NewMediaWise :: Blog - Summary http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/rss-partialText/ NewMediaWise - Exploring a New World of Marketing en graeme@newmediawise.com Copyright 2008 2008-05-15T13:13:00-06:00 Big Brands Talk Social Media in Minneapolis http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-big-brands-talk-social-media-in-minneapolis/ So, you wonder, do major consumer brands “get” social media, or are they even starting to deal with it at all yet in any meaningful ways?  Well, thanks to our local 850-member strong Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, we had a chance to hear from some of our more well-known corporate biggies last night.  It was a gorgeous, sunny, 70-degree evening in downtown Minneapolis, but a crowd of 300+ jammed inside (on the third floor of the Solera at 9th and Hennepin) to hear a panel that had been billed as Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise? [I guess we can assume the hope is that marketing will do that, and not the lawyers… :-) ] The panelists were:
• Jim Cuene, Director of Interactive at General Mills
• Gary Koelling, Creative Director/Social Technology, Best Buy
• Jason Kleckner, Manager of Information Architecture, Target
• Brad Smith, VP eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
• Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage Marketing

-- Read More --]]> 2008-05-15T13:13:00-06:00 This Blog's for You, Bud http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/this-blogs-for-you-bud/ Corporate blogging is still a little understood art.  And very little practiced, to be quite honest, outside of the tech field. You think most companies are blogging?  Guess again. According to this ongoing survey, only a measly 11.6 % of the Fortune 500 are doing it—as of about a week ago, to be exact. (Not to speak of the even smaller percentage of those doing it well, I might add, whether in the Fortune 500 or elsewhere.)

But there was an absolutely great front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday: For All You Do, Bud, This Blog Is About You.  Here’s an excerpt:

(Jim) Arndorfer, 37 years old, is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing Co., the U.S. arm of SABMiller PLC. A former reporter for Advertising Age, he now runs Brew Blog, a free Web site dedicated to breaking news about beer. Especially news about Anheuser-Busch’s beer.

Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser. Mr. Arndorfer tracks the St. Louis company’s every move, from earnings reports to management changes. He relishes revealing details of its products before Anheuser does.

Okay, this is funny!  I think it’s one of the best front-page pieces in the Journal in a long time.  [But then, I would—I’m a blogger!] A great, big shout-out to the reporter, David Kesmodel.  The competitive antics of these two big brewers is no secret; it’s the stuff of ad industry legend.  But, more than this, I think the Brew Blog is a great case study in corporate blogging. Here are some reasons why....

-- Read More --]]> 2008-04-26T12:07:01-06:00 New to 'Blogger Relations'? Take a Lesson... http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-new-to-blogger-relations-take-a-lesson/ No, I’m not talking about the relatives of your blogger friends. I’m talking about a term that’s becoming as frequently used in the PR business as “media relations.” How PR professionals interact with bloggers is taking on more and more importance—so much so that it’s now actually being studied. That’s right, all you bloggers out there—now we’re legit: the PR people are officially studying what we do and how they can influence us. In an announcement this week, the two firms behind the study announced a new web site, where you can read about their ongoing findings, as well as best practices in the field: BloggersandPR.com.

It’s a very nice, well organized site, with lots of information, and I would encourage anyone either new to PR, or just interested in getting up to speed with the latest thinking in blogger relations best practices, to bookmark it.  What are the biggest surprises in the findings so far?  Well, to me they are....

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-30T13:17:00-06:00 OpenSocial's On a Roll - Now Yahoo's In http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-opensocials-on-a-roll-now-yahoos-in/ Big happenings yesterday, with Yahoo announcing it will endorse the “OpenSocial” tech spec that was initiated by Google and is also backed by MySpace, Ning, and several others. Yahoo and Google also said, on a conference call they organized for the media, that they, along with MySpace, were forming a non-profit foundation for OpenSocial. The most significant thing I heard from the conference call was that OpenSocial apps will now be able to reach more than potential 200 million users by next week, based on all the social networks signed on to date. That is huge—more users than MySpace and Facebook combined. Which social nets of Yahoo’s will get OpenSocial apps initially?  The firm wouldn’t say, but one wonders about their oldest and best known: Flickr. For the complete lowdown on yesterday’s announcement, see today’s Wall Street Journal coverage.

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-26T13:54:00-06:00 What Social Networking Needs http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-what-social-networking-needs/ 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.

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-22T12:41:01-06:00 All Your Social Media Are Belong to Us http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-all-your-social-media-are-belong-to-us/ 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… :-) ]

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-14T17:04:00-06:00 Two Studies: Blog Influence Rising, But A-Listers' Declining http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-two-studies-blog-influence-rising-but-a-listers-declining/ 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.

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-10T16:53:00-06:00 Google Will Stop at Nothing - NOTHING! http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-google-will-stop-at-nothing-nothing/ 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.

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-07T14:21:00-06:00 Ad Agencies Get the Prod for Lack of Blogging http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-ad-agencies-get-the-prod-for-lack-of-blogging/ 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. 

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-05T17:36:00-06:00 I'm Wondering About the Impact of Microblogging http://www.newmediawise.com/index.php/blog/comments/blog-im-wondering-about-the-impact-of-microblogging/ Blogging, the wonder child of the Web 2.0 juggernaut, seems to be changing. And the biggest reason for that, as I see it, is the new kid on the block: microblogging. And by that I’m mainly talking about that quick-post, sound-bite, here’s-what-I’m-thinking-or-doing-right-now phenomenon called Twitter.  (There are others of this ilk, too, like Jaiku and Pownce, but Twitter seems to have sucked most of the oxygen away from them since it launched only a year ago.) I blogged about the momentum of Twitter recently on my other blog, here. Then I also did this post about a new site with a lot of buzz that drafts off of Twitter’s popularity to a large extent, called Friendfeed.

The best blog post I’ve read on Twitter is this one from Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Read the comments, too—the impact of microblogging on PR is something you may be surprised to learn.  And I just caught an interesting post on how a blogger, having only discovered FriendFeed, is now longing to understand how it can help him manage his time—specifically, his blog. (That’s because the fuel of blogs is time. Like oil, there’s a finite amount of it.  Ever think about that?) Here’s his post: Wish I could run my blog with FriendFeed.

So, just what is microblogging doing to blogging? That’s what I’m wondering. What do you think?  Are bloggers now moving away from doing longer posts— where thinking, writing, maybe some research is actually a requirement—as opposed to just blurting something out?  I mean, how much time can a blogger spend, even if he/she tries, in planning a measly 140-character “Tweet,” as Twitter posts are so playfully called. (Yes, “Tweet” is already to “microblog post” what Levi’s is to jeans, Kleenex is to tissues, and Xerox is to copies.) I hardly know a blogger who isn’t Twittering like a maniac these days.

-- Read More --]]> 2008-03-01T17:11:00-06:00