von Roland Hachmann | Mai 18, 2008 | Blog, Digital News
I missed the blogpost „social media will be like air“ by Charlene Li in March. But before not mentioning it at all, I’ll rather blog about it late. The article is about the fact that social media, especially the communities/social networks that make up these media plattforms, will be be ubiquitous in a few years. The son of my boss once asked, how people managed to access the internet before computers were invented. A rather smart question, once you think about it.
In a few years kids will ask us, why we used so many different platforms to socially engage with one another online. (And why we used platforms in the first place). Similar to why they will ask us, why we needed stationary big machines with huge screens to access the internet.
So the article of Charlene Li is worth reading in any case, but there was one point that I particularly noticed:
4) A business model where social influence defines marketing value. Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence. For example, Steve Rubel is a highly influential person because he is an authority on social media, the people in his social graph tend to interested in his views, and they in turn have a great deal of authority as well. (Several people came up to me after the speech and said that this is similar to a „PageRank of people“, a very easy way to crystallize the idea.)
There are discussions about the future of your „typical target group“ already going on. The idea of establishing a „PageRank of people“ seems to be a viable solution. Discriminating it may be, but it provides a good indication of who to target – or should we rather call it: speak to?
In summary, Participation is no longer optional writes Steve Rubel, referencing Charlene Li’s post. And he ads:
The end result is that marketers will need to shift the way they approach communities. Static advertising is no longer viable. The solution is collaboration. Marketers will need to tap these emerging social operating systems to build meaningful connections through their sites and others before competitors do.
Engaging in „social networking“ with your brand/product advocates will be is a crucial part of the media mix. I just wonder, when this insight will have found its way into marketing plans of most companies?
von Roland Hachmann | Apr 17, 2008 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing
Seth Godin, godfather of good quotes, recently wrote this:
The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
Publishing your ideas… in books, or on a blog, or in little twits on Twitter… and doing it with patience, over time, is the best way I can think of to lay a foundation for whatever it is you hope to do next.
This is why, in my opinion, Social Media Marketing cannot simply be viewed as another tactical discipline within marketing – or even advertising, as many companies might currently think about it. You shouldn’t just do Social Media Marketing as a one-off, as part of a campaign („we’ll have som TV commercials, some online banners, and, let’s see, some social media activities“).
It needs to be a strategic, long term goal to engage in Social Media activities, to build relations with the target audience, and to build trust for those moments, when you (urgently) need to activate your greatest brand/product fans…
von Roland Hachmann | Apr 7, 2008 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Over at the One Degree blog, there is a coverage of a panel from the SXSW interactive festival, during which the panelists were asked to vote on the worst social media campaigns in 2007. Amongst the panelists were bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Steve Hall. I have to admit, I didn’t hear about all of these campaigns, but some of the bigger blunders (Walmart, Coke/Mentos and Sony) I did hear about, of course. I wonder what will be next for this year? You would assume, that (we) marketers learn…
von Roland Hachmann | Apr 1, 2008 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Online Advertising
There is a standard joke around online advertising managers about the fear of those „chinese villages“ taking over one of your ad campaigns so that you receive the clicks you paid for, only all of them come from one and the same family (in China or India, or Eastern Europe or Antigua, etc. it doesn’t really matter).
But you don’t need to go very far away. Your next door neighbor might be part of a „click farm“. Even though he most likely never realised what he got himself into.
Just the other day I took a look at a site called OnlineTVRecorder.com (don’t want to give them any link credit). On that site you can record TV programms of any German TV Channel – most of which I wouldn’t even be able to access in this area of the country. You first record them, and then download and decode them. But you can only decode those that you „recorded“ in advance. This makes it similar to any VCR/DVD recorder and hence (I guess) a legal way of recording shows via the web.
So far so good. However, the system only works for you, when you pay per download with so called „good will points“. If you haven’t got enough points, you can’t download or decode any files.
And how do you get these points? There are two ways. Either you donate money, or you click on some of their ads. Yes, that’s right: you can click on the ads to receive good will points! You get points for clicks that advertisers pay a lot of money for (on aggregate).
I guess most users on this site aren’t fully aware of the fact that each of their clicks contributes to ripping of advertisers. Note: I am not saying „poor advertisers“ here! I am just saying that advertisers don’t get what they pay for when they signed the contract with these mediasites: intentional attention.
Clickworking is an interesting and positive trend, since it uses the minimal individual productivity of large crowds to achieve a large complex goal.
Clickfarming seems to be a dark side equivalent. Utilize the small contributions of a large crowd’s individuals who might not even (want to) realize that their few clicks are contributing to a large system of fraud.
I wonder how many other sites of this kind are out there? How much dubious content is paid for in this way? How many advertising campaigns bought on a pay-per-click basis have been corrupted by clickfarms like these?
If I was an advertiser and I saw one of my banners on one of those sites, I would ask my media agency or the publisher for my money back. And may be sue them.
von Roland Hachmann | Mrz 30, 2008 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
This is a strange but rather interesting idea: Modernista, an ad agency, doesn’t actually have a real website. Instead, the just provide a navigation layer that sits on top of various websites that have the relevant content, i.e. a flickr gallery of their work, a google news page with news of the agency, a wikipedia page (or facebook profile) with the descriptive info of what the agency did in the past and offers for their clients.
(via online spin.)
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