03/22/08

I learned a lot at the recent O’Reilly conference, “Graphing Social Patterns.” (You may have seen my coverage of the event at my other blog, and also on my Twitter page.) But the most interesting thing that was confirmed for me personally at this event was that, for social networking to really become successful from a business standpoint, it must somehow start to enable the one big missing element so far: commerce.  Advertising is not going to cut it as a sole business model, a fact that’s becoming increasingly evident.

With clickthrough rates continuing to decline, ad spending hardly going up in the current economic environment, and the lack of ad relevancy getting talked about more and more (especially on social networks!), suddenly advertising is not seen as the panacea it once was. It would appear that commerce—selling real stuff—must be the next big thing.

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03/14/08

Guy Kawasaki launched a new site this week called Alltop, which makes the boastful statement that “We’ve Got All the Top Stories Covered All the Time.” It’s a news and blog aggregator site for those who either can’t or don’t want to bother with setting up their own RSS readers or start pages—which is a large percentage of what I’d call mainstream web users. RSS remains very geeky and has low penetration beyond the tech-literate crowd. Mainstream users, Kawasaki and his partners reason, just want to go know, quickly, what’s going on related to their favorite topic or field of interest.  And I put experienced users like me in the category of people who will like Alltop, too. The site launched with pages covering 40 broad-interest topics.

Guess what, friends?  One of those topics is Social Media!  And I heartily recommend you bookmark that page now—socialmedia.alltop.com—because I think it’s a fantastic collection of sites and blogs in this burgeoning field, which can be a real challenge to keep up with. [Okay, so NewMediaWise is one of the sites listed—what can I say? These people are brilliant… :-) ]

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03/10/08

Some interesting information popped up today about blog influence—actually, I saw two studies cited, within minutes of each other, that seem on first blush to be opposing. But, in reality, I determined they’re complementary, and certainly of interest to anyone involved in blogging or social media. The first was noted in a story called New Media An Important Place To Be Seen. In this piece, The Center for Media Research reports that, according to the most recent BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, “many new media options are showing double digit growth.” In particular, blogging experienced 21.5% year-over-year growth for purchase influence—the second highest of any new media type, and well ahead of any traditional media class (many of which declined). Granted, this study was just for a single category of products (electronics), but other recent studies have show an increasing influence for blogs in general.

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(Image By: Ad Council)

03/07/08

In its quest to dominate the world of advertising as we know it, just what will Google do?  How about hire the longtime head of giant Interpublic Group to juice up its its ad dashboard strategy for buying media? And note that dashboard is not just for online media. A Google exec announced yesterday at the AAAA media conference what had been a top-secret strategy for the above, and also that he’d hired David Bell, 63, now chairman emeritus of Interpublic. According to this Mediapost story, Mr. Bell had “ripped” Google’s strategy at a recent meeting with Eric Schmidt—right in front of The Man Himself! So, a Google ad exec who reports to Schmidt hires him to straighten them out (perhaps at his boss’ suggestion?)

Bell is no rookie. Essentially retired, I think we can assume he didn’t need a job: his last reported total compensation (when he was chairman/CEO) was $$3,289,403. The man has lived and breathed advertising his entire career, rising up from the lowly rank of account executive at a small but influential agency in Minneapolis. (I know because I worked there, my first job out of college. I recall he managed the General Mills Wheaties account—and it appears he definitely learned how to eat his.) Here’s David Bell’s bio.

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03/05/08

Great piece today by Cathy Taylor on one of the Mediapost blogs, Social Insider. In it, she points out that many agencies aren’t walking the talk about social media, particularly when it comes to blogging. And the first commenter makes the interesting point that social media may go against the whole culture or M.O. of agencies—implying not to look for much improvement anytime soon. 

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