Rohit Bhargava
Late last week I had the chance to participate as a faculty member at WOMM-U,
an engaging event put on by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association
(which my employer, Ogilvy PR, is a member of). My role was somewhat
unique among other speaking events that I have done - along with Jason
Anello from Yahoo!, I was meant to lead six half hour sessions on the
topic of "speed trials" of tools in the WOM and social media space.
Just over a week ago during lunch at the New Communication Forum,
I had a great conversation with Tim Tozer from Radian6 (a social media
monitoring service) about the real metrics that marketers are looking
for and the increasingly common difficulty of finding metrics that are
actually useful and offer actionable insights. Many people who have to
contend with web analytics tools today will tell you that it is no
longer an issue of having the technology available to measure things
online, but rather the analytical ability to hone in on the metrics
that really matter.
Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't
know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used
his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes
his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email
address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that
require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a
decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I
feel bad about it.
As
someone passionate about travel and the travel industry, I pay a lot of
attention to sites that are out there. Travel has long been an active
industry online, whether you talk about people's behaviour with
increasingly booking travel online, or the slate of review and opinion
sites that let people share their opinions about travel destinations.
From Yelp to Driftr to Dopplr
there are new travel sites that let you do just about anything you want
and they are all great ... yet none have quite found the right formula
to harness the one thing that travel enthusiasts like me all have in
common: a passion for talking about travel and sharing my experiences.
If last year's SXSW was Twitter's coming out party, this year it
achieved utility status. A utility is something that is always on, and
essential. To lose it would be to thrust yourself into the dark ages.
Water, electricity, gas ... and Twitter. Sound like an exaggeration?
Not for anyone who has spent the last few days watching the incessant
live twittering at SXSW. Because not every reader is as tricked out in
extreme geekdom as those at SXSW, here's a brief description of Twitter:
Last Thursday, I spent the day at my first event of 2008 called the Social Networking Conference
(SNC) in Miami to present a session called "Secrets of Creating
Talkability." The event kicks of a string of speaking appearances I
will be making over the next few months as I start to get ready for my
book launch in March.
Not everyone is a content creator. Open up any report of statistics
on social media, and you will usually see some standard ratio of
content consumers to content creators that typically ranges from 1 in
10, or less. This means, on average, that in most communities less
than 10% of the individuals in that community are creating content.
This post is about the biggest myth many people believe about the other
90%.
For
those who are fans of Guy Kawasaki, there is a phenomenon he is fond of
calling "Guy's golden touch." It is his own trademark reversal of a
well known saying, where he likes to note that "everything that turns
to gold is what Guy touches." One site that is definitely gold right
now is Twitter, riding a wave since it's popularity at SXSW last year,
the site steadily seems to be getting more and more users.
At
every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge. I have a box full of
them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of
"Speaker" affixed beneath my name. I recently had a conversation with
some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event.
Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of
speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a
conversation with other speakers. If you think about it, the badges at
a conference are like a caste system. Your badge identifies which
group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy
away from a conversation with you.
CES 2008 - I spent
this week at what is probably the largest tradeshow in the world. The
sheer size of CES means that information overload is inevitable, and
the consistent challenge for any exhibitor at a show like this is
rising above the clutter. If you think about it, this challenge is no
different from any other tradeshow or exhibition ... though CES is
surely more difficult to stand out at than most. Throughout the show,
there were a few vendors that did do something noteworthy to stand
out. This post is about how they did it and some marketing lessons you
can learn from their efforts.
CES 2008 - What happens in Vegas this week won't stay here for too long. If
you have been watching or reading any media at all this week, you have
seen all the rampant coverage of everything from CES. Being here at
the epicenter of the hype has been an interesting experience. Think of
it as a cross between a museum exhibit of never before seen artwork,
and walking past storefront display windows on 5th Avenue.
Today
is the day for new year's resolutions. For most people, this means the
inevitable pledges to get healthy, lose weight, work less and spend
more time with family. Like any good blogger, though, I have several
social media resolutions for the new year. In no particular order,
here are my three big ones:
I love
lists and I love trend predictions. So a trend prediction list would
be an obvious choice for my post today, on the last day of the year.
Throughout the past week I have been reading lots of smart projections
on what to expect for the year ahead. With all the discussion of
microtrends, the evolution of how we consume media and highly useful recap lists
of smart thinking from 2007, I thought I would take a different
approach.
Do you have a Kindle yet? All the buzz about the Wii aside, the most
lusted after gift this holiday season for media pros may just be
Amazon's new digital content reader called the Kindle (which sold out
within 5.5 hours upon first release a few weeks ago). The device may
not have an Apple-esque level of sex appeal, but it does represent a
huge shift in thinking that may just propel portable digital content
and ebooks in particular to the kind of widespread adoption that
digital music has already enjoyed.
This
post is the continuation of a topic I started yesterday all about the
right metrics to focus on and how many marketing teams may be using the
wrong ones without realizing it. In Part I, I shared 10 meaningless metrics
that brands should consider moving away from. Most of those metrics
are either based on precedent (what brands have always measured) or
ignorance (a lack of knowledge about other metrics to track). As a
whole, the single word that defines the old view of metrics is to focus
on impressions.
We
all know marketers love metrics. Flashy award winning campaigns are
great and celebrity spokespersons are always appealing, but most of the
time we try to base judging the success of a campaign on hard and fast
metrics. The only problem is, many times the metrics that marketers
use to gauge success are wrong, inaccurate, incomplete or just plain
useless. There are two main reasons this happens ... precedent and
ignorance.
The author of one of the greatest blogs on the Internet announced
a few weeks ago that he would be posting far less often. In a world
where it seems that everyone (and their mom) is starting a blog for one
reason or another, seeing one prominent and popular blogger decide to
do it less often captured my attention, and it should capture yours
too. The blogger I'm talking about, of course, is Scott Adams -
creator of Dilbert. His blog serves up his signature wit in narrative
form and offers his reasoned approach to highlighting stupidity in the
world, both inside and outside of the workplace.
This is
a post that I am guessing will get some fairly passionate responses on
either side of the debate. Here's the question lots of people are
asking today: where and how much does privacy really matter to you
online? This is a critical question for 3 reasons:
My job
is all about conversation. Having one with clients and peers, and
helping them have one with their customers. To a degree, my own book
is about conversations so this may seem like a strange observation
coming from me ... but I don't see any point in publishing a video on
YouTube and allowing comments.
There has been a firestorm of discussion lately after Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of the long tail recently "outed" all the PR professionals that had been contacting him with anonymous spam style "Dear Editor" communications. On a day where he had more than 300 of these, he finally decided he had enough and fired off a post banning those PR folks from contacting him and adding him to his blocked sender list.
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