Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Facebook (apparently) plans to drive brands away from its site and (back) to their own online platforms (this just in via @planoma and Silicon Alley Insider quoting WSJ Blogs and the Facebook Developers Wiki).

One of the new features Facebook is currently playing with exploring is the Open Graph API that will allow webmasters to deck out any website with the tools previously reserved for Facebook fan pages. The API will extend Facebook Connect while being easier to implement.

From Facebook’s perspective, this move will strengthen its position as your one-stop gateway to the internet as well as lay the groundworks for a potential advertising network. For the user, it may not change all that much (except add to the confusion of your average non-geek onliner who thinks of their GMX webmail interface as “my internet”).

For brands … well. Of course, if you believe in the branding power of custom URLs, having that AND Facebook’s full feature set would be nice. And if your business model is in web-based services, content or ecommerce, driving traffic to your own site(s) is vital. But do I see the likes of Coca-Cola or Pepsi doing the full-stop u-turn to reallocate social marketing budgets to build a plethora of branded microsites? Erm. And even then, I wonder which of Facebook’s features are really intersting for owned media. Probably not the kind of applications that allow custom designs, discussion boards or payment within the limits of a Facebook page. Maybe tracking and analysis features - if they integrate well with or fully substitute existing free or commercial solutions.

From a marketing point of view, I don’t think that as long as Facebook is a relevant medium, brands can do without their own page. A social marketing strategy is very much an embassy strategy. If you want to communicate with people, you can wait till they come to you, but it’s better to have a premanent representation wherever they are - and to make sure you welcome them in and make them feel at home. And this includes Facebook as well as Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, wer-kennt-wen and any other place where your people hang out.

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Via @ghensel via Thorsten Konrad: Casey Neistat’s brief video documentary on the latest online fad cultural phenomenon, Chatroulette.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

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Here’s the latest promotional initiative from Swiss supermarket chain Migros, Dominomania:

Dominomania - image from Migros.ch

• buy a playing board (a bargain at 6 Euros 50)
• for every 20 CHF (about 13 EUR) you spend at a Migros checkout, collect 1 of 36 domino tiles (they’re wrapped to keep you guessing if you get one you haven’t already got)
• HOWEVER: max. 10 tiles per person per purchase
• HOWEVER: on “Double Dominoday”, collect 2 (TWO!) tiles per purchase value of 20 CHF
• PLUS: on one previously announced day, a purchase over 60 CHF got you a “Joker” tile
• Jokers are also available for successful players of a corresponding online game
• spare tiles can be traded freestyle or during special trading days.

In the end, what you get is a Swiss-themed domino board game (playable even with less than the full 36 tiles).

Unattractive incentive? And way too complicated? Apparently not.

According to a Migros press release, 50 mio. tiles found a new home, the corresponding online game got played 4.5 mio. times and tiles were traded on 53 trading platforms (Migros: Die Dominomania im Rückblick). Swiss blog publisher blogwerk.com, at one point, counted 563 concurrent auctions on Ricardo.ch. Today, a Google search on “Dominomania” (not really a common expression) finds 164.000 entries. Not quite bad.

What do we learn?

• collectibles work
• trading and swapping works
• a little bit of complexity is not necessarily doomed, especially if it builds on learned patterns
• the journey is the reward - and a good journey seems to be one with group activities and a bit of competition.

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Fresh out of Seth Godin’s (viral marketing) blog, here’s the graph to show to your client the next time they ask for tactics that’ll speed-boost their Twitter followers:

Graph by Seth Godin

Yellow: If you post low virality content to huge numbers of followers, the viral distribution will soon peter out. Green: High virality content, even from a smaller reader base, will go quite a way. Purple: The higher the virality factor, the better the passalong.

So, forget about mass-following and comment-spam. The money (so to speak) is in quality. And while the graph is just mathematical gymnastics, the million dollar question remains: what makes content viral?

Read Seth Godin, Viral growth trumps lots of faux followers.

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While not an industry first, BVDW (Bundesverband Digiale Wirtschaft, Germany’s Digital Economy Association) have published fresh data on the interplay of search- and TV-advertising. According to this study, running search ads in tandem with TVCs

• increases unaided brand awareness by 42 %
• improves brand image by 28 %
• improves effectiveness (regarding relevance and recommendation) by 44 %
• increases contact duration by almost 50 %
• increases clickthrough in search ads by almost 50 %.

But is this relevant? After all, people in the study were made to search after they watched… The key is parallel usage. According to a recent eiaa study (Media Multi-Tasking 2009), 22 % of Europeans are using TV and internet simultaneously. That’s a 38 % rise over 2006. Media multi-tasking is the missing link that alleviates the media discontinuity of traditional advertising. The checkout may be a click away from your award-winning banner ad, but the TV is still a long way away from the shelf. Pairing ATL with SEM shortens this gap and picks up a fifth European TV watchers in the flow of their media usage. And according to the eiaa-study, media multi-taskers are twice as likely to buy online as single-purpose users.

Download the BVDW-study “TV-Werbung: Niemals ohne Suche” here.

Because, after all, if you don’t own the search results while your ad runs, your media spendings directly benefit the competitor who did invest in search.

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I had just read this article about marketers not sure how to take advantage of Location-Based Services, specifically ones that are Social-Network based, and one of our Account people popped their head in my office to ask “What’s up with FourSquare? Is it worthwhile? And is it significant for Marketers?”

Good questions all. Foursquare allows you to “check in” to locations and awards badges for different user activities. The Article correctly states that some restaurants and bars are already embracing it, but the activities and offers are still in early days. Note the offer from Wow Bao in my building below:

Yeah – it’s a freebie offer, but I find it interesting that there is such a conversation about “is this interesting for marketers” and “how will marketers use it” – since it should make sense to pay attention to if you’ve got at least some of your audience that uses these kinds of things, and you’re worth having a relationship with in the first place (which, granted, is a big question for some marketers).

Here’s why: think about why restaurants and bars already jumped on the bandwagon. They have to develop relationships with their customers – they don’t have a choice. They don’t have a retailer that will put up POS material, or vast amounts of online ad spend (generally), and most of the places I’ve seen don’t do TV. For them, the relationship with the person in that establishment is everything, and finding new ways to prolong and enrich that relationship is the key to their success. For them the only question would be “why would I not get involved?”

Now I’m looking back over the last 12 months and thinking about the times I’ve mentioned doing something like this for a marketer, and thinking “You know what? My Client needs to break out from the shelf, their target is pretty well-connected digitally, they are not always getting the POS attention they want, or always deserve, they want more engagement, and since their relationship with the consumer is everything for them as well … so Why not?”

Bonus topic for further conversation: How different would the strategy for the marketer be from what they use for Facebook and Twitter?

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Genius product placement…

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This is not new, but I just found this interesting lecture by Henry Jenkins of MIT on the convergence of media, media culture etc. What I find so refreshing about it is that it is, in fact, a bit more academic. That might sound weird, but with all the hype around connections planning and discussion about its future difference to experience planning, media planning and brand planning, and our industry’s tendency to create buzz words and self-congratulatory one-liners, it is nice to have an MIT professor take a crack at it.

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Mccann Digital Israel has developed a digital personalized media campaign to promote a new Chocolate Dessert from Tnuva.  See above the case study. (Thanks to Sahar)

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Media consulant Leander Wattig has compiled a ranking of German media brands on Facebook (by number of fans). The top ten are:

The break-off to four digits arrives at #14 (ProSieben, German TV station, 9.757 fans as of Jan 10, 2010). From #86 (PRINZ, a print magazine) downward, we’re below 1000 fans. That’s just over 60% with less than 1000 fans. The bottom 30% are below 170 fans. (Figures not adujusted for the fact that esp. in the lower ranks, sometimes two or more brands share one position, e.g. 7 brands with 11 fans each).

According to Wattig, about 30% of these sites exclude fan-comments from their walls, i.e. exercise very tight brand control, even within a social media campaign. This overall figure equally applies to the brands with 1000 fans or more. There’s no apparent pattern as to which types of media would allow fan-comments on their startpage. I would’ve expected radio (strong call-in tradition) to be at the forefront, but no.

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