Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

What’s Your Take on 360i’s Social Marketing Playbook?

On top of writing a weekly column, contributing to Ad Age, and posting at 360i’s Digital Connections blog, I’ve had another side project that’s kept me – and quite a number of my colleagues – busy over the past couple months. Today, my agency 360i released its Social Marketing Playbook, a comprehensive guide for how marketers should consider strategically approaching social media.

We’ve been keeping this under wraps for a bit, so now that it’s out, I really want to know what you think. You can comment here, blog or tweet your thoughts, of just email me privately – dberkowitz @ 360i . com. The last thing I want is for this to be a bunch of 360i people talking to ourselves.

Read 360i’s blog post on it at http://blog.360i.com/social-media/playbook or just download it directly at www.360i.com/playbook .

It’s a long read, but if the subject is relevant to you, I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Update: It’s now on Scribd so you can embed it if you’re so inclined:

360i Social Marketing Playbook

Magazines Adopt Emerging Media, but Trail Newspapers

There's a great release from The Bivings Report on how magazine sites use emerging media. I can't wait to spend some time with the full report and dive into it. A couple key findings:

• More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006.  Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now offer reporter blogs on their sites, compared to just 40 percent in 2006. 
  
• Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007.  The only exception is the use of tags; four percent of magazines use tags compared to just one percent of newspapers.

I won't steal their thunder; go ahead and check it out for yourself. Thanks Erin Teeling from Bivings for sending the link.

Web Widget Optimization

If you want some great feedback on a blog post, try writing about widgets, Rene Descartes, or both. It's not so much the volume of responses today that's enlightening - it's the quality of them. On MediaPost's blog, I'm taken to task for my muddling of French and Latin (and Bill Hilton's totally right - thanks for that). Another reader wrote in, "Actually, if Descartes were alive I think he'd sue you for slander" (the respondent later noted he was just having fun).

The best letter, however, came from David Benfell:
"On what grounds do you claim the insight as to what Descartes would or would not have done, today?  I've seen a few self-aggrandizing columns since I subscribed to MediaPost e-mail newsletters, but this has to take the cake for being the most supremely arrogant."

On that note, however literally you care to read the column, I welcome your feedback. The column continues in the extended entry.

Web Widget Optimization

If Rene Descartes were alive today, rather than saying “Je pense, donc je suis” (“I think, therefore I am”), he might say, “Il est, donc j’optimise” (“It is, therefore I optimize”). By that same reasoning, if Monsieur Descartes were alive today, instead of emerging as both the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics, he’d be trying to figure out how to optimize Web widgets — the next frontier of search engine optimization.

With Newsweek and others calling 2007 the Year of the Widget, then it will also invariably be the year of Web Widget Optimization (WWO). First, let’s get on the same page as to which widgets we’re talking about.

Widgets, alternatively called gadgets (by Google), applications (by Facebook), badges (by people who like the letter b), and other terms, provide a way of syndicating any form of digital content imaginable to other Web sites. Google refers to them as mini-websites. Blog publisher TypePad calls its widgets “bling for your blog.” Jai Shen, co-founder of widget developer RockYou, told Reuters that widgets are a form of self-expression.

There are three key types of widgets, with important distinctions among them (I’ve also included this as a table on my blog):

Web Widget Optimization

Tomorrow's column is a first take on Web Widget Optimization, almost a preview for what a primer will be.

Surprisingly, there were only 97 results in Google for "widget optimization" and none for "web widget optimization." The same was true for "integrated asset digitization" when that column came out, but maybe this will be a little catchier.

To be fair, this post itself is part of an optimization strategy. If anyone does try to Google "web widget optimization" tomorrow when the column comes out, this blog will likely appear (especially if they use quotes, which isn't remotely as common). If you own the search results, you coin the phrase. I'm not sure Googling something would be relevant in court for trademark disputes, but Google is the de facto way to determine who owns what in the public domain.

WidgetBox Case Study - WidgetCon

More from WidgetCon - a good 3-fold case study from WidgetBox CEO Ed Anuff.

3 types of branded widgets

- Branded Content - PopSugar’s MySugar that spread in social network Bebo
    - viral brand extension
    - post anywhere
    - typically not perceived as ad
- E-Commerce – eBay
    - leverages existing affiliate programs
    - revenue sharing with community
- In-Widget Advertising – Forbes.com news widget with light Visa branding
    - branded content
    - objective editorial
    - ad-supported

Social Media Explained: The Common Craft Show

I know some of these videos have made their way around, but for those who haven't caught Lee LeFever's Common Craft Show, be sure to take a look (one more reminder to post it came from Jeremiah Owyang's writeup). There's even a Facebook group for you die-hard fans.

Rocketboom in the Red

Frank Barnako at MarketWatch wrote one of those posts that kept grabbing me. Then I remembered I have a blog, so I can see if it strikes anyone else. Here's the excerpt:

Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank.  Advertising is not doing it.  "It's frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now," said the daily video blog's founder, Andrew Baron.

"Even though we have a relatively large audience, advertisers are just not happy to do 'small deals," he explained in an interview. Baron says there are 200,000 downloads of Rocketboom shows, seven days a week. "They say they want to blast their commercials to millions of people."  So, Rocketboom is again toying with the idea of charging for content.

Rocketboom is practically synonymous with video podcasts. Have they now jumped the shark?

Perhaps it just speaks to the challenges of going it alone. Yes, he reaches more people than some cable TV programs. But there's only one way to reach the Rocketboom audience, as opposed to, say, reaching a smattering of viewers across a TV network, or a highly targeted and loyal audience of blog readers via one of the major blog ad networks.

Even so, perhaps Mr. Baron's done the math and figures that's still not enough. To me, it underscores how if you have any overhead whatsoever, regardless of the oft-reported dearth of video ad inventory, it's a tough business to get rich in.

 

From the Red-Eye to Reuters

I can't resist posting this one. Reuters interviewed me this week on widgets and the story just went on the site last night. You can watch it here.

A few notes:
1) They spelled my company's name wrong in my byline. So much for the branding. At least the reporter pronounced it right. 360i - four characters. Two are out of order in the clip.

2) The text next to the video spells the reporter's name wrong. She's Bobbi, not Bibbi. And she runs stories, oh, every day. Screwing up my company's understandable. But the reporter's name? Granted, by 5pm on a Friday, I'm just trying to get out of the office too.

3) My big TV appearance came a few hours after me getting off the red-eye after returning from OMMA Hollywood. If you're wondering why it looks like I hadn't gotten any real sleep in the previous 40 hours, well, I hadn't.

4) The background for Yahoo looks like the set of Blue's Clues. The Daily Show does better.

Enough nitpicking. Enjoy the clip.

Fun with Widgets: NBA.com

Thanks to Steve from ClearSpring for showing me the impressive widget gallery at NBA.com (note that the scrunching is my own fault, as my blog column isn't wide enough to allow for the full view)

Social Media Architecture

At a meeting of New York's chapter of the Social Media Club last night, a debate took place revolving around how to define social media. Before I get into the substance of the discussion , I wanted to toy with a metaphor I was playing with and wanted to test out here. I call the concept Social Media Architecture.

Here's the gist of how this works:

If you build a house for yourself, can that be considered 'social architecture'? No.

What if other people gather outside the house and talk about it? Still, no, there's nothing social about it, even if others happen to be discussing it. This is essentially the broadcast model. There's a builder, and then there's everyone else who just stands outside and discusses it. It doesn't matter if the house is so amazing that it brings a mass of people together to gawk at it. The architecture itself isn't social.

What if you get together with a bunch of other people and build the house, and then everyone else stands outside? It's still not social.

What if you design the house and order masses of people to build it according to your specifications? The image of the Hebrews building the Egyptian pyramids comes to mind. That doesn't count as social though. Additionally, hiring an architect to build the structure doesn't matter any.

What if you built a house and someone comes along and sprays it with graffiti? A consumer took ownership of the structure, but it's illegal. This would be like a case of plagiarism or theft of intellectual property, or hacking.

Now, what if you built a house, and as you were building it, you invited all the people stopping by to vote on what color each wall is painted, or which room becomes the master bedroom, or what furniture to put in each room? This is a sort of 101 version of social media, much like "American Idol." It's interactive in terms of giving consumers a stake in the content, but it still isn't really social media.

What if you built a house where everyone could come and construct their own rooms and additions? That's another step in the right direction in terms of giving consumers control, but it's not yet social media. That model is more like Geocities or Blogger, where everyone can come and put up their own rooms, but it's still not social.

What if you built a house where everyone could come and construct their own rooms, and then reach out to other builders to agree to directly link rooms to each other? Everyone, even those who choose not to build rooms themselves, could freely enter everyone else's room and offer their comments on it. Everyone would be identifiable in some way, even if it's by a handle that preserves their anonyminity. This is social media. It's the social media architecture behind MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and any of the true social media phenomena.