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.

Targeting

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.

Messaging

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.

Communicating

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.

Attention and Reputation

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:

• Aaron Strout
• John Bell
• Phil Gillman

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

One of the most challenging things in social media is finding the conversation leaders. Those people who drive the conversation, and create a community.

FriendFeedHolic (ffholic) has taken the base knowledge that exists in FriendFeed and added a ranking mechanism to it based on input and output. In fact, they weight the participation in the FriendFeed community more heavily than participation in other communities.

This is important. Although FriendFeedHolic is separate from FriendFeed, they have found the way to isolate and target those users who are most likely to participate and create conversations. These users, be it Scoble or Mona N, are where advertisers and marketers can target their money.

How would they do this?

Think about it. If someone that is a large commenter or conversation-creator on FriendFeed creates new content, they are assigned a higher ranking in the new conversation-driven ad-discovery model that advertisers will have to create to succeed.

This new targeted advertising logic will be forced to discover:

• The content of the conversation
• The context of the conversation
• The tone of the conversation
• The participants in the conversation

This model will be able to identify when it is an inward-facing conversation that involves mostly super-users, or if it is a conversation that engages a wide-spectrum of people.

Conversations among super-users will lead to more passive advertising being shown, as that is a spectator event, with only a few participants.

Conversations created by super-users, or that involve super-users, but have a higher participation from the general community will get more intelligent attention to ensure that the marketing messages and advertising shown fit the four criteria above.

In this new model, advertisers will have to see that they can’t simply slap a set of ads up on the popular kids web sites. They will have to understand who leads a community, who generates buzz, and who can engage the most people on a regular basis.

In this model, the leader has far less power than the community that they create. And maintain.

Tags: advertising, community, context, conversation, engagement, ffholic, friendfeed, FriendFeedHolic, marketing, passive advertising, social media, targeted advertising logic

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

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

Tags: ad network, ads, adsense, advertising, advertising model, API, attention, audience, b5 Media, blog, blog advertising, BuzzLogic, BuzzMachine, community, content, control, conversation, current, data, digg, disqus, EAD, feeds, Fred Wilson, friendfeed, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, information, interaction, interactions, IP, it, Jeff Jarvis, LAN, Lookery, Mac, marketing, measurement, media, metrics, Newest Industry, Om, One, online, online world, pr, social media, social media advertising, social media advertising model turns, social media mavens, social media providers, Steven Hodson, Technorati, The Inquisitr, twitter, Union Square, Union Square Ventures

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

It’s the places that you go when you’re a child that stay with you for your whole life.

My grandparents lived their entire lives in the Crowsnest Pass. This narrow, sometimes forgotten section of the Rockies emptied itself of its coal to feed the engines of Canada and the world for more than a hundred years.

My grandfathers, and my great-grandfathers, all gave their lives to the dirty work of ripping this black gold from the bowels of the earth. Their bodies showed the scars of a life lived in darkness, straining to pull themselves through another day.

When it got to much, they drank. They fought. They dreamed. Some escaped, some took their own lives, many just survived.

The Alberta side of the Pass — no one who has spent any time in the area ever uses “Crowsnest Pass” — is slowly dying. The generation who mined underground is dying away. The next generation, and the one after them, has taken to tearing the tops off mountains in BC.

Or they just left, like my parents did. They empty carcasses of a life abandoned for economics are still there.

I was back there this summer for the first time since 1999. It has come a long way, but their is an aura, a feeling that the end is near. All the money from Calgary can’t save them. The old, independent life, the hardened bitterness, the brutal economics of coal that bred a people that accepted all into the brotherhood of the black gold, is gone.

There was a bluff outside the Pass community of Coleman, full of what the locals called “black diamonds”. I’m not sure if it was jet (made from extra compression on some of the coal deposits), or obsidian (from the volcanic activity that dominated the area in previous epochs). Sometimes, if the light was right, you could see the light reflecting off the pieces showing through the bluff.

Then, about 15 years ago, in order to straighten the highway and let more huge trailer trucks roar through Coleman on their way to the rest of the world, the bluff was blown away.

Sometimes, in the rush of time, the memories in our blood get blown away, each individual event glistening in the sun one last time, before being scooped up and swept away.

Tags: ARIN, Canada, community, compress, compression, content, cro, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, ISP, it, LAN, live, Om, One, pr, Technorati

Homeland Stupidity is great and reminding us that the security and intelligence community in the United States is insecure and of questionable intelligence.

The military intelligence unit responsible for spying on Americans had to evacuate its Fort Meade, Md., offices Friday after a six-alarm fire broke out.

A fire broke out shortly after 3 p.m. on the roof of Nathan Hale Hall, at 4554 Llewellyn Ave., just on the other side of the golf course from the National Security Agency headquarters. Construction was underway on the part of the roof that caught fire, according to Lt. Col. James Peterson, director of emergency services at Fort Meade.

A fire is unfortunate, and yes, it occurred in a building with sensitive “intelligence” material. However, isn’t this quote from later in the post a bit odd?

Jennifer Downing, a spokesman for the post, would only confirm a fire was burning at 4554 Llewellyn Ave., deep inside the west county Army base. She directed calls to a spokesman with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, who did not return calls.

Fort Meade’s fire chief also did not return calls for comment. And later, a public affairs officer told The Capital to file a Freedom of Information Act request. — Annapolis Capital

Ummm….

“Dude, I can see flames coming from your offices.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that my hair and clothes are on fire. Excuse me, I must participate in the screaming in pain and running madly away from the fire exercise.”

Tags: API, community, EAD, HTTP, IE, IM, information, IP, it, LAN, Om, run, the other, United States

Summer is officially over. Our neighborhood is now an emptying parking lot as the City of Marlborough begins to recover from the Annual Labour Day Parade.

All of the usual floats and groups were there — in fact, the order is almost predictable now.

Machine gun fire is echoing from one of the floats. It seems that the parade is less a celebration of the working man, and more a celebration of the military culture of the United States. I know that the average military man is a working man, but does the air of my community have to ring with the constant rage of machine gun staccato to remind me of the glory of the military?

The one memory I will take from this year? The several thousand balloons released by parade spectators bearing the words “Gabrieli for Governor”. I think the Gabrieli campaign should have thought a little harder about this. Now there are flocks of latex animal killers floating through the MetroWest skies.

Yay team.

Technorati Tags: Labor+Day, Labour+Day, Parade, militarism, Gabrieli, balloons, waste, Marlborough, MA, Massachusetts

Tags: ARIN, community, HTTP, IE, IM, it, Mac, Marlborough, Massachusetts, Om, One, pr, Technorati, United States

The new GrabPERF Agent code, with support for plain text or regular expression content matching, is now in production on all active measurement agents.

I added one more feature before I rolled out the new code: when a content match error occurs, the server headers and HTML content for 14 days.

I have not exposed this feature yet, but will be doing so in the next few days.

Again, thanks to the GrabPERF community for your continued support.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web+performance, Text+match, Content+match, Agent+upgrade

Tags: community, content, EAD, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, it, measurement, Om, One, performance, pr, server, Technorati, web, Web+performance