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.

Chris Martin has said: “We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.” I bet he wishes he hadn’t said that now…

Though what really caught my attention with all this is yet another use for YouTube. A video titled “Did Coldplay copy Joe Satriani?” was uploaded to YouTube comparing both songs and asking people to comment, using YouTube as a destination for generating discussions based on a hypothesis presented in a video format. The video is less than a week old and has over 1.5 million views and almost 12,000 comments.

With that said, I wish YouTube had a better comment management and filtering, allow to search on comments, filter by date, rating, display only your friends’ comments, etc …

So we’ve seen YouTube being used for entertainment, news, learning, gaming, advertising, and discussions… I can see YouTube using Google Friend Connect or if Google is smart, even Facebook Connect to gain a few new million users

Ultimately both services start to decentralize social networks by virtue of data portability. Basically you can start having a single login and friend’s list that use them across a myriad of sites that integrate their tech.

We started to tinker with Google Friend connect on this site, but held back as we didn’t want to have two commenting systems.  I think it will be better suited to community sites that aren’t blogs.

Google’s system appears to be easier to implement for a typical site user, but Facebook’s has launched with some very interesting uses of their technology. My particular favorite is Loopt. Loopt is one of those mobile social networks that allow you to see where your friends are at in proximity to you. I didn’t dive deep into the service, because I didn’t want to go through the process of adding a whole new series of friends. I can now leverage my Facebook friend’s list to connect through Loopt.

Evan Tana, the Director of Product Management & Marketing of Loopt, commented “Working with Facebook Connect widens the circle of friends Loopt users can interact with, combining the power of Loopt’s social-mapping service with an established network of Facebook friends.” “Loopt users will be able to receive an alert whenever Facebook friends are nearby, discover restaurants and bars recommended by their Facebook friends, and integrate their location into their Facebook feed,” he added.

I strongly suggest you do deeper research on both platforms. There is an opportunity for innovation and success here. I guarantee you it’s what I’ll be doing.

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…

They’ve managed to inspire a multitude of hate websites from ihatecomcast.com to comcastsucks.org. If you search Comcast on Google there is a video result showing a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch. I frequently talk about how a brand’s perception is now being defined not only by their own messaging, but by the content consumers are creating and permeating search, media sharing sites, and viral jokes. Comcast is case study example number one.

Normally I like to pick on Comcast, but today I want to commend them. They’ve done something that every major business should do. They’ve created a team for searching for references or conversations about their brand and addressing them in a positive way. They’re not slapping customers with law suits, but sending them messages of apology, encouragement, and advice. They’re engaging in forums, comments on blogs, and sending personalized emails or phone calls.

This isn’t propaganda. It’s proactive customer service and it’s the new model to create a positive customer experience. If your customer’s are creating commentary on your brand and making it part of public record - why shouldn’t you respond to them and add your two cents to the conversation. Ultimately that’s what the social web is all about - collaboration, open communication, and community building.

Big business, if you’re listening, this is the future. If you want to build a lasting relationship with your customers join their community and you’ll always be remembered as a friendly face. Congrats to Frank Eliason, senior director of digital care, you’re going to make a very positive impact on the business.

(Now let’s see if any of they’re people find this and leave a comment….)

OpenSocial didn’t take off nearly as fast as I thought it would. I had always assumed that when MySpace enabled it that adoption would pick-up rapidly. LinkedIn has now finally enabled it and I believe future tech like Google Friend Connect (which also uses OpenSocial) will really push this application platform over the top.

I installed two applications immediately. An application to quickly and easily port this blog to my profile as well an application that scans twitter with references to my company. The two apps are called Wordpress and Company Buzz respectively.

The installation was easy in terms of the number of clicks, but there were some bugs. LinkedIn didn’t acknowledge that the application was complete and the apps were only working intermittently when I viewed my profile. On the basis that I got the email they were launching this at 12.21 AM and blogged about it at 1.35 AM I’m going to cut them some slack. Hopefully it will work a bit better by the time you check it out.

If you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile yet your missing out. Social networking in the business space is equally as interesting as Facebook or MySpace. It’s just harder to pick up a date on LinkedIn…

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.