Buzz Marketing for Technology: November 2006

Create Buzz, Not Ink!

Don’t take my word for it check out Guy Kawasaki Top 10 Lessons of PR. A summary is available here

Kawasaki is the CEO of venture capital investment bank Garage.com, former Chief Evangelist for Apple Computer and author of numerous books on business and technology. So check out what Guy’s #1 rule in PR - Create buzz, not ink!

“The first thing is that the world has completely changed in terms of buzz versus ink. It used to be that if you got ink in places like Walt Mossberg’s column in The Wall Street Journal, or in The Industry Standard or Fortune or Forbes or Business Week, the ink would create buzz. I believe that the world has completely reversed.

Today, you get buzz when people are talking about you because 25 million people are ripping off music with your software therefore you get ink. Journalists have no choice but to write about something that is a phenomenon.

What’s the secret to all of the evangelism? The answer is to create great products because great products creates buzz and great buzz creates ink. That’s how it works.”

Check out Cost per Play Video Advertising

Google AdWords has rolled out click-to-play video ads – "ads that combine the power of sound and motion with the precision of Google to provide users with a relevant and engaging advertising experience". Video ads join the Google lineup of text, image, and flash ad formats and will be displayed on sites that are part of the “Google network”.

How do they work? When a video ad is served to a page, it will be displayed as a static opening image until the user interacts with the ad. Once the user clicks the play button or the opening image, the video will begin playing within the ad space. If the user clicks the display URL at the bottom of the ad, they will automatically be taken to the advertiser's website. Google will report a clickthrough whenever a user clicks the display URL and visits the advertiser's site, rather than when a user clicks the play button or image.

How much do they cost? Pricing will vary depending on the type of ad campaign you choose to create. What’s cool here is you may create a content-targeted campaign with the ads priced on a cost-per-click basis. Alternatively, you can use one of our custom targeting options – demographic, category, or site targeting – the ads will be priced on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis. The amount an advertiser bids is the maximum he/she is willing to pay for either a click (CPC) or a thousand impressions (CPM). Unlike other video ad programs, there is no charge to serve your ad – you only pay for the impressions/clicks you receive!

Best of all the AdWords pricing system also ensures that you never overpay: the winning bid is always reduced to one cent more than the next highest competitor's bid!

Should you start a VideoBlog?

Spending on online video is expected to soar to $1.5 billion in 2009 from a projected $385 million this year, according to eMarketer.

Which is why Andy Plesser, founder of PR agency Plesser Holland Associates, has started a video blog, or "vlog," called Beet.TV which debuted in April and runs five days a week. It features interviews with journalists, technology executives, analysts, venture capitalists and podcasters. Clips that typically run less than five minutes, have been garnering about 5,000 viewers a week.

Plesser conducts many of the interviews himself, tackling issues concerning the transformation of new media. He also produces vlogs created specifically for clients such as Technology Review, a bimonthly magazine published by MIT.

I got to meet Andy at a recent Web Video event hosted by InfoWorld in NY, he thinks vlogs present a huge opportunity for b-to-b marketers to talk about their products and services.

So what should Buzz Marketers do? – Andy sees video as real, and marketers who ignore it do so at their own peril. He told me anyone with a Video cam and an Apple computer can produce videos. “Just go to Google videos, post your video content, hit the share button, post it to your blog and BINGO you are a videoblogger!”

Online Marketing Dominates B2B Lead Generation

Direct Impact Marketing recently conducted a survey of B2B marketers on lead generation tools. When voting for their favorite best-of-breed B2B lead generation tool, 65% of those surveyed nominated email, blogging and web analytics tools as their top 3!

Those surveyed reported that although these tools were nominated based on affordability and user-friendliness, B2B marketers were deploying these tools strategically to fill a gap in marketing capabilities.

The satisfaction level with all types of tools was high — only 15% of marketers indicated that a change of tool was planned; all the more interesting given the low barriers to switching tools.

Adoption was also high within respondents’ organizations —the majority of marketing staff have already adopted the tools or widespread deployment is about to occur.

B2B marketers indicated disparate and uneven sources of awareness about these tools, ranging from word-of-mouth, to online media like e-zines, search engine results and email marketing.

Buzz Marketers should check out www.LeadGenTools.com for more information and a list of tools nominated by users of the tools and ranked according to the number of votes posted by B2B marketers responding to the LeadGen Tools Survey.

Take another look at SEO

It is estimated that 70% of Google’s searches result in click-throughs to search listings provided by “natural” search results. And Yahoo’s and MSN’s natural search results are thought to be responsible for 60% of their search click-throughs.

Despite this fact – a recent survey conducted by Frost & Sullivan shows only 27% of Fortune 1000 customers currently use Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This indicates that an early mover advantage if not first mover advantage can be gained in some search terms by proper a SEO program.

Moreover, Frost & Sullivan also detailed 33% of the survey respondents listed Brand Identity as their #1 goal of their SEO program. Followed by pure marketing efforts at 25%, lead generation efforts at 21% and outright sales at 12%.

What should Buzz Marketers do? – Design a comprehensive SEO program that consists of 3 stages: Stage 1 – Optimize all main brand pages, Stage 2 – Optimize all sub brand pages, and Stage 3 – re-evaluate your business processes to integrate SEO from the beginning of the content creation cycle not as an afterthought.

IBM embraces Second Life

Until recently, Second Life had mostly been a playground for individuals who enjoy exploring, communing with like minds, and setting up virtual mom-and-pop businesses.

However, in the last few months, all sorts of established companies have been planting their virtual flags. They're marketing their goods and hoping to sprinkle coolness on their brands by testing a new kind of online meeting place. All told about 40 corporations have established themselves on Second Life, which has gone from zero members to 1.2 million in just three years. Among them are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Reebok, Starwood Hotels & Resorts (see my prior blog entry on their experiment in Second Life), and Reuters, which assigned a reporter full-time to hang out and chronicle the goings-on.

So where is the Buzz? - This isn't all fun and games anymore. IBM foresees a sizable business in providing the software, hardware and consulting services in advising clients on how to take advantage of this virtual world. What’s your Second Life like?

Should you fire your brand manager?

I heard an interesting statistic from Larry Weber on a recent B2B Marketing webcast. He said "12 months ago the leading media outlets were traditional (CNN, BBC). Now, 5 of the top 10 are blogs!"

Why should you care? We are entering an age where the consumer will be your brand manager. Any complaints a customer may have will play out in the blogosphere long after the media cover it, and most likely until the customer gets total satisfaction.

I would suggest that the brand manager of the future will need to be a very different type of beast. Gone are the days of the "brand cop" pulling you over for "collateral violations." Brand managers need to become open, collaborative and sensitive to your external customer. They must learn how to interface with customers as the wave of social media washes over us.

Where's the Buzz here? We may be forgetting brand management as we rush to try out new social media tools. Why not get them involved in your experiments with social media now?

Best Practices in Corporate Blogs

For many businesses, blogging remains a mysterious medium dominated by teenagers and techno geeks. But there are a few shining examples of business blogs.

McDonald's blogs on corporate responsibility. General Motors' blogging team posts pictures from photo-sharing site Flickr and videos from YouTube. Product groups within Wells Fargo use blogs to exchange ideas. And Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, one of the first execs to start a blog and really make waves with it, is seeking approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to write about Sun's financial performance on his blog – moving the needle on how and where public disclosure may happen in the future!!

For many businesses, blogs remain a mysterious medium dominated by teenagers and technology geeks. Most execs "do not read them, they do not understand why people write them," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li says. According to a tally by blog vendor Socialtext, just 40 of the country's largest 500 companies have blogs. That will need to change if they want to stay current with customers. "It's a different mind-set that they have to understand," Li says.

So where’s the Buzz? Study the leading edge examples that show how there can be real substance and value to blogs. But beware the blogsosphere wont tolerate blogs for thinly veiled PR stunts, or put little thought into content will be missing the point of entering into a conversation with their customer -- after all marketing is a conversation!

For more examples of how blogs are being used by large companies check out a recent article in InformationWeek

Are You Ready for E-commerce 2.0?

E-commerce is poised for a fundamental change—a shift from making online purchases to going shopping online - a social experience involving groups of people interacting with one another in a three-dimensional Web space.

The evolution is foreshadowed with places such as Second Life, Entropia Universe, and There. Although real-life products are occasionally offered for sale in these worlds, the May 2006 opening of an American Apparel outlet in Second Life was a milestone. At the store, customers can browse through the merchandise and then, by clicking on an image of a particular item, purchase virtual clothing for their avatars or real-world clothing for themselves. Other companies are following suit: Adidas is slated to open a store in Second Life this fall.

The shopping experience in these online worlds is still pretty rudimentary. In order to buy the real-world article, you click on an image of the product and are simply transported to the company’s regular Web site, where you complete the purchase. In fact, American Apparel currently sees the store more as a brand-building than as a revenue-generating venture.

As the experience becomes more realistic, there will be a return to the "social and recreational aspect of shopping". One can envision a group of teenage girls arranging to meet at a virtual store to try on clothes, comment on each other’s choices, and ultimately choose something, real or virtual, to buy.

So where is the Buzz? I can see a day when iTunes could create a virtual store in which people would hang out and listen to others’ playlists, and swap opinions about the music. Kind of like a virtual Starbucks environment. Web 2.0 is all about Multi Sensory Experiential content – if you want to create Buzz!