The post is an interview with MizFit Online who’s a fitness blogger. Reading the post however did not get me too far, other than MizFit’s avid blog reading and commenting herself and a key phrase “commentversation” which tried to capture her approach. Even MizFit seems unsure of what drives the comments saying “If only I knew. It varies wildly.”

I wanted to know more and decided to do some real analysis on MizFit’s blog. It seems like a great blog. True to her personality. Quite personal. And it seems she’s got a strong following. She also has a theme/category of the day: Monday Faceday, Tuesday Trends, View Mail Food, Glorious Food and Link Love.

I started by looking at every post she made in November. I looked at the title of the post, the theme, the length of the post, text vs. video, the number of outbound links in the post and the number of links to other pages on the blog.

The only thing that seemed to matter was whether the blog post was part of a theme. Uncategorized posts did very poorly incomparison. Post length, other than extremely short posts, had no impact. Number of links had no impact either. Video performed as well as text.

I decided to dig in further. I took the last 10 posts for each theme and for uncategorized posts (note: I screened out the uncategorized posts that were very short announcements).

Here are the results of the analysis of the last 10 posts by theme/catagory:

The results are facinating, at least to me.  If you factor out contests, four of the themes average about 100 comments per post.  Food Glorious Food does a little less well averaging 89.6 comments per post, which may be due to a heavier reliance on guest posts in this theme.

The pattern I saw with the uncategorized posts held true.  These types of posts only averaged 48.4 comments per post.

Contests also play a big role in making the numbers fluctuate.  They seem to add about 45 extra comments to a post on average.  More when the contest was enticing and less when it was not so enticing.

I dug further into the best performing and worst performing non-contest posts to see if I could find some other qualitative reasons for the variances. Indeed there seemed to be more going on qualitatitively.

When I looked deeper at the strongest performing posts based upon comments, I saw that these posts tended to stand out for one or more of the following reasons: Challenges, very personal stories, strenuous exercise video, or lots of questions (3-5) to audience at the end of the post.

In contrast the poorest performing posts were missing these elements.  The poorest performing posts where guest posts without questions to the readers. These posts dropped to 66-79 comments.  Guest posts with questions did a little better running in the mid 80s.  MizFit’s poorest performers in themed posts tended not to have as much passion and had no questions for the audience.

My take aways if you want to generate comments:

• Be personal
• Be passionate
• Post questions not answers
• Set up themes by day and be consistent
• Make sure guest posters have lots of questions for readers
• Use small contests to motivate your commentors

So what do you think?  What kind of posts get people to comment?  Is it this list or some other factors?  Who else gets lots of comments and what do they do?

Comment away:)

Update with ideas from comments about what drives comments:

• commentversation
• taking the time to personally respond to comments

The site has been quite successful recruiting members and now has 2 million users.

Tom and I had a great conversation about Gather and what they are doing to make the site a success.  I was especially intrigued by their use of social campaigns as a way to monetize the social network.  In these campaigns, users are recruited to try products and then write about them.  Tom describes how that leads other people in the network to also get involved, try the product and write about it.  It’s an interesting idea that looks like it could be adopted by other people who have built communities.

This is an example of one more great way to turn a community into an economy.

Let us know what you think.

I was impressed by their use of social media. It’s good to see social media doing some good things for the world. She sent me a link to their social media news release that was chock full of ways to learn about the project.

In short the project goal is saving the lives of malnourished children.  And they need your vote to help them increase the amount of funding they can get for the project.

“Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” is now guaranteed a share of $2.5 million in prize money. The project with the most votes receives $1.5 million, 2nd receives $500,000, 3rd $300,000, and 4th and 5th $100,000. The funding – made possible by your votes – would bring a vital lifeline to hungry and malnourished children around the world.

But we need your help between now and October 13. Voting is easy and doesn’t cost a thing! In just a click, you can save the lives of thousands of malnourished children. Click here to vote:

For severely malnourished children, we offer a step-by-step treatment program that gives them what they need to recover, including nutrient-dense food supplements like the peanut-based product, Plumpy’Nut. Our comprehensive monitoring system saves more than 90 percent of children being treated in our feeding centers. Being one of the Top 5 would mean our nutrition could reach more children around the world who need our help.

Save Some Kids — Vote Now

Time is short – so Vote NOW!

This is a great example of how social media can be used to increase awareness and do good in the world. These kids need our help, so GO VOTE NOW.

By way of background, Susan told me that they were working on ways to connect more effectively with brand advertisers and found real interest from the marketers in putting content from Personal Life Media right on the brand marketers’ web sites.  That led to the development of Personal Life Media’s new brandable player widget which can be loaded with up to five RSS feeds for audio podcasts and customized by color and size to match any web site.  Just like most widgets, the player can be embedded in blogs, Facebook, Myspace and anywhere else you want to use it.  Not only can you customize the player, the widget enables the the brand to be the exclusive sponsor of the podcast content in the customized player.

Imagine the new pitch to advertisers, we give you content you can use on your site, you get your own branded player that your enthusiast supporters can reuse and you get to the be the exclusive advertiser on content played through the branded player.  This gives the marketers some really interesting new ways to engage visitors to the site and gives Personal Life Media the ability to reuse its content on other players with different marketing programs.

At launch, they will have a number of brands using the widget including

• AccuQuote has integrated their “Life Insurance Podcast” along with four shows from Personal Life Media including “Aging Gratefully,” “GreenTalk Radio,” “Living Green” and “Coaching by the Life Coach.”  The player can be found on their multimedia page and their corporate blog.
• CardScan is distributing “Evolutionary Sales,” “Conscious Business,” “Money, Mission and Meaning,” and “Coaching by the Life Coach” in their customized player.
• Oceanus Naturals is providing “Just For Women,” “Tantra & Kama Sutra,” “Sex Love & Intimacy,” “Expanded Lovemaking” and “Fearless Lover” to site http://oceanusnaturals.com site visitors.
• Sinclair Institute is offering a series of five relationship shows on their Sinclair University site at http://www.bettersex.com/t-bsu-university.aspx.
• Zen by Design, makers of meditation chairs, is featuring “Buddhist Geeks,” “The New Man,” “Living Dialogues,” “Living Green” and “GreenTalk Radio” on their site at http://zenbydesign.com along with a group of relationship shows on http://tantrachair.com.
• Music discovery publisher IndieFeed is using two customized players to distribute their 7 weekly music shows on Facebook and MySpace in addition to offering the widget for their fans to get and share for free at http://indiefeed.com.

Even more exciting is that Personal Life Media is making this brandable player available to other podcasters. Here’s a sample of the player I built using their widget builder.

Powered by Personal Life Media

According to the press release:

The widget creator at http://personallifemedia.com/widget is free for any company, podcaster or content fan. Fees may be involved if a marketer wants to offer shows from Personal Life Media that exclusively feature the brand’s messages. Otherwise, the shows will feature existing sponsor’s ads.

Three simple steps customize your player:

1. Select up to five RSS feeds for audio podcasts.
2. Customize the player’s color and background, pick a size and add a logo.
3. Click “Get” and insert it directly on a blog, website and more than 20 social media services.  Any time a visitor to the brand’s site wants to “get” the widget for their own site, blog or social media page, the sponsor’s logo will be displayed along with the podcasts that include the sponsor’s marketing messages.

I look forward to seeing how this changes the way marketers think about downloadable media.

I briefly caught up with Charlene Li after hearing her speak at Forrester Research’s Marketing Forum 2008 in Los Angeles.

In this podcast, Charlene talks about getting the book written, and her and Josh’s goals of helping marketers understand the wild world of social media and engage with consumers in the groundswell.

Charlene also describes how marketing is evolving from highly controlled one-way messaging to a much less controlled process of creating relationships with consumers. In particular, she outlines how one of the best-known and most successful consumer tech brands, Apple, breaks the rules for engaging the groundswell, and the risks that other brands face if they follow Apple’s lead.

[tags]Forrester 2008 Marketing Forum, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, Groundswell, Apple[/tags]

Andrew and Alex covered Forrester Research’s Marketing Forum 2008. During the forum, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented material from their new book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Charlene and Josh quickly overviewed their POST framework for using social networks and shared a number of bite-sized case studies of how brands like Procter & Gamble, Ernst & Young, and Loblaws effectively use social media to talk with and energize their customers. They also used Dell to illustrate the importance of tackling social media one application at a time, with high level executive support, and getting it right before moving on to the next initiative.

In addition to covering the presentation at the conference, Andrew also interviewed Charlene later in the day.

Harnessing Social Technologies to Energize Sales
Charlene Li, Analyst, Forrester Research
Josh Bernoff, Analyst, Forrester Research

POST Framework

The biggest problem with the use of social networks is that companies are trying things without a strategy. You need to have a process, start with the desired customer relationships, not the technologies, then decide what technologies to use the enable those relationships.

We call our methodology the “POST” process:

• People – What are your customers’ social activities?
• Objectives  – What do you want to accomplish?
• Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change?
• Technology – Which technologies will help you achieve those objectives?

Within POST we break Objectives into five pieces:

• Research – listening to your customers;
• Marketing – talking to your customers;
• Sales – energizing your customers to advocate;
• Support – responding to your customers’ needs;
• Developing – embracing your customers.

Today’s Focus: Talking and Energizing (Marketing and Sales)

Talking. Talking is about two-way conversations, not just shouting, which is analogous to traditional one-way advertising. It’s critical to accompany these conversations with the use of metrics to track activity to sales.

Blendtec is a great example. They sell commercial grade blenders, and their decision to make videos began when the marketing executive saw the CEO trying to blend 2×4s to test out the blenders and decided he should record it. So they spent a few thousand dollars buying stuff to blend and then creating videos. The videos have become a YouTube hit with over 7 million views and 20+% sales growth. (See also Digital Podcast’s Are Ads as Content the Future of Advertising?)

Another example is Johnson & Johnson. J&J created a blog, opened it up for comments but incorporated a very strict comment screening policy to avoid liability, and made those guidelines explicit to consumers to avoid any will. They are a good example of how you can try things even within a strict regulatory oversight environment.

Ernst & Young is doing a great job of interacting with people on Facebook for recruiting. E&Y needs to recruit 3,500 college students each year, so within Facebook, they include information about recruiting and a wall for posting. In one post a student asked E&Y why they are not recruiting on their campus, and Dan Black, the head of North American campus recruitment, answered personally with suggestions for how to get in touch with E&Y. This kind of dialog has a viral effect on campuses.

Procter & Gamble had a problem trying to connect with teenage girls regarding tampons, which is not something that’s openly discussed. P&G created beinggirl.com, which includes discussions and Q&A about life as a teenage girl and Tampax and Always branding but no direct marketing. They are achieving a 4X return relative to traditional advertising, using their own internal metrics, and have rolled out the approach globally.

Energizing. Energizing is about finding and motivating enthusiastic customers to talk about your customers. Example efforts include brand ambassador programs, communities, and embeddable widgets.

Ratings and reviews are one of the most interesting ways for interacting with customers, especially for customers who wouldn’t otherwise be engaged. Loblaws, a supermarket chain, encourages shoppers to rate products online and share the ratings in the store aisles and advertisements. If customers complain about a product they’ll fix it, like when the added more eggplant to the eggplant mousaka that customers told them were under-eggplanted.

Fiskars, a scissors and craft supplies maker, created the Fisk-A-Teers website, an ambassador program. These are deeply passionate customers, but when surveyed, were very neutral about the Fiskars brand (when asked what food Fiskars would be, customers said Saltines). They made the Fisk-A-Teers site somewhat of a hot commodity by restricting membership to invitation-only after the site was seeded. They have 4,000 Fisk-A-Teers, and the number of positive mentions on the internet went up many-fold after the site launched. Fisk-A-Teers go to stores to give demonstrations, and when they do triple sales in the store on those days.

Brides.com energizes its fans through the use of widgets. They understand that brides and their friends are the ones who care about weddings, and created a countdown clock widget that brides can put on their own MySpace page.

How should companies get started?

It’s very easy for marketers to look at these social media efforts and get intimidated. Do not start by trying to move social applications into everything you do in your company. Pick one place, one application, make that’s successful and only then move on. Put metrics in place to make sure the success is measurable and can be replicated.

Dell jumped into social networking when Dells started catching on fire, literally. They had Lionel Menchaca be the lead spokesperson  he had the technical background, product review PR experience, and was well connected throughout the company.

Unfortunately, Lionel’s first efforts were too stiff and too company-focused. The blog was getting criticized, but despite these setbacks Michael Dell threw his support behind Lionel. It’s critical to have this kind of high-up support for social applications as these efforts always some ruffle feathers along the way.

Lionel put up a post titled ‘Flaming Notebook’ directly addressing the issue, including a link to pictures. He described in detail what Dell was doing about it and their investigations. Dell got wide praise for its directness and as a result were well ahead solving the problem and getting replacements before other laptop makers.

Dell didn’t stop there. The next thing they tried was IdeaStorm, a social application for generating ideas from customers. The first suggestion was a PC running Linux. They asked customers what form of Linux, what type of support, and conceived and shipped the product in 2 months vs. 9 months for the typical Dell product.

Next came DellShares, a Dell investor-focused blog. In many ways, this was really a means for distributing to individual investors answers they were already providing to the institutional investor community. They engaged with Legal first to identify and agree to necessary safeguards, ensuring that DellShares made it through to release versus being roadblocked. In this case, the Legal department devised a disclaimer that needs to be agreed to and clicked through before gaining access to the site.

In summary, to succeed with the use of social marketing:
(1) Focus on relationships, not the technologies.
(2) Find and nurture your revolutionaries.
(3) Start small with individual applications, but think big.

Q&A Discussion

How do you engineer the creation of viral video? It’s really hard to create something that goes viral, and it’s even harder to create one that communicates the message you want for the brand. For example, Delta put up a safety video featuring “Deltalina”, a take-off on Angelina. They at least thought about this enough to show consumers that they “get-it”, and there’s a lot more they could do to engage fans around the video. Forrester is going to do a video in support of the book about how to use data. It won’t be BlendTec-scale success, but we expect some pass-around

How critical are these techniques to driving business and marketing peripheral or the meat? It depends on how big your company is. BeingGirl.com is not what made Tampax and Always successful, but it’s a nice addition to a marketing plan. On the other hand, BlendTec had no consumer market before the videos, now they do. ConstantContact doubled their business with customer involvement. It goes back to marketing mix – never put all your eggs in one basket. You never know what will work with your audience.

How do you feel secure about what you’re creating? You don’t start with coming up with a brilliant idea, you start with who are your customers and what do they want. The BlendTech guys started by spending $50 with no real risk involved. Make it safe to fail, and encourage your team to try a lot of different things.

How do you tackle efforts to create very rich customer experiences with a very small number of people? If you look at the classical value of lifetime value, look at purchase amount, frequency, and viral value. Count the number of people they are actually touching and the value that drives. It’s not nearly as expensive as TV too. You have to start small to prove out the concept and see what works before trying to move it to the next level; once they get going these things scale very well.

More resources are available at www.forrester.com/Groundswell

[tags]Forrester 2008 Marketing Forum, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, Social Marketing[/tags]

You’ve seen the scantily clad cocktail waitresses in the casinos.  The sexy woman posed on the hood of a car.  We know that sex gets men’s attention.

But does sex actually sell?

A new research study by Brian Knutson of Stanford suggests the answer is yes; at least, that heterosexual men are more likely to take financial risks after being subjected to positive emotional stimuli—in the case of the study, erotic photos of a man and woman.

Why should digital marketers and publishers care?

As digital content and advertising become increasingly intertwined (here’s one of many posts on that topic), and marketers and publishers get better about measuring the effectiveness of their efforts (read more in our mini-eBook on social media performance management), we can expect the trend toward sex in advertising to be further invigorated (pun intended), at least in advertising that targets men.

And as social media becomes an increasingly effective marketing tool, we can also expect more of the digital equivalent of those cocktail waitresses.  The Stanford study alluded to the particular relevance in online gaming (gambling) businesses, and I noticed the effect firsthand when checking out XuQa.com, an online casual gaming community co-founded by Murtaza Hussain, co-founder and CEO of PeanutLabs and the subject of a recent DigitalPodcast interview.  Many of the most popular gaming rooms in XuQa are hosted by very attractive women (or at least hosts with photos of very attractive women), and the formula seems to be quite successful there.

By the way, for our female readers (my wife included) who by now are gloating over the superiority of your half of the species, beware:  Mr. Knutson is planning to test women’s responses in the future.

[tags]Brian Knutson, Erotic Content, Stanford University, Sex[/tags]

Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand

Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans.  The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand.  Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market?  Read on and share your opinion…

Emmanuel began by sharing background on Nike, whose headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon is like a Disneyland for adults, and its Jordan Brand division, where Michael Jordan (MJ) still deeply interacts with the brand, the same way that he was engaged with the game of basketball.

Mentally, or digitally, cut to a stirring, inspiring Michael Jordan video (videos can be found at Nike’s site for the Jordan Brand, Jumpman23).

The Jordan Brand.  Nike approached Michael Jordan in 1984 to have a signature shoe built around him, a completely novel concept at the time.  In 1996, the Jordan Brand was born as a division within Nike.  The brand has 110 people versus the Tiger Woods Brand’s 400 people, and both brands support the same amount of revenue.  Nine out of ten people own (or have owned) Air Jordans, and the Jordan Brand is the second in the market behind Nike itself.

The Jordan Brand’s primary consumer is the core urban male 15-20 year old, highly competitive, a leader of the team.  These guys often know what the brand is doing before the news is made public.  The secondary consumer is 12-24 year old males and females, urban and suburban, not necessarily competitive.  Their consumers’ mind space includes social media, television, and the video game space.  The Jordan Brand does a lot of marketing through video games – with them, kids can see the entire line-up.  Most kids know what products they want before they get to the store.

The engagement philosophy for the brand is (1) to engage with consumers where and when they want (online!); (2) product and service together are critical to delivering a greater experience and engagement; and finally (3) the consumer decides.

The Jordan Breakfast Club.  A key platform for engagement is the Jordan Breakfast Club.  The challenge was to establish an authentic position for Jordan in the training marketplace.  Every morning, MJ and his teammates used to wake up and complete a workout regiment before he got to eat his four course breakfast.  So the Jordan Brand went after an unmet need of the target customer around training – everyone says that training is important, but no one tells kids how to train.  The Breakfast Club includes a simple peer-based assessment and a custom designed workout program that can be printed out or downloaded onto an iPod as videos for a huge number of possible workouts.  The Jordan Breakfast Club has 20,000 plus engaged users, and tens of thousands additional views on YouTube.  The Club also did a 10-city summer tour to reach thousands more at day long training camps.  The program won a 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award.

The Jordan Flight Club.  After building the Breakfast Club, the brand started getting more information about its consumers, and next started the Flight Club.  The Jordan brand has a huge “sneaker-head” following, and the Flight Club is about limited edition, one-at-a-time, high demand products for fiercely loyal customers who are willing to pay a very high price and avoid the disappointment of trying to get limited products through retail.  The brand got a lot of feedback from consumers in designing how the Breakfast Club would work.  Members of jumpman23.com got membership offers and the opportunity to invite two more friends – in others words, an “insider” offer for loyal customers only.  Demand went through the roof, with people selling their free invitations on eBay, and over 40,000 members joining in the first 45 days.

Emmanuel’s summary:  (1) create relevant experiences beyond the product, (2) service complementary needs of the consumer, (3) empower engaged consumers to be brand advocates, and (3) create and own communities where they are relevant and authentic.  The Jordan Brand’s next big challenge is to take these opportunities in the digital space and migrate them to the physical space, like the Jordan Breakfast Club tour.

Q&A Discussion

How do you share learning from the Jordan Brand throughout Nike?  We do case studies.  Things may work differently for us versus golf, and we use best practices.

The 15-20 year old market is refreshed every 5 years, so how do you target for the future, and specifically do you market to even younger (under 15) generations?  We try to communicate in a simplified format, keep MJ’s story relevant, and make great products.  We don’t market to the younger kids, but do try to emphasize success through working hard.

What do you mean that you’ve learned the hard way about ignoring customers?  We created a website where consumers could buy one-off products, and only created 6,000 units of a product that 1.6 million consumers tried to buy, crashing the site and generating hate mail.  We use sales data and forecasting to ensure that problem is not repeated going forward.  We’d rather overstock and deal with excess inventory than to have too little product and anger consumers.

For limited editions, doesn’t it help the brand to sell out so fast?  You have to appreciate the global effect of our brand.  Kids in Australia were getting their hands on US-only products; we responded to make the products available there.   We’re pushing to think more globally and satisfy demand, offering limited products in all parts of the world.

The Breakfast Club concept sounds great, but how are you measuring the true impact?  We’re not measuring the financials, but we do track the ongoing activities of the kids who sign up.  One of the Pro teams we visited adopted the philosophy as their primary means of training!

Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely disconnected. Someone had arranged for the branded entertainment piece on the Project Runway show and as a part of that got a large online buy on the Bravo site.

The project landed in Patrice’s lap and she went to Avenue A/Razorfish and had them develop an online campaign oriented around a very detailed map of all the touch points. Once they had completed the map, they went back through the map and made sure that they incorporated selling pants into the program in a way that featured the right products.

They got 3,000 design submissions to the contest for designing a new Levi’s product. Over 2000 of the submissions complied with the rules. The campaign got 134,000 unique visitors and almost 19,000 registered users. Two-thirds of those were women in target age group of 18 to 25 years old. They had 122,000 design ratings. They also got 924 social networking/blog badges with over 30,000 views.

Interestingly word of mouth marketing on social media like blogs and social networks turned out to be a major driver of awareness about the campaign. Social media drove 38% of the awareness about the campaign as compared to 30% of awareness coming from TV and low single digit for everything else.

During the five weeks that the program was running, the top 5 selling products changed from traditional products to the featured products. The traditional core products had a price point of about 44 dollars and sold to an older demographic. The products featured in the campaign were Levi store exclusive, more fashion forward and had price range of 58 to 70 dollars. Literally overnight they got a different demographic and a sales lift that made a measurable impact on sales.

Once the campaign ended, the top 5 selling products switched back to the traditional top 5 selling products.

Patrice said that they had to steal themselves to the loss of control and reaction during the program. Once they had chosen a winner, they had some very negative comments from people who didn’t win. This caused some consternation about the comments and debate about what to do about the comments. Levi decided to leave the comments up and it turned out well as the community policed the problem well.

Perhaps the most important part of the program was the way the program changed the way the company worked to get the digital team working with the marketing team. The online and traditional agencies had to work together to make this work.

While the results may not seem tremendous, Patrice felt that the program was a tremendous success, due to the organizational learning and the level of engagement.

It is very interesting to see Levi’s willingness to experiment and the results of this program. Project 501 clearly provided some hands on learning and capability building for Levi. It is clear that this kind of program can drive sales. The challenge now becomes how how to scale this type of program into a more significant campaign and how to make it more than a five week program.

[tags]social marketing, case study, Levi[/tags]

She calls it an “educational GPS” and a CRM for LeapFrog.

The service, which is planned to launch this summer, focuses on 8-13 year olds.

Learning Path automatically collects data from devices and produces reports that get emailed to the parents. It allows the parent to see first hand what the kid has been doing, how engaged they are, where they are on the Learning Path and what LeapFrog product should be next.

LeapFrog is increasing its investment into the LeapFrog website. They now have an educational content advisory board and are working on building community aspects into the site. They are also working on how to mobilize the millions of moms out there who love LeapFrog. They want to increase the strength of connection between the moms and their children by giving them information about how the child’s learning is progressing.

Nancy was asked about what LeapFrog is doing about the kids graduating from LeapFrog to Nintendo and she described their new Didj product as their competitive offering. (Editors note: Seems like Nintendo and LeapFrog should merge. It would be a good fit.)

Nancy was asked about multi-player games and she said that they have a secret product called Maestro that will be a multi-player product for kids and will launch next year.

[tags]LeapFrog, Learning Path, Forrester[/tags]

The book is about why brands need to have a personality, how to avoid being faceless and finding a way to add more authenticity into marketing.

Rohit describes to us how he came to write the book and what he wanted to accomplish. He describes what he means by personality and provides some concrete, actionable suggestions for how to use his ideas in your marketing work.

He argues that personality must be unique, authentic and talkable. We explore what he means by talkable and in the process he reveals a secret about the book that readers will want to know. To hear the secret you will have to listen to the podcast. Pay attention around the half-way point to hear the details.

Rohit also goes into detail about how he is using the ideas in his book to market the book. The ideas he shares are valuable for everyone with something to market. If you’re a CEO who wants to make your marketing more effective, a marketing manager who wants to make a difference, a blogger/podcaster who wants to grow your audience then the ideas and suggestions Rohit makes are worth paying attention too.

Remember be unique, be authentic, be talkable.

You can find out more about Rohit at Influential Marketing Blog and at the book’s web site at PersonalityNotIncluded.com.

You can buy the book at Amazon (affiliate link).

[tags]Rohit Bhargava, Personality Not Included[/tags]

Kobe Bryant recently released a video of himself jumping over a speeding car, or at least appearing to jump over a speeding car. While the video is likely some special effect, the stunt is incredibly stupid and irresponsible. He starts the video by showing off his new Nike’s which makes me believe that this is part of some kind of ad campaign.

The video has been shown on numerous news shows this morning and will undoubtedly get sent around until everyone has seen it.

The problem will come when the first stupid person decides to try it themselves to show off. The first broken neck, paralyzed or dead kid will make Kobe and Nike look incredibly irresponsible. I would not be surprised if they get sued and it becomes a big mess.

While I don’t want to sound like the grumpy parent that I am, I can’t help but point out that this is stupid and irresponsible behavior and the perhaps the dark side of social media marketing. Kobe has a huge following despite his problems off the court. Kobe’s jersey is the number one most popular jersey in the US and even in China. Kids who don’t know any better and adults who are stupid enough to try to emulate their heroes are going to see if they can do this too.

While a pair of Nike’s costs $130 bucks, a kid’s life priceless. Nike and Kobe should start thinking now about how they get themselves out of that mess. It’s coming soon.

[tags]Kobe Bryant, Nike, social responsibility,social media marketing[/tags]

I came up with a short starter list of why Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Communications Officers should make social media a priority.

You need to know what people are saying about you. There is a customer to customer and press to customer conversation going on throughout the internet. Any company that fails to understand and act on this puts themselves at risk for getting blindsided by the conversation. At a minimum, they should be tracking the conversation. The best practice is to go beyond monitoring to building a social media strategy to influence the conversation.

You need to know what your people are saying. If your customers are using social media, it’s also quite likely that your employees are using social media. They will be doing it no only for themselves, but also to fill gaps in the company’s social media strategy. Left un-managed, this presents numerous risks to the company’s reputation and customer/competitive relations. Inappropriate information may get disclosed and comments about policies by employees may confuse customers. Further, it is not uncommon for information published by employees with good intentions to be poorly maintained and out of date. Every company should have a Social Media Policy and a plan for cleaning up/maintaining information published about them across the internet.

You need to make your marketing/communications more efficient. Customer and stakeholder attention is now in shorter supply than ever. Traditional marketing and communications approaches are becoming increasingly less effective and consequently it’s becoming more expensive to realize communication goals. Social media and community are two mechanisms to radically improve efficiency. It will take an investment, but this investment has much greater leverage than investments in traditional media. Traditional media content scales up linearly with cost and have diminishing returns. Social media content scales up with the size of the community and can have compounding returns. Any cost conscious CMO or CCO should be figuring out how to use these tools to make their companies more cost effective.

Tell us why you think CMOs and CCOs should make social media like blogging, podcasting and networking a priority.

PS – Click here to learn more about how the University of Southern California’s CCO is using social media by listening to this Digital Podcast.

[tags]social media marketing, marketing priorities[/tags]

They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out.

This is an excellent example of a simple, highly focused campaign and a well orchestrated effort to measure the results.

This type of campaign shows that social media can be woven into your marketing efforts with practical and relatively straightforward methods. I’ve captured some screen shots below and a sample of a YouTube video to help provide some perspective on the project.

Here’s what the blog looked like:

And a video from YouTube.

And some of pictures from Flickr.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, FastCompany.tv, SeaWorld, Journey to Atlantis, Shel Israel[/tags]

Andrew started the conversation by describing viral marketing as a marketing system where your customers sell your next generation of customers. Jia pointed out that the time frame now has been collapsed by the social networks so there is an accelerated viral opportunity.

There’s been a long evolution of viral from word of mouth, through email and other tools that have been turned into features of the social networks. Now instead of starting with the product, you can start from the customer and work back through the social networks as distribution channels.

Jai pointed out that early on Facebook did not put much restraint on how many invitations could be sent which created a gold rush effect that allowed an eco-system to grow as developers chased the growth. Now Facebook has put constraints on viral marketing tools which will make it much harder for new players to grow. The newer APIs are also being more conservative and that means they may have more difficulty building the same kind of ecosystem.

The differences in functionality across sites drives difference in application strategy. For example, on MySpace the focus will be more on applications that are self-expression, canvas oriented and less the viral, messaging applications.

Andrew highlighted that you can learn a lot from games in helping to make applications more successful. Things like reward schedules can drive use.

If you can build something that catches on you will know after the first couple of thousand users. If it’s successful with this group you can be confident that you can grow the applications penetration. Less viral applications will take marketing money to grow.

Being viral is not all it takes. If you’re getting lots of visitors and trials, and are not converting them into active users you are missing the opportunity. You need to make sure you’re measuring retention and repeat use of different visitor cohorts to ensure long term success.

It takes both viral growth and engagement to be successful.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, viral applications, viral marketing[/tags]

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy – sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad – the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon – imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? – Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology – points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace[/tags]

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

[tags]brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish[/tags]