Online Marketing Effectiveness from eMarketer

How can an organization utilize online marketing channels to accomplish its goals?

MOST EFFECTIVE IN GENERATING ONLINE CONVERSATIONS:
1. Search engine optimization
2. Email & enewsletter**
3. Pay-per-click search ads**
4. Behavioral targeting
5. Site or page sponsorship
**respondents working with $1+ marketing budgets swapped these two in order of effectiveness


MOST EFFECTIVE IN AFFECTING BRAND PERCEPTION:
1. Site or page sponsorship
2. Search engine optimization
3. Email & enewsletter
4. Pay-per-impression ads on digital publications
5. Viral marketing



Visit eMarketer for more on this poll.

Twitter = Traffic, a TechCrunch Statistical Breakdown

The main point of this post on TechCrunch is the following – the most common ways people use Twitter are:
1. As a social information filter
2. As a link distributor

TechCrunch has come to this conclusion through first-hand experience - during the last few months, outside traffic to the site from Twitter has grown so much that Twitter is now second only to Google.

Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch
1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%

Much of this traffic is generated by TechCrunch's Twitter account, with over 700,000 followers. TechCrunch uses this account to send out story links, driving followers to its site. These tweets spread virally, as followers retweet (forward) the link to others. The main take-away from this post on TechCrunch is this = "Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere."

While TechCrunch is a unique site, with a demographic that is not representative of the public, there are clearly other opportunities in that statement. As an Arts Administration student, I can see how arts organizations (or sports, any ticketed event) could utilize Twitter to make sure no seats go unsold to any event. As Twitter provides real-time feedback, using Tiny URLs to send out waves of ticketing in tiered prices could allow for an instant gauge of demand and supply, in a perishable environment where the product has a limtited shelf-life.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/

Fox's Cartoon Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing for the next Family Guy? That's right! Fox (the network that produces The Simpsons, Family Guy, and King of the Hill) is crowdsourcing through Aniboom to find the next great cartoon hit.

Submissions are accepted from May 27-August 31; users must create a 2-4 minute animated holiday short on Aniboom, a virtual animation studio with a mission as follows, "to cultivate animated content by leveraging the web, providing online animation opportunities such as animated competitions and free online animation software".

Click here to visit Aniboom and browse through other competition entries.

Beginning September, online viewers will get to vote on the submissions, with their choice representing one of the final five spots (I assume the other four spots will be filled by a jury assembled by Fox). Finalists then will be announced around the beginning of November, and will receive $5K each. The winner will receive an additional $10K and a development deal with Fox. It will be interesting to see the results of this competition and whether it generates media attention and/or a hit.

Click here to read an article on this topic by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch.

A Million Penguins

On the website for A Million Penguins, Penguin publishing asks the question many ask today, "Is the same [wisdom of crowds] true in artistic fields?" Obviously, collaboration already commonly exists in artistic fields - film and television writers work in teams, theatrical projects are almost always assembled by a team of artists, and even those works that are seemingly individual (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons) are actually the end product of a team. But can you crowdsource for content? Can a collective (as assembled a la Web 2.0 - a large group of people, geographically dispersed, without knowledge of one another) produce a work of art?

Penguin Books writes, "So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months."

Fast forward (the project launched February 2007 and closed about a month later) - What's the answer? Can a novel be written by a crowd? Although Penguin doesn't release a definitive Yes or No, I think it's safe to say A Million Penguins is not an easy read. Here are the stats:

• 1030 pages of text in total
• 75,000 people visited the site during the free editing period, with 280,000 page views
  
• 1,500 people contributed to the novel, editing the wiki 11,000 times

So what does this mean? As Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher for Penguin, blogs, "As the project evolved I think I stopped thinking about it as a literary experiment and started thinking about it more as a social experiment."

And in April 2008, the Institute of Creative Technologies of De Montfort University published A Million Penguins Research Report:

What today appears not to be a novel as we know it may in time come to be seen as one, just as work once judged not to be poetry is often later brought into the critical fold. But for the moment at least the answer to whether or not a community can write a novel appears to be 'not like this'. Our research has shown that "A Million Penguins" is something other than a novel and, thereby, opened up new questions and avenues for exploration. It has treated the final product not as a variation of a printed novel or something which could be turned into one, but as type of performance. The contributors did not form a community, rather they spontaneously organised themselves into a diverse, riotous assembly. We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was, ground-breaking and exciting.

Maybe crowdsourcing for traditional artistic categories in this manner doesn't necessarily work under our current definitions of the end product? Maybe this concept opens up new avenues for new categories, or work that can't be categorized? I think one definitive statement that can be made regarding A Million Penguins is this - there are a lot of people out there, looking for channels in which to express their creativity and point of view. And there must be opportunity in that!

Aaron Koblin's Sheep Market

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace - people who need something done can go there and pay those who are willing to do it. The vast majority of work available is for small tasks (labeled HIT: Human Intelligence Task) - such as transcription or simple market research like counting certain words as they appear in website comment sections. Payment can be $0.05 a word transcribed, or similar compensation. Critics call it an virtual sweatshop, as much of the work is repetitive and the pay is quite low.

San Francisco-based artist Aaron Koblin decided to use Mechanical Turk to harness the power of the crowd's creativity instead. He created the following HIT: in exchange for $0.02, users are to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’. Koblin received 10,000 sheeps which he then combined into one art piece, The Sheep Market. Inspired by the Mechanical Turk system, and drawing on the last Industrial Revolution and the artistic response it illicited, Koblin created a custom drawing tool that captured not only the finished sheep drawing but the process. The Sheep Market is a website, that looks like a bar code initially but once the viewer zooms in s/he can make out the individual sheep caricatures. The viewer can click on a sheep, and above the collective picture a window displays the drawing process. Click here to view The Sheep Market.

Video Interview: Aaron Koblin for Wired.com

Social Media Literature

I am still in the process of reading these books, so I can't comment on them all first-hand at the moment (but I'll update this post accordingly). This list comes from a mash-up of several marketing/media/Internet courses I've taken, from professors' lists of recommended/required texts. Some emphasize marketing, some emphasize economics, and most deal with the idea of Web 2.0, or the Internet's ability to facilitate communication between large groups of people.

James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds
Like the jellybeans story in the About Me section, Surowiecki's book deals with collective vs. individual intellegence, and how to harness the power of group knowledge. On Amazon.com, the book review summarizes Surowiecki's elements of 'wise crowds': (1) diversity of opinion for different information; (2) independence of members from one another to avoid opinion leaders; (3) decentralization for errors to balance out; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions so that a single expert isn't skewing the results. This is the hypothesis for Click! - is a crowd as wise in curating an exhibit as a professional?

Seth Godin - Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us
I'll have to update this one, as I am in the process of reading it. According to the review on Amazon.com, Godin's main thesis is that "lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a tribe: a group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea. Smart innovators find or assemble a movement of similarly minded individuals and get the tribe excited by a new product, service or message, often via the Internet (consider, for example, the popularity of the Obama campaign, Facebook or Twitter)."

Chris Anderson - The Long Tail
Chris Anderson is an editor at Wired; the book below is also by a writer there, Jeff Howe. The long tail is based on niche markets - that with the Internet, the ability to find and access niche markets is so much easier and cheaper to do, that one can capitalize on the long tail of offerings. For example, in 2008 the best-selling digital album on Amazon was by Nine Inch Nails, an arguably niche rather than mass market band. While record stores ten years ago might not have even stocked such a CD, it obviously has a market. The long tail offering, rather than the blockbuster, mass market offer (like a Justin Timberlake CD) had the largest market in this scenario. Interesting opportunities for arts organizations, whose offerings are often niche rather than mass.

Jeff Howe - Crowdsourcing
Another 'power of the crowd' one, this deals with some examples from the art world, including the acquisition of iStockPhoto by Getty Images (some of the same issues in this book can be found in the comments exchange regarding the Met's 'It's Time We Met' marketing campaign). I find this book interesting, but it focuses on the benefits for the amateur or semi-professional without addressing the other side of the coin (what happened to all the professional stock photographers with Getty?).

Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams - Wikinomics
From Amazon.com: "methods for exploiting the power of collaborative production are outlined throughout, an alluring compendium of ways to throw open previously guarded intellectual property and to invite in previously unavailable ideas that hide within the populace at large"
As Wikinomics takes its title from Wikipedia, the biggest example of crowd participation in the creation of the world's largest encyclopedia, this book deals with the issue of control in opening an idea up for crowd input. Control regarding intellectual property is very much related to the creative process and product; this book contains several examples that may seem very unrelated to the arts and entertainment industries but really are quite similar.

Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year

2006: Time's Person of the Year - You

by Lev Grossman - December 13th, 2006

...Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

As Grossman writes, Web 2.0 is a gigantic social experiment - in participation, collaboration and the exchange of information and ideas. As he points out, not all of it is good - the crowd is not always wise, and accepting the democracy of the Internet involves the inclusion of many opinions, some of which are bigoted, sexist, and just plain factually wrong.

But obviously we wanted it and were ready! We have things to say and creativity to express. We want to add a comment on Amazon.com when we buy a DVD that arrives scratched. We want to make videos combining our cats playing with laser lights with the title track from Star Wars. Do all of us contribute? No, but that's OK because we're also watching. Where is the line between consumer and producer? Who knows now!

Visit the Time article here.

User-Generated Advertising with YouTube & Sprint

The second week of May Sprint ran an ad on YouTube, taking over the masthead banner to display Sprint's Now Network in the form of a real-time digital clock, using user-generated video to create the numbers. Sprint assigned numbers to those who wished to participate, and then managed for 24 hours the streaming of the user-generated videos accordingly (for example, at 1:42, Sprint streamed video from three users, all displaying in their own creative expression the numbers 1, 4 and 2).

Jennifer Van Grove writes in a post on Mashable: "While Hulu seems to be focused on adding more premium content to attract premium advertisers, YouTube’s experimentation with ad formats appears to be an attempt to demonstrate that integrating social and user content into ads is a big new way to turn advertisements into premium content that viewers want to engage with."

Other companies have ventured into this area, hoping to engage users with advertising to create an enhanced experience; for platforms, one that is worth more in revenue, for products/services, one that delivers sales, and for users, an experience that is a welcomed rather than intrusive engagement. Volvo also launched an ad, using the YouTube masthead space, which included a live Twitter feed for user participation. It will be interesting to see where this goes..

Has anyone seen this Sprint Now Network clock? I've found articles like the one in Mashable mentioned above but I can't find evidence of the campaign, on either the YouTube or Sprint sites. It would be interesting to see the actual clock and to hear more about the campaign after its launch, as the two articles (links below) I found are both in anticipation of the ad's debut.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/12/sprint-youtube-campaign/
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=105650

Understanding Online Relationships

Stephen Baker in BusinessWeek, "Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_22/b4133032573293.htm

The article discusses the efforts at the moment that marketers and researchers are undertaking to aggregate the massive amounts of data created by the vast social networking opportunities that exist. Duncan J. Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and the head of a research unit at Yahoo!, says that "this flood of data for social scientists could be as transformative as Galileo's telescope was for the physical sciences. It gives us a new understanding of our world and ourselves."

The amount of data regarding online relationships that is available provides an opportunity for advertisers to develop a better understanding of their targeted consumers and those consumers' motivations. And as information is certainly not scarce now, attention most definitely is, and knowledge regarding relationships and motivation just gets more and more valuable as the competition for attention intensifies.

But online relationship networks have changed the understanding of interaction. The article discusses how friends are more likely to be interested in the same sort of products, attracted by the same type of ads. But what constitutes a friend now? Although I have about 250 Facebook friends, would I be interested in wearing the same type of clothes as all of them, or do I like the same movies, books, television shows, etc.? Sociologists, economists and market researchers are using all of the data generated by social network activity to try and understand of my 250 'Friends', whose opinions and tastes are most like my own?

Friendship Data

Cameron A. Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, is working on a study to determine how close we are to our online friends. He and his team look at how often people communicate with Facebook friends, click on their links, news and photos, as well as how the communication flows (is it reciprocal?). They have determined the following about an average Facebook user (average user is considered by them to be one with 500 friends):

• S/he actively follows news on only 40 of them
• S/he communicates with 20
• S/he keeps in close touch with about 10
• And those with smaller networks (less than 500 friends) follow even fewer

As we've discussed in class, the jury is still out on Facebook ads. Although the traffic is there, obviously (as evidenced through the study findings above) people aren't paying a ton of attention to most of their friends. But if scientists like Marlow can discover how these relationships work, then the ability to target those small, intimate networks amongst the vast pool of friends could be very valuable to advertisers.

The article also discusses the internal value of social networks for corporations in increasing the flow of ideas and harnessing the collective intellegence of its employees on a large scale. IBM Research has one such experimental internal online social network, Beehive. The network (at 60,000 currently) connects employees with similar interests and expertise and suggests them as friends. In addition to more social interactions (posting photos), the friends also use Beehive to discuss patents and critique software code.

It will be interesting to see how these studies impact advertising and internal corporate communications, particularly once the data is used to attempt to better understand these relationships in an actionable way so that the hypothesis are tested and produce some real, quantifiable results.

HBO's BloodCopy on Gawker

HBO's idea is to play along "that fine line of fully disrupting someone's experience and at the same time immersing them in your experience," said Zach Enterlin, vice president of advertising and promotions for HBO.

HBO, in promoting its new series True Blood last summer, created a blog for vampires, BloodCopy.com - Vampire News with Bite. The show True Blood is based on the premise that due to the creation of synthetic blood, vampires are now free to walk amongst us humans. As part of HBO's marketing campaign, it aimed to create the world that the premise of the show is based on; vampires are out, working/loving/walking alongside humans (at night anyway, of course). BloodCopy.com is where these vampires interact online, posting on current topics such as politics, entertainment, news, and fashion as it pertains to their particular community. Posts sound like this one: "Every hipster with a neckerchief and an MFA is reading Pride and Predjudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. If the L train were a famous talk-show host's book club, PAPAZ would be its Eat, Pray, Love."

This season, taking BloodCopy.com and the campaign to the next level, HBO has teamed with brands such as Harley-Davidson and Monster.com to create vampire-targeted advertisements. These ads are displayed on the blog and on the 'official' True Blood website.

A bit of controversy erupted just the other day, when Gawker picked up BloodCopy.com for inclusion in its roster of very popular (and all legitimate/'real') blogs. "Gawker Media announced last night that it acquired BloodCopy.com," Silicon Alley Insider (an industry news blog) reported last Saturday morning. "It's a blog about vampires. Really." The next day they apologized for the misunderstanding, but also added, "We also think that HBO, Gawker, and the marketing agency crossed a line ... We're all for experimental online advertising, viral marketing, etc. ... In our opinion, however, this campaign is designed to trick people."

Zach Enterlin at HBO replied with, "The goal isn't to really mislead at all. It's just igniting curiosity. I think the way the ads are done, there's a certain amount of known quantity with a wink. It inspires a double take. We're trying to make them as authentic as possible, but it's an absolute necessity that they have that element of 'wink'."

I can see how the broad issue of setting up a fake blog as part of a marketing campaign and then somewhat staging it as real could certainly be inappropriate and even dangerous in some situations (medical products and services, for example). But I think that in entertainment it is a natural extension of creativity, and HBO is just really good at being creative. I also think it's somewhat telling that the criticism came from someone who didn't get the joke, or as Enterlin puts it, the wink ;)....

Official True Blood site – http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/
BloodCopy - http://www.bloodcopy.com/
Article by Brian Steinberg on AdAge.com –
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090529/FREE/905299988
Gavin O'Malley's post on Online Media Daily –
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?art_aid=106720&fa=Articles.showArticle

Setting an Online Trend.. Three Wolves = Sarcastic Fashion

So this topic made its media/blog run about a week ago. Aside from being funny, I think it speaks to several marketing concepts - viral marketing (consumer-driven), the conversation driven by the audience rather than the company or marketers, and the opportunities in utilizing user-generated content (as well as the user-review format providing a new platform for creativity - the comments section as participatory, and in this case, sarcastic, creative writing).

Three Wolf Moon Adult Tee on Amazon.com

Brian Govern, a 32-year-old law student Rutgers School of Law in N.J., found this t-shirt while browsing through Amazon.com's apparel section (we're in grad school - my guess is while doing homework). On November 10, 2008, he posted this review (just an excerpt edited by me, check out the link at the bottom of this post for the full review):

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened... I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.
Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

This review inspired Amazon cruisers to contribute their stories of the shirt's magical powers (1,012 reviews total as of right now), including some of the selections below:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather - from Overlook1977

For you left brain types out there, who are still unsure on whether or not this shirt would make a wise purchase, allow me to break it down for you. Most shirts like this only contain one wolf. This shirt has three wolves, plus a moon. You are basically getting three wolves and a moon for the price on one wolf. You won't find that deal anywhere else - from lowwwwi

Pros: It's, amazing, this only works out at $5 per wolf - with the moon thrown in free! Yep, three awesome howling wolves and a free moon - who can argue with value like that, especially on unemployment benefits in these tough economic times.
Cons: One time at a party I spilled Natural Light Beer onto my upper-left wolf, and for a while it looked more like a howling collie than a wolf. It totally spoiled my mojo - I mean what chick wants to get with two-wolves and Lassie? I was pretty worried for a while but it all ended up okay in the end - my Mum washed it for me and I picked up two prime unwed-teenagers at the next party. - from G. Smith

According to The Mountain, the New Hampshire-based company that makes Three Wolf Moon shirts, the company has gone from selling 2 to 3 of the shirts a day to 100 an hour on Amazon. As Peter Applebome wrote in the NY Times on May 24, 2009, "Like the butterfly wings creating the tornado, Mr. Govern inadvertently helped set off an almost impossible marketing bonanza and pop-culture craze: The shirt has been Amazon's top-selling item of apparel every day since May 19, and it has morphed into one of those instant icons of Internet culture."

What does this mean for marketers? Clearly people want to be part of the conversation, and are willing to contribute their time to do so. This was not a campaign, and The Mountain didn't set out to market its shirt in a viral manner. But it seems as if there's an opportunity here - finding ways to tap into the interest/desire in expressing creativity might be a good avenue for an intention viral campaign. In reading through these posts, I thought first, who has the time to do this, and then, this is some funny and creative stuff. Most jobs/daily life activities do not provide the opportunity for expressing creativity. So a bunch of people found a way to through a wolf t-shirt - that's a lot of attention from a large audience. And it worked out well for The Mountain, although maybe not for Brian, original reviewer.. “I tell my parents and friends that it’s sad, but this is probably the most impact I’ll have on the world in my life.”

If you don't have time to look at anything else, and are bored/procrastinating with homework like (I'm guessing) Brian the Reviewer was, check out this video review (that's right, people made videos too!) starring Pocahontas and a man in a mullet and Mets shirt:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R29Z83O4AK10UD/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Peter Applebome's NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/nyregion/25towns.html
Meghan Daum's LA Times article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum28-2009may28,1,4391040.column
Amazon.com (the review or if you want to be the hottest wolf t-shirt wearing thing in the Hamptons this summer):
http://www.amazon.com/THREE-WOLF-SHIRT-ADULT-TEE/product-reviews/B000NZW3IY/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

About Me

Thank you for visiting my thesis blog! I am racing towards the finish line of my graduate degree in Arts Administration at Columbia University. Prior to returning to school, I worked as a dancer. I am currently on the adjunct faculty as a dance teacher at Pace University and hoping to transition into arts marketing. Having shaped my degree around marketing, I find the opportunities available in social media for arts organizations to be an exciting extension of creativity, a way to further communicate an artistic message and mission, and a great tool for building audiences!

So why the picture of the jellybeans? First, because I have an awful sweet tooth and taking this picture was a good excuse to buy jellybeans. But really, it's in response to my first case study - the Brooklyn Museum and Click!, the crowd-curated exhibit. In exploring the website, the museum explains that James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, was the impetus for the idea. And the classic example of group intelligence outperforming the individual is the jellybeans in a jar experiment - the average of all the guesses of members of a group will always be more accurate than the vast majority of all individual guesses. And did I mention that I will be eating all the jellybeans as well?..

Please contact me if you are working in this world of social media and the arts and have new ideas/examples that I haven't considered. Thanks again!

Shannon Houston
smh2149@columbia.edu

Social Media Tools

What Is Social Media & What Tools Are Available to Me?

From the User-Generated Content, Social Media and Advertising Report published in April 2008 by the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

UGC (user-generated content) and Social Networks are transforming the media ecosystem. Gone are the days when power rested in the hands of a few content creators and media distributors. Gone are the days when marketers controlled the communication and path between adavertisement and consumer. Today's model is collaborative, collective, customized and shared. It's a world in which the consumer is the creator, consumer and distributor of content.

Social Media: Social media is the convergence of all types of UGC - including video, photos, and commentary. Social media is usually organized within a social media network, like Facebook. The strength of a social media network is dependent on two elements - the number of users participating in the network and the amount of activity they generate.

Blogs: Short for weblog, a blog is a personal journal maintained on the web - updated frequently, appearing in reverse chronological order, and available to the public (best example - the site you're on now!).

Wikis: A wiki is a collaborative website built through the contributions of many writers and editors. The idea is open collaboration, although many wikis are restricted to members only (Wikipedia).

Widgets: Widgets are small programs that users can download onto their desktops or embed in their blogs or profile pages that import live information (such as the weather, flight prices, etc.)