AAF: MySpace and YouTube, Yes; Blogs, Not Really Very Much
An AAF (American Advertising Federation ) survey of industry leaders on digital media trends indicates that advertising agencies are not confident that Fortune 500 companies quite appreciate the effectiveness of digital marketing. Sixty three percent of Fortune 500 companies according to the survey are, “generally behind the curve when it comes to online strategy.” However, the agencies executives themselves acknowledge that fifty-eight percent are “personally “struggling simply to manage existing online efforts, let alone stay ahead of the curve.”
Well, what a shame about that curve; agencies think clients are behind the digital curve but agencies admit they can’t stay ahead of it. While the agencies and the client in this surveys are roundingﾃゑｿｽ Dead Man’s Curve they might want to drive by Todd Copilevitz’ and see why they are Advertising Themselves to Death.. Another eye opener awaits as Todd notes that General Mills has told its agencies that they will now be compensated based upon the dreaded RESULTS.
Might be important to realize that the Future of Advertising is NOW: Its not about whether the advertisers or the advertising agencies “get it.” The consumer gets “it” and that is really all that matters. According to Yankelovich and Forrester, seventy percent (70%) of consumers say they like products such as TiVo that block advertising and ninety two percent (92%) of these users fast forward through advertising. For more data, check out the Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMMA) Research Blog and to experience the future in real time join me next week at the Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMBAT 2) Basic Training Conference.
OK, and how does the AAF regard blogs and “user generated content sites”? “Advertising executives find blogs a riskier, less effective advertising vehicle than user-generated content sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Sixty-two percent (62%) stated that “blogs are too risky to advertise with due to lack of predictability of the editorial content,” while only 53 percent agreed with the same statement about user-generated content. Despite these concerns, an overwhelming majority said advertisers “should exploit the viral marketing opportunities” of user-generated sites and, to a lesser degree, blogs.
Well Yankelovitch did report that 55% of consumers still enjoy advertising “itself’. Of course that reminds me of the oft quoted John Wannamaker comment about the 50% of add dollars that are wasted but he just didn’t know which half.
Tags: advertising, marketing, word of mouth marketing, WOMMA, WOM, digital advertising, digital media, YouTube, MySpace, blogs
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MyGrace: The Other Blog Evangelists
Inspired by a member of his congregation that used MySpace to attract listeners for his rock band, Rev. Patrick Gray, am Episcopal priest from Boston set up a MySpace profile, the Advent, to attract listeners to his sermons. His site includes reminders about service times as well as audio files of the choir. The graphics are very cool and the Advent has 671 friends. The WSJ reports that churches across the US are using social media such as blogs and podcasts and on line social networking to connect with members and potential members.
Church Unplugged, according to the WSJ, attributes its growth to its MySpace profiles, saying that the church profile can be found while searching for music, television, or local MySpace users. Unplugged has about 100 church attendees and over 2000 MySpace friends.
The evangelicals are leading the way with blogs such as Outside the Box Ministry and Church Marketing Sucks that provide "how to’s" for churches to improve their marketing and their messages.Church Marketing Sucks has a Squido lens and posts with titles such as, "What Web 2.0 can mean for your church." Outside the Box Ministry is a little less "in your face" than Church Marketing Sucks but the message is similar. Their language is about engagement, connection and recognition that if people are on MySpace or Facebook that’s where they need to be.
The Vatican is podcasting and has a web site and according to Businessweek is hard at work on a faith based social networking site which is referred to as MySpace for Catholics. Sister Judith, the nun who is responsible for the web site and the upcoming social networking site, says that "the Net is the ultimate way to reach millions of people and to connect… it’s about something much bigger than myself…you can touch it, you can change it, and you can touch people with it." Spoken like some other evangelists at a different church.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2004) 64% of online Americans use the Internet for faith based acclivities. The study said, "Faith-related activity online is a supplement to, rather than a substitute for offline religious life. The survey found that two-thirds of those who attend religious services weekly use the Internet for personal religious or spiritual purposes." Sounds like online out reach is reaching the target.
But what about the MySpace environment for delivering the MyGrace message? Businessweek recently reported of the growing campaign to protect children from online predators that may close space on MySpace. One church education group mentioned in the WSJ article that the challenge was to reach teens without exposing them to inappropriate content. I think he may have the equation backwards, teens and actually most people, are probably not on MySpace to find a church but rather may find a church while they are MySpace.
As Ross Dawson writes about the MySpace generation, on Trends in the Living Networks, " The way I see relational technologies such as mobiles, chat forums, multiplayer roleplaying games, video sharing and so on, is that they extend our capacity as humans to relate. People have a built-in drive to connect with others, and now that has a far wider canvas across which to express itself. We can now discover many of the latent propensities and characteristics of humans, because we have been given new tools to explore our human identity." Or our spiritual side.
Outside of the Box Ministry has a post titled Blogging is Similar to Spiritual Multiplication which is a pretty good explanation of word of mouth marketing with blogs. If you want your message to be heard, as Businessweek notes, OClick All Ye Faithful.
Tags: MySpace, WOMMA, word of mouth, Church of the Consumer, Evangelism, marketing, church marketing, blogs, social media, media, podcasting, social networks
Mark Cuban Given A Technical for Blogging But He Still Scores
Mark Cuban, blogger and owner of the Dallas Mavericks was fined $100,000 for blogging his criticism of NBA officiating. Cuban was also fined $100,000 was going onto the court on Sunday’s game against the San Antonion Spurs. According to Cuban, he started writing his blog because he wanted to be able to communicate directly with fans in part because he didn’t believe his team was getting fair coverage by the mainstream sports media.
Cuban has set records for being fined by the NBA for expressing his displeasure at officials on the court; this fine for blogging is the second time that the NBA has fined Cuban for expressing his opinions on his blog. In November 2004, Cuban posted that his blog fine was a first in professional sports and posed the question,
Do the customers and fans of the NBA or other leagues, feel it makes the league appear stronger , weaker or unaffected when a player, owner, coach, GM, executive publicly criticizes the league ?
Are you as a consumer more likely to purchase, watch, recommend our products, or are you more likely to reduce your attachment and purchase of our products ? How does it affect how you interact with us ?
Steve Rubel answered the question on his blog and said that in his opinion,
"In the end, the public will evaluate the criticism based on who else is validating it and their views of those parties…if a chorus of criticism arises that is deemed valid by those who cover the league in the press-it carries a different weight."
Is it possible that Steve is saying that public opinion is only influenced by the press? If so, this would be a surprising point of view from one of the Technorati 100 who "explores how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations" on his own blog. Although, one has to be realistic about the meaning of "different weight," as Stephen Bryant points out:
"According to Gallup, only one in five Americans, or about 40 million of us, read blogs. By comparison, more than 55 million people visited newspaper websites in November of 2005 alone, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings analysis conducted for the Newspaper Association of America."
According to the 12/05 Pew Internet & American Life Project 8 million Americans say they have created blogs and 27% of internet users say they read blogs; the important component in this is the increase in blog readership, 58%. But 62% of internet users say they do not know what a blog is.
In other words, there are still more people in the world who get the "story" from tradtional media. Cuban’s NBA fine will no doubt drive traffic to his blog. Some of that traffic will no doubt be people who have never visited a blog before but read about the fine in the mainstream media and then wanted to read the blog.
This is an interesting twist to Cuban’s desire to use his blog to speak directly to fans as an alternative to the coverage of tradtional media sources. He is fined by the NBA for expressing his opinion on his blog; the event is covered in the mainstream media which most likely leads more people to pay attention to his blog and to his opinions than otherwise would have.
Similarly, the lack of media coverage of the Colbert speech on the part of the main stream media significantly extended its reach and life…the bloggers blogged the story and the bloggers became a story within a story. The audience for the Colbert speech was greatly expanded by its appearnce on YouTube, which reported that the video had been viewed 2.7mm times in less than 48 hours. As Liz Dunn said on the Technorati Weblog: Bloggers1, Mainstream Media 0.
Although the absolute numbers of blog readers is small relative to traditional media readers, the number of newspaper readers is declining as is traditional magazine circulation while blog readership is increasing. In fact, according to the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project about 50 million Americans get their news online and for a "group of high pwered online users" the internet is their primary news source.
Traditional media and social media each point the finger of credibility at each other but the big difference between the two is the revenue model for the content. In traditional media, the publishers pay the content creators and then own the content and the distribution of the content. In social media, the individual controls creation, ownership, and distribution of content frequently without a sustainable revenue model.
As Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis write in the Nieman Reports,
"The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but by the audience it serves. Citizens everywhere are getting together via
the Internet in unprecedented ways to set the agenda for news, to inform each other about hyper-local and global issues, and to create
new services in a connected, always-on society. The audience is now an active, important participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information, with or without the help of mainstream news media."
So as the authority shifts from content owners to individual producers and users, how does traditional media "reach out" to social media to retain ownership of the content. Syndication? Who has an ownership model for the content? BlogBurst. Who does not? IndieKarma.
The lines between mainstream media and bloggers are blurred as online magazines such as Newsweek link to blogs via Technorati and online magazines such as Businessweek Online host blogs on their site. However, BlogBurst which was launched on May 2, 2006 redefines the relationship between blogs and mainstream media.
BlogBurst has signed up 600 bloggers who responded to "Got a great blog? Get big time exposure! Increse your reach, visibility and readership by making your blog available to our network of leading publishers;" available for a share of ad revenue. Publishers, according to Wired quoting Pluck’s (Blog Burst is a service of Pluck) gain "expert blog commentary on travel, women’s issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories where publishers may not have dedicated staff." This doesn’t sound too bad, right? This wouldn’t be a revenue model would it?
Well according to Stephan Bryant advertisers are lined up like airplanes at O’hare for online advertising and niched blogs present an attractive revenue magnet for newspapers. Since blogs are conversational media, newspapers are expressing an interest in joining the conversation by syndicating blogs.However will the relationship between the newspapers, the advertisers and the bloggers influence the content? Well, time will tell.
Now back to Mark Cuban, and his intermediated strategy. Cuban says that he is a whiner.
Well, he is a blogger and in this case, I believe they are synonomous. He says,"Whining is the first step towards change….People who don’t whine are punching bags. They just go about their days, their jobs, their lives, knowing there is
nothing they can do to change a darn thing, so why say a word ? They see no reason to whine because they know
they are incapable of affecting change."
In the Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, says that people tend to grant an undeserved amount of authority to those who talk the loudest. Or those that whine the loudest? Or those who are passionate enough about their beliefs to write a blog to express their point of view; or passionate enough to express a point of view to the referees.
Steve Rubel again, In the end, the public will evaluate the criticism based on who else
is validating it and their views of those parties…if a chorus of
criticism arises that is deemed valid by those who cover the league in
the press-it carries a different weight."
I think the chorus that Steve refers to is the Wisdom of Crowds. I think Mark Cuban wants to provide information so that the crowd can make an informed decision. In the coverage of him and the Dallas Mavericks,Cuban says, "there was not a whole lot of fact-checking done, not a whole lot of accountability," and blogging "was my chance to correct what needed to be corrected. Too many times I read what I was doing from people I’d never talked to — ‘rumor had it,’ ’sources say.’ " He says blogmaverick.com "has changed how the media deal with me" because if reporters are sloppy, "they know I’ll call them on it."
"Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and
don’t. The other half is composed of people who have nothing to say and
keep on saying it." Robert Frost
Tags: Mark Cuban, Technorati, Media, Wisdom Of Crowds, Blogmarverick, Blogging, NBA, Steve Rubel, San Antonio Spurs, Mavericks, Mainstream media, Social Media Tags: YouTube, Pluck, BlogBurst
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Word of MouthSpace
What space do gymnasts, cheerleaders, Fall Out Boy fans and gay guys share? http://www.myspace.com/stickitmovie.According to Reuters,ﾃつ Jessica Bendinger, the director of Stick It aﾃつ movie the opened April 18th from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures devised a word of mouth marketing campaign through niche outlets and a MySpace page.
Disney promoted the movie in a two week flight of TV advertising using 10 and 15 second spots on syndicated shows such as "America’s Next Top Model." The actress, Vanessa Lengies, one of the stars in the movie asked Bendinger is she could set up a MySpace page for the movie. Vanessa set up the page but after several weeks Bendinger hired a freelancer to build traffic on the site.
Bendinger identified the target audience, gymnasts, Fall Out Boys fans, cheerleaders who were familiar with Bring it On (a cheerleader movie from 2000) and gay guys.They built the site to 6000 "friends".ﾃつ Then Disney took over the MySpace site and upgraded the design and features which added another 4000 "friends."
Bendinger definitely gets the effect of the 10,000 MySpace friends as she recognizes that 10,000 friends who have anywhere from 50-3,000 friends can sell a lot of tickets to a movie. But, Bendinger also had a few other buzz building tactics. She sought out a gymnastics writer to draft press releases for college magazines and newspapers highlightingﾃつ all the NCAA gymnasts who are in the movie.
She also worked with Disney to package the movie’s trailer andﾃつ the Missy Elliotﾃつ music video to the 30,000 International Gymnast’s subscribers. Their subscribers gymnastic are gyms clubs…..there are 3000 clubs in the US and each club represents hundreds of gymnasts and gymnasts-to-be who are all high potential ticket buyers.
As Wired noted MySpace is a community site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest market strategy since MTV. Of course, it would have been interesting to have seen the impact of a blog strategy and to have seen what would have developed on the Stick It My Space site had Disney not taken it over.
And, yes, of course, you can see a clip of Stick It on YouTube. In fact there are several.
Tags: YouTube, MySpace, WOM, CGM, Marketing, Media, gymnastics, NCAA, Disney, Touchstone, MTV, Direct Mail
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