Last week Reuters UK reported that Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) rejected the latest bid from WPP, the world’s second largest ad firm.
Sounds like they’re closer to becoming bedfellows with WPP’s German counterpart, GfK.

I thought WPP chieftain Martin Sorrell covered all the bases as he described his firm’s motivation:

“Growth is being driven by continuous pressure on clients to raise
their like-for-like revenue growth and to optimise their investment
against a backdrop of changing demographics, decreasing product
differentiation, intensifying global competition, the fragmentation of
the media and the impact of digital development.”

The forces at work here are disruptive to say the least. The big agencies are getting pressure from clients to move away from costly print and TV ads and move to more conversational forms of marketing and advertising. It’s not enough to just deploy a microsite and track page views. Customers want real-time information and they’re demanding it on their terms.

If I were a mid-market or large brand, I’d cut down on the one-off microsites and email-based newsletters and move the conversation to more interactive environments. Many companies have figured out that tapping the collective wisdom of their customer base provides huge value. Evidence of this is the large number of customer-driven communities and B2B networks getting sponsorship deals from consumer brands and software companies. It’s likely these communities are where your customers are lurking anyway or they’re building their own versions. Why not engage with them on their terms and in their environments?

I’m not calling for the death of traditional marketing techniques - unless there’s no infusion of 21st Century smarts.

This one’s spinning around the web, most recently seen in the Twitterverse.
Enjoy.

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I read this PCWorld story and I couldn’t help but think how indicative it is of of the typical command and control mentality within enterprises. I know there’s a balance between fighting the external social network (SoNet) effect and creating a corporate one of your own. With all the technology horsepower and APIs gone wild, shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to create some harmony between the two? The quote from one of the Gap’s web engineers sums it up pretty well:

“Do you really want Facebook to manage it for you in the outside world, or do you want to do it yourself so you have control?”

Control. It’s a word I hear over and over: How will we maintain control of what’s being said by the community?

I’ve talked to more companies than I can count about social publishing, social media, and setting up communities. The enterprises that typically lead the charge tend to be the ones that want to sell software or services to setup the community. But like communities in the real world, who wants to pay for the roads that others will use? When we talk to the brands in the community cross hairs, well that’s when you see the cold sweat start to break out.

The big brands hire in teams of marketing folk from the best B-schools to manage their content. They pay the most expensive consultants to determine what color has which meaning for their brand; what word has which association in middle America vs. big cities; heck how does this kid think vs. that adult. It’s been done this way for years, decades, and now, that level of tight brand control is showing cracks.

For the last decade or more, people with passion for products are expressing their views over the web - the enterprise fear originates when the views aren’t all that rosy. With all of their collective experience, too many companies still have the fear of shelling out big bucks to develop a social publishing strategy. Do they really want to give the rest of the world a forum to say what they’re really thinking?

The bus has already left the station folks; the negative views are already finding their ways through other sites and locations. I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it’s important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive. 

But for all of those brands who don’t want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers: your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you.

That’s social publishing.

A while back I attended a PRWeek and Waggener Edstrom event at the posh  Hotel Palomar here in Big D. The event was titled Campaigns in the 21st Century: Measuring Perceptions. Dan Gallagher delivered an interesting look at how they analyzed content being created on the web related to the Presidential candidates. The analysis was done back in Sept. 2007 and was accomplished using the Narrative Network, a toolset they created using some pretty nifty algorithms. You can download Dan’s presentation here. (if it doesn’t work. lemme know) And here’s the movie.

In short, it’s text mining and brand mapping that creates a visual map of how the media perceives a particular brand or topic. That’s pretty hot stuff these days with all the attention on social media measurement or brand monitoring. Smart companies and agencies are finally figuring out that social media measurement is just another layer in a well-integrated approach to digital marketing and public relations.

I’m still a little baffled when clients don’t want to budget for stuff like this. It really gives new meaning to the “intel” connotation.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, you’ve probably figured out there’s some interesting things you can do with these types of SMS-based apps. If you’re a power Twitterer all of you know it’s way more than “what am I doing”. Jaiku’s the other one, and although essentially both provide the same capabilities, I give an aesthetic edge to Jaiku for its slick looking badges.  That aside, while working on a community project yesterday, we started thinking about how these tools can benefit the business. If you extrapolate what’s being done  by some of the big brands, it’s pretty easy to see the evolution. Take ZDNet for instance. Their approach aggregates all of their blogs into one Twitter feed. Using something like TwitKu, (screenshot below) I get a pulse of what ZDNet is covering that hour. And ZDNet knows most people won’t have the inclination to subscribe to all of their blogs, so they give us options. That’s an important notion when building your business case. Always give the user options. If you want to be a media company, act like one. Show me how to consume, repurpose, mashup, and deliver your content not just in ways you want but ways I want.

Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use  use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations.  And conversations build brand.

Yesterday’s BusinessWire breakfast was proof that some PR firms do get it. It also proved if the jury’s still out on their capabilities, they’re plugging in the right people to execute. Enter Waggener Edstrom and their new digital duo Jim Olson and David Almacy. Both were asked by BusinessWire to host their so-called “wireside” chat about PR in the Digital Age. I actually Twittered some of the session from my Blackberry Pearl, at one point looking up during a post as Almacy remarked that, “some of you might be Twittering this presentation right now.” I looked up to see a bunch of blank stares. Oh well, nice try David.

Olson, a big brand guy and former VP at Overture, kicked off the discussion with his list of digital trends. One of the things he confirmed was what we’re all seeing happen in front of us — video. As he put it, the web now is in full motion and has a voice. Video is mainstream.

( Jim Olson and David Almacy | Pics taken by Blackberry Pearl)

The second point was the broad notion of “interactivity“, where users are now part of the mix — like it or not. Citing the oft-used citizen journalism term, Olson explained how media companies have had to rethink the way news is produced and delivered.

Individual Addressability was another term Olson used to describe the ability to tailor content to the right constituents. This is a big one in a lot of ways. It brings the Long Tail into the fold and helps all of us get a clearer picture of the impact of our marketing and advertising spend. Olson quoted the old advertising saying, “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half!” Well folks, that’s a changing. And that’s the lure of content with digital DNA.

The last few points dealt with the potential ramifications of a growing global internet community and the proliferation of mobile devices. On the former, Olson pointed to statistics showing how China will soon surpass the U.S. with more than 200M internet users. The numbers aren’t so surprising for a country of more than a billion, but the message was more about preparation. Think about the challenges (cultural, technological) that poses for U.S. marketers. Olson was dead on titling the slide, “The Revolution is not being televised.”

The last digital piece he dissected was the mobile movement, drawing a definitive stake in the sand by proclaiming, “Mobile is the new PC”. He reminded us more than half the planet’s mobile devices are in developing countries. A fitting end to his pitch was a quote from GE’s CEO - “I want my communicators to be role models for creativity and innovation.”

David Almacy took the floor next with a little faster tempo. A well-traveled political advisor and former web guru for the White House, Almacy came across as part geek and part strategist. That’s just what the Doctor ordered for the big PR agencies being called on by the big brands.

His White House 2.0 discussion was fascinating. It’s daunting to even think of developing a Web 2.0 strategy for the leader of the free world. Even more interesting was hearing Almacy talk about the early backlash from the President’s office when he launched the first Presidential podcasts. Once the first distasteful threads started to bubble up, he was asked to remove the content from iTunes. But in true web evangelist form, Almacy stuck to his guns, finally winning out after the comments evened out with an acceptable positive and negative mix.

I told my colleagues, we can’t take the podcast down, we’re on the front page of iTunes!

The other thing Almacy knifed through was the bevy of social media tools and services. He obviously caught me nodding as he rattled off all the newest Web 2.0 kids on the block, everything from Digg to Twitter and Pownce. The takeaway though wasn’t being jargon-capable, it was more about curiosity and exploration. As he put it..

I only have a few Tweets out there but I had to see what it was all about. 

And that’s really the sense I got from yesterday’s event. There was a lot of tire-kicking, a lot of curiosity, and heck of a lot of passion. It was apparent the room was full of communicators trying to keep a foothold on the shifting ground beneath them.

A few weeks back we worked an Art Fest in Addison,Tx, helping promote my sister-in-law’s jewelry works. And like any good marketer, my head’s always on a swivel absorbing the ways companies try to reach us. My wife and I liked the fact the Jack FM set-up was green and clean. No emissions, low power usage, etc.

 
And speaking of clean, the other image is from Micro Target Media and comes straight to you from a genuine Addsion, Tx Port-o-Potty. It cracked me up that the PROs — portable restaurant operators — got into the acronym game. But apparently I should have done my homework. PRO is a common term as you can see in the comment thread.

And you wonder why social media and brand measurement is so hot. It took what, less than 48 hours for somebody to track me down. WOW.

I got a call from a PR firm the other day looking for an “online communicator” to perform various Web 2.0 tasks for some of their clients. Looked like a cool gig until you get toward the bottom of the listing. Note to PR firms..bloggers are not going away. They’ll continue to a key element in driving brand discussions - good or bad.

This post has been marinating for a while in my Live Writer queue. It’s one of those “take a step back and quickly observe” posts. You know, when you realize there’s knowledge to be gleaned from some of your web creations. And with some recent developments in the internet advertising space, I thought it was a good time to resurrect some quick observations. In this case, I’m referencing Google’s AdSense, but I run ads from the other usual suspects as well — namely MSFT, Yahoo, and FeedBurner.

Before you call me a sell out, hear me out on some coffee-shop observations

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1. Competitive Intelligence

This is an easy one. Once you get rid of your paranoia and turn off Google’s competitive ad filter, your competition will be at your blog’s doorstep shortly.

2. Marketing and Advertising insight

Take a quick look at the kind of ads your site serves. Once your content  settles and gets indexed, an aggregate theme begins to develop as you look at the ads. Many times this helps me understand if my content is providing the right context for you, my user.

3. Product discovery and selection

My colleagues and I joke about this one. Anytime we have some downtime and get in an exploratory mode for new webby tools and services, we just take a quick spin through 5 or 10 pages and voila!

4. Business Development

This one’s also terribly apparent. You’re a digital agency and you provide email marketing services. I probably shouldn’t admit this and open source my email marketing strategy, but one of the solutions we’re using for a few of our clients is IntelliContact. How’d we find them? Yep, the ad running on my blog.

5. Brand and Community Building

As you begin to develop consistency in your content, you’ll notice the ads begin to tell your story. WOW Feed has a lot of Web 2.0, social media, and agency-oriented content. If you look around you’ll usually notice some very targeted Ads on at least a few of those topics. Users, in turn, get a quick sense of what the site’s all about..a sense of what conversations are taking place.

The jury’s still out whether the rumors of Kodak’s digital death have been greatly exaggerated. On the consumer side of their business (they do make business scanners and software) it just seems like they’ve been stuck in a lower gear for a while now. But Kodak execs say their current YouTube video exemplifies the hipper Kodak analysts and consumers have been waiting for.

Still, the company may need to hurry up a bit. As IDC analyst Chris Chute pointed out, Kodak is now the No. 3 seller of digital cameras, behind Canon and Sony, and investors are getting impatient with quarter after quarter of red ink. Fourth-quarter figures aren’t in yet, but Kodak’s market share for the third quarter was 14%, down from 21% in 2005, he said.

And I thought this excerpt was funny:

The executives interviewed said they are not sure how the video made its way to the web in December, but the best guess is one or more tech-savvy employees copied it or uploaded it from the company intranet.

Why hide this? Kodak makes it sound like video and the web are foreign to their average employee. Maybe that’s half the problem.

You’ll see more of this as companies are finally figuring out that creating real dialogue with customers means simply letting them be a part of the conversation. You gotta take the good with the bad.

Note:: First seen @ Organic’s blog

Take a look at this slide show and tell me if you come away as unimpressed as I was. My only takeaway from the weak memorable ads was how traditional advertising continues to get turned on its head by consumer-generated media (CGM). Enter the Chevy Tahoe user-generated campaign. If you didn’t see that debacle coming, you gotta be living underground. Or maybe you’ve just never seen YouTube. Chevy’s only saving grace was actually running all the ads — positive or negative. 

What I can’t figure out is how some of these decisions come about? Was the agency and client simply chasing publicity or was it just a case of the non-existent strategy? (Hint: Don’t always do user-generated media because everyone else is doing it.)

Here’s more evidence that B2B companies are getting smarter about the way their content is used to drive business. Kudos to Caterpillar for seeing an opportunity to repurpose their digital assets and relaunch online.

There’s more to the story however. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of research and market intelligence required to find the right channel or community. Sure you can produce your own niche-oriented videos (narrowcasting of sorts), but being part of the right community of eyeballs is far more important. Once you’ve found the community, how do you become a trusted advisor? That’s where your agency earns their paycheck.

Caterpillar already had a great deal of video assets: training videos and the promotional videos dealers would use to sell the company’s products. Much of the content on the video site will be repurposed, said Carr Davis, Cygnus Business Media’s co-CEO. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to just produce video for the internet as a first run, but [it works] if you have content and repurpose it.”

The buzz around social media is everywhere, this time popping up in a segment from CBS News as they interviewed the authors of Citizen Marketers, a book that dissects how new media has given a new (and louder)voice to the consumer. I saw it first on David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog. And I won’t say it again. Um, actually I will. If you ignore this stuff and don’t dive into the conversation, you’ll absolutely regret it. Start planning your social media strategy now.

BrandWeek recently wrote about car maker Kia’s soft launch of their forthcoming 2007 Rondo. I think the strategy is unfolding right here in front of us. Get some influencers buzzing (very overused term) about your advertising strategy, pitch a few beat writers and you’re off.

My gut tells me they won’t see much of an uptick unless they have a brilliantly planned grassroots effort in the works. How can you “hope” to generate buzz with light direct mail and search engine marketing?

..there will be no print ads or broadcast spots. Instead, over the next 30 days, there will merely be some direct mail to targeted consumers, a presence on several search engines and, hopefully, some buzz.

I would have an events calendar that would put me and my Rondo in the back pocket of every one of my consumers every time they walked out the door in my target markets. And I think you have to go deeper than that. How ’bout monitoring your competitors’ brand on the web to see what’s driving some of those purchasing decisions. Once you’re privy to those conversations, you can plan an effective strategy that blends the best of traditional and new media approaches.

On the heels of my “always be branding” soapbox, I ran across BrandWeek’s coverage of a recent study that tracked how people have brand discussions.

The report, from The Keller Fay Group and PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee, sampled responses from 1,100 people between June and August.

And according to Keller Fay CEO Ed Keller, more than 80% of conversations about brands happen offline.

That doesn’t surprise me too much. Think about the last time you made a big purchase. You probably sought all kinds of opinions from your influencer network, right?

What we’re seeing here is reflections of everyday conversations,” he said. One of the most important findings, Keller said, is that 15% of the population consists of what he calls “conversation catalysts,” or “influencers.”

In a ho-hum story from Ad Age about how media execs should always be pushing the envelope, I saw the excerpt below.

Mediaedge:cia research found that most men now who read circulars about consumer electronics aren’t doing it to scope out deals, but instead to get the lay of the land and keep up with the new products.

I’d say there’s a lot of brand equity for the retailers who push all those Sunday circulars on us. At some point, you just give up and make the purchase, right?

Always be branding. Your brand is what defines you. It can be the one thing your customer thinks of right before making that split-second decision to go with you or your competitor.

When we’re working with clients we’re trying to absorb everything that constitutes a brand. Is there a corporate and conservative nature to the brand? What about colors and fonts? It all plays into the experience. I mean, can you imagine UPS saying, “what can yellow do for you”? 

One of our recent brand efforts was for one of our clients in the restaurant business, Mary’s Cajun Corner. We wanted a bit more playful feel, but one that also captured the look of a national brand.

Let us know if we can help you brand you.