MarketerBlog

Marketing 2.0: What’s Old Is New

It’s heartening to see people from the bastions of old, mass-marketing think start to embrace the new world order. Of course they realize that, as in many aspects of life, there is nothing new under the sun.

Today’s MediaPost (registration required) features an excellent editorial by J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich Partners. He opens with the bold statement that the “Internet has matured into the most important medium since television”. He goes on to provide a thoughtful analysis of the reasons why.

“The smartest use of technology is to leverage this dynamic of participation and engagement. This is what people want to do in general, and it's what all of the new technologies do so well. E-commerce is booming, but the biggest trend online is social engagement, and this will be an essential foundation for e-commerce in the future.”

Both Smith and Yankelovich recognize that this is the age of consumer resistance, and that people seek engagement with each other, not brands. In this environment successful marketers will recognize and embrace this important shift. They’ll stop focusing on controlling the message and the brand. Instead they’ll engage users in everything from product design to advocacy, to word-of-mouth sales. They’ll learn to listen first and then to join the conversation, as opposed to trying to dominate it.

Scott Karp takes this a step further, and asserts that Web 2.0 cannot be successful without Marketing 2.0.

“If Web 2.0 is going to make any money, it needs to pursue these new marketing paradigms and not just depend on Old Media models like selling ads — even Google AdWords feels like its Marketing 1.2 at best.”

He refers to Umair Hague’s recent claim that Web 2.0 cannot live up to its enormous potential unless the “geeks step outside their geekery”. In other words, that they need to embrace one of the essential premises of marketing (being truly customer-centric); instead of categorically refuting old-school marketing, they need to change it. 

That they're evil doesn't mean you should ignore them - it means you should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them less about Madison Ave and BuzzAgent, and more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing the deep economics of many industries - principles like peer production, gift economies, sharing, transparency, social capital, anticonsumption, and deep culture.

All of these recommendations resonate with anyone who’s ever managed a customer service center or a customer loyalty program. It’s about listening to customer needs, designing products and services that they actually want, and marketing thing in the context of their preferences.

Imagine, being successful by actually giving the people what they want. Now that’s new!

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Marketing 2.0, Media Economics, New Media, Old Media, Web2.0

Fake Videos and Genuine Successes

Last Friday Adrants reported that McKinney & Silver extended their Pherotones campaign, a thinly disguised promotion for Oasys Mobile to viral video with a clip seeded through Emily's Eatmail. “While ringing cell phones in the middle of a wedding ceremony certainly cause reaction, the reaction to this ring tone...excuse us...pherotone causes a different sort of reaction with the groom.” I don’t know how many downloads they’ve had to date, but I hope it exceeds the number of gullible clients served. 

Today, various bloggers reported the unveiling of Edgeio, a blog-based classified listing service which uses tags as its categorization structure. As Om Malik noted, much has been written about this already, but it’s not just hyperbole. Edgeio gives individuals the ability to distribute and control their own content. Edgeio aggregates and organizes content, but doesn’t require that it conform to the rules of a particular transaction platform like eBay or Craigslist. In short, it connects buyers to sellers directly, without a third-party intermediary. That sure sounds like the basis for a genuine “Web 2.0” service to me. 

Finally, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that CBS is launching a new service which will enable customers to receive news alerts via their cell phones. According to the Journal, the service will include content from CBS News and "Entertainment Tonight" for monthly fees of 99 cents and $3.99, respectively. CBS noted the alerts will be available for all mobile phones and wireless carriers next week. Today’s New York Times (subscription required) reports that the News Corporation has created a mobile entertainment store called Mobizzo and a production studio to focus exclusively on developing cell phone entertainment in much the same way that 20th Century Fox creates movies and television. Given analyst predictions that the number of cell phones will double in the next five years to more than 5 billion phones, both moves appear to be shrewd strategies for tapping into an enormous market opportunity. 

While these may appear to be completely unrelated, in fact they’re all part of the continued momentum towards differentiated and distributed content and the on-demand economy.  Each of these services offers users the ability to get exactly what they want, when and where they want it. For all the critics, the ideas and concepts behind “Web 2.0” seem to be taking shape in a variety of new offerings. 

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Edgeio, Stealth Marketing, Viral Marketing, Web 2.0

A Billion iTunes Served: Another Giant Step Towards The On-Demand Economy

Yesterday’s stunning announcement that Apple hit the 1 billion mark for iTunes downloads was greeted with fascination by the media. There were articles in the blogosphere and the trades, and even stories on the national evening news broadcasts. It’s not surprising that they’re interested. It’s one of the single greatest indicators that media is shifting from its artist-label-channel-package legacy to the new on-demand model. While the technical formats and audience demographics of music made that industry a logical candidate to begin this shift, video and print aren’t far behind.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a post earlier this week on Edgeio , which he describes as “the classified system for the distributed future”. Jarvis makes the points that the future of media is distributed, that control will shift from the content producers to the attention and transaction owners, and that all of this will be enabled by tagging. “They [tags] help organize the world and its relationships.” 

That might appear to be a bold claim, but when you look at Apple’s share of total music sales (top ten, just behind WalMart) and its dominance in the download market (70%), it doesn’t seem like such a stretch. Last month’s simultaneous theatrical/direct-to-DVD release of “Bubble”, and the cable-channel-disaggregation hearings on Capital Hill were portents of changes to come for film and television. 

While Seth Goldstein and others focus on the concept of attention and the “Attention Economy”, I would argue that we’re moving to an “On-Demand Economy”. Greater availability of broadband combined with cheap storage and memory gives us the ability to purchase nearly every digital item on a by-the-drink basis. This is happening in the consumer market with music and video, and in the enterprise market with on-demand CRM and ERP software. 

The interesting question is how old-line companies, which still account for the vast majority of GDP in this country, will adapt to the new model. Newspapers and cable companies are hurling towards it, kicking and screaming all the way. To date, signs of innovation are scarce. 

With all due respect to the unique talents of Mr. Jobs, let’s hope that there are a hundred innovative leaders like him, to guide us through this period of market transformation. 

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Web 2.0, Edgeio, iTunes, Apple, Media, Attention Economy

Blogs Are Dead, Long Live Blogs

Sometimes it’s fun to watch the contradictory conversations that circle between “old” or “mainstream” media and “new” media. Their positions are self-serving but instructive. 

Today’s MediaPost (registration required) features an editorial about the virtues of including blogs in market research and PR strategies. While acknowledging the potential downside of digital lynch mobs, the article makes the point that these highly engaged consumers can also serve as terrific brand advocates. The piece underscores the premise that effective “blog relations” is founded on authentic engagement with the audience, and that it’s more akin to customer service than PR. 

On the other hand, today’s editorial page of the Chicago Tribune (registration required) includes an article about the relative ineffectiveness (and irrelevancy) of the blogosphere. It cites as proof a recent Gallup  poll which said that only 9% of Internet users regularly read blogs, and that blogging was last among online activities. (Somehow they missed countless other studies on the subject, including a Pew study from early 2005 which reported that 8 million American adults created blogs; and that in 2004 blog readership jumped 58%, representing 27% of Internet users.) The Tribune article concludes that blogs have a disproportionate influence on media, but virtually no one else. 

Now we all know that research can be flogged to prove nearly any point. The interesting question is why so many old media warhorses are so threatened by the idea of consumer generated media. Heaven forbid that they’d actually have readers so interested that they start a debate. 

Of course there are flaws in today’s incarnation of blogs and consumer generated media. And yes, there are many self-referential conversations, particularly among technologists and politicians. But at 28m blogs and growing, they aren’t going away anytime soon. The self-expression Pandora has been unleashed from the box. Savvy journalists and marketers will learn how best to engage, and, even better, provide a counterpoint of reasoned thought in these conversations. 

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Blogging, Citizen Journalism, Marketing, Media, Newspapers

The Future of Newspapers: Will We Read Everything Online?

There were several intriguing posts in the past few days which orbited around the question of the evolution of newspapers and print media. Jeff Jarvis commented on the Newspaper Association of America’s upcoming $50m campaign designed to show advertisers the value of newspapers. According to Rafat Ali this exceeds the $40m campaign planned by the Magazine Publishers of America. The campaign addresses how readers are engaged with not just the newspaper itself, but with websites, niche publications, and even podcasts. But while newspapers are anxious to prove their online chops, it seems they aren’t eager to share the wealth. According to Steve Rubel a scant few of the top 100 daily newspapers in the United States have RSS feeds that stream the full contents of the print edition. 

Each of these writers concludes that the industry isn’t forward thinking enough and/or isn’t thinking strategically. The bottom line: newspapers need to get with the program or find themselves extinct. Steve Rubel goes so far as to make the prediction that in ten years news will be delivered automatically each day, not by the paper boy, but via wirelessly enabled e-paper devices that are easy to read, powered by RSS. 

I wholeheartedly embrace the myriad changes brought about by the various disruptive Internet technologies. I’m a big believer in the democratization of information and the potent combination of citizen journalism with real-time user interaction. From the perspective of media and advertising this brings substantive and welcome changes. That said, I question whether we’re going to enter a Jetson’s-style media consumption model anytime in the near future. 

When it comes to anything longer than a paragraph or two, I want to read it on paper. I need that physical interaction in order to fully absorb the content. And I suspect I’m not alone. While many of us may glance through headlines on a monitor, we also print out longer articles – or wait until we get the paper version. 

So the question is what will readers want? Yes they want customized content on-demand. Yes they want access to it anytime, anywhere. But how would they design the experience? And how will the news and print media industries respond? 

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Blogging, Citizen Journalism, RSS, Newspapers

Web 2.0: No More Mr. Little Guy

Today’s New York Times has a great piece about the impact of web services on small businesses (subscription required). The article provides an insightful profile of how this next generation of web development empowers small businesses to compete effectively – arguably more effectively – than their larger, process-laden counterparts. 

While the article describes the role of Salesforce.com and other on-demand software services, it misses one of the critical forces behind this momentous shift. Web 2.0 has opened hundreds of thousands of “many-to-many” markets. These markets are dynamic, innovative, and constantly in motion. They are truly consumer driven, empowered by various forms of consumer generated media. While Salesforce.com and other software-as-service tools are doing their share to transform the ways businesses operate, consumer generated media introduces a new world of market opportunities. As consumers continue to opt-out of traditional marketing, this new approach will move from experimental to mainstream to imperative. That’s the real momentum behind the reversal of business growth from trickle-down to bottom-up. 

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New York Times, Small Business, Entrepreneur, CGM, Consumer Generated Media, Web 2.0

Viral Fruitcakes: Clever Promotion Does Not Equal Great Word-of-Mouth

I have to come clean. While this blog is predominantly about the virtues of authentic relationships with customers and ways to cultivate those relationships, I have, in the past, been guilty of crass mass marketing. So I can appreciate a good consumer promotion as well as the next marketing flack. But as a recent initiate into the Web 2.0 blogger ranks, I feel compelled to comment. 

Today’s Media Post (registration required) has an article about Cold Stone Creamery’s “Fruitcake Freedom” campaign last December. The intention was to promote ice cream sales during what’s typically an off season. During the promotion consumers were encouraged to "turn in" their unwanted fruitcakes in exchange for a discount on an ice cream cake. The campaign was stimulated via collateral materials sent to franchisees.   

Did it work? A quick search yields a handful of links to news articles and even fewer blog posts. I don’t know what sales results were for the period, but if the intention was to increase customer loyalty this campaign appeared to miss the mark. A quote from the company spokesperson, Kevin Donnellan reveals the flaw in their strategy. 

"I think word-of-mouth has immense potential for increasing loyalty," says Donnellan. "In the world we live in, we're inundated with ad messages and consumers are looking to build an intimate relationship with brands. I think that comes from buzz."

He got it half right. We are inundated with marketing messages. But consumers don’t want to build an intimate relationship with brands. We want to discover brands that deliver on, or better yet, exceed our expectations. And we want to interact with them on our own terms. 

At the holiday season there are usually more than enough jokes going around about things to do with fruitcakes. If Cold Stone Creamery really wanted to create some “buzz” they would have tapped into those conversations and done things like having a video contest for ways to get rid of fruitcakes. You can see the Letterman-esque images now. And you can be that something clever would have gone viral. 

PR folks often confuse buzz with genuine interest. Consumer Generated Media gives marketers the opportunity to go behind the curtain, to interact directly with customers, and to engage their passions and interests. 

Spring is coming. Maybe Cold Stone Creamery will create a campaign which is really “buzz worthy”.

 
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Viral Marketing, Marketing, Blogs, Buzz Marketing, Cold Stone Creamery

Sony BMG Product Shills: Dumb and Dumber?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Sony BMG comes up with another zinger. Not content with the maelstrom of bitterness they created over the Rootkit scandal last fall, they’ve now moved on to shilling product promotions via unpaid interns. Today’s New York Times (subscription required) reports that Epic Records, a Sony BMG company, has posted an ad on EntertainmentCareers.net for its “social networking” program.

 
“Do you blog, have lots of friends at your MySpace page, and love music? Epic Records is looking for skilled, motivated interns to promote artists on social networking sites like MySpace, purevolume, Facebook & others.”

And in return for losing credibility with their peers, the youth of America can learn how to promote propaganda while getting college credit. What a deal!

These guys (Sony BMG and its subsidiaries) are so busy making noise that they can’t hear the obvious.  The communities on MySpace, Facebook and others are among the most digitally astute and have tremendous cynicism towards marketing and advertising. They’re twice as likely to turn off ads as their parents. They’ll smell product shills a mile away. Instead of trying to co-opt these communities, Epic Records should listen and learn from them. 

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Marketing, Blogs, Stealth Marketing, sony bmg

Get Real: Authenticity and Consumer Generated Media

You know, the thing I always love about the Ad guys – they’re great at faking it. Two stories hit the wires yesterday about faux-consumer generated media campaigns. 

The first was about Guinness who launched a corporate blog this week. The story appeared on both MicroPersuasion and AdRants, though Hugh Macleod has the best review. And it’s a darn good thing too, since the site prevents anyone who says s/he is under 21 and/or in the US  from reading it. Hmmm, now there’s a security approach – let’s use self reported data to qualify users. Based on what I’ve seen, it sounds like the Walmart corporate blog is more heartfelt. 

My former colleagues at McKinney & Silver have engaged the Viral Factory to create a campaign which is more than a little misleading. The campaign is for a little-known cellular company called Oasys Mobile. It promotes the “aphrodisiac” powers of its ring tones, using a fax sex therapist, faux commercials and even a bogus Wikipedia entry. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that the Wikipedia entry was taken down after Wikipedia realized it was a fake.

These campaigns go in the category of seriously not getting it. By creating phony consumer generated media the companies are trampling on an essential element of word-of-mouth marketing: trust. Sure they may get a few thousand downloads for jokes – but how much will that impact sales and what will it do for the brand? 

In both cases the organizations would have been better served by finding existing communities of beer or ring-tone lovers and tapping into their networks of conversations. But in order to engage in a conversation, you have to learn how to listen. These campaigns show that marketers can still be a little hard of hearing.

Update:

Wow! I love the blogosphere.  No sooner had I hit the “save” button in TypePad when I got an RSS update from Shel Israel’s blog saying he had mistakenly attributed the Pherotones story to the New York Times, when in fact Scott Baradell at Media Orchard scooped the story almost a month ago.  So here’s my corrected attribution, with kudos to Mr. Baradell for breaking the story and for handling the snarky McKinney/Faux Sex Therapist comments on his blog.  He sums up the situation brilliantly: 

    ‘When people stop calling it "marketing" and start calling it "lying," you've probably made a mistake, gang.’

I couldn’t agree with you more.    

 

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viral marketing, Marketing, Blogs, Stealth Marketing

Stealth vs. Quiet: A Tale of Two Launches

One question every new technology company faces is when and how to launch. There are several schools of thought about it, but they fundamentally break into two camps: Stealth and Not Stealth. There are pros and cons to both and determining which is best for your company or product is highly dependent on a number of factors including the competitive landscape, the nature of the technology (e.g. are you ahead of the market or improving on an existing offering) and the entrepreneur’s confidence in being ready for “prime time”. This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t limited to technology start-ups. I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies who used goofy names and internal NDA’s to try to enforce an aura of secrecy prior to a product launch. 

Today’s environment of active, consumer generated media gives companies the opportunity to test the waters with minimum expense, but not necessarily minimum risk. Two examples of recent launches are Ning and CollectiveX. 

As they say on their site, Ning is a free online service for cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps. They launched in Beta last October. The company was in deep-stealth mode prior to the October release, but given Marc Andreessen’s involvement has been under intense scrutiny by Silicon Valley tech-watchers.  The initial release fell short of expectations in some quarters, and they received some negative-blog-press in January. Ning did a superb job of handling the criticism from the blogosphere, and more importantly, delivering a rich new release today. They clearly used the Beta as an extended R&D exercise, and have built a new version of the product which should knock the socks off of any critics. Ning’s CEO,  Gina Bianchini, says their strategy is to focus on quietly delivering the best possible product for their users. 

To quote Michael Arrington, “CollectiveX is LinkedIn the way it should have been done in the first place”. It’s social networking created by and for groups. CollectiveX is a secure, private meeting place which provides group members with tools to centralize communications, synchronize calendars, and share files and information.  This approach stimulates viral growth of the service and more importantly, a richer user experience as group-members select where and how they want to share information with others. It elegantly enables cross-over between professional and personal interests. Again, CollectiveX took the quiet route though the CEO, Clarence Wooten, has been working on the concept for some time. They made a small announcement last week and plan to run a highly targeted Beta for a short period. Given their sales and marketing strategy (viral growth through groups/referrals) they’re smart to focus on developing some strong case studies before they do a full commercial launch. 

Lesson learned? The success of your launch is more dependent on the quality of your product than on any MSM or blogosphere PR plan. Listen to your users, develop the best possible product and focus on exceeding user expectations. CGM has just amplified the impact of happy (or unhappy users). A group of enthusiastic beta customers will do more for your launch than any PR flacks.

 
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Ning, CollectiveX, launch, social software, web 2.0