Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Wikimobidex: Mobile Media Planners' New Favorite Site?

Editor's note: This post has been updated from July 2009 when it referred to Wikimobipedia. The site is now Wikimobidex as per below.

I received an email from Jamie Wells, US Mobile Director from OMD, about a new site he launched, Wikimobidex. He wrote when it first launched:

He wrote:

I wanted to let you all in on a little side project that I've been working on, and was hoping you'd embrace it for the good of our industry.  The site is called wikimobidex.org, and it's basically a public wiki where mobile marketing buyers can easily collect the info they need (case studies, contact info, audience comps, etc) to begin their planning process.

With our space moving so fast I felt the industry would benefit from a place that "keeps up with mobile (so you don't have to)", and so far things have been going pretty well.  I've yet to publically publicize the site (that's coming soon), and so far I've got most of the major mobile players involved - over 50 companies - in less than a month.

I love this idea for a number of reasons. One is that my least interesting collection is my media kit library, so having everything together on the web will potentially make one part of my job easier.

The other is that everyone Jamie sent that email too worked at different agencies that have some involvement with mobile. It’s safe to say no agency is going to win any business because of how current one’s media kit is, so this kind of collaboration will benefit everyone and threaten no one. Yes, some agency planners and strategists will probably discover a few more potential vendors and partners through this, but again, that alone isn’t going to come at another agency’s expense. And mobile’s an area where there’s so much going on but often in fits and starts, so it’s great to have areas where people bring it together.

The Motivation Bubble

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 
We're getting so good at motivating consumers that we're motivating them to death. If you thought it was tough to bring Lazarus back, just wait until we have to revive our consumers.

We'll get to that challenge shortly. Let's backtrack to the present, where I have a confession to make: I love social gaming.

First, I love it as a consumer. I'm level 700-something in Zynga's Mafia Wars. I'd tell you the exact level, but by the time you read this, it'll be a few increments higher. I'm very good at it. I click the right buttons at the right time while sharing content with friends who play. I've purchased virtual currency with real currency  -- on occasion, in small batches. I love it enough that I had to set a rule that I'll only actively play two such addictive games concurrently. I traded Café World, a fellow Zynga creation, for ngmoco's We Rule, a mobile, medieval version of Farmville. It's much cooler than Farmville, though; there are magic shops and spy towers, and -- my personal favorite -- magic cauliflower. Okay, so it's not that much cooler than Farmville. But I like it.

I also love these games as a marketer. These games are masterful at getting people to do something. Every person who plays becomes an automaton, exemplified by the arc in the series "Lost" where stranded survivors slaved over pushing a sequence of buttons every 108 minutes in an underground bunker. The only difference: the button-pushing sequence in "Lost" proved to have a purpose. It's from an old season, but I won't spoil the show; I'll only spoil the fun of these social games.

Beyond loving the games as a marketer, I love the psychology. You can figure out just the right reward at the right interval to keep people hooked, to get them to convince their friends to join, and to spend money for virtual trivialities. When I play Mafia Wars, there's the superficial enjoyment, and then the amazement at how they find new ways to lure me in, with the occasional frustration of when I have to click too many buttons.

The gaming doesn't just happen in games. I earn badges everywhere now -- in Foursquare, which made them famous, and in Miso, which is like Foursquare for watching TV and movies, and in Glue, which invented "liking" content across the web before Facebook, and in Gowalla, which calls its badges "pins," and in Whrrl, which calls them "societies." The applications are all different, but the psychology is the same.

 Here's the contract you implicitly sign when engaging in these activities: "Complete enough actions and you get some form of recognition, which may take the form of social currency if it's publicized." Now, here's the fine print you never, ever see: "We forever benefit from your actions because your actions count as data, and data grows more valuable over time as we collect more and learn how to use it. But the recognition is short-lived, too inconsequential to take pride in, and so fleeting that you must keep coming back for more or it feels like it was all for nothing. Ha ha ha."

As marketers, we can bring more to the table than recognition. We can offer discounts and free products and content from our exclusive partners and inside information. We have what you want and we can give it to you.

Both camps are learning from each other. Combine fleeting recognition and a free sample, and all the bases are covered.

What happens when you strip all of it away, though? Strip away the incentives, the currency, the constant calls for coming back. Strip away the requirements for how many friends you need. Strip away the artifice and the ruses.

What you have then is the kernel of intrinsic motivation. It's what keeps people going. It's exemplified by "fun" -- whether that fun is scaling a mountain or indulging in a rich meal or reading "On the Origin of Species."

You'll counter that external forces are at work in those situations. How much of the fun is the act of doing it, versus telling people what you did: how high you climbed or how much you ate or how erudite you were? There are no badges for those acts, though, no one telling you what your self-destructing mission is that you must choose to accept.

Former students of undergraduate psychology courses or readers of pop psych magazines may recall the 1973 study "Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Rewards" by Mark Lepper and others. The title gives it away: external rewards kill internal mojo. The authors warn in the introduction of "the possible side effects and long-term consequences of powerful systems of extrinsic rewards."

Powerful systems are in place, but these systems in their current form are too new. We are focused on the short-term results: spikes of fans, clicks, engagement, or whatever action we're trying to incentivize.

It won't last indefinitely. We're creating a motivation bubble. We'll fill it with extrinsic rewards until it pops. We'll try to revive it with more, and it will be too late. We'll call out for the intrinsic motivation to return from hibernation, and it will -- it's how people survive. But we'll have to find new ruses and rewards to get back some semblance of what we had. Even if all we had was a bubble.

Want Your Message to Spread? The Answer - Dandelion Marketing - Is Blowing in the Wind

My friend Jeremy Epstein, who happens do so a fair amount of marketing for authors and is a great writer in his own right at the blog Never Stop Marketing, just came out with a great, brief read a little longer than his usual entries. Go figure - weeks ago I convinced him to add it to Scribd for easily downloading and of course I then didn't have time to write it up.

The overall concept is to think like a dandelion to get your message to 'go viral.' It's hardly the only analogy in here - rather than getting too literal with the floral motif, he pulls in lessons from Johanes Gutenberg, Karl von Clausewitz, Microsoft Research, and then the Cluetrain Manifesto for good measure.

One of the great takeaways here is around prototyping, which he quotes Tim Brown's summary of "failing faster to succeed sooner." And hence it goes back to the dandelion - with lots of opportunities for spreading and pollination.

It's all of 11 pages - long enough that you may want to print it out and mark it up, short enough that you don't need too long to get the gist of it. But you may well want to keep it around to read a few times. I know I'm due for another run-through.

Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of 'Going Viral'

In Search of Your Booker Moment

Cory Booker image by Getty Images via Daylife

Have you shoveled any of your consumers' driveways lately? Just about everyone but Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker can put their hands down.

Booker, a savvy enough marketer that he can get some positive ink for Newark, is not a bad role model for marketers. As Mashable reported yesterday, New Jersey radio show host Ravie Rave (with all of about 250 followers) tweeted that her 65-year-old father needed help shoveling snow, and Booker promptly responded. Booker asked where her dad lived and then tweeted, "Please @BigSixxRaven don't worry bout ur dad. Just talked 2 him & I'll get 2 his Driveway by noon. I've got salt, shovels & great volunteers." The story went on to make headlines on CNN and elsewhere.

Newark's mayor has engaged in bigger publicity stunts than that, but this is one that may well stick around as part of his brand. It's the kind of thing people will remember - he's the mayor who showed up with a shovel when someone's dad was snowed in. Even before this made headlines, he already had over a million followers to witness his conversation with Rave.

What Booker instinctively grasps is that in social media, people need to know what's in it for them. That may seem obvious, but it's not true of all forms of media. When you see an ad on television, do you really care if the marketer's doing anything for you, or do you just happen to pay closer attention if the ad's really funny or relevant? When you see an ad in a magazine for tomato sauce or over-the-counter medication, do you care if there's something in it for you, or do you just turn the page? Social media has a higher threshold to cross, and to break through, that value proposition has to be abundantly clear.

When a marketer hits a homerun like Booker did, it can become part of the brand's mythology. A number of brands have had these ‘Booker moments' with social media:

·  Comcast, once symbolized by the technician who fell asleep on a customer's couch, became known among Twitter users and others as a company redefining how customer service works through social media.

·  When Coca-Cola got started on Facebook, it built on the work done by super-fans Dusty and Michael who organically created a presence for the brand, setting the ultimate example of a brand working with consumers rather than fighting them for control.

·  Jeep was one of the first marketers to harness Flickr, and it still does, making fan photos a centerpiece of its community.

These aren't all exact moments, but they're key milestones in how brands have changed the way they relate to consumers. For large brands, from Coke to Cory Booker, this becomes part of the brand lore. For smaller brands, like FreshBooks or New York's Roger Smith Hotel, social media helps define the brand entirely. In each scenario, these brands are thinking about game changing ways to make an impact by providing value for their target audiences.

Brands can fall into a trap doing this if they're not careful. If the value proposition lives and dies by giving away free stuff through social media to boost reach or add bodies mailing lists, then the brand just triggers a Pavlovian response where consumers are trained to expect handouts. But when the value is part of something, part of a brand identity and mission, then it starts to matter. When Dell started blogging after a period where consumers felt neglected and its brand was hurting, many wondered if it was really coming around. But when Dell started IdeaStorm to solicit customer feedback and act on it, this became a signal of Dell's revival and part of its identity.

Marketers should look for Booker moments as opportunities. At times it might feel like a ploy, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It reminds me of a passage I recently came across, oddly enough, in Robert Wright's The Evolution of God where he discusses how tolerance of others developed in Western religion: "What starts as a tactical ploy... can for various reasons evolve into a truer, more philosophical appreciation of tolerance... Having a pragmatic, selfish reason to coexist with people can be (even if it isn't) the first step toward thinking about them in a nonselfish way." For our purposes, selfishly trying to meaningfully connect with and provide value for consumers can make such relationship building a cornerstone of how brands operate.

That's why I'm not too concerned over how calculating or sincere Booker was when he shoveled that driveway. If appreciates what he did, he will seek to build on it, and either way he can still inspire others.

Related articles by Zemanta

• If You Tweet, He Will Come: Mayor Cory Booker Shovels Snow for a NJ Resident (mashable.com)
• Cory Booker Is The Best Mayor (buzzfeed.com)
• Mayor Shovels Snow For Elderly Resident (eyeonannapolis.net)
• Newark Mayor Cory Booker bans Conan O'Brien from airport (inquisitr.com)

A Social Media Insider’s Recap of 2009

Originally published in MediaPost


Amazingly, some highlights from this year had nothing to do with photogenic cats.

A Social Media Insider’s Recap of 2009

Assuming you’re working this week, hopefully you have some time to catch up. If you’ll indulge me, I’ve rounded up what I’d consider the highlights from the past year of my contributions here.

For me, 2009 started with a dramatic change in perspective, as I transitioned from the Search Insider to the Social Media Insider after 224 editions of the former. In the first ten weeks of the year, I largely explored how search and social connected. I noted the value of community-powered retail search engines and bathroom search engines and search engines to help with a move, showed why Skittles overhauled its own Web site (a column so tenuously related to search that I almost didn’t submit it), and made a plea for Google to incorporate Twitter’s content. The Twitter column concluded, “At some point… Google will need live search. When Google's ready, the question will be whether any scalable live search platform needs Google.” Sure enough, Twitter needed Google, and such a partnership was one of few revenue streams for Twitter this year.

That was just in the first 15 columns. The next 32 (not including this one) were part of the Social Media Insider, where I got to join the inimitable Cathy Taylor. Here are some columns and topics that resonated.

Best Practices

This is one of the most tempting areas to cover, but it’s always a risk to sound too professorial or even too obvious. One from May that managed to work was a treatise against the “c-word” (campaign). Especially after an email exchange with a reader, I wanted to write a rebuttal to show when campaigns make sense for social media. I never got to it, so there’s one I can consider for 2010.

Pricing

As a thought experiment, I proposed a new pricing model: CPSA, or cost per social action. I can’t say it’s an industry standard yet, but the dialogue on MediaPost and elsewhere was reward enough.

Mobile

I love diving into mobile, even if I’m no Steve Smith. Some mobile coverage came up when looking into mobile apps, including a broad look earlier and then the recent tongue in cheek example of Cat Paint. The most popular in this category shared research from AdMob on mobile social network usage.

Personal

Personal stories run the risk of turning a trade column into Reader’s Digest if done too often, but when they work they’re easy to relate to. My mother-in-law continues to amaze me with her Twitter prowess, even if she had to take a hiatus in the fall when her netbook was in the shop; her nearly 900 followers are happy to have her back. Travelers and Los Angeles readers appreciated social media’s impact on my Labor Day vacation. I also got nostalgic for my camp counselor days, and it turns out I wasn’t alone with such experiences.

Atonement

As proof that ideas literally come from everywhere, I attempted an acrostic inspired by one of the most famous prayers said on Judaism’s Day of Atonement. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to come up with 26 ways marketers sin using social media; I’ve had to ask forgiveness for at least a couple of these myself.

Top Ten Lists

If I learned anything from digg, it’s that top ten lists are easier to read, and when they work they’re fun to write. I shared top ten lists on claiming social media domains, corporate tweeting, social graph ad targeting, and most recently how social media changed our thinking this year. I wasn’t stuck on the number ten though: there were five ways to use Twitter lists, six ways to improve conferences, and twelve reasons to look at Google Wave (admittedly the Wave hype was premature).

Measurement

A bit of advice: if you’re going to attempt a top 100 list, you better be able to get there. I’ve been working on one for my blog for months, and I’m stuck in the 70s. The 100 ways to measure social media came together much faster, and I still see it tweeted on occasion.

Thanks to everyone who commented on, emailed, tweeted, blogged, and inspired these columns this year. Most importantly, thanks for sharing what’s most valuable to you – the time you spent reading these. My resolution is to continue to try and respect your time in the year ahead, and I look forward to all the conversations that these contributions trigger.

Happy New Year, and may a healthful and prosperous 2010 await us all.

We Have Sinned

Here's today's Social Media Insider, originally published in MediaPost

It's time to atone.

Some may appreciate the timing, as it coincides with yesterday's observance of Yom Kippur, Judaism's Day of Atonement, the climax of a period of repentance. Everyone has some sins to atone for, including marketers and agencies trying to engage consumers through social media. Today, we'll confess.

On the Day of Atonement, one of the most memorable prayers is a short confessional where a series of sins are listed alphabetically in Hebrew. It's unlikely anyone reciting the confessional has committed all such sins over the past year, but one recognizes that these sins have been committed. Some sins listed are so broad, such as scorning and sinning willfully, that most likely everyone will have committed them.

Below is our confessional, for marketers and agencies. Similar to the spirit of the liturgy, we haven't all committed all of these sins, but most of these transgressions should be familiar.

We Have Sinned

We have awkwardly applied metrics like click-through rates to social marketing programs when we could have found more appropriate ways to quantify results that aligned with our business objectives.

We have bribed consumers to be our friends without devising ways to connect with our real fans and sustain communication with them.

We have ceded control of our social programs to interns, or lawyers, or those who are not in the best position to be the faces and voices of our brands.

We have deceived ourselves, falling in love with our ideas without considering what would provide value for our target audience.

We have eavesdropped on consumers, instead of actually hearing them and listening to them.

We have failed to monitor social channels for discussions of our brands and competitors.

We have guessed at our target audience's interests and activities rather than conducting research that could have provided real answers.

We have hurried into the newest, most-buzzed-about social spaces without developing a strategy.

We have imitated when we could have innovated.

We have judged competitors harshly for making the same mistakes we made.

We have killed ideas that were spot on in favor of pet projects that we wanted for our portfolios.

We have lost consumers by organizing social architectures that were impossible to navigate coherently.

We have mismanaged social marketing by shoehorning it into someone's job description.

We have neglected to integrate social marketing with broader marketing programs.

We have overreached, hoping for content to go viral without investing in resources to properly create, distribute, and promote it.

We have partitioned our organizations so rigidly that we can't plan earned and paid media together.

We have quarreled over who should own social media in our organization.

We have repurposed creative and messaging from other channels when we should have adapted or created it for these social spaces.

We have shortchanged social marketing by planning campaigns instead of ongoing programs.

We have tuned out consumers' criticism when we could have engaged with them to better understand it, or we could have learned from it to ensure other consumers wouldn't have such problems in the future.

We have undervalued and underfunded social programs to such an extent that we have set them up for failure.

We have violated consumers' trust by not being fully transparent as to our identities and objectives.

We have wronged consumers by not respecting their privacy.

We have xenophobically avoided any forms of social media beyond the ones we use ourselves.

We have yelled when we could have conversed.

We have zigzagged between the path we knew was best and the path that was most convenient, even when we could have prevented our transgressions.

Acknowledging these sins is not the same as absolving ourselves of them, but it is the first step on the path to repentance. What we can hope and strive for us that next year, should our community as a whole revisit this confessional, the transgressions will seem more alien -- a memory of how we were and a sign of how far we've come.

What other sins must we atone for? Add your contributions to the confessional in the comments.

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

What Do AARP and the 4As Have in Common?

Image by Civil Rights via Flickr

Answer: both of them ditched their official names for their acronyms.

AAAA

Ad Age, April 2009:

President-CEO Nancy Hill told attendees that the group, for years known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies, has officially traded its name for its more commonly used acronym, the 4A's.

AARP

The New York Times, August 1999:

The American Association of Retired Persons is no longer the American Association of Retired Persons. It is AARP, and Horace B. Deets, its executive director, insists that, ''It is no longer an acronym.''

What’s next? The American Automobile Association? The American Anthropological Association? Share your predictions in the comments.

Technorati Tags: aarp,aaaas,acronyms,branding,marketing,associations

Facebook Social Ads will prove to be ineffective

If you've managed to stop by the Marketers Studio for any time the past few weeks you would have noticed that David has been unwittingly transformed from being a live, independent minded human being into a two-dimensional promotional vehicle by Facebook for the company Blockbuster Video.  It seems unending.  In fact, it's driven David to the point he's established a contest in which people can create their own Facebook style anti-Social ad.  That is so cool.

My own thoughts on this is that it's obnoxious.  They take an image of someone and place it - without the individual's prior consent or even knowledge - all over the place on Facebook.  And they have the friend implicitly endorsing a product or service.  The subject of the ad doesn't get paid a dime or benefit in any other way.  The ad agency and presumably the client cold save money by not having to pay for a photographer or a creative type or a model or even for stock photography.  And it is a direct violation of the concept of permission marketing, a sacred tenet for many in new media marketing.

But what isn't being discussed is something that would be vital to it's success.  Namely as to whether or not the concept as a marketing too at all.  And there it should fail as well.  Why?

Because it's not targeted to the ad recipient.  Because it's not targeted toward the needs and interests that the recipient that the person has laid out on their Facebook profile.  In fact, it has nothing to do with the recipient of the ad.  Instead, it's like spaghetti thrown up against a wall.  It's old style marketing.  But because it's on a hot property and it has the word "social" in it, it is supposed to be a new wave of advertising.  I think not.

Now I realize that initially it may be intriguing for many at first.  And that interest may last a little longer for college students and high school kids.  But as one gets older (and hits their mid-twenties) gets a little less exciting.  Our interests solidify and we don't need as much affirmation of our interests from our peers as we did when we were a few years younger.  Tangerine Toad has a great piece about it here.

Now, I wasn't much for Beacon either.  But I see this as another extension of over-hyped banal marketing designed to hopefully meet their silly $15 billion valuation.

Facebook Marketing: A Marketer and Member Speakers

In response to my column last week about Facebook, I received an email from Tanya Cottrell, a student at San Diego State University, and her experience struck me as a great example of a 'small business' approach to Facebook. With her permission, I've excerpted some of her thoughts below. I welcome your stories on how you're using the network.

Tanya writes:

I am a student at

San Diego

State

University

and I have used Facebook to promote to my fellow classmates new programs and activities for Campus Recreation. It is very inexpensive and easy to use. I think it cost me $20 to target 20,000 students or something.

Sincerely,
Tanya Cottrell

PS. I think Yahoo should allow niche marketing for their yahoo groups because I know some could be targeted by different industries too. Ex. I am on the Yahoo CIU Italy group which is designed for students who will be studying abroad at the University in Italy and any traveling industry business should promote on this group page because they have a captured audience.

She then added in a subsequent email:

 

Something else I would like to mention I know I previous commented on Yahoo but on Facebook it is incredibly easy to create groups and invite friends to join too. For example, as soon as the fires started raging here in

San Diego

a friend of mine created a group on Facebook where we informed each other of what was happening instead of the news, since the news was spread pretty thin. It was very convenient for people who lived in

San Diego

or friends who lived outside of

San   Diego

and were worried about the situation.

Also, I am studying global marketing abroad in Italy next semester and usually you don’t meet other people going on the trip until you get there but someone opened a Facebook group for our 2008 semester specifically. With our group are able to exchange advice, meet people who are going on the trip before we even go, and a bonus is we are able to coordinate flights and meetings to travel together into

Italy

. As a person learning in marketing, it is these “niche” groups that I would seek out and advertise on. If not advertise have a company account and post comments on the pages. Ex. A tour company can leave a wall post for students with a deal on weekend tours in

Europe

. Everyday there are at least one new person added to the group and a couple wall posts.

Honestly, I haven’t really noticed any of the new Facebook ads unless they have something to do with something already in my mind set. Ex. I am planning my trip for Europe so if I see an ad that says “

Europe

” it catches my eye.

 

Do you actually have an account? You should join. You would be amazed at how many adults are currently on it and as my generation grows older I don’t see Facebook becoming any smaller. We are the social chat room generation - we will always be online.

 

Sincerely,
Tanya Cottrell
San Diego State University 2008 Graduate and Marketing Executive at VivanTech

This is a great snapshot of a multitude of ways marketers and members both can use Facebook.