email, it looks like you're going to have to work harder to earn the right to ask for a user's email address. I suppose the upside is that now those bogus emails will bounce after four hours. I bet poor Bob wishes I found this site a lot earlier.

Link Credit: http://www.vqcdesigns.com/blog/

Inside Lenovo's Olympic Blogging Program

This past week in the string of posts about the book coming out, I've been stockpiling ideas for "real" blog posts and wanting to write about them more and more. Thankfully now that I launched the Personality Matters blog, I will post most of the updates about the book there and refocus on marketing strategy and insights here. I can't promise I won't share the occasional post about the book ... but I know that you're giving me your time to read this blog because you want marketing ideas and you want lots of them. So this post is about one I'm particularly excited about.

The Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team recently finalized the details to take the lead on what I would have to call my dream project. Those who know me know that I am what you might call a full on Olympic enthusiast. I went to college in Atlanta and was there for the 1996 Olympics. I moved to Sydney in 1998 and lived there during the Sydney Olympics, and my first son was born right in the middle of the Athens Olympics (during the women's marathon, ironically). So I've been there and seen it, and more importantly, I think it is a world stage that nothing else even comes close to.

Which brings me to this very ambitious project that we are helping Lenovo with. David Churbuck, our main client, posted about the idea behind the project on his blog and it is a brilliant summary of a big vision that Lenovo and David himself has for this project. Here it is in a nutshell:

The Problem: Media coverage of the Olympics has become about melodrama that is broadcasted as "real" stories. But those producers only choose the athletes who have overcome quadruple knee surgery and the lack of a college degree to become a world champion ... in other words, the extreme stories.

The Insight: What about the real athletes who spend every day training and working hard just to get to the Olympics whether they have a shot of winning or not?  Their voices could be the most powerful and this Olympics more than any other promises to offer the chance for them to do that.

The Project: We are seeking 100 potential Olympic athletes from around the world to all start and maintain a blog all about their experience leading up to and during the Games. In return, Lenovo is offering all participants the chance to use a new IdeaPad laptop for their blogging and help from our team to set up and maintain their blogs. 

This is a big project on a scale that is completely global, multi-lingual and very ambitious. Lenovo, to their credit, are not content to sit back with their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay and Olympic Village (already considerable efforts) and call it a job well done.  If this is the year for Olympics 2.0, this program should be one of the best examples of it. Our main goal right now is finding Olympic athletes, so if you know any (or you happen to be one), please get in touch with myself rohit [dot] bhargava [at] ogilvypr.com or David.

Be Part Of The Personality Not Included Book Launch On March 28th

There are a lot of ideas for how to launch a book online. As I head toward launching* Personality Not Included this Friday, I've looked at most of them. Some authors create a group and ask all their contacts to all hit an online bookstore like Amazon at one time to create a surge in sales.  Others coordinate big launch events in the real world and aim to use those to propel interest in their book. Bigger books might buy advertising to announce a launch and, of course, there is the old PR method of blasting lots of press releases at people who may or may not be interested in the book. There is one big problem with all these approaches: none of them are very conversational.

A conversation does not start instantly with a big spike and then trail off. A really good conversation builds momentum steadily and eventually turns into something more powerful. So my aim today is not to create a short term spike, but to start a conversation about the central idea of the book - which is that personality matters, and continue it over the next few weeks and months. To jumpstart this conversation, I'm asking for your help - and offering you something in return.

My idea is simple: if you send me five questions that you want to know about the book or personality, I'll write you a response on Friday that you can publish on your blog. Let's call these virtual interviews (ie - interviews by email). You choose whether to post the interview on your blog or not after you get my responses, but I am essentially offering for ANY BLOGGER to send me interview questions and I will respond with answers that are NOT cut and pasted, but specific to your questions. I will send all my responses to you on Friday in the order that I get your questions, and I will link to all the posted interviews on Friday.  On Monday, I'll be running a competition on my blog to let readers vote on the Best Interview. The winner will get a signed copy of my book and a gift certificate for $100 from Amazon. Here are a few reasons you may want to do it:

1. For relatively little effort, you'll get a customized post by me that you can use exclusively on your blog
2. Your blog will be featured in my follow up post compiling all the interviews (getting you more visibility)
3. You have a chance to win a signed copy of my new book and a gift certificate for from Amazon.com if your post is voted "Best Interview" by the readers of my blog.

That's about it. I'll be answering review questions in the order that I get them, so please send me yours soon at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com and I will add you to the list. If you don't have a blog, you can still ask questions by leaving a comment on this post - there will be a prize for best question from the comments too. For the latest news about the book launch and access to exclusive content which you can't get anywhere else, be sure to join my Facebook group for the book if you haven't already and also follow the launch in real time by adding me to your Twitter follow list (Twitter ID - rohitbhargava), or friending me on Facebook (which republished my updates if you are not a Twitter user).

Update (3/26/08): Up to 25 interview requests in less than 24 hours ... thanks to all the bloggers for your interest - I'm hoping to make it to 50 request by Friday!

* The book bindery date is this Friday, which means the book is complete and printed and they will be shipping out to those who preordered over the weekend or on Monday (so you should have your copy by early next week). The official date when they will be in bookstores across the US and Canada is likely to be around April 14th - and the book will be released internationally about 4-6 weeks after that (across Europe, Asia, Australia). If you have a specific query about your country and when the book will be out, please send me an email and I can let you know.

10 Easy Ways to Piss Off A Blogger (from SXSW)

At SXSW yesterday, I ran a "core conversation" called 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger.  This year at SXSW, these aptly titled "conversations" were a type of speaking slot where there was a round table and the challenge of engaging people in a discussion about a particular topic.  Mine was one close to my heart ... the best way to piss off a blogger.  I had created a Facebook event page before the session to try and build the buzz and going into yesterday I had almost 50 people signed up.  So I figured we'd get about 20 to 25.  After the session, I spoke to one of the participants who said he counted about 70 - so we had a really tough challenge of having a conversation with 70 people.

Learning from some of the feedback that came from a panel on Social Media Metrics that I had participated in a day earlier, my main aim was to make sure everyone walked out of the session with what I had promised them ... the 10 easy ways.  The format of the session was a bit different too - as there was no presentation or powerpoint, and I didn't walk in with the 10 ways.  Instead our aim was to collaborate, discuss and walk out with the ten.  I think we managed to make it to more than ten.  A few folks kindly offered to take some live notes and have posted about the ten, but without further ado ... here are the 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger, as defined by a group of super smart and engaged folks who all made it to be part of this conversation:

1. Invite bloggers to participate in something and don't give them a chance to talk about themselves. This was what I opened the session with, followed by letting people around the group introduce their name and their blogs.  A list of people who chose to share their names and blogs is at the end of this post.
2. Pretend to be a "long time reader" when you actually just visited the blog once and read a few posts.
3. Use a blogger's content or identity without giving proper attribution
4. Send irrelevant information that exhibits no understanding of what they care about or fail to personalize it
5. Add them to a PR list and don't let them get off of it
6. Make it hard for them to link to something by hiding your content behind usernames/passwords, giving them uncertain directions or requiring them to take multiple steps
7. Ask for favors as part of your first outreach to them without building a relationship or earning the right to ask them to help you
8. Fail to identify yourself or falsely represent yourself as something or someone you are not.  This includes failing to mention something about your or your employer that is relevant.
9. Set an unreasonable expectation for a blogger and expect things in an unreasonable amount of time ... ie - sending informaiton and expecting them to post within a few hours.  Quick poll of our session showed that for the vast majority of bloggers, it's not their day job.
10. Get the journalism relationship right.  Some bloggers consider themselves journalists and others don't.  It was clear from the participants that this is a tricky subject, as some people also noted after the session. 

I think we actually ended up with more than ten, but these were the main ones.  I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing more thoughts from some of the participants as the SXSW haze settles and they get a chance to get back to their computers.  It's a crazy show ... lookout for a post here tomorrow on what I think has been the most interesting cultural and technological story of the show: the dominant use of Twitter.

Finally, special thanks to Aaron from Longstation and Steve Harbula (Director of Marketing for the Denver Broncoes) who were both kind enough to take live notes and post them almost right away after our session.

============================

Partial List of Participating Bloggers (from a list passed around - we missed many bloggers, so please add your name and thoughts in a comment if you were there and I'll update the post):

• Destin Joy Layne - The Green Fork http://www.eatwellguide.org
• Biray Alsac - Fitness & Technology Blog http://www.befitwithberay.com
• Beth Carls - K-Ized Mindoh! http://mindoh.wordpress.com
• Lindsay Yaw - Body, Mind & Soul http://www.bethree.com
• Sunil Doshi - http://blog.swiftmob.com
• Adam Brohman - http://amediacirc.us
• Brian Buser - http://www.minggl.com
• Daniel Englander - http://www.greentechmedia.com
• Meghan Warby - http://withoutayard.blogspot.com
• Ruth Ward - http://ruthward.wordpress.com | http://www.sxswm.com
• Jonny Goldstein - http://www.jonnygoldstein.com
• Eric Bryn - Real Estate Relativity http://www.realestaterelativity.com
• Heather Barmore - No Pasa Nada http://www.nopasanada.com
• Amy Bills - Bullblog http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/bullblog
• Eloy Zuniga - http://www.eloyz.com
• Aaron Long - http://www.longstation.com
• Greg Swan - Perfect Porridge http://www.perfectporridge.com
• Danielle Kozich - http://danipennsylvania.blogspot.com
• David J. Neff - Futuring and Innovation in Non Profits http://www.fispace.org
• Marjan Jindrich - Consumers Union Blogs http://www.consumersunion.org/blog
• Tara Anderson - http://iquitforlijit.typepad.com/i_quit_for_lijit/
• Eric Berto - http://www.etelos.com/blogs
• Jackie Huba - http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/
• Samantha Warren - http://www.badassideas.com

Also, thanks to Maura Welch, Sanjay Sabrani, Tracy Locke, Liz Link, Shannon McKarney, Gladys Kong, and many other participants who didn't add their names to the list for sharing their perspective as people who interact with bloggers and want to do it better.  We may have focused on ways to piss off bloggers, but clearly there is some great interest and emerging guidelines on how to end up with happier bloggers.  For reference, the guidelines from our 360 Digital Influence team that I mentioned to several of you at the session can be found here: http://blog.ogilvypr.com/?p=244

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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.

Inside the 5 Badges of the Conference Caste System

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge.  I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name.  I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event.  Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a conversation with other speakers.  If you think about it, the badges at a conference are like a caste system.  Your badge identifies which group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy away from a conversation with you. 

There are usually only five types of badges that you can get at a conference (listed in order of importance):

1. Speaker
2. Media
3. Sponsor
4. Attendee
5. Vendor

Being a speaker is usually the best choice, because it positions you as an expert at the event and you also have a chance to demonstrate your expertise in front of a subset of attendees.  Media is usually second best, because just about all the sponsors and vendors want to get media coverage.  Last week at an event like the Consumer Electronics Show, however, most people would agree that media was definitely number one because of the relative importance of media coverage to that event.  The interesting thing about "media" at CES (as well as at most other large events today) is that this group is usually divided into two categories: bloggers and press.  For CES, the blogger badges were gray, and the press badges were red.  Thinking this would be a good chance for a bit of a social experiment, I went and got both badges ... the blogger badge by virtue of my blog, and the press badge as a result of my writing being republished by the good folks at Digital Media Wire (sorry I missed the Insider event, Ned).

What did I learn?  Probably not surprisingly, the blogger badge got a lot less attention and special treatment.  It was an odd feeling to walk through certain booths first with my gray badge and then switch to the red one.  There were different rooms for bloggers versus press, and in the press room there was real food (not just snacks), rows of press releases that you could pickup and many invites for private parties or events.  Clearly, there is a gap in perceived value between bloggers and journalists from the organizers of CES, as well as many of the vendors exhibiting at the event.  It really is no different than a caste system where individuals are judged based on the color of their badges.  The question is, when will we see this situation change?  Already, there are signs that it is changing.  Most notably, the fact that there is a blogger room and blogger credentials at an event of this size at all.  The way I see it, in another few years, events like this will start to embrace bloggers and media on the same level and apply a similar criteria to who gets credentials.  This means the real metric will be audience and reach.  Regardless of whether you write for a blog or something else, your credentials will be based on the number of people you reach.  It's just a matter of time before it happens.

Blogger Social 2008 and the Art of Personalized Outreach

The first thing I should say is that I was planning to write about Blogger Social 2008 anyway.  You'll see why I started with that disclaimer in a moment ...

Just about everyone in any kind of communications role has probably reach out to at least one blogger at some point to share something of value and ask for a link.  For most bloggers, the greatest value they can offer to someone is to choose to post about something they are doing.  One lesson I have been reminded of time and time again, though, is that sometimes having great and relevant content is not enough.  I was reminded of this fact on two distinct occasions over the past few days.

The first was Steve's recent post on Adrants about how Amber Lee (Obama Girl) created a personalized video for him talking about how much she loves Adrants.  It's a brilliant move by BarelyPolitical.com to create something specifically targeted at Steve and Adrants, as well as a strong relationship builder.  There's a lesson in this for any marketer hoping to build a connection with a highly influential blogger in any industry.

The second was when I started to see lots of anticipation posts from fellow marketing bloggers sharing that there are just 90 days left until Blogger Social 08.  This is going to be a great informal gathering of marketing bloggers and something long overdue.  Organized primarily by marketing bloggers CK and Drew McLellan, the event now has a trailer of sorts, thanks to Mark Goren.  The video features images of all the bloggers attending the event, including me.  Which brings me back to my disclaimer from earlier.  I was planning to write about this event.  The video made it personal again for me and helped propel me to do it sooner rather than later.  It just goes to show, sometimes a bit of personalization (along with a play to blog ego - which we all have) makes the difference between just having great content and getting it talked about:

PS - If you are a marketing blogger, you should definitely consider registering yourself for Blogger Social 08 - it will be in NY on the weekend of April 4th.  Below is the list of just a few marketing bloggers already registered:

Susan Bird Tim Brunelle Katie Chatfield Terry Dagrosa Matt Dickman Luc Debaisieux Gianandrea Facchini Mark Goren Gavin Heaton Sean Howard CK Valeria Maltoni Drew McLellan Doug Meacham Marilyn Pratt Steve Roesler Greg Verdino CB Whittemore Steve Woodruff Paul McEnany Ann Handley David Reich Tangerine Toad Kristin Gorski Mack Collier David Armano Ryan Barrett Lori Magno Tim McHale Gene DeWitt Mario Vellandi Arun Rajagopal Darryl Ohrt Joseph Jaffe Rohit Bhargava Anna Farmery Marianne Richmond Thomas Clifford Lewis Green Geoff Livingston Kris Hoet Connie Reece CeCe Lee Jonathan Trenn Toby Bloomberg Seni Thomas

How Much Does Online Privacy Matter To You?

This is a post that I am guessing will get some fairly passionate responses on either side of the debate.  Here's the question lots of people are asking today: where and how much does privacy really matter to you online?  This is a critical question for 3 reasons:

1. Marketers have more data about people than they ever have
2. Social networks are experimenting with new ways to let marketers use data that was previously hidden
3. People are sharing more and more of their private lives online

I wrote a piece about two weeks ago for the ThinkerNet site which talked about why identity may be the future of online advertising.  The article got some very good reasoned comments from folks who wondered whether Facebook may be overstepping their bounds and compromising their user's privacy.  These are valid questions hovering around many other sites and social networks as well.

I recall another such uprising a few years ago when Google first introduced Gmail with a similarly contentious idea ... serving text ads based on the content of your email.  You may disagree with me on this, but I feel that one place online where I am most concerned about privacy is in my email.  The simple reason for this is that the information I choose to share on any social network is up to me.  My email, on the other hand, is usually meant to be private.

For these reasons, I would say that privacy matters most to me in my email, and less so in my profiles on social networks.  Does this mean that I want people grabbing my personal details or stealing my identity?  Of course not.  But the problem is that many people are lumping privacy concerns into this single bucket.  Just because someone serves ads against data they have doesn't mean they are going to sell your credit card information and email address to the highest bidder.  When Google first introduced Gmail, it came with the unheard of condition that in order to get it, you would have to be comfortable with them serving text ads against the content of your emails

Yet in time I got used to it - as most Gmail users did.  Perhaps I'm unique, but I've even been guilty of sending myself an email with a brand or product name in it so I will get the associated Google ads with discount codes and links that I can click on and follow to purchase an item I was already buying.  So, here's the real question I am coming to ... if we can all get used to Google's algorithms reading our private emails and serving ads against them, then won't we all get used to identity targeting schemes like Facebook's beacon as well?  What do you think?

Update (12/11/07) - Seth Godin just posted about privacy online asking a similar question ...

Announcing The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore

Several months ago I participated in the LitLiberation Blogger Challenge launched by my friend Tim Ferriss to try and raise money for DonorsChoose.org (a site which allows teachers to submit funding proposals to ask for help doing something they don't normally get the funding for).  Around the same time, I started playing around with Amazon Affiliate links and made more than ten bucks on links by just using a few links on several blog posts.  That's only a small amount of money, but it got me thinking about the potential of using an affiliate program to generate money for charity in the marketing world.  Over the time that I was away from blogging, one of my side projects was to start contacting several influential people to see if they would be willing to participate in a new kind of bookstore - which I called The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore.  Today I am launching it (although I will resist the temptation to call it a "Beta launch").  Here's how I described the purpose of the site and what makes it different:

This site is different because it features all the reading lists of marketers that you already know and respect in one place.  From CEOs to marketing directors to top marketing bloggers - The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore lets you see and shop from all their reading lists ... and all for a good cause.

The way most of us find out about great marketing books is the same way that we learn about great products ... through recommendations from people we trust.  Most online bookstores are just categories of books selected by one or two people.  They are great if you trust those people, but they are not comprehensive. 

As I describe above, all the proceeds from affiliate commissions that this site generates will be donated to DonorsChoose.org on a monthly basis and I plan to try and spread the word in the marketing community about this new bookstore and will be adding new names on a weekly basis.  Here are a few reasons why I think this idea can work:

1. Collects a central hub of reading lists from marketers that are currently widely distributed online. 
2. Encourages marketers who are not sharing their reading lists to do so in an easy way.
3. Makes great marketing books easier to find and buy.
4. Creates a community of marketing book readers and allows them to contribute to a good cause
5. Offers a platform for new marketing books to get promoted to an interested audience

That's the initial idea, but I'd love to hear some feedback on what you think could make it better.  I am still reaching out to marketers to add their book lists, so stay tuned in the next few weeks as I will likely be adding lots more names to this list, and I plan to publish updates with money raised and associate this bookstore with a challenge on DonorsChoose.org so the amount raised (and what the dollars are being spent on) is highly visible.  Blog badges and other tools to promote the site are in the works as well.  Any other suggestions?

Note: A big thank you to all the people who responded to my LinkedIn question about which charity could be the best to support for this.  DonorsChoose.org was the most popular suggestion.

Guest Post: Facebook Jumping the Shark

and of course Cory Doctorow in an Information Week article:

Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid.

It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but inevitably Facebook will experience a great big sucking sound as everyone moves on to the next big thing, it happened to AOL, Tribes, Friendster, and even to Myspace. The point is yes develop strategies and tools for leveraging Facebook, but as the old saying goes "don't put all your eggs in one basket", and don't stop scanning the horizon for new and interesting ways to connect and more importantly empower your customers.

This was a brief Public Service Announcement from Karl Long who writes about new strategy at ExperienceCurve.com, good luck Rohit :-)

Guest Post: Is Word of Mouth a Discipline or Just a Channel?

by John Bell

Rohit has invited a handful of folks to post on his blog while he manages his true key influencers - family (including the newest member!). It only seems fitting that each of us post on what we care about most. In my case, that's word of mouth marketing.

My team uses digital marketing, social media and traditional strategy to amplify and activate word of mouth all to support our clients business objectives. While I love social media and it is a part of all of our work and personal digital lives, I must frame it as a set of techniques, methodologies and behavior geared towards motivating people to share, participate and even recommend products and services to their circle of friends, colleagues and family - their affinity groups. Why "must" I? At the end of the day, we have to measure. Social media is not a measurable unit. WOM is. To make WOM a reliable approach to marketing, it must be measured in a way that CMOs, Communications Officers and CEOs, can report its effectiveness to reaching their business goal. WOM can be measured and reported today. We do it. BzzAgent does it. Visible Technologies does it. In the near future, an industry standard for that measurement will arise. Social media drives WOM.   

I am fresh back from the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2007 in Vegas. I serve on the board of the organization so take any endorsements for the organization with that in mind. The quality of the experience was up there: good speakers, topics, brands, solid debate, some news. It reminded me of why I joined the organization. Still it wasn't perfect. But that's okay. I enjoy the naive enthusiasm we all have for creating a new discipline based upon the tenants of two-way conversation with people, authentic relationships and the value of advocates (or "promoters" in the Net Promoter Score framework).

Problem is - are we a discipline? An expertise? Or just another channel? Having spent last week with about 500 people from brands, agencies and start-ups who think word of mouth is important enough to travel to Vegas during the final budget-clampdown quarter of the year, here's some points to consider:

Discipline or channel?
Discipline: Word of mouth marketing takes belief (based on understanding and knowledge) and discipline. There are no shortcuts. As Sean Driscoll from Microsoft points out , there is a 'right model' and a 'wrong model' of influencer marketing (which I interpret as a part of word of mouth marketing). The wrong model suggests that I can just tell people about the wonder of my brand and they will yak about it. The right model assumes a truly engaged conversation model where we listen as much as we talk. To do things "right" in Sean's vernacular, it is very hard to just tack on some WOM-stuff to a large traditional marketing campaign and expect significant results. Like any discipline, word of mouth marketing requires certain procedures and conditions to succeed.

Channel: The media buying companies and some advertising agencies want to see WOM as a channel. They deal in channels. They want to fill up on the 360 degrees of our lives reaching us at home, at play, at work. They want a new channel to deliver messages. Preferably one that is as predictable as other channels ("if I spend $1 more on WOM it will deliver X"). That's why BzzAgent's current configuration has been so successful with media agencies. they can just buy 6000 agents in three markets for 12 weeks. Feels like media. While the agents will talk about the product, this is not two-way conversation. And the brand is renting those agents not building a long-term relationship. Still, it is a form of word of mouth.

Discipline: To deliver on the promise of social media, word of mouth marketing, influencer marketing, conversation marketing - whatever part of WOM you want to emphasize - we need a simple, shared approach to measurement that compares well to what brand managers are used to. Yes, that probably means some sort of ad equivalency. That approach - comparing to advertising - may be a trap. Look what happened to public relations. In most cases PR reports media "hits" as equal to ad impressions. Shouldn't they be valued far north of simple paid impressions? And WOM, shouldn't that be like 10X and ad impression (with a true "recommendation" even north of that)? WOMMA and other groups are working on an industry standard for measuring WOM. I think we will have a solid model in 2008 that will be a tipping point for the discipline.

Channel: Many ad-based marketers see viral video as the answer to their WOM aspirations. If they can just get enough views of a video, it starts to feel like traditional media. And if the mechanism for accummulating those views is people sharing and recommending amongst their friends then that, my friend, is social media. Within the Ogilvy family, we have the ultimate accomplishment/curse: the Dove Evolution video. With millions of views under its belt, it really deserves to be the poster child for viral video. Because those views grew from people recommending it to others, it is more valuable than TV impressions (pull vs. push) BUT, it is one dimensional and doesn't fully utilize what is possible in word of mouth marketing. Still, many marketers will use this case as their compass for word of mouth and try to leverage the channel of video-sharing to meet their goals. Viral video leverages something that ad agencies are very good at: storytelling and filmmaking. That's why branded entertainment is ad agencies' social media technique of choice.

It's a discipline

Word of mouth is a broad discipline like advertising or public relations. It requires technique and methodologies that are particularly relevant to do it well. It is possible to treat it like a channel by tacking on some WOM tactic to a larger advertising program, but it may not pay off in comparison to those more traditional marketing tactics.

Most WOM strategy is about engagement and building strong relationships with a core group. If it serves a "reach" purpose, it is through the long-term multiplier effect of one satisfied and engaged customer telling 3 friends who tell 3 friends and so on. If you want to reach millions with a product launch in January and have no existing set of WOM relationships, word of mouth marketing is probably not your first choice. BUT if you had those relationships in place - oh, what a launch it would be.

Now the next interesting question is whether word of mouth will be a stand-alone discipline or be integrated into either PR or ad firms or both. Think of account planning (or connections planning). More often than not, this is a discipline found inside ad agencies. Yet several firms like Naked have cropped up where account planning is the defining discipline of the firm. Will the same thing happen with Word of Mouth? Forward thinking communications/marketing firms will build or acquire the expertise for a true word of mouth discipline (not just channel experience). they will do this in droves once the measurement nut is cracked. Until then, you will have the visionary companies who believe that business objectives for many (not all) clients can be achieved well and efficiently using WOM - setting up a WOM shop. That's where our team - 360 Digital Influence - comes in. I still believe that enlightened PR firms (i.e. more than 'media relations') shops) stand a better chance culturally of making these units work than traditional ad agencies.  Some specialty shops are already cropping up - Brains on Fire and Zocalo Group come to mind. Since WOM can be enhanced by advertising, PR, digital marketing, you name it, I prefer as much integration as possible.

Much has been written on the characteristics of the best word of mouth marketing. Suffice it to say that it is different than the discipline necessary for successful advertising campaigns.

John Bell runs the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy and blogs at the Digital Influence Mapping Project

Guest Post: Understanding blogging is about understanding community

By Mack Collier

It's happened to all of us.  We'll go a day without posting at our blog.  Then before we know it the day has become two, then three.  When we finally get a chance to post again, we leave that post that all of us have left.

The 'sorry about the lack of posts' post.

But why do we feel the need to write that post?  My guess is because we bloggers see our visitors as more than numbers that are collected by SiteMeter or Google Analytics.  We see these people as a wonderful community that we have a relationship with.   And when we miss a few days, well we may feel that we have let our community down, and thus the apology.

Recently, there's been some great discussion about measuring the effectiveness of social media.  These discussions are important and necessary in order to give companies and organizations valid tools and metrics that they can use to measure their social media efforts.

But in the end, these marketers need to keep in mind that succeeding with social media means connecting with people.  I cringe a bit when I hear marketers talk about measurement and statistics, because that's applying a business mentality to an area that's about connecting with and understanding people.

When I talk to businesses and corporations about blogging, I tell them not to think of blogging as a direct tool to grow their business, but as a community-building tool.  A tool that allows companies to better understand their customers, and that helps current and potential customers better understand the company.  Business growth is a pleasant by-product of connecting with your customers via blogging.

And that leads us back to why I am here.  Rohit was kind enough to invite several prominent marketing/pr/business bloggers (along with me) to fill in for him while he is away becoming a parent for the second time (congrats Rohit!).  Rohit did this because he felt an obligation to his community of readers to make sure that there was a steady stream of posts here for you guys in his absence.

I think there's a great lesson there for companies; blogging is most effective when it focuses not on profits and business growth, but on the people.

Mack Collier is a social-media consultant who blogs at The Viral Garden.

Guest Post: Five questions for social computing strategy

  Can Paixano 
  Originally uploaded by Pete Kim.

[Cross posting from Being Peter Kim]

First off, thanks to Rohit for inviting me to guest post.  I've enjoyed following this blog and meeting in person. Rohit provides a feed that's in my "must-read" folder and hopefully I'll provide you with some information that of a similar quality.

I'm currently in Barcelona and had "dinner" at Can Paixano last night - talk about being social!  You can't help but be networked with the crowd, whether you like it or not.  Never ending friending, indeed.

I spent most of the day prior at Forrester's Consumer Marketing Forum EMEA.  During the day, there was a lot of talk about social computing initiatives and we tweeted quite a bit of it.  As I hear about different brands, industries, and technologies, some questions keep coming to mind:

1. Does it integrate with our existing marketing strategy?
2. Does it build our brand?
3. Does it drive profitable business results?
4. Can we measure it?
5. Will it scale?

There are probably more questions; these are the highest-level ones that keep coming to mind when I hear people speaking about what they're doing or recommending to clients.

Good case study examples should answer all of those questions - we're past social computing 101.  Brands still need 101-type information and there's still a lot of learning left out there.  What it means is that people who are put on stage these days as experts should be delivering the goods, better.  If you're not a regular reader of this blog, I suggest you subscribe now because Rohit's a great resource on getting to 102.

The Great Recycling Myth and Your Marketing Data

With all of the attention on global warming and what each of us could do, there is an interesting paradox that you may not realize which is happening right under your nose at work.  I was reminded of it again as I came across a Dilbert comic that sums up the issue in three short panels as only Scott Adams can do:

The short story is that what you think is recycling at work is very often a myth.  You may be diligently separating your garbage from your paper recyling, but at the end of the night when the cleaners come through your office, they just have one big trash can and it all goes into the same place.  A cousin of mine who lives in Austin had the same situation and it bothered her so much, she agreed to take the paper recycling out herself every week and now people pile it outside of her office.  Am I bringing this up to tell you to launch your own internal paper recycling army like she did?  Not really (unless that's what you want to do, of course).

If you think about it, the relationship between recycling and trash is exactly how you need to treat your marketing data online, by separating the useful from the not useful, instead of throwing it into the same database all together.  The irony is, in many cases your customers are separating this data for you (like the hapless cubicle workers) ... it's just up to you to keep it separate when you record it.  Less useful demographics in this model would be all the things you are used to capturing (gender, age, location, HHI, etc.).  Instead, you would focus on three different things:

1. Behaviour - What are they doing on your site and how are they searching or browsing?  What is the progression of pages or areas they viewed?  Where did they go before and after visiting your site?  How often did they return?  How long did they spend on your site?  What type of marketing do they respond to?
   
2. Conversation - What have they asked you about online or through email?  Did they call in and what did they ask about?  Have they written about you on a forum or a blog and what did they say?
   
3. History - What have they purchased from you before?  How often do they come back to purchase or browse your site?  What sort of items do they buy and who do they buy them for (if not for themselves)?

On a very basic level, these are the three elements of your marketing data worth recycling.  You probably noticed that most have nothing to do with what gender someone is or where they live.  What would happen if you just focused on these and tossed the rest of the data you are used to focusing on?

Related Post: Thinking Outside the Demographic

Lufthansa Proves Sweden Is Full of Gorgeous Blondes

Typical marketing advice says that you should never focus on marketing your category, but instead focus on what makes your service distinct from your competitors.  Marketing an industry or type of service is usually a losing proposition because even if you convince someone they need something, you have not convinced them that they need to get it from you.

In the travel industry, this lesson is somewhat different.  Today American travellers are increasingly choosing destinations outside of Europe for their vacations because of the weak dollar against the Euro.  Europe needs to find a way to get its appeal back and Lufthansa (an airline with many of the most frequented routes from the East coast to Europe) is helping the cause with a smart new campaign called Rumor Travels at www.rumortravels.com.  The site offers a few videos focused on three of the greatest rumors about great European countries:

1. Sweden is full of hot blonde women - Watch Video
2. Germany has beer everywhere for every meal - Watch Video
3. France is full of lovers who cannot stop kissing each other - Watch Video

The videos are meant to visualize silly stereotypes and all end with the compelling tagline, "you'll never know if you don't go."  There is a contest on the site where users can submit their own videos to win 2 business class tickets to Europe and a new Sony digital video camera.  Strategically, the campaign works on on several levels:

1. Demonstrates the necessity of travelling in a world of increasing virtual experiences.
2. Positions Europe as the ideal destination to travel for challenging your preconceptions (something people may usually associate with other more "exotic" destinations)
3. Targets the young, professional and single travellers (who will likely be least deterred by the negative exchange rate between Dollars and Euros)

Of course, it doesn't hurt that each video features attractive people and focuses on the romance of travel.  Europe, romance, professional, single ... you get the picture.  This campaign seems like it would work - if only Lufthansa was doing any perceptible amount of marketing around it.  I read about the campaign on Adrants and most of the less than 20 blogs that are listed on Technorati as linking to the campaign come from people reading about it on Adrants.  Even the Lufthansa US homepage only features a blurb on their promotion with Iron Chef instead of any links to the RumorTravels.com site.  The video views on YouTube are still super low, and the contest ends in just 2 days.

As far as I can tell, it seems like a classic smart, strategic and engaging campaign that will ultimately underperform and fade into obscurity because the team behind it was unable to coordinate enough marketing support from whomever controls the ad budgets for Lufthansa.  If anyone has insight into the campaign, please share.  I would love to be wrong on this one ...

A Recap of Ideas from Nielsen's CGM Summit 2007

I spent the day today at the Nielsen CGM Summit in NY listening to some panels and presentations from Nielsen and many of their clients about the future of measuring CGM.  One thing I was looking forward to about this event in particular is that the percentage of brands vs. agencies in attendance would be much more favored toward brands.  It is sadly ironic when you think about all the events that agency folks attend to basically talk to themselves, while their clients are all interested in (and spending time attending) events on measurement (which few creative folks from agencies would be able to stay awake through).  I must admit, I had a bit of a hard time staying awake myself today ... but to be fair, that was probably due to my redeye from the west coast to NY last night. 

In any case, I managed to stay awake throughout the day long enough to take some notes on some key takeaways from the summit which you will find below.  I also had the chance to meet several folks in person that I have been reading or known from afar, including Peter Kim, Henry Copeland, and Emanuel Rosen (author of The Anatomy of Buzz).  Though some of the "wonder of Nielsen" presentations that I expected throughout the day ran a bit long (not yours, Pete!) - overall the day was a great deep dive into all the ways we can and should be measuring.  As one speaker shared earlier in the day, "media is not an island" and is interconnected as consumers watch and interact with messages across mediums. Marketers may be specialists in one particular channel (TV, Online, Mobile, WOM, etc.) ... but consumers are most definitely becoming experts in all of them and use them concurrently. 

Anyway, here are some key notes and insights I took away from the event:

1. Influencers are emailers.  There was an interesting data point in one of the presentations that said that 55% of people who were considered "speakers" (those who share opinions vocally) have emailed directly to a company about a product that they liked.  This was a big insight throughout the day, as it indicated that brands seeking their influencers may simply need to listen more closely to the feedback they are already getting.
2. CGM generates powerful insights, not just influential voices to "target" - In response to a question from Max, I shared this point of view during the recap of the day and it was something that came up repeatedly throughout the morning.  Listening to CGM can drive strategy if you find the gaps which you can use CGM and social media to solve.  One example I shared was using CGM to find the conversation about Julian Beever (a sidewalk chalk artist) before we started our Fountain of Youth program for Aveeno.  We learned that there was lots of discussion online where people wanted to see more of his images and know how he does it.  So we created a Flickr gallery of all his images and a video of him drawing to rave reviews online.
3. Buzzphrase #1: Consumer Fortified Media - This was a new concept that Pete introduced in his presentation about how brands are putting their commercial messages online (like Dove Evolution), and consumers are talking about them and adding credibility to these messages, thus making them fortified.  Of course, there is a handy acronym for this as well: CFM.  (I suppose it could be CFM2 when those commercial messages are for products already "fortified" ... um, like Fruit Loops).
4. A new reason 2008 Superbowl ads will be better than the game - The guy from Fox Interactive shared that next year Fox has a deal with the NFL to create an official site where the 30 second spots will be accompanied by "long form video."  The smart marketers will take the chance to create "making of" secondary ads around their $3 million Superbowl spots.  Not sure how CGM plays a part here (unless lots of brands do the "you can create our Superbowl ad" thing again), but I still thought this idea of extending the most watching ads in the world with long form content behind them is a great concept.  Maybe worth an idea bar post at some point ...
5. "Getting out of the way" is a strategy - During the panel where media brands shared what they believe will happen in 2010, the guy from CBS talked about the things that they are doing and noted a significant moment where a random user placed a clip from Letterman where he interviewed Paris Hilton on YouTube and the clip got millions of views.  His point ... we didn't go after him, which signifies a great case study.  I loved the irony that getting out of the way is now considered a strategy.  Actually, sometimes it's the best one. 
6. Buzzphrase #2: Consumer Emulation - In this second concept from Pete's presentation early in the day, he talked about how we are in the midst of a wave of "consumer emulation."  Citing examples like the JetBlue and Mattel CEOs addressing the public as if they were doing consumer produced Youtube videos, or politicians and celebs who have Facebook or MySpace pages  - the point he made is that the pros are sometimes emulating the amateurs.  And of course, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't ...
7. It's not about volume anymore - The great conflict with how brands used to purchase media to buy influence online versus how they do now is that tricky measure of CPMs.  When you are buying in blocks of thousands of impressions, it is impossible to say you are not buying volume.  Yet as many marketers noted today, less is really becoming more.  One thought I shared is that sponsorships of blogs and social media sites that are persistent can offer a much higher value, but not measured in terms of page views, but rather in terms of brand perception.
8. The silo-fication of marketing remains a barrier - Many of the brands that participated in the day were large ones, and all seemed to struggle with similar issues when it comes to ownership.  This was not about the typical debate on whether blogs belong in corporate comm, or product development, or marketing, etc.  The silos on a macro level are those between marketing/communications, customer service, product testing, and other large divisions.  In many large organizations, these groups are in geographically disparate locations.  CGM may be a brilliant place to gather insight, but if the marketing team who gets the blog monitoring reports isn't sharing them with product development, or the customer service team who is speaking with a blogger doesn't share that information with marketing ... the power of CGM is never realized.

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10 Truths of Marketing in a Web2.0 World

I am in Austin today participating in the eMarketing Summit as part of the Innotech Conference.  I had the chance to do a lunch keynote presentation following Allen Olivo of Yahoo - focused on marketing in a Web2.0 world.  The presentation had a great crowd of engaged people and most (surprisingly) managed to stay awake despite my excellent spot right after lunch.  Below is the presentation I gave at the event, and I am told there will be a podcast of the presentation with audio synched with slides online in the next day or two so I will share the link for that as soon as I have it.

Update (10/15/07) - Read a Dutch Translation of this presentation from Enthousiasmeren

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