Microsoft - Change the World or Go Home

It is the Blue Monsters Birthday today....more on this to come but check out what Hugh McLeod has to say on this exciting anniversary at his blog www.gapingvoid.com

Content + ( The most important part of a social media marketing campaign )

The most important component to a social media marketing campaign in one word is CONTENT. Thats it. Simple right? Well unfortunatley its not that simple...i really wish it was as my job would be so much easier. In trying to explain why content is so important I found myself always repeating the same mantra. "Its content plus measurement, its content + portablility, its content + strategy its content + analytics. You get the picture. So I have started calling this my Content + strategy for social media. And it seems to resonate with my audience.

It never ceases to amaze me how many meetings I end up in where the discussion is based around "driving users" to a "campaign landing environment" - but the question of if that CLE actually has compelling, relevent content once you have driven your audience there more often than not somehow gets overlooked. Another scenario I often find myself in is when both agency and client folks alike suggest "lets do something viral"! Virals can be wildly successful. They do more often than not put the "content first" model to play. However virals act like hit models...and more often they miss than hit. This is due to a variety of reasons but one of the main ones is the lack of prioritzation around sharing and portability. Make it easy for people to pass a long your content. Share with friends. upload to their blog, comment on it, digg it...you get where I am going here. It is becoming more and more feasible to measure this "pass a long" effect and for me this is where my job gets really exciting. Finally we can start to look at the effect of not just what search and display can have on a campaign but what the "sharing of content" has had on driving awareness or even end actions like a download, a registration and even a purchase. A company that is making great leaps and bounds in this area is Reach Machines....check them out if you can. As always i will leave this post with a question...does anyone know of any other companies - apart from the obvious ad serving tech companies - that are really making progress in the measurement of portable content and the "pass a long" effect on marketing campaigns?

Favorite Quotation of the Day...

"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win."
Robert Heinlein
US science fiction author (1907 - 1988)

Vivace...

...what would I do without you in the morning??. Best dam coffee in seattle....honestly have note found better. Let me know if I am missing something but this black deliciousness has got to be hard to beat!

what is up with myspace...seriously...

...was negotiating with them today and had the worst sales person on the phone. Honestly, so rude, so sales driven. I asked them to work with us, come up with a creative solution to our problem which would benefit my client, and Myspace and their response was "client X has millions of $$$...they just need to pay for advertising".... done and done. Well Myspace, its not done and done, and you guys need to think of new ways to monetize your platform. We work with many social media platforms and they all work with us, as an extension of our team, there are many ways to engage consumers and make money at the same time....

Creative Media

what comes first media or creative? Distribution or content? a debate that lasted over four hours today with my emerging media team in seattle? does media need to have a creative offering or vice versa? social media adds a whole other element to the discussion....what's your thoughts?

love this site....just, well...very cool

http://marumushi.com/

Obama and In Game Advertising

Even though there is no winner as yet in the race to become the next president Obama has clearly taken the lead when you view the campaign through a digital media lens. Moreover, he is the first political candidate to used social media to promote himself and his party and now he has moved into the rehlm of gaming as a way to reach the American male youth audience.Here is a sample of the whole article featured on Yahoo news last week...worth a read. Being someone who is continually tasked by my clients to develop the best methodology to measure social and emerging media ROI, engagement and of course sales or in this case votes, I would LOVE to see the metrics off the back of the Obama Presidential campaign...if anyone can share any information to date on this I would be very, very interested. thanks

Mundane Mondays

Yes, i know it is a Saturday, however i am sending you this in preparation for this Monday, and many more Mundays, sorry, Monday's to come. He's right Monday mornings should feel like Friday afternoons...www.lucaskanephoto.blogspot.com

Somebodyelsesphone....

...http://www.somebodyelsesphone.com/ is the latest ad campaign from Nokia promoting the new 7610 Supernover and obviously targeting a youth audience. I like the creative concept of the website, it kept me intrigued for some time. The brand extentions are interesting too e.g the "characters" featured have set up their own facebook profile and are actively befriending people....however, part of the ad agencies promotional strategy was to video the characters - one nineteen year old woman in particular - in an overtly sexual way. mmm...part of me thinks well this is what appeals to nineteen year old guys (actually all guys right? ) but the other part of me is like...really? do you have to be that obvious and unoriginal? sex of course sells, but this part of the campaign on facebook is both unoriginal and gratuitous. Come on creative peeps come up with something a little better next time!! ( interesting side note - I'd say 90% of the comments around the video campaign on Facebook are negative in sentiment)

a thought to ponder...

read on a blog today the following post which was in response to a discussion around the Microsoft Windows Vista campaign which has been titled "Life without Walls". The post stated "In a life without walls - how could there be any windows and gates?" this tickled me!

FM Conference

Just got back from San Fran after attending the FM Conversation Marketing conference. All the usual suspects were there and it was a really intersting two days. Most interesting discussion to me on day one was the "Why we can't measure this space?" panel. Adam Gerber, CMO of Quantcast disagreed. He thinks we can measure the space and that Quantcast is the first and only direct-measurement solution that equips all publishers to characterize their increasingly dynamic online audiences. From the demo i have had of their solution i would tend to agree. Morever, it also enables marketers to search for, discover, and validate specific target segments that are most relevant to them in order to tie together the complexities of media planning and delivery. Bascially, through Quantcast, I can segment my audience based more around behaviour as opposed to traditional demographics. I can also address the opportunity that long tail of advertising now presents us with - something that i am not seeing Nielsen or Comscore making a whole lot of headway in. Would love thoughts,feedback on this - social media measurement in general - and check out the FM site for transcripts and videos of the event.

Looking for good junior planners...

...to join our digital innovation team here at MEC interaction in Seattle. Feel free to email me with your resume...good digital talent is hard to find!

Federated Media...

...Heading to their conversation marketing conference this week in San Francisco...really looking forward to it...