My Daily Bookmarks 11/21/2008

• Clark Kokich, Razorfish. "focused on business solutions and less on marketing communications"

  much more focused on business solutions and less on marketing communications

  tags: Social, Media

• The Key with all audiences is Relevancy & "Taste" (the later means different things for diff audiences)

  If advertising is done in a relevant and credible way, young adults are actually eager to interact, share opinions and even pass the message on

  tags: Social, Media

  • “If advertising is done in a relevant and credible way, young adults are actually eager to interact, share opinions and even pass the message on,”

• SN Report - Geographic - Demographic and Traffic Data

  Very interesting report; one of the things that immediately jumps to mind for me is the need to keep your strategy (how are you going to leverage Social Media to achieve your business objectives) independent from your choice of networks (channels) that you are going to use to apply the tactics associated with it.

  tags: Social, Media, Metrics

  • The 2008 Social Network Analysis Report - Geographic - Demographic and Traffic Data Revealed

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Daily Bookmarks 11/20/2008

• only two main components of success... brands and their delivery

  Very inspiring essay; a lot of these points resonate with me because Social enables the organization to go back to being human, facilitate the relationship and eliminate the barriers to self expression that Marty Neumeier writes about.

  tags: Social, Media

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Daily Bookmarks 11/19/2008

• Social Media Visualization

  Great work by Marc Smith

  tags: Social, Media, Visualization

• Study: CMOs Must Evolve to Meet New Marketing Challenges - MarketingVOX

  Interesting study! Even when I don't agree with all the points & conclusions (i.e. I don't agree that "Effective advertising agencies and marketing partners must abandon the old paradigms and assist clients in embracing new technologies") There are other very valuable points in this report; my favorite: "Integrate marketing with other forms of corporate communications. Both the interactive nature ofWeb 2.0 technologies and the transparency of corporate messages among different constituencies—suchas customers, investors, media, regulatory bodies and employees (past, present and future)—demandthe integration of various forms of marketing and communications. Businesses can no longer segmentaudiences and messages as if audiences don’t talk to each other."

  tags: Social, Media

  • study of global CMOs conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Google, reports MarketingCharts.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A little something I found 11/17/2008

• P&G's McConnell Not Sure Marketers Belong on Social Networks - Advertising Age - Digital

  Mr. McConnell is delivering tough, but fair, words in this article. However I think the trick will be in the evoulation of the engagement form.. I do think that what a consumer chooses to write in public is fair game for engagement, as long as this is kept relevant and in good taste.. thoughts?

  tags: Social, Media, Contrarian

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A little something I found (weekly)

• RexBlog.com: Rex Hammock's weblog >> Blog Archive >> Fill-in-the-blank memo: What our marketing team can learn from the Obama campaign - Annotated

  RexBlog on marketing lessons fromt eh Obama campaign

  tags: Social, Media

  • The brand is a narrative
  • Somewhere along the way, marketing people like us decided we couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time -- that there is something inherently different and distinct about writing copy for a :30 second spot vs. writing copy for a direct mail solicitation letter. Worse, we started believing a myth that one individual can't think in "TV" and in "the web" or in video or social media -- that each of those are somehow extreme specialties like brain surgery vs. dermatology. The Obama campaign proved that thinking wrong. It was "wholistic" marketing. While, no doubt, the greatest amount of money was spent on TV, there was never a sense that TV was "driving" the campaign and everything else was supporting it. Each medium used -- including media not even around when the campaign began (iPhone Apps and Twitter, for example) -- was utilized with the same intensity and priority and treated, not like an "extension" of the paid-media campaign, but as a critical component to the overall "brand" that, to at least some supporters, was more important than all of the other activities of the campaign
    • Social Media is one of the tools, not the only one and not always the most important but one that should be kept in mind and properly used. - post by filibertoselvas
  • In the past, the terms "viral" and "grassroots" and "user-generated" seemed to indicate that a marketing effort was less expensive than traditional media -- or, more naively, free. Yet the Obama campaign invested tens of millions into providing the "movement" the tools necessary for it to grow and flourish. If you were to show me a startup business that, in two years, could build a database of 3+ million individuals who will contribute more than $200 each online, I'd show you a startup ready to go public with a multi-billion dollar valuation.
    • Social Media does not equal cheap advertisement; but does equal valuable customer relationships... (if properly implemented) - post by filibertoselvas

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

FEED your brain!

I just finished my long overdue read of the FEED report; Razorfish's Consumer Experience Report.

Is a looong document (actually a compliation of articles/documents); filled with lots of golden nuggets and pearls of wisdom, definetely recommended reading. Here a couple of snippets to get you interested:

“….. It’s a powerful concept for companies— building a real relationship with their influential customers and audiences, and then empowering those folks to get the word out. The problem is that community cannot be created instantly. You need people to get people, and it takes a lot of seeding and feeding to reach a network effect strong enough to create a real, working community. In the end, a company has to be patient with community relationships and nudge a bit to get them started. That’s normal and well worth the effort” (Page 25).

Enjoy the reading; and let me know what you think.

Filiberto Selvas
Filiberto.Selvas@razorfish.com

Let’s don’t go about Social Media like the blind men went about the elephant..

I love the Social Media space; and I am as passionate as the best of them… but it is very interesting to me to see how we tend to get stuck in conversations of what is or is not Social Media that simply reflect the fact that we have different (and valid) perspectives on the same idea…


Allow me to illustrate.. (and BTW; by no means I think this is a comprehensive list):

You can think about social Media as an opportunity to hyper target your advertisement message; nothing wrong with that… The tools that the likes of Facebook, YouTube and others are offering today are amazing and improving at a fast pace.

You can think about Social Media as an opportunity to present your consumers with valuable “content” and “tools” (in the broadest understanding of the term) and through those leverage their social networks to propagate your message and/or awareness of your brand i.e. a nifty tool to help people learn about last minute deals and enable them to share these with their friends and family; conveniently branded as x and created in such a way that your actions on it are properly reflected in your social graph (i.e. Facebook Newsfeed).. this is great too.. an example (with no commentary or implications about my political preferences): Obama’s application

Then you can think about Social Media as an opportunity to support, engage, be associated with something your consumers want to achieve/care about (and in the process present your brand/services in a relevant context); for example Bank of America Small Business Online Community.

Then you can think about Social Media as an opportunity to identify, engage and interact with those influencer consumers that seem to be able to affect and represent) the opinions of many others; a great way to co-create and validate ideas before you actually invest on them. I say the Microsoft MVP program is a great example of this one..

You can then think about Social Media as a way to become transparent and approachable to/for your consumer; willing to present to them your ideas and challenges and ready to take on their comments and perceptions of those. For example Barry Judge (Best Buy CMO) blog..

So let’s agree that this is a very ample space; and its applications very broad! IMHO It is all about what your business objectives are and, just as important, what your consumers objectives & desires are.. and then finding the best way to apply Social Media to satisfy both of those (which can be one or many of the above, or many others)

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas

Filiberto.Selvas@razorfish.com