Magnosticism

Some consider “broadcast journalism” an oxymoron, but Tim Russert defied that derisive view. He was the ultimate newsman. In these days of stream-of-conscsiousness blogging masquerading as news, Russert stood out as a relentlessly prepared and fearless journalist, an objective reporter who had no other agenda than to get the truth out of politicians and other Washington power brokers. But as colleagues and friends noted in the many tributes pouring in since his sudden and unexpected death yesterday at age 58, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

As someone who always believed in the ideals of journalism, the art of interviewing, and the thrill of pursuing a hot story, I loved watching Russert perform his craft. He was a true master, and both journalism and politics will be much worse off without him.

A couple of articles I wrote for MarketingNPV Journal are now available on their website. The first, “How Do You Measure Engagement?”, examines the emergence of customer engagement as a hot new marketing metric. The problem is that marketers define engagement in many different ways, which makes it difficult to come to any common understanding of its importance. The article looks at the more accepted view of engagement - the emotional connection a consumer makes with a brand - but argues that a better way to frame engagement is around behaviors, not emotions:

It’s important to note that behavioral engagement is not limited to a purchase of a product or service; it encompasses all the interactions that a prospect or customer has in relation to a brand. There are any number of pre- or post-sale activities that can be (directly or indirectly) predictive of a future purchase or re-purchase; they include visiting a Web site, downloading a whitepaper, calling customer service, recommending a product, or even commenting on a blog.

Such behavioral measures of engagement hold the potential to displace awareness and brand preference as interim measures of marketing effectiveness.

The second (related) article is “Calculating the Value of Referrals: Easier Said than Done.” This piece looks at the emerging methods for determining the economic value of customer referrals and other word-of-mouth marketing activities:

Current methodologies and research give us small glimpses of a great universe, but in many ways our current approach to charting WOM is like being an astronomer back in the pre-Galilean era. We can see the moon and the stars, but we have no real frame of reference around how big the universe actually is or the activity that’s taking place outside of our view.

Consider, for instance, that even the most advanced third-party tools primarily track online WOM — a severe limitation when you look at studies like the 2006 Keller Fay Group survey, which concludes that only 8% of brand-related conversations take place online. “Online tracking mechanisms make it easier to track who’s recommending what,” says V. Kumar, the ING Chair Professor in Marketing at the University of Connecticut’s School of Business and executive director of the school’s ING Center for Financial Services. “But still the hole is there, because the offline activities are not captured.”

The good news is that the tools and research methods are improving — much as the modern telescope has evolved from the early models built by Galileo — helping us to gain more informed insight around the real drivers of WOM. 

I came across two important papers while researching the WOM article, which are cited in the feature: “How Valuable is Word of Mouth” from the Harvard Business Review, and “Measuring the Ripple,” a joint effort by Northeastern University and BzzAgent. Good reading if you’re into that marketing geek analysis stuff.  

An About Us page is a checklist item for any business’s website (and many personal blogs, in its more informal About Me variation). Here’s what NOT to do on your “About Us” page:

• Don’t put your “About Us” page in the “Past News” section - this implies that, well, you are old news.  
• Don’t put embeddable ads in the text. That tells me a lot “about” you - all of it negative.
• Don’t say you have an experienced staff, but then provide no information about or access to those people.
• Don’t post text with numerous typos (and compound the oversight by calling yourself an “award-winning” media publication).

If you don’t think any established website could possibly allow any of these egregious errors to go unchecked, think again: I found one that features ALL of them. And I’m sad to say I used to work for them. What a disturbing decline for a once-great publication.

“Feeding frenzy” takes on a whole new meaning with 7/24 news cycles. Witness the Eliot Spitzer scandal. This guy was buried in a New York minute. My favorite tabloid covers:

You can even write your own NY Post headline.

Google News search results for “Eliot Spitzer” for March 11: 16,199

Google-indexed blog posts referencing “Eliot Spitzer ” on March 11: 2,160

Best jokes, compiled here.

Even advertisers are getting into the act.

Nothing’s more tasty to media folk than a holier-than-thou public figure caught with his pants down. The Steamroller gets steamrolled.

A new study from a research firm called Grunwald Associates indicates a significant shift in the media habits of children:

Sixty-four percent of kids go online while watching television, and nearly half of U.S. teens (49 percent) report that they do so frequently — anywhere from three times a week to several times a day. … The study reveals that 73 percent of TV-online multitasking kids are engaged in “active multitasking,” defined by Grunwald Associates as content in one medium influencing concurrent behavior in another. This trend represents a 33 percent increase in active multitasking since 2002. While kids are using more media, their attention primarily and overwhelmingly is focused on their online activities.

I don’t need stats to tell me about the decline of traditional TV among tomorrow’s generation; I see it daily in my own house, as my 17-year-old watches downloaded episodes of Degrassi on her iPod, as my 12-year-old focuses far more time IM’ing or fast-forwarding through DVR’d Celtic games than watching live TV, and as my 9-year-old runs around the house making videos and begging me to let him post something on YouTube, or as he surfs for PS2 cheats online, half-listening as Jimmy Neutron drones in the background.   

Sure, there are a few seminal TV events that the family feels obligated to watch live, like the Super Bowl or, to a lesser extent, American Idol. But today’s kids are edging - no, rushing - away from the passive TV experience. I do not envy network execs.
 

Companies are all over the map in their embrace/avoidance of blogs and other social media. Some, especially tech firms, have given virtually free reign to their employees to launch blogs and talk directly to customers. Others are paralyzed by concerns over governance issues and the possibility that some corporate blogger will disclose something that doesn’t adhere to corporate policy or catches the probing eyes of the SEC.  

Even the experts can’t agree on how to approach corporate blogging. In the true spirit of this new medium, a curriculum of sorts has organically sprung up for social media marketing. Start with Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst who posted on the “three impossible conversations for corporations” (1. Asking for Feedback; 2. Saying Positive Things about your Competitors; 3. Admitting You Were Wrong.) Good, solid advice for the social media novice. 

David Churbuck retorted that those tips are way too basic to be useful for most corporate marketers, who he believes are past the Blogging 101 stage and are seeking more advanced education:

This corporate blogging stuff isn’t a two headed chicken in the freak tent anymore. This is mainstream baby. Anyone writing posts about “impossible” corporate conversations has to step it up – talk about the serious stuff, like – contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints. Let’s get into that one and you’ll earn my respect.

Challenged to provide his own advice (as someone who lives the stuff daily), Churbuck offered a couple of Blogging 201 primers: one on the risks of a no-questions-asked blogger appeasement strategy, the other a broader list of 10 topics that he’d like to see more discussion about:

1. Tool and platforms
2. Pronouns
3. Metrics
4. Rogue SMM
5. How to do SMM/SEO right
6. Going Uplevel
7. Organizational Ownership
8. One vs many
9. Review mechanism and buddy systems
10. The politics of being a know-it-all

The pundit and the practitioner have both agreed to dig into these and other social media marketing topics over the next few months, which is good news for any marketer trying to get his or her arms around this brave new world of “customer engagement.”

Of course, any curriculum would be incomplete without some backround reading: I’ve provided a bit of that with a dusted-off interview I did in 2005 with Lenn Pryor, who created the Channel 9 website for Microsoft in 2004 that serves as a touchstone for current social media marketing.

At client meetings today in Milwaukee, where - surprise! - it’s snowing. For such a supposedly hardy area of the country, the local news sure makes the populace seem weather-wimpy. The ABC affiliate extended their morning news by a half-hour to cover what amounted to a traffic jam on I-94 and generally slippery roads. Among the list of safe-driving tips they offered:

• Clear snow from vehicle before you drive
• Drive slowly
• Avoid skids

And the anchor added, with the tone and furrowed brow of someone who’s acutely aware of the seriousness of the situation: “Drive slowly out there.”

This probably speaks more to the state of local media than the fine state of Wisconsin.

Still recovering from the shock and awe of Super Bowl XLII. Shock, as in I can’t believe the Patriots lost, and awe, as in the Giants - my boyhood team of choice in the ’70s before I transitioned/bandwagoned to the Pats in the ’80s and ’90s - not just beating New England, but beating them up in the process. I’ve been out of sorts all day, still trying to make sense of it.

So I’m way behind (as usual) on the usual post-Super Bowl blather over the ads that ran during the game. Far better pundits have already weighed in. You have USA Today’s Ad Meter results [puking e-trade baby only ranks 15th - are you kidding me?], and BusinessWeek’s picks and pans (nice graphic treatment with the embedded ads), and the curious critiques of AdAge Ad Critic Bob Garfield (Bridgestone homophobia? screams that frighten children?), and countless other post-mortems that show just how focused we all are on unimportant things.

Spare me the debate over whether these ads actually provide any return on investment. Buzz trackers are off the charts for this event, and the YouTube effect no doubt makes these spots justifiable. The only one I’m truly perplexed by is salesgenie.com - a completely inane three-pack (3 spots!!!) from a dot-com that sells call and mailing lists. Double ick. Adweek provides an important piece of insight on these spots:  

Vin Gupta, chairman of Salesgenie … said that, like the previous spot, he conceptualized and wrote copy for the new ads himself.

So there you have it. Gupta claims that last year’s spot sent 25,000 folks scurrying to the website. He doesn’t say if they bought any sales leads once they got there. But why sweat the details? This is the Super Bowl, baby.  

Update: Churbuck concurs.

First sentence in an email I just received: “Hi Rob…I wanted to let you know that your blog ranked as the #52 overall blog in the Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs premiere listing.”

Number 52 in a Top-42 listing? Wow, that’s great. No, really.

As traditional media companies attempt to turn their Web properties into social networking sites, it seems that MySpace is evolving into a media company. The New York Times makes that point in an article explaining how MySpace, though still operating independently under News Corp., is taking on many of the characteristics of traditional media companies as it builds out its own content. The site has “become very mainstream. It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture,” co-founder Chris DeWolfe told the Times, which goes on to say:

As a result, the MySpace site resembles a portal like Yahoo or AOL as much as a social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform” and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.”

A quick view of the homepage shows that the portal comparison is correct. New sections devoted to news, politics and celebrities all feature original or licensed content (in addition to the site’s traditional user-generated content, including, for example, links to celebrity MySpace pages). It’s a pretty clear indication of where MySpace is going, since the new content is a way to attract advertisers - the lifeblood of any media company - without soiling the personal profile pages of MySpace’s gazillion members.

I don’t know if the “mediatization” of MySpace spells doom to the purists who just go there to connect with friends. And there are plenty of people pointing to MySpace’s slowing growth as a sign that the site’s appeal has peaked, but if I were AOL, MSN or Yahoo - or any other media company trying to reload to stay competitive - I’d be plenty worried.