Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Corporate Blogging: From the Discovery to Discipline

Cymfony and Porter-Novelli just presented the 2007 update of the Corporate Blog survey we initiated last year. We christened last year "The Discovery Age". Changes in the past year have brought more discipline to the management of some aspects of the corporate blog, while evaluation and monitoring lag.

First the progress. Management of corporate blogs has evolved quite a bit in the last year. PR has stepped up to lead most aspects of the corporate blog process. PR depts and agencies have implemented formal processes and guidelines on the management, writing and review of blog posts to ensure quality and consistency.

Fortunately, this has not appeared to censor or restrict participation. In fact, more employees across the company are now involved in contributing posts, and nobody is writing the posts for them. They generally have broad guidelines, not strict rule of what can and can't be published. Few require legal or departmental approvals. This is important to preserve the authenticity and honesty that corporate blogs need to be successful.  PR seems to get it. 

What they don’t seem to get is the strategic evaluation and analysis. For example, almost three-quarters of respondents felt the blog increased the company's visibility, but half were unsure if the blog was successful. The most popular measurement of success is blog traffic and not any measure of influence or business impact. 

This is even more apparent when it comes to monitoring other blogs. Monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of their company is usually very infrequent (avg 5.1 times a month), manual (most rely on Google alerts) and lack strategic analysis of the findings.   Only 26% have any sort of influential blogger outreach efforts in place. 

Peter Hirsch, a Partner at Porter Novelli, and I had an interesting discussion about these results and what companies can do to improve their programs in our webinar.  I encourage you to view the recording on our site. If you don’t have the time now, search “Cymfony” next time you are in iTunes and listen to an audio portion of the session.

Bubble 2.0 -- set to music

If you've developed a bad case of angst around whether there is a new bubble or not, kick back and lighten up with this video.

Social Networks' 2008 Tightrope Walk

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble....

My musings on whether social media has become a bubble has stirred up a bit of buzz.

But here's the real issue: in order to develop a solid revenue model, social networks must walk a very thin line between pleasing marketers without alienating their users. The models and examples exist today; the question is: will media companies and marketers resist the urge for the quick hit and exercise the retraint, wisdom, and patience to build a mutually beneficial relationship with their audience?

Paul LaMonica at CNN Money picked up on it earlier this week and so when I was in New York we had a wide-ranging discussion which he wrote up here.

The blog Socialized, took it the wrong way, and thought I was an idiot. I corrected her interpretation and she kindly put up a new post to draw attention to my comments.

To save you all the trouble of wading through all the various links and comments, here is a succinct summary of my key points.

1. The bubble is in VC funding and start up companies, not in consumer behavior. I elaborated on this in this post and as I told Paul the trend of consumers using social media is "unequivocal, inexorable, and irreversible." Just as consumers kept using the Internet after the 2000 bubble burst, they will keep using social media no matter how much money the VCs lose or how much doom-and-gloom comes from the media. Smart marketers will keep their eyes on their audience.
2. The social media business model creates greater tension than other media businesses. Any media business has to manage the tension between editorial and advertising. But here the tension is especially acute. One of the drivers of social media's growth is that consumers are sick of the ad clutter in other media. In addition, the value of social media is personal relationship, not information. Ads that are relevant to the editorial are more accepted (think cosmetics ads in Cosmo or shotgun ads in Field & Stream. What kind of ad is relevant to insert between two people building a personal rapport?
3. Marketers are likely to push the model the wrong way. In marketers' embryonic understanding of the social media ethos, they will ask -- and push for -- what they know: guaranteed placements and impressions/GRPs or some other measure or audience size. Banner ads everywhere....lists of members they can ping to invite to friend their brand profile. Facebook is facing a mini-rebellion from their members with a 50,000-strong group called "Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy." (As an aside I was invited to join this group -- by a friend who is a senior marketer at a CPG company!)

To me this is reminiscent of the pop-up ad phase of online advertising: advertisers wanted more intrusive units than 468x60 banners, sites obliged them, felt huge backlash from their audience, and dialed down, or even eliminated pop-ups altogether. Kudos to Facebook for listening to their users and rapidly amending policies that meet resistance, as they have done with the Beacon Opt-out policy.

But social networks have a better alternative than retreat: educate marketers on the right way to become part of the social media environment. The panel I did at AdTech this month had great case studies from Coke, Digitas (representing Delta), MySpace and YouTube that begin to provide models other advertisers can follow to be successful.

And, thanks to MySpace, Isobar, and Carat, there is great research that has defined the "Momentum Effect" as the ROI driver in social media. This is a MUST READ report for marketers entering this space (get it here) (Disclosure/mini-plug: my colleagues at TNS were one of three partners is executing the research, along with TRU and Marketing Evolution).

Will social networks have the backbone to turn down revenue is marketers demand types of placements that will alienat users? Will marketers learn to give up control and learn to become the kind of friend that social network users will welcome?

This will be the real story of 2008, not Bubble 2.0.

Memo to Bob Parsons: You are so wrong!

Dear Bob:

I read that you have decided that it is not worth it to promote GoDaddy's Super Bowl ad ahead of the game as you have in the past. I say, the strategy of promoting early isn't wrong -- your execution last year was flawed! Tune in to my webinar tomorrow with the Advertising Research Foundation and I'll show you the proof!

Bob,

A recent Brandweek article, quoted you as saying that you won't promote GoDaddy's ad as aggressively before the game as in year's past:

What we learned is that doesn’t really pay off because people are going to watch anyhow. So while that might work for other occasions, that doesn’t work for the Super Bowl.

Our analysis (to be published in the December Journal of Advertising Research) shows that advertisers who promote their ad aggressively before the game (whom we dubbed "Play Action Advertisers") got 10 times the coverage and consumer discussion as those who didn't.

10 times!!

We calculated that Doritos got a minimum of 40 million impressions even before the coin toss. That's almost half of the audience that the game gets. Stick that in your ROI calculator!

And those who showed their ad online before the game got 4 times the coverage of those who announced early, but did not show their ad. You can download an abstract of this (and some other analysis we did at our site

Bob: The lesson you should take away from last year is that you can't do the same thing two years in a row. It was boring and seemed a lot more contrived than the 2006 effort. (see my 2006 post in which I awarded you the "They Really Get It" Award). Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read my review of your brilliant strategy.

So promote your ad aggressively ahead of the game -- if your really have something new to say!

PS. I take back what I said about questioning your reason for being on the Super Bowl at all, both in last year's and my 2005 review (where I gave you the "Load up the Cannon with Gerbils" Award). I recently started a blog about my other obssession -- LED lighting -- at http://ledlightsathome.com . When I decided to do it, GoDaddy was top of mind and you got my $14 to register the domain (actually more like $80 because I also registered a few variations thereof).

(cross-posted at www.superbowladvertisers.com )