Does “tweeting” mean you’ve figured it out? Does knowing how to “friend” someone qualify you as a modern marketer of the new advertising age? Hardly. In fact, reaching that lofty goal is less about the tactics we employ, and more about our overall approach to the complexities of the modern consumer.

Our jobs are becoming more demanding. Big businesses now operate in a multi-market, multi-lingual, and frequently multi-brand world. A world filled with commercial and cultural nuances. The modern marketers I respect are finding ways to address these nuances by developing cross-market and cross-brand efficiencies. They’re fostering smarter collaboration across teams, agencies, and disciplines, producing big brand ideas that transcend tactical executions and work in markets of varying sophistication, and they’re leveraging their scale to lower costs while focusing their marketing dollars in the right growth areas. All while producing great work.

My personal fascination lies in the fact that digital marketing — and at a minimum Internet based technology — is helping to drive this evolution. Digital marketing is at different stages depending on which markets you are working in around the globe. But in almost all instances, it seems to function as the great connector that helps to bring cross-channel experiences to the consumer.

Digital, once deemed complex and expensive by the rest of the advertising world, actually offers the ability to produce re-usable libraries of common tools that can be shared across markets and brands, empowering them to focus their budgets on brilliant creative ideas instead of unnecessary technology that had been used multiples times in the last year by other agencies and brand teams.

Social media monitoring tools can be set up for enterprise businesses and deliver intelligence to multiple brands across multiple markets at reduced costs while facilitating a deeper understanding of the consumer. Web based collaboration tools are helping to produce better ideas, faster, with equal input from brand agencies, digital agencies, and media agencies.

I’m not discrediting the importance of innovation. I’m the world’s worst culprit for loving new exciting platforms in digital marketing. I just think we need to step back and reevaluate what makes us pat someone on the back for being in a “digital master class” that understands modern marketing. Some of the biggest companies in the world who frequently get accused of being laggards are realizing how scale and digital marketing play VERY well together, and could form the cement in their global marketing initiatives.

In the end, modern marketers are putting their money where there mouth is and, as a result, giving their agencies what amounts to a thinly veiled, but no less justifiable ultimatum: show us results, the analytics to support them, and develop creative in a cost effective way, or we’ll find someone who can. We should all heed the warning. Those who don’t? Well, then they don’t know “tweet” about modern marketing.

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

Objective: Drive brand
Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Objective: Drive Revenue
Revenue can be driven directly by the application, or indirectly but multi-channel tie-in with retail and stores. Indirect revenue usually aims to drive users to store fronts, partners, or provide reasons for the user to purchase products or services. Whereas direct revenue is generated by the application. Measurement towards these objectives are always dollars.

Direct revenue can be generated from advertising or downloads, and both have different strategies. Revenue from advertising is similar to brand-driven applications: it aims to reach as many users as possible by providing free entertaining or utilities, and collect revenue through 3rd party advertising. However, download revenue can be a little more complex as it involves pricing strategy.

The secret to maximize download revenue is pricing. The most popular paid applications are priced between $0.99 and $3.99, with predominant 99 cent applications. These applications are what we call the big-fast-sales. Most users download them and use them once or twice; they’re predominantly entertainment and provide small value to the consumer, but the mass download provides great initial revenue and then stops. The most grossing applications are actually priced between $4.99 and $9.99 at 44% and account for 44% of revenue. These applications are downloaded less, but used much more often as usually they do provide value.

Here’s a simple framework to determine your iPhone application strategy

• Set objectives – what is successful?
  • Drive Brand – Free
    • Entertaining
    • Useful
  • Generate Revenue
    • Direct Revenue
      • Business models
        • Free apps
        • big fast sales
        • sustained sales
      • Revenue Models
        • Thru ads
        • Thru downloads
          • Pricing Structure
            • Most popular $0.99 at 50% and 0.99-3.99
            • Most grossing $4.99-9.99 at 44%
    • Indirect Revenue
      • Cross / Multi-channel
      • Point of Sale

Conclusion
So what does it take to make a successful iPhone application? You need a strategy, know what you want, how to get there, and how to measure. Keep it simple, make it engaging, and provide means to share and pass-along.

Simply put, I’m excited about the potential of mobile marketing and particularly the convergence of social networking and mobile. New capabilities on phones are opening doors to limitless new marketing innovations and, simultaneously, developing countries are having entirely new segments of their population enter the digital world. I spend a lot of time in the day dreaming about how to bring entirely new digital experiences to people, but I think we need to proceed with caution. Marketers, the frequently reckless group of individuals we are, are in danger of screwing it up (again).

Consider the lessons from social media. One of the factors that caused so many marketers to fail in this space is they forgot basic web etiquette and lost sight that all successful marketing (on the modern web) is some form of value exchange. Consumers must be approached in a way that is not disruptive or disrespectful of their time. Social media was never free — the buzz created around your brand or people’s willingness to come together as a community was earned. They would tolerate a certain amount of advertising if it was a reasonable value exchange.

Mobile, the ever-present digital touch point, is for many of us not only an essential daily tool, but also a place of great privacy and perceived intimacy. We’re far more sensitive about the “value exchange” in the mobile world. In addition we don’t click ads as often because, in my opinion, we’re frequently trying to get quick digital or social experiences on the mobile device in between other events. We have frequent interaction with our mobile devices, but the sessions might be shorter.

Sometimes I like to talk about the “paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.

The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.

There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.

The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to tell you: We’re in a recession.

The doom has advertisers hanging signs along the lines of “Will Work For Food” on their agency walls, and marketers continue to face facts and figures like these, from Forrester’s 2009 Global CMO Recession Survey: 71% of marketing budgets have been reduced this year, and more than half reported reductions greater than 20%.

Now here comes the curveball: I think this might be the best thing that has happened to our industry in decades. Yes, I said that. While I have empathy for those that have lost jobs and the extra pressure many of us are facing, it’s also forced us to innovate, reinvent ourselves, think more strategically, and, most importantly, bring a level of sophistication and maturity that, in my opinion, has been desperately missing from digital advertising throughout most of the industry.

There are five trends I believe are reshaping the face of marketing.

Brand as an enabler
We’re moving away from short-sighted, highly sales-driven marketing campaigns in favor of long-term brand platforms that use evergreen content to add value to your day. Examples include Nike+, whose latest effort serves as an enabler of self-discovery and health and delivers a sense of community within the running world. Bank of America’s Small Business Online Community is also a great example in that it helps business owners to share knowledge. A final example is Kraft’s iFood Assistant iPhone app, which adds convenience to recipe planning.

All these initiatives gave something while asking for little or nothing in return. But they’ll ultimately help foster a relationship with the consumer that builds brand value, loyalty and engagement for less money than the cost of repetitive ad campaigns.

Distributed content
This trend moves us more in line to the modern digital ecosystem. It’s fragmented and complex, with consumers interacting through many devices and sites. Modern digital marketers have recognized that in terms of the consumer, the center is everywhere. As a result, digital content is now designed to be syndicated, reskinned and reformatted while still remaining relevant. This evolution is pushing advertisers away from building million-dollar microsites and toward smart, tactical ideas that revolve around specific needs or even communities. Now consumers can access similar content across primary websites, partner sites, widgets, applications, social presences, blogs and mobile devices. They can even enjoy entire rich experiences without ever visiting a primary brand site.

Customer service as marketing
While a great product or service backed up with great customer support or service remains your biggest asset in achieving success, never before has the vehicle of customer service become one your best methods for connecting with consumers in a social-media-driven web. Big business is taking notice, with brands like Comcast and Dell changing consumer sentiment around their brands and engaging them in the communities in which they reside. Better yet, they are doing so in a way that feels natural and adds value to the conversation, all while driving additional sales, boosting loyalty, and lowering operational and marketing costs.

Next-generation listening and targeting
As the way people spend their time becomes increasingly fragmented and marketers continue to face growing pressures to demonstrate the value of our services, the tools we are using to do so have undergone a significant evolution. More than 100 technology firms are offering variants of social-media-monitoring tools that measure not only references to key search terms but also the sentiment of the messaging around them. In doing so, these tools not only provide insight into customer behavior that extends miles beyond surveys and focus groups, they help to inform media strategies that include both media buying and influencer marketing.

As an industry we have moved beyond basic web and campaign analytics. Marketing firms are now able to monitor the entire customer life cycle with significantly more accuracy and then track the correlation between traditional, digital and commerce channels and customer conversion.

Meaningful metrics
Deep analytics and tracking are enabling meaningful insight. As a result, in its ongoing path to full maturity, digital marketing is finally adopting meaningful metrics that we can equate back to real business value. Now marketers are moving beyond digital-campaign measurement standards such as traffic and are instead mapping key performance indicators back to metrics and ultimately the conversation funnel, which includes the different levels of engagement — awareness, consideration, purchase intent, purchase and loyalty.

A massive recession is never a good thing, but it’s safe to say that someday, when the marketing sun is in full shine, we will find that some good came from it.

(As Featured on AdAge.com)

The past year, although troubling and difficult for many people, has been a fascinating period in advertising. It has caused fundamental shifts in the balance of power between traditional and digital shops and, more important, changed the way that most savvy agencies approach marketing. Results are still king, but budgets are becoming more and more scrappy and if that wasn’t challenging enough, the client is standing behind you with a pitchfork just to make sure that you stay on form.

This new marketing climate has businesses and brand teams embracing blogs and open-source content-management system (CMS) platforms to drive their new sites. While this shift is being viewed as a reaction to tough economic times, using tools like Drupal, Wordpress, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook Pages and others doesn’t have to mean you’re trying to take the cheap route. The fact is that these tools embrace open architectures that have a lot of work (particularly social media integration tools) already built into them.

Creating basic blogs, allowing comments and uploading photos is not some new and revolutionary idea. Brands should have been embracing these kinds of initiatives all along. I think the driving force behind this delay was the time it took for many companies to finally get the ear of their internal stakeholders and receive not only their social media “buy in” but also a genuine vote of confidence that this medium could be vital to their brand.

Now the stakeholders are enamored with social media and its ability to enable brand-focused conversations online. The issue is that they are looking to spark dialogue through destination sites and campaigns that have a very short shelf life (i.e. campaigns that allow their brand to stay relevant until the economy improves). What they should be doing is treating them as permanent sites through which they can build a community, provide thought leadership and encourage ongoing discussion.

Now the question is, if conversation is really the goal and low costs are the requirement, what are your next steps? I say you take the conversations to the communities where they’re happening. How do you do this? Dedicate a full-time person to engage people in the social-media space by discovering conversations through free tools. This approach will cost less than a typical agency site and I can guarantee you that it will generate more conversation.

Marketers should also be sure to put more emphasis on strategy behind these efforts, as this kind of upfront thinking — the kind not limited to creative executions — can save the business money and lay a clear road map for success. Clients are demanding results and are most likely seeking reductions in fees in places like account management and general oversight, places where they don’t perceive ROI.

As part of your social campaign, empower your clients to do more work in-house to maximize budgets while enabling them to be successful. This can be achieved by sharing links to free online tools or providing guides or knowledge-sharing tools to handle things like digital engagement. And seek out low-cost production facilities and don’t have your agency make online videos for $100,000 when teenagers around the world are making successful ones for free.

Even if your budgets aren’t being reduced, you should look at these kinds of solutions. Why? Because right now there’s someone trying to get a meeting with one of your clients and they’re going to underbid you. But if you can do your work more economically, you can produce more of it and help the client to be exponentially more successful. Inexpensive doesn’t have to mean less intelligent.

As featured on AdAge’s Digital Next Column.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

Driving effective change and achieving these goals requires a two-pronged attack – addressing both organizational and technological change.

Organizational change

Part one of this change is holistic and gets into issues of how marketing is organized and operates, how it defines its objectives and how it integrates with sales channels and the rest of the enterprise.

A CMO’s checklist for organizational change should address the following:

•    Customers must be moved to the center, not the periphery; brands must be re-invigorated in terms of aligning the company with its customers’ needs:  CMOs must be the voice inside the company that challenges the tradition of product-centric, supply-chain systems and that re-orients the company’s processes and systems around the customer.  CMOs also must re-position and re-invigorate their brands with a sense of customer purpose.

•    Revenue must become part of the marketing mission and the link between marketing and sales; brand must be re-framed as an asset:  CMOs must ensure not only that every marketer in their organization embraces their role in, and understands the risks related to, generating revenue; they must also be compensated to live up to this idea.  Where does brand building fit into this?  CMOs are often charged with being stewards of the corporate brand and/or the total brand portfolio.  But building the brand, per se, will not lead to revenues; instead, it will provide us with a critical asset that we must understand how best to leverage.

•    Best practices must BE practices:  CMOs must not only raise the bar for their organization’s marketing practices and but also make sure that this standard is pervasive.

•    Creative/abstract approaches and an analytical/concrete mindset must be guided to equilibrium:  CMOs must actively cultivate this equilibrium – ensuring their organization is driving fresh, new ideas while maintaining analytical accountability –  through hiring, training and cultural imperatives.

•    Marketing technology and marketing systems must be viewed as a strategic asset, rather than a ‘problem for IT’:  CMOs must be the champion of a technologically-savvy, data-centric marketing culture.

•    Marketing system ‘architecture’ must reinforce marketing sustainability and be designed with a longer-term perspective:  CMOs must focus their companies on investing in and building marketing organizations that do not sacrifice longer-term opportunity for short-term gain and that can scale delivery to customers in a repeatable and value-added way over time.

Technological change

Part two of this change is technology-focused and gets into a critical topic – the need for CMOs to make sure their marketing information systems are up to the task of dynamic, scalable and integrated marketing management.

A CMO’s checklist for driving technological change includes:

•    Breaking ground and leading the charge on enterprises’ build-out of customer-centric information systems:  The CMO must be the chief advocate for not only transforming his/her company into a more customer-centric organization but also for ensuring that enterprise systems mirror this objective, rather than hindering it or sacrificing it to short-term profitability.

•    Focusing the spotlight on strategic vs. tactical marketing technology:  CMOs must question their organizations’ existing marketing systems and push for investments that balance priorities and help achieve what I like to refer to as ‘holistic agility’ – i.e., effective and detail-oriented execution at the periphery that remains constantly guided and bounded by the strategic whole.  CMOs must also make sure their teams to not become bogged down in tactical, communication-channel specific technology or data.

•    Investing in an integrated marketing management platform:  CMOs must work to understand and champion investments in these systems.  Integrated marketing management platforms are critical to the success of their marketing organizations in responding to a dynamic customer environment; they are a key step toward becoming more customer-centric; and they are the critical link to ensuring real-time accountability of marketing.  Plus, “[i]t’s insurance for the CMO,” commented John Rotheray, a mobile software entrepreneur.  I might take it a step further:  An integrated marketing management framework is the strategic infrastructure a CMO requires to succeed.

•    Making sure business intelligence and predictive analytics are pervasive throughout marketing systems:  CMOs must be aware of and push for business intelligence and predictive analytics being a critical element of their marketing technology infrastructure.

•    Pushing for a balanced picture of both online and offline marketing activities:  CMOs must push for marketing technology infrastructure that balances the total picture and integrates both online and offline pictures of customer-brand interaction.

•    Integrating with other enterprise systems:  CMOs must lead the charge on this integration and remind their peers that the type of real-time insight they demand into marketing activities is not possible without total integration.

It is only by addressing the need for both organizational and technological change that CMOs can position themselves and their marketing organizations for success in a newly-challenging marketing environment.

———-

Adam Needles is an entrepreneurial marketing leader, who is passionate about two areas — brand strategy and technology innovation.  And he both researches and writes regularly on the intersection of the two.  You can read his regular posts on his Propelling Brands blog or via his Twitter stream @abneedles.  He is also the former head of marketing for technology-industry analysis firm The 451 Group (and knows what it means to be challenged as a CMO).

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph – Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends – shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends – Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts – Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme – blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Search Tools

• BoardTracker – tracks words in forums
• BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili – Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
• Google Groups – Searches usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Twitter Search Tools

• Twitter Search – Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’.
• Twitstat – Twitter Tweitgeist – Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• TweetScan – search for words on Twitter
• Twit(url)y – see what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags – Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
• TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
• Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
• TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
• Twilert – Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.

Web Site Traffic

• Compete – Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
• Quantcast – Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
• Alexa – Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
• BlogFlux Page Rank – Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.

Search Data

• Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume by country and region.
• Google Insights – Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
• Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.
• Yahoo! Keyword Tool – Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month’s search data.
• FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.
• Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.

Multimedia Search

• YouTube – Search for videos and channels by keyword.
• MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine.
• Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else?
• Flickr – Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
• Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.
• Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
• Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web

Social Bookmarking

• Digg – Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
• StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking – general cool stuff
• Delicious – Social bookmarking

Feed Aggregator

• Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome.

URL cruncher

• Bit.ly – URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc

Specific Social Network Tracking

• Adonomics – Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing.

Search Engine rankings

• PageRank Checker – Shows Google page ranking

Advertising and Event Tracking

• MediaHound – Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.

Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …

Folder 1 – Must Reads: this folder contains services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I have to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.

Folder 2 – Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati

Folder 3 – Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.

Folder 4 – Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.

Folder 5 – Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

Folder 6 – Microblogging: I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.

Folder 7 – General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.

I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand …

Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.

This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.

If you want an easy indicator of how this site does, check out the number of Facebook friends it already has in place (an impressive 582,604 at the time of this post). Other measurements, such as the number of comments it has on its YouTube videos and images, and general comments and sentiments can also be helpful indicators, but I think the Facebook figure serves at the simplest indicator for most casual observers.

The reality is, Skittles has done this completely right. This solution was quick to produce, leverages existing communities that have great interest in the product and creates a platform that further engages the consumer. I would recommend any brand with minimal budget and the right kind of audience drop the brand sites they currently have, which I’m guessing aren’t terribly effective. The problem is that such a scenario raises an interesting dilemma.

What happens if everyone shifts their current strategy and starts launching these kinds of sites? Don’t worry — it isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but some trends will develop.

In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers. These people certainly want their social media and a big part of a brand’s focus will be on creating great quality websites that encourage discussion, communication and participation. The social-media aspects will be achieved by using the web services and integration tools of sites like Facebook. Deep integration with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will become more prevalent and brands with budgets will use all of these social features that Skittles has embraced.

However, while social aspects will become more prevalent, brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value and will work to make sure they retain the ability to at least control the brand visually. They will also differentiate as they always have with great creative and fun concepts that leverage these same social communities. Sites will also be more conscious of usability and not adding complex layers that inhibit the social functions of the third party web services like Flickr, YouTube or Twitter — which are frequently botched today.

I don’t think the age of the microsite is over. The successful microsites, both low and high budget, will undoubtedly have one thing in common: a simple open infrastructure for integrating into popular web communities and leveraging their social nature.

Again, I commend Agency.com for paying attention to great ideas, Modernista for doing it first, but most importantly Skittle’s brand team for having the courage to get out there and embrace the web and the new creative process so wholeheartedly. (Of course, Team Skittles could be terrified to death. But, um, congrats anyway…)

As featured on AdAge.com.

There are many approaches to marketing in the digital-media space, but I subscribe to the belief that consumers live at the intersection between owned media, such as your brand’s web properties; bought media, such as display and pay-per-click campaigns; and earned media, which includes all the user-generated content in the social-media space, from blog posts to comments on YouTube. Although I don’t believe all three approaches must be represented in every campaign, I do believe that in today’s world you do always need to include the earned-media perspective, because consumers will start the dialogue and build value or destroy value for your brand, whether you want it or not. Ultimately it comes down to how you want to engage in these conversations as you evaluate how they add value.

Arguably a single Super Bowl ad is the ultimate “splash” in terms of bought media, but once it has created that initial wave of awareness and conversation, how do you channel and harness that energy to sustain and expand your marketing campaign? It’s what I like to call the ripple. Traditionally, we have driven consumers to websites, micro-sites, mobile sites or even SMS interactions to engage on a deeper level. Now the most effective approach is to monitor and analyze the conversations that are happening online, in as near real-time a fashion as possible. You can then set up and maintain digital-engagement teams to participate in the conversations as they take place.

We conducted an experiment on behalf of one of our clients before, during and after the event using social-media analysis tools. We used Visible Technologies for this experiment, but if you’re interested in learning more about social-media analysis tools in general, check out this post.

Although I can’t get into any details, I can tell you that the conversation spike around the Super Bowl, not surprisingly, was impressive. However, the real value came from being able to quickly differentiate the types of conversations and identify the people who were actually discussing the virtues of the product (and their general sentiment) as opposed to the quality of the advert.

Each blog post, tweet, message board post, editorial article or comment on a media-sharing site allows us to identify individuals and communities that are interested enough to discuss a product or service, which makes them one step closer to being advocates. By participating with these people you not only extend the life of the conversation, but you breathe new life into it, or even possibly change its direction in a positive manner.

Here are five tips to help extend the life of your campaigns:

1. Proactively reach out to bloggers who have even briefly acknowledged your product or service and offer them an in-depth interview with one of your senior people to encourage further coverage in the social media space.
2. Use social-media analytics as a method of managing audience fragmentation. Work toward individualized treatment and micro-segmentation in your messaging as quickly as possible. This process will drive more focused conversations and enhance demand and engagement.
3. Keep a portion of your media budget in reserve and set up some quick, small media buys on sites where you have identified sufficient interest and conversation around your brand. This intelligent and targeted buying method will bring you maximum ROI in an economy where every penny counts.
4. Openly and honestly leave messages and comments in open forums identifying yourself as a representative of the brand. Thank them for their interest, their point of view and their insights (and actually mean it) and invite them to reach out to you via e-mail or to visit a website. Doing so allows you actually channel the energy of these conversations productively to your branded properties.
5. Don’t be short-sighted. Like any good relationship, you wouldn’t throw away a person’s e-mail address or phone number after you’ve built a relationship with them. Start documenting and storing all your online relationships in one place and categorize them by their interests. You’ll be surprised how many people you can build long-term relationships with, albeit digitally.

As the title implies, great campaigns in today’s digital space (and even more so in today’s economy) must look beyond the big splash and understand how to ride, extend and hopefully even grow the interest in brands using social media.

As featured in AdAge’s DigitalNext Blog.