Agencies and a few brave clients converged on OMMA Social in San Francisco earlier this week. The most debated panel was about “Personal CPM” (a term championed by Charlene Li back in 2007).

In short, personal CPM reflects each person’s value as a publisher of content with influence. Everyone will develop their own number which defines their worth to an advertiser or a marketer. Accordingly,  companies will market through high-CPM individuals rather than market to the unwashed masses directly.

The prolific David Berkowitz raised the creepiness issue. Is marketing through someone and piggybacking on their personal brands somehow creepier than direct messages?

Maybe—to me the real issue is that things we do offline constantly seem creepier when they’re brought online. Marketers sell through the credibility of other people in other media all the time: from celebrity endorsements (Boomers can buy Vuitton if Keith Richards does) to product placements (Ford’s a lot cooler when Will Smith is driving).  One of the panelists mentioned that he was happy to hand over his grocery store card and embedded personal info to save a buck—and, presumably, does not worry about the invisible transactions that may or may not occur later that day (like their correlating his love for cinnamon with a cinnamon cereal promo, or, more nefariously, selling his love for Ho-Hos and cigarettes to a health insurer.)

Online, these brand piggybacks on people’s credibility are more visible in a new medium where authenticity is still valued. Everyone’s creep factor will be different on this one, and the murky definition of creepy leaves us with Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of obscenity: I know it when I see it.

Photo credit:  Lara604

Tags: advertising, marketing, uh oh by admin
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Lately Google has been adding features, such as its Preferred Sites or SearchWiki, that enable users to narrow in on the one result they want even better, or to promote or demote sites in their own future searches. These features will clearly help users find the needle in the haystack, but as they get better for this purpose, we should not expect them to also improve our ability to characterize a whole set of web documents. Here’s an example where searching for the needle can be limiting:  Academics are in the business of pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge. But if you don’t know where the boundaries of knowledge are, its easy to spend a great deal of time reinventing wheels and all manner of other existing technology.

So you’d think that the advent of search engines (including academic search engines like Google Scholar) would make our jobs much easier — and they undoubtedly do in some ways. But here’s the risk: there’s been some evidence lately that these search engines have caused academics to read and cite fewer articles (i.e., only those that appear at the top of search results) and for our articles to be less comprehensive overall.  There’s an ongoing debate about this evidence in academic and technology circles, but you can see how it might happen.  Search engines are about searching for one item; we shouldn’t expect them to be as good at describing the haystack as they are at serving up needles.

Photo credit: pierreyves0

Tags: brand monitoring, research by Gary King
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In the age of user generated content, design-on-line computers and customized tennis shoes it was a bit odd to hear the joint announcement from the Gap and Pantone earlier this week that 2009 was, in fact, the year of Mimosa – not the drink, but the color.

At first (champagne-induced) blush it seems so 1993, in a preppy kids growing out their hair and getting on the grunge bandwagon kind of way. Are retailers actually so out of touch that they would dare to impose such a style mandate on their customers? Will people really wear Mimosa (without spilling it on themselves) just because the Gap has said that it is the color of 2009? Where is the groundswell effect in all  this, or is fashion inherently top-down and curated?

We have less than four weeks to find out, as Mimosa tees will be available for purchase through the middle of February only at Gap’s rotating concept store on Fifth Avenue.

And for those who are curious, Pantone claims that Mimosa is  “optimistic, hopeful, reassuring, warm, cheerful, radiant [and] versatile.” Maybe everyone needs a little more Mimosa in 2009 after all.

Photo credit:  pasotraspaso

Tags: brand, marketing by Megan Costello
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Hyundai’s been making a big splash recently.  This summer it become the world’s 5th largest automaker. Early this month, the company announced the innovative sales promotion of allowing buyers to return their cars if they lose their jobs. And this week, Consumer reports crowned Hyundai’s new entrant into the upscale sedan segment, the Genesis,  as their top rated luxury car.

The engineering achievement alone, taking out Toyota’s Lexus as CR’s choice for a lux-ride,  is worthy of some major bragging by Hyundai. Somehow, the company’s neglected to mention it on either their blog or Twitter feed.

The reason? They have neither.

Hyundai’s brand could certainly use the help from social media.  The Korean manufacturer, previously known for its low-cost sedans, is trying to break into the crowded upscale market at a difficult time.   Its competitors have established separate high-end marks with differentiated brands;  Toyota has Lexus, Honda/Acura,  VW/Audi,  Ford/Lincoln (sort of), etc.  Shunning convention, and the associated costs of establishing a new brand, Hyundai has launched the acclaimed Genesis under its own name. However, Hyundai’s core brand attribute of value for money may put it at disadvantage against BMW’s performance image or Audi’s aura of refinement.

To convince potential customers that the $36k Genesis is every bit as good as its $45K+ rivals, the company will need more than great reviews and an upcoming Superbowl commercial.  Hyundai needs to persuade the public to think of the brand in an entirely new light and manage complex messaging of its luxury vs lower-end products.

Rivals have already established themselves in the social media space.  GM has managed its FastLane blog since 2005, with peeks at product development and features from executives.  Toyota has been using its Twitter feed to direct users to its blog and combat rumors that it failed to donate to post-9/11 charities.  Ford was recently dubbed the ‘Anti-Motrin’ for its effectiveness in utilizing social media to diffuse backlash from legal action against a fan site.

To be sure, Hyundai’s not the last one in the pool.  Notably, Honda and Mercedes don’t maintain an official (English-language) social media presence.  Eventually they’ll get there, but in the meantime they have an established upmarket brand that Hyundai lacks or, in Honda’s case, a rabid community of enthusiasts.  Hyundai will need to build and maintain its grassroots network of  evangelists if its going to reap the full benefits of its new ‘halo car.’  A Genesis widget, published back in October, is a positive first step but only underscores the long road to real commitment to the medium.

Hyundai’s newest car has shown it now has the engineering skills and marketing muscle to rattle the established players; it’s time for it to develop the social-media savvy needed to supercharge its brand.

Photo credit: jiazi

Tags: brand, social web, uncategorized by edward
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I was lucky enough to escape yet another New England ice storm for a trip to #CES in Las Vegas.  Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle brought in interesting people from around the country, who in turn raised even more interesting questions about whys and hows of social media, including:

• How to steer your own pirate ship, and when to interact with those that don’t “get it” (and what does that mean, anyway)? [Chris Brogan]
• What are some different lenses for thinking about social media ROI? [Ben Grossman]
• How can companies adjust when rules of brand control and traditional tactics no longer apply? [Susan Etlinger]
• How can companies avoid common mistakes when starting out with social media? [David Berkowitz]
• When people participate in online community, what are the “artifacts” left behind? [Robert Scoble]

The question about the artifacts really intrigued me – what are the traces we leave behind when participating online? On Twitter, if I delete someone from the list of people I follow, their conversations (if they are influential, and if they are connected to my other followees) will continue to break through.

These community artifacts feel like a meaningful, but comparatively hard to quantify, measure of influence. For example, on Twitter, people frequently retweet others’ messages, repeating and spreading valuable content. This type of rebroadcast can be quantified: Dan Zarrella created a terrific tool to track individual Twitter users’ levels of retweets.

But beyond the repetition, how do we measure the way influential people consistently introduce valuable ideas, topics, and memes? For example, if David Armano launches a charitable campaign for a victim of domestic violence, his page views and retweets are easy to capture. But how do we track the far-reaching effect of his content and measure the new ideas he’s responsible for germinating? This may well be an instance where “not everything that matters can be measured”.

Photo credit: kimba

Tags: measurement by admin
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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, opinosphere by admin
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