Accidentally on Purpose Blog

Ferg Devins will be one of the 1100 Molson employees that will take to the streets of Toronto on the morning of February 5th for “Toque Tuesday.”  This is Raising the Roof’s  national day of awareness and fundraising in support of combating youth homelessness in Canada.  If your interested you can show your support by buying your toque here. 

For those of you not familiar with what a toque (French) or tuque (English) is — it came to prominence (for me anyway) courtesy of Bob and Doug’ McKenzie’s, The Great White North comedy album — circa 1981.  For those of you that don’t recall, please enjoy the The Twelve Days Of Christmas - “Kanadian Korner” style, Eh?

Follow along as Molson will be updating their community blog as to their efforts. 

This is from a few weeks ago but hey, I’m just now getting caught up from the past 10 days of vacation! 

The BBC’s Peter Day contributed a byline in the Daily Mail about his experiences with podcasting, a medium that may not be getting the raw numbers still enjoyed by traditional broadcast, but which appears to be better serving its listeners (at least on the BBC).

Until now listeners have been remote: all we had was ratings to tell us who was listening, and a few appreciative or moaning letters. Now we have a new democracy of broadcasting: listening habits made manifest, ratings created by listeners making an active decision to download a particular programme.

Radio is music, chat and news but most of all it is ideas, and podcasting is going some way to redefine the ideas that interest our listeners. Podcasting is a new kind of listening, much more active and involved than merely sitting back to wait for what comes next.

Day concludes:  “It makes us broadcasters think much harder about who what and why we are talking to. It moves broadcasting much closer to conversation.”  That’s a big admission coming from a star member of the BBC, whose brand is almost synonymous with its broadcast “voice” — the distinct breeding and tone that have long characterized the smart men and women who have spoken on BBC radio.  I seriously doubt that brand will go away.  But the voice of the BBC may soon be the voice of its listeners.

In a very smart article about the advent of social media, AdWeek’s Brian Morrissey eulogizes the death of the campaign microsite.  More and more businesses are looking for ways to connect with consumers where ever they go. 

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends.

“We really believe in fishing where the fish are,” said Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola. “The old model is to build your own site, then spend media dollars to bring them there.”

Not so long ago, marketing was like the mantra in “Field of Dreams”:  “build it and they will come.”  Today, we know that we first need to understand what to build, and where to build it.  The first step, as always — listening!

Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch adds a fresh breath of air to the conversation on community-based marketing.  More and more people are finding that bigger doesn’t mean better.

While much of the recent focus on social media marketing centers on the big social sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us, search marketers would be smart to spend some time learning about micro communities.

Unlike the larger general-purpose sites, the traffic from a micro community will be vertically focused on your niche, which makes for a big bonus. While these communities get the label of “micro”, some of them are not really so small at all. You can get tons of useful traffic from them by matching the nature of your content to the right community.

I say, let’s just stop calling these communities “micro.”  These are the true communities that people need to think about.  As for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., it’s better to think of these as communities of communities.  It’s a lesson that’s being learned all around the business world, including eBay, which, as I recently posted, has decided to break out its own communities.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Watch, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, eBay

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

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.