A Wider Net

The Bloggies are in - congratulations to all the nominees and winners!

Among my favorites who won this year:

Cute Overload won Best American Weblog.

YouTube won Best eb Application for Weblogs

Gizmodo won Best Computers or Technology Weblog (why Engadget wasn’t even nominated is beyond me)
Lifehacker won Best Group Weblog

And my awards for the winners with the most non-P.C. titles goes to My Boyfriend is a Twat and Tokyo Girl Down Under.

Every blogger has his leftovers. And for leftovers comes Tumblr. At least that’s what I see it for - all the little stuff that you want to post but can’t/shouldn’t/won’t post on your main blog. It creates a Tumblog - a running log of thoughts, snippets, posts, scraps, and ends.
I played with it for a few minutes - and in those few minutes I had my own Tumblog created. You can make simple posts, quote text, insert conversation snippet, upload videos and images, integrate multiple RSS feeds, and even moblog to it. For a better example try Leo Laporte’s tumblog or the project.ioni.st . (I’m not sure if the last one is a Tumblr tumblog but it’s a tumblog either way.)

They also have an alpha version of “radar” - a display of recent tumblr posts - which is designed to help people discover other tumblogs.

I’m not sure at the moment how I would prescribe this to a typical marketing person. You may find them easy and fun enough to want one for each new campaign as a sort of progress journal. If you find a great marketing application let me know. At the very least, you can use this as a creative outlet - something many people in our business need from time to time.

Thanks to one of our Creative Directors for sending me this breaking news:

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch.

Awesome.

Well, they don’t call it that. But they went and ripped off Second Life to design their PlayStation3 “home” interface, due to launch this fall. They aim to sell 10-40 million consoles, while second life has yet to sell 3 million users. I guess the real marketing virtual land rush will begin when Sony says so.

If you’re looking for reasons to stay away from Second Life here are two:

Last week disgruntled users “nuked” the pretend stores of American Apparel and Reebok.

This week ultra-conservative nutjobs vandalized John Edward’s virtual headquarters.

Days later, there appears to be nothing mentioned about either incident on the Reuters Second Life News Center. I guess the press can be bought in Second Life, too.
One could argue that getting virtual radioactive sludge or virtual feces slung on your brand represents PR, and bad PR is good PR. Like my cholesterol, I’ll stick to the good kind.

Michael Stelzner, a prominent white paper author and consultant, wrote about a new RainToday study into the state of lead generation. From his post:

A new study by RainToday revealed that 74 percent of professional services companies ranked white papers as an excellent source of lead generation.

In addition, white papers are one of the top two marketing strategies businesses plan on implementing in the next two years.

White papers make a lot of sense for B2B marketing because they position your company as a thought leader and they foster deep conversations that can lead to new business. One thing that isn’t clear to me is whether these papers are getting read. I’m sure Mr. Stelzner has plenty to say on that topic on his blog. It comes to mind that Forrester Research discovered several years ago that their study briefs, which were only a dozen pages or so, were considered too long. Their solution was to boil the study down into a 3-5 minute video summary.

That, to me, is a more compelling way to leverage all the work that went into the white paper. Record a 3-5 minute video and post it on your website and maybe in one or more aggregation sites. The video player should be embeddable on other people’s blogs, so they can better reference your example. B2B customers will appreciate the short-form because it shows sensitivity to their time, and it makes your company look more tech savvy.

Having just written that, I expect a call from my marketing department any minute now about a couple of my white papers…

If you dig the Geico caveman campaign, you’re in luck. ABC plans to air a sitcom starring three of them. Adrants pointed me to the TMZ story published on Friday. Personally I’d rather see a Gecko sitcom. I’ve seen enough TV shows portraying men as stupid as cavemen (true or not). I still bear the scars from Married with Children.
The caveman sitcom will apparently also feature a Geico spokesperson role in the cast. This makes simple product placement seem rather prehistoric by comparison. This is branded content at it’s pinnacle (but the quality obviously can’t be judged yet).

Searching around the net I could find no article describing how deep Geico is into the funding and development of the show. If Geico or it’s agency bought the content, commissioning the pilot and pitching it to ABC, it would not surprise me. Buying branded content is nothing new: check out this NYT article from a few months ago. In it, they mention that  companies like Burger King and Anheuser-Busch are producing full-length movies and their own television networks. Companies have often funded documentaries, or created their own content for television and/or web and now they’re making their own video games and working harder to capture viewers attention outside of the TiVo-removed ad insertions.

Building your own branded content can position your company as a thought leader, or position your product or company in the heart of pop culture. Smaller companies can do this too, now, publishing the content through their own web site, through a custom micro site, or through any of the content platforms like YouTube or Brightcove. One of my favorite examples was Reebok’s Terry Tate Office Linebacker campaign. Which reminds me - make your own branded content all you want - it still has to be good.

Nice article on mobile marketing. Mobile phone marketing, that is. The phone marketers seem to have stolen that term. What, now, do we call mobile marketing when it refers to themed Winnebago’s, expanding tractor trailers, and buses full of XBOX’s? Vehicular Marketing? Wheel-ality Marketing? Global-Positionally Variable Marketing?
I noticed Wikipedia doesn’t have the answer:

Excerpt: Mobile Marketing can refer to one of two categories of marketing. First, and relatively new, is meant to describe marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a mobile phone. Second, and a more traditional definition, is meant to describe marketing in a moving fashion - for example - technology road shows or moving billboards.

Does anyone else find it amusing when a technology like Telepresence comes along to save us from the pain of having to travel for face to face meetings, and then they turn around and launch a conference about it that requires travelling to meet face to face?

Don’t get me wrong - I’m all down with telepresence - I think it’s awesome. But traveling to a show about it just feels bass-ackwards to me.

National Transit Media has brought the K2 to the United States. At 40′x60′, this double-sided mobile monster will get your message noticed with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. These will suit product launches, brand-immersed meetings, and of course, exhibitor and sponsor marketing at trade shows and special events. The whole thing unfolds from a trailer that acts as its stabilizing base - very slick.
You can change the banner in about an hour, so you can sell different sponsors for each day of an event, or change your graphics daily to keep people engaged and broaden the message.