I continue to like T. Boone Pickens’ communication strategy. While it helps to have deep pockets, you still have to pull it all together and execute. His so-called “army” is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting itself with all sorts of digital tools and services that spur the creation of consumer-generated content. Over the last 48 hours there was a battle brewing over whether or not NBC would show a recent Pickens’ ad.
Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:
We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.
Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.
On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.
There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.
This post wasn’t meant to be a soapbox for why you need a widget strategy. That’s been broadcast numerous times and there’s even events dedicated to all things widgety.
But before leaving the pulpit, I will reinforce that if you or your clients aren’t exploring the ways to distribute content via widgets, you’re missing out. Sharing and syndicating information via web snippets doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary at first, but dissect things a little more and you’ll find it encompasses some of the fundamental things that we talk about everyday on the web. Simple things like giving users control of content to larger notions like telling your client they need to act more like a media company. Yep, all embodied in widgets. So when I noticed a few slick renditions from Real Time Matrix (for Social Media Today) and CoBrandit (powered by SpringWidgets), I thought I’d pass along a friendly reminder why they’re important. Some are obvious, so bear with me.
Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.
After mooching off the open source world for 10 years and making millions, Backcountry.com finally threw the Postgres community a bone in the form of a database synching tool curiously called Bucardo.
And judging by their PR firm’s (Base Camp Communications) transparent writing style, they clearly architected it. Good for them.
Everyday there’s hundreds of instances where the rise of social media is impacting the way we think, share ideas, and bring about change. The latest incarnation comes from a 23 year-old graphic designer from Pennsylvania. iJustine, as she’s known, filmed herself opening up her iPhone bill from AT&T and sparked enough of a viral trend to surpass 300K views on YouTube so far.
I can hear it now.
Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.
During a press briefing in Seoul, Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked about the flavors of today’s evolving Web, specifically Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Before describing Web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and distilling it down to AJAX, Schmidt told the reporter, “as far as Web 3.0, I think you just invented the term.”
Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?) within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.
And while it’s obvious AJAX improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”
Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling the their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.
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 noticed some of the buzz surrounding Ad Age’s Digital Marketing Conference this week and couldn’t help but think of Jerry Bowles’ recent post about the Social Media Content Audit. He makes the point that a lot of the stuff we need to establish a networked community is right under our nose.
Cadillac’s top ad exec agreed.
..some marketers might be surprised to see the communities that already exist online. Liz Vanzura, global director of advertising for Cadillac, found 300 Cadillac communities in Yahoo Groups and 1,500 YouTube videos tagged Cadillac when she went out to create MyCadillacStory.com. They were already there. We were just providing a unique forum where they could interact using video technology.
Could finding the starting point for social media strategy be as simple as combing through an annual report and a few press releases? You bet. When you’re evangelizing how the new web creates value, you better know your client’s business and be able to identify the folks most likely to champion the cause. Good job Jerry.
One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being driven by social media and powerful search technologies.
(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)
According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.
With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.
The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares.
Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it. The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content.
The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.
But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is, they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.
However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.
I’ve seen a lot more activity on LinkedIn lately. I think some of it has to do with the end-user spike that a new feature can bring, in this case LinkedIn Answers.
It also might have something to do with my personal widget marketing strategy. (Translation: I have my LinkedIn profileplastered published everywhere)
But more importantly, the thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn is how well it works at painting a picture of what social software and social networking is all about.Once you invite a client to be your connection on LinkedIn, it’s amazing how fast they get it after you explain how they’ve quickly become part of a vibrant and interactive social network.
Whether you think it’s useful or not, you can’t ignore the ramifications of things like LinkedIn. There’s been a ton of lists on how you can use LinkedIn, but it always fascinates me how each client comes up with their own take on its usefulness. But that’s just the point. Get people thinking about how they use social software and let them create.
Oh, and if you think we should connect, let me know
For fear of having the wrath of bad blog karma come down on me, I’ll perpetuate the blog tag game. If you didn’t know, the blogosphere’s version of the chain letter has taken hold in the form of calling out (tagging) other bloggers to divulge 5 things about themselves. I think its genealogy can be traced to here. I apologize in advance for the intrusion as I enter your feedreader.
1.My wife and I appeared on the front page of the Dallas Morning News on Christmas Eve 2001. That’s me with the bright yellow shirt on. Clearly it was my wife who garnered the photographer’s attention.
2. My first internet job was for USWeb Corporation back in 1996. I answered a classified ad in the newspaper looking for an internet salesperson. For those of you that don’t remember USWeb, they were one of the first internet professional services firms (whatever that meant) and they used the franchise model to grow their “affiliate offices”. Sort of the McDonald’s of the web at that time. It still amazes how the web has been transformed in just over a decade. Back then I was pitching $10-20K websites and intranets with functionality less than today’s build-on-the-fly widgets.
3. We had our first son almost a year ago to this post (1|19|2006) – Nate Dearing. What can I say, best thing that’s ever happened to me.
4. My wife and I have an obsession with vintage stuff. We started collecting junk antiques after we got married and quickly filled up our house and garage. Luckily, we’ve honed our tasted to focus on mostly items from the art deco and midcentury eras. Midcentury stuff is my real weakness.
5. I’m a native Texan and grew up in Houston before moving to Big “D”.
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.
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.Â
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.”
My premise for pitching the SMNR to them was simple. Let your audience slice and dice your content on their terms. Some folks will download the video, some will pull down a photo. Others might decide to just Digg it and move on. Whatever the interaction with your SMNR, the key is just that, interaction.
It’s fascinating to think how early we are in all of this. Fast forward a few years and think how silly it’ll seem gloating over an embedded video (below) inside of a press release.
It looks like 2006 will be viewed as the watershed year for social media, and with good reason. The impact of social spaces like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, along with the emergence of video, business blogs, and the mobile web was hard to ignore.
Now it’s still early, but clients are asking the right questions when it comes to social media. Instead of just building a website or microsite, they’re asking how to build community. They’re asking how to facilitate conversation. And they’re asking how to create and distribute content in new and innovative ways.
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
It seems The “Information Age” has finally found its frontman. You.
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.
Shift Communications seems to think so. And while I wish every news item had all the attributes of the so-called “social media” release, the reality is most companies still have difficulties understanding what the hell social media means, much less the components that make up a “social media release”.
I think it’s more realistic to get clients using “social media” in their work process. Once they’re bookmarking, tagging, and podcasting, they’ll be more inclined to use this expertise for outbound PR and marketing activities.
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I continue to like T. Boone Pickens’ communication strategy. While it helps to have deep pockets, you still have to pull it all together and execute. His so-called “army” is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting itself with all sorts of digital tools and services that spur the creation of consumer-generated content. Over the last 48 hours there was a battle brewing over whether or not NBC would show a recent Pickens’ ad.
(Translation: I have 
Take a look at this slide show
Here’s more evidence
