Accidentally on Purpose Blog

I’m attending a party in NYC tonight where the official theme is food and wine blogging.  I say “official” because I am guessing the real purpose of the gathering is to socialize — with advertising people, media people, PR people, and blogger people.  Among the many folks attending is David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto.  But among the folks not attending is New York Times marketing columnist Rob Walker.  One of the event organizers says that Rob — who is based in Savannah — send his regrets, as well as a link to a blog post on the topic of, well, blogging.  It’s worth reposting in its entirety.

No serious wine consumer makes decisions about what to buy based on the aesthetics of the label or the bottle.

But here at Murketing HQ, that’s exactly what we do. And it is for this reason that we — “we” being me (henceforth known as “R.”) and my wife (or “E,” to you) — have founded The International Review of Wine Packaging Aesthetics.

Other than that, it seems pretty much self-explanatory. We will add only this point of clarification: Many wines we buy regularly and enjoy will not be included here, because the packaging is of no interest.

The International Review of Wine Packaging Aesthetics will appear once in a while.

Volume 14: Irony vs. Sincerity: The showdown.

Volume 13: “Not just a ‘tude wine — a novelty ‘tude wine.”

Volume 12, (Double-Dog Special!): “This celebrates the dog. The other one humiliates the dog.”

Volume 11: “Punk rock in a bottle?”

Volume 10: “Stylish. Yet still somehow cute.”

Volume 9: “‘Cone-shaped stone buildings’ unique to the Puglia region. Yeah?”

Volume 8: “A bit too self consciously ‘design-y’ — but that’s why we bought it.”

Volume 7: “The very idea is repellent.”

Volume 6: “A wine inspired by posters? Stupid. But great-looking.”

Volume 5: “Big bold fleur de lys, rendered in a tattoo style. Eye-catching!”

Volume 4: “The clearness and the little guy –- very exciting.”

Volume 3: “The bottle design is, self evidently, awful.”

Volume 2: “Let us be honest: What made us buy this was the monster illustration.”

Volume 1: “We find this gimmick to be fully satisfying.”

As the saying goes, in vino veritas.  I’m looking forward to a frank talk with the bloggers tonight.

For a sidelong glance at social media, I suggest you read “Net, Blogs and Rock N Roll” by David Jennings. The book looks at how consumers find, share, and — yes — buy music in the post-2.0 world (a subject that was covered far more pessimistically by Andrew Keen in “The Cult of the Amateur“).

Jennings, a psychologist and business consultant, divides the music world into a familiar hierarchy of consumers based on levels of participation: “savants, enthusiasts, casuals, and indifferents.” Nothing surprising here, but it’s worth noting one of his more pointed observations about the nature of communities.

“… communities do not require majority participation in order to be successful and to generate content and relationships that their members find valuable.”

Social media consultants should take heed — “communities do not require majority participation.” And it is wrong to harass the hidden 90% — the vast majority of people who would prefer to remain invisible. This has always been true of communities and some marketers over the past few years have learned this lesson the hard way.

Technorati Tags: David Jennings, Net Blogs and Rock N Roll, Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur

I had to laugh when I saw this. Ogilvy PR is hosting its “First Ever ‘Bring Your Parents to Work Day.’” Brilliant concept, but why?

“Employees have found that their parents are often confused about PR, even though they are exposed to it every day when they read a great review about a new product or respond to coverage of a company’s crisis, to name a few. Ogilvy PR realized that this was an opportunity for the company to illustrate the connection, while strengthening its ties to its employees.”

Hey, there are many people in my family who don’t understand what I do for a living — and with social media, even more are confused. I think Ogilvy is onto something. To take this to the next level I would propose they host a “Bring Your Favorite Blogger to Work Day.”

Technorati Tags: Public Relations, Ogilvy PR

This is interesting, and it’s a nice follow-up to the recent NYTimes article I posted about last week. Prospero, a social-media vendor, has posted a study which shows that social-media spending is on the rise. Quoting MarketingVox, here are the key takeaways from the study:

Prospero’s 2007 Social Media Survey found 30 percent of online marketers who use social media plan to spend significantly more on social-media applications in 2008, while an additional 58 percent also plan to increase spending, though not “significantly.”

Some 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives.

Survey participants were from leading brand organizations from a variety of industries, including Media, Education, Financial Services, Health, and Sports and Gaming.

Asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35 percent reported positive ROI and 41 percent said that ROI was “unknown.”

What’s most interesting, to me, is that the report claims that marketing pros are not so interested in “ROI.” Why this matters: marketing folks of course care whether social media is effective. They wouldn’t approve bigger budgets if they thought otherwise. But I would bet that many marketing pros recognize that an investment in social media is a “must have” — regardless of the proven models for measurement because the entire business world is moving in that direction, and they cannot afford to be left behind.

Technorati Tags: Social Media Spending, ROI

The Mercury News had a great post about the growing number of fake CEO blogs — fake Steve Jobs, fake Steve Ballmer, fake Larry Ellison just to name just a few.  Fake blogs yes; but, the entertainment is real enough.  The persona of these blogs are like characters in a TV sitcom.  Wouldn’t that be rich — a sitcom based on the CEO’s of the tech sector.

Fake Steve Ballmer: “CEO and general Manager at the worlds most powerful and pervasive company, a mover and shaker with world changing influence and charisma. Don’t freaking cross me!”

Fake Larry Ellison: “The more I win, the more I want to win. And I will win, okay?  Trust me.”

Fake Steve Jobs:  “I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me.”

For me, what’s most interesting about this trend (if you could call it that) is how it might play in the context of an ongoing debate:  should CEO’s blog?  Many social-media savvy folks believe they should not.  Too easy to get into trouble, too boring if they protect themselves against potential trouble topics.  

Perhaps theses fake blogs are filling a void?  Since Jonathan Schwartz has both – you decided.  Which is more interesting, fake Jonathan Schwartz, or the real Jonathan Schwartz?   

The AP’s Rachel Konrad filed a story about eBay’s new social-networking project called “neighborhoods.”  But before you laugh, this isn’t a trivial, me-too exercise by a company that has been criticized for being too slow to warm to web 2.0.  Neighborhoods is part of a broader reorganization strategy for eBay.

“The move is one result of a broad reorganization strategy started in late 2006, when the San Jose-based e-commerce leader’s scorching growth rate began to slow.

“Individuals listed 480 million items on eBay in the second quarter, down 6 percent from the first quarter and down 2 percent from a year earlier. The number of listings by “power sellers” who operated eBay stores was 79.1 million — unchanged from the previous quarter but down 25 percent from a year earlier.

“Many users complain that the site’s size — it listed 559.1 million items worth $14.46 billion in the second quarter — can make it tough to find and purchase a specific product quickly. Users are turning to rivals such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com Inc. and Chicago-based uBid Inc.

“‘We knew we had to change things internally because we couldn’t innovate with the effectiveness or speed we needed’, spokesman Hani Durzy said Tuesday.”

For me, the “neighborhoods,” metaphor works.  eBay is attempting to break down its once unstoppable but now imposing marketplace into smaller communities of interest — Beatles, coffee lovers, gadgets, etc.  That’s always been the promise of social media for businesses — making information available and helping people find it –  eBay seems to have finally figured that out, again. 

I wonder how Shel feels when reading about the eBay experiment.  I believe it was Shel — a consultant to my team at SAP — who coined the term “global neighborhoods” to describe a phenomenon that has implications far beyond the enterprise.  Shel, I think its time to write that next book! 

Fascinating article in the Sunday New York Times about the recent shift in ad dollars.  We’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence about this — the decline in ad dollars going to traditional media – but the Times article spells bad news for the ad industry and media companies as a whole.

… many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.

Adventurous companies like Nike have been experimenting with these alternatives since the 1990s. But now, even the most conventional marketers are making these alternatives a permanent — and ever bigger — part of their advertising budgets.

Last year, Johnson & Johnson decided to boycott the so-called upfronts, an annual event when advertisers get together with television executives to negotiate for commercial time. In August, General Motors said that 2008 would be the last year for its longtime sponsorship of the Olympics. In May, A. G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble, told financial analysts that the company would spend less on traditional media and more on its Web site, in-store advertising and promotional events.

“If you step back and look at our mix across most of the major brands,” Mr. Lafley said, “it is clearly shifting.”

Add it up, and the money flowing out of the traditional media is huge — even at a time when ad budgets in general are growing, advertising research shows. The 25 companies that spent the most on advertising over the last five years cut their spending last year in traditional media by about $767 million, according to Advertising Age and TNS Media Intelligence. And in the first half of this year, those companies decreased their media spending an additional 3 percent, or $446 million, to $14.53 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

I took the opportunity to ask SAP’s Costanza Tedesco, vice president of global advertising and branding for her take on the NYT’s story.  This is what she had to say:

It’s not that “traditional” media is no longer relevant… those channels are still a very important part of our media mix.  We have detailed campaign performance data that tells us we get the greatest impact from campaigns when there is an integrated mix of multiple “traditional” and “new” interactive media channels.

But now that we have more choice of relevant media vehicles, and a greater ability to assess the performance of each, we are shifting the mix of our media investment.

In 2003, we had basically 100% of our media investment in “traditional” vehicles. Now, we have more than 25% of our media investment in interactive media.  And the percentage will continue to grow.

Where are the dollars going?  Well, it’s no surprise that some of the money is going to social media (e.g., communities).  But the overall trend — which transcends social media, as we know it – is direct-to-consumer marketing.  That’s a trend worth watching for all communicators, whether they are in advertising, PR, or other any other discipline. 

I caught this very interesting ZDNet Asia article in which Eileen Yu interviews Ovum analyst Steve Hodgkinson on the benefits of Enterprise 2.0.  Eileen summarizes Steve’s “top five reasons why businesses in Asia should deploy Web 2.0 tools”:

1. To encourage a culture of information-sharing and collaboration between staff.
2. To appeal to the creative energy of social networking behavior in the Net generation, or young tech-savvy “Generation X and Y” employees.
3. To provide a forum that spotlights workers who contribute to cross-organization discussions.
4. To stimulate innovation and leverage knowledge across the organization.
5. To create transparent “corporate memory”, or establish dialog of rationale behind important policy and strategy decisions.

I agree with Steve’s observations, we have been doing these things at SAP, and the benefits are clear.  With regard to some of the risks of web 2.0, many of the items Steve mentions are real; however, there were and still are risks with more mainstream technologies like email and USB sticks.  While the security issues will be sorted out — they’re certainly not deal breakers!  The one comment that Steve made that really struck me was:

Companies that are more closed, or “anti-social” in nature, have legitimate needs to manage their operational risks, and restrict information flows to protect sensitive data, business processes and intellectual property, he noted.

These organizations typically need a higher degree of efficiency and predictability in their business, rather than have tools that enable innovation.

I don’t believe that any company has the option of not being innovative nor do I believe that being “anti-social” should at any level be tolerable.  Web 2.0 tools have as much a place behind the firewall  for business productivity gains as they do outside the firewall for knowledge transfer/sharing.  While companies must manage operational risk and protect sensitive data, these needs don’t negate the use or the value of Web 2.0 tools. 

Is this Enterprise 2.0 Asia Style?   I think not — Enterprise 2.0 is global!

Alana Samuels at The L.A. Times notes (online subscription is free) that mainstream newspapers are finding ways to incorporate blog content on their sites.  More specifically, she also looks at how papers like The Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), and USA Today are sharing revenue with bloggers.  Doubtful that anyone is making serious money under these arrangements, but that’s not the point.  There’s mutual benefit — newspapers need more relevant content, and bloggers need …  well, let’s go to the article to see what they need:

“Some popular blogs have been ‘absorbed’, to use the New York Times’ term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue.

“Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world ‘with all the readership and support that comes along with it’.

“The blog gets more traffic on the Times site than it did when it was accessible only at Freakonomics.com, he said. Unlike before, now it can make money.
“With the funds, the Freakonomics authors are sprucing up the blog, adding a full-time editor and filmmaker.

“Most bloggers are paid little, if anything, for the thousands of words they type. Teaming up with a newspaper is a way to establish credibility, said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, which distributes blog content to a handful of newspaper sites, including USA Today’s, through a service called BlogBurst.

“‘Being picked up by the mainstream media’, he said, ‘is the highest form of flattery’”

I’m not sure that all bloggers would agree with that last statement.  But I do think that attention economics — which are not entirely based on $$$ — might begin to bring about a friendly truce between the mainstream media and bloggers.

I really wanted to post about this earlier but as many of you may have noticed we’ve been pretty busy since TechEd Las Vegas.  I had a longish post planned that went into a lot of detail regarding Demo Jam.  That idea was scuttled the moment Eddie Hermann wrote this post on his blog.   Serves me right for taking to long but it also serves you better because he along with Dan McWeeney should be telling the story of Majority Desk.

Eddie’s post is actually one of the highlights of my career.  You see, both Dan and Eddie are from Colgate-Palmolive which means they’re customers.  Eddie mentioned this in his post:

Some other SAP guys that helped with the videos and actually make SAP fun to work with, if you can believe it.

• Craig Cmehil
• Thomas Jung
• Mike Prosceno

When a customer becomes a friend and a friend tells you that one of the reasons that being a customer is fun, at least in part, is because of you – WOW.  How do you top that? 

Now I’ve only know Eddie and Dan for just over a year now.  Craig Cmehil introduced us to each other after they won Demo Jam 2006 in Las Vegas.  Over the past year I’ve gotten to know them a little better and while I do consider them both friends, we definitely come from completely different worlds, they’re software developers and I’m a “PR” guy. What we share is a sense of community that the concepts and tools of social media allow for in a way that hasn’t always been availableble. In this particular case it was the SDN community, social networking and blogging that enabled our getting to know one another. 

This my friends is the power of social media! 

If your going to be in Munich next week for TechEd you’ll want to attend Demo Jam!  Dan, Eddie, James and Cote (of Redmonk fame) and I had some good laughs after the demo and we discussed ways in which to make the demo even more fun for Munich.  If any of the props we discussed actually make it into the Munich performance; it will be the mother of all demos!

Do you have your Wii Hands on?  I do!

Technorati Tags: Wii Hands, Majority Desk, Eddie Herrman, Dan McWeeney, Redmonk, SAP TechEd 07, SDN