Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Via AdFreak: The best online advertising placement ever?

This could be it—at least until Barnum & Bailey starts advertising on Web pages about coulrophobia. Via BuzzFeed.

via adweek.blogs.com

In case you're wondering, the answer is... YES.

New Post in Mashable: Facebook Should Offer Sponsored Stories on an Opt-in Basis [Op-Ed]

When users lose control, they will speak up, as I had to back in December 2007 when Facebook used my endorsement in ads without my consent.

via mashable.com

This isn't the first time Facebook's been so callous. This post from 2007 explains far more: http://www.marketersstudio.com/2007/12/facebook-social.html

There's far more in the Mashable piece, focusing on Facebook's startling lack of empathy.

Also read 360i's official POV on its Digital Connections Blog. 

Ten Social Local Technologies For Marketers

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Are you the master of social local? (Image source: Yelp iPhone app)

Ten Social Local Technologies For Marketers 

Social media is often appreciated for its virality, which implies a loss of control as messaging spreads beyond target audiences. Marketers still can use social media to target consumers in specific localities, or incorporate social sharing functionality into local programs. Here are ten technologies and ways marketers can use them:

Facebook Pages: Most of the time, marketers broadcast their posts as widely as possible. Sometimes, however, more narrowly targeted posts are more relevant, and relevance is a large part of keeping consumers engaged. If you're a cheese producer and write a post about the best poutine in Wisconsin, you can choose to show the post only to your fans who are residents of Milwaukee and speak Canadian French. Pourquoi pas?

Facebook Places: Let the social network with about 600 million members get a second entry, since Places is a different animal. It's only for businesses with physical locations, and it's designed for mobile devices. With the added option for marketers to offer deals, Places can incorporate local promotions that don't necessarily need to be part of the Page strategy itself.

Mobile Social Alerts: Places and deals aside, few mobile marketing offerings come directly from Facebook. TextualAds fills a void by allowing marketers to text Facebook fans who opt in to such communications. You can target consumers based on information they provide through Facebook, such as location, gender and age.

Mobile Social Integration: If you offer local content through mobile channels, and that content consists of updates consumers may want to share, then adding social calls-to-action can facilitate the spread of your messaging. My favorite example here is Xtify, which powers local alerts for marketers and app developers. Glance at their case studies and notice how many examples include a "share" button.

Twitter: Last year, Twitter started to show why it matters for local marketing. Trends can be monitored for certain geographies, while searches can show only the tweets near you. As Twitter learns more about where its users are -and especially about when they use mobile devices - local targeting will become one of the key value propositions for marketers.

Group Buying: Groupon may be the most prominent in this genre, but I like LivingSocial's straightforward hook to encourage customers to spread the word about local deals: "Buy, share, and if three friends buy, yours is free." It's now generally a given that enough people will act on a deal, as long as they're at least moderately vetted and have some hook where a marketer gives away something for nothing. LivingSocial keeps "social" as part of its name and its appeal.

Review Sites: I wouldn't call Amazon a social media site, but reviews do add social elements to any retail or local business site that uses them. Sites like Yelp, Citysearch, and Menupages only survive thanks to reviews, or what we in the earlier days of social media liked to call "user-generated content." Side note: when did references to "UGC" go the way of the widget? I never hear it referenced anymore.

Recommendations: It was only after breakfast at Norma's with Lea Marino from startup Bizzy that I thought of breaking out recommendations from reviews here. When I wasn't stuffing my face with caramel-drenched French toast, I was grilling Lea on what makes Bizzy different from other sites where one finds and rates local businesses. Bizzy's focus on personalized, categorized, local recommendations stood out. The idea is you don't need to find a place to eat that has a hundred reviews if you can choose between the two favorite sushi bars from your close friends. Foursquare and FoodSpotting operate under similar principles.

Check-in Apps: Beyond Facebook Places, you can pick any of your favorite Foursquare-esque check-in apps to find some way to reach consumers seeking local information. This year these apps will have to prove that they can scale, at least within certain demographics.

Aggregated Check-In Responses: This category is so new, I'm not sure what to call it yet, but there are already a couple of entrants. PlacePunch says it "provides easy to use loyalty and mobile marketing solutions that leverage 'check-ins' to deliver more customers to your business." LocalResponse lacks any details on its website but seems to take a similar approach based on a presentation given by its founder. Since I've only talked with these companies' founders off the record, I'll refer you to those sites for now, but will have much more to say about this area soon.

This list includes many of the more compelling ways to marry social media with local targeting, but it's hardly comprehensive, as the options for marketers grow by the day. Recommend, review, or share your own favorites in the comments or through your social channel of choice. 

 

 

Congrats to my colleagues at 360i for the recognition in Ad Age

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Every Friday at the New York offices of 360i, David Berkowitz hosts breakfast for staff -- Bagels with Berky, they call it -- over a briefing on digital hot topics from Android to Quora and everything in between.

The weekly event is symbolic of the passion Mr. Berkowitz, the digital agency's senior director of emerging media and innovation, exudes for all things digital, but it's also a mandate from management to keep the Dentsu-owned shop on the cutting edge.

Five years ago, 100% of 360i's revenue came from search marketing, but that number has been cut to 40% as most clients calling upon it today want 360i as a full-service partner leading digital strategy for clients. The shop's new-business record in 2010 illustrates the shift; 360i added nearly $125 million in new-business billings last year

via adage.com

It's a tremendous honor to be part of 360i, having spent nearly five years working with the hundreds of others here on building the practice. Thanks, Ad Age, for a bit of recognition.

Join me at Social Media Week Feb 9: How Mobile-Social is Changing How Brands Connect with Consumers

How Mobile-Social is Changing How Brands Connect with Consumers, Hosted by 360i New York

Care to join me at this free Social Media Week event? I don't always get to hand-pick my panelists, but these were all personal invites, and I'm especially curious to hear what Noah, Craig, and Jamie have to say.

 

Make Way For The One True Fan

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

There's a lot of reflection now about the lack of civil discourse in America. I hit my low point last week, thanks to a site you probably haven't heard of called One True Fan.

Here's how it happened:

Liza Sperling, a friend of mine from the social media tech community, is a fellow user of One True Fan. That means we've both installed a browser extension that allows us to constantly check into any website we visit. Yes, the whole check-in thing has extended to the web. You can set it as opt-in or opt-out, depending on how much you want to share.

If I can attempt to read your mind right now, it's probably thinking something along the lines of, "Why would anyone ever want to do that?" It's may be similar to a thought you had when you read about Stickybits, Barcode Hero, Foodspotting, Checkpoints, and a number of the other wonderfully "weird" social activities that people can do.

 For me at least, there's a lot of "weird" technology out there, and I use "weird" in quotes as a way of noting it's not just the typical definition, like David Lynch-movie weird or Kanye-tweet weird or Three Wolf Moon-shirt weird. This kind of "weird" denotes something that's not meant to be mainstream yet, as we don't know how people will use it. Sometimes, as in Twitter's case, something "weird" becomes a phenomenon. More often, it quietly disappears. 

I don't know which way One True Fan will go, but it's fun to try it out, especially while it's new. It includes some elements I really don't understand, like patches, which I guess are sort of like badges, but if anyone kidnapped me, brandished a gun, and said, "What's the difference between a Second Base patch and Level 2 patch on OneTrueFan.com?" I would not make it out alive.

What I do understand is the competitive element. The more pages you click on a site, the more points you earn. If you earn 20 points (not that hard) in fourteen days, you're a fan. If you earn more points than anyone else, you're the One True Fan. Of all the sites where I'm the One True Fan (43 right now, but it's a moving target), the one my boss would likely least approve of is - get your mind out of the gutter now - Gmail. My biggest point tally is on Geni.com, a genealogical site, along with its rivals Ancestry.com and MyHeritage, thanks to a few nights this past weekend where I stayed up until 3am working on my family tree. I'll enjoy the fame while it lasts.

I first appreciated the competitive nature of One True Fan when I received an alert that Chris Pirillo stole my True Fan title from Orbitz. A more sane person might think, "I'm not planning a trip right now. It's okay that someone else is the fan of that site." A slightly less sane person might get mildly annoyed and brush it off. Someone who's probably not getting enough riboflavin in his diet would think, "Damn you, Chris Pirillo. I don't care how many clicks it takes, but I'm stopping whatever I'm doing and going back to Orbitz.com until I get the One True Fan title, and then I'll spend a little extra time there to make it harder for you to win it back." In case you're wondering, I fell into camp number three. The same obsessiveness that has led me to add nearly 750 profiles to my family tree on Geni sometimes manifests itself in less productive ways.

That brings me back to Liza Sperling, who may take two steps back from me when I run into her at South by Southwest in March. The rivalry with her started with something so innocuous - my visit to Motorola's site to find an image of its new tablet for a slideshow I was creating about the Consumer Electronics Show. I found my image and was done. Simple enough, right?

The problem was that in the process, I earned the One True Fan title. Hours later, Liza needed technical support from Motorola and stole the title from me. This gnawed at me. I knew Liza. It became personal. So of course I spent a while clicking around motorola.com. We took the battle public, bragging about the seesawing lead on Twitter, until my sense of decorum faded. After that, Liza earned back the title, and I made peace with her keeping it, except that I happened to become the One True Fan again while working on this column. She has yet to try to win it back.

The way I used One True Fan may only serve to lessen publisher and marketer in the site. I'm admitting to visiting sites over and over even if I'm no longer in the market for their offerings.

Others, however, might actually find the competition leading to useful reminders to return to a site they actually want to revisit. It's an added reminder to return. And who knows, maybe even people like me who have no reason to return will wind up discovering something appealing.

Or maybe it's just too "weird" for it to go much further. I'm willing to cede that this is not the future of social media. But for a browser extension that makes little sense and has only limited appeal right now, I'm having a ton of fun while it lasts. 

 

 

Official Google Blog: A new look for Google Translate for Android

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

via googleblog.blogspot.com

I'm really impressed with the voice translation so far.

The Full Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Multimedia Multiplatform Coverage Roundup Spectactular

Whenever I get to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I get a little content crazy, as I'm consuming it aggressively while trying to put out some of my own.

Here's a roundup of my own contributions if you care for a starting point:

On YouTube, I shared an animated take on Why We Go to CES:

 

In Advertising Age, on the Digital Next blog, I showed Why You Don't Need a Tablet Marketing Agency. This was inspired by a panel I was on at Digital Hollywood - CES where we discussed both mobile and tablet advertising. If there are all these mobile marketing agencies, should there be tablet marketing shops? You can tell where I'm going with it from the title, but it was a fun thought piece to figure out why, and it was one of those posts where writing it clarified several things for me. I hope it does the same for others.

Over at 360i's blog, I posted CES 2011 in Review in PowerPoint form, with a few highlights on the blog. You can find the slides themselves below:

CES 2011 Year in Review - Consumer Electronics Show

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.

On this blog, I also shared my column from MediaPost on The Social Side of CES 2011, which specifically looked at the social media relevance of CES. It includes a few examples from the slides but in a much more focused context. 

Finally, you can always find my photos shared on Flickr. They're embedded below as well.

Were you at CES? What did you think? And what did I miss? 

 

 

The Social Side of CES 2011

There are many ways to describe the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, such as: vast, tiring, over the top, technophilic, illuminating, geeky, and productive. One more to add to the list is "social." Now that this year's gadget fest has wrapped, it's time to follow up on last year's roundup and check out the social side of CES 2011.

Tablets: You can find tablets wherever you look at CES. They line the walls, hors d'oeuvres are served on them, and strippers walk around wearing nothing but touch-screens. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but only a little. There's not much inherently social about tablets in particular, but if you look at the trends for social media usage as a percentage of digital media consumption, then tablet adoption will only accelerate social usage.

TVs: I'm a big believer in the living room's reinvention, or at least reimagination. Yet it's not so much about tweeting and Facebooking and checking in and chatting from your TV set. Video-chat on an HDTV is especially frightening to me. As someone who's had his face projected on to more than one large building, I know that no one -- family and friends included -- needs to see me in 1080p resolution. Instead, you'll find social media interwoven into the experiences, from reviews of Netflix content to multiplayer gaming.

Multimedia Sharing: I technically brought along four cameras to CES: a Canon SX30IS, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH20, an iPhone, and a Motorola Droid. With all options on hand to capture the event, it was still nearly impossible to upload photos with the spotty wireless coverage across Las Vegas. It's a sobering omen of what lies ahead when the vast majority of mobile users are sporting smartphones.

Check-ins: I tried a bunch of check-in apps out in Vegas: Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Whrrl, SCVNGR, Gowalla, and possibly others. See the note above about the wireless -- it's amazing anyone checked in anywhere. There were a bunch of rewards around if you could get a signal. Hotels like the Wynn offered free drinks to anyone who checked in, while SCVNGR offered some rewards at certain exhibitors' booths. With any of the rewards I found, I happened to stumble on all of them. I never saw any of them promoted by the venues themselves, so there was a missed opportunity.

Portable power: Portable charges for mobile devices facilitated my social media usage out in Vegas. I brought along a Zaggsparq 2.0 charger with 2 USB ports that claims to carry four full iPhone charges, all in a device that fits in a jacket pocket. I then won a poorly designed but compact Case-Mate charger while I was there, and both saved me during nights when I was texting people all night trying to link up with friends. Until battery life dramatically improves, these gadgets could wind up driving quite a bit of mobile usage -- social and otherwise.

Crowdsourcing: Quirky's one of the more fascinating companies I've come across in recent years. It crowdsources product development, and people who influence the product earn a percentage of its sales. I didn't realize they're yet another one of the startups operating in my fair borough, so I'll be keeping even closer tabs on them back home.

Wearable and shareable: When it comes to CES launches of products that people I know will actually buy, the Nike+ SportWatch GPS is way up there. It's not the first GPS watch, but it syncs up seamlessly with the Nike+ online community. Before catching the Nike demo, I didn't realize that if you see someone share on Facebook that they're running, you can cheer them on, and the runner will hear your cheer live.

Washing and tweeting machine: All devices are becoming digital, and more are Internet-enabled, too. I was fascinated by LG's new line of appliances that connect to the internet for a range of purposes, from managing power consumption to updating the best ways to care for your clothes. Still, I'll beg them not to open it up to third-party developers so that Twitter and Farmville come to your fridge, even if a few friends of mine (OK, maybe just my colleague Matt Wurst) would want to be mayor of his own oven.

The future of brands: I didn't get to many panels at CES, but I lined up early for the Entertainment Matters keynote panel featuring The Coca-Cola Company CMO Joe Tripodi, along with leaders from MediaLink, Akamai, IPG, Microsoft, and WPP. The money quote came from Tripodi: "We're more in the space of managing communities than creating ads." He referred to community management several times, while other times decrying push marketing as passé.

Think about that. This CMO of one of the biggest brands and advertisers in the world wanted to talk about anything but advertising. Better than anyone else there, it took Tripodi one sentence to show how fast the world is changing. We'll see how much changes between now and CES 2012 

 

All in the Social Family

What a handsome bunch of social media users

All in the Social Family

The end-of-year holidays offer a perennial reminder that no matter how hard you try, you can never escape your family. My own family often inspires columns here, sometimes directly as in 2005's "Google vs. Grandmom," and sometimes through more convoluted paths.

They don't always get credit here, nor do they necessarily seek it, but each of my relatives has his or her own approach to social media. Meet the extended Berkowitz family:

Mom: I was so excited on New Year's Day when she commented on my Facebook Places check-in from White House Sub Shop in Atlantic City, asking, "How come you didn't bring any back for us?" She told me she was going through my Facebook photos, too and noticed they're all about travel, food, and animals. Perhaps that's a hint that family should be higher on the list. My mom is growing more tech-savvy by the day, as last year my parents switched from PCs to Macs, and my mom has been especially diligent at taking lessons at her local Apple store.

Dad: I'm still not sure why he has two Facebook profiles, though only one is current. He barely uses Facebook, except for a few times last year when he'd reply to others posting on his wall. The other day he did "like" a book review on WSJ.com, a first for him using Facebook's plug-ins. A while back, Facebook intimidated him, as he thought he was supposed to respond to every single status update, so he stayed away. It's thanks to my dad, though, that I'm technologically savvy, and in many ways he's been an early adopter. For instance, he's been sharing photos online for years, even early last decade as an avid Picasa user when it was a paid download before Google acquired it.

Oldest brother: It annoys me sometimes that he's a very savvy Facebook user and often gets more responses to his posts than I do. Genetically, we're practically twins born 13 years apart, so I'm not surprised our pseudo sibling rivalry extends to social media. One recent post of his read, "Wisconsin: cold weather, warm people," and showed a car with a license plate reading "IPUTOUT." I can't compete with that.

Other brother: He's launching his own business and recently sought my social media guidance. He's the only member of my immediate family whose updates I never see in any social channel, though I am one of his 80 LinkedIn connections, and it looks like he's been using that site a bit more frequently lately.

Sister: She has personal and professional interests in social media. She's the one person who sometimes sees my updates on Google Buzz, where I automatically share updates from various sites. Her favorite social site? Skype. She lives in Mexico, so Skype, instant messenger, and other social services help her stay connected with her gringos up north.

Grandmom: She really needs a new computer. She still has the same one from 2005, and it's so slow that most people give up when they try to teach her something new. She's ready for her next toy though. I was just visiting her and after I showed her my Kindle, she really wants one. Don't tell her I said this, but Amazon's future e-book customer will turn 95 in March.

Wife: She reads all my columns and blog posts, as she's done since we met. On Facebook she routinely catches family members' updates on either side before I do, so it provides another way for her to tell me what my own family is up to. She'll also be offended that she's not first on this list unless I publicly state on the record that this list is not in order of importance.

Parents-in-law: They remain enthusiastic about social media. He loves it as a way to grow their business. She enjoys the business aspect but also uses it to stay in touch with her family.

Brother -in-law: A constant resource, I bribed him with beer from 360i's Tweeting Bar to help me set up the Xbox in the Emerging Media Lab. He's always quick to send me links from sources that are too geeky for me to read regularly.

Oldest nephew: Facebook is the one and only way I stay on top of any of his relationship updates. A college-aged kid studying abroad, he constantly fills me in on his favorite mobile communication apps.

Cousin G: He was a longstanding Mafia Wars friend until I kicked my Zynga habit in October. He recently got annoyed that I kept un-tagging myself from Facebook photos that don't include me.

Aunt L: As a genealogy collaborator, she's helping me with my biggest personal crowdsourcing project, even if she'd never refer to it that way.

Aunt C: She loves social media and is by far the most active on my list of family members on Twitter.

Aunt S: She's the only person I know who ever comments on updates I automatically share through Plaxo. I still don't know why. Beyond my wife, she's the next most likely to read my blog posts.

If anything, all of the varied uses of social media are apt reminders that it's bigger than Facebook and Twitter, even if Facebook is by far the biggest hub that brings a lot of us together. The one thing all my relatives have in common is that I'd wager not one would say they're using social media. Instead, they adopt the technologies and services that add something to their lives. Technologists and marketers alike need to keep remembering what's in it for all of these people.