Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

eMarketer Looks at Feel-Good Effects of Real-Time Marketing

eMarketer has a new report out on a topic near and dear to me, "Real-Time Marketing: Speeding Up the Creative Process" (read more about it in eMarketers' newsletter article on it). 

The chart below, via GolinHarris, shows this real-time marketing thing may actually move the needle for brands, whichever needle marketers are looking to move.

(image courtesy of eMarketer Inc)

I have a few mentions in the report. Here are excerpts:

When deciding when to pull the trigger on a real-time opportunity, Oreo's digital agency, 360i, considers three factors, said David Berkowitz, VP Emerging Media:

* Is the moment that is happening brand friendly?

* Are there influencers online and available to extend the message virally?

* Is there an opportunity to 'surpise and delight' the consumer?

Then...

"What's going to define it well is not the Super Bowl. I'm much more curious about what happens on a typical Wednesday. Making social currency part of the brand identity - that is a bigger challenge and bigger opportunity." ...

"The biggest thing we can do to speed up the creative process is generate trust from our clients. Trust and real-time marketing are interwoven."

It also brings to mind a conversation I just had on Twitter with USA Network's Jesse Redniss:

How much of the RTM Social content race is just "disposable brilliance" one and done? #socialTV #secondscreen #TV #marketing @dberkowitz

— Jesse Redniss (@jesseredniss) May 8, 2013

@jesseredniss the brands that get a reputation for consistent RTM are the ones that get a reputation for understanding culture

— David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) May 9, 2013

Book Review: Return on Relationship by Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose

Ted Rubin was kind enough to share a copy of his new book Return on Relationship, which he co-authored with Kathryn Rose. I’ve known Ted for years and have learned quite a bit from him, whether through seeing him present at several conferences or catching up with him one on one. He is undoubtedly one of the great leaders in social media marketing, so I was curious to see what he put together in this book – or perhaps the non-fiction version of a novella (is there a word for that?). I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn yet but hope to change that soon enough.

The book is a quick read and a useful handbook, especially for those newer to social media marketing. It doesn’t go too deep into any particular aspect but is a good survey course when it comes to using social media to build loyalty, connect with content creators, and bolster customer service. One area where it struggles is to distinguish relationship marketing from social media marketing, so those who are already current enough with how to use social media for marketing purposes won’t find too much that’s new in this book.

Undoubtedly, there are thousands and thousands of people who will find this book a tremendous resource. There’s little to argue with overall. However, I do think they can add a bit of clarity in a few areas, and rather than just offer a love fest to Ted’s latest work, I’ll share a few thoughts on areas where my perspective differs with what the authors write:

Backward or Forward?

Rubin and Rose write, “The fact that building relationships has only recently become the focal point of marketing seems a bit backward, as relationships should always be the focus of our interactions.”

That seems to miss the point that digital media, and specifically the past decade where social media usage has achieved the necessary scale, has enabled relationship marketing to happen. In the 1980s, when I was a grade school student, I wrote letters to some major corporations to alert them about product defects, such as a promised pack of bubble gum missing from a cereal box, and I often received letters in return, but that was hardly an efficient way to build relationships for the consumer or brand. Similarly, direct mail marketers accumulated a vast amount of data on their customers, but direct mail is hardly the best way for most marketers to regularly engage in personalized communication with thousands or millions of consumers.

Not Just a Social ID

They also refer to “building your Social ID,” touching on five areas in particular:

1. Responsiveness
2. Thought leadership
3. Content creation
4. Relevance
5. Demeanor

It’s a great roundup of what can impact how a brand is perceived online. Yet by calling it a Social ID, the authors risk encouraging readers to create a Social ID that is separate from the brand identity. If Time Warner Cable is incredibly responsive online – especially to someone like me with a larger than average Twitter follower count or Klout score – but can’t string a coherent sentence together over the phone, the Social ID  means nothing. Or consider whether the brand stands for thought leadership. If so, social media can be an enabler of it, and offer new distribution channels for those leading thoughts. But if the brand comes off as a thought leader online and its products lag behind, it will lose its credibility. I have experienced this first-hand at my agency, 360i. When I was one of a number of people working on our Social Marketing Playbook that we released in 2009, we knew it only mattered if we were doing some of the best work in social media marketing. Otherwise, we would have risked alienating our clients. Thoughts mean little without actions to back them up.

Measuring the Return

This is a short book, but one area where I was hoping for more is in the measurement piece. I was very excited to see this addressed, but it didn’t go nearly far enough, especially when the book’s cover urges readers to “start measuring your ROR.”

Early on in the section, the authors quote Erik Qualman who, when asked about the return on investment (ROI) of social media, retorted, “How do you measure the ROI of your phone?” That reminds me of when Charlene Li wrote in her book Open Leadership, “What is the ROI on your fire insurance policy?” Fair point. But Li, who also co-authored Groundswell, has devoted numerous pages of books and reports to then go on and help businesses actually calculate the ROI of social media.

The ROR chapter ends with a sort of tautology formatted into something resembling a haiku: “Social media drives engagement. Engagement drives loyalty. Loyalty correlates directly to increased sales.” Then it closes with “ROR = ROI.”

There are two problems with this. The first is that social media can do far more and far less than drive engagement. Social media can directly impact loyalty beyond just using proxies like engagement, and social media can at times directly contribute to sales – though it doesn’t need to for it to be effective, most of the time. And social media doesn’t necessarily drive engagement at all. I go to all too many brands’ Facebook pages that post pathetic attempts at drivel and generate practically no engagement whatsoever.

Then there’s the ROR = ROI piece. If that’s it, then I’m really confused. Why read a whole book on ROR if I already know how to calculate ROI? What’s different about ROR? From the Zen koan of an equation, I have no idea. I’d love to see this fleshed out more in a subsequent work.

Post-script:

First, Ted and Kathryn couldn't be more gracious in their reception of the review. My first reaction to Ted over email when I read the book was very simple: "I'm not the target audience." He knew that, but he still encouraged me to read and review the book, and I'm glad I took the time to go through it.

Second, Chuck Kent penned a meta-review of this review, comparing it to one written by another friend of mine and Ted's, Drew Neisser. I've enjoyed reading Drew's writing and meeting up with him over the years, and next time I see him, I'll be sure to ask him more about what he learned from ROR, as I would be surprised if I didn't miss a few gems when reading the book.

Related articles

13 Questions With The Social CMO Ted Rubin: Listening, Relationships, and The Social C-Suite

What's Your #RonR? Five Takeaways from the new book Return on Relationship

10 More Social Marketing Experts Offer Key Advice

50 Thought Provoking Social Media Wishes for 2013

Research Highlights from CES 2013

Getting Return on Relationship: a Book Review

Twitter Changes its Twune, but Object to the Lawsuit

I've got a new byline in Ad Age on the latest Twitter controversy, as a startup doesn't like how Twitter is changing course. The column begins: 

Twitter has made plenty of enemies this year, but one just took Twitter to court and won an opening battle. As tempting as it is to root for the underdog in PeopleBrowsr vs. Twitter, the only crime Twitter may be guilty of is false advertising.

PeopleBrowsr, a social media analytics company, has paid for full access to Twitter's "fire hose" – its entire database of tweets – since 2008. Twitter cut off access, claiming it did so with the 30 days' notice required by its contract. PeopleBrowsr was not amused, so it took Twitter to court and won a restraining order that temporarily requires Twitter to keep the fire hose flowing to its longtime customer.

Read the rest of the post in Ad Age to see what this means for all those who depend on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Tonia Ries has an even more detailed writeup on the story in the Realtime Report. Go there for some great color to further get a sense of what this all means.

What's the Challenge with Mobile Social Media Marketing?

I've got a post this week in Digiday on mobile social media:

Mobile social media is like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of marketing: two great tastes that are even better together. Social media is all about communication, and mobile devices are designed around facilitating communication. Now, try to think of great mobile social marketing campaigns. How quickly do any come to mind? There seems to be a large-scale disconnect between mobile marketing and social media marketing, even though the two together sit at this sweet spot of an intersection of two of the fastest-growing marketing channels. 

There are 3 reasons offered for what's proving challenging:

1. Mobile and social are hard to define
2. There aren't clear owners of mobile and social
3. Technologies and publishers underserve marketers

Read the full article on Digiday for more, and let me know what you think.

10 Ways Facebook Has Changed Since 2004

10 Ways Facebook Has Changed Since 2004
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Facebook has earned a few degrees since it launched as Thefacebook in 2004. A Facebook media kit from the spring of 2004 recently surfaced, and it offers a glimpse as to how much has changed since then. Here are 10 quotes from the media kit that illustrate what has changed with Facebook, media, and online advertising.

1) “Thefacebook.com is an expanding online directory…”

This is so quaint. Remember the directory-centric era of the 1990s? As innovative as Thefacebook was, it was selling itself as a form of online media that was a relic by 2004. Months after this media kit was published, Google went public and accelerated the demise of browsing through directories.

2) “Additionally, thefacebook.com automatically adds to each user profile links to school news articles that refer to the user, the last user away-message in the AIM system and the last user access location…”

Facebook was a potential lightning rod for privacy lawsuits right from its birth. Did users realize this in 2004? Did they care? Even if it was only used by college students at the time, these students couldn’t have wanted to share all of this information with advertisers.

3) “Advanced search engine”

LOL. If Thefacebook had an advanced search engine in 2004, what the heck happened to it?

4) “Additionally, each user can add a friendship list to their profile, pending second-source verification of friendship status.”

Given Thefacebook’s birth in a dorm room full of Harvard computer scientists, it’s funny to see words like “second-source verification” slip in and overcomplicate simple ideas. Yet it’s also important to remember that in 2004, most people  -- especially those older than 25 -- had little idea what a friend request was. This was before “friend” was a verb.

5) “The mission of thefacebook.com is to expand to include most of the schools in the United States.”

The company’s publicly stated mission had nothing to do with world domination. It wasn’t even sure it would get to every college and university.

6) “With an estimated purchasing power that exceeds $85 billion, college students have money in their pockets for your services and products.”

As simplistic as it sounds, this is one of several cases where I wonder if Facebook lost something as it grew up. Here, the media kit included the kind of straightforward language that advertisers expect. It made Thefacebook seem safer for advertisers, rather than some entirely new paradigm.

7) “Unique Users,” “Traffic,” “Pageviews”

Facebook was selling eyeballs in 2004, as was nearly everyone. Now Facebook is known for engagement and building relationships. None of that was possible on Thefacebook eight years ago.

8) “You can target users using traditional horizontal/vertical banners, links and other more contextual ad placements.”

Facebook hates this today. The media kit was created before the current era of native ad formats. Now it’s a badge of honor to sell proprietary units and offerings, and Facebook was one of the most adamant promoters of going native. Yet Facebook hasn’t fully evolved from its eyeball-oriented past. By cramming seven small ad units on the righthand rail of a page, Facebook today is a master at devaluing its own inventory.

9) “House/Dormitory,” “Sexual Orientation,” “Number of Intra/Inter-School Friends”

These are some of Thefacebook’s ad targeting options --  just three of 16 listed. At the time, targeting by one’s number of friends made sense, as online popularity could be assumed to be a proxy for influence; that notion has since been refuted.  Facebook has evolved considerably. For instance, earlier this year, Facebook made a change to let advertisers target broad categories such as small-business owners, U.S. Hispanics, people who recently moved, and expecting parents. This is one significant way where Facebook has improved ad offerings to give advertisers more of what they need.

10) “Mobile”

Actually, this word isn’t in the media kit at all. In 2004, Facebook wasn’t a platform, it wasn’t a social utility, and it surely wasn’t mobile. Selling mobile advertising is hard enough today, though it’s increasingly profitable and scalable. Back then, it wasn’t part of the plan.

It didn’t need to be. Thefacebook was a site for college kids to engage in second-source verification, and advertisers could run banner ads targeting the most popular heterosexual or homosexual kids in certain dorms. Facebook maintains some of Thefacebook’s roots, but with about a billion users, it’s something quite different. What isn’t clear is exactly what Facebook is. Some younguns these days take forever to figure out what they’ll be when they grow up.

 

Six Chickenpants of Separation

Six Chickenpants of Separation
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

One morning, I arrived at work to find an unexpected visitor waiting for me at my desk. Short and bald, he was shirtless and wearing the most extraordinary pair of pants. He goes by the name Agent 011, but his real name is Chester Chickenpants, and he may be your next social media role model.

After Chester journeyed to Manhattan, he revealed that he’s part of an elite group, the Chickenpants Adventure Society. It describes itself as “an elite breed of plush toy, sent out into the world to spread the joy of random serendipity.” In other words, it’s an entire organization dedicated to surprising and delighting, just like every trendy brand these days.

The rules of the Society are simple: “1. Get the Chickenpants dropped in the most interesting spots possible. 2. See who picks them up.” People who discover an agent are instructed to email headquarters. A blog tracks the adventures of the agents who are found.

There’s something wonderfully purist about the whole enterprise. There’s this warmth that comes from those moments of weird, creative joy inspired by the Internet’s manifold ways to bring people together. Could the world unite around the Chickenpants Adventure Society? Imagine the Sabra Dipping Company commercials where people of every nationality gather around a potluck meal, but in this case there would be less hummus and more toy chickens in colorful pants.

Then again, digging deeper, there’s a commercial underpinning to it. Chickenpants does have a shop on Etsy. Still, it’s not the kind of enterprise where it’s all a ruse to get people to buy tiny $10 gifts. Then again, if the Adventure Society turns Chickenpants into the next LEGO, so much the better.

At the risk of totally bastardizing the purity of Chickenpants for the purposes of a marketing publication, people managing much larger brands can learn a few things from this toy poultry phenomenon. Here’s what you should learn from Chickenpants:

1) Consumer behavior is centered on mobility, not mobile devices. While Chester Chickenpants may be a “dumb” device technologically (sorry, Chester!) given his lack of digital connectivity, it’s a prescient indicator of where mobile social media is heading. Anything can be a mobile device, and a trigger for mobile experiences. Chester is portable, a conversation-starter, and can even stay in your pocket when you head through airport security. Maybe this is what the iPhone 5 will look like.

2) The physical and digital worlds are inseparable. Chester Chickenpants can live entirely in the physical world, but the poor doll would be like the fallen tree in the woods, barely making a peep. It’s thus fair to assume that the raison d’être for Chester is to live digitally -- to be shared online, and then in person, and then online again. A Chester that’s only digital is flat, missing the substance of a corporeal self that could be held (and even pecked), even if relatively few will ever encounter his physical form.

3) “Just because marketing” is the new cause marketing. Why would creator Claire Chambers let Chester Chickenpants and friends escape the coop on this global adventure? What’s the ultimate point? What, pray tell, is the return on investment? It’s an experiment, with the likely hypothesis that it’s more fun to do this than not to do this. The key metric, then, is not sales of Chickenpants postcards, but in the responses received indicating some level of fun, or the lack thereof in the event that the hypothesis is disproved. Claire found a way for the Chickenpants brand to grow as it travels the world literally and virtually.

There are two things Claire has going for her: the undying popularity of both chickens and pants, with pants being 6.8 times as popular than chickens globally, and 2.4 times as popular in South Africa (source: Google Trends). She also has an uncanny grasp of some of the bigger trends and changes marketers must grapple with.  If a short, bald, shirtless visitor with the head of a chicken shows up at your desk, check to see if he’s wearing remarkably fashionable pants. If so, pay attention. If he’s not wearing pants, you might want to call security.

 

 

10 Comebacks I'd Like to See

Second Life's new motto: "They're not real, but they're spectacular!"

Ten Comebacks I'd Like to See
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider 

It could be the Olympics, or the fear of another early ending to the Mets’ season, or Ben Folds reuniting with the other two guys as they ironically tour again as Ben Folds Five. Whatever the reason, I’ve got comeback fever. While I try to find the cure, I keep thinking about social media. Here are 10 social media comebacks that I’d love to see:

1) Facebook’s stock: As a marketer, I don’t care what Facebook’s share price is. But the price indicates that Facebook is struggling to properly value its assets and communicate that value to marketers and investors. As a public company, Facebook is more accountable to marketers. With ads now appearing in the News Feed and on mobile devices, Facebook is delivering more of what brands want without sacrificing the user experience. It will have to keep moving faster, though.

2) Yahoo’s relevance: Yahoo’s still great for display media buyers, but there was a time when Yahoo was a pioneer in search (well before Google), an innovator in mobile (well before Google), and a scrappy social disruptor (Google’s working on it). Yahoo brought together acquisitions like Flickr (alive, but in need of resuscitation), Delicious (which it sold), and Upcoming (which somehow still exists as a Yahoo brand). OK, its homegrown network, Yahoo 360 ,was a Google Buzz-esque flop, but now its one big social idea is to connect all its pages to Facebook and get people to automatically share everything they read. There better be more. This week’s updates to IntoNow are a start.

3) Hashable’s idea: Hashable had a vision of replacing business cards and making introductions easier. It relied too much on game mechanics, and the company took itself so seriously that it inspired the memorable post “Hashable is Worthless” during SXSW 2011. Someone will come up with a better way to digitally connect people professionally, and when it happens, we’ll probably see just how close Hashable was.

4) Foursquare’s mojo. Yes, Foursquare is growing, and it just released Promoted Updates. The company matters less for what it is than what it was. Foursquare was a catalyst for marketers to expand their thinking around mobile marketing, location-based services, and game mechanics. Now, when I encounter someone using Foursquare, it’s often to get $5 back on their AmEx statement. That’s a great reason to love American Express, but it turns Foursquare into a coupon pusher. I still like and regularly use it, but I want to get back to loving Foursquare again.

5) Groupon’s original approach: Groupon’s etymology derives from its origins as a group buying platform. It was exciting, in the way that winning your first eBay was exciting ten or fifteen years ago. If deals didn’t get enough subscribers, they wouldn’t materialize, much like Kickstarter projects today. If you loved it, you’d need to tell your friends. Who’s bragging to their friends they bought a Groupon now? 

6) Barcode Hero and Stickybits: There was a brief time when barcodes were wonderfully weird marketing vehicles. Barcode Hero added a gaming layer to barcode scans. After scanning relevant products, I was the king of Kraft, and even the king of shoes after killing time waiting for my wife to finish up at DSW. Stickybits treated barcodes as a content gateway, so you could scan a code and leave comments, photos, and videos. While neither company was destined to be a mass market hit, it was fun looking at black and white lines and boxes in entirely new ways.

7) Chat bots: Before there was Siri, there was SmarterChild, an instant messaging bot that was a fun alternative to search engines. Before instant messaging, there was Dr. Sbaitso, a DOS program that was the world’s first mass market virtual therapist. They didn’t catch on in time for brands to take part, but Siri will have a longer shelf life.

8) Color’s concept: If Instagram was the “Blair Witch Project” of mobile apps, Color was the “Waterworld.” It had a creative premise but couldn’t live up to the expectations set by its funding. The idea of an app that displays content shared from your immediate location sounds like a great social experiment, and perhaps even an important technology underlying the future of how content will be shared. Color pivoted and is now a video-sharing app. Yawn.

9) Second Life: I have fond memories of hanging out on H&R Block’s virtual island, where the avatars of real tax advisors would answer consumers’ avatars’ tax questions. I also recall another time tagging along with some clique of avatars (this may or may not have been when I met my first virtual furry), and one of them kindly offered me some digital genitalia to make my avatar look less like a Ken doll. Second Life is still around, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it in a marketing plan.

10) Digg: Digg introduced millions of people to social discovery, crowdsourcing, and creating content that’s designed to spread through social networks rather than search engines. Now there are new owners that want to make Digg a verb again. I’m especially excited for two reasons. First, Buzzfeed is on the verge of a monopoly for publicizing stories like, “Gotye’s 50 Funniest Kittens at the 2012 Lego Olympics.” Buzzfeed needs more competition. Secondly, as much as I couldn’t stand Digg’s fanboys with their hero worship of the site’s founders, Reddit’s insular crowd of contributors is even worse, voting up photos about – what else? – what it’s like introducing people to Reddit. Digg, you can do better.

I may often get nostalgic, but not everything needs an encore. I’m perfectly happy to say farewell to MySpace, Google Buzz, the hype around widgets, and every game that resembles FarmVille. Yet the Internet is the best comeback generator the world has ever known. It rebooted Betty White’s career, brought “Arrested Development” back from oblivion, and made Nikola Tesla a scientific folk hero. Some of these social media comebacks are destined to happen. When they do, you’ll hear about it – on Digg, from friends sharing a Yahoo story, via SmarterChild, or by scanning a barcode sticker in Second Life.

 

Is This the Murderer's Motive?

The face of a murderer - distorted from the original and yet all too recognizable 

Is This the Murderer's Motive?
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider 

I woke up yesterday morning to a report from NY1 that it could take months before we learn the motive of the Aurora, Colo. murderer. Then I arrived at the office, logged into Facebook, and saw that youthful face with the shock of flaming red hair all over my feed. Could that be his motive?

Reports said that the killer wasn’t an avid social media user, with the exception of Adult Friend Finder. We need to redefine what it means to use social media. One doesn’t need to actively participate in social networking services in order to effectively use them. To manipulate social media is to use it.

The Colorado killer, whose name I can’t even bring myself to write, must be thriving on his social media notoriety. Ten years ago, if I didn’t want to hear more about the murderer, I could choose to tune out the media. I could turn off the TV, stick to FM radio stations, skip newspapers and magazines, and avoid CNN.com and Drudge Report for a few days or weeks. That might have taken more effort than it was worth, and I would have lost something in the process, but I could manage it.

Now, I can’t. My most important media sources are my friends and peers, the ones I choose to friend and follow. I can’t turn them off. I can’t say, “No more photos of the mass murderer, please.” I can’t say, “I’m over posts about the presidential candidates until the debates happen and we can try to find one shred of substance hidden amongst the partisan attacks.” I can’t say, “Why do I need to hear about what sports team you’re rooting for right now?” The reason I can’t say that is that I care. I learn more about people that way. I get closer to them. It’s the only news source I can’t turn off because I don’t want to turn it off.

That’s where the manipulators come in. Manipulators aren’t always evil. Look at the most-funded projects from Kickstarter. These aren’t getting funds through massive ad budgets and brand building. These are brands being built from scratch. The companies don’t own much owned media at all. They propose what they hope is a great project or product, create a compelling story, and milk the press where they can. Practically the only way these projects get funded is if they wind up spreading through social media.

Brands do their part to manipulate social media as well. When Taco Bell airlifted a truck full of tacos to a remote Alaska town, it wasn’t targeting the town’s 6,200 residents. Neither was TNT when it staged a seemingly spontaneous action epic in a quiet Belgian town. Both were YouTube bait. TNT racked up 36 million views and a Cannes Gold Lion. Yes, these brands may be participants in social media as well, but they created events that only matter if people share the footage. It hardly matters if the original event even happened; the live witnesses were not the target audience at all.

And now we have the killer. He crafted a story. He carried out his plot. Hundreds of millions of people are talking about him, and he may ensure his story continues for months, or perhaps years. His motives are currently unknown, but how could he not relish the attention? Just the idea of it -- that his manipulation may be happening right now -- makes it all the more tempting to turn it all off.

Then, I keep reading. There are the victims’ memorials, and the testimonials to life. There are links to the essay by Jason Alexander, who offered the most eloquent analysis of the Second Amendment that I have ever read. There’s Slate exploring the phenomenon of men giving their lives so that their girlfriends could live. There’s context. There’s insight. There’s meaning.

I can’t shut it off. I don’t want to shut it off. I know what I must do instead: accept it, embrace it, and be a part of it.

Getting Lost In Social Discovery

Getting Lost In Social Discovery
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

“Social discovery” is one of the hotter buzzwords these days, referring to how people can tap friends’ implicit and explicit recommendations to experience something new. At first, it sounds like more jargon, but when you experience it firsthand, you can get a sense of what it really means.

Consider a recent Sunday afternoon. I had been cooped up more than usual, a self-imposed internment following an ironic summer cold, and took advantage of the extra time indoors to watch every episode of the most recent “Battlestar Galactica” series during a five-day stretch. Forcing myself to leave home on a day with heat that was only stifling and not paralyzing, I ventured to the New Amsterdam Market at New York’s South Street Seaport. After snacking on lobster rolls and Dutch pancakes, I was ready for a detour – or a quest, courtesy of Traveler’s Quest.

Traveler’s Quest is a mobile game that epitomizes social discovery. Players hunt for virtual treasures and earn points reburying them as far as possible from the point of discovery. For the especially aggressive hunters, players can buy maps to reveal the locations of treasures hidden further away. Yes, it all sounds pretty silly if not pointless, but as opposed to most mobile games, Traveler’s Quest creates relationships between the players and their physical surroundings. Often, treasures are just out of reach, so players are motivated to go out of their way to nab them. This gets back to social discovery – discovering a place one didn’t intend to go to, in search of something shared by another person.

Now let’s return to that stifling Sunday. A few treasures were buried downtown past the market, with the furthest a good 10 blocks out of the way of where I planned to go. In Manhattan, 10 blocks is a short walk when you’re going from point A to point B, but a hike when it’s out of your way. Still, I was in need of fresh air, and I had to clear my head, after nights of dreaming that everyone I knew was a Cylon. Traveler’s Quest fulfilled my need to pursue an unplanned course.

Walking further south, I stumbled upon Stone Street, a vibrant alley crammed with outdoor seating, and an old favorite spot when I worked near Wall Street back in my eMarketer days. It was just out of the way of the treasure, but I took this detour. Not only did I discover the street, but I discovered two friends, Noah Brier and Faris Yakob, wrapping up their brunch over beer, and they invited me to join them. It was, at that moment, surreal. I was on a street I hadn’t visited in years, having wandered in that direction thanks to a relatively obscure mobile application for the sole purpose of collecting a worthless virtual good.

Logically, it made no sense. It’s not like Traveler’s Quest is designed to connect people with long-lost friends and nostalgia-inducing side streets. Yet I’ve also discovered that the most unexpected social interactions come from taking a route I didn’t intend to take at a time I wasn’t supposed to take it. It’s like when I was driving up to Lake George and pulled off a random exit to drive two miles to a McDonald’s all because a “30 Rock” episode had my wife and I hankering for a McFlurry, and I ran into a former coworker. That happened without any digital technology beyond GPS, but Traveler’s Quest creates far more occasions for something like that to happen. As you hunt for virtual treasure, it encourages you to get lost. Getting lost is the most reliable route to social discovery online, offline, and where the digital and physical worlds meet.

 

Is Experimentation Innovation?

uhh, thanks, Bob Garfield, but this isn't the experimentation I had in mind...

Is Experimentation Innovation?
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Are experimentation and innovation one and the same? The two words were initially used interchangeably during MediaPost’s recent Brand Marketers Summit, until some panelists sorted it out.

Consider the description of the panel “Budgeting for Experimentation: How Much Money Does It Take to Not Be Left Behind?” It notes, “Many marketers probably wish they had spent just a little more money a few years ago to get in on the ground floor of something that became the next big thing.” This clearly implies that the discussion should focus on innovation. Yet it then says, “How do you make experimentation an ongoing part of your marketing efforts?” Are experimentation and innovation really synonymous?

For many marketers, one isn’t innovating until they’re trying something new. Trying something new is the essence of experimentation. Innovating and experimenting feel like they have a lot in common.

Yet experimenting doesn’t just mean doing something new. First, it means having a point of view. The hypothesis could be that when dropping a 10-pound ball and a 1-pound ball from a rooftop, both will reach the ground at the same time. Or it could be that adding paid media to a socially fueled earned media program will increase the entire program’s effectiveness. The experiment then provides results, which can of course be measured.

Innovation doesn’t have any of these requirements. It’s not always clear what’s innovative anyway. Something that’s never been done before isn’t necessarily better, nor is it necessarily significant. I could advise a client to post all their Facebook messages to Englis- speaking audiences in a Cyrillic font. It’s quite probable no brand targeting English speakers has done that before, as it’s a terrible idea. But the brand could say that it was the first to try to teach Americans how to read Russian against their will and get a bored reporter to write a feature story about it. Bad ideas are easy to come by, as any great brainstorming meeting will produce dozens of them. Nearly all of the rejected ideas are probably innovative in some way.

Experiments don’t need to be innovative. Target and Chase, for instance, both ran programs on Facebook where fans could choose which nonprofit organizations received donations. I don’t recall which did it first; both did it, and garnered much of their exposure from participating nonprofits promoting the programs. Each one had its own twists, but one had to have been at least somewhat derivative from the other. The second one, even if derivative, was still most likely an experiment for the marketer, with the success of the program far from assured.

Innovation is clearly more popular. A quick search of Google News yields 77,000 results for “experiment” and “experimentation” combined (a tally inflated by the Higgs Boson discovery), and 2.2 million results just for “innovation.” Innovation is largely a construct of marketing -- not that there’s anything wrong with that. More importantly, innovation is a construct of perception, so as long as there’s some alignment between a marketer and its audience, then it’s possible to pass off just about anything as innovation. The word “new” remains as powerful as ever.

Experiments can’t be sold so easily. There needs to be the hypothesis, the comparison of a variable to a control, and demonstrable results. Experiments can be done constantly by people at all levels of an organization. Experimentation is what really generates better and more effective marketing. On occasion, it even leads to innovation. As Encyclopedia Brown likes to say, “No case is too small.”

Thanks go to MediaPost’s panel of innovative experimenters who illustrated the differences between the two concepts. Keep an eye out for  Gizmo Beverages President Walter Apodaca, Something Massive Chief Creative Strategist Adam Broitman, Tremor Video CRO Randy Kilgore, Big Fuel Communications Director of Platform & Product Strategy Michoel Ogince, and Bulbstorm President & CEO Bart Steiner. There will be plenty of innovation coming from them, and more experimentation than any of us may realize.