ChaosScenario

7 days in a Sentra

Marc Horowitz finished his seven days in a Nissan Senata, which, as far as I know, is Nissan's first venture into social media. The campaign had all the components, a blog, podcast, video and a MySpace page.

This campaign seems to have all the right components. It's not over-produced and does a good job of showing what the vehicle has to offer, while not over-selling. It lacks a one thing though, it's not funny, outrageous, it's just kind of boring. Marc seems like he's stretching to come up with things to say and do. There's an attempt to entertain, but with all the other stuff out there, it doesn't have what it takes to go 'viral', at least in my opinion (we'll wait and see if any results are published).

I guess this goes to show you that it's difficult to just 'produce a viral campaign'. It takes a lot of planning and isn't guaranteed to work. If your off on just a little in the creative and audience planning, you'll miss the mark. - Paul Herring

A (More) Complete Internet Advertising Solution

Last month, Paul Herring wondered out loud whether paid advertising was getting too much credit. Contrary to what Jakob Nielsen and others say, he speculated that banner ads can work well, in spite of the fact that contextual links get clicked more.

Today, Seth Godin cited a study that seems to lend weight to Paul's theory. He says,

If you run banner ads ... you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. ... The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.

As Paul asked earlier, which ad worked harder? Perhaps this is a reminder that we need to take a more complete approach to our Internet advertising, and that there is no "Holy Grail" solution that applies equally to everything. - Cam Beck

The Internet Has Limits, Too

Over at Hee Haw Marketing, Paul McEnany's has a thoughtful post concerning the application of human decency in advertising. I commented that nature of television required deep reasoning be omitted from advertising, since the designed to motivate the audience to take a course of action only last for 30 seconds at a time. The Internet is great, I said, because deeper reasoning is always only one click away.

I submitted the comment before I realized the quandry: Everything else is only one click away, too.

Speaking to the main subject of Paul's post, caring about the outcome of elections requires more work than not caring. So to actually affect the elections some of us care about, we really have two options:

1. Appeal to the audience's higher sensibilities
2. Appeal to their faults

Appealing to their higher sensibilities requires getting them to trust you so that they will come close enough that you can whisper to them. This is a lot of work, because it cannot be forced. I have tried talking about politics in mixed company -- and let me tell you... there is a reason they say not to do it. I've always had better luck on forums where people are talking about news and politics anyway... and even that requires enormous patience.

Appealing to their faults is quicker, because it does not require explaining the logic behind a position (which would explain why it is used so much), but depending on the outcome, this will cause the audience to either be too easily manipulated by clever marketing messages or to never trust what we have to say -- ever again. Both outcomes are rather unsavory and have negative long-term consequences beyond the upcoming election.

But then, with a 90% incumbancy rate, losing elections has long-term consequences, too, which makes the quicker method of motivating voters all the more appealing. The Internet isn't going to solve this quandry by itself, but we can make it so at least we aren't duplicating the faults of network TV, which we do when we resort to silly potty humor instead of more refined discourse. - Cam Beck

MySpace and Facebook declining?

According to the Wall Street Journal, there was a fairly sharp drop in MySpace and Facebook traffic in September. MySpace saw a 4% decrease in traffic and Facebook saw a whopping 12% decrease. Although Nielsen/Netratings says that it's probably seasonal, the article should serve as a warning signal to marketers that use the site. (There's also a video providing an explanation)

Users of the sites are complaining because they're getting  friend request from people they barely know or from 'marketers'. Apparently some companies are using bots to create friend requests in mass, resulting in a new type of spam.

I'm a proponent of the right brands setting up profiles. Some of my favorite are the X-men profile and Sprite's. There's nothing wrong with brands having a profile online, no one is forcing you to go to there page or become their friend.

The issue is when these brands start to aggressively 'push' their way to consumers who haven't necessarily expressed an interest. It's a good way to get on their black list, and, a good way to find bad publicity.

If we're going to keep this new media viable as an advertising platform, let's learn from what happened to email. Set up a profile, allow engagement, have friends, even incent them to come to you, just don't push your profile on them.

The Politics of YouTube

Blogs were the buzz during the last presidential election, and this time around, it looks like online video is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the political arena. Tuesday on NPR's "All Things Considered", they aired a piece about the role of YouTube as a political tool for campaigns. Listen to the broadcast here.

One aspect I find interesting is exposure that sites like YouTube have given to the ads that politicians are running in different states. Like the case of the Harold Ford advertisement that's causing controversy... you can pull ads from the broadcast waves to save face, but that ad can make it to YouTube, and have a national... wait, international audience.

The only evidence you need is to look at the top videos on YouTube today. - John Keehler

Patent Foolishness

IBM announced the other day that it is going to sue Amazon.com for patent infringement. Taking a page out of Amazon's playbook for protecting its "One-Click" ordering process, which simply utilizes existing web technologies such as cookies to store billing information on the user's computer, IBM claims that its patent is on the online ordering process that provides hyperlinks to other items that are recommended on the basis of the user's purchase or browsing behavior.

For the purposes of this post, I won't address the bureaucratic, legislative, and judicial issues surrounding each of these cases. You can (and should) read about them yourself. I will, however, address the implications the current state of patent law has for our industry.

The criteria required for issuing 20-year patents on business processes that utilize existing technology -- barring all others from using it without paying a licensing fee -- are absurd. This applies to IBM, Amazon, or any other opportunists who would license the use of air if they could. It increases the cost of doing business, which in turn increases the cost of products, which decreases the amount we have available to spend, save, or invest.

I'm sure Amazon patted themselves on the back pretty hard when they developed their "One-Click" ordering process... but their ownership of that process -- and U.S. Patent Office's allowance of it -- guaranteed the rest of the Internet would remain difficult to use for the life of the patent. The Internet should make things easier to buy and use. That much is clear. Barring any corporate espionage into proprietary technology, the rest of the universe should be able to utilize the same technology Amazon accessed for free to make their sites easy to use, as well. Essentially Amazon is claiming ownership of, not just the process, but the idea that customers should be able to buy what they want without being hassled.

Let's suppose the offline equivalent to this nonsense.

Nowadays to make a purchase, you're allowed to just swipe your debit or credit card in a little machine. For security purposes, most of the time you're required to either sign your name to a receipt or type in a PIN. That machine had to be purchased, but it was manufactured independently, or in compliance with patent laws that required the payment of licensing fees. Amazon is claiming that in order to make a purchase, you have to type in the code yourself (rather than swipe your card), and you must rub an etching of your card onto a separate receipt -- not because Amazon owns patents on the technology the machines use to swipe cards or the machines themselves, but because they were granted a patent for a process that made purchases easier.

Whenever you're in a computer store and select a product, a good sales representative will point out accessories that would either aid in the unit's functionality or that are required for the unit to work properly. IBM is now saying that it owns the process by which people will make that recommendation.

To give you a further idea about how ridiculous the patent process has become, in 1995, U.S. Patent No 5,443,036 was issued to Kevin Amiss and Martin Abbott, which provided a means for exercising a cat, that consisted of a human using a laser pointer to cause the curious cat to try and capture the light.

I'm not sure what the licensing fee is for such an "innovative" process, but I figure there's a lot of you cat owners who owe Msrs. Amiss and Abbott some cash.

Pay up or fight back. It's up to you.

- Cam Beck

They could have been contenders

There's one of the marketing paradigms that says there is a 'first mover advantage'. When it comes to online sharing sites, I'm not so sure:

Take a look at Photobucket, a fairly recent addition to online photo sharing, versus Kodak's offering.

My guess is that Kodak didn't really understand social networking, and were probably focused more on photo development. My favorite is Wikipedia and Encarta. Take a look at this difference.

Wikipedia has been getting a lot of heat recently because it's not written (necessarily) by experts. However, in most cases I'd put the validity of it's self policed data up against Encarta. Maybe Microsoft was too busy fixing security leaks to worry about Encarta?

And then there's the classic example of the iPod. Not necessarily a Web 2.0 example, I know. However, the fact that the iPod was not the first mp3 player but the best designed demonstrates the point. Maybe it's better to be second and better than first and copied.

Information from a recent Web 2.0 report from Pew Internet and the Hitwise blog.

- Paul Hering

When Fake Blogs Work

Wal-Mart has come under a lot of fire for sponsoring a fake blog about "Wal-Marting Across America," and they deserved it. The blogging community let out a collective groan and held conferences about how successful corporate blogs are authentic, honest, insightful, etc.

Christina Kerley (CK), for instance, nailed it precisely: "Just be yourself. Lose the tie. Lose the script, too."

It should be noted that if you're a superhero, you can throw that rule out the window.

NBC, who just announced massive layoffs to "help ... exploit technology and focus ... resources as [they] continue [their] transformation into a digital media company for the 21st century," created a fake blog for one of their characters from the hit TV-show, Heroes, which I normally watch online (Last episode's sponsor, which I watched last Tuesday, was Cars.com, in case you were wondering).

On the blog, the character "Hiro," played by Masi Oka on the show (and who knows if it's him on the blog) talks about his trials and experiences as -- not an actor on a hit TV show, but as the character he is playing on the show.

NBC could have gone a different route that literally followed all the rules about authenticity and honesty... Certainly there is a small segment of people who want to know about the technical aspects to creating a program, and there's probably a larger segment who want to feel like they are communicating with a TV star online. Instead, NBC decided to break the conventional rules and do something that, I think, is far more effective as a branding tool.

Nobody is fooled by this, of course, and based on the comments (I didn't read all of them), there was at least one person who had a real problem with this deliberate falsehood. However, in the context of the TV show, this fabrication makes perfect sense. People don't watch TV shows like "Heroes" because they want an authentic experience. They watch shows like "Heroes" because they want to be entertained by fiction masquerading as an authentic experience. They want to suspend their disbelief. And the more convincing NBC can make that fiction, the more people will become advocates for that brand.

But let's be honest. No matter how you slice it, except to trolls, orcs, and maybe Ash from "Army of Darkness," no giant retail store experience is ever going to be as entertaining to the masses as "Heroes." My only wish for the TV show's blog is that they'd open it up to more characters and encourage more posts per week, which would not only aid in character development, but it would also help build evangelists for the brand. Perhaps one of the characters could even have a MySpace profile.

CK's admonition certainly applies to most corporate blogs, which she specifically called out in her rules. But I have to leave open the possibility that the right opportunity could arise to launch a fictional corporate blog. Wal-Mart could even do it, if it is tied into something that 1) people are already using for entertainment, 2) it is done in the context of that entertainment, and 3) the blog is 95%-99% about the entertainment (even though corporate bean counters would want a ratio skewed in the other direction).

I'd sure like to see it done right.

- Cam Beck

Close Enough to Whisper

Paul McEnany has a short, pithy post on his blog.

We're in an industry where everyone is trying to scream the loudest, when all we ever needed to do was get close enough to whisper.

"Close enough to whisper" is a great metaphor for all kinds of advertising, but it's especially true for the Internet, where for so long flashing banner ads and popups that deceptively looked like Windows error messages ruled the day. Our challenge is that we must not only get close enough to whisper, but in an age when the competition is only a click away, the customers must trust us enough to allow us to get that close.

Getting them to notice you isn't enough. For consumers, it's less work to find an alternative than it ever was. Therefore, it must be easier to buy from you than it is to buy from the competition.

It's not about only usability. It's not about only creative or content. It's about more than just honest messaging--it's about being honest at our core. It can take years to develop a good reputation, but it only takes one act of dishonesty to ruin it.

That is why, I'm convinced, when companies focus their efforts solely on narrowly targeted metrics instead of just becoming a great company, they  are really just losing sight of the fact that their customers are real people who have real concerns about what that business represents, and whether or not they are the sort of company the conumers want to be seen associated with--whispering sweet nothings or empty promises in their ears.

Lose sight of that, and your customers will make sure you're never close enough to whisper. - Cam Beck

Google analytics, google optimizer, what next?

Google beta released (invitation only) their Website Optimizer, providing an easy tool to test different offers, copy and content on landing pages. This just on the heels of releasing an online spreadsheet and word processing tools and, a little less recently, their analytics tool.

Is Google the new Microsoft? Some people think so but I think there are key differences:

1. Google's products are a result of their innovative culture. Using a model pioneered by 3M, Google allows their developers time to work on special projects that hold promise and doesn't punish them for mistakes.

2. Google actually releases products in beta, improves them, and doesn't allow a full release until it works. I write this after having got restart IE 7 twice.

The big question in my mind is how Google will monetize these products? Will they just use them to increase the use of Ad words and Ad sense? Maybe not a bad strategy since so much of interet advertising is devoted to search. Will they charge for them? I paid for a tracking program for this blog before Google Analytics and have clients that would definitely pay for Website Optimizer.

- Paul Herring