A Wider Net

According to Hill & Knowlton, the current issue of PR Magazine has a cover story people who pose as consumers to blog for clients.  Apparently this practice will likely be illegal soon in the EU.
Seems like there are loads of similar testimonial fraud territory that the US could tackle, from user reviews to client case studies to radio testimonials.  Blog posers are certainly among the most insidious, since it undermines a media form built on trust.

Here’s a relevant article that asked the question about the legality of Splogs over a year ago. Since then there have been a lot of high profile fraud examples but I found no reference of any real progress on dealing with the issue.

Note: The PR Mag article isn’t on their web site - it’s apparently behind the subscriber login.

NewTeeVee has a nice list of 10 great video mashup sites. Don’t forget to check out the ones in the top paragraph, too.

Each one has different functionality - some are designed to track popularity of videos across multiple sites like youtube and google, while others provide make-your-own-thing-and-share-it tools.

It will make your head spin a little, but if you’re attempting to follow the social/web/viral/video/mashup thing, then consider NeeTeeVee’s list a “to-do” list for ya.

What’s a widget? Check here, here, and here. Widgets are basically virtual desktop accessories - clocks, radios, cd players, weather indicators, stock tickers, etc. They’re fun, wildly customizable, potentially super-useful, and most importantly - they’re entirely up to you.

From a marketing perspective there are great opportunities in widgets - ranging from advertiser-funded displays to entirely branded widgets like this Harry Potter widget. Once this baby adorns the screen real estate of their target fan base, the marketing job is over. This one provides a countdown timer and a news feed. Believe it or not, it’s not the first Harry Potter widget - this one conjures up a quote from the movies on request. Also, these widgets did not come from the film publisher. Movie makers ought to be looking at these widgets and integrating them into the overall fan experience - connecting them to direct news, fan programs, movie microsites, trailers, etc.

You may have noticed that those two examples were only for Macs. Macs have built-in widget support. PC users can use Yahoo Widgets - found here. And yes, the Harry Potter widget is available there, too.

At CES I also spotted a neat desktop device, the Emtrace WidgetStation that uses widgets so you can change it’s display features as often as you like.

Custom widgets for corporate communications are being created all the time - some using a platform like Yahoo, some are simply stand-alone applications. Basically, these mini applications are designed to sit on your computer screen and make available crucial information at all times - critical internal notices, announcements, schedules. The corporate widgets can combine critical updates with company brand, vision, and value reinforcement, as well as helpful information like local traffic updates, stock, and weather.

I’m buying stock in the really big companies that make really, really, really big monitors.

Here are some of the CES photos I took so far.

iMedia Connection: Drive Consumers with Online Coupons

Great article about the merits and tactics of online coupons.

Adrants links to a few clever agency christmas cards here. Clever… but while these elaborate e-cards were being made, who was handling their clients?

Swivel just launched, according to Techcrunch. This is still a very early startup phase for what may be a wildly interesting data playground. Users can submit their own data - any data - and share it with the world. Then other users can play with that data, compare it to other data, and share that with the world.

Data purists will hate this as much as historians initially hated the Wikipedia. But, properly used, this will be fun, interesting, and ultimately - valuable and informative.

See the graph below that was on today’s front page. There are already almost 600 data sets to play with and cross-analyze. You just have to be careful about drawing conclusions that may be due to other factors.

WillItBlend

For those who have ever had a bad day on the course – check out willitblend.com and see what happens when golf balls are put into a Blendtec blender.

I saw a link on youtube and clicked through to watch a pseudo-scientist show us how this consumer blender can mince up golf balls. Beyond the fact that the power of this blender is quite astonishing, I am blown away but the simplicity of this marketing effort. This video alone has been viewed 1,371,935 in the last 5 days. Now, I realize that a lot of that traffic is not ‘the right audience’ for the proto-typical blender buyer but, at the very worst; Blendtec has definitely used youtube as an engine for creating awareness. I picked up the video front the front page of youtube.

We discussed in our Ad 2.0 session at Innovation Day the concept of ROI in this case. Specifically we asked, does this type of media have a better ROI than a Superbowl ad? The answer of course is that it depends on the purpose of the campaign. Each medium connects to another (tv to internet to internet to commerce) but I would argue that the willitblend approach is interesting as it all ties into an end point to purchase the blenders within 2 clicks – pretty compelling. Of course, for mass awareness, 90M plus impressions during the Superbowl (400M pre and post) is going to be hard to beat but I am not sure that’s exactly what the blender folks had in mind. Plus, I am only guessing here, but the price tag of the Superbowl spots may be a little expensive for a division of this size company (82M gross revenues for KTEC, Blendtec’s parent company)

Regardless of the marketing goals and tactics chosen, pretty fun to watch someone throw things into a blender.

The folks at Picture Marketing have developed a great way to add value to an event while driving traffic to a website and gathering valuable survey data. How do they do that? They take your picture!

It’s a concept that has been well-proven in sports stadiums across America. You have your picture taken, for free, in a ballpark, and the photographer hands you a card with a web site address on it and an index code. Using the index code, you can find your photo among the thousands of other shutter-blessed attendees. The hope of finding a great keepsake memory drives people to these sites and once there, nothing is free.
The Picture Marketing folks take a different approach to corporate events. They send you sets of camera kits and you equip brand ambassadors to take the pictures. A branded website is built for people to visit and view their photos. In the process of accessing the photos, the visitors can be polled for information, given offers for merchandise, or invited to join an online community. In fact, one customer used Picture Marketing to drive traffic to an introNetwork site.

According to Picture Marketing’s website, the desire to download their own photos results in an attendee response rate of 50-80% which is outstanding. Companies have to be careful how this is used, so attendees don’t feel like they’re being pushed into buying something. Done right, this is a powerful way to connect an onsite experience with a follow-up online experience. I’m excited to have Picture Marketing here on Innovation Day to show us their process and their latest toys.

With all the buzz around the world of RSS, it seems like few have been able to actually monetize it. I ran into a company that is starting with a good idea. Offertrax is focused on enabling merchants and their products with RSS. The idea is that 97% of people leave without purchasing from e-commerce sites. RSS is a way to gain a level of commitment when the full sales conversion is not reached, continuing the conversation with the buyer – hoping to eventually bring them back to the site, or in-store, to buy.

From a consumer perspective RSS is a nice way to get information on our terms. Whether it is a feed from a news paper or blog (like this one) or from merchants as companies enable them, RSS puts the control back into the consumers’ hands.

What I keep waiting for is someone to arm the world of bloggers with a way to capitalize on their readers the way that affiliate programs did in the late 90s. Perhaps RSS’ role will be to leverage communities as buying groups or simple as an easier way to manage the flood of spam.

One thing is for sure; RSS is about to hit big. Whenever Microsoft agrees with anyone else, you know something’s brewing. Microsoft and Mozilla have agreed to use the same icon for RSS even loading it into MS Office 2007– a new standard….

the logo they agreed on….

http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/12/14/503778.aspx

You can check them Offertrax here:

www.offertrax.com