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

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

If you ask 15 different people what the phrase Web performance means to them, you will get 30 different answers. Like all things in this technological age, the definition is in the eye of the beholder. To the Marketing person, it is delivering content to the correct audience in a manner that converts visitors into customers. To the business leader, it is the ability of a Web site to deliver on a certain revenue goal, while managing costs and creating shareholder/investor value.

For IT audiences, the mere mention of the phrase will spark a debate that would frighten the UN Security Council. Is it the Network? The Web server? The designers? The application? What is making the Web site slow?

So, what is Web performance? It is everything mentioned above, and more. Working in this industry for nine years, I have heard all facets of the debate. And all of the above positions will appear in every organization with a Web site to varying degrees.

In this ongoing series, I will examine various facets of Web performance, from the statistical measures used to truly analyze Web performance data, to the concepts that drive the evolution of a company from “Hey, we really need to know how fast our Web page loads” to “We need to accurately correlate the performance of our site to traffic volumes and revenue generation”.

Defining Web performance is much harder than it seems. It’s simplest metrics are tied into the basic concepts of speed and success rate (availability). These concepts have been around a very long time, and are understood all the way up to the highest levels of any organization.

However, this very simple state is one that very few companies manage to evolve away from. It is the lowest common denominator in Web performance, and only provides a mere scraping of the data that is available within every company.

As a company evolves and matures in its view toward Web performance, the focus shifts away from the basic data, and begins to focus on the more abstract concepts of reliability and consistency. These force organizations to step away from the aggregated and simplistic approach of speed and availability, to a place where the user experience component of performance is factored into the equation.

After tackling consistency and reliability, the final step is toward performance optimization. This is a holistic approach to Web performance, a place where speed and availability data are only one component of an integrated whole. Companies at this strata are usually generating their own performance dashboards with combinations of data sources that correlate disparate data sources in a way that provides a clear and concise view not only of the performance of their Web site, but also of the health of their entire online business.

During this series, I will refer to data and information very frequently. In today’s world, even after nearly a decade of using Web performance tools and services, most firms only rely on data. All that matters is that the measurements arrive.

The smartest companies move to the next level and take that data and turn it into information, ideas that can shape the way that they design their Web site, service their customers, and view themselves against the entire population of Internet businesses.

This series will not be a technical HOWTO on making your site faster. I cover a lot of that ground in another of my Web sites. It will also not be data heavy; again, I point you to another of my Web sites if you want only the numbers.

What this series will do is lead you through the minefield of Web performance ideas, so that when you are asked what you think Web performance is, you can present the person asking the question with a clear, concise answer.

The next article in this series will focus on Web performance measures: why and when you use them, and how to present them to a non-technical audience.

Tags: business, conversion, delivery, it, marketing, Web Performance, WebPerformance.Org

It was to be expected. On Moleskinerie there was a post that highlighted that the latest Moleskines are “Made in China”. The response from the Moleskine fan community has been overwhelming: we want the old books back.

China is responsible for a large number of the consumer products that we use today. However, there is an expectation that Moleskines were better than a mass-produced throwaway consumable. I imagine we all had images of a workshop filled with dedicated craftsmen, carefully hand-binding each notebook with absolute focus and attention to detail.

Sorry folks: these books have always been mass-produced. What is irksome even to me is that Modo e Modo (or their new French corporate masters) is no longer making a pretense of selling a quality journal that is unique and worth posessing. An item that sets the owner apart as someone who takes their notes, sketches and writings seriously, as thoughts worth dedicating to a medium that will last beyond them.

It’s all about brand. And the Moleskine notebooks are the icon of the social networking brand growth vision held by so many companies today. The core, dedicated following evangelizes the product, drawing more people to try the product and love it. As with so many things, will popularity denude and degrade the product?

If it is true that the latest production runs of Moleskines are originating in China and are of a lower quality than the community has come to expect, nay, demand, of this fine piece of crafting, then the no longer have the cachet, and are no longer unique, and will die the death of a million blog posts.

I am voting for the Rite in the Rain notebooks to be the next iconoclastic notebook. The unique yellow covers and indestructible paper have made me think twice about this addiction to Moleskines. They are books designed to be noticed (try finding a black notebook in the woods after it’s fallen out of your pack!), and stand out in a coffee shop, especially one filled with darkly dressed artist types.

Moleskine, I am willing to give you a chance. The community wants to hear your answer.

Technorati Tags: Moleskine, Modo+e+Modo, Rite+in+the+Rain, Moleskinerie, RiteintheRain, notebooks, Made+in+China, Viral+Marketing, brand+integrity

Tags: attention, blog, blog posts, book, brand, China, community, consumer products, corporate, design, marketing, moleskine, rite in the rain, Technorati

Microsoft releases a new browser, and, of course, Live Search is the default search tool.

Google is pouting.Who do they think they are? Shut up and sit down.

New Microsoft Browser Raises Google’s Hackles

Microsoft, you have got me to say something that supports something you are doing. Ain’t viral marketing grand?

Now shut up and sit down.

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, search, Live Search, IE7

Tags: browser, cro, Google, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, it, LAN, live, marketing, Microsoft, Om, RSS, search, Technorati, tn

Usually I classify this sort of mail as complete nonsense, and delet it. But this one was such a classic, I had to post it.

The letter is from the new CEO of the joint Borland/Segue. He is announcing that he thinks that Segue and Borland customers will be able to find cool ways to use the products of this new company…at least, after I translate it, it seems like that is what he is TRYING to say.

…

This is a great move for both of our organizations as we come together to tackle what we all know to be a key development challenge and the biggest opportunity for our industry — software quality. Borland and Segue have long shared a common belief that the challenge of software quality reaches far beyond testing and QA. Together we will approach this issue holistically, providing value at each stage of the software delivery lifecycle.

Our focus now is on the development of a comprehensive Lifecycle Quality Management solution — bringing together our unparalleled process improvement expertise with proper skills training and a true end-to-end quality technology offering. Our goal is alignment of people, process and technology, proactively driving higher standards of software quality while systematically reducing costs associated with rework and maintenance.

While continuing to enhance Segue’s quality and application performance technologies, we will also focus on delivering even tighter linkage with Borland’s broad portfolio of Application Lifecycle Management technologies. As part of a complete solution, these technologies will address quality across the entire lifecycle, eliminating quality issues at the root cause.

…

Chaucer and Shakespeare just rose from the dead, and they are looking for the marketing people who wrote this.

Technorati Tags: Fight the bull, nonsense, marketing

Tags: app, application, cool, cro, customers, delivery, EAD, HTTP, IE, IM, improvement, Issues, it, LAN, live, maintenance, marketing, Om, One, performance, pr, Technorati, testing

I had an interesting exchange with David Parmet earlier today that involved self-promotion and promotion of causes that mean something to us personally.

Well, isn’t that the geek way? Lay low, do the “cool” things, and let the marketing folks make the buzz? I am no good at going out there and saying “LOOK AT ME!”; not my style.

Tags: cool, HTTP, IE, it, marketing, Om, personal, pr

The gang at the Never Work Alone blog have a fantastic post describing some of the solutions to the Introverted IT / Extroverted Sales-Marketing integration issue.[here]

The best points:

• When hiring, place a premium on being able to explain technical issues to users and determine whether they’ve mastered the material. Expect this to cost more.
• Offer raises for taking training in oral technical communication
• Offer “days off” learning the essential business function of the department. You don’t understand what they do, they often don’t really GET what you do either, nor why its important - gieve them a chance to understand each other
• Train non-IT staff to repeat back in their own words what the IT person explained to them and confirm that they got it right (a good idea for any complex communication)

My eternal salvation comes from falling into the first category listed above. I can tear apart a packet trace and spot issues at the TCP layer, and then turn around and explain this issue to the VP of Marketing in terms that she can understand, and are relevant to her.

That is not dumbing it down, as many IT people feel. This strategy (or survival mechanism) allows a technical person to appeal to a wider audience. Being recognized across your organization, not just in your team, leads to greater rewards in the long run.

Tags: ads, app, audience, blog, business, cro, EAD, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, Issues, it, marketing, Om, One, pr, run, strategy, TCP, users