Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Getting Discoverd on Flickr

One of the benefits of uploading photos to Flickr and tagging them (including geotagging) is the serendipity of others finding you. Flickr now has stats to show you how many times your photos are viewed, and other times comments are left or there are other interactions with the community.

I've had three interesting moments of note lately, all within the past month or so, from being discovered by others:

1) After posting a photo of a happy cow from my India honeymoon collection, I received this comment from the user whose alias is "goateatingshirt": Hi, I'm an admin for a group called goats,cows,antelope,wild sheep and deer, and we'd love to have your photo added to the group.

Who knew what kinds of groups there were on Flickr? Note I only discovered this comment because the homepage of the Flock browser, designed for easy social media integration, includes a feed from my Flickr account, which it set up automatically after I logged into Flickr from Flock

2) Treehugger, the #1 environmental blog, posted a photo I took of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg on a recent story. I'll add that their attribution, where they not only posted my name but linked to my photos, was especially upfront, a great way to go above and beyond with social media citations. The photo was reposted in linked stories on Frozen Toothpaste (also credited to me and linking to my Flickr account) and Climate of Our Future (with the photo attributed to Treehugger - no big deal there).

3) I got a note from the managing editor of Schmap.com that photos of mine on Flickr from the Stein Eriksen Lodge, taken during MediaPost's Search Insider Summit, were included in their

Salt Lake City guide. You can see my contribution as #10 of 19 in this widget of deluxe hotels.

As an aside, the widget offering's one of the best I've seen anywhere, making it incredibly easy to customize the widget's size and colors, as well as choosing the source of the map (Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft). Anyone offering widgets would do well to make it that easy to share content.

With this blog and with my personal adventures into social media, it's much easier to experiment when I don't need to achieve some kind of return on investment, but marketers, and those looking to market themselves, can find great value in making more concerted efforts on Flickr. Including descriptive titles and tags and then geotagging the photos is a great way to start. Then you'll want to link the photos from other sources to help improve the search engine rankings (without really trying, my Flickr bio ranks #2 in Yahoo, which owns Flickr, for the term "david berkowitz").

As for sharing photos, I still don't use Flickr exclusively. In fact, I actually share photos in four places. Flickr's great for long-term exposure. Kodak's my favorite spot for printing, as I've found they have the best quality compared to other sites I've tried like Snapfish and Shutterfly (it's easily worth paying a bit more on Kodak). I've found Picasa Web's easiest for non-Internet addicts, and it integrates perfectly with Picasa, so I use that for sharing photos with family and friends. And then there's Facebook, which tends to get the most visibility among friends, so when I want random connections to see them, plus I want to tag other people within the photos, I'll put some photo highlights there.

Flickr's still what's going to lead to the serendipitous exposure on sites like Treehugger and Schmap, and I hope in time it's easier to share photos from there and print to Kodak as well. I'll still have to divide and conquer in the meantime.

Performance Performance

A little while back, Tony Winders of ValueClick interviewed a number of people in the interactive marketing agency to ask them about what performance means to them. I didn't realize what an amazing roster of talent Tony and his colleagues assembled, and it's a thrill to be included.

This was all one take, without the actual questions given in advance (I just knew it had something to do with performance), so the Q&A spans search engine marketing to Alfred Molina to my grandparents. My interview's here, and you can check out the whole site including interviews with Amy Auerbach, Kevin Ryan, Sean Cheyney, Taddy Hall, Jim Meskauskas, Joe Mandese, and way too many others to name.

Widget Standards Wiki Launched

Chad Catacchio just launched the Widget Standards Wiki at widgetstandards.org.

It's interesting, just the other day a client was asking us for such standards as they developed their own widgets, and it's still one of those gray areas. Google has some information for gadget developers, but no specifics on sizing. If the right people contribute enough, this could be a great resource for developers, and in turn for marketers.

Book Review: A "Conversation" You Can Put on Mute

Sometimes I feel like disclaimers and caveats can be longer than the posts themselves. That's going to be the case in my review of Joe Jaffe's latest book, Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Wear Consumers with yadda yadda yadda.... even the book's title goes on forever.

Caveat #1: I don't read Jaffe's blog, or listen to his podcast. I don't listen to any podcasts, though I hope to get back into Coffee Break Spanish one of these days.

Caveat #2: I like and respect Joe quite a bit. He's done a good job getting a lot of important ideas out there.

Caveat #3: If you don't read any blogs at all, and don't spend much time reading trades like MediaPost and Ad Age, you might have a very different impression of this book than I did. But odds are you realize that this is a blog, and you've come across all or most of the examples in the book before.

Caveat #4: The proceeds of this book go to charity, which is great. So if you expense this book and get reimbursed for it, you break even, whatever charity comes out ahead (in Joe's email to bloggers like myself he didn't mention where, but maybe if I read the blog I'd know), and your business comes out ahead because the powers that be there think you're educating yourself and taking the future of the company seriously. Joe of course benefits too. So the act of buying the book is a net positive on the world, except for the rainforests, but maybe, just maybe, there's some recycled paper in here. If you can get this book for the Kindle though, you're clicking on all cylinders.

Caveat #5: I didn't read this book cover to cover. I just couldn't. I got about 50 pages into this 300-ish page book and couldn't take it anymore. I skimmed some of the rest, skipping big chunks of the middle entirely. I'm guessing somewhere in there he mentions those Dove campaigns, and Nikon, and maybe the Super Bowl (okay, so I just checked the book's index, and the Super Bowl's nowhere to be found - I'm guessing he mentioned it a lot in his previous book Life After the 30-Second Spot, though I didn't read that one either).

Caveat #6: The book really started to lose me on page 27. That's when he starts going on with all these platitudes like, "Marketing used to be an art. Today it is a science." I should invite him to some of my brainstorming meetings. And then there's, "Marketing is no longer any fun." Ditto the above. I actually have a lot of fun with marketing these days. I'm always spending time with BMW's Mini ads in Wired magazine - I remember that one well from the last issue. And the whole Tide stain thing was fantastic, on TV and online. Every time I see the outdoor advertising for Bravo's Top Chef, I instinctively check it out to remind myself to watch it on March 12, even though it is so ingrained in my brain already. But I actually get excited to see the ad, because it reminds me how excited I am about the show, which makes me feel a little sad inside because the show, really, is only so entertaining, and I shouldn't look forward to it that much. But then I look at that ad again, and I stop myself from thinking too hard, and I enjoy that fleeting second, as then the bus drives away and the ad on the bus drives away with it and my attention must focus on the next thing.

Caveat #7: That Bravo ad isn't a conversation. I don't want it to be. Maybe, at most, I want some kind of reminder when the show's on. But I don't want this whole lengthy conversation about the show. I just want to watch it. And I don't want to check my email while it's on.

Caveat #8: In case you missed the review in this review, you don't need to read the book in question there. You should just read some other good blogs, like Jeremiah and CK and Jim and Mitch and Jay and Valeria and Kaila and way too many people to name here. You don't need to read all of them every day. Just get to know as many of them as you can because their blogs are current and alive and full of brilliant ideas day to day.

Caveat #9: The people who'd most appreciate the ideas in the book already know this stuff, and the people who really need to read this book aren't going to sit through 300 pages of it. It's the catch-22.

Caveat #10: This is also why I'll probably be waiting awhile before I embark on writing a book of my own.

Will The Future of Search be Televised?

This column, originally published in MediaPost, came out last week, but I forgot to blog it, and given that it's about the future, it should still be relevant for a few more days. It continues in the extended entry.

Would you believe the next Google-killer is coming from Samsung?

Samsung doesn't refer to its See'N'Search set-top box as a Google killer; that's generally a phrase used by the media to describe some technology you'll never hear from again. What Samsung is doing actually doesn't interfere with Google's current business model in the slightest, though it could spell competition going forward.

Here's how the blog Mashable describes Samsung's program:

"The new See'N'Search is a set-top box that reads the closed captions on a television show, as well as listens for keywords, to search for related Internet articles to the content you are currently watching. Say you're watching the news and they do a story about the President; links to information on the President will appear at the bottom of the screen. For programs such as scripted shows, the system will pull up information on the actors as well as whatever they are discussing in the show. Furthermore, while it may be annoying to have information covering the bottom portion of your screen, you can instead choose to have any requested info show up on handheld devices or a computer connected to the local network."

Live Blogging Oscar Online Marketing

I'll be including some notes about online media while the Oscars run tonight. Check back to this post repeatedly for updates.

8:45pm (all times EST): Elizabeth Golden Age wins Best Costume (EST)

* Google search for “Elizabeth” brings ad for Liz Claiborne clothing
* Google search for “Elizabeth Golden Age” brings up eBay Ad

MyCokeRewards commercial mentions something about a partnership about heart disease. Yet MyCokeRewards.com has nothing clearly visible on the site referring to it.

8:55pm
* Ratatouille wins best animated film. Google searching the movie leads to an ad from JuliesBraShop.com for lingerie. Whether I'm searching for the movie or the dish, I'm wondering how that one's relevant.

There are far more ads on Yahoo. For this search, there are ads from Family.com, eBay, Amazon, LeapFrog, HotMovieSale.com, Blockbuster, and AllPosters.com.

9:04pm
The wife's wondering how come the Oscars commercials are so much better than the Super Bowl. Maybe the agencies just needed more time this year? The MasterCard commercial with the lazy/curious eye was pretty good. Though the site, priceless.com/search, didn't have any recognizable connection to the ad.

9:09pm
Golden Compass wins an Oscar. Searching for that brings up no ads in Google. Kudos to Snopes.com for ranking #5 in the natural results for the movie title to clarify urban legends. It should get an extra bump from this. Note that Yahoo has some ads running for the movie title, including a couple book advertisers like Barnesandnoble.com.

9:12pm
In Google, there are tons of irrelevant results for the phrase (without quotes) 'Jon Stewart Oscar monologue." Roger Ebert's page at the Chicago Sun-Times ranks #1 - expect a bonus tonight too. Slate.com ranks #1 for the search at Yahoo and Live.com. Score. [Update: You can now find the monologue on YouTube.]

9:18pm
Best Supporting Actor winner: Javier Bardem. Moviefone's the lone advertiser in Google. Fancast advertises in Yahoo. As for the movie title, No Country for Old Men (without quotes), Blockbuster, Amazon, YellowPages and Netflix advertise on Yahoo, and Yahoo has a great featured info box above the natural search results with ratings and local showtimes. It does mean the top 3 links (official site, IMDB, Wikipedia) get pushed further down, and everything else quickly disappears into no man's land. Google's much more simple for the movie title, and RottenTomatoes advertises.

9:21pm
Dove encourages people to vote on the two ad finalists at Oscar.com - a huge win for Oscar and Dove. People can also text in the vote choice by just texting A or B to the short code, making it really easy. At DoveCreamOil.com (hosted on MSN), there's a link to Oscar.com for the voting. And at Oscar.com, it is very clear where and how to vote. Mercifully, registration was not required.

9:28pm
An aside: Jon Stewart's outstanding tonight. I'm really enjoying him. He just made some joke about actor Hal Holbrooke doing what I thought he said was the "cabin patch" - a dance of sorts. I couldn't find any related reference in Google. What was he talking about?

9:32pm
Jerry Seinfeld's bit about bees in movies is the funniest Bee Movie promo he's done - well, after the 30 Rock season premiere (check it out at Hulu.com).

9:35pm
As of now, there's nothing on Wikipedia about Jon Stewart's performance tonight other than the mention that he's hosting the awards. I wonder when something material will be updated.

9:38pm
Best Supporting Actress winner: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton. No ads in Google for a search on her name. For the movie name, finally, there's an Oscar movie survey from www.redirexit.com/Oscars. It's amazing, finally seeing an ad relevant to the awards. Granted, it looks like some spammy company offering a gift card for survey completions. Ugh. Amazon and Blockbuster advertise for Michael Clayton in Yahoo. Blockbuster's ad references the awards, saying "rent Oscar DVDs." It's something.

9:44pm
I just ran a search for "Dove," and Dove is well placed in the natural results in Google but doesn't advertise at all, which is a missed opportunity tonight. Strangely, here's the text of the ad - why does it think I'm in the UK? I even signed out of Google to make sure there wasn't a glitch with my personal settings and I got the same ad:

Buy Bath & Shower Here
Shower Gels, Soaps, Bath Products.
Buy Now! Next Day UK Delivery.
www.Chemistdirect.co.uk/Bath&Shower

9:48pm
Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men. Whew, I can hold off searching a sec since we just did this a minute ago.

9:57pm
I searched for Enchanted, which has provided two of the three best song nominations performed so far, and the two worst songs performed so far. In Google, there's just one ad for the movie title, an ad for "Enchanted ringtones" at bonusringtones.fm.

10:01pm
There's a TV spot for the special Oprah's Big Give. A search in Google shows Oprah.com ranking first, topped by an ad from ABC.com specifically about the special. Bravo.

10:12pm
Best Actress goes to someone in a movie no one's ever seen, and maybe no one's ever heard of. Well, that part's a given, unless it goes to Ellen Page for Juno. My favorite performance: Laura Linney in The Savages, a wonderful, biting picture. And it actually goes to... Marion Cotillard, so not only an actress no one's heard of with a name no one can pronounce playing a character's name I can never remember (Google had to correct me on her name). Google has no ads for her - go figure. Interestingly, the first result that comes up right after she wins is a section of Google News results that mentions she won some French award. She's racking up the continents.

10:27pm
Google saves me in a different way. Searching Google and Amazon confirms I didn't know the spelling of the name of my pseudo-uncle who's recovering from surgery (and doing fine, thanks). I was going to send him flowers and nearly entirely botched his name. And he's only been dating my aunt for, oh, 15 years.

10:44pm
The Counterfeiters is the first Austrian movie to win an Oscar (best foreign film). For the movie title, Moviefone advertisers in Google (in English, not Austrian). I'm leaving the word "the" out of searching, so for "counterfeiters," in Yahoo there's Amazon advertising as well as... Dealtime. What? This is great - here's the ad copy:

• Counterfeiters
  Millions of Products from Thousands of Stores All in One Place.
  www.Dealtime.com

Someone might want to rethink that ad copy. It makes me all the happier that Beaufort didn't win. Those ad mixups wouldn't be anywhere nearly as funny. More fun: in Ask.com, a search on Counterfeiters has recommendations to expand your search with FBI or CIA.

10:52pm
Once wins for Best Song. Thank goodness. Not only was it a great picture with truly moving music, but the trio from Enchanted had to be three of the worst songs ever nominated, and they were all from the same movie in the same year. And this $100,000 movie steals the award. In Google, FoxStore.com advertises, mentioning the "award-winning Irish musical," clearly a catch-all for a movie that already won awards, but fitting and timely given that people searching for it now will make the Oscar connection themselves.

10:57pm
Has this EVER happened? They cut off Markéta Irglová when she won for Once and then after the commercial brought her back on to give a speech. Wow. It's so great to hear from people who a) are so outside the establishment it's amazing they're there in the first place, and b) are genuinely excited to be there. It just makes this whole overblown night feel like it means something, since it really does matter to these people. Fittingly, no one's advertising on Marketa's name in Google, though Amazon is in Yahoo - and Amazon will do well to buy its way in as it's not in the top 10 natural results in Yahoo (it's #10 on page 1 of Google).

11:25pm
What's up with Harrison Ford's earring? Searching for info, apparently some think it's tied to a mid-life crisis. That just shows you how much a man this guy is, putting off his midlife crisis until he's in his 60s.

By the way, seeing the Dove ad a few minutes ago, the one that won the voting, was strangely satisfying. It's just a great media execution. I'd love to dive more into the psychological reactions for it. For instance, compare the reactions of those who didn't vote, those who voted for the winning ad, and those who voted for the loser. How are all affected? For the record, I voted for the winner, so maybe I'm predisposed to favoring it.

11:35pm
In Google, it's Moviefone advertising for the name of the Best Actor winner, Daniel Day Lewis. There are no ads for him in Yahoo. Top natural results in Yahoo: images from Yahoo, followed by IMDB, Wikipedia, and Yahoo Movies. In Google, the natural results are for Google News, then IMDB, Wikipedia, and a bio at tiscali.co.uk.

11:44pm
The Coen Brothers predictably win Best Director. Surprisingly, a local ad is the sole ad to appear in Google:
 

Ethan Coen Off Broadway
Almost an Evening - 3 short plays
Theatres at 45 Bleecker, NYC
www.almostanevening.com
New York, NY

11:46pm
And the winner is... No Country for Old Men. No ads in Google. In Yahoo: Blockbuster, Amazon, Netflix, and YellowPages advertise (though again, the best real estate goes to the Yahoo Movies roundup). In Live.com, Amazon and YellowPages.com advertised. In Ask.com, there's the local ad again for almostanevening.com.


And the ad winner is...

DOVE! Great use of multichannel marketing here.

And the loser is...

Dealtime. That Counterfeiters ad was far more entertaining than four of the five best song performances.

Thanks to all the nominees. You've been great. Sorry if your speech time was limited.

 

Surf Canyon Plugin Finds Relevant Results

Here's a great tip on blogger relations: always show what's in it for the blogger.

A case in point: Surf Canyon, the newly launched browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer. The plugin finds 'long tail' relevant results when you conduct searches in Google, Yahoo, and Live Search. You just have to click a bullseye link that appears.

I wasn't sure if I'd cover this, or when. SurfCanyon CEO Mark Cramer has been in touch with me for awhile, and I always enjoy our interactions, but I wanted to give this a little time to find instances where this was useful before I blogged about it.

Well, Mark went ahead and sent me a screenshot of a Google search on my own name. It turns out that it included a press mention in Mobile Marketer that I hadn't seen before. It also provides a good illustration of when it can be useful: you're searching for something specific in your mind (someone in particular) but ambiguous to Google (there are tons of people with that name), and it successfully grouped some relevant results together.

Mark, well done with SurfCanyon and with the personal attention.

Do Tax Prep and Social Media Go Together?

The post starts with a question for two reasons:

1) There's a disclaimer: my agency, 360i, has been working on the emerging media strategy for the campaign described below in conjunction with other agencies and of course everyone at H&R Block.

2) I'm genuinely curious for your feedback. Rip it, praise it, comment on it, post it on your blog, email me directly - any reaction's helpful here.

The story:

H&R Block wanted to create a broad presence online to showcase their digital tax preparation offerings, and given their overarching campaign across all media hinges on the "You Got People" tagline, they were especially interested in tapping into social media.

The placements include:

* A profile page on MySpace, supported by a media buy there. The profile features the character Truman Greene, and it's clear he's a corporate shill, but he has some fun with it and creates his own 'fan videos', along with blog posts, a game, and other content. As of now he has over 2,100 friends.

* A YouTube page based around Truman Greene

* A Facebook page with a contest (5 fans get to file for free with TaxCut Online Premium), a Countdown to Tax Time app, a Tax Fact or Myth quiz, a poll, a game called The Deductor where you fly around collecting deductions and avoiding IRS agents, a Financial Match Quiz where you compare your finance style with a friend's, a video from the Common Craft Show on using their new web-based tax software Tango, and then photos, wall posts, and a discussion board. There are about 850 fans. H&R Block's also running an ad campaign which included a Facebook gift.

* Columns on eHarmony's advice site

* A new site Digits where people can discuss tax-related issues

* A presence on Twitter

Below's the Common Craft video. What's your take?

Surprise - Facebook Users Shrug at Privacy

I didn't need any data to tell you this one, but Compete just quantified it... the people have responded to Facebook's privacy issues, and the response is a resounding "meh."

And the Winner Is...

Update: In honor of Kaila's win, five books have been donated through Amazon to the Camel Book Drive. Congrats again, Kaila.

Last month I debuted a contest for creating an Anti-Social Ad for Facebook. I'm proud to (belatedly) announce the winning entry, this gem from one of my favorite bloggers and writers, Kaila Colbin:

Bonus points for including two formats with different copy.

Given that Kaila's in New Zealand, I'll let her choose whether to give the months of Netflix to someone in the US, donate the winnings to the camel book drive, or name the charity of her choice.

Congrats, Kaila!