Sometime this month The New York Times will be launching online Instant Op-Eds. According to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, “the idea is to have a group that provides opinions soon after news occurs, with a solid Web space dedicated to them.” The editorial page and news departments will collaborate on creating the feature.

Is this a good idea or a bad one? On the one hand, it gives the Times the ability to provide breaking-news opinion that it currently lacks: it’s a void I think online news outlets like the Huffington Post are filling today. Others fear that this is merely the cult of the instant, and risks losing thoughtful analysis to a world where “Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets.”

However these first efforts pan out, with the internet now eclipsing every news source except TV, the Times is wise to continue to innovate.

Photo credit: omar_chatriwala

Tags: news, opinion // Add Comment »

Came across Twitchboard on today’s ReadWriteWeb post on The Rise of Cloud Agents. Twitchboard goes after the problem many web users are encountering: Humans just don’t scale. You sign up for a bunch of online services (my toolbar is littered with them) and then you have to remember you have them, use them, and, in an ideal world, integrate them.

Services like Ping.fm do a terrific job helping you publish across multiple platforms, like updating your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn statuses all at once. But Twitchboard takes it a level further by automating the interactions of these social web services.

More from ReadWriteWeb:

Blogger Chris Arkenberg says Twitchboard is a part of the “emerging class of cloud agents.” These cloud agents, as he describes them, will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. He envisions that soon we’ll have many of these cloud agents, swarming around us, working on our behalf, helping to parse the data flowing in and providing us with the information that we need, separated from the noise.

The Apple app store not too long ago passed 300 million downloads, and yesterday we learned that even the lowly iFart is earning over $10,000 every day. The problem is not that there too few useful or amusing applications, but how to manage all the resulting data and their interactions. I, for one, welcome our new cloud agent overlords.

Tags: automation, cloud agent, semantic web, social media, social networks // 1 Comment »

With a big chunk of the country getting hammered by snow, it’s definitely sinking in that the holidays have arrived. And along with all the joy and happiness the next few weeks entail, there’s the inevitable sneezing, sniffling, and general misery that more than a few of us will experience with the flu.  Luckily, last month researchers at Google, after some testing with the Center for Disease Control, have provided an online tool called Google FluTrends that can quickly and accurately detect flu outbreaks in different geographies.

Traditionally, flu outbreaks have been identified by polling doctors at local clinics and hospitals. This data is then aggregated across the country and analyzed. If there is an unusually high number of people with flu-like symptoms in any one area, then there was probably a flu outbreak … one or two weeks ago. That might be nice to know, but it provides little solace for those of us who wind up suffering.

Google’s novel approach is to monitor real-time search engine queries for people seeking cures for flu-like symptoms. When certain areas have a higher than usual number of queries, it’s likely the first sign of an outbreak. That means we can all wash our hands a little longer, take extra care when sneezing, and even avoid busy areas in hopes of dodging the flu this year.

At Crimson Hexagon, we take a similar approach to brand monitoring.  If a product or PR campaign has gone wrong, there’s no sense in waiting until it shows up in your bottom line.  Instead, by monitoring the opinion of your brand online, you can act at the earliest signs of a problem. With this type of real-time, actionable information maybe both we and our brands can stay healthy this holiday season. And that’s something we can all celebrate.

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We’ve written before that summarizing opinion is complex, and that understanding the meaning behind product reviews can lend more insight than averaging the “star ratings.” I encountered a terrific example of needing this context tonight.

In a situation that any working parents reading may relate to, by mid-December each year I’ve abandoned the fantasy of gifts purchased months in advance and am racing to online shopping destinations with quick shipping. My first stop tonight was for a video game for my son, a game that I remembered was pretty popular and well received. When I checked out Spore on Amazon, I was surprised to see a 1.5 star rating with over 3,100 reviews. Did I have the wrong game? I IMed a friend for advice.

Turns out, the game itself is pretty cool. But the DRM (digital rights management) designed to prevent piracy is a ludicrous opt-in, leading gamers to review it negatively. Here’s a sample:

First of all, the game incorporates a draconian DRM system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations. If you reach that limit, then you’ll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That’s not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief.

So, the bad reviews make sense: there’s a strong negative associated with the game but it’s not about the graphics or the gameplay, features that might matter to me (or the gamer). Getting to the why (without having to read an adequate sample of the thousands of reviews) was vital. Automating the process might have been even better,

Oh, and the punchline? Apparently EA managed to deter potential customers, annoy their existing base, and still end up with Spore as the most pirated game of 2008.

Tags: ratings, reviews // Add Comment »

Companies are rapidly adopting web 2.0 technologies as they see consumer opinion affecting their brands and marketing campaigns. When 41% of bloggers post about brands they love or hate, companies sit up and take notice. Their efforts to engage in the dialogue—from J&J’s Motrin Mom babywearing campaign to Chris Brogan’s sponsored blog post for KMart—are heavily reported on as large brands and consumers struggle to define the appropriate terms of engagement.

Comparatively little attention is being paid to the government’s move to engage with citizens using similar technologies. The new administration is interacting with citizens online as a logical extension of the Obama campaign’s successes with new media outreach. Recent developments include Change.gov’s eliciting citizens’ stories of giving back to communitites,  implementing Open ID for commenters, switching to a permissive Creative Commons license, and creating an iPhone app.

These activities are breaking new ground for the private and public sectors, and the drastically reduced cost of web 2.0 technologies has the effect of leveling the playing field. It will be interesting to see the successes and inevitable missteps as corporations and the government use new media to encourage and measure constituency engagement.

Tags: customer voice, gov 2.0 // Add Comment »

Less than 6 weeks ago, Pepsi was grabbing attention in the blogosphere with leaks of their new branding. The company followed up by sending the new cans to 25 of the blogging elite and soliciting feedback on Friendfeed. Reaction to both the logo and the campaign was somewhat mixed, but Pepsi deserves credit for adopting a direct and fresh style to generate buzz beyond the tired milieu of the insider blog or vanilla social network presence.

The company’s in the spotlight once again after publishing ads for Pepsi Max in a German magazine featuring a black-humor take on the suicide of a personified calorie.  The (suspiciously crisp) images of the ads have been inciting a fiery backlash centered around the fact that most people don’t find suicide all that funny (surprise!). Recall GM’s 2007 Superbowl spot, which showed an assembly robot throwing itself off a bridge, was withdrawn amid public criticism.  Pepsi’s already pulled the ad but the question remains: what the devil are they up to?

Pepsi is a Fortune 100 company with a colossal marketing engine. Having bought two spots in last year’s Superbowl, they surely were aware of GM’s snafu. For me to believe that their publishing a highly controversial advertisement in a single magazine in Düsseldorf is some kind of fluke requires excessive suspension of disbelief. Yet, by publishing on such a small scale and then quickly retracting, Pepsi has achieved the corporate equivalent of plausible deniability.

Normally this type of ‘gaffe’ is a challenge to a brand’s reputation. I think there are still a few dents in the Kevlar over at Motrin marketing, and they were making light of baby slings, not suicide. But what’s left to criticize Pepsi® for? The ads have been withdrawn, there’s no real physical evidence to speak of, and the ads’ short reach diminishes perceived accountability. I’ve noticed that while many commenters lambaste the subject matter, there is surprisingly little bile toward Pepsi for choosing to employ it.

So Pepsi has managed once again to initiate massive word of mouth interest in their brand at nearly zero cost.  They’re clearly gained a tolerance for risk and I can’t wait to see what’s next in Pepsi’s special ops marketing campaign. I just wonder in their quest to stir up buzz they’ll end up poking the beehive just a little too hard.

Tags: advertising, social media // 2 Comments »

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today fully opened up their rival data portability initiatives. What does this mean for you? Now, you can log in to partnering sites using either your Facebook or Google account, and bring with you your “social graph”:  the network of folks you’re already connected with to share in the website’s experience. Here’s are some thoughts from Shiv Singh and colleagues over at Razorfish about how implementations of the portable social graph might look:

On the one hand, this service feels like a tremendous win for convenience: a digital E-Z Pass,  obviating the need for creating and managing myriad accounts and passwords across the web. But the convenience may come with a cost. Any time a large company offers to manage your data across multiple purchase points and interactions, the question arises of what that aggregated data about behaviors and relationships might be used for. The E-ZPass analogy holds true: the same guy who signed up for an electronic pass to avoid long lines at tolls might not want those travel records showing up in divorce court.

Privacy concerns aside, it’s too early to tell what portable social graph interactions will ultimately look like. In the 90s, the beginnings of e-commerce made most of us envision bringing bricks-and-mortar stores online, not predict the resurgence of handmade goods on Etsy or the crowdsourcing of designs on Threadless. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine today which new practices—and entirely new businesses—will emerge as the portable social graph becomes a reality.

Tags: data portability, social graph, social networks // Add Comment »

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 clearer. Marketers looking to understand how far buzz is resonating as well as where to place campaigns are all too familiar with the limitations of simple keyword matching. And any web user who has searched for Pink the singer versus Victoria’s Secret Pink lingerie versus breast cancer Pink can relate to their keyword pain.

How might Web 3.0 change this? Google AdWords currently places ads primarily based on a keyword approach. How long will it be before AdWords or other prominent ad networks develop or partner for semantic capability, ensuring marketers know which “Pink” they’re getting?

Today there’s still some confusion about which online marketing tactics are resonating, and how best to measure their ROI. Marketers are still learning where they can and can’t play successfully online. Strickland poses the right question at the end: anyone promising to bring semantic benefit to your business should be able to readily explain how their technology will make your ads more relevant and your metrics more meaningful. Bridging the disconnect with ad-weary consumers and helping marketers measure their results will help marketers better target their onlne efforts—always important, but vital in a downturn.

Tags: advertising, marketing, semantic web // Add Comment »

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, aimed at mothers with young children, that was perceived by some ‘Mommy Bloggers’ as condescending and preachy.  A firestorm rapidly ensued on Twitter, video parodies appeared on Facebook, and the social media cognoscenti emerged to offer their counsel to the surprised brand managers. Motrin, to their credit, reacted quickly, pulling the advertisement and issuing an apology within 48 hours.

To borrow a phrase from State Farm’s ad campaign:  Now what ?

Counterintuitively, Motrin is in a great position for its next foray into the social media conversation. The outpouring of customer opinion, albeit negative, has been a fire-hose of feedback on the Motrin product and brand. This feedback can be a valuable resource for Motrin when constructing their social media engagement.

Motrin has the opportunity to use this episode and its unsightly residue in the blogosphere to learn three things that will help their future social media efforts

1. What were people’s initial perceptions of product or brand?
This incident probably generated more text from consumers about Motrin than has been written in the last five years.  The insight mined from these comments can be used to help steer future product innovations or marketing planning .

2. Who are the key influencers in the social network?
Knowing how opinions spread, the key channels, and the node influencers, will help Motrin avoid future problems. By understanding whom they might reach out to and give them a roadmap to spread desirable messaging.

3. How long will the damage last?
Motrin will learn how badly this incident has tarnished their brand, if at all. (Personally, I view this as a case of ‘any publicity is good publicity’). Motrin has found itself with a naturally-occuring case study for gauging the ROI of social media investments.. This lesson can help them weigh the benefits of social media marketing, as well as understand the pitfalls.

Tags: brand monitoring, CPG, J&J, Motrin, uh oh // 1 Comment »

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 the large organizations, it’s a balancing act between providing the core, statistically valid analysis of the data, while “storytelling” with enough of the vivid anecdote for the client to hear the customer’s voice and engage. While opinion percentages are revelatory, an incident like Motrin Moms (summary from AdAge) tends to speed the adoption cycle dramatically.

Tags: data, social media // Add Comment »