Category — Interactive Marketing

Every few weeks I scan the Ad Age 150 – a comprehensive list of industry blogs indexed based on popularity and relevance.  They index over 1000 blogs, and the top 150 have been published annually in their magazine.

Two things really stuck with me yesterday

1. Seth Godin‘s blog had dropped from first to 28th.  His blog ranking has recovered this morning to second spot – but the fact he is no longer on top of the blogsphere is a seismic shift from the last three years
2. The number three blog Micro Persuasion (also consistently in the top 5) has declared his blog dead. He’s walking away from impressive rankings in Alexa, Technorati, Google, Post rank,Yahoo, and Collective Intellect in order to start a new site he’s calling  The Steve Rubel Lifestream – which is really just another blog, but with a new POV that instead of writing long articles supported by several references he will post snack sized bits of information several times a day.
   

Looking at my 300 subscriptions in my RSS feed, nearly half the blogs have either stopped posting or at least reduced their frequency. Although I wrote about 5 reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant here, I think it would be a mistake for people to abandon their blog in favour of a micro-blog such as twitter or a feed aggregator such as friendfeed.

Given that the most important brand you ever work on should be your own, your blog should evolve to be more than an opinion site, but one that aggregates and presents your personal brand. I was speaking to my friend Ted last night about this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s also something I’ve intuitively done over the last year with this site.

CVs are dead – long live your personal brand aggregator!

Instead of killing your blog in favour of another platform, use your blog as the platform to other branches of your personal brand. Linkedin for business networking, slideshare for presentations, twitter for the in the moment perspectivce, facebook for the more personal connections, and youtube for videos.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a “share this” widget so that others can easily share your awesome content with their network and be sure your blog is mobile friendly – as increasingly your fans or those who stumble upon your site will be accessing it from their smartphones.

It would seem that blogs are in fact undead.

Not that any of the clients I’ve ever worked with would ever behave this way, but I’m sure some of you can relate to this

Thanks to Craig Bond for finding & sharing the link from the typophile blog.

Last week we helped Kinder launch a new breed of CPG site at haveyouplayedtoday.ca. Our objective was to create a website experience that balanced the need to bring the brand philosophy of “simple play” to life while creating a platform for in-market promotions.

We picked Joomla as our CMS / community platform as the developer support & modules available aligned well with the information architecture designs we had created. Joomla allowed us for example to enable consumer ratings on articles, RSS feeds for all content pages, and an events module that allowed us to start with a robust community event listing for “playful events near you” – across Canada.

The contest we launched the site with gives consumers the chance to win $5,000 by submitting their stories and ideas around how to ensure there is play time in their kids everyday life. Keeping in the spirit of the site philosophy, top submissions will be published on the site to go with articles re-published from today’s parent and other sources.

“To date, most CPG marketers have been reluctant to move a significant portion of their marketing budgets online because the Internet is not a primary sales channel for their products,” said Carolina Petrini, SVP of consumer packaged goods solutions at comScore. “However, many brands have found success by attracting a wide audience online through effective promotions and site activities that appeal to consumers’ lifestyles.”

“Savvy brand marketers are beginning to understand the importance of the online channel as a means of engaging consumers, which will ultimately lead to offline sales,” she concluded.  (source: comScore)

We’ve given consumers a way to engage with Kinder and we are looking forward to launching phase 2 of the site in about six weeks which will also include extensions into other social media platforms.

This afternoon I decided to follow the live blog from Apple on their new iphone 3.0 software over at CNET.

Here are some highlights:

• Copy & paste functionality is finally coming to the iphone. It will work across the platform – including SMS messages. This has been the longest running complaint since the original 2G version
• Cross-device search feature also arrives – allowing you to search for anything from anywhere – including applications.
• Landscape keyboard now available in all applications – not just web browsing
• New voice memo abilities
• MMS capability – but only for 3G phones
• Expanded software developer kit (SDK) that will allow for subscriptions for applications and increased video and audio streaming abilities
• Expanded bluetooth capabilities – including support for stereo bluetooth (only for 3G). This should be especially exciting for proximity marketers who have not been able to bluecast to iphones until now

Things we were hoping for that didn’t happen:

• Tethering – which would allow your device to act as a wifi hub for your laptop, game machine etc… although they did say the ability to do so was now part of the platform but it would be up to the carriers to enable it on their side
• No multi-tasking / background abilities. This means you can only run one application at a time – unlike the Palm Pre which will allow you to run several background apps. The reason is apparently the need to conserve battery power
• No flash lite support (unlike new Nokia & Palm devices)
• No hardware preview of the next generation iphone

Overall the updates addressed most of the major user complaints about the iphone and positions them well to stay competitive with the Palm Pre.

After nearly nine years at Carlson Marketing Canada, I’ve accepted a new position at B-street Communications as their new VP of Interactive & Mobile supporting both their Toronto and London UK offices.

It was not an easy decision for me to make as I both enjoyed what I did at Carlson and had made many great friends over the years.  It was also hard leaving a great team that I had spent years building & cultivating. I wanted to thank my last boss Martha Barss, the president Robert Clarkson and my former boss Terry Rumsey for the opportunities to grow and contribute to a vibrant company.

With that said, I can hardly wait to get started in my new role which starts today.

Superbowl Sunday is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s the one day a year where I look forward to watching commercials.

Although this past weekend was arguably one of the best and most entertaining games in recent memory, there is no other advertising event in the world quite like the Superbowl.

Some of the most memorable commercials of all time have premiered at this event. Apple’s 1984 commercial is still being talked about!

Here are my 8 favorite commercials from the 2009 game (in no particular order, although the first one is definitely my favorite).

1) Career Builder: Tips

2) E-trade: Babies 2009

3) Pepsi Max: I’m good

4) Conan O’Brian and Bud Light: Swedish

5) Hyundai: Knowing our name

6) Pedigree: Crazy Pets

7) Doritoes: Crystal Ball

Coke Zero

I’m a digital marketer – but how do you explain that to your Mother, Aunt, or to somebody who grew up BG (before google)?  Here’s a nifty video that illustrates the old way and the paradigm shift to the new way.

If you are still having problems explaining what it is you do as a digital marketer, you can do what I do and default to my second answer = “i go to meetings and respond to email for a living”  

Thanks to Katrina Banovic who found this gem & shared it with our team last week.

Recently i discovered a new site / service called snap ads.  The way it works is that you upload your ad to the service in a specified photoshop format (with layers) and they’ll in turn publish variations of your ad in the network

Like google ad words which will optimize variations of your text ad for optimal peformance, snapads.com will optimize colour and other layer details for each site and start displaying the top performing variations.

By changing the look / appearance of your ad, the idea is that users will become more engaged – or at least notice the ad where otherwise they may not.

Initial trials have shown significant performance improvements over traditional banner ad strategies and placements.

For those of you who do online media planning / buying and are being pressured away from cpm buys into cpc or performance buys, this is one tool to experiement with.

Thanks to our friends at adjoke for finding this great presentation around the digital lessons learned from Obama’s recent and history victory.

Although our Canadian parliamentary system would prevent any one party in Canada from raising this type of money (even proportionally), a fundamental lesson here is that if you engage people where and how they like to be engaged, chances are your message will be heard.  

If you can own that space as a political Party or Politician, chances are you can heavily impact the voting tendencies of that demographic. 

As proved by Obama, even the traditionally vocal but absent on voting day youth can be energized and mobilized to make a difference. 

Last week I started following Mr. Tweet on Twitter who not only follows you in return, but makes recommendations on which influencers you should be following both within your existing network and beyond it. 

It’s a neat concept that facilitates the discovery cycle everybody goes through online. 

This is how it works…. 

1. Start following Mr. Tweet on Twitter
2. Wait 4-5 days for a direct message from Mr. Tweet
3. Go to your personalized page on http://www.mrtweet.net/ (this will be included in the email) and check out their recommendations 

It’s that simple – and it works. Like any new assistant, there is a learning curve and you can’t expect perfection from day one.

For example, Mr. Tweet recommended that I started return following people who were clearly spammers.  Identifying real influencers vs. spammers is something I’d expect in the next version of this tool.

Mr. Tweet also recommended 200 influencers I should start following.  After adding many of the recommendations on the first few pages I quickly began to lose interest.

I hope that the next iteration of the tool allows mass adds – or at least a way to filter the recommendations based on location, type of influencer, # of tweets per day (I won’t add people who Tweet every 30 seconds), or even based on those who have the most (or least) number of followers in common. 

Here’s another suggestion – how about a recommendation on which people to stop following based on pre-defined criteria? 

Why does this matter? 

Twitter has become a research and a broadcast channel. It’s also an extension of your personal brand – something we all need to stay focused on. 

Who you follow and who follows you is an extension of your personal brand.

Want more? Check out this slideshare presentation on going beyond engagement: