Category / Interactive Marketing

by adam

The Future Will Be Televised…With Social Media

Forrester Marketing Forum 2008 How fitting that engagement is the theme.  For my first time at Forrester’s Marketing Forum, I’ve decided to take a different tact on my own personal engagement if nothing else than for the learning experience.  Ever go to a large conference and just sit at the back, taking those 8 second […]

Mf08_webForrester Marketing Forum 2008

How fitting that engagement is the theme.  For my first time at Forrester’s Marketing Forum, I’ve decided to take a different tact on my own personal engagement if nothing else than for the learning experience. 

Ever go to a large conference and just sit at the back, taking those 8 second vacations, checking your email, paying attention only to the most dynamic speakers and humorous presentations?  That was me.  Sometimes I’d wonder why I was even at the conference that was what I was going to get out of it.  Here is a great tip on how to avoid that – use Twitter to take notes.  Jeremiah Owyang, one of Forrester’s well known analysts covering social media, mentioned over Twitter that he would be live blogging during the keynote presentations and offered to have folks sit up front.  Forrester went beyond that with a meebo chat room on the Forrester blog site and ustreaming the keynote with live video.  I decided to take him up on the offer and spent much of the first day of the conference laptop open on Twitter (Twhirl to be precise).  A very interesting thing happened – I paid attention more than I had before, looking for the key points in each speaker’s presentation.  Another side effect happened – I was able to quickly share that knowledge and interact with many who were not at the conference.  To be honest, I was in this to be better engaged, but glad to hear (via twitter responses) a few people got something out of it.

There is a group of folks doing the same here – some experienced social media folks and others relatively new like yours truly.  Here is a list – all talented folks who are deep into marketing in various ways.  I’d recommend following each of them:

@jowyang – Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst for Social Computing
@jspepper – Jeremy Pepper, PR manager for Boingo
@worleygirl – Amy Worley, Director of Digital Marketing for H&R Block
@Rumford – Rodney Rumford, CEO of Gravitational Media and FaceReviews.com
@MichelleBB – Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, VP of Marketing for Harte-Hanks (also fellow member of Forrester’s Technology Marketing Council)
@weave – Eric Weaver, VP, Edelman Digital

I’m sure there are others out there I haven’t met yet who were doing the same.  I had an enjoyable day today keeping up with the speakers and ‘tweeting’ along the way even through the smaller track sessions.  You can find all of our tweets at http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=forrmarketing08 …

Sessions I attended and covered on Twitter during the day today:

  • Engagement: A New Approach to Understanding Your Customers – Brian Haven, Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research
  • Tapping Agencies’ Evolving Marketing Capabilities – Casey C. Jones, VP, Global Marketing, Dell
  • Moving Beyond Marketing to Engagement – Gary Skidmore, President, Harte-Hanks
  • Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand – Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand
  • The Interactive Marketing Maturity Model – Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
  • Making Word of Mouth Work – Peter Kim, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research; Janet Eden-Harris, CEO, Umbria; Dave Balter, Founder/CEO, BzzAgent
  • Community: Engaging 130 Million Customers – Cathy Halligan, CMO, Walmart.com
  • The Four Pleasures: A Framework For Customer Engagement – Dr. Patrick Jordan, CEO, Patrick W. Jordan, Ltd.

My day 2 includes conducting a usability test for Forrester’s new website (a project led by a former Accenture colleague), meeting 1:1 with Forrester analysts, following a host of what looks like more great content, and an awful flight home.  Did I miss anything?  I have lots of notes to share back with team Brulant and have some great content for future posts… Thank you Forrester.

by adam

Top Retailers and Social Media – Designing our next study

The top internet retailers are savvy companies who are mastering the art of user experience, search marketing, email marketing and many other tools to maintain a steadily growing industry.  Have they mastered, or even embraced, social media yet?  Geoff Livingston, in his book Now Is Gone, suggests companies need to "engage or die."  Which online […]

RetailThe top internet retailers are savvy companies who are mastering the art of user experience, search marketing, email marketing and many other tools to maintain a steadily growing industry.  Have they mastered, or even embraced, social media yet?  Geoff Livingston, in his book Now Is Gone, suggests companies need to "engage or die."  Which online retailers have started to engage, and how? 

I am sponsoring another Brulant survey of 100 of the top retailers – similar to Brulant’s Alternate Payment Methods study conducted in February – to see which companies are using social media tools to enhance their online presence and engage their communities. 

Here’s where I could use your help – What to measure? 

To keep it simple, we are going to go do our own research on a series of "yes" or "no" questions.  What questions do you think would help the casual observer determine "adoption" of social media?  Here is what we have so far.

Take 100 of the top internet retailers and measure the following – Does the company have:

  • an official Facebook Fan Page or Sponsored Group
  • an official Myspace page (after looking around this may be hard to figure out, but I’m clearly no myspace expert)
  • 1 or more official corporate blogs on their websites (interesting list at: http://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi)
  • RSS feeds off their websites
  • user reviews of products available on their websites
  • any YouTube “official” videos
  • any YouTube “Unofficial” videos
  • any Flickr results for brand

Realizing some of these may be both hard to quantify and that there are more likely to be individuals doing these activities on behalf of the companies, we’d want the measurements to be easy to capture and refresh at a later date to see trends.  What do you think?

by adam

Digital Footprints – I’m no longer size 10 1/2

At Len Devanna’s blog, he announces a very cool gadget from EMC on their recently revamped emc.com – a downloadable application to calculate your complete digital footprint based on how much you email, send text messages, take digital pictures or videos, etc.  (There is both a mac and PC version).  Len’s was 11.7MB, and being […]

Adamdf_2 At Len Devanna’s blog, he announces a very cool gadget from EMC on their recently revamped emc.com – a downloadable application to calculate your complete digital footprint based on how much you email, send text messages, take digital pictures or videos, etc.  (There is both a mac and PC version).  Len’s was 11.7MB, and being the Director of eBusiness for a data storage company like EMC, I figured that’s some heavy bandwidth.  I don’t consider myself an online junkie, yet I scored 19.1MB!  The app then starts a running ticker showing bytes of data I have created.

First, this gives a great appreciation for how much data is created out there.  Some of the well known bloggers, podcasters and others out there will have much larger footprints, but think of how this ties to corporations, small and large.

Second, this is a terrific marketing tool.  Not only is it interactive, it has a direct correlation to EMC’s business.  I’d love to see a similar one created by Earth911.org or the EPA that shows how much trash we generate or each person’s personal impact on global warming.  Or instead of Alicia Silverstone naked, PETA could create an application that calculates your "animal cruelty" footprint.  The campaign for Florida orange juice could calculate your annual carbonated soda footprint.  A hybrid automaker could calculate how much gas is guzzled by driver behavior.  There are lots of applications.  Hmm – maybe I need someone to calculate how many times I’ve watched that PETA ad.  Nah, I only looked at it once, I swear.