He says that Yahoo has been open for a long time. They have lots of open API’s. Flickr is the second largest of these.

He wants to take “open” to a whole new place. He wants to open up all the assets to developers. They want to open up the social network that is Yahoo. It sounds like they have been learning from Facebook and OpenSocial. They seem to recognize that they have the ability to be the worlds largest social platform if they can get this right.

He announced the opening of the beta for search monkey. He says that Yahoo’s open strategy is not just about opening up the search page, but opening up all the aspects of Yahoo.

They will have an application platform and a social platform. They are going to unify profiles across Yahoo go make social possible. The third element is to re-wire all the properties of Yahoo so that there is a consistent API across the different experiences.

They want to rewire the entire Yahoo experience to be social. They don’t view social as a destination. He provides an example of social being used to highlight mail in email system, highlight what’s important to friends in My Yahoo or on the sports page.

Y! OS (open strategy)

• Rewiring Yahoo
• Open Yahoo to developers like never before
• Making Yahoo more social
• Making Yahoo portable.

Search Monkey now, much more later this year. The overall process will unfold over time. Look for releases over this year and next.

UPDATE: Here’s the video of the presentation:

[tags]Yahoo, Open Strategy, Web20Expo[/tags]

Digital Podcast joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused heavily on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. We’ll be writing about the conference over the next two weeks. Our first series of articles, like the conference, is focused on the topic of engagement. This article covers the first two presentations of the conference.

Setting the Stage
Harley Manning, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester

Harley introduces the conference’s theme by emphasizing that the imperative for marketing success going forward is customer engagement, and previews three case studies on the subject.

Traditional channels are shrinking – the 30 second spot is declining in reach and importance – yet the new channels, like YouTube, hold risk for marketers. The challenge and opportunity is to engage with customers and in return they’ll engage with your brand.

Harley shared three quick case studies of engagement:

Jordan’s Furniture: Is it a furniture store or an amusement park? Complete with a trapeze school, water display, café, IMAX theatre, and the backing of Berkshire Hathaway, Jordan’s engaged customers stroll past “finished room” furniture displays to get to lots of the good stuff. Along the way, they seem to buy a lot of furniture

Nike Running website: Articles, splashy photos, and aspirational content motivated Harley to drop a wad of cash on Nike’s best running shoes, begin running again after a lengthy hiatus, and then drop more cash on Nike apparel. Is Harley buying shoes or buying into a lifestyle?

LeapFrog: Toys that engage Harley’s son’s brain while he’s too busy having fun to notice that he is learning too. No wonder these toys sell like hotcakes.

Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers
Brian Haven, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Two brands, two superfans, two very different reactions – one shove, and one embrace. If you want your fans to keep loving your brand, try hugging them back!

The Ikea Superfan

Brian starts by sharing a story of true engagement, and how gazing into the eyes of superfan love be hard for some corporations. Jen is an Ikea superfan from Ohio, and she singlehandedly started a movement to bring Ikea to her corner of Ohio. She started a website, scouted retail locations, and worked tirelessly to drum up support for Ikea to move in. How did Ikea management react? They warned her to stop using their trademark, were concerned when her Google rank approached that of the brand, and after actually building a store in her neck of the woods, Ikea didn’t even respond to her job application. While Ikea is a great brand that does many things right, they could have handled this superfan in a more enlightened manner.

What can we learn from Jen’s story? The traditional marketing funnel and message control is a thing of the past. Consumers can now chase down a spaghetti maze of paths to your brand, and marketers risk drowning in a sea of metrics – too often we don’t know which matter, what to do with them, and even if we did, how to track them technologically and across channels.

Even overcoming all these hurdles, the next challenge is how to make “engagement” actionable. What does engagement mean?

In simple terms, engagement is a person’s participation with a brand, regardless of channel, where they call the shots. Brian defines engagement as the 4 I’s, the level of Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence that a person has with a brand over time:

• Involvement: A person’s presence at brand touchpoints
• Interactions: A person’s actions while at the touchpoints
• Intimacy: A person’s affection for a brand
• Influence: A person’s advocacy for a brand

The Alli Superfan

Brian shares a contrasting example – Laura, who tries out GlaxoSmithKline’s “alli” weight loss system and community website. The system and site effectively engage Laura:

• Involvement through community tracking, forum tracking, registration data
• Interaction through product purchases, diet diaries, fridge photos, food journals
• Intimacy through product feedback, online ad opinions and shopping experience
• Influence through tools for advocacy.

As Laura worked with the system and the website (and lost a lot of weight!), GlaxoSmithKline decided to feature Laura, one of their most engaged customers, on the web site. This highly engaging system realized a very successful launch – in just the first six weeks, 1 million people tried product, and they rang up $155 million in sales on a $150 million ad budget.

Brian then discussed some of the steps for defining and measuring engagement (understand existing and outside data and metrics) and encouraging engagement (provide content, facilitate conversations, give customers a reason for sharing information). Engagement involves a fundamentally different relationship with customers.

And he reminded marketers to engage, embrace, and encourage the Jen’s of the world.

Q & A Discussion with Brian

How to address the fact that companies have many different departments involved in “engagement” and many different metrics are used? The marketing team needs to take lead with other parts of the company to share the vision of engagement, provide value to those groups, and bring the company together on goals and associated metrics.

How to identify and scale Superfans like Jen? Online is a great place to start. There are brand monitoring services, even Google search can be used to find the bloggers. To scale this group, first nail the customer insight, who the customers are, what they care about. Then the best way to attract, encourage and track them will depend on the answer to those questions.

How can companies engage around intangible, infrequent purchases such as insurance or other financial services? The purchase may be infrequent, but there is ongoing usage data that you can track and monitor. These customers may not be engaged Superfans like Jen, but the same principles apply.

How should Ikea have treated Jen? Not to pick on Ikea, but Jen wasn’t doing anything bad, everything she communicated about Ikea was positive. Ikea should have leaked her information about the store in advance, given her access to better technology to support the blog, talked about her on their own website. Reach out, embrace, and help your superfans! Very simple things would have meant the world to Jen, and would encourage others like her.

Are there examples where pursuing engagement has backfired? There is nothing negative about understanding who your customers are and what they care about. Overall there are negative things that can happen, but remember we’re in a different world now, and we don’t have the same control. We have to stop being scared of our customers.

What do you do about people who are negatively engaged with the brand? We call this disengagement, and it will happen whether you like it or not. The question is do you want it to happen where you can see and influence it, or spread out beyond your reach. Ultimately, brands need to pay attention to the reasons for disengagement and make their products better!

It’s a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media.

The approach aligns management around success strategies and shared goals to provide your staff with the guide posts for making decisions consistent with the interest of the business. Done well, it will create or reinforce a culture of continuous improvement in new content, function, and initiative development.

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[tags]social media, social media performance management, ebook, whitepaper, report[/tags]

Twitter, self described as a “social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time”, has rapidly become a source of real time juicy material for reporters and bloggers straight from the crowd.

Twitter asks people just one question: What are you doing now? You get to answer with up to 140 characters.

The resulting Tweets can be monitored on a web browser or on your phone. The service has proven remarkable popular and become an interesting, real time new sources for news tips. Two very recent examples have the tech industry twittering away.

I witnessed one of these events on Twitter as it happened. At the SXSW conference, an interview of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy got out of control. The tweets started flying and the press and bloggers piled on here, here, here and a whole bunch more here. The Tweeting just made the event spin way out of control. Here’s Sarah’s response as posted on cNet:

And in an unrelated story, Techcrunch referenced some Tweets to point out a somewhat heated back and forth between the Six Apart and Wordpress guys.

Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took aim at Wordpress users in a blog post today. Instead of upgrading to the new version of Wordpress, he says, consider moving over to their platform.

Now, it’s generally fair game to target your competitors, and Dash’s blog post was so tame that I can’t even find a good quote to pull into this post. But that didn’t stop Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg from going for blood. In a Twitter message, Matt says “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.” Anil fires back almost immediately with “@photomatt desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

Not only has Twitter become a source for news, it has also become a broadcast channel for people who collect large followings, which results in a strange co-mingling of news with Tweets about everyday activities like “waking up, making coffee”. The phenomenon of Twitter as a source of real time news can only grow as bloggers like Jason Calaconis, CEO of Mahalo, observe the growing importance of Twitter to blog traffic.

While Twitter has some great potential as a source of buzz and news, the real time mob effect is scary. Sarah, of the “train wreck” interview fame, may be getting lots of advice about what she could have done differently, but with Twitter the crowd will be talking about every real time event and it may not be nice.

Anyone doing this kind of interview or a speech better be aware that the crowd is talking, and when disgruntled people realize they are not alone, they tend to speak up like they did at SXSW.

UPDATE: I saw this on Twitter from Tim Bourquin who runs the New Media Expo. It says it all. Anyone running a live event now runs the risk of being Twitterfied :

Click here to follow me on Twitter  at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

[tags]Twitter[/tags]

Umair points to Millward Brown’s report about the top 100 most powerful brands in which the number one brand is Google as evidence that there is a shrinking advantage of brands.

I strongly disagree with the point Umair makes in the title to his post. Brands are just as important as ever. Just ask Ask or Yahoo? Would they like to be at the top of that list. You bet.

However, when I read the post I agree with the body of the argument he is making. If you substitute the word advertising for the word brand the argument makes sense. There is a shrinking advantage to advertising and advertising scale.

Because every other player in the top ten has spent decades – if not literally centuries, as for P&G and Coke – investing billions in advertising to build a brand.

But where these players invest on the order of 5-10% of revenues on advertising, Google’s advertising expenditure is almost exactly zero.

Stop and think about that for a second: the top brand in the world belongs to a player that…uhhh…doesn’t advertise.

The social web is way more powerful than traditional advertising based brand building efforts.

Communities have always been central to building brands as positive word of mouth has always been much more powerful than advertising in building brand strength and value. When our friends speak, we listen.

Google’s brand has been built without any paid advertising. It has been built by the world’s biggest community – the social web.

We’ve gone from people telling their physical communities about good stuff to global web based communities where strong positive word of mouth spreads virally across the globe at zero cost.

Brands that don’t understand the power of the social web will shrink in advantage, those that do can build even stronger brands and more value.

[tags]social web, advertising, brand building, competitive advantage[/tags]