Marketing Pop Culture

The business world is paying more attention to Facebook

I'll keep this short, since I've got to jump to other things.  But please check out the article in today's Times, which details all of the activity around Facebook since Microsoft let it be known that they are considering at $500MM investment in the social networking platform.  Yes, FB is a closed network, but the article notes that there have been more than 4,000 applications created for the platform.  I ask again: Where are the brands who are creating custom applications here?  At least one entrepreneur has developed  a tool that helps determine monetary value to the applications.  So, if you notice that your valuation is growing, that's one indication of growing engagement.

Another strategy might be to simply buy applications as they reach a certain usage threshold, in which case you'd (ideally) be buying the user records.  One company already did so.

Your thoughts?

Facebook and brands--Part 2

photo by Daniel Casini

Some additional thoughts based on my last post. 

One of the things that I notice about MySpace, Facebook and the like is the way that people communicate.  Specifically, there's a contingent that uses the internal communications tools.  I've had a significant number of notes exchanged with some people inside these networks.  However, if I send a note to their e-mail address, I get no reply.  Interesting, right?  Is it that they're more likely to answer a note from a "friend"?

I don't have an answer for this.  But, what's piqued my curiousity is this question: What are the implications for e-mail marketing, particularly when consumers begin using other communications channels?  Do any of you foresee a time when e-mail ceases to be an effective tool for marketers?  What would that future look like?  If for example, it's not e-mail, then will it be shared mobile video?  Will marketers leverage intra-network sites and use functionality to share links with images to outside sites, much in the way you can in Facebook?

At the end of the day, should marketers begin to prepare for the rise of a much more immersive social network that upends the current communications paradigms?  Maybe just having you as a friend will be the price of entry in order to begin a communication/dialogue with you.

I'd love some feedback on this, so feel free to fire away!

Facebook and brands in socially networked environments

So it’s only been a month since I’ve really been active on Facebook (FB) and I like what I see.  First, let me say that I’m on both platforms. FB is a different kind of experience than MySpace, largely because it seems easier to navigate and customize.  The one big drawback of FB is that you have to be a user in order to see pages.  That limits its usefulness as a business building platform, since your page is not open to the world. 

But once you’re in, you find that FB is highly flexible.  In fact, thanks to the News Feed section, which give updates on what’s happening in your network, you learn a lot:: Who’s become friends; who’s modified their profile; and who’s added new applications.  It’s the latter that strikes me as interesting.

The big question is: What’s the role of a brand within a socially networked environment?  Is it enough for a brand to have lots of friends?  Even giving this only the most superficial of thought, the answer would seem to be no.  After all, having lots “friends” doesn’t necessarily mean that a brand has high engagement.

Which is where FB applications come in.  I haven’t subscribed to many, but I like the idea behind them, particularly as they work within FB.

We Are Smarter Than Me

I just read about this new initiative from Wharton through its newsletter, Knowledge@Wharton (which I highly recommend).  From the blurb:

The project -- tentatively called We Are Smarter Than Me -- is an experiment to see whether a large community of business people can jointly author a book of the same name. Pearson will publish the book later this year. The book focuses on ways in which companies are learning to leverage social networks and the power of communities to improve their performance by allowing customers or others to take over functions typically performed by experts.

This is something to keep an eye on.  Hopefully, we'll begin to see a lot more of this: A community puts forth its collective knowledge and a smaller group of editors culls the results into a manageable form that will then be redistributed to the community and beyond.

Follow this link for more information on We Are Smarter Than Me.

Likeminds, Coffee and Community

Hats off to Noah Brier and Piers Fawkes for starting the Likemind events.  What’s Likemind?  Just a chance for those involved in marketing and blogging to meet in an offline setting.  For the cost of a cup of coffee, you can meet your peers, make connections and have some good, old-fashioned conversation.  Yesterday’s was the fifth such event and, as far as I could tell, was the most attended one to date.  With a nod to Seth Godin, I ribbed both of them that they’d “unleashed an ideavirus”: Others have started Likemind events in San Francisco, Seattle and Oslo, Norway.  Interestingly, David Armano noted that there was a similar event in Chicago yesterday as well.

This underscores for me is that even in a flat, digitally connected world, there’s still a strong desire for a face-to-face community.

I've posted some photos after the jump:

Number 101 and counting. . .others

crowded, originally uploaded by thebittermonk.

One of the joys of having been blogging for close to three years (my 100th post was the previous one!) is that I’ve not only developed a small following, but have become part of a community of marketing bloggers.  Now, an even cooler part of this is when you get to meet in an offline setting other people you’ve read or who are familiar with your own work.

I had such an experience last night, when I hooked up with a few other bloggers and marketing folks courtesy of Noah Brier.  So here are some of the bloggers I’ve recently met, both through Noah and Piers over at psfk through their likemind breakfast series.  All of these blogs are impressive in their own right and are definitely worth a visit:

• David Armano of Logic +Emotion

• David Berkowitz of Marketers Studio

• Prince Campbell of Chartreuse

• Ed Cotton of Influx Insights and his colleague James Friedman of Emergetrends

• Nichelle Stephens of Chicks and Giggles

• Noah Kagan of OkDork

• Christina (CK) Kerley of ck-blog

These folks are also doing some cool stuff:

• Casey Pugh of Feed Hole (check it now while it’s still in beta and BEFORE it blows up!)

• Shout out to Casey’s colleagues at Fearless Concepts: Chad and Vanessa

• Loren Feldman at 1938 Media

Short attention span takeaway: It’s a conversational economy: Get out, meet your public and share the love.

On the trail of new (or not so new) music

There are two services I'm really excited about and recommend:  LaLa and Pandora.  While they sound like willing participants in a guy's fantasies, these flirty-sounding services help make discovering music online manageable.

LaLa is an online system for trading CDs.  It works like this:

• You list the CDs you have and choose CDs you'd like from a list of over 1.4 million.
• Ship the CDs to another members who's indicated that they want the particular CD (LaLa does the matching for you!)
• You get CDs from your list from other members, all for the low cost of $1.49.

A cool feature of this is that the service kicks back 20% to the artist.  And, like any good social networking site, the more you share, the more CDs you'll get.  While I can't control the order in which I receive CDs, it's kind of a nice surprise when they get arrive.  At the very least, it's something you requested.  And, if I really don't like it, hey, I only spent a buck fifty.

One small problem with the service is that their category designations aren't so precise.  LaLa deals in broad categories.  For example, R&B contains a lot of black music, from contemporary R&B (R. Kelly) to soul (Diana Ross, Otis Redding), current hip hop (Ghostface Killah) to underground hip hop (Company Flow, Aceyalone).  Likewise, in the "International" category, you're very likely to find Maura O'Connell (Ireland), Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Pakistan), Femi Kuti (Nigeria), and Ibrahim Ferrer (Cuba) all on the same page.  One solution might be to employ tags for the CDs, so that users can employ a more refined search.

A small digression here: One of the records I'm happy to pass onto some other deserving soul is M.I.A.'s "Arular".  I have to believe that her record got so much critical support (#2 on the Village Voice's 2005 annual "Pazz and Jop" listing) due to its political nature (her father was involved in Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, and she shouts out the PLO on the record), all of which got her visa application rejected when it came time to enter the States to record her next album.  However, from a musical standpoint, I just don't get it.  Subpar rapping and amateurish production is what I hear.  Believe me, I've tried to listen to it.  It's one of those albums I felt I should like because there was so much buzz about it last year.  Derrick in Minneapolis, it's on its way to you, and I hope you enjoy it in good health.

Pandora enables users to create their own radio stations.  Pandoria itself is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project, the goal of which has been to capture music at its most fundamental level, i.e., to identify the distinctive elements of each song.  It then uses those elements to find songs from other artists that are similar. 

For example, if I set up a station called "Bad Brains radio", Pandora looks for songs that have "major and minor key tonality, repetitive phrasing, an aggressive male vocalist, unintelligible lyrics and prominent drums."  It took me from the Brains' "Banned in D.C." to "Run It" by the Replacements to "Live to Win" by Motorhead (purists will note that I'm missing an umlaut).  At this point, I gave this last one a thumbs down, and it moved back to the Brains' own "With the Quickness" and then onto "Vampires" by Strung Out, which I like.  So I've already discovered something new in the course of writing this post.  See, that's the good thing about Pandora, your input alters the selection.  After all, I could hear why it pulled up the Motorhead song, but that wasn't what I was going for.  You can bookmark your favorite songs into your profile as you hear them--as I did with "Strung Out"--and you have the option to buy them via Amazon or iTunes.

Now go discover new music: Check out Pandora here.  LaLa is here.

Tags: LaLa, Pandora, music discovery, Music Genome Project, Bad Brains, M.I.A., The Replacements, music marketing, digital distribution

The Envelope, Please--Part 2

Updates: The voting deadline has been extended to Monday, June 26, due to the massive amounts of traffic to MarketingSherpa's servers.  As a result, they've switched the survey to another server, which you can get to via the link the earlier post.

The Envelope, Please. . .

I want your vote.  But, first a little backstory. 

Both my wife Bridgett and my friend Katie Gallagher at Plan B Marketing nominated this blog for MarketingSherpa’s 2006 Reader’s Choice Blog and Podcasting Awards.  Out of the 1,028 submissions, Marketing Pop Culture made the cut of 14 in—gasp!—the Advertising category.  Hey, I’ll take it.  After all’s said and done, there are some killer blogs in this category, some of which are daily reads for me.  It may sound cliché, but it’s great to be included.

Be that as it may, I want your vote.  Here’s the deal:

• Follow this link. 
• Scroll down to the “Advertising” category.
• Click on the appropriate “Excellent” button. 
• Scroll further down and click “Submit”.

Hurry, voting ends this week, I think.

Thanks!

Tags: blog awards, MarketingSherpa

Shout-outs: Right back atcha!

When it comes to this blogging and social media phenomenon, it’s really about being part of the conversation.  What’s great is when the bloggers you read begin giving you shout-outs.  It says that they find your content useful, engaging, maybe even compelling. 

All of which is to say that I’m very appreciative of the nods I’ve gotten recently.  These are some fine blogs and are examples of some of the great spots for marketing conversations in the blogosphere.

• Edelman’s Steve Rubel has been interested in how social media transforms marketing, media and public relations.  He gave Marketing Pop Culture a shout out via his link roll last Thursday, June 15.
• Clyde Smith covers the business of hip hop at ProHipHop.com.  He was kind enough to check me out after I commented on one of his posts. 
• Joseph Jaffe included me in his podcast.  After seeing his presentation at last week’s Association of National Advertisers conference, he encouraged audience members to leave comments on his comment line.  So I did just that and asked him to explain his assertion that consumers were not, in fact, empowered.  Check out my full question and his response here, which comes around 5 minutes into the podcast. Apparently, I was the only one in the audience who called.  A nice reward for doing so is that I get a copy of his book.  Joseph, I’ll ping you tomorrow. 

Thanks, guys.  And now back to the conversation!

Tags: social media, marketing blogs, Steve Rubel, MicroPersuasion, hip hop blogs, prohiphop.com, Joseph Jaffe, jaffe juice, marketing podcasts