The American Idol/Social Network Generation knows no world without the internet. Online video and other bandwidth-heavy experiences, to many of this generation, are as reliable as gravity. Be they fresh out of college or still bushwacking through the various levels of school, the people of this generation are known for rejecting traditional ways of consuming news such as print and television, and embracing newer, instantaneous ways such as websites, Twitter and now Facebook. Traditional ways of consuming information are increasingly coming up short as the definition of “news” becomes more literal every day and this generation is spearheading the change-over.

Over the past few years, social networks, once single-purpose tools for students trying to keeping in touch, have integrated themselves ever more fully into the fabric of the larger global society. After the college crowd, Facebook and other social networking sites expanded into the professional realm as a centralized tool to meet and keep in touch with professional contacts. After a more diverse cross section of people (and corporations) began to spend significant portions of their time on social networks, people began looking for social network-based outlets for information like news and politics.

The most recent, and possibly the most powerful, of these groups are the multitude of groups devoted to sharing photos from the recent Gaza conflict. Using photos of mangled and murdered children (be warned: very disturbing images), the groups are effectively presenting an unheard version of truth about a conflict that is a world away and making it hard for any user of social networking sites to ignore.

Recently, people have been using the groups and apps built into these sites as ways to even challenge and protest legal rulings. While many of these movements are largely symbolic, check out the millions of dollars possibly lost by Cinemark (to the tune of 4%+ of Sales) due to unpopular campaign donations by the CEO. With social networks taking such a large role in many aspects of society and people using social networks as a place to share their deepest concerns with the larger world, companies who resist social networks in favor of more traditional advertising need to ask themselves if their reasons for avoiding social network advertising are out of prudence, or out of fear.

Even if you fear these new locations as places to engage in marketing, in this recession, might it make sense to lay a foundation on these networks so that you have them as outlets for your message during the coming boom times? The financial and PR risk are significantly lower than other types of marketing, so what’s stopping you from reading some Chris Brogan or calling a successful social network marketing company? Ignore social networks, their communities and the marketing and messaging opportunities they offer at your peril.

Imagine you’re a marketing and media manager of a popular television show with a loyal (dare I say ‘fanatical’) following. The fans of this show eagerly await each new piece of media you deign to drop their way the way a pack of hungry dogs awaits a dangling morsel. These are the fans that you see posting thousands of posts on the show’s official boards and traveling thousands of miles to score a single autograph: saying they’re “engaged” doesn’t even begin to capture the level of loyalty they possess that is just waiting for confirmation and recognition.

Imagine now all of the amazing things you, as a savvy marketer, could accomplish with these loyal fans on your side. Whether you create a detailed, crowd-sourced, social network that persists between seasons; an army of user-generated videos on sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Break.com; or a word of mouth marketing effort to spread the show’s message virally, the options for marketing media powerfully over the long term are endless when you have such an congregation ready to preach the show’s evangel.

Now imagine one final scenario: you’re the person in charge of marketing with media’s most loyal fans. Imagine that, due to a shortsighted outlook, hasty decision or pressure from your superiors, you made a decision that backfired. A decision that, no matter how much you tried reverse, spin or explain, alienated a significant portion of these perfect evangelists. More specifically, imagine that you put a lot of investment and effort into giving your fans high quality, exclusive media to enjoy between seasons and something you did in the process not only turned away some of your fans, but also made it hard for the rest of your fans to access and experience this exclusive media.

This would be a terrible use of these loyal fans by our imaginary media marketing manager, no? If I were that manager, I would call up Monster.com and begin marketing my resume the very next day.

The reason I’ve taken you down this imagination rabbit hole for so long is to remove branding associations and other distractions from a very recent, real-life scenario from which I derived the above story. As an open and unrepentant (dare I say “fanatical”) Battlestar Galactica fan, it is particularly disappointing for me to say that this egregious error of marketing media was committed against me and my fellow BSG fans by the Sci-fi Channel.

After taking almost a year off in the middle of the final season of the show, the Sci-fi Channel released 20 BSG webisodes titled “The Face of the Enemy” designed to satiate the hunger for more BSG media and to combat the negative effect they had already caused with the needless hiatus (10 webisodes and 10 “enhanced” versions of the webisodes with writer commentary).

The webisodes clearly required a lot of care and investment as they are as intricate, emotional and CG-heavy as the series that spawned them. Totaling approximately 60 minutes of perfectly-crafted content, the webisodes were pitched as “a series of revelations you won’t see on the show”. This is the kind of content that makes a fan like myself go crazy and immediately begin the armchair quarterbacking that often goes with being a disciple of such a mysterious and multi-faceted show. In short, I’m the target audience for this type of content.

Enter the marketing error so egregious that it has spawned it’s own ‘media marketing fail’ blog post: marketing other media, before the desired media with pre-roll advertising. Nothing makes a loyal fan feel less important than having to watch the same 30-second trailer before each of the 20 four-minute webisodes. To remove the math from your day, that means watching 10 minutes worth of the same commercial in an hour. That’s watching the same commercial every four minutes for 20 iterations.

To put it another way: Would you have an anniversary ring made specifically for your wife/husband and require that they sang 30 seconds of the Barney the Dinosaur theme song before they put the ring on each day? If you’re answering ‘no’ (and for your spouse’s sake I hope you are), why would you create expensive, specialized, micro-targeted content, then impede the exact group you spent such care catering to from enjoying that content 110%?

Is the Sci-fi channel so in need of dollars that they can risk alienating the best fans of one of their two successful shows? Can anyone in any creative or marketing position justify taking that risk?

This is indicative of a larger issue that I touched last year at the bottom of a post with a seemingly irrelevant title: Viral Marketing in the Fabric Industry? Then, the idea was crystalized as “pre-roll ads are dead”. Now I’m expanding the conclusion to “marketing media by interrupting other (desired) media is dying.” It’s not elegant, but it’s a point that needs to be made.

In an on-demand platform (the internet), if I’m trying to watch something specific and have to sit through other media first (irrelevant media of your choosing), you’ve already lost me. If you have the audacity to make me watch the same piece of media over and over before the media I’m looking for, I don’t care how awesome your content is purported to be, I’ll pass or wait and find that content elsewhere.

Not only is this marketing tactic offensive to your best customers, it’s lazy. “Cram more advertisements in” shouldn’t pass the wise marketing decision bar anymore. The internet has evolved passed its first iteration and now has sufficient variability to allow for brain cells to be expended in the form of creativity when attempting to win the business of your fans.

Or as Seth Godin puts it to Verizon in regards to Verizon’s mobile advertising strategy in late 2006, “Do you really want to alienate millions of users [fans] by giving us something we don’t need and don’t want?”

While nothing short of force majeure will stop me from watching the final episodes of BSG starting 1/16/09, nothing will get me to sit in front of Sci-fi’s botched effort to make a few extra bucks at the expense of their best fans. The sooner companies abandon this half-baked strategy of marketing media, the sooner they will be able to fully leverage their evangelists and completely monetize their content.

What does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ actually mean?

I’ve recently run into some confusion when talking to the viral and social media marketing crowd. While the issue wears many guises, it boils down to a disagreement regarding the definition of the word ‘viral’ in the term ‘viral marketing’.

Most recently in my own life, the confusion surfaced during both a client discussion and in the comments of my most recent viral marketing post. Both instances of miscommunication occurred for exactly the same reason: I had a different take on the word ‘viral’ than the others involved. This confusion raises a legitimate question: Does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ refer to a result or a strategy?

Max Gladwell (@maxgladwell on Twitter), in the comments of a recent PandemicBlog post, pointed out that by referring to Pandemic Labs as a “viral marketing company” we were misleading people and that “Viral is an outcome, not a strategy.” I found this very intriguing for two reasons:

1. I have previously heard the opinion that viral refers to an outcome yet I personally don’t see it that way and have never used it in this manner.
2. He followed up his objections with thoughtful explanation which helped me understand the crux of the issue, understand his argument and question the validity of ‘viral’ being used at all.

As Max pointed out, the term “go viral” is often used to refer to a huge, blowout success; a pandemic. This phrase, more than anything I’ve come across thus far, seems responsible for some of the confusion. As this phrase is equating ‘viral’ with success, Max’s opinion is clearly a legitimate conclusion.

That said, my own understanding of ‘viral’ is distinctly different. To me, ‘viral’ denotes the specific distribution strategy of a piece of online media. Based on the precedent set by other types of marketing (online marketing, television marketing, email marketing, etc), I built my business around the idea that ‘viral’ described the means by which the marketing uses to spread the message.

By my logic, when referring to a viral marketing effort, you know the piece of media will largely be spread around by online word-of-mouth, email and other person-to-person means. Understandably, the viral itself requires person-to-person spread like it’s namesake the biological virus. The individual-to-individual contact inherent to the spread of a virus is the important difference between viral marketing and other forms of “blast the consumer from one source” marketing (television, radio, print, etc).

Viral marketing does not guarantee success. Indeed, there are no forms of marketing or advertising that do. It is simply a newer strategy that has recently become available to marketers that has been named after a pre-existing biological process that it closely resembles. I do not think “viral marketing” should have unreasonable expectations laid on it just because the term “go viral” has gained a certain meaning in our modern lexicon.

My own opinions aside, Max’s point still stands and this leaves us, the marketing community, at a crossroads.

1. Do we standardize on one of these definitions for clarity?
2. Do we recognize going forward the validity of both and make sure to clarify when important?
3. Do we seek another name for this person-to-person type of marketing to avoid the confusion altogether?

Personally, I feel ‘viral’ is an unfortunate but accurate moniker for what we do. The spread of a piece of viral media is very similar to the spread of a biological virus. The similarity lends itself to sharing a name. However, the shared name is what is limiting people’s thinking and causing confusion (this isn’t even taking into account the aversion people have to anything ‘viral, but that’s another post entirely).

When next the marketing community invents a type of marketing, might we give it a name entirely its own and skip the confusion?

Thanks to Max Gladwell for inspiring this post.

I’ll continue the discussion in the comments as usual. I await your thoughts.

1. TV Isn’t King
2. They Don’t Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think
3. Marketing Has to Change

I agree so strongly with these three notes in particular that I formed this business based on them! But the discussion that followed the article brought up some points that I thought worth getting blogosphere feedback on.

1. If TV isn’t king what is? Stats show that TV quality content is still extremely popular (might we say king?) online. If this isn’t King, what does something need to do to be ‘King’? My main feeling is that TV as a medium is dying due to one main factor: Interruption marketing. What is the first thing a DVR/TiVo owner does? Skip all commercials. One of my colleagues asked “why?” when this point was brought up. I think the better question is “now that the possibility for freedom is there, why does anyone EVER WATCH TV commercials?”
2. Gen-Y (and many older folks) are supposedly of the opinion that “your ad doesn’t matter”. I would have further refined this point to be “your poorly-targeted, uninteresting ad doesn’t matter”. Look at the viral success of some interesting, funny or amazing online ads. Are they THAT hard to understand? Are they random, unrepeatable anomalies? I say no. They all engage the consumer in a way that the consumer WANTS to be engaged. Putting a TV commercial online and then complaining that viral marketing is failing is like putting a Mustang in the ocean and telling Ford their cars don’t work! I think ReadWriteWeb had it slightly wrong. Gen Y-ers like relevant, engaging ads. They watch the Superbowl for the ads, they forward amazing online ads. Gen Y is responsible for the huge success of some viral campaigns. It’s the overwhelming failure on the part of the ads to understand the medium and earn attention that Gen-Y disagrees with, not advertising in general.
3. “Marketing has to change” is about as timely and insightful an observation as someone showing up to the D-day beaches on June 10th, 1944 and proclaiming “something big just went down”. Maybe they were being “simple” for simplicity’s sake, but think comments like that reassure marketers in a terrible way. With that comment, we’re askin g people to ignore and delay the inevitable. “It’s OK, other people who ‘get it’ are just beginning to understand this new wave of marketing. I can spend five more years of marketing budget before I turn my brain on.” So much content is available online now (print, radio AND Television content) that advertisers who aren’t wising up don’t have much more time as the space is rapidly being conquered by the forward thinking outfits who are willing to “brave” the lands where consumers are in control of what they spend their time on.

I would say I think very much like a Gen Y-er. I can’t stand being interrupted online and I hate irrelevant ads, but I LOVE good viral videos and I love targeted ads. I realize that TV isn’t king anymore (or more specifically, for much longer). I realize that in an increasingly on-demand world, marketers can’t demand attention of Gen Y, they can only earn it.

If you’re a marketer seeking Generation Y’s dollars, ask yourself if you’ve honestly considered the changing landscape and changed your actions accordingly. It’s like they say, repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. How will you change your approach today to win Gen Y dollars tomorrow?

Created to promote the movie “Meet the Spartans”, 20th century Fox’s latest social media marketing effort walked a well-trodden path. Following the lead of Elf Yourself and My Talking Stain, Fox created the website Carmenhasacrushonyou.com and allows you to paste your face and other personal details into a video. What is particularly powerful about this marketing effort is the final version of the video is uploaded to what looks like a blog and can be used to confuse friends and lend legitimacy to any jokes you’d like to play on said friends using the video. It is very entertaining to the correct demographic.

The Scores:

1. Value to Consumer: 79
2. Engagement: 62
3. Creativity: 60
4. Ease of Use: 100
5. Viralness: 65
6. Forwards: 3

Category Drill-Down:

Value to Consumer: The site has quite a bit of entertainment value. More than your average “hey guys, look at my face on this elf!”, I was able to send my girlfriend a link to the fake blog that is created with your video attached under the heading “Carmen Bares All”. While we weren’t endlessly entertained, we did have a good time with it. Likely we aren’t the target demographic anyway as the movie seemed to be targeting a younger crowd.
Value to Consumer Score: 79

Engagement: Assuming the ultimate goal of this effort is to get people to see Meet The Spartans rather than build any amount of company brand, engagement might be less important than usual as a facet of the social media effort. That said, there was disappointingly little engagement with the consumer designed into the site. Once you’ve set up the video, you have to invent ways to use it. It would have been more engaging had the site been more plugged in to the social networks and offered itself to be sent to friends to help people spread the joke (and therefore the marketing message). Having no additional engagement beyond the initial effort makes this effort little more than a toy or trick when it could have been much more.
Engagement Score: 62

Creativity: While the idea is amusing, and the idea was executed well, Carmen Has a Crush on You lacks originality. Building other aspects of the same promotion and intertwining them, integrating this effort with other social media efforts or providing unique ways to get friends involved could have been avenues to showcase creativity. Without Carmen Electra being involved, this would be a carbon copy of Elf Yourself and it lacks the mutli-faceted aspect that make My Talking Stain shine.
Creativity Score: 60

Ease of Use: This site couldn’t be easier to use. If you are able to upload a file, type your name and hit crtl and C at the same time, this site is in your skill set. I wish I could say more, but I can’t, it’s that simple.
Ease of Use Score: 100

Viralness: The finished site doesn’t include any (functional) buttons to post your video to social media sites. Furthermore, it doesn’t even suggest that you promote your video anywhere (thereby encouraging the viral spread). The only positive on the viral side is that the site is so simple to use that forwarding the url of your specific page to friends is as easy as sending an email. A lot more could have been done to improve and encourage this spread and leverage each video created via Carmenhasacrushonyou.com as a proactive marketing tool.
Viralness Score: 65

Conclusion:

From the composite score (73.8) we can determine that Carmen Has a Crush on You is effective in targeting the audience and providing entertainment value but fails to fully capitalize on its success. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.

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Other Reviews:
Tide’s “My Talking Stain” – 2.21.08

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The other day, I visited my favorite social news site, Mixx, and saw something that sparked a lot of questions in my head. It was an article, quite popular on Mixx in the few hours it had existed, that had an interesting title. The truly interesting part of the title was that it was only one word off from the exact title of an entry on this blog less than one month ago. Furthermore, the title structure (exactly the same between the two posts) was very specific. The title-similarity alone got my attention. I was further sucked in when I noticed the writer of the new article on Mixx had read (or at least voted for) the article on our blog when it came out last month and, yet, he had not even mentioned the original post in his new post. No link, no citing, no credit given even to the idea what-so-ever.

Intrigued, I read the post and left a comment expressing my confusion with the forgotten link or possible plagiarism (in addition to providing more standard commentary on the content of the post). Since the title and main thrust of the content was largely similar to the original post on our blog I really wanted desire feedback or at least explanation from the new writer.

While this is a predictable, emotional response (”he’s ripping off my partner’s ideas!”) it is not worth giving real weight to. The actual interesting part of this whole episode is not how I reacted initially, but the question “how I should react in the future?” It seems there may be some changing in the definition of plagiarism as related to social media. The aforementioned unanswered questions that burst into my head are:

1. To be honest, I liked the new post. I thought it added value to my morning and was definitely worth a read. Do these facts remove the need of the author to give credit to where credit is due? Is credit due?
2. It would seem to me that if I wrote a new book on sales/negotiation and titled it “Getting to an Affirmative”, I’d have some credit to give and a link to include (and possibly some royalties to pay). Is the analogous situation valid? If not, why not? If so, is this same rule not true with social media?
3. Occasionally some blogs or social news sites will tackle the same issues, ideas and content at the same time. This is an unavoidable fact of having 60 million blogs in this world. Does that mean “plagiarism” is no longer a problem in social media? Or has the rule merely gotten more lax?
4. If the rules have loosened, where do they stand now?
5. In the theoretical sense, if our population growth and internet usage continued to increase without bounds, we would eventually reach a point where there were identical (or nearly identical) posts being written by unrelated people concurrently. That wouldn’t be plagiarism as neither writer would have seen the other’s post prior to writing. Are we there already?

In the particular case, the author of the questionable blog post explained the genesis of his post to me in such a way that convinced me that he did not mean to plagiarize in any way. Does his good intent clear his name?

Personally I think the “plagiarism line” is definitely moving and re-hashing people’s content is becoming more acceptable due to increased acceptance in the community. I would guess these pressures come from the ever-increasing number of posts and the rather finite bits of news in any given day. If this is true, the biggest question that every one of us needs to consider is “is this changing definition plagiarism a step forward or a step back?”

I’m not so sure I have an answer to that one yet.

For those out there who are new to the game, give me the one sentence description of Blog Catalog.

BlogCatalog is the fastest-growing member-driven social community for bloggers.

Isn’t BlogCatalog a lot like MyBlogLog? How are you different? How are you better?

BlogCatalog’s purpose is to help bloggers connect, share ideas, and grow through group and general discussions. It also provides a variety of tools, features, and widgets to help bloggers. So our emphasis is on building a community and helping bloggers rather than an interactive volume-driven blog directory. We also screen blogs to minimize splogs, spammers, and questionable content.

What are your vital stats? How long have you been around? How much have you grown? How many users do you have?

When Angie Alaniz and I acquired it last year, BlogCatalog was a basic blog directory with a heavy emphasis on adult content and splogs. Our team cleaned up the membership and began integrating robust social network features such as a general discussion board, groups, and neighborhood feeds. Since then, we’ve added a number of tools and campaigns that strengthen the community and help bloggers improve their blogs. Right now, BlogCatalog has approximately 100,000 blogs indexed. More than 15,000 are submitted for review every month. Traffic, in the same period, has gone from 30,000 a month to well over 4 million.

We hear you’ve got a shiny new widget. Tell us about it?

Yes, that’s right. We just released a News Feed widget. It is a powerful little tool, that when added to your blog automatically displays what you are doing on social networks.

The widget is a member-driven application. Bloggers were telling us that they wanted to streamline networking, stay up to date with friends across the Web, and share their own social network activities without having to visit eight to twelve networks. So the widget was a logical next step in that it made this information customizable and portable. Portability is the next evolutionary step in social networks. People want to manage when, where, and how they share data. This widget helps do exactly that.

So it’s like social network cross-pollination! What is the biggest benefit of this for the average blogger?

The biggest benefit for most bloggers is that it allows your friends to know what you’ve said on Twitter, what article you’ve submitted to Digg, what site you discovered on StumbleUpon, or what song you’ve listened to on Last.fm where ever you place the widget. This also allows them to connect with you on Twitter, Digg the article you submitted, check out the site you stumbled, or discover that you have some of the same musical interests. It makes sense because people tend to connect online with people who they share interests with.

How many people have begun to use the widget since launch? Is it too early to ask?

It’s too early to say. However, what you might find interesting is that many bloggers have already found that the widget can be used for a number of additional applications. Some bloggers are using it for a recommendation tool, some bloggers are using it to update one blog across multiple blogs, some are using it to increase their opportunity for a viral post and some have set it up in a way that only displays their affiliate marketing links. It’s become their product recommendation engine. It’s surprisingly versatile in ways we never considered; every day, different bloggers are trying to find new uses for it. We originally looked at the widget as a way for bloggers to make their social network activities public on their blogs. No matter how you use it, it adds real value to a blog.

The widget connects with your social dashboard on BlogCatalog, right?

Yes. Except, rather than share information about all your friends, it only shares your activities. Unless, you point to your friends post, link, or StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. submission.

When the widget is placed on a blog will it increase page load times?

Not that we are aware of, at least not in any noticeable amount.

You mention on your website that this widget will help things to go viral. How will it help?

As I mentioned, if you submit an article to Digg, anyone who subscribes to your widget or sees the widget on a blog or site might Digg that article. Even more amazing, if your friend Diggs it and also has the widget, then all his or her friends might also Digg it. That’s a very powerful way to share information.

Isn’t the “viral potential” something that is still very dependent on the number of people following an individual? If I don’t have a large community of friends then just because I Digg something doesn’t mean that it will now go viral.

There are never any guarantees that something will go viral. However, the size of your friend network or number of blog readers is not part of that equation. We know several bloggers that have very few friends and readers by comparison to top ranked bloggers. Yet, these bloggers are read by top ranked bloggers. So sometimes it’s not about the quantity of people you know, but the quality of people you know.

Other than the potential for more efficient viral spread, do you think the widget has potential for marketers to reach consumers in new ways? Have you thought about that at all?

I suppose there are applications, but we really didn’t develop the widget for marketing purposes. We developed it to help bloggers.

What’s next for BlogCatalog in general? In terms of widgets?

What would you like to see next? … Maybe we’ll do that!

Is there anything that could make you leave/abandon BlogCatalog? (a tough one, we know)

There was a time last year when I was speaking with several potential investors, including venture capitalists, about the possibility of making BlogCatalog the next bright and shiny new object. But I decided to pass because it seemed to me that every proposal would require us to move away from our core values. Maybe one day BlogCatalog will be the darling of the Internet, but right now I like the idea of being a diamond in the rough. It gives us the opportunity to stay focused on helping bloggers and working to enhance their experience as opposed to always thinking about ourselves. It’s more fun our way, don’t you think?

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We’d like to thank the entire BlogCatalog team for agreeing to this interview and sharing their insight, history and vision. It will be very exciting to see how this new feed widget affects social media as a whole and to watch Blog Catalog grow in the coming year.

Keep an eye out for future interviews from the social media world.

It’s a funny thing sometimes, consulting for our client’s blogs. Often, our clients express identical opinions and questions to those we’ve expressed internally at one time or another. Specifically when it comes to the debate around on-blog advertising, I often find myself telling clients “you wouldn’t believe how much we understand your position right now”. While sounding ’salesy’, it couldn’t be more true.

Running a company blog, you’re bound to think at one time or another “hmmmmm. Maybe this blog can help the early stage of the business by generating ad revenue!” Before immediately dialing up Google (if you still have dial-up that is) and jumping on the Adsense bandwagon, I’d suggest that you take a moment to consider some pros and cons of having ads on your blog.

Pros:

1. Ads provide additional revenue for your business. Especially if you’re a self-funded start up, squeezing money out of every opportunity might be your M.O. and blog ads can definitely help in this area. For example, at an entrepreneurs meetup event on Tuesday, I met a blogger who was making $5k/month from just the Google ads on her blog and her other ad services did even better (she gets 12 Million page views a month). Clearly, if you have the traffic, you can can make the ca$h with very little effort.
2. Ads can provide readers with additional resources. Don’t have a resources/library/learn/etc link on your blog where readers can go to find additional related info? Luckily, well-targeted ads (provided through a good service), can benefit your readers by providing additional, related resources to augment your content.
3. Ads can put your readers at ease. While initially counter-intuitive, I personally think this point has great merit. On-blog ads are not common on most company blogs. So by having ads, you are subconsciously making your company blog appear more like a regular, non-company blog, thereby putting the readers in a different mindset. If the company blog also provides great content (aka the blog is useful in its own right), the presence of ads can have a similar effect on the readers as viral marketing videos have on their viewers. By putting the blog readers at ease, they are more likely to let down their “I’m being sold to” defenses and consider your content more fairly and openly.

Cons:

1. Ads clutter your blog. Many blogs are already so cluttered by widgets and unwieldy blogrolls that ads might not be the main problem in this area. However, adding ads to even a clean blog can cause the blog to become cluttered and unwelcoming to the eye. Even if you think your blog exists solely to promote your business, the reason people come to your blog is to read, correct? Don’t lose sight of this; readability is of the utmost importance.
2. Without proper planning you can accidentally advertise competitors. Even with a well-targeted ad service, it may be hard to ensure your competitors don’t get onto your site to steal your readers/business. Unless you’re extremely diligent in babysitting your ads, that new destination URL your competitor created last week isn’t going to be blocked by your ad service. Before you realize it, your competitors may have taken precious loyalty and attention away from your brand. Is the revenue stream provided by the ads worth undermining the business the blog was created to promote?
   
3. Ads look unprofessional. People have different expectations of a company blog than other blogs. A professional look and feel is often one of those expectations and ads detract from this professional look. Do you want to enter a competitive situation against a competitor that looks more professional than you in any way?

As you can see from the layout of this blog, we’ve chosen to remain ad-free. Most companies have more to gain from improving their consumer touch points than from advertising on their blog. If the world-at-large has an exceptional experience with your company blog, that can’t be a bad thing. Think about who your readers are and how they will react to ads on your blog. Then apply the Golden Rule.

If you need help figuring out whether your business can support ads, I’ve created a flow chart that takes you through the high-level questions quickly. Points in the chart that require further clarification are marked by purple numbers and will be discussed below.

1. By “probably fine” I mean that I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t have an adverse affect on the success of your blog. Clearly some people will prefer no ads in all situations, but I view these people (myself included) as the fringe.
2. “Significant Revenue” could be clarified further by saying “revenue that would have a significant impact on the success of your business”. Significant, here, refers to business needs, not some subjective measure of dollar amounts.
3. Web-based companies often use their blog as the main way to reach the online community. If the blog is the main way people interact with your brand, meaning your company hasn’t begun to utilize other interactive online avenues, I believe ads are not worth the ‘Cons’ they bring with them.
4. As outlined in the ‘Cons’ section above, ads in many cases can drive business away and otherwise decrease your conversion rate. The ‘cost’ I’m referring to is any lost business caused indirectly or directly by these ‘Cons.’

Clearly, putting ads on a company blog is an involved decision. Our experience speaking to clients going through this exact decision has provided us with insights that I’ve attempted to aggregate here. I hope my thoughts help anyone going through this decision process.

Any opinions and insights are welcome.

Introduced with a Super Bowl commercial, Tide’s newest social media effort takes the form of a destination website. The site, located at www.mytalkingstain.com, not only hosts the original commercial, but also provides visitors with the ability to create a customized stain and commercial.

The Scores:

1. Value to Consumer: 65
2. Engagement: 88
3. Creativity: 73
4. Ease of Use: 83
5. Viralness: 87
6. Forwards: 4
   

Category Drill-Down:

Value to Consumer: Anyone playing around on this site for more than three minutes will realize that the main value added to the consumer is entertainment value. Having spent 30 minutes on the site myself, I must say it is definitely more entertaining than I expected. Uploading my photo, recording my voice and sending the absurd result to a friend actually is fun. While, in the end, I learned nothing about life, love or even Tide, there was definitely entertainment value to be had.
Value to Consumer Score: 65

Engagement: Interestingly, My Talking Stain offers many levels of engagement. If you want to upload a photo and watch the commercial, you can do that for a quick bit of fun. If you want to record your voice, send the commercial to your friends and enter to win some prizes, you can. If you want to make your own talking stain vid, you can do that too. Simply choose your level and rock out. This is a great feature as many people aren’t interested in playing with all aspects of the site to write an accurate post about it. Some people only want to play a little bit and Tide clearly considered this. The brand is present, but not offensively so. The addition of My Talking Stain branded content for ringtones, MP3s and buddy icons allows Tide to engage consumers where the consumers choose to live rather than demanding the consumers come to them. This shows a nice understanding of the social media space.
Engagement Score: 88

Creativity: The idea of the talking stain is definitely amusing. Building a social media experience utilizing a pre-made commercial, a destination site, customizable sounds and faces is a great way to expand upon the commercial. However, the customization of the talking stain is basically one small technological step above Elf Yourself and could have been better.
Creativity Score: 73

Ease of Use: The site is very easy to navigate; your options are clearly defined upfront by the stains on the shirt. The site is very well made and it’s very easy to make yourself a spoof video. Calling in to record your voice does require having a phone around, but that isn’t too much to expect these days is it? I wish they streamlined the “get famous” section of the site more, but the “spoof toolkit” is a big step above the “make one and post it online” that I was expecting. I’d bet 99.999% of people visiting don’t even seriously consider making a video but every .001% convinced to engage further with your brand via making a video is a huge win. This is especially true when applied to the very large numbers of people aware of the site due to Superbowl exposure.
Ease of Use Score: 83

Viralness: The site provides various opportunities for sharing and spreading the video online. While the medium is inherently not as viral as a video, they’ve offset this by prompting people to create their own videos and by facilitating a quick upload to Youtube. I was prompted multiple times to share, all in non-offensive ways. I was pleasantly surprised that they included, prominently, an embed option for your custom-made commercial; most companies would overlook this move. The lack of social news/bookmarking sites (think digg/del.icio.us/etc) was the only big mistake I saw.
Viralness Score: 87

Conclusion:

From the composite score (80) we can determine that Tide’s ‘My Talking Stain’ website provides a very solid forum for users to engage their brand. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.

BONUS: the video I made

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Business, Marketing, Advertising, Viral Marketing, Social Media Marketing

The scores will be presented as follows:

1. Value to Consumer: 1-100
2. Engagement: 1-100
3. Viralness: 1-100
4. Ease of Use: 1-100
5. Creativity: 1-100
6. Forwards: 0-Infinite

Composite Score: Calculated by adding the scores of sections 1-6 and dividing by 5.

Category explanations:

Value to Consumer: This category represents our belief that a successful viral or social media marketing efforts should bring actual value to the consumers that experience them. This value, as I’m defining it, is pretty open and can be anything from entertainment and interesting discussions, to information and helpful resources. Since an online consumer is not captive to the marketer in any way, the marketing effort needs to bring real value to the consumer’s life if the marketing effort has any hope of being watched, engaged with or passed along. This category’s score ranges from 1-100 (100 being the best possible score).

Engagement: This category represents the ability of the marketing piece to engage the consumer with the brand. More than just “time spent on site”, this metric takes into account how much the consumer actually gets to “play” with the brand behind the marketing effort. A video can be very engaging, but destination sites, games, and blogs have even more potential for drawing the users into the “world” of the brand. Campaigns that combine multiple “new media” elements can be more engaging still. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Viralness: This category measures the ease by which someone can share the marketing effort with their network and any incentives that they have to do so. Are consumers prompted to share the marketing piece via social networks, email or embed tags? Is it even possible for them to do so? An important factor when discussing the ROI of an online marketing effort will be the ability of the effort to disperse easily on its own and reach a significant number of consumers. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Ease of Use: This category represents the ease of use or user-friendliness of the marketing piece. Can people see/play/download/upload/etc what is necessary to make this piece engaging in a quick and effortless way? Marketing efforts that are too involved and require much work on the part of the consumer will not spread optimally. The more time or tech savvy required to successfully experience the marketing message, the smaller the group of consumers using it will be. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Creativity: This category is relatively self explanatory. Something has to earn the consumer’s attention and the more interesting and different the marketing effort, the more easily that attention can be earned. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Forwards: This is a more concrete, “the proof is in the pudding”, category that simply reports the number of times I, personally, forwarded the marketing piece before sitting down to write a blog post about it. I figured, rather than trying to come up with a more subjective measure, why not simply record the number of times I ACTUALLY forward the piece and weight that number significantly less in the overall calculation. This category, barely affecting the Composite Score, almost amounts to a “bonus” category and can only shade the final score slightly in one direction or another. This category’s score range begins at zero and could theoretically be as large as the amount of connections I have in my network at any given time.

Composite Score: This number represents the overall assigned score to the marketing effort as a whole. With the first five categories equally weighted and the final category (Forwards) weighted significantly less, the composite score provides an easy way to compare otherwise disparate marketing campaigns. The range of the composite score is theoretically infinite, but the score of the campaign should be considered as if it were on a 1-100 scale.

Our Reviews series will hopefully provide a platform for discussion about actual viral and social media efforts that are currently online. Acting as a bare-bones case study, our readers will be able to see not only how each marketing effort stacks up against other efforts, but also what factors go into creating a successful viral and social media campaign. After reviewing multiple campaigns, important trends, strategies and techniques will be discussed.

As always, email us directly or comment if you have questions, improvements or social media marketing campaigns that you’d like to see reviewed.