What About the Changes on Facebook?

If you’ve missed it elsewhere, Facebook made changes on Wednesday that affect brand pages. When C. C. Chapman visited my class that evening we looked at the changes and wondered if the inability to moderate wall comments would scare away some brands. Caroline McCarthy had a good post on CNET yesterday that explains some of the issues.

You should check out some of the brand pages that you’re interested in. Target is one that gets Facebook and does interesting things. Check out their page and notice all the comments on the wall and look at their reviews page. All of us should "fan" (note that that's a behavior) a few good brand pages and watch what they do.

I noticed on my page that C.C. has updated the page for his agency, The Advance Group. The portfolio page represents the work of the agency and their boxes page shows the other ways you can follow this group of social media marketers.


No one is talking much about the effects on non-profits. In fact, I thought that non-profit pages were to remain under the Groups rubric. I checked out one of my favorites, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and it clearly has been converted. MSCPA is an organization with many passionate supporters, as you can see if you look at one of their pages. This is the wall page from their Angell Memorial Hospital. They will have people bring up issues from time to time, as people are currently discussing the closure of animal shelters as a result of the recession. These people are posting with sadness and understanding, but others could post in a more critical way.

It’s nice to look at this as a great way for consumers to contribute. Businesses and non-profits also have to look at the monitoring and response function. If you have your own page, you have to keep an eye on it. But you also need to be watching what people say about you on other pages.

It sounds to me like a serious set of feeds and filters for any business or non-profit that’s serious about its online reputation. When Facebook talks about filters, they are talking about personal Facebook pages and the way individuals can control their feeds, which is fine, but I doubt that it’s sufficient for businesses. There are some third-party Facebook tools out there, but a quick search didn’t reveal the kind of tool I have in mind.

I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, if you know of any monitoring tools specifically for Facebook, let me know!

Essentials of Web 2.0 Community

I’ve found myself writing a lot about community lately, and I have several other things I want to cover in days to come. This material has gotten me thinking and I’d like to suggest a couple of ideas.

The basic one is that “community” in the broadest sense, seems to be the uniting theme of the social web. That’s true in both B2C markets, where it’s easy to see, and also in B2B markets, where there is strong motivation for community building and participation.

If community is the uniting theme, what are the special elements of the social web in each marketspace? In the B2B space it seems obvious that collaboration—again broadly speaking--is the key benefit of focused social networks. For example, while I was writing this I got an update from LinkedIn guiding me to the activity of the Social Media group where people are asking questions, passing along information and looking for jobs and business. That’s a public network; the collaboration that goes on inside corporate firewalls on shared documents, wikis, and so forth is a major productivity enhancement, especially for global corporations.

In the B2C space the key element doesn’t seem—to me at least—to be as clear. I’ve called it User-Focused Communications, to include both relevant marketer-initiated communications as well as user-generated content. Do you have a better/another idea?

Whatever terms you use, I would argue that community is the common thread. What should we be thinking about in terms of “community strategy” if there is such a thing. A concept that has been circulating on the web for several months is the 4C’s of Community. They are:

• Content
• Context
• Connectivity
• Continuity.

Think about those and read this Ad Age article. Content, context and continuity are all things that require organizational commitment and resources. In the way it’s used here, connectivity is more than just the technology, and therefore it becomes an organizational issue also. More about that tomorrow.

There’s a lot of fun technology out there, and I enjoy that as much as anyone else. More important to marketers, though, will be the emergence of a strategic framework for thinking about the social web. Your comments on this broad-brush strategic concept are welcome!

Have You Been Pingged?

I’ve been evited, but I’ve never been pingged. Presumably the name of this new site is a play on the technical term ping—clever!

Pingg came to my attention as the result of a story from DM News’ Sara Holoubek. It’s a good story that has an important marketing point. I was initially intrigued by the complete “party management” service she described, so I looked at the two sites and found a lot going on.


Evite has been around for awhile and according to the site has 18 million registered users. Evite has recently added the ability to send and receive invitations from your cell phone (assuming that you want to. . .). It also has a photo page to which you can upload pics of your parties, so they are clearly adding social networking apps.

Pingg is new, having been launched in March of this year. It is obviously designed with social networking in mind. It’s surroundSend functionality lets you get your invitation to the recipient, wherever he or she may be. The event management function provides all the basics and some cool Internet apps. The gift and charity registry allows you to embed your Amazon Wish List or to ask your guests to contribute to a charity instead. If you’re selling tickets to your event like Sara was, invitees can purchase their tickets with PayPal. If you are doing this for a worthy cause, you can show the fund-raising target on your personalized event page. Not only cool, but useful!

Back to Sara’s point. If your goal is to draw an audience, just putting something out there, even to your handpicked guest list may not be enough. “Searches and online transactions all originate within the physical world.” Right! And with all the clutter in both physical and cyber worlds, it usually takes more than one communications channel to get your marketing message to its target audience!

Announcing a New Blog

I'm happy to announce that a new vertical blog sponsored by Glam Media launched just last night. eBrand Marketing has an interesting line-up of authors and you can expect it to be a lively and informative look at ebranding, especially in the context of marketing to women.

You may be familiar with Glam Media. Their website Glam has recently become the web traffic leader in the women's space. It has lots of good content and Web 2.0 features.

I'll be making today's post there with some new data on video. We hope you'll check it out and come back often!

Don't Just Listen - Pay Attention to the Voice of the Customer

The marketing world is all a-twitter with news of the iPod touch ad originally created by an 18-year old English college student. On his YouTube post in September Nick Haley said,

I loved the look of the new iPod Touch, found this music, and thought it was perfect for it. I made a commercial using material from apple.com and editing in Apple's Final Cut Pro.
*Sorry about the grey start, its the way YouTube deals with MPEGs*
Made on my MacBook - September 2007.
Music - CSS - Music is My Hot Hot Sex.

Apple found the 30-second ad, loved it, and brought the young man to the US to confer with their agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. The result? His ad, with minor modifications, started airing last night on Desperate Housewives and the World Series. If you missed it, take a look.


Apple posted a higher quality video here.

And, no, apparently no one knows what kind of a deal the agency made with Nick Haley. Whatever it was, as a college freshman, he’s probably pretty happy with it. And if he wants to go into advertising, he has a great start on his portfolio!

I think the relevant words in all of this are “Apple found” it. But you also have to add, “they followed up with a smart response.”

So enjoy the ad. It’s slick, professional and thoroughly appealing. While you do, ask, “Who in my company scans communication channels for what users are saying about us?” “What do they do when they find it?” “Do we have a mechanism for dealing with the negative by opening a dialogue?” “Do we encourage employees at all levels to bring material to the attention of marketing?” “Do we have an organizational process/organizational support for bringing the positive in and taking advantage of it?”

I’ll belabor the obvious. It’s is a rich ecosystem of customer-created content out there. Marketers ignore it--good or bad--at their peril. If they’re smart, they react positively to the good stuff and use it in ways that build strong bridges to their customers. And if they get lots of positive media twitter in the process, that’s a bonus!
Sphere: Related Content

Social Networks Getting Smaller?

Much has been made of the growth of the big networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. As this table from Marketing Charts shows, there’s good reason for all the attention. They have tremendous reach. It’s easy to liken them to shopping malls, with something for everyone.

So I was intrigued last week when I ran across this article in the New York Times. The idea of a social network just for your apartment building made me to search to see what was available. LifeAt is the firm referenced in the article. It’s pretty new and the application below seems to be the work of the property manager, but if the residents choose to participate it will become interesting and vital.


As I looked I realized there were numerous sites where one can set up personal networks and other sites that have local collaborative content like Topix.com. There are, of course, local newspapers, which are offering many kinds of user-submitted content and creating community around that.


I feel another mashup opportunity coming on. There is growing support for the creation of neighborhood or small town communities although sites like FatDoor are in their infancy. Or web-savy residents will build sites on their own, taking feeds from sites like CitySearch and Craig’s List. They’ll adding a lot of opportunities for their neighbor to provide content and they’ll not only have vibrant local social nets, they’ll also have ideal opportunities for local advertising. It won’t be a virtual community like Second Life; it may in fact, be a lot more useful and engaging—a new version of the local shopping papers, but one that’s personal and interactive.
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A Marketer-Friendly Mashup Tool

Mashups are a great way to attract attention and create engagement among customers and non-customers alike. The Frito-Lay contest for SuperBowl08 is an example of providing some tools and allowing users to make their own videos. This spring Heinz ran a college challenge contest in which they provided content that student teams could “mash up” in their own way to make ketchup ads.

Mash up sites have been around for awhile. There is AdCandy, which has gone through multiple iterations. Presently JetBlue and and Monster Energy Drink are running slogan contests, so they appear to be working on the mashup capabilities.

Many sites offer mashup tools. For marketers, most of these these are ugly places where they speak languages like JAVA, AJAX, Flash, ATOM, and lots of others that marketers just don’t speak. Until now, creating your own enterprise mashup--for either internal productivity or external marketing--has required some assistance, either a developer to do custom programming or an API like one of the many offered by Yahoo!’s Flickr site. Google Maps is very popular with local businesses because they can incorporate the mapping information into their listings and sites with ease.

The new web service announced by Microsoft last week at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco may finally have made mashups a DIY activity for marketers. One of the product developers gives an interesting demo in this video.


Click here to view video.

Microsoft has further information on their Popfly site and – if you plan to call in a developer, background information on the Sliverlight site.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to use mashups effectively for marketing purposes. Contests are fine, but there must be more. Any ideas?

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Marketers are Out of Control

We’ve all heard the phrase “consumers are in control” many times. It has become part of the theme music for Web 2.0. How often do we stop to think about what it really means?

One thing is clear. Consumers can say pretty much anything they want to say pretty much anywhere on the web. They can post videos. They can make content viral. If it’s favorable to our brand, that’s great! What if it’s not?

Marketers are used to controlling their communications with consumers. Marketing guru Don Schultz call this “linear media.” In the video clip he also points out that media doesn’t work that way anymore. Marketers are still trying to control communications that are no longer under their control.

What is the response? Head-in-the sand is one option. A headline today on eMarketer says “Marketers Hooked on Old Media” (September 28, 2007). Quoting a study by Gundersen Partners, they say that 60% of marketers put at least half their marketing budgets into traditional media and 45% allocate only 10% of their budget to new media.

But the situation is not all bleak for new media. More than half of respondents in this study plan to put 10 to 30% of their budgets into new media, with 80% planning to achieve their goal within two years. I wonder how much the media will have changed by that time. Clearly a static plan will not accomplish meaningful goals.

One more point from this report. When asked why they were not moving faster, 40% said they had insufficient knowledge and 1/3 said they did not have enough time to evaluate new channels.

While I don’t doubt the surface truth of those two statements, is fear of the unknown lurking below the rational responses? Are the majority of marketers afraid to take the plunge into social media?

Or perhaps the reason for the long lead time is to allow for experimentation to see what works before committing substantial funds. Is your company experimenting? If not, I’d suggest that train has already left the station and you need to hurry to catch up to it.

Heinz has a tradition of contests that generate ideas from everything from ketchup bottles to labels. It probably should be no surprise that they recently ran a contest for consumer-created ads. The contest generated thousands of entries by the deadline on August 6, so many that they have announced a second round of winners, coming in October. If you missed the winning ad on the Emmy Awards in mid-September, you can view it and all the semifinalists on the Top This TV microsite. You might also want to read the contest rules; Heinz created an environment that protected them against intellectual property issues and, working with YouTube, protection against objectionable content.

Marketers cannot control what consumers say about their brand. But they can provide a forum for constructive discussion and support activities that give insight into consumers feelings and lifestyles.