November 2008
Reading between the keywords
Marta Strickland of Organic has a terrific article in AdAge on the looming intersection of semantic web and marketing. The article’s title What Can Semantic Web – or Web 3.0 – Can Do for Marketers? was bound to raise some hackles: our Utopian semantically-rich online future meets marketers flogging their wares online. Strickland introduces the concept of 3.0 and uncovering meaning behind the data, and contemplates what semantic capability could mean for making ads relevant and metrics meaningful.
The value of understanding meaning as well as words is becoming ever …
3 ways for Johnson & Johnson to move forward, post #motrinmoms
For everyone that missed the excitement: Motrin, a staid J&J brand, had a social media campaign blow up in their faces last weekend. They posted an
online video video parodies
To …
The plural of anecdote is not data
Joel Spolsky writes an excellent post on anecdote, pointing out how compelling vignettes are often strung together and used to support conclusions. As a marketer I’m a big believer in the power of the story, but the oft-quoted “the plural of anecdote is not data” (long, indeterminate attribution here) definitely applies to brand and opinion monitoring. The most obvious problem is that anecdotes are not systematically selected; they’re selected as supporting points while other, conflicting anecdotes are inadvertently or deliberately ignored.
For those selling opinion monitoring into …
Friends don’t vote; Evangelists do
The two weeks since the election have been filled with theories about what, precisely, fueled the Obama victory. Technophiles and social media gurus have been quick to connect the dots between the huge gap in the youth vote (Obama led McCain among the under thirty crowd by a 2-to-1 margin) and the Obama campaign’s extensive use of ìhipî technologies to announce his running mate, raise money, and defend himself.
It is a joke to assume that every one of Barack Obama’s 3,164,379 Facebook friends voted for him. The lesson behind …
Crimson Hexagon Presenting at it Conference
The it conference was designed for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs who understand the value of extraordinary relationships. it connects entrepreneurs to investors, industry leaders, advisors, service providers, and every other player in the game.
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MITX Awards
The MITX Awards is the largest and most prestigious awards competition in the country for interactive and web innovations and celebrates the best creative and technological accomplishments emerging from New England.…
Of Obama-mania and brand remixes
The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. is pondering legal action regarding the sale of unlicensed King imagery in the commemorative items cropping up all over in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory. Whether this legal action strikes you as sensible image protection or overzealous profit-seeking, the real takeaway for me is the power of consumers to remix and, to a lesser extent, remake your brand.
Long gone are the days when companies could effectively police brand style guides with their logo non-interference zones, and showcase “walls of shame” depicting …
Exploring safe, effective UGC with CMO Club
Last week, I attended the CMO Summit in San Francisco, and this week my colleague Cesar Brea and I presented at CMO Club in Boston. Our focus was a framework for engagement — defining “structured collaboration” as a sort of a brandprint for identifying and filtering
In both venues, questions arose about the changing role of marketing in the Web 2.0 environment. CMOs today face huge challenges: rapidly shifting channels, ever shorter tenures, interaction with IT as technology becomes core, and managing relationships with legal (which are
captured beautifully here
CMO Club dinner
Next April marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that presaged the shift from message command-and-control to marketing-as-conversation. Today, it’s widely accepted that there is a need for corporations to listen, understand, and participate in the online dialogue. User Generated Content — UGC for short — is part of the furniture, and the relevant questions are less whether and more how and where to engage. The how is especially important: large and small brands alike need smart and safe strategies for engagement to avoid …
On complex opinions
We’ve often noticed that people tend toward extremes when assigning online product ratings. For Amazon products with an theoretically average (3 star) rating, more than 65% of all ratings lump into either the best or worst score – a ‘bimodal distribution’ in stats-speak.There are many potential reasons: a lack of clear criteria for different ratings, a desire to influence the displayed score, shameless promotion, spite, and so on. Whatever the reason, the end result is that many rating systems are essentially a thumbs-up, thumbs-down proposition and often give misleading information…