In deference to Peter Kim’s M20 list of marketing blogs, of which this feeble effort now resides in 12th place, I need to stay on topic and be pedantic about marketing.
In the spirit of this week’s random theme, here are some random topics which I have been thinking about lately:
1. Facebook: joined in January to the horror of my daughter, who has lived on the thing since it was launched. Now spend more and more time there without knowing why. I intend to do a deeper anthropological study of the phenomenon and make the argument that the company needs to be there in a big way. Initial fears: it is a closed system; it is spammish; it is a great demo for our public sector/college marketing efforts. It needs to be watched as part of our Social Media Marketing monitoring efforts.
2. Vibrant Media/Intellitext: I remain opposed to this insertion of advertiser links within editorial copy. This begs the question of can an ex-journalist be effective as a marketer?
3. Corporate Blog Policy: Ours is being reviewed. A new general counsel and the discipline of an annual review is now in process. I have a new personal corporate blog policy: I am going to see how long I can go without mentioning the “L word” and I don’t mean Lebanon. Why? This remains a personal endeavor and if I want to talk about the company I’ll do it on a company blog.
4. Agency Disintermediation: The “D-word” of the 90s, you know, the end of the middle-man, death of a travel agent, extinction of the human modem — the crumb catchers who act as a go-between. Ive been thinking a lot about the role of the traditional advertising agency and clients given the rise of the global interactive network and the consolidation of ad servers by the big players. I need to think carefully on this topic, but for now, I see clients going direct to the networks, and fragmenting their interactive operations across boutiques (viral agencies, microsite developers, ad servers, email outsourcers, etc. etc.)
5. Content Effectiveness: I need to embark on a project to rigorously quantify content effectiveness, fall out points, A/B and multivariate testing. I know the framework exists, I just need to focus on discovering it.
6. Social Media Metrics: lots of thoughts about the marriage of social media monitoring, actions/outreach and impact/ROI. Need to spend some time in NYC this week discussing the metrics, but I believe there is a major brand management move in the offing.
7. Conferences: I’m not a conference goer, but there are more and more beginning to pile up on the calendar. I thought conferences were somewhat doomed, but now the whole BarCamp thing seems to be breathing life back into them.
I share your concern re: #2. I’m also curious to see where your corporate blog policy nets out. There are many of us who identify with this issue.
Concern about Vibrant/Intellitxt or ex-reporters as marketers?
I’ll do something at length on the corporate policy.
I hate Intellitxt from a reader standpoint: they get in the way of reading and are a pain to keep from interfering. One site I know of, Anandtech, gives users the option to turn it off. Supposedly they maintain a separate editorial & sales/advertising staff so the reviews remain unbiased, but the EiC (Anand) of course maintains oversight of the whole company and insisted users be given that option, that way he can make the sales team and his readers happy (in theory).