Category: Interactive Marketing

Keynote @ Folio

i will take the stage in the ballroom of the Chicago Marriott in about two hours to talk — according to the show program — about “What e-centric marketers want from magazine brands.” Instead I entitled my slides, “Geek Marketing” and open with Steve Rubel @ Edelman’s year-old definition of geek marketers as those people who straddle the worlds of marketing and technology and drive the two together into interesting and effective stuff. As usual I feel unprepared and ready to crash and burn. I don’t do well in ballroom environments, with microphones and podiums. I greatly prefer to sit on the edge of the stage, tell stories, and take questions. Standing up there for 75 minutes with a powerpoint is my idea of hell.

Folio is one of the biggest shows for the magazine industry. As a trade magazine it was best known to me as a journalist for its annual salary surveys which allowed me benchmark my compensation against other reporters and editors. This one is pretty packed, and fortunately, what what I have seen and heard, not mired in Print vs. Online 101 discussions, in fact, Time’s president and publisher, Ed McCarrick just delivered a morning keynote about the reinvention of Time as a digital property, not

At dinner last night with yesterday’s keynote speaker, Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback (and fellow PC Week alumnus), we joked about the doom and gloom scenarios that would so easy and so glibly delivered: “run for your lives! Print is dead.” But the reality is there is hope for magazine brands in this day and age, the question is whether or not a spirit of innovation has taken hold so the magazines can start to drive the evolution of media and not react to it.

My agenda today is pretty basic:

  1. What it is like to leave media for marketing?
  2. What does an ecommerce focused advertiser look for from media?
  3. The difference between demand generation and brand awareness online
  4. The Funnel
  5. The marketing dollar
  6. Brand is reputation and word of mouth
  7. The death of the microsite model
  8. The rise of the social model
  9. Our latest and most ambitious online campaign (Voices of the Summer Olympics)
  10. Some advice

I’ll try to post my slides later. Until them, wish me luck and no, don’t tell me to imagine the audience in their underwear.

Someone needs to write an open letter to Ballmer …

So the Seinfeld-Gates comedy duo has been disbanded and the weirdest tech ad campaign in years has been unplugged.

Crispin-Porter limps away with two black eyes. Microsoft takes a kick to its reputational crotch. Mac fans chortle with glee.

Be it far from me to tell MSFT what to do, but I think I will work on a post to tell them what to do.

PS: I use and I like Vista.

“A blog or two speculated tonight that Microsoft would announce the end of those ads tomorrow. I’ve just spoken to a Microsoft source who confirms the ads will cease, that Microsoft is canceling them after only a few weeks and will be making that announcement tomorrow.

Confirmed.

Seinfeld Gets the Boot in Microsoft Ads – Tech Check with Jim Goldman – CNBC.com.

Glassdoor.com – Foolish waste of time

For the last few weeks there’s been an annoying ad on my Facebook page inviting me to dish what I know about working at Lenovo. (“Wow, that ad is smart, it knows where I work!”)

Today I clicked and there it is: Glassdoor.com, another Vault-like insider’s guide to working at companies, complete with salary information. The come-on is simple — fill out the survey, write some commentary — all anonymous of course — and get a chance at winnng $500. They get free insider’s scoop, and eventually populate a big fat database for job seekers.

This is why Facebook is growing more tedious on me, but in the end, this is not Facebook’s fault. Just a dumb idea that uses Facebook and its capabilities to advertise.

Why dumb? Out of a moment of tedium I went through the whole process and Glassdoor rejected the submission because it required at least 100 words to be written. Um … idiots. First, disclose that at the front end so I can decided to be done with you, second, be happy with what you get. If I believe I can summarize the Lenovo experience in six well-selected words, well that’s what I think it can be done it. But no, you’re going to reject a VP’s commentary because it isn’t verbose enough?

Not me. I hate survey based business plans. I hate surveys that don’t disclose how many minutes out of my day they are going to eat before they are done with me.

“Every day, our members share what it’s really like to work at their companies. To see their ratings, reviews, and salaries — simply post an anonymous review or salary of your own.”

Glassdoor.com – Post a Review or Salary.

Just write 100 words.

Mid-Game Lenovo Athlete Blogger Update

Welcome to the last week of the Beijing Olympics. I wanted to look at how the heart of our online activation of our sponsorship is going, and let you know about some good content being generated by the athletes.

First, for some background on the project, we issued a press release today that can be found here at MarketWatch. The nut of the release is:

“Lenovo has provided IdeaPad and other notebook PCs and video cameras to more than 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and 29 sports who are participating in the program. Their blogs are presented on the website www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames. To date, there have been 1,374 athlete postings on the forum, reaching more than 8.5 million Olympic fans through conversations on third-party blogs and social media sites.”

This is a pretty complex social media play, so bear with me.

  1. These are athlete owned and produced blogs. Lenovo has no editorial oversight on what they write and photograph. The only guideline applied is the IOC’s Rule 41. These are the first Games where athletes have been permitted to blog after the opening ceremonies, and so far there have been few to no restrictions applied.
  2. The plan is to aggregate – or collect in one place – all the blog posts, biographies of the athletes, and provide linkage to …
    1. A YouTube channel: LenovoAthleteBlogger
    2. A Flickr photoset
    3. A Twitter stream: Lenovo2008
  3. Lenovo promotes the primary page – http://www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames or summergames.lenovo.com – through a banner campaign on Federated Media’s network of blogs. Promote blogs on blogs, right? Right, so we’re building dynamic banners that refresh with the content posted by the athletes and running it automatically through the Federated network.
  4. In Europe the European Broadcast Union is hosting most, if not all, of the country specific video of the Games. We’re a primary sponsor, running pre-roll and display ads to the tune of many, many millions of impressions. Due to IP targeting, this program is only visible in Europe. Those clicks are going to the Voices of the Olympic Games page.
  5. In the US there is a major program in place on NBCOlympics.com. Those clicks are not going to the bloggers, but a landing page on Lenovo.com that explains our sponsorship of the Games and role as the lead technology provider and designer of the Olympic torch.
  6. We’re running paid search and bidding on some Olympic terms and sports related to our bloggers and their sports. The idea is to find the athletes’ fans and make them aware that a channel exists for them to follow their favorite sport.

How to declare success? I think there are three vectors to success in this program.

  • First, of course, is “gross tonnage” – how many people looked or heard about it. We asked the athletes to put a badge on their blogs, so we’re getting some impressions on that. But to be frank, I could care less about the gross tonnage measurements.
  • Second is PR effects. Is this a good story? Did the press find it interesting? CNET Asia has a post titled “How Lenovo Changed our Olympics Experience.” The Burlington, Vermont newspaper, the Burlington Free Press is syndicating the blog posts of hometown favorite, US weightlifter Carissa Gump using Pluck. The Rocky Mountain News writes about it. That’s just the press. The blog pick up has been very gratifying, with some good conversations with bloggers developing both here in China and globally. This also is good positioning for the brand with the issue of free speech and communications hanging over the pre-Game buzz (a non-issue as far as I can see).
  • Engagement and conversations. My line is this: “The Lenovo Voice of the Summer Olympics is not going to be measured by the Web 1.0 metrics of millions and million of impressions but by the Web 2.0 measure of thousands and thousands of conversations between athletes and their fans.” Nuff said.

From a purely selfish point of view, the best part of this project has been meeting the athlete bloggers and seeing how genuinely excited they are to hear those words that thrill any blogger: “I read your blog.” They started off doing this to let their friends and family know what they are up to. Then suddenly, some, like India’s first individual gold medalist, Abhinav Bindra, have a place for an entire nation to offer their congratulations. One second he had 30 comments on a post. An hour after winning gold he had a thousand! My thanks go to them, because this is their project in the end.

Purely selfish photo of your humble narrator with US epee fencer/blogger Capt. (USAF) Seth Kelsey who “gets to travel all over the world and stab people with swords.”

Having a team on the ground to drive the content creation has proven invaluable and I couldn’t have asked for more than Rohit Bhargava and Kaitlyn Wilkins from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Project. They have been tirelessly roaming the streets of Beijing, interviewing reporters, snapping photos, tweeting away on Twitter, helping me cover this vast project while I do the thing in the war room. Back home, the team of Esteban Panzeri, Alan White and Tim Supples are keeping the sites live and building the infrastructure, delivering the PCs and cameras … the details and logistics have been staggering. Here in China, Yan An for his diplomacy with the IOC and Sheji Ho for his interactive expertise.

I have no doubt the second half of this program will be just as interesting and surprising as the first. I guess that’s the fun part of all this for an adrenaline fiend like myself – it all changes hour by hour.

Here’s Seth Kelsey on YouTube talking about blogging.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com

This is a very important column by David Carr on the effects the Web 2.0 Games are having on the containment of content by the mainstream media. Very important. This is it ladies and gentlemen. Image of little boys with their fingers in leaking dikes comes to mind. Take 10,500 athletes, give them video cameras, cell phones, whatever, and watch them share what they see with the world.

“On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC’s game of “whack-a-mole” as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free, its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com.

Faster, higher, stronger and digital – USATODAY.com on Olympic interactive marketing

Big piece in USA Today — talking about leveraging social media as a sponsor:

“Blogging from China. The Beijing Games are the first to allow athletes to blog during the Games. In the past, athletes could blog only until opening day, then resume after the Games ended. But new International Olympic Committee rules permit blogging during the Games.

Lenovo doled out computers and video cameras to more than 100 Olympians, asking them to tell their tales. Lenovo.com/VoicesOfTheGames has contributions from athletes representing more than 25 countries.”

Faster, higher, stronger and digital – USATODAY.com.

How to market Centrino 2

Jim Forbes blogs about how the wireless capabilities of the Intel Centrino 2 chipset should be marketed.

“If I were working in PR today for Intel or one of its portable computer marketing partners, I would have set up tables with new notebooks that incorporate the new technology in a parking lot or field. Each of the tables would also have an older notebook with legacy wireless networking chipsets. And each of the tables would set in front of as range marker listing the distance between it and the WiFi router.

The very visible point of the demonstration is that the new chipsets free notebook users from being close to a WiFi access point.

Now let’s think a minute about Intel’s WiMax WAN technology. Want a fun way to demonstrate it? Set up a test network along Amtrak’s Oakland, CA to Sacramento right of way. Now load up 15 reporters, editors or industry luminaries in several of the cars on a train’s consist ( the term used to describe an engine and cars expressed as a single unit). Let them experience true persistent mobile connectivity, sit back and wait an hour or so for the rave reviews to appear.

Mobile persistent connectivity is a transformational experience for most users.”

Jim and I worked together at PC Week in the mid-80s. He has seen it all when it comes to PC marketing and I think he’s right. Users need to see this stuff in the field to grasp the impact of what we marketers try to embody in the speeds and feeds that characterize “spec pod” marketing.

Ditching Twitter (twhirl)

I tried and rejected Twitter in 07, returned in January, followed it via the Twhirl desktop client and the TwitterFox plug in, and now am basically saying it sucks yet again.

Sure, it’s another valid channel to monitor from a brand reputation standpoint. Who is bitching or praising brand terms is a good thing to know. But in terms of signal-to-noise ratios, it’s mostly noise, a classic example of the ourosborosphere/echo chamber promoting their latest blog posts, product beta, or book on social networking.

Only two twitter accounts really caught my attention — and both are demented. One was Merlin Mann’s @hotdogsladies and the other was @ainsleyofattack (recommended by Merlin). The reality — I don’t care what some Forrester, Jupiter, TechCrunch, GigaOm bloviator has to say about ButtDog 2.0, whether they want to organize a “tweet-up” at the brew pub after the BarCamp, or if they think Twitter’s Fail Whale is the meme of the week.

No, what I like to read is dementia such as this Tweet from @ainsleyofattack: “AinsleyofAttack It’s confirmed. During sex I sound like a laundry bag filled with chihuahuas being smacked against a MoonBounce. 10:54 AM June 28, 2008 from web “

So, rather than unsub from everyone who talks about things that bore me to tears (should it be called social media? what is the ROI of social media? why do airlines suck?), I decided to expand my circle of suck to include everything, and I mean everything, but joining the cool kids’ march to FriendFeed.

Which meant installing a FriendFeed desktop client — the Alert Thingy — which rolls the whole burrito of diggs, delicious tags, flickr uploads, Amazon buys, tweets, etc. into one cacophony of desktop alerts.

World’s ugliest running shoe? They’re gonna be mine.


My custom running shoes

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

I need a pair of running shoes — the old Salomon trail shoes are rounding on the heels and a threat to my health. So off I went for recommendations from the CrossFit community and came up with these — Nike Free’s.

When I checked them out on Nike.com I discovered I could customize them — really customize them — so in honor of my Cotuit Skiff, the Snafu II, I went with a yellow body and a green highlight.

Professionally, while these suckers will take a discouraging four to six weeks to arrive, I liked:

1. The customization interface was really intuitive and kind of cool to play around with.
2. The text entry for putting words on the heel cups was capricious — permitting some words: “Sinister”; but dinging others: “Dexter.”
3. The email progress notification is a great example of post-sale-pre-delivery expectation management. Including a photo of my shoe is very smart.

There’s a lot to learn from Nike in the customization and communications process. I know I will probably be horrified at how ugly these are on my feet, will look like I have two lemons strapped to my feet, and have an argument with my wife for not conferring with her before committing the order.