Blogs: "Unimaginative Failures"

Wall Street Journal blogger Ben Worthen calls most corporate blogs "unimaginative failures," noting, "Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value." Ouch.

The catalyst for Worthen's comments is a new study from Forrester Research. Forrester reviewed 90 blogs from Fortune 500 business-to-business companies and surveyed B2B marketers. As Worthen notes:

Forrester found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

Ouch again. The report notes that one challenge B2B companies face is selling to customers who follow their products professionally, not personally, like in consumer markets.

Forrester suggests that corporate bloggers spruce up their blogs by publishing more often, publishing regularly and injecting "personality" into posts, such as "musings from an executive, insight into how a product decision was made, something funny."

It seems like the real issue is the motivation behind blogging. If a corporate blogger is blogging simply to follow the pack, as opposed to blogging to offer something of value to an audience, then the blog is pointless. Disinterested blogging would certainly lead to flat blogs and no readers. If that's the outcome, why bother?

Localizing Online Video

While YouTube and other online video platforms allow users to upload, view and search for whatever content they wish, one company is offering a localized twist -- a video platform specific to one market, South Africa.

Brands such as FHM, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, Die Burger and Kick Off have dedicated brand channels on MyVideo.co.za, South Africa's first online video platform. The site was launched in January 2007 and targeted at South African Internet users.

"Where videos posted on YouTube are likely to get lost in a sea of clutter, MyVideo ensures that South African content is aired as the sole focus, ensuring that companies who use it are connecting with targeted internet traffic," says MyVideo marketing officer Tristan Owen.

This is an interesting development that mirrors so many other like minded communities of interest (think blogs) that have developed because of digital technologies, and which provide new opportunities for marketers. By understanding the localized needs and desires of South Africans, marketers like Sports Illustrated can push localized content on MyVideo. This even creates new opportunities for low-budget, local businesses, whose messagse may be lost in the vastness of YouTube.

As Owen notes"By developing content that is both relevant to your brand as well as topical to users, you are creating an empire of possibilities."

Medium as Message Revisited

“The most creative mobile executions these days aggressively explore the wireless device itself – what the technology does, where it does it, and how marketing messages can be integrated into our most intimate communications habits,” wrote consultant and analyst Steve Smith.

Enter the iPhone. Tom Burgess, chief executive officer of Third Screen Media, a mobile marketing technology company, called the iPhone a “beachhead for converging mobile devices. It's a music player, video player and a phone all together. There's no doubt that it is a step in the right direction for a more robust marketing medium."

Cyriac Roeding, vice president of wireless at CBS Interactive, said the iPhone could “spark a surge in mobile marketing – provided that users embrace it the same way they turned to the iPod a few years ago.”

Those are the obvious advantages from a marketer’s perspective. It’s hard not to assume the iPhone could take mobile marketing opportunities to a new level through the integration of cellular, wireless, mobile web, video, audio and storage technologies.

That said, there are also challenges for both Apple and AT&T Wireless, upon whose cellular networks iPhones operate. As consultant Alan Chapell writes, “No discussion of mobile data would be complete without a word about the mobile carriers, such as T-mobile, Verizon, and Cingular…(T)he carriers currently have enough influence over the mobile space that pretty much any new mobile marketing technique or technology will have to meet with their approval in order to succeed…The carriers know all too well that customers tend to blame them for – well – just about anything that negatively impacts their mobile experience.”

Case in point, according to an Associated Press article regarding product registration delays during the iPhone’s initial roll out, iPhone customer Timothy Johnson, “said he was happy with the iPhone and credited Apple for acknowledging the problem. But he expressed concerned about the type of service he would get from AT&T in the future.”

The iPhone case exemplifies both the opportunities, as well as the challenges, inherent in technology-driven and technology-dependent mobile marketing. Mobile marketers must be aware of how their technologies and strategies will impact, or be impacted by, device developers and mobile carriers. Importantly, they must take note of how the developers and carriers react to the praise or criticism.

Connected Customer

Around a million new mobile subscribers are brought online in India alone every month. With those new subscribers comes a similar explosion in mobile bandwidth. “Mobile and wireless services are rapidly transforming from ‘poor man’s connectivity’ with data rates well below those for fixed services to comparable in speed and quality to their fixed-line counterparts. By some projections, mobile broadband services will overtake fixed broadband services as early as 2010,” writes Johna Till Johnson.

The revolution is not limited to mobile broadband, however. Take WiMax for example. WiMax enables a wireless signal to broadcast over a 10-mile radius. These new networks, and their corresponding devices and applications, are vastly increasing the reach of mobile connectivity.

Addressing Network World magazine’s IT audience, Johnson writes that these changes mean, “executives need to stop thinking of wireless and mobile technologies as a niche — relevant for a subset of users, but a footnote in the organization’s overall strategy. Instead, they should assume that mobile connectivity will become an increasingly important piece of the technology roadmap, and plan and budget for it accordingly.”

The same could be said for mobile marketers. Better bandwidth and a larger audience open the door to new, more innovative and increasingly interactive strategies and tactics. Ultimately, any effort to leverage technology upgrades to benefit mobile marketing strategies and tactics is predicated upon an understanding of the consumer’s product desires and mobile device expectations.

Michael Becker and Michael Hanley call this consumer, the “Connected Customer.” They write that “Marketers need to better understand the Connected Customer and what Connected Customers find relevant, informative and entertaining, and how the mobile channel and the practice of mobile marketing can help them accomplish their goals.”

Research surely will be important. The challenge will be to both determine those strategies and tactics which can be transferred from the web to the higher-bandwidth mobile marketing efforts, and to invent those strategies and tactics which will emerge from the new wireless and mobile capabilities.

Marketing to Kids

Marketing to children is a contentious practice. Food marketing, in particular, has caught the eye of federal agencies, due to the rising rates of childhood obesity. Food marketers reach children through a variety of means: packaging, product placement, advergaming, licensing of children's television characters and others.

According to a joint Federal Trade Commission / Department of Health and Human Services workshop report, the food industry spent $10 billion to $12 billion in 2002 on marketing to children. Examples include:

• Paying retailers to place products at locations accessible to children.
• Including toys with food, such the toys included in McDonald’s Happy Meals.
• Linking food with popular children's characters, books, toys and clothing, such as selling a Barbie doll that wears a Jell-O t-shirt or marketing SpongeBob SquarePants-shaped Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

A growing area, as noted in the report, is digital media, including web sites and branded video games (often integrated). These sites feature interactive games that promote food products (advergames), as well as contest, music, videos, downloadable items and more.

The report recommends a number of steps that food marketers should take to reign in marketing to children. However, since the focus is obesity prevention, the recommendations call for, for example, more nutritious food choices or creating smaller portion-sized packaging.

While these steps can help to lessen some of the impacts of marketing to children (by at least marketing better food options to children), they don't address the real underlying problem: that marketing to children is unethical. As the Center for a New American Dream notes, "New research suggests that aggressive marketing to kids contributes not only to excessive materialism, but also to a host of psychological and behavioral problems, including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, childhood obesity, eating disorders, increased violence, and family stress."

So, while the federal efforts are a step in the right direction in pushing industry to market better products to kids, they are off track in that they still enable marketing to the wrong audience. Leave the kids alone. Let their parents deal with the pros and cons of consumerism.

Piling on Pop-Ups

Everyone hates pop-ups. Yahoo and eBay found that 95 percent of Internet users viewed pop-ups “negatively” or “very negatively.” According to the same research, 69 percent of users report using pop-up or ad-blocking software. There’s even an “official hatelisting” website called “Pop-Ups Suck!”

All well and good, but does this matter, as long as pop-ups are effective? For example, pop-ups are 13 times more effective than banner ads, according to Advertising.com. As Jim Nail of Forrester Research notes, “Everyone hates advertising, but it works.”

In my opinion, it does matter. In fact, it’s possible that the short-term gains from pop-ups may have long-term consequences that ultimately could cause their demise. The first negative consequence may be brand damage. According to Jakob Nielsen, “In a survey of 18,808 users, more than 50% reported that a pop-up ad affected their opinion of the advertiser very negatively and nearly 40% reported that it affected their opinion of the website very negatively.”

Further, writes eWeek's Kevin Zaney, “Pop-up ads hurt company brands. The Federal Trade Commission found that more than 40 percent of consumers who experienced pop-up ads believe the Web site they were on – not the pop-up advertiser – had permitted the ad to appear. Approximately one-third of consumers surveyed by the FTC said the pop-up ad would cause them to have a less favorable opinion of the Web site.”

Beyond brand damage, consumer dislike of pop-ups could lead to legal and regulatory considerations. There are already laws that prevent advertisers from engaging in deceptive practices to harvest email addresses through pop-ups. Laws also prevent advertisers from deceptively using pop-ups in an attempt to persuade consumers to purchase products that stop those same pop-ups from appearing. The federal CAN-SPAM Act, for example, regulates pop-ups that collect information.

If the consumer dislike rises to a level that spurs congressional activity, and if brands that have been burned by pop-ups fail to come to their rescue, from a lobbying perspective, it is possible that new and expanded federal legislation could impact pop-ups in the same way that do-not-call legislation has impacted telemarketing.

New Media as New Media

Last year, YouTube announced a plan to "introduce a new type of ad module, where commercial messages are introduced as an overlay on the bottom 1/5th of the screen after 15 seconds of the clip. The overlay lasts for 10 seconds, and the user can either close or just choose to ignore it.”

The ads, running at $20 per 1,000 views, will only appear on videos from the company's content partners, that is, the approximately 1,000 companies and groups that have partnered with YouTube to show copyrighted content on the site.

A smaller video sharing company called VideoEgg has enabled the use of these ads for some time. "Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, said the goal was to get away from forcing users to watch an ad before showing the clip they wanted to see. Those ads are known as 'preroll' and are the most common form of online video advertising so far." VideoEgg notes that 74.3 percent of U.S. Internet users stream video online and that in-stream ads “enhance rather than disrupt the user experience.”

In-stream ads seem like a positive step, considering that preroll ads smack of the television ads that are under assault from digital video recorders (DVRs). If digital technology is helping consumers to overcome old media, as expressed by DVRs and television ads, then why would consumers suffer an old media style approach (preroll) to another digital technology (online video)?

As Catharine Taylor relates in a BrandWeek article entitled, “New Media as Old Media”: “No one in the industry wants to return to the hype of bubbles gone by, but there is an undercurrent of concern that online is trying to be more like offline (read: traditional media) just at the point when digital TV technologies are changing traditional media.”

“By the time we finish repositioning new media to be 'apples to apples' like old media, old media will have evolved to be very much like new media," said Joseph Jaffe, a marketing consultant.

The More Things Change...

Marketing websites tend to serve as gateways for other new media tools, including blogs, banner ads, pop-ups, videos, etc. While websites may serve as a gateway and coexist with other new media tools (and vice versa), are these various tools integrated effectively, so as to enable unified marketing strategies/tactics?

Focusing on the relationships between websites and blogs, as an example, JupiterResearch found that 35 percent of large companies planned to implement corporate blogs. Prior research found that 34 percent of companies already utilize blogs. The new research, therefore, found that nearly 70 percent of large corporations would utilize blogs. Other research found that 76 percent of corporations that utilize blogs reported increases in website traffic and media attention as result of their blogs. These numbers would suggest that blogs are a growing component of corporate marketing efforts and are integrated well with corporate web sites in the sense that the blogs drive traffic to the sites, which are presumably the repositories of corporate and product information.

However, JupiterResearch also found that corporate blogs are under utilized for generating word-of-mouth marketing opportunities. Only 32 percent of surveyed marketing executives said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth around their company's products or services. Also, Porter Novelli found that 63 percent of respondents started their blogs in order to participate in the new medium rather than to satisfy a specific need.

This would suggest a dissonance in the corporate world of blogging. On one hand, the use of blogs is growing and the blogs seem to direct traffic to corporate sites. On the other hand, many corporations fail to utilize their blogs to supplement other specific marketing activities, or fail to understand the potential of their blogs in general.

As Frederick E. Webster Jr. commented in 1996: “Simply put, there is a real and persistent danger that, caught up in the excitement and hype of a new technology, marketers will once again let attention to the short-term and tactical overwhelm consideration of the long-term and strategic. In the new world of interactive marketing, tactics often precede strategy.” It seems, more than ten years later, that there are lessons yet to be learned in the world of new media.

Two minutes?

Another interesting point regarding the emergence of online video: the videos are tailored to viewers with short attention spans. The previously mentioned USA Today article lists a few current and upcoming web-only serials (beyond the aforementioned lonelygirl15) that churn out a high number of episodes, but limit the duration of each episode.

These include Prom Queen, a horror series geared toward young adults featuring two minute videos, and Foreign Body, a series based on a forthcoming book by Robin Cook (and an example of new media marketing in its own right) featuring about 50 two- to three-minute videos, leading up to the book's Aug. 5 release.

As Brent Weinstein, founder of online film production company 60Frames.com notes,

"Online entertainment is as different from TV as TV is from film," says Weinstein, whose company aims to have 50 Web series in production by the end of the year. "When you're telling stories in two-minute bursts, it's much more like a comic strip that you come back to day after day to see what happens. Not everyone can do it, but slowly we'll figure out who the Aaron Sorkins of the Web storytelling world are."

The two-minute drill that these videos embrace is consistent with the general impression of web surfers: short attention span, limited engagement, the pursuit of instant gratification, etc. And yet, a 2007 eye tracking study from Poynter found that online news readers spend longer amounts of time consuming content than print readers.

One can only assume the difference is intent. The short video serials are geared toward a younger audience who, likely, stumble upon entertainment content or are directed to said content by peers, and who quickly move on to something else, in either case. Whereas news readers expect to spend time delving into articles (and have a great deal more options to select than print readers), since they often actively seek out news material.

It will be interesting to see if two minutes becomes the online standard in the way that television shows are divided in 30 and 60 minutes chunks (counting ads time) -- or if Hollywood-backed content providers will remain flexible in light of the medium's flexibility. Time will tell if the comic strip method prevails.

New Media for Self Promotion

Digital media have opened new doors to amateur entertainers in search of stardom. Specifically, they've enabled low-cost production and marketing of videos and short films. By leveraging video sharing sites, like You Tube, along with blogs, wikis, social sites, chat rooms and other viral-friendly media, budding directors, writers, comedians and actors have generated buzz, built a global fan base, and forced the hand of Hollywood players in search of the next big thing.

USA Today reports that, as online content becomes the calling card for talent, Hollywood agencies are trawling the web for talent and network executives are making deals with online auteurs.

Says Larry Gerbrandt, an entertainment industry media consultant: "The media companies know they will ignore this trend at their peril. The Internet is what cable TV was two decades ago. At first, the big guys balked at it. Now, they own it."

Consider the lonelygirl15 phenomenon. You Tube-posted videos of a high school girl's web confessionals (under the name "lonelygirl15") became a hit and a viral sensation as viewers and bloggers debated their authenticity. Even after the videos were unmasked as fiction, they continued as a sort of online soap opera (in brief segments). (As an interesting side note: lonelygirl15 has embarked on product placement and sponsorship deals with companies looking toward online advertising, including a deal with skin care company Neutrogena. The Neutrogena deal involves a step beyond product placement in the form of a "branded" character on the show, a "scientist" that happens to work at Neutrogena.)

As more lonelygirls turn to You Tube and blogs to hawk their wares (and there seem to be any number of one-hit wonders out there at the moment), the competition will stiffen. But for now, opportunities still remain:

An example: David Young, 25, and Joey Manderino, 23...After developing a following on websites such as CollegeHumor.com and YouTube, the duo was signed by (entertainment agency) CAA. The result: Besides a deal with Warner Bros, the two are writing a comedy pilot for TBS with the support of fellow CAA clients Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development) and Eric and Kim Tannenbaum (Two and a Half Men).