Do You Need a Social Media Marketer?

Do you like to go on Facebook and Twitter all day? Do you excel at making online friends and writing pithy tweets and status updates? If so, there may be a job out there for you!

If more companies follow the lead of Pepsi, Ford, Dell and Toyota, then social media marketer will become a growing occupation as more companies hire full-timers to interact with consumers on their behalf via Facebook and Twitter. But the lack of ROI around social media, and the belief that such duties should be spread around rather than concentrated in one unit, may limit that growth.

“Most companies just aren’t ready,” said Matthew Schwartz, president of MJS Executive Search, which placed Bonin Bough as global director of social media, a new position, at PepsiCo in September. Schwartz said he would not describe social media marketer as a hot new occupation yet. “Pepsi was a visionary.”

A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a parter at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.”

While almost every company does some form of social media marketing these days, the function is usually performed by an interactive marketing group and not broken out separately. Coca-Cola, for instance, clearly believes social media is important. The company created an office of digital communications and social media led by Adam Brown, director of digital communications for Coca-Cola, last month. But that group doesn’t hire a single full-timer charged with social media marketing. The company prefers that all employees in marketing and communications do some social media marketing instead. “Our model hasn’t been to have a staff that does nothing but respond to tweets,” said Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing for Coke. Donnelly said he believes having full-time employees charged with such a function comes across as disingenuous. “The only way is to be genuine and real,” he said.

That’s not everyone’s view. Dell has more than 40 full-time employees charged solely with social media marketing on behalf of the brand. Dell formed the group in 2006 after blogger Jeff Jarvis had shown how consumers in the Web 2.0 age can flex their muscles. Jarvis’ bad experience with Dell tech support, outlined on his blog Buzz Machine, in 2005, wound up hurting the brand’s reputation. “That was a factor and it was a catalyst for us to start listening and engaging people in the blogosphere,” said John Pope, a Dell rep.

Another pioneer in the space, Wells Fargo, has had a vp of social media since 2005, Ed Terpening. Part of the function of such a position is to determine which forms of social media are worth investing in. “We were the first brand that participated with Second Life and the first one to leave,” said Tim Collins, director of experiential marketing for Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo entered Twitter in late March and Collins sees that as the big three of social media marketing outlets along with Facebook and MySpace. Other brands have been on Twitter for a while, including Dell, which has more than 80 accounts (most notably RichardatDELL with more than 5,000 followers) on the network and Ford, whose Scott Monty holds the title head of social media for the brand. As of last week Monty had more than 16,000 followers on Twitter and has authored close to 13,000 tweets—bursts of text of no more than 140 characters. While those tweets often plug Ford products in one way or another, he occasionally goes off topic as if to underscore the fact that he’s a real person. (Last week, for instance, he entertained a discussion with a follower about the fact that Bacardi rum is actually made in Mexico, not Puerto Rico as commonly thought.)

The mix of genuineness and salesmanship is a key to being a successful social media marketer, said Collins. “You have to have a passion for the space,” he said. “You can tell some people are very passionate and you can tell [when] it’s kind of forced.”

Though Collins said Wells Fargo has been able to prove ROI on its social media efforts in many cases, Schwartz said most companies are still tentative about social media marketing.
“There’s been a lot of pushback on that as far as marketing goes,” said Schwartz. “People think that social media doesn’t work. It’s hard to find ROI on pure social media marketing, but it’s a long, slow build, not something you see immediate gratification on.”

[read more : http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3ie2a94edbc5b0a7c1150d6cbf4741dede?pn=1]

McDonald's Filet-O-Fish ad makes a big splash

People have been hooked by McDonald's Filet-O-Fish singing fish ad.

The fish sings, "Give me back that Filet-O-Fish" as he hangs mounted on a wall plaque in a garage. Two friends watch the fish, but enjoy the sandwich without a word.

The ad and its infectious song have spawned a series of knockoff ads posted online and a ring tone. Google says searches for "McDonald's fish" are up 100% in the past four weeks and that the ad has been viewed on YouTube more than a million times.

"It took a life of its own," says Danya Proud, McDonald's spokeswoman.

The talking fish looks like the "Big Mouth Billy Bass" gag gift advertised on cable TV almost a decade ago. Agency Arnold Worldwide came up with the parody idea after struggling to create an ad local franchisees could air for the Filet-O-Fish promotion that is done every year around this time.

Proud says that McDonald's sells about 300 million fish sandwiches annually, 25% during the 40-day Lenten period before Easter Sunday (April 12 this year).

"It was our third Saturday in a row working in a conference room that's known as the fish bowl," says Peter Harvey, senior copy writer at Arnold in Boston. "We started talking about the toy that everybody had 10 years ago, and it came to us."

Part of the creative challenge was that the actors don't speak, yet had to be funny. Actor Ray Conchado plays the guy who shrugs off the singing fish, while JR Reed is the friend surprised to see a fish singing when he walks into the garage.

"We had to run this in both English and Spanish," Harvey says. "We had to have the actors not speak. If they have to talk to make us crack up, it's not going to work."

That put the pressure on the fish. "The fish was only going to take up 12 seconds, so he had to be fun and catchy really fast," Harvey says.

Once the concept was nailed, they came up with lyrics and music and assigned a music agency to create six or seven versions of the tune that is sung by Joey Auch.

"We wound up choosing the song not because there was a science behind it but because when we heard it the first time we wanted to hear it again," Harvey says.

They also needed a fish that wouldn't put people off. A Los Angeles taxidermist created a pollock with a remote control device to operate his mouth and tail. The sandwich is made with cod as well as pollock, but that fish looked too scary.

Says Harvey, "We said, 'Let's make it a little more toy-like so it won't scare people completely.' "

[read more at : http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/adtrack/2009-04-05-mcdonalds-singing-fish-ad_N.htm]

Video :

Google Bets on Startup's 'Photo-Based AdSense'

Google is investing in a new startup, Pixazza, that bills its core offering as the photo version of Google's text-based advertising product for Web site publishers, AdSense.

Pixazza, whose $5.75 million financing round also included investments from August Capital and CMEA Capital, today formally launched its service, which overlays photos on Web pages with links that enable viewers to buy the products shown.

Like Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) AdSense, which bases the text ads it displays on the content of a Web publisher's site, Pixazza's tool turns the content of Web images into clickable e-commerce links.

"Pixazza hopes to do for images what Google's AdSense did for Web pages," said Pixazza CEO Bob Lisbonne.

Given the similarity to AdSense, there's speculation that Google might employ the technology somehow at its site, or even eventually buy out Pixazza. But for now, Google's remaining mum on any plans.

"Aside from saying that Google invested in Pixazza to support a promising and innovative new advertising technology, I don't have much information I can share," Google spokesperson Andrew Pederson told InternetNews.com.

Right now, the Pixazza technology is being used at fashion and apparel sites, but Lisbonne tells InternetNews.com that the company is planning to expand to the travel, sports, electronics and home furnishing categories.

"It makes sense to start with fashion, there's a very passionate audience and photos are key parts of those Web sites, so it's a good match," Lisbonne said. "But our vision involves all the major e-commerce categories in time."

He said installing the technology is "as simple as adding Google Analytics," and involves copying and pasting a line of Java script on a Web page.

Crowdsourcing for commerce

Here's how it works: Pixazza uses its proprietary platform and a group of subject-matter experts -- at present, fashionistas -- to identify taggable items in photos and connect them to similar products carried by its network of merchants.

On a site using the technology, visitors can mouse over the images to get additional information about products within a pop-up box. Clicking on the text takes them to an individual product page where they can get more information, or even purchase the item from one of Pixazza's participating vendors.

The operation thus relies heavily on what industry insiders call "crowdsourcing," enlisting the efforts of many people over the Internet, who each do a little work toward a common goal.

For the army of product experts comprising the crowdsource, money is an incentive: They get a slice of the revenue. When a consumer clicks on an item and buys through the Pixazza tool, it generates a commission that's shared with the crowdsource expert and the publishing partner.

Lisbonne added that the approach sets his service apart from other online product recommendation technology because Pixazza is not solely relying on an algorithm to deliver results.

"Computers are great at some things, but awful at others, and one of those things is identifying products in a picture," he said. "But our product experts have a passion for this, and this is how our technology approach is distinctive. It builds on our prior experience at LiveOps, which did crowdsourcing for virtual call centers."

At the same time, the Web publisher housing the image also gets a cut of the commission from advertisers, as does Pixazza.

"It's a recession-proof business model because everyone wins: advertisers get new customers, crowdsourcers get the opportunity to make money, the Web site publisher gets incremental revenue stream and Pixazza gets paid for enabling all of that," he said.

While Pixazza is now opening its service to publishers, the service has been undergoing testing since November 2008 and is already live on multiple Web sites.

[Read more : http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3812186/Google%20Bets%20on%20Startups%20PhotoBased%20AdSense.htm]

Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web

Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings.

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Supporters of this idea say such programs will help with the emergence of a new “social Web,” because chatter among friends will infiltrate even sites that have been entirely unsociable thus far.

For example, a person might alert his Facebook friends to the fact that he is watching a video on CBS.com and invite them to join him there to watch together and discuss the video as it plays.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

MySpace, Yahoo and Google have all announced similar programs this year, using common standards that will allow other Web sites to reduce the work needed to embrace each identity system. Facebook, which is using its own data-sharing technology, is slightly ahead of its rivals.

Facebook, with 120 million members worldwide, has also been under extra pressure to get its revenue to match its media hype and membership growth. Responding to reports that Facebook was looking for more capital after raising $235 million last year, Ms. Sandberg said she would not rule that out. “There is a lot of interest in investing in us and we are always open to the right financing at the right price,” she said.

The most immediate challenge confronting Facebook is to create an enduring stream of advertising revenue.

A survey last week from the research firm IDC suggested that social networks were a miserable place for advertisers: just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.

This is where Facebook Connect could help. No money changes hands between Facebook and the sites using Connect, and executives are wary of discussing how it could bring in revenue. But there are some obvious possibilities.

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

“It’s becoming very clear that advertisers don’t know how to advertise on Facebook,” said Charlene Li, an independent consultant and social media analyst. “But if you take a group of Facebook friends and put them on a travel site where they are spending more time and generating more ad dollars in a focused area like travel, that is an opportunity ripe for getting revenues back and sharing it.”

Facebook executives argue that Connect will naturally increase traffic on the site and increase ad revenue as a result.

That reluctance is partly born of experience. Last year, Facebook was lambasted for its Beacon advertising program, which some thought failed to properly warn users that their actions on other sites were being shared on Facebook. Some users’ purchases on e-commerce sites, for example, were broadcast to their friends, in some cases spoiling gift plans.

As a result, Facebook executives have been exceedingly circumspect with Connect, introducing it slowly and pitching it as a privacy tool. They argue that it allows users to set their privacy settings once on Facebook and then apply them on other sites.

Facebook has also taken other precautions. According to staff members at the political advocacy group MoveOn.org, which led the charge against Beacon, Facebook executives gave them an early briefing this summer about Connect.

For now, Facebook is also carefully authorizing each partner in the Connect program and reviewing how it will use data on Facebook members and discuss the feature publicly. It plans to allow Web sites to register themselves for Connect, without having to seek approval, in the next few weeks.

When asked about the potential promises and pitfalls of Connect, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said: “We want to make the experience as lightweight and easy to use as possible. But we also have to make sure that people understand what’s going on and have control over it.”

Executives at the social network MySpace, which has similar goals, are more outspoken in discussing their identification system.

“There are so many important issues to get right,” said Jason Oberfest, a vice president at MySpace. “Consumers need to understand where their data is going and how it’s being used.”

“Then, if we can get the privacy issues right, if it’s totally clear to the user what is happening, there is potential for advertising,” Mr. Oberfest added. “But certainly not without a lot of testing and consideration.”

Marketers Push for Mobile Tuesday as the New Black Friday

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Black friday and Cyber Monday have become retail mainstays, but Mobile Tuesday?

Recent economic woes have eliminated many marketers' ability to invest in emerging media. Still, aggressive mobile-marketing firms and major retailers are introducing programs meant to entice wary consumers this holiday season. One such program is the attempt to create yet another shopping holiday, Mobile Tuesday.

Mobigosee, a mobile-marketing firm, is moving forward with the launch of Mobile Tuesday on Dec. 2, despite the loss of major marketing partners whose budgets have been decimated by the recession. The concept was born out of research showing that the Tuesday after Thanksgiving is a slow shopping day, as are many Tuesdays throughout the year, said Tanya Penman, founder-CEO of Mobigosee. Armed with that knowledge, the firm aims to encourage shopping with a mobile circular of sorts every Tuesday. An advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will support the launch in 10 cities, in addition to an online presence.

Plans for Mobile Tuesday were well under way earlier this fall, with a major car company, as well as several well-known luxury brands and retailers signed on, Ms. Penman said. But those companies began pulling the plug on the program in September, putting off plans until next year.

Now Ms. Penman is attempting to launch Mobile Tuesday with just three marketers onboard: McDonald's, Finish Line and RedTag. The company is hoping to attract additional retailers with couponing strategies, in which Mobigosee is paid only when the mobile coupons are redeemed.

"Mobile is the natural next generation of shopping," Ms. Penman said. "We thought about waiting until next year, but ... our belief is there's a demand." She cited the rollout of mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone 3G, BlackBerry's Bold and HTC's G1, as well as consumers' desire for coupons and deals this holiday season.

So far, 18,000 people have signed up for Mobile Tuesday updates, most through sites that leak Black Friday deals. Ms. Penman said the goal had been 5,000.

With plenty of numbers to support the argument for mobile marketing—there are 259 million wireless lines in the U.S., 69% of which are used for at least one data service, according to Nielsen Mobile—several major retailers also embarking on their own mobile campaigns.

Retailers including Gap and Sears are promoting mobile programs, believing they're an important tactic to reach harried and increasingly tech-savvy consumers during the holidays.

Gap created a free iPhone application that allows consumers to put together an outfit and then generate a gift list of the items. "With our target audience being that 25- to 35-year-old, we wanted to engage our customer where they're playing and really be where they are," said Ivy Ross, exec VP-Gap marketing.

JCPenney is using a WAP site to promote popular gifts and will be sending text-message alerts about sales. And Sears is pushing into the space with its first WAP site, sears2go.com. The site launched in November as a way to appeal to busy shoppers. Kmart, which is also owned by Sears Holdings, is a sponsor of the VH1 WAP site for the top 40 music videos of 2008.

"Even though you might not have the marketing spend that you'd like, you have to be sure you're approaching things from a multichannel perspective," said Tom Aiello, divisional VP-public relations at Sears Holdings. "We felt it was important to have a presence there so we could really engage consumers and get them used to engaging Sears and Kmart through those different channels."

Now isin't there a wow factor to all this...

You could read the article at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=132861

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu cases had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report was released. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

The C.D.C. reports are slower because they rely on data collected and compiled from thousands of health care providers, labs and other sources. Some public health experts say the Google data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. From 5 to 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.

The service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Dr. Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and an author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keeping daily tabs on disease trends in their communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City.

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional, free way to detect influenza, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology of Google Flu Trends is expected to be published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune ad campaigns. And internally, the company has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but privacy concerns had generally stopped it from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Dr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Google also says it believes the tool may help people take precautions if a disease is in their area.

Others have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with the Children’s Hospital Boston, scours the Web for articles, blog posts and newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”


You could read the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/technology/internet/12flu.html?_r=2&ref=health&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
or
for more on Google Flu trends please visit http://www.google.org/flutrends

Google's PageRank Is Best Way to Rate Online Influence

BusinessWeek recently created a bit of a stir from bloggers such as Ogilvy's John Bell when it reported that Google had created a method for ranking the influence of social networkers. But it might be moot, because bloggers are more influential.

Blog readership has quietly grown 300% in four years. Further, blogs strongly influence purchasing decisions, according to a new Jupiter Research/BuzzLogic study. Once again, trust comes into view. Frequent blog readers trust blogs for product advice more than they trust social networks.

Influence in the blogging community is built link by link. That's why Technorati's link-authority algorithm, for a time, was the de facto way to measure bloggers. Over time, however, the environment changed. The media started to blog, and bloggers started attracting links from an array of sources, including Twitter and even static corporate sites. Enter Google.

Google assigns every page and site in its index a PageRank between one and 10. According to Google, "Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results."

Let's argue that Google is the gateway to all online content people want to find. To me, then, as a site builds its PageRank, it also grows its ability to influence people just when they're searching for products and services. Many bloggers -- with their linking ethos -- have attracted high PageRanks and thus have been assigned influence ratings by Google. It's a big reason why they remain more influential than social networks.

Although it's not perfect, there are three reasons why Google PageRank rules: It's something you have to earn over time, it measures your ability to shape opinions on the world's largest digital stage and it takes the entire online ecosystem into account. Many bloggers monitor their Google PageRanks; the Ad Age Power 150 and Healthcare 100 lists allow you to sort bloggers this way. (You can see the PageRank for any site or page using the advanced features of the Google Toolbar.)

So until someone shows me a better system, PageRank is the ultimate way to measure online influence.


You could read the article at http://adage.com/article?article_id=132554