I spent some time today pairing ideas that separate Branding from Reputation. These came from my discussion of Branding being closed-source and Reputation being open-source [here].
It’s just a start, but it’s a start.
Tags: branding, reputation
Marketing has traditionally been a two-pronged attack on your mind and your wallet, designed to find the most effective ways to reach your mind, and get you to part with your money.
The techniques used to identify who to go after, how to go after them, and why this message will work drives a social media campaign as much as it does an old-school marketing campaign. The traditional layers in this model are targeting and messaging.
What is interesting is that the emergence of social media has turned a two-layer model into a three-layer model. The third layer has always been there, it just hasn’t been large enough to matter to anyone until the last 2-3 years.
The navel-gazing that is occurring in the social media marketing community is due to the rise of this third layer, the layer that is concerned with communicating.
This is not the communications that so many organizations confuse with branding. This is the communication that focuses on the best way to isolate conversations, identify engaged audiences, and participate in communities.
The science of marketing lives here. Demographics are the foundation of the targeting phase of any marketing campaign. What does the market we are trying to reach look like?
In this area, Lookery and QuantCast provide organizations with the data they need to decide when and where there message should go.
This is where the science becomes the visible. Advertising and branding create the message that portrays the product to the customers, using the information gathered in the targeting phase.
Advertising and branding are not the same thing. Branding is the overarching vision that a product wants to push to the world while advertising is the ephemeral visual and aural methods used to get the brand embedded in the consciousness of a population.
The third, and most critical circle in this cycle is communication. It is the one that companies so often get wrong, and that is garnering such a great deal of interest now. I would argue that until recently, companies have not understood communication, preferring to try and shape communication remotely, using advertising and branding, rather than engaging in it directly.
An organization that actively engages in communication is one that has a willingness to walk out from behind the safety of its brand and its advertising and talk to customers. Participate in conversations. Shape communities that emerge either for or against the product.
This is what companies are having so much difficulty with.
Communicating with clients is the smallest circle because so few companies are doing it at all, and those that do it find it so hard to get right. What organizations have found is that attempting to use communication in the same way they use their existing marketing tools leads to failure here.
Getting the attention of a population of key customers is a targeting and messaging success. Holding the attention of these customers doesn’t require new advertising and a constantly refreshed brand. The people who we listen to most have a reputation, have opinions we trust.
It will be interesting to watch the true evolution of Corporate Communication (Corporate Conversations?) circle evolve in the next few years.
Tags: advertising, branding, bullseye, communicating, community, conversation, demographics, engagement, marketing, messaging, social media, social media marketing community, targeting
If you are interested in the area of social media marketing, head over to Peter Kim’s blog and check out Social Media Marketing’s Scalability Problem. The post is excellent, and the comments are the kind of conversation that needs to be had in this area.
The best comments so far:
The interesting thing is that this post is nearly two months old. And without realizing it, that’s about the time I started writing about conversation and community, branding v. reputation, and how the content-based advertising algorithms are failing the social media market.
I agree with the commenters and Peter Kim that there is a scalability problem when you are trying to have a conversation. that’s why companies rely so much on branding. However, if you take the time to build a community, you don’t have to scale your own conversation, as you will have the community willing to build your reputation.
Conversations and community happen around the reputation of brands, people, and products. And where there is a gap between the branding message and the reputation conversation, that’s when the greatest problems arise.
Tags: Aaron Strout, branding, community, content-based advertising algorithms, conversation, John Bell, Peter Kim, Phil Gillman, reputation, social media, social media marketing
In previous posts about advertising and marketing to the new social media world [here and here], I postulated that it is very difficult to assign a value to a stream of comments, a community of followers, or a conversation.
As always, Google seems (to think) it has the answer. BusinessWeek reports the vague concept of PageRank for the People [here]. Matt Rhodes agrees with this idea, and that advertising will become more and more focused on the community, rather than on the content.
Where the real value in this discussion lies is in targeting the advertising to be relevant to the conversation. It’s not just matching the content. It’s all about making the advertising relevant to the context.
Is the tone of the conversation about the brand positive or negative? I like to point out that I see my articles about Gutter Helmet creating a content-match in the AdSense logic that drives this product to be advertised. What is lost in the logic that AdSense uses is that I am describing my extremely negative experience with Gutter Helmet.
Shouldn’t the competitors of Gutter Helmet be able to take advantage of this, based on the context of the article? Shouldn’t Gutter Helmet be trying to respond to these negative posts by monitoring the conversation and actively trying to turn a bad customer experience into a positive long-term relationship?
Conversation and community marketing is a far more complex problem than a modified PageRank algorithm. It is not about the number of connections, or the level of engagement. In the end, it is about ensuring that advertisers can target their shrinking marketing dollars at the conversations that are most important.
Injecting irrelevant content into conversation is not the way to succeed in this new approach. Being an active participant in the conversation is the key.
In effect, the old model that is based on the many eyeballs for the lowest cost approach is failing. A BuzzLogic model that examines conversations and encourages firms to intelligently and actively engage in them is the one that will win.
The road to success is based on engagement, not eyeballs.
Tags: advertising, community, conversation, engagement, Google, marketing, Matt Rhodes, modified PageRank algorithm, PageRank, social media world
Fred Wilson adds his thoughts to the conversation about a more intelligent way to target blog and social media advertising. His idea plays right into the ideas I discussed yesterday, ideas that emphasize that a new and successful advertising strategy can be dictated by content creators and bloggers by basing advertising rates on the level of interaction that an audience has with a post.
Where the model I proposed is one that is based on community and conversation, Fred sees an opportunityfor fims that can effectively inject advertising and marketing directly into the conversation, not added on as an afterthought.
Today’s conversations take place in the streams of Twitter and FriendFeed, and are solidly founded on the ideas of community and conversation. They are spontaneous, unpredictable. Marketing into the stream requires a level of conversational intelligence that doesn’t exist in contextual advertising. It is not simply the words on the screen, it is how those ads are being used.
For example, there is no sense trying to advertise a product on a page or in a conversation that is actively engaged in discussing the flaws and failings of that product. It makes an advertiser look cold, insensitive, and even ridiculous.
In his post, Fred presents examples of subtle, targeted advertising that appears in the streams of an existing conversation without redirecting or changing the conversation. As a VC, he recognizes the opportunity in this area.
Community and conversation focused marketing is potentially huge and likely very effective, if done in a way that does not drive people to filter their content to prevent such advertising. The advertisers will also have to adopt a clear code of behavior that prevents them from being seen as anything more than new-age spammers.
Why will it be more effective? It plays right to the marketers sweet spot: an engaged group, with a focused interest, creating a conversation in a shared community.
If that doesn’t set of the buzzword bingo alarms, nothing will.
It is, however, also true. And the interest in this new model of advertising is solely drive by one idea: attention. I have commented on the attention economy previously, and I stick to my guns that a post, a conversation, a community that holds a person’s attention in today’s world of media and information saturation is one that needs to be explored by marketers.
Rob Crumpler and the team at BuzzLogic announced their conversation ad service yesterday (September 18 2008). This is likely the first move in this exciting new area. And Fred and his team at Union Square recognize the potential in this area.
Tags: advertising rates, advertising strategy, BuzzLogiz, community, contextual advertising, conversation, Fred Wilson, Rob Crumpler, social media advertising, Union Square, Union Square Ventures
This week, I have been discussing the different approaches to blog analytics that can be used to determine what posts from a blog’s archive are most popular, and whether a blog is front-loaded or long-tailed. The thesis is that it’s not always what the words in the blog are that are important.
In a guest post this morning at ProBlogger, Skellie discusses how the value of social media visitors is different and inherently more complex than the value of visitors generated from traditional methods, such as search and feedreaders. Her eight points further support my ideas that the old advertising models are not the best suited for the new blogging world.
Stepping away from the existing advertising models that have been used since blogging popularity exploded in 2005 and 2006, it is clear that the new, interactive social web model requires an advertising approach that centers on community and conversation, rather than the older idea of context and aggregated readership.
Current blog advertising falls into two categories:
In my opinion, these two approaches fail blog owners.
Contextual ads understand the content of the page, but do not understand the popularity of the page, or its relationship to the popularity of other pages in the archive.Contextual ads lack a sense of community, a sense of conversation. While the model has proven successful, it does not maximize the reach that a blog has with its own audience.
Sponsored ads understand the audience that the blog reaches, but do not account for posts that draw the readers’ attention for the longest time, both in terms of time spent reading and thinking about the post as well as over time in an historical sense. The sponsored ad model assumes that all posts get equal attention, or drive community and conversation to the same degree.
In the new model, more effective use of visitor analytics is vital to shaping the type and value of the ads sold. Studying the visitor statistics of a blog will allow the owners to see whether the blog is, in general, front-loaded or long-tailed.
If the blog has a front-loaded audience, the most recent posts are of higher value and could be auctioned of at higher prices. In order for this to work, both the ad-hoster and the advertiser would have to agree to the value of the most recent posts using a proven and open statistical analysis methodology. In the case of front-loaded blogs, this analysis methodology would have to demonstrate that there is a higher traffic volume for posts that are between 0-3 days old (setting a hypothetical boundary on front-loading).
For blogs that are long-tailed, those posts that continue to draw consistent traffic would be valued far more highly than those that fall out into the general ebb and flow of a bloggers traffic. These posts have proven historically that they appear highly in search results and are visited often.
In addition to the posts themselves, the comment stream has to be considered. Posts that generate an active conversation are farmore valuable those that don’t. Again, showing the value of the conversation is reliant of the ability to track the numbers of people in the conversation (through Disqus or some other commenting system).
This model can be further augmented by using a tool like Lookery that helps to clearly establish the demographics of the blog audience. Being able to pinpoint not only where on a blog to advertise but also who the visitors are who view those page, provides a further selling point for this new model and helps build faith in the virtues of a blog that sells space using this new, more effectively targeted advertising pricing structure.
Now, I separate the front-loaded and long-tailed blogs as if they are distinct. Obviously these categories apply to nearly every blog as there are new posts that suddenly capture the imagination of an audience, and there are older posts that continue to provide specific information that draws a steady stream of traffic to them.
This is a very early stage idea, one that has no code or methodology to support it. However, I believe that the current contextual advertising model, one based solely on the content of the post, is not allowing the content creators and blog entities to take advantage of their most valuable resource - their own posts and the conversations that they create.
I also believe that blog owners are not taking advantage of their own best resource, Web analytics, to help determine the price for advertising of their site. Not all blog posts are created or read equally. Being able to very clearly show what drives the most eyeballs to your site is a selling point that can be used in a variable-price advertising model.
By providing tools to blog owners that intimately link the analytics they already gather and the advertising space they have to sell, a new advertising model can arise, one that is uniquely suited to the new Web. This advertising model will be founded in the concepts of conversation and community, providing more discretely targeted eyeballs to advertisers, and higher ad revenues to blog owners and content creators.
Appears that BuzzLogic has already started down this path. VentureBeat has commentary here.
Tags: ad network, advertising, advertising approach, advertising initiatives, advertising model, advertising models, advertising space, analytics, audience, blog advertising, blog advertising works, BuzzLogic, contextual ads, contextual advertising, contextual advertising model, front-loaded, Google, interactive social web model, long tail, long-tailed, search results, social media visitors, statistics, traffic, variable-price advertising model, VentureBeat, views, Web analytics
