This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

This past summer, when I was interviewing for jobs, I drafted the notes below for a follow-up meeting with a tech company (that ultimately did not happen.) Re-reading them recently, I realized they would make a decent post about the marketing process, so I stripped out the specifics.

–

Marketing is a process that combines art and science. The more grounded your art is in your science, the more repeatable the process and the more successful you will be. The marketing plan also relies on many different inputs — including the expertise and experience of all the members of the team, past results, market research, data from the field and customer feedback. You can’t develop a marketing plan without the data and the team contributions.

Budget and timing are also factors.  When it comes to marketing tactics, there’s fast, cheap and everything in between. Typically, the most cost effective tactics take time to build before bearing fruit,  and when the situation demands fast results, it usually comes with a higher price tag.

To answer the question, What would you do?, you need to start with some more questions.

• Who is the customer? How many of them are there in market?
• What is the product she needs/wants? How well does the product we have match up to what she wants? This helps us understand market potential of a segment. We’re looking for the best fit with the largest possible number of customers. A perfect fit for a very small number of consumers is not sustainable, unless you’ve got a luxury product with high price tag and great margins.
• What is the emotional driver for the purchase? How can we find a way to differentiate our product based on a dimension that matters to the customer? This is especially critical when you are trying to expand into a new market segment. You may have a very clear understanding of how your product fits the emotional needs of the your initial  customer segment, but no clear idea of how to appeal to a new group, even though you understand that there is an appeal.

For example, take end user security software like anti-virus and spam filtering. For the core customer of these products —  the 25-50 year old technology enthusiast  – the emotional purchase drivers are met by feeds, speeds and features.  He knows he needs security software for his PC  and can be swayed by product excellence, even at a higher price, because being the smartest guy with the best product satisfies an emotional need.

However, if a product is perceived as a commodity, the consumer is likely to be very price sensitive. That one product is better than the others won’t matter as much, unless it also happens to be the cheaper one.

Other segments, like retirees or moms, are less interested in the technical aspects of these products. They need to understand the benefits to them  AND that it won’t be difficult or expensive to obtain the benefits. Their emotional satisfaction in computer use does not come intrinsically from the computer and its operation. They use the computer to do something, and it is in the “something” that we find the emotional driver upon which to base messaging.

• Where and how does she buy? Who does she trust when making a purchasing decision? We know referral is the best advertising. What referrals matter to this customer? Consumer electronics sales people ( a la Best Buy)? Friends and neighbors? How does this customer weigh testimonials from experts versus “people like me.”

This approach is a customer-centric marketing approach. You’ve got to put the process in place to find out what motivates and excites the target population, and then use this learning in marketing strategy and product development.

Once you have process in place, it is duplicable market to market. You still need creative ideas and the flash of intuition that reveals the killer idea for a specific marketing campaign, but you can’t get to those without the base.

The customer-centered approach is the first leg on the marketing “stool.” The other two are the power of personal testimony and listening posts.

The Power of Personal Testimony

Product messaging should always be grounded in customer experiences, but from their frame of reference, not the product. Consumer product goods companies understand this. In their mass market advertising anyway. No one tugs at the heartstrings better. A brand of laundry soap gets your clothes cleaner, but what it REALLY does is make you happy. Technology companies have a harder time understanding that it’s not the product that matters. It’s what the product lets us do, feel, understand etc.

And when I say customer experiences, I mean the real customers, not the hypothetical customers created in ad and PR agency conference rooms. The consumer has many ways to make her voice heard, from traditional customer service channels in your company to online reviews, social networks and blogging.

Tap into the real personal testimony.

For example, back to our spam filter example. Instead of advertisements in which the consumer thanks the computer security company  for protecting her computer, have her talk about how her life is easier/better now that she has the freedom to shop online and let her kids use the Internet without worrying about viruses, stalkers and identity theft.

Brand evangelist programs and user-generated content (especially video) are another effective way to tap into the power of personal testimony.

Of course in order to really tap into your customers as endorsers, you have to be listening to them.

Getting Your Listening Ears On: Establish online listening posts

You need an active online listening program to understand what is being said about your brand and the overall category online. Capturing online reviews, and feedback from customer service and your sales channels only scratches the surface. These channels capture the folks who really like you or really hate you.

A company needs to grasp the  “muddle in the middle” — what average folks say about a company, competitors and the product category in online forums other than the company’s own.  What they say about their lives and needs even when they do not mention products at all.

This acts as an online focus group and gives valuable  visibility into what the consumer really cares about.  This information can then be used to develop marketing programs, customer service offerings and new products.

Does active listening replace the need for things like focus groups and market research? Of course not. Traditional methods still offer tremendous value to the marketing task, particularly when it comes to measurement. Monitoring is largely dependent on the organic conversation. We’re just eavesdropping. To find out whether we’ve been successful with our programs, we need to ask specific questions, and the old research stand-bys are very relevant to that task.

If you don’t listen? It’s like a child sticking his fingers in his ears. You may not look as ridiculous but it’s just as stupid. And ultimately ineffective.

cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

The Super Bowl is pretty much the only athletic contest in the world where the television advertisements during the event get nearly as much media coverage as the event itself. Likewise the run-up and hype of the commercials. Will the network will sell all the space? Who will run ads, how much will they pay and what will they promote?

Before the ads even run, the pundits are postulating and after, they dissect them.

It’s a bit obscene really — and full disclosure, I’ve played the game on my blog in past years.

This year, though, the real news is who is NOT advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead of spending a hefty chunk of change on a few spots during the football game, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project. For the next year,  the company is giving away $1.3 million dollars per month to community development projects submitted and selected online by the public.

Anyone can submit a grant. Pepsi will accept 1000 every month, and the public can vote for up to 10 projects every day.

Of course, the company is getting a lot of media, and social media, coverage for the campaign, and I imagine they are also spending a pretty penny on the infrastructure to support the project with their ad, PR and interactive agencies. I’m sure they have high expectations for positive revenue as well as brand awareness results from the project.

What makes this campaign so exciting is the scale of the grants. Other companies have done similar projects to fund charities through community submission and vote. For example American Express. But I can’t think of anything from corporate America that matches the scale of Pepsi Refresh.

It is truly refreshing to see a company do so much potential good. I’ve got no problem if they “do good” as a result.

In fact, I’d love to see more copycats.

Who’s next?

This post started out with the intent to be about online privacy and advertising.  I was going to talk about the issues raised at last month’s FTC roundtable on online privacy including behaviorally targeted advertising. Maybe even float around in cloud computing, the topic of next week’s session at the FTC. Talk a little about Facebook’s privacy woes in the aftermath of changing its privacy settings.

But I have bronchitis and a terrible sinus headache, so that post is on hold.

Instead, I am going to have a very  little rant about the demographically targeted ads on Facebook.

Ads like these that pull age related data from my Facebook profile and “fill in the blank” in an otherwise generic ad.

This isn’t targeted advertising.

It’s spam. And it’s lazy.

<Rant off>

Advertising.

It is often said that consumers don’t like or pay attention to advertising.

Not true.

What consumers don’t like is BAD advertising. Lazy copy. Poor targeting. Offensive stereotypes.

We also don’t like crummy products. No matter how good the ad, it cannot make a crummy product excellent or a dangerous product safe. Regardless of what they say on Mad Men.

We do like — even love — good advertising. Ads that tell a story. Make us feel. Make us laugh. If we’re in marketing, make us wish we’d thought of that.

Tuesday night, I was privileged to  attend the 49th Annual Hatch Awards as a guest of the AdClub and got to see a lot of great advertising without having to watch TV or read a magazine.

There’s no way I can do justice to all the award winners in a single post, but here’s a random sampling of the ones I liked most.

My favorite TV spots were Mullen‘s Bruins Hockey Rules commercials. The campaign won a gold as did this commercial “Date.”

If you want more, I posted all the spots over at Snapshot Chronicles.

I also liked Arnold‘s TV spots for the American Legacy Foundation and Hill Holliday‘s series for Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project.

It’s harder to appreciate print advertising in the award show format. You miss the look and feel of the ad in the chosen vehicle. How well it fits (or doesn’t) in the publication. Even so, it was easy to like Mullen’s work for the New England Aquarium and Kelliher Samets Volk/Boston’s newspaper ads for WMBR radio.

Finally, as much as I do not believe in personal branding, I have to commend the silver winner in the personal branding category for the sheer balls of his campaign, malecopywriter.com

You may have noticed I did not mention any of the award winners in the social media or website/microsite categories. Not because the work wasn’t excellent. It was. But my strongest impression was that advertising agencies see, and execute, social media very differently than PR agencies and marketing shops (internal and external) focused on interactive media. Yes, I am about to make a generalization, and welcome respectful disagreement, but the ad agency work seemed to be about production values, not relationships.

In other words, engagement means very different things to the different groups.

Now, I didn’t actually find this surprising. I’ve written before that I have noticed that PR and advertising folks definitely approach engagement through different lenses.

Public relations folks — good PR folks — understand the importance of building relationships with customers. That blogger engagement is a commitment, not a one-night stand. Where sometimes they have difficulty is engaging with emotion and enthusiasm. Their training teaches them to be objective, factual. Storytellers, not promoters. It can be difficult (although not impossible) to shed that skin and engage around emotion and shared values, versus news, facts and benefits.

Advertising professionals, on the other hand, have no problem understanding the importance of emotion in eliciting engagement. Good advertising taps into our emotions to evoke an action. It’s rarely about what a product does. It’s all about how it makes us feel. Where advertising pros can miss in social media is that they don’t dial it down to more personal terms. The message is hype, not human. It’s about producing a slick “viral video,” not about finding a shared value with the customer that encourages her to pass the message on.

That’s where marketing generalists (like me) can help the process. We embrace both approaches – relationship and emotion – and can help organizations best leverage their advertising and PR specialists to develop well-rounded programs and campaigns that truly engage the customer.

Today the FTC published the final guidelines  for endorsements and testimonials. Nothing terribly surprising, although I was pleased to see some additions to the examples about blogging and word of mouth marketing that made things much clearer. [Full text of the changes to the guidelines (pdf) as submitted to the Federal Register.]

More from me on this later this week. We’ll also be updating and repeating the Blog with Integrity webinar on disclosure to reflect the final approved guidelines. Follow @BlogIntegrity on Twitter, fan on Facebook or subscribe to the email list for updates.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will be tweeting live from the Ad Club of Boston’s Hatch Awards tomorrow, courtesy of an invite from the folks at 360 Public Relations. Hashtag #AdClub.

AdAge has a case study on the Motrin ad flap today (hat tip Queen of Spain) that characterizes Motrin’s decision to pull the babywearing ad as caving to “a vocal flash mob.”

It has lots and lots of great numbers to show that not that many people saw the ad. True enough, and I urge everyone to bookmark the article for the Twitter stats alone. Twitter isn’t mainstream, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it is. Useful? Promising? Trendy? Yes. But mainstream? Not yet. Maybe not ever.

However, from an advertising perspective, the Motrin team did the absolutely right and responsible thing. The ad offended, no matter how small the number. It pulled it.  Last week, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil Healthcare Kathy Widmer wrote on JNJ BTW, the company’s corp comm blog and motrin.com:

So…it’s been almost 4 days since I apologized here for our Motrin advertising. What an unbelievable 4 days it’s been. Believe me when I say we’ve been taking our own headache medicine here lately!

Btw – if you’re confused by this – we removed our Motrin ad campaign from the marketplace on Sunday because we realized through your feedback that we had missed the mark and insulted many moms. We didn’t mean to…but we did. We’ve been able to get most of the ads out of circulation, but those in magazines will, unfortunately, be out there for a while.

We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.

In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:

• When you make a mistake – own up to it, and say you’re sorry.
• Learn from that mistake.

That’s all… for now.

I wish more marketers would be as responsible and responsive to their customers as McNeil has been here.

Most online advertising is easy to spot. Skyscrapers  or banners with blinking lights and  flash animations. Text ads with the clear tag "XYZ Ad Network" or Google Adsense.

But what about blogs that are sponsored by a company. For example, Scratchings and Sniffings, a pet blog sponsored by Purina.

Or Pay Per Post? Or blogging networks like Parent Bloggers Network in which companies pay a consulting fee for review coordination and the bloggers keep the products?

Or blogger relations — where companies reach out directly to bloggers with products and exclusive stories and other blog-worthy material?.

Are the posts that result from these efforts advertising or editorial? It has to be one thing or another, right? After all, in the" good old days," it was black or white. It was advertising or it was editorial and never the twain shall meet. Right?

I mean, we’ve never had evaluation labs that did paid reviews of products and applied a seal of approval. Oh wait a minute. Yes we did.

Magazines and newspapers never sold editorial-like space for advertisers to write their own stories. Oh wait a minute. Yes we did. And do.

And it wasn’t really a problem. It just was.

And is. Readers have always been, and still are, able to apply their own judgment to the material they read, no matter how stupid advertisers seem to think we are. The Web is no different.

And all these approaches have their place in our informational ecosystem. So, let’s put a little definition around the issue.

What is advertising, what qualifies as "advertorial," and when can we expect that a blog, podcast or Web site is serving up "pure" editorial content?

Advertising. The advertiser has complete control over the ad content and landing pages. Paid or pro bono, using rate cards not that different from the old magazine CPM. Examples: site advertising, Google AdSense, BlogHer ad network, Blogads.

Advertorial. This is where I put things like Pay Per Post and blog networks like Parent Bloggers Network. In the print world, of course, the advertiser has complete content control and the magazine simply dictates a common format. Online, it is a bit different, but the end result isn’t. Online, the advertiser has control over the initial factors — what is to be reviewed or written about and who will be writing. But, after that, the blogger is more or less free to write what he pleases.

That said, we can certainly expect a certain cognitive dissonance effect; paid reviewers will be more likely to be positive about  a product, regardless of their opinion, or lack thereof, before starting the review. While they aren’t being paid to voice a view contrary to their own opinons, as were the subjects in Leon Festinger’s original research in the 50s, the mere fact that they are being paid by an entity with a vested interest is bound to shape the review.

But so what. Readers can make up their own minds. And will. However, full disclosure of relationships is absolutely essential. If the service or network does not require full disclosure, I strongly advise both advertising companies and bloggers to stay away.

Sponsored blogs fit in the advertorial category. Even if the writer is totally independent, a certain sensibility is bound to affect the blog. The sponsor may not say "don’t trash me" but the writer isn’t going to. Unless there is such an egregious situation that the blogger wants to divorce the sponsor. Likewise, I consider review networks like Parent Bloggers to be advertorial because even though the writer is free to write whatever she wishes about the product or services, there is a prior agreement that there will be a post.

Caveat: Do not confuse pay-per-post type writing with freelance writing. Paid posts on a personal blog reflect the personal opinion and style of the blogger — some are short and breezy, some funny, some deep and introspective. The clients are not paying for the in-depth research, impartiality and writing skills that we might see on a sponsored blog or from a professional freelance writer.

This does not mean that bloggers cannot be freelance writers. They can. It just means that we need to understand that there is a real difference between pay-per-post writing and freelance writing, and the fees each type of writing should command.

Independent editorial. The blogger may take advertising, but the expectation is that the blog contents are 100% owned by the blogger, in all senses of the word. The blogger may be receptive to pitches from blogger relations, marketing and PR firms, but there is no quid pro quo. The company making the pitch had better tell a compelling, relevant story that offers something of value to the blogger. Or risk being ignored, or worse, ridiculed.

Companies that get this right can have long, mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers. Get it wrong? Just ask Wal*Mart.

Pay Per Post and other paid blogging services can supplement blogger relations, but in my opinion, do not replace it.

They can however coexist. Just as advertising, editorial and advertorial have been working together to tell us the story for years.

Tags: blogger relations, advertorial, pay per post, parent bloggers network, advertising

So is it Monday or Thursday?

Doesn’t matter to me because today is my birthday and I am pretty much goofing off, playing with puppies and clearing out my feed reader of all that good stuff I "saved for later."

Enjoy!

Marianne Richmond in The Blogstorm: If you sell your soul, how much should you get for it? has some terrific insights on blogger relations.

The Common Craft Show, fast becoming a favorite for its simple explanations of complex Web 2.0 topics, explains social networking.

In the category of not to be believed, AdRants tells us of a client demanding that its agency AE ask permission to take a vacation…

Speaking of passive-aggressive, if you haven’t checked out passive-aggressive notes.com, do it today for a real gem.

And have a terrific weekend!

Tags: blogger relations, social networking

Last weekend, I saw one of the most creative TV commercials I’ve seen  in a long time.

And it was for a Traveler’s Insurance, usually a pretty risk averse industry

Enjoy!

(tip of the hat to AdRants for the link to the commercial)

Tags: rabbit’s foot, Traveler’s Insurance, advertising