Are You Addicted to Big Numbers?

I love math. It has an uncanny way of teasing apart the truth, but alas, it can also just as easily be used selectively to manipulate or create false impressions. And if we get addicted to a certain type of math - tracking eyeballs and households for example - then we can be inadvertently wasting time and money on our way to building brands and selling stuff.

In the old days of business, it was not possible in most cases to communicate with just the people who were a good fit for your products and services. So your agency developed campaigns for you that involved sending out millions of mailers or commercials broadcast to hundreds of thousands of households.

Typical rates of return? Less than one percent. We all know that. But those big campaign numbers are still so addicting. "I need the big numbers in order to get the rates of return to justify this expense." Well, you only want the actual end result numbers.

The point is that now with technology, new media aka podcasting or downloadable media and social networks, you can actually reach the precise people who are most likely to buy from you, on the first round. You don't have to bother interrupting or shouting at gazillions watching a mainstream TV show knowing that in there a few customers (who are probably fast-forwarding the commercials anyway...) You have other more powerful ways of having "private" conversations with your target audience instead of hoping your target finds you in the midst of all that noise.

I call it the phenomenon of having people actually self-enrolling themselves and it's one step faster and juicier than "targeting." Though there were dozens of companies here at ad:tech promising better and better targeting of audiences, wouldn't you rather be able to just show up with your stuff knowing that people had already organized themselves around a related "something"?

I have a couple of examples for you.

iPhone Users and Web Software
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal wrote about a new iPhone software:

Earlier today, we wrote about new software that lets businesses customize Web sites for visitors with iPhones. Our take: Businesses that sell to other businesses shouldn’t rush out and buy this software because iPhones only account for 0.18% of Internet traffic...

That's a really small number. 0.18%. Who wants to bother with such a small, even microscopic group of people? Well what if you knew that iPhone users as a group are high income and highly educated phone users, and as early adopters they are also trend-sensors as well as trend setters? They are the people who have the money and the intellect to detect smart moves in the marketplace and tend to have others who follow them.

Now, not every company wants to meet the smart, rich, trendy, 24-7 movers and shakers, but if you do, iPhone users have already identified themselves as such, and making your web site i-Phone-compatible is an incredibly easy way to say to them: hey you! over here. My company wants to make it easy for you to play with us.

Mainstream Media Placement or Podcast Placement?
There's a local girl band here in Hawaii, MighTyJ. During the production of their album, they set up a blog and filmed a vidcast aka video podcast with their recording engineer, Doctor Trey. When it was time to start promoting themselves, they used a combination of approaches. For one they got booked on the CBS-affiliate morning show (about 25,000 households). After that appearance, there was zero uptick on their web site traffic and no increase in downloads or subscribers to their vidcast.

Then they made an appearance on our daily Internet TV show, Beach Walks with Rox, average daily download of about 2500 or one-tenth the reported size of morning network TV. Their site traffic jumped enormously and they doubled the number of subscribers to their podcast.

So do you want to waste your time contacting 25,000 and get no response or contact 2,500 and get an enormous response?

Welcome to the new new math people. Fall in love with small numbers. Be willing to pay a higher CPM/CPA because other things (technology) and other people (podcast creators) are doing the heavy lifting for you.

Clinton & Obama: A lesson of losing control of your brand

Many of my colleagues (Mitch Joel, Shel Holtz, Valeria Maltoni) and I frequently speak to members of PRSA, IABC, and advertising agencies explaining as best we can how consumers now own the brand. Good will increasingly cannot be bought and the political season is giving us striking examples of the mechanics of how "web 2.0" - "new media" - "social media" (choose your buzz) have changed the landscape of both business communication and brand marketing.

Frank Rich has this in today's New York Times editorial page:

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to "who knows how many" Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the Yes We Can Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Ed. Note: Video inserted at the end of this post to save you a click-thru.

I have two points to make. First is to note the extreme shift in balance of power as to who controls your brand. Hillary is trying, some would say desperately, to control her brand and essentially trick people into voting for her. She (along with Bill presumably) are convinced they are the best for the country. The country, increasingly, is demonstrative otherwise. She can spend money and stage "staged" events with planted questioners, but we have learned as consumers of media as well as of products, when someone is "faking it up." (My favorite way to describe the traditional art of advertising's dark side.)

Second, one of the best measurements of how well your brand is being received, is the way that people play with it. Are they promoting you or are they disparaging you? It is not that hard to tell these days.

The great opportunity for business is that we can learn from the political season. We can observe how losing control can be tragic, comedic, and/or a fast trip from relative obscurity to leader of the pack.

Footnote Observations

1. It is still early on the date of publication of Frank Rich's editorial (cited above) and there are over 500 comments already posted. People have opinions and they want to share them.
2. My mom, a lifelong Republican, said she would consider voting for Obama before McCain because, "Obama has class." In this age of communication transparency, things like class definitely can shine through all the traditional mud-slinging.

Reporting Standards Bloggers v Journalists

This is an ongoing discussion, and @astrout, one of the people I follow on Twitter, is putting together a summary of this debate. Please read his post (I'll update this one with a link after it's published next week) for the full monty! No links here as this is a Rox Opinion Piece.

While I understand that people really like to frame discussions in the "either-or" mode, I am almost always going to see them as "either-and." Here's the general perspective I have on journalists and bloggers.

Journalists

• Journalists have training that is relatively unique to them, and at the least, there are entire academic curricula defining the rules of engagement.
• They have access to key people and places that is cultivated over the years both by personal means and by being a member of certain clubs. (The journalists club, the employee of ___News Co club, the pool reporters club, etc.)
• Because of where they are published (an established, already vetted, news source) they have implied credibility of the mainstream and traditional kind.
• And this presumed authority also allows them to get away with using the term "anonymous sources" and still maintain a level of cred. Let's call this cred by association.
• This credibility is generally challenged remotely, in broad sweeping terms, by people who are promoting a different agenda aka a different news business entity. The battle of the corporate titans.
• They get paychecks, some of them "obscene" (as told to me directly by more than one leading TV news personalities).
• These paychecks are an incentive to get out a story, not necessarily find the most accurate or well-rounded story. Let's say "the man" is their ultimate master.

Bloggers

• Have more interest and passion in their topic than formal training in many cases.
• Have less access to people in power on average but more access to the opinions on the street precisely because they are having conversations there. And they hang out there.
• Because of where they are published (an independent media source online) they have to first build credibility by creating an audience, then sustain it.
• Most credible bloggers will cite their posts with numerous, verifiable sources. This is called link love and it bears so much influence and good will. (I am resisting the urge to go find links to support each of my points, but I am in a hurry to draft my next blog post and I am trusting Aaron Strout.)
• Their all-volunteer army err I mean audience either confirms the experience or disputes it. And it happens right there on the blog post, back and forth, in real time.
• Most bloggers do it for love not money.
• That independence gives them freedom to explore the farther reaches of the truth, and the audience becomes the ultimate master.

IMO the audience is not always right, so just as paid journalists are vulnerable to the man's paycheck, so are bloggers vulnerable to inflaming the story to whip up the passions of their fans. At the end of the day, each is contributing something of value the other doesn't have and the only thing that isn't happening that much yet is a mutual respect for the work each does.

As more and more people understand the power of word-of-mouth communication, I suspect we will see bloggers continue to rise as being sources of influence and information. IMO, neither bloggers nor journalists have a lock on the truth, as the truth is a very personal and complex thing.

Pep Talk and Talk Prep for HAF

I'll be speaking this morning at the Hawaii Advertising Federation's annual "university." This is a day when the ad pros come together to network and open minds to new ideas.

First off, I say congrats. There is this sticky wicket in that the more a person becomes an expert, the more confusing it is to find space for new information. If you are like me, you can hear the echo of a client somewhere saying, "But you're the expert - why didn't you know that already or why are you going to this seminar?"

Of course, true experts and wise people understand that with information being created at an inconceivably fast pace, no one can be an expert for more than a few moments in time. I prefer to think of myself as a lover of knowledge, and that inspires me to learn as much as I can, plus I am interested in sharing it with others. That is my time-saving gift - I will do the research and make some of the silly learning mistakes so I can fast track you with a new tool.

This session is a tour of the deep parts of the tubes. The internet truly is a culture of its own, and I will be your tour guide making the trip inside fun and informative and safe. It will be a living example of how the net works these days, so please expect some interaction, some social networking, some gossip 2.0, and some key takeaways for how this can impact your business and those you serve.

Rent or Buy? How Does a Company Decide to Use New Media

I just tripped across the Custom Content Conference being held this March in New Orleans. It is targeted at brand managers and ad folks who may be considering creating their own serialized web content or new media/social media channels. I thought I'd mention a few of the companies who have already ventured in to this arena, and hopefully you may have some more to add to the list.

Whole Foods has been doing this for about a year with both audio and video podcasts, all of which are produced using in-house talent. Scott Simons, Regional Marketing Director, hosts the Secret Ingredient show. There has been discussion on the Yahoo Videoblogging List about this show and the opportunities to also integrate both freelance-produced content as well as user-generated content. Word on the street is that Whole Food is not interested, preferring to control the show in-house. It's a full service blog-based site, with comments accepted and RSS. Visitors can manually download the flash version of the episode, though that is not playable on most MP3 devices.

American Express last year launched LX.tv which is a combination traditional web site and video blog, using the "new" part of the media and not so much the "social" part of the media. It is Flash-based, which makes the site a bit slow for my tastes, but does allow the designers to create a very rich, urban mood and feel. They use freelance contributors and the episodes focus on restaurants (AMEX merchants) and celebrity/social life. You can get an RSS feed, and in their grab the embed code for each episode, but the flash programming makes that part very cumbersome and the interface is elusive unless you know what the little icons represent. Viewer comments are not accepted.

Starwood Hotels launched The Lobby as a text blog in 2006. It also hires freelance contributors around the world, sharing local life stories and virtually always ending with a link to a hotel or hotel service found in the region. They have started including YouTube-hosted videos made by their contributors. I really like the widget they have in addition to traditional RSS options.

We are in production with a Fortune 100 company to develop a branded show that is educational in nature. Naturally, the goal is to drive sales for this particular service, but the company believes (and so do we) that creating original branded content that is useful and entertaining using new media (aka your own internet TV station) is a terrific, largely untapped opportunity at this time.

There are many other examples of companies who are doing direct ad sponsorships of independently-produced shows. I discussed the Ford - Amanda Across America collaboration in this post with follow-up in this post. Earthlink was an early sponsor of the Washington Post video podcasts and pharmaceutical companies are pursing this as well.

I definitely have my preferences, based on years of experience as a consumer (!) and also the past three years of being on the forefront of creating audio and video content for the web. Keep in mind as well that the criteria will vary depending on your audience and your product/service - there is no cookie-cutter solution here. And if things go wrong, as they did on the Edelman-managed video for Walmart, do like Edelman did and learn from the experience. It's not possible to know it all - and that's the reason for us to keep talking. For those of you attending the HAF Conference tomorrow, we'll be discussing this in more detail.

Video Podcasting for Unconferenz 2008

Here is my talk at Unconferenz 2008 in Honolulu on Jan 12, 2008. I am using the social networking site for slide shows, SlideShare.net. It does not play the embedded video — for that you'll want to be live! UPDATE: Ryan Ozawa has posted this video compilation from the day's events.

Links from the talk
Hardware & Software
Elgato Turbo USB encoding device
Sanyo Xacti Digital Underwater Video Camera
Flip Digital Video Camera
The Poor Man's Steady Cam
Visual Hub Batch Encoding Software
Quicktime Pro

Video Clips Used in Presentation
The Clip Show - Jim Kirks' Video Podcast Reviews
Levelator Audio Software by Bruce Sharpe
Todd Cochrane of Raw Voice
Laura Athavale Fitton of Pistachio Consulting

Other Useful Links for Video Podcasting
Blip.tv - free and almost free hosting for serialized video content
TubeMogul - batch upload your files to multiple sites and get viewership stats
Show in a Box WordPress theme for Video
Freevlog - Tutorials on Video Blogging

Our Internet TV Show
Beach Walks with Rox

Site ReLaunch: Coffee Kids

Coffee Kids has been our client for almost a decade. As a nonprofit, they help coffee-growing families learn new skills and develop sustainable lifestyles, as the coffee industry suffers from a glut of over-production that keeps income low to the first line of coffee workers - those who cultivate and pick the beans. It's not an easy story to tell when you and I are used to paying four bucks for a grandé latté. They depend on their web site as the key communication tool.

Their site has been due for an upgrade for years, but time and money constraints have meant the web site has been on the back burner. Years ago we set them up to collect online payments and also use Contribute software to edit their pages. It was a good tool at that time, but had out-grown its usefulness. It had many limitations and required a software license on each computer that was being used to make updates, not to mention training.

Their new site uses Expression Engine software, which is our favorite enterprise content management system. It is highly flexible from a programmers point of view, very easy to work in from an editor's point of view (right in the browser - no extra software required), and very easy to control multi-user access from an administrator's point of view. With just 1.5 hours of training, the staff was busy adding new Businesses to their searchable database, uploading photos, and blogging in both English and Spanish! Click on the thumbnail graphics to see full size screenshots, then follow the numbers for a detailed analysis below.

Home Page Before	Home Page After

A Few Home Page Highlights
1 Toolbar	Old site: no search. New site: full search plus CSS tools to easily let the user change font size. Donate and Contact are easily found on every single page.
2 High Impact Headline	Old Site: lots going on, no real focal point, a lot of reading required to get your attention. New Site: Wow - color, font size, and brevity all work to stop the visitor and create an emotional connection via a powerful statement of fact.
3 Time-sensitive Call to Action	Via a PHP script, we pull the date in (like a lot of sites do) but we integrate it into the message of the page. It is then immediately followed by three strong actions. Surely one of them will speak to you! This is an editable area, so the client can include as many as they want at any given time. A special link style was created to give this call to action even more prominence and draw users into the site. We are especially proud of the features added to their Business Members database, and pages that encourage people to visit their donors, tell a friend about the local businesses, and support special programs offered by donors. By helping Coffee Kids help their donors, the web site strengthens the donor partnerships.
4 Use Flickr to Manage Photos	Why build a private cumbersome photo gallery when they can join the Flickr community? One of the original (and still one of the best) social applications, it allows for easy upload of pictures, tagging of pictures, creating and belonging to groups, and a little script here automatically feeds in new pictures to the home page. Not only does it help Coffee Kids easily manage their many compelling pictures, it helps them network with others over at Flickr, finding new supporters.
5 Embedded Video Message	Coffee Kids wants to explore using video - which is very hot right now. Because video is much harder to create, we decided to try placing a short intro message on the home page as a way to start. However, this high impact placement can be converted later to a video blog post if desired. We like to build the bones first and then let the site's function and content grow organically over time.
6 A Blog	It's my opinion that you just aren't serious about communicating with your audience if you don't have a blog. Like many companies (and non-profits especially) they had concerns. "We've never done this." "What if people leave bad comments?" "It takes too much time." But luckily and ideally, they now have a staff member, Kyle Freund, who is leading the challenge to provide support and coaching inside the organization. Coffee Kids is also rare in having a multilingual blog—perfect because so much of their work takes place in Central and South America. We've also coded simple buttons in the admin so editors can easily add accented Spanish characters without learning the code.

Donate Page Before	Donate Page After

Making Donations Count
1 Easy to Sort Donor Groups	Old site: one long cumbersome donation page. New site: separate pages for individuals and businesses, because Coffee Kids really has unique messages and requests for each group. The generic donation information is clearly displayed on a separate page, easily accessible to both groups.
2 Custom PayPal Programming	Old Site - default PayPal button functionality. New Site - custom programming for a cleaner, more flexible user interface. We also added the option for gift donations, thereby removing yet one more barrier to give. By continuing to use PayPal, Coffee Kids can leverage the very low transaction fees and very wide user base without incurring custom shopping cart software expense.
3 Colorful clear graphics	The entire look of the site is more modern, easy to navigate, and user-friendly. The submit buttons include help messaging to make the donation process even easier.
4 Multiple Donation Choices	The new configuration allows for different amounts for individuals and business, and allows each group to make a one-time or recurring donation. The layout clearly sorts the two, instead of having them all lumped together as on the old site. This allows for a simple, deliberative process for their donors which means fewer clean ups by office staff for mistaken donations.
5 Interactive Donate button	Every inside page of the site has this bold Donate button, that rolls over to red and answers the "Want to Donate?" question with, "Your gift really helps." A smart strategy and simple programming makes for a high impact conversation with site visitors.

With all this lean CSS design, re-thinking of the content strategy to use social apps wherever possible, and the inclusion of a blog, search engines love this site! And the possibilities for expanding further into social media and community building are amazing.

Why the new Facebook “Endorse” Model Works for Me

Today Facebook announced that it will allow companies to create profiles inside the social networking web site. Individual users can then endorse or be "fan" of said company. Just like Facebook, independent media producers can serve as a very valuable filter for their audiences when it comes to products and services. In more crass terms, stop being ashamed of having corporate sponsorship, and duh, don't take on any sponsors whom you do not trust or support yourself. Business ethics 101. People like Chris Brogan are happy to call you out when you use the tools effectively.

What we are really enabling now is a whole new self-sustaining system whereby people who make stuff (P-producers/plafroms) attract people who like that stuff (A-audience) and can be supported by companies who want to tell us about their stuff (S-sponsors/advertisers). I presented this Player's Triangle concept at the Podcast & New Media Expo this past September and I think it is an incredibly efficient way of connecting people and building businesses.

The independent producer - be it Facebook or Meredith Medland of Living Green Podcast - gets the party started. The platform/show both have natural filtering mechanisms built in. They are built of networks of people who have organized themselves based on shared interests not irrelevant data like geography or age.

Audiences are very tired of being sold to every waking moment, and I have written before how advertising is broken. Nonetheless, they still want to connect, to be entertained, to be informed. The platforms and the independent producers are doing that, while traditional media struggles to find a place in this new world. The internet has also trained people to want things for free. I think this is partly because that was how early internet companies competed against each other and because it is relatively cheap to built an internet business. Not so easy to sustain one though.

And that is where commercial sponsors come into play. They have the budget and the desire to reach new customers. They have been trained to think a 2M audience is better than a 20K one, but that was before targeted audiences. The Long Tail as Chris Anderson elucidated, is about this revolution where meaningful and profitable transactions are taking place directly, without the radio or TV station required.

How long will it take until we never have to get an un-targeted or mass-mailed advertisement again? Well, a few generations probably, but this is a start. Who wants to be the first company to stop using mass marketing tactics and instead commit to only targeted message delivery?

I think of it as an organic circle of commerce. We find each other by shared interests and not by accident in the thousands of messages blast at us daily. I can hear the quiet coming already. And I love how this supports people like us who are creating a first-class internet tv programs that our viewers want to be free.

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