At best, people have ambivalent feeling about clowns.

On one end of the spectrum, there’s the relatively benign Bozo the Clown, a historic television favorite whose name implied entertaining, well-meaning buffoonery. There’s also the sad beauty of the crying clown of the opera Paglicci. Then, at the other end, the worst nightmare of anyone suffering from full-blown coulrophobia — the “scary clown.”

Pretty much any way you look at it, there’s not a lot of upside to being called a clown. So imagine my feelings when my PR firm sent me this post they found on Twitter about my company’s recent attendance at an Adobe trade show:

“I thought Sapient was a mgmt consulting co? They’re the booth next to us at Adobe Max and they’re complete clowns” –Message posted on Twitter by [name withheld], November 19, 2008

Read the rest of this article at AdAge.com.

A different kind of digital ecosystem....

Even though in most regions of the world, half of the top 20 websites are social media sites, companies rely primarily on web statistics and click-through rates on media campaigns to judge the health of their brands in the online world.

People are discussing your company, brands, products and services, and potentially even talking about YOU or your top people all over the digital ecosystem in places far outside of your control. Doesn’t it make sense that there are many more conversations, probably in high exponential multiples, about these subjects on sites that you have nothing to do with your business?

We’ve seen all the blunders big companies make by not monitoring and — more importantly — not reacting intelligently and expeditiously on social upheaval in the digital space. Can you business reputation afford that kind of negativity in today’s market???

The solution lies in using proper social media analysis tools. Social media analysis tools will literally scour the internet for references to certain keywords you define (your company, key people, products, services, competitors products and services, industry specific keywords, new trends you want to watch, etc) and then provide you with links to the conversations. The best solutions also allow you to define or automatically analyze sentiment around those keywords. For example, you can see if someone uses positive or negative words in conjunction with each keyword.

There are literally 50+ social media analysis vendors in the world today. Some are obviously better then others - so how do you pick the right one?

Here’s my two cents – take it or leave it.

First, evaluate the sources that the service provider reviews. The sources will include:

• Blog posts / Blog comments – Some providers only search posts. The feedback that people leave is just as important. A great tool is going to evaluate the complete “conversation” around any blog post.
• Discussion Boards / Usenet – This includes the ability to search a pre-defined set of message boards and in some cases they previously popular Usenet platform that was much popular in the earlier days of the internet.
• Product Reviews – People are providing invaluable feedback on commerce sites and general product review sites all over the web. Why not get their insight as well?
• Photo / Video Sharing Sites – YouTube and Flickr are too of the most popular sites on the web. There are enormous amounts of conversations taking place around the media being shared. Obviously there are many more media sharing sites then Flickr and YouTube to analyze, but you get the idea.
• Social Networks – Evaluating social networks can be challenging. It really depends on the system. For example, Facebook’s closed friend architecture makes it difficult to do broad searches, but systems like MySpace are far more open.
• Social News – Digg and Reddit, for example, are hugely popular sites for submitting news stories whose popularity and placement on the site are ultimately driven by user votes. People discuss their thoughts and feelings in these forums as well.
• Micro-Blogging – Even though Pounce has been declared dead. Twitter is still growing rapidly. It seems like the blogging community is particularly big on Twitter which makes monitoring the platform even more important.
• Offline Media – Some systems will even monitor print, TV, and radio for mentions of your brands and display it in the same centralized tool. This is particularly interesting, but not very common yet.

There are companies out there that generally take a couple different stances to analyzing all of this information. It’s important to note the distinctions.

Some companies research these sources, some monitor them, and some do both. The difference is that researching sources will look at what’s out there currently — while monitoring them will allow you to setup ongoing watch lists that constantly look for feedback on terms.

Some companies provide web tools that allow you to access your data in real time; others provide reports on certain dates that include their consultative thoughts, and some do both.

I strongly recommend using a firm that has research, monitoring, AND web tools. In this fast paced market, it’s important to be able to review things in near real time. Having a provider that also has consultation and analysts on staff can also be very helpful. It really depends on the nature of your business. For example, we do all of the analysis in house, but if you’re a brand and not an agency, you may not have those resources in house.

Another important feature is language. If you manage a US or UK brand, then you should be fine with only monitoring the English language. The vast majority of providers monitor English, but if you’re doing work globally as US or UK company or you’re specifically working on a non-English speaking region, then this starts to become very important.

For example, Sapient needed a platform that could not only monitor Spanish, French, German and some of the more obvious languages, but we also wanted to monitor Hindi due to our large presence in India.

Why is this all so important?

All of this rich consumer opinion can:

• Create a new series of metrics that tracks your brand’s performance. For example, so what if your banner campaign flopped? You might be the most discussed brand on Twitter or YouTube.
• Unprompted opinions tend to be more sincere. New truths will emerge from this raw data and hopefully new opportunities as well.
• Instant feedback on marketing campaigns. Does before and after testing get any faster? (Motrin staff – take notes….)
• Monitor people’s thoughts on your competitors.
• Watch what your investors might be discovering about your brand so you can fix problems before they become an issue.

I’ve become increasingly more passionate about this subject as I’ve been able to “play” with more and more platforms.  It just makes normal web analytics seem so yesterday…

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with social media analysis tools, I would love to hear your thoughts!   I also welcome any questions you may have.

Place your hand on a copy of Ad Age and repeat after me: “I am a responsible marketer. I swear I will not contribute to the death of Twitter.” OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at five ways that we can end the Paradox of Interactive Marketing.

1. Read, Read, and Read
I consider myself to be an avid trend watcher but you don’t have to be overly fanatical about this process to be successful. There are plenty of people like me who are sharing their insights every day on their blogs or potentially within your agency. Check out alltop.com to see a brilliant aggregation of some of the web’s best blogs on specific subjects like marketing, social media or trend watching. These people have been doing all the hard work for you while you’ve been wasting time at night sleeping.

Read more here…

One of things I’m obviously passionate about is spotting new trends and potential new marketing opportunities. As marketers we’re all charged with looking for new opportunities to get our client’s brands out there, but to be successful we must be very conscious of timing. When is it too early to recommend a new medium or platform? When is it too late and you’re only adding to the clutter?

This problem is more acute in the digital and mobile space, thanks to the rapid evolution of technology. Let’s take a look at some of the more recent opportunities that I think have passed and use it as a platform to understand how to find the next big thing before it becomes just that — the next big thing.

Continue reading here…

Obama’s digital team is hard at work again. Within 24 hours of winning the historic voite change.gov was launched. The new site transitions the focus away from winning the vote and on to streamlining the transitional period and establishing an ongoing dialog with the citizens of the United States.

The commitment to digital as a communication medium has proven effective for Obama which leads one to ponder what else will be communicated via from the Oval office in the future.

Sites like TechPresident.com which billiantly track the technical ascendancy of our two candidates and how they compare have made predictions that Obama will release his weekly address online and on video sharing sites like YouTube. They predict “town halls” will be facilitated online allowing citizens to make sure their voice is heard. They remind us of the digitally savy nature of his campaign, but most of all they predict he’ll be our first tech president even adding a chief technical officer to his chief advisors.

I’m inclined to agree, but as we marvel at this achievement we also need to understand the implications. The success of this campaign and soon to be realized success of the leveraging digital to manage his presidency’s communication will establish a paradigm shift in the way politics and government policy are communicated. He’s the first, but we’re about to see a long line of (hopefully) successful imitators.

My prediction is that the web and certain variations of social media will engage citizens on a whole new level. Participation will increase as it becomes easy to rally around ideas, add your voice in a simple and easy way, and find like minded souls. It’s hard to not acknowledge the fact that convenience and minimal commitment might also play a factor in this new generation of digitally savvy political activists.

We had record turn-outs for voters this election. Imagine the participation level if you could vote from home via the Internet. I wonder how long it will take for that to become reality?

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.

Overall, really interesting to see how traditional channels such as CNN is realizing and acknowledging the need to move towards digital channels, add social elements, and leverage user generated content.

Next, Geoff Ramsey, CEO for eMarketer, took over for 15 minutes to give us his seven strategies for surviving the downturn. In summary, the entire strategy is move media dollars from traditional to digital; it’s cheaper, more measurable, and provides better returns. 70% of marketers said they will cut budget for traditional ads, 30% said they already did … at the same time digital ad spend grew 17% in 2008, and it’s expected to continue to grow with double digits in 2009 … even if it only grows 9 or 10%, it’s better than negative numbers such as traditional media spend.

There were a few boring panels that I won’t mention, so I started talking to exhibitors and companies I found interesting. I will post more details later, but great new products by VeriSign, Akamai, Izea, and IdeaLaunch.

I tried to watch the TV 3.0 panel, but I really couldn’t stand it. What is up with the 3.0 buzzwords? Does anyone even know what 3.0 represents? I bet the panelists can’t even answer what would be the difference between TV 2.0 and 3.0 …. if we can even say 3.0 is here. For our readers, TV 2.0 includes P2PTV, HDTV, IPTV, Streaming Video, and mobile TV.

So what is TV 3.0?

“The first I heard of it (TV 3.0) was when I was invited to this panel”, responded Michael Steib, the director of TV Ads at Google (I appreciate his acknowledgement of the made-up buzz word). In TV 3.0 there is a proliferation of channels, people are watching TV in different places (online, DVR, etc) and at different times. Connecting advertisers and audiences as people start to watch TV in new and different times and places.

Here is the billion dollar question: will TV networks be able to make up the ad revenue lost from the shift away from traditional TV? People will watch 400 billion hours on their TV and watch 10 million hours of online video – online is still a small segment. For networks to stay afloat, they need to either increase the # of ads 4x versus what they are showing now, or increase the effectiveness. The solution? Technology: it can be used in 2 ways to help solve this problem. The first is better targeting, and the second is by using technologies to improve the effectiveness of the interaction or ad that is served (ie. rich media).

Stay tuned for Ad:Tech NY 2008 - Day 2.

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

Beyond the user interface changes the whole process of migrating to the new system was painful for both our team and our clients. Applications stopped functioning properly and this lead to poor experiences for our application’s users. The latest news is that once a user has opted to install an application they will have to go to a separate page to enable the mini-view for the “boxes” page and also to allow for mini-feeds that include pictures. This will effectively inhibit the experience on all new installations on existing and new applications.

This could have all been avoided with better communication and coordination.

Facebook as a company embraced working with the general public (which included bed room developers and global digital agencies like Sapient) and for this I applauded them. We all happilly contributed our time, experience, and money to create an enriched experience for Facebook’s users. Unfortunately Facebook runs their development process with complete disregard for it’s users. This was obvious in the way they handled Beacon and it became obvious again in the way they’re now handing applications.

Now Facebook application developers are having to re-design their applications to make them successful within the new rules. I’m not convinced that older applications are going to re-engineer very well, but there is almost certainly an opportunity to design a clever application that plays within the rules and focus on the incredibly mini-feed centric new layout.

Unfortunately I think this has really left a bitter taste in the application development community. As we watch diminishing returns on our applications will we be motivated to continue to develop them? I’m not concerned that irreparable damage has been done to the application platform in terms of it’s perception by users and developers. If nothing else it’s going to take sometime for it to recover and people to find a balance that allows it to return to it’s exciting beginnings.

There were so many smarter ways to handle this. Couldn’t they have taken the “like / don’t like” functionality on the mini-feed and aggregated the sentiment globally and used this information to push down all overly intrusive and annoying applications?

The Obama's latest campaign initiative: an iPhone Application

I’m consistently impressed with the Obama campaign’s innovative marketing campaigns. They’re not doing anything particularly revoutionary by the marketing world’s standards, but in the world of politics they might have well been transported here from the ninth dimension.

Let’s compare the campaigns.

Facebook:
Obama has over 1,000,000 members across multiple groups while McCain has around 230,000 members across multiple groups. Each campaign has multiple Facebook applications that cover everything from pridge badges for your page to tools that help you do voter outreach, but Obama has over twice the number of available applications and over 120,000 monthly users on his lead application compared to McCain’s 25,000.

MySpace:

Obama has over 687,000 “friends” on MySpace. McCain has over 162,000.

Here’s an unexpected and interesting discovery. Obama’s biggest group on MySpace has just under 7,000 users and McCain is only a couple hundred user behind that. There are multiple groups for each candidate, but nothing signficicant of any form. I’m truly suprised by the lack on initiative here. MySpace isn’t that dead…

There are multiple applications for both candidates as there were in Facebook. The big difference is that both of the most popular apps had around 10,500 users. Amusingly they were both designed by the same application designer (three cheers for capitalism) and none of the applications appeared to be officially sponsored by either party.

I was suprised to see how little the groups function was in MySpace in comparison to Facebook. Although the gap in application adoption is not quite as suprising.

Blog Exposure:

There are 40 links backs, courtesy of Technorati, to Obama’s official blog. Now here’s a stat you wouldn’t have expected. There are 1484 link backs to McCain’s official blog. I was suprised to note that neither campaign appears to be “claimed” within Technorait so I was unable to gauge either blogs authority level or ranking globally using their system. These huge shift in terms of links back to the original blog was consistent when tested within Google by searching the URL.

Both candidates are getting notable exposure in the blogosphere in terms of being discussed.

The numbers split on these two campaign blogs is quite suprising. If I’m misreading it in some way please send me an email or leave a comment and I’ll do more research and update my post.

Mobile:
Both campaigns have been doing their traditional (and annoying) automated calling services sending out notifications and theoretically positive messages.

The biggest change since previous years has been an attention to the mobile space in terms of mobile sites and text messaging services. Obama’s campaign showed a particular streak of brilliance this year when they publically announced that the running mate would be announced via text message. This generated some media buzz and drove the subscription to their SMS service up substantially. After the running mate was announced subscribers were invited to send in their zip code which would obviously prove very valuable in the coming months.

The latest addition to their mobile strategy has been the iPhone application shown above. It’s very useful in terms of the information it provides, but from a developer standpoint I can state that it appears to have been designed and developed very well. The quick facts function is probably the most interesting as it allows politically opinionated people to win most of arguments (which I tend to avoid at all costs).

Search Engine Marketing:
Obama’s campaign has spent almost $3.5M up to the end of August on just paid search campaigns ($5.5M if you include display ads) according to the Federal Exchange Commission. Unfortunately McCain has not broken out their media spend so I can report exact figures.

I searched a myriad of search terms and wasn’t able to find a broad reaching keyword strategy for either candidate on a lot of hot subjects. Although their organic rankings were both very strong they could have shown a greater level of foresight in terms of monitoring hot subjects in the press.

Online Tool Set:
Both campaigns have a fairly impressive toolset to help supporters reach out to their friends, but the level of  training that is available in both text and video formats to Obama supporters takes the cake.

And Let’s Not Forget:
The first truly brilliant move of either of the campaigns was releasing the video “Yes We Can” on YouTube. Although not officially part of Obama’s campaign it’s important not to forget the amount of press Obama Girl had on the campaign. You can view an interesting interview of Obama Girl on YouTube here.

Obama’s also the number one person on Twitter with over 95,000 “followers” compared to John McCain’s 2100+. I’ve noticed around a 3,000 person increase on Obama since my last post on the subject.

Summary:

Obama has really been levering social media far more successfully than McCain. The quality of their digital marketing work in both design and technological prowess is superior and they appear to be demonstrating well planned and executed strategy on par with today’s top marketing campaigns.

Sadly, I realized after I dug into this subject that I could have wrote about 30 pages with ease. I hope you found this top level analysis helpful.

Android is Google’s attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte’s telecommunications practice. “Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model,” he said.

The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.

There are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide; many more than computers users. Google, with their success at delivering advertising to desktop computers are looking to monetize this enormous opportunity.
Mobile advertising so far is a small market, but some analysts have high hopes for growth in the future. M:Metrics found that mobile display advertising was an approximately $200 million industry last year, a figure analysts there expect to at least double this year. Analysts at Heavy Reading predict that the mobile advertising industry will exceed $10 billion in annual revenue in 2013.

AdMob is the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. Founded in 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob offers both advertisers and publishers the ability to target and personalize advertising to their customers in 150 countries. AdMob has servers over 43 trillion impressions to date, and I’ve seen quite a few on my iPhone, on my sportacular app where I follow up to the minute football games and stats.
Researchers at Strategy Analytics predict that 400,000 people will buy the G1 by the end of the year, compared to 1,000,000 people who bought the 3G iPhone on its opening weekend.

Google and T-Mobile appear to be mainly hoping that mass-market consumers will buy the phone, even though smartphones have traditionally appealed most to business users. The G1 lacks some features that business users might want. For example, it doesn’t support Exchange mail, however Android is an open platform and developers can build applications that might interest enterprise users. I think the main difference between Android and the iPhone is the application publication model, since Android developers don’t have to go through Apple Store approval hell.

Once other Android phones start appearing, the platform could gain momentum. “There will be more to come in 2009 when manufacturers such as Samsung and LG will deliver their devices. Android has the potential to become the de facto operating system for Linux, and we expect sales to reach around 10 percent of the smartphone market in 2011,” said Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza.

Let's Hug!

A survey was done at the end of last year that asked people  What their most important source of information was. 80% responded the Internet followed by TV, Radio, and Newspaper at 68%, 63%, and 63% respectively. Simultaneously 73% of people responded personal source as their most important method. When the two highest categories Internet and Personal Source can be so close coordinated in a social network it paves the way for potentially the most important way to communicate with consumers. - USC Annenberg School: Digital Future Report 2007

We can target Age, Connection Type, Day Part, Education Level, Ethnicity, Gender, Geographical, Interest Groups, Marital Status, Parents, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Smoker/Drinker, Enthusiast Targeting.  Unfortunately we’re still just pushing more target ads, when we should be targeting communities and using this knowledge to engage them in a longer conversation.

While brand advertisers have historically trusted people as consumers, they do not trust them in the new role of producer (e.g. uncontrollable content).  Likewise, people who are armed with the power of interactivity are also demonstrating that they are increasingly distrustful of brand advertisers (e.g. ad-skipping).

Remember, social networks are a new medium for self-expression and, unlike traditional media, the content is being produced and owned by the audience itself and to be extra clear I’m not talking about consumers creating youtube videos of themselves with your product in it. I’m talking about every bit of content they create from the photos they upload to the comments they make in public forums.

This is a new model that requires new rules… and for advertising, the most important rule is to launch programs that integrate users and advertisers, not segregate them.

By aligning their interests, trust will be created and social networks will be able to offer advertisers, and users, benefits that are truly unique to the new medium.

We’re seeing it already, but these elements of social networking are in everything. They’re in our business applications like LinkedIn, they’re in music applications like IMEEM, and they’re even in our news portals like Digg. Consumers will control everything – it’s time to make friends now.