LB's Rambles

Crunching More Than the Numbers

The keynote at the New Media Expo today was George Wright, VP of Marketing and Sales for Blendtec - the company behind www.willitblend.com . The videos are hysterical, but there's a pretty good business story here as well.
Before Will It Blend, Wright says, they had major problems. The brand was unknown. Weak brand = weak sales.
Wright says he was new at the company. He walked in one day and found company founder and engineer Tom Dickson had been testing strange things, such as a 2x4 board, and testing to see if it would brak the blender. That's how it started.
Wright reminded the audience that the next runaway hit could be under their noses - and nobody was noticing because it was taken for granted, a kind of in-house oddity.

Being Social Outside a "Social Network"

Steve Baldwin of Didit makes some interesting points over on the Search Insider blog today, noting that "social media" embraces more than just the big networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. He points to forums - fora, sorry - that have been around since the early days of the internet and that continue to evolve into places where conversations about products and services are taking place every day. So, as a marketer, whether people are signing up as "fans" of your brand on Facebook, or visiting your page on MySpace, or talking about the brand on an industry-wide forum site, you need to be reaching all of them.

He's right.

“Forums” have been a means of two-way conversation well before the Web really got going, via usegroups and other earlier conversations. PR people - the good ones, anyway - have been counseling clients for a long time now about the need to think in terms of conversations rather than bullhorns. It can be done on “social network” sites such as Facebook just as effectively as on an established forum - but the smart marketer will be in both places.

Surprising Video Trend

eMarketer has a report today on what I would call a fairly surprising trend in online video. It has long been a truism that viewers of online video prefer short clips - the kind you generally find on sites like YouTube. While some people do view longer clips, the advice usually given to people trying to get advertising or PR messages out online, for example, has been: keep it short, preferably under 4 minutes.

Maybe not so much. According to eMarketer, a couple of recent surveys indicate that viewers are anxious to watch longer videos - particularly TV shows - online, if/when they are available. Nearly half of all users told Harris Interactive that they felt the same way about movies.

eMarketer says that's good news for producers, fearful that their audiences might dwindle overall if more online viewing starts cutting into TV and movie watching. That doesn't seem to have happened.

eMarketer also says that a surprisingly large percentage of viewers realize "the money for longer programming has to come from somewhere." They seem willing to watch ads for long form videos - more so than they are for the short videos that make up such a large percentage of today's viewing. That's a new trend, to me - and I think an interesting one showing good possibilities as online video continues to mature.

Target or Opportunity?

eMarketer has a smart and balanced article today on public reaction to behavioral targeting that I think manages to avoid some of the extreme positions on both sides of the privacy debate.

On the one hand, according to a Harris Poll cited in the article, more than half the respondents to the survey consider themselves very or somewhat comfortable with sites that allow targeted advertising. On the other hand, of course, that means nearly half - 45% are not comfortable with it, and that's hard for marketers to ignore. And, despite what they say about their comfort level, more than half are uncomfortable with the actual implementation of advertising targeted to reflect their own browsing habits.

What does all this mean? eMarketer concludes that advertisers and publishers are going to have to rely more heavily on informed consent, and allowing Web visitors to opt in to receiving targeted ads based on their behavior. I have no problem with that - my problem is with the self-styled "privacy advocates" who want to protect me from receiving ads that may, in fact, be relevant to me. I'll take relevance - but I still want some degree of control over who gets to know what about me.

Podcast Predictions

As a podcaster myself, I am always trying to do whatever I can to spread the word about podcasting in general. You know, "a rising tide floats all ships," and so forth. And - possibly because of the circles in which I travel - I do seem to be encountering more people who don't just stare at me and ask, "a pod-WHAT?"

It's encouraging to find that I'm not alone. Steve Smith, writing in MediaPost's Mobile Insider blog, says podcasting remains a niche - but a big one, with perhaps 10 million people - but it is beginning to attract serious amounts of audio and video advertising. A lot of it, he says, appears to be created especially for web use, rather than just repurposed TV ads.

That's good news - and the dollars will be welcome. Smith quotes industry people who say they think podcasting is set to break out of its niche and become mainstream. As a podcaster, I'd say it can't happen soon enough.

Counter Intuitive

That's "counter" as in "sales counter." According to eMarketer, a lot of shoppers are largely in the habit of checking out possible purchases off-line, in brick-and-mortar establishments, before coming home and ordering them on-line. According to the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, better than 2/3 of consumers - young and old - do their shopping that way, looking at the product first in retail stores and then buying on line. I would have thought it was the other way around - especially given the number of studies we've seen recently about the growing trend to rely on friends and others we trust to give us online reviews of products. Ah, the joys of statistics...

12 Billion

That's the number of online videos watched in May, according to comScore, as quoted by MediaPost.

12 billion. Up 45% from a year ago. Up 10% from April.

12 billion.

So what's your company's strategy when it comes to online video?

Hint: it takes more than hiring some company and saying "I want my video to go viral."

The Mighty Dinosaur in the C-Suite

Steven Cody, Managing Partner at Peppercom, has a fairly depressing commentary over at the Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog site - depressing because it is accurate. Cody laments the lack of understanding of digital PR in the C-suites. He quotes various communications execs, speaking about their bosses:

• "The CEO is disinterested in communications altogether."
• "The C-suite is for it as long as it saves money."
• "They see it as an expensive tool to use during hard economic times."
• "My C-suite simply doesn't believe in digital."
• "My communications department is ready to implement a digital strategy, but management and other departments are uncomfortable with technology."
• "They have no idea what it is."

Thus spake Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of the dinosaurs, at the top of the food chain, looking forward to an undoubtedly bright future.

Also, alas, extinction.

I don't expect the CEOs and other Cs of major corporations necessarily to lead the way on technology. They have other matters on their plate, necessary functions if they are to become or remain industry leaders. But technology isn't waiting for them. Cody has some very good suggestions about how to speed up the education of these people. He's right. It's just that we're all well along the way through this communications revolution we're all undergoing - and it would be so much easier for all of us if the top people had a clue...

What's Wrong with the Target?

Meir Zohar, the CEO and founder of eXelate, has a somewhat depressing but accurate observation posted today on MediaPost's Online Media Daily: targeted behavioral advertising still doesn't "play in Peoria."

He has some useful observations about why that should be, and a couple of suggestions for the marketing community about things we can to to help alleviate the problem. But there is little doubt that it IS a problem - and a big one at that.

And it's one, frankly, that I don't get. As I've said many times here and elsewhere, if I am going to have to view advertising, I would far rather it be for something that interests and concerns me, not some generic crap for products I neither want nor need. To do that, advertisers need to have some idea of what interests me. So far, no storm troopers have kicked in my doors at night, despite the advertisers having this "useful" information.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Making SEO More Relevant

Jeff Jarvis has a thought-provoking post on BuzzMachine today, questioning the future of Search Engine Optimization as Google becomes more sophisticated about tailoring search results to the individual needs of each searcher. Those of us who encourage that sort of thing by making our search histories available to Google are getting much more relevant results pages when we search.

But does that mean that SEO is finished? I don't think so. As several of the commenters on Jeff's thread point out, it's more likely that we'll see a shift in the way SEO is done, to optimize it for as many potential customers (users, readers, whatever) as possible. It may get more difficult for marketers to game the system - and that's a plus, as far as I'm concerned. But marketers and site designers will have to use increasingly sophisticated SEO techniques to try to ensure that their sites wind up on the first page of my results - and the results of people with similar needs but different preferences.