Left Image: An impoverished Darfur child is shown holding an LV-like purse, image sold as a T-shirt from artist, now being sued, see Hi-Res version.

Thanks to Søren Storm Hansen for bringing this to my attention.

It could have been your brand
It could have been Rolex, Lexus, Gucci, or even your brand, sadly for LV, it was theirs.

A 26 year old artist named Nadia Plesner has been sued by Louis Vuitton for brand jacking their famous purses in a anti-genocide campaign.

The artist was trying to make a point that the media cares more for Paris Hilton extravaganza’s more than the genocide in the nation of Darfur.

Nadia states her intentions for the grass roots campaign:

“My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things.

My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designerbags and small ugly dogs appearantly is enough to get you on a magasine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.

When we’re presented with the same images in the media over and over again, we might start to believe that they’re important.

As I was reading the book ”Not on our watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast this summer, I felt horrified by the fact that even with the genocide and other ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Paris Hilton was the one getting all the attention. Is it possible that show business have outruled common sense?

If you can’t beat them, join them. This is why I have chosen to mix the cruel reality with showbiz elements in my drawing.”

LV: “Cease and Desist”
Luxury brands certainly have teams of brand police within Marketing to ensure their products aren’t being misplaced or improperly positioned, and have taken action by first sending a cease and desist letter (notice they “applaud the efforts) PDF.

Nadia: “Free Speech”
Nadia then sent a return note, stating this was her ability to self-express and claimed the logo was not referring to LV in particular (PDF).

LV files lawsuit
The letter was not met well, and LV has now filled suit against Nadia, claiming damages of over $20,000 a day, each day the campaign is continued.

The Groundswell begins
Since then the Darfur has grown in awareness, having now been on Digg, a Facebook group formed, spread in the news, and hundreds of blogs pointing to her site.

LV has two a few options
Here’s my take, from what I can tell, Louis Vuitton (and the dog) have nothing to do with Darfur, and their brand is being dragged through the African mud. Their response is pretty standard and expected, to protect the image and brand that they’ve been working to build. I’m sympathetic to them getting brand jacked, as they’ve not done anything to occur this unwanted attention.

Option 1: Continue legal path: Continue this path and settle with Nadia, given the many lawyers they have access to and resources, they will likely win a copyright infringement for the design being on another paid product.

Option 2: Join the campaign: They could drop the suit, and work with the Save Dafur organization to help raise funds by doing events, creating a specific product, or help promote the cause. This too has it’s downsides, the brand will be brought into the human rights spotlight, and if they have any dirt in this arena (perhaps oversees manufacturing) they’ll be in turn scrutinized. Secondly, this would be a nod to activitists everywhere to brand jack major brands in order to get support –and funding, the cycle will continue.

Option 3: Redirect focus on issues: Submitted by John Bell. I enjoyed John’s option so much, that I’ve embedded it here on the post as an update. “What they could do is work with Nadia and other artists to host discussions about media focus. They could partner with a neutral party like my friends at ifocos.org to steward the conversation. Keep the discussion away from luxury brands (which is not Nadia’s point anyhow). LV can become part of teh solution without taking on the brunt of an issue they do not own.”

Option 4: Walk away: Submitted by Alison Byrne Fields: “Drop the suit. Walk away and wait for the dust to settle. This little hullabaloo will have no long term negative impact on their brand.”

I’m weighing both options here for LV, there’s really not a great way out of it for them. I believe they are collateral damage, having done no wrong to invoke this groundswell, yet this is a nod to what could easily happen to other brands.

I asked my Twitter community to voice their opinion, on the topic, here’s what was said in public

ronbailey: - why not just donate a few bucks to the cause in exchange for her NOT using LV products in her campaign?

Dan Lewis: legalities aside, I’d be mighty upset if my name were wrongly associated with genocide. the artist is morally wrong here, no doubt

Alberto Nardelli: besides LV point being morally disturbing, IP case doesn’t stand: would be like campbells suing warhol

Kim Pearson: I’m a former PR person, not a lawyer, but I’d argue that LV is doing itself more harm by its response, not protecting its brand.

Ed Saipetch: ironically in the same vain, I heard the (RED) campaign benefits retailers and product producers much much more than the AIDS fight

Rainne: I say not, b/c the artist did not use the vuitton pattern, she simply invoked its similarity.

mlogan: They turned this into a big story and managed to put themselves on the wrong side of a humanitarian crisis. Smooth

bethdunn: it’s another case of a company doing more harm than good to their brand by trying to halt something they can’t control

ronbailey: how has LV been harmed by Nadia’s campaign? - She was poking fun at celebrity culture in general, not LV in particular

ronbailey: They could have easily turned a blind eye to the whole episode.

Ok, you weigh in, If you were the CMO, what should LV do?

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I’m meeting more and more corporate marketers who understand the value of social media, but don’t know how to use it. I’m seeing a trend of at least 3 different adoption strategies, listed out below.

Often they want to repurpose their corporate marketing brochures, videos, and pass them on to social channels –without understand that content, often has to change. Corporate “top-down” content doesn’t do well on YouTube, brochures and press releases don’t do well on blogs, and a marcom’s product announcement on a podcast is going to have limited traction.

Corporations are adopting at least one of the three styles of Social Media Marketing:

Locked in the Castle
Keeping the good stuff close to your domain.

Example: Creating videos, audio, and blog posts, but keeping them behind registration, or for clients only.

I’m seeing a handful of corporations in the past year, require registration for videos and podcasts that limit people from accessing them. The risks include: limiting the organic spread of your hard earned content, and not benefiting by the natural word of mouth network. Of course, the flip side is that those that do register are truly hungry for the content, and self-selecting themselves further down the funnel.

Building roads to Towns
Reach adjacent towns by enticing them with content, and provide them with links (roads) back to your land.

Example: Creating brand related images, publishing in flickr, and providing a link in the image notes back to the corporate domain

Some marketers are realizing that they can put a great deal of product and company content on social media tools for free, but by providing links back to the corproate site in comments, in the post-roll of a video, or mentioning a call to action at the end of a podcast extends their reach. By providing these ‘hooks’ to content, you can hope to entice people, who will embed, share, or consume your content, and then eventually click on the links to move closer to your corporate website.

Traveling Missionaries
Missionaries spread to new communities.

Example: Creating campaigns in social networks (like Facebook) where communities already exist, but with no links back to the corporate domain, and no blatant advertising.

The truly savvy marketers are learning to find communities where they exist, becoming that community, and not worry about ‘driving traffic’ back to the corporate website as a measure of success. I’ve a few clients that have figured out how to experiment with ‘off domain’ success. There are risks too, this strategy could give up complete control to the members, and could result in a brand backlash or few people caring about a brand’s products.

When it comes to social media marketing, which style is your corporation going to adopt? each has a strength –and weakness –so it’s best you understand the elements and benefits of each.

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The question many marketers are trying to answer now, is “Who do people trust?”

I’ve been spending more and more time pouring over data, medium usage, behavioral and preference data for clients, and am learning more and more about how humans behave on the web.

So who do people trust? Three research studies indicate it’s peers, or people they know. And social clout from bloggers, or those with a lot of online friends ain’t it.

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1) Forrester Research

What’s interesting is that colleague Josh Bernoff’s weekly post on who do people trust, indicates that people trust their peers the most, and bloggers last. Josh writes:

“What does this mean for your brand? It means that a focus on “influencers” is not enough. You never know who may be reviewing your product, or where. Influencers may touch a lot of people, but so do the masses of reviewers on Yelp, or Amazon.com, or TripAdvisor. And heaven forbid you get people talking about your brand on The Consumerist.”

If people trust the reviews of friend that they know and trust 14% more than your corporate website, what is your web marketing team doing to accommodate this? Are you spending 14% more effort to listen, learn, influence peer reviews? I’ll bet your not, as most brand marketers I know are spending time building microsites, and launching brochure ware on their sites, without think about the impacts of their corporate website becoming irrelevant.

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2) Edelman Trust Barometer

In a confirming correlation, Edelmen’s research from Steve Rubel indicates the exact same findings, despite different phrasing of the questions. Steve writes: “both marketers and publishers - continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.”

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3) Pollara Research

Steve points to a third research report also validating this claim. Research firm Pollara found similar results:

“According to a new study from Canadian research firm Pollara, self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

“This shows that popularity doesn’t always equate to credibility,” said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there.”

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What you should do
Forward this post back to your marketing team, encourage the team to have an active and open dialog. Should you be focusing in on influencers only in your market space? Or should you start also focusing on ratings and review sites, where customers are critiquing, reading, and making decisions based on each others data.

So what’s this mean for me? Unless you know me, you’ll probably trust your friends or family far more than my opinion.

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So how can I win your trust back? Lately, I’ve been starting to see the cracks in social media, and have started a tag on this blog called Challenges. Social media isn’t perfect, it’s new, and many people and brands are doing it wrong. It’s important to be objective and point out when it works and when it doesn’t.

Update: Am I looking in the rear view mirror? intersting audio podcast debating this post, listen in (around 20 minutes in)

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Forrester has asked me to be on point for the social media efforts during tomorrow’s Marketing conference in L.A. (over 800 senior marketers are attending) we’re still in the evaluation process for hiring the community manager, so I’m just filling in.

So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be blogging at the Marketing Blog, and will be using the Forrester Twitter account.

Quite a few bloggers are attending, such as Jeremy Pepper, Rodney Rumford, Jennifer Jones (podcaster), and others. On the Forrester Marketing blog, I’ll link to all those that are doing live blogging of the sessions.

If I can get my gear to work correctly, Ill be live streaming the keynotes, I’ll announce it from the Forrester Twitter account.

Here’s the last event I went to, Day 1, and Day 2.

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Although there are many forms of Web Monetization (I’ve listed out nearly 15 forms), the newest iteration of web marketing: widgets, haven’t yet fully cashed in.

Widget, Gadgets, Applications, Canvas Pages, Embeds, it goes on and one. One thing is clear, the rate of widgets continues to increase, take for example Facebook’s application platform has over 15,000, 20,000 applications in just about 9 months. Granted, many of those are slightly tweaked clones of each other, the top 100 widgets clearly has adoption.

In some cases, there are sophisticated companies developing widgets, the RockYou’s and Slides of the world can really zero in and focus, or take the garage developers such as the two Russian developers who created Scrabulouos, or lastly, the big corporations or interactive firms that are getting in on the action –often with limited success.

Yet, how do we monetize widgets? There’s only a few ways, some tied back to traditional methods, and some leaning on the new media.

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Many Forms of Monetizing Widgets

Advertising/Sponsorship: CPM models sit nicely here, yet research indicates that users don’t go to social networks for finding products, CTRs are pretty damn low. Why? because people go there to socialize and self-exprsess, not find products, (that’s what Google, eBay, Craigslist is for). Banner ads count too, such as this case study with Vampires and Sony.

Interactive Marketing: Some widget developers are selling their already existing application space to large brands, who can insert this branded engagement into an existing community. Take for example Dell’s regeneration campaign case study.

Branded Entertainment: Somewhat different than advertising and interactive marketing, popular media or widgets can be put forth from funding from large companies, while we’ve yet to see this occur, Intel comes to mind: they sponsored a feature on Digg, and paid for the development, all in the context of their brand.

Cost Per Install: I personally think this is a dangerous way to monetize, although I realize the top widget networks are getting sizable revenues from selling the opportunity for other applications to piggy back off their success, and sell installations. If everyone does this, we’re going to end up with an excess of applications installed, based upon lower value. I somehow imagine successful widgets should grow naturally and organically, not sold from a mercenary application.

Acquisition: No brainer here, but folks like Scrabulous (if they weren’t shut down) could sell of their application to an interactive firm or widget network and all the community members that come with them.

eCommerce: Surprisingly, we’ve not seen any great applications spur forth with adoption in social networks, it just isn’t happening yet, expect to see an existing eCommerce site to create a successful widget by end of year, and likely a new form of social shopping to appear. Update: Rodney is watching this new type of ‘classified’ widget Radical Buy make some traction.

Now if I’ve missed any forms of widget monetization, do leave a comment. Also, see the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008.

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I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, so please, pass them around.

If you’re seeking advanced topics, cruise through the web strategy posts (it goes back pages and pages)

Social Media FAQ #4: How Do I Launch My Social Media Program?

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Companies unsure how to launch
Most companies are used to announcing products or initiatives using press releases, advertising, media influence, and even analyst influence. While many companies are toe dipping in the social media waters (The majority still have not, I’ve seen some adoption data from work) so there’s still many questions on what to do once you launch your blog, community site, podcast, etc.

Unlike Traditional Marketing
First of all, the term “launch” is the wrong way to think about this. Launch implies a single effort, getting a program in the air, and letting go, social media efforts are long term, and require a different approach, here’s how to approach it: think grassroots, not big bang.

The first thing to do is to remember this is unlike traditional marketing efforts. Remember that trust is highest between customers-to-prospect, not marketer-to-prospect. The next time you buy an item, think about who you trust more, a friend who has the product, or a marketer from that company. Therefore, the most effective way to announce your social media program is to get those in your community to announce it for you.

Tactics vary
In many cases, companies experiment internally with tools, and then launch a public social media program quietly, and let it build up momentum through natural word of mouth spread.

When a company wants to boost it’s presence, there’s quite a few ways to do this: 1) Link to the blogs, communities in your marketplace, add value from your own social media properties. 2) Join existing communities by leaving comments that add value, be an ongoing member of the community you’re trying to reach 3) For the sophisticated, provide special access to influencers in your market to announce, join, or co-create your social media programs.

Objectives
The goal for this exercise is simple, your employees, using social media tools, is to engage your community by interacting with them, being relevant, and adding valuable content to them (which is often, not marketing content) to your community. The objective is for them to respond to you, and sing your praises on your behalf. We’ll explore more advanced goals in future posts.

While I think good things are going to come out of ebay’s social media effort, to some, going the route of mainstream media to announce a groundswell effort seems counterintuitive.

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[It’s a perfect day here in San Diego at Graphing Social Patterns, we’re right on the waterfront, but us geeks, well we tweeted, blogged, and talked in a dark room]

Most of the presentations this morning have been very developer focused, I’m covering Graphing Social from the Web Strategists’ perspective: Web decision makers in corporate.

Rodney Rumford gave a Facebook Marketing 101 presentations and explains how businesses can use widgets to reach customers. Facebook gives you multiple ways to reach customers, and with them spending 20 minutes per day, the attention is there.

In the presentation from BJ Fogg who co-ran the Facebook class at Stanford, they developed applications, that they estimated totaled $500,000 in revenue from the students efforts in advertising. They give out a list of learnings on what made them successful, often it included being flexible, quickly iterating, not listening to individual opinions or getting approvals, just launching them, and experimentation. It was very clear to me that that behavior is the opposite of large brands, who want safety, low risk, and pre-written plans.

[Successful applications were experimental, embraced risk, and quickly iterated –everything big brands will struggle with]

Rodney gave the example of the where I’ve been map, and suggested that brand managers should consider sponsoring existing successful apps, rather than create their own. Rodney suggested that advertising rates were disappointing yet, suggested that interactive marketing and social ads gave more opportunity. First, define success, lay out metrics, use a multi-pronged approach (there are many different tools to use).

Rodney suggests that one of the key challenges is with the decision making process:

“Most of the people (at big corporations) who are making the decisions for Facebook are 45 or older, and are not immersed in Facebook”

For success, one should consider: 1) Outsourcing development to those that get it, such as an a successful widget development company, or 2) lean on someone in your own team who really understands this space. While strategy remains, social networking marketing requires a different mindset, approach, and use of tools.

Various pics from the event

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Jennifer Jones the host of Marketing Voices continues to improve in quality, with her strong background in broadcast TV, she continues to bring professionalism by interviewing the top leaders in the marketing industry.

Her latest guest, who needs no introduction is famed Guy Kawasaki. Featuring his latest project Alltop a preset bookmarking service organized by verticals.

Every day, I’m seeing new companies that are pushing technology to meet business needs, and in my honest review, I gave Guy a great review on the marketing of his services, but a less than steller review on innovation.

Initially, when I did that review, there were only a few sites available (egos, sports, etc) recently, he’s launched one that may have more value to my focus area called social media. I’m taking the ‘Kellogg’ challenge and am starting each day with this site, to see if it can enhance my information collecting, so far, so good.

In a fun and metaphorical way, Guy gives me a real good lesson that I’m going to take to heart, and positions me as the young, naive samurai.

Damn, I guess I need to buy Jennifer a new table.

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In business schools, we were force fed many comprehensive, yet meaningless definitions of marketing –and were then forced to recite, write, and regurgitate it. Two days ago, Chris Kenton asked the community roundtable for their definition of marketing, I coughed up mine:

[Marketing is the act of connecting customers to products]

Usually, I’m very thorough in my blog posts, but this time, I’ll keep it simple. Submit your definitions below, or critique mine.

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The job of a Marketer is to connect products with customers.

While it’s often native for marketers to know their products, they often fail at truly understanding their customers. Today, customers are much more than just recipients of messages, they create their own messages, share with their peers, and in some cases, are working very hard to keep marketers out of the picture.

Demographics
In business school, I learned about understanding your customer, we learned about the concepts of Demographics (people’s lifestyles, habits, population movements, spending, age, social grade, employment). The goal was to create a model to understand who these people were, where they live, and what they do.

Psychographics
We also learned that beyond understanding the who, we needed to understand the why, therefore understanding the psyhcographics (lifestyles and behaviors, what interests them, what they hold valuable and how they behave) became of importance.

Technographics
I first learned of Technographics from Steve Rubel’s blog, he was reviewing a report from colleague Charlene Li, who describes it as “Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies”. It’s important that before a company use a social media tool, they understand which tools their customers are using. Update: Julie Katz of Forrester has left a comment showing how the scope of Technographics is used beyond Social Media, and also see a brief history on Wikipedia

Sure, some of the really savvy marketers out there already know your audience, you’re involved in conversations with them all the time, or at one point you were a customer, but for many, that’s not enough.

How about me? How well do I know my community on this blog? Judging by the analytics, I know I have a lot of readers in North American and then in UK. I can tell who some of the readers are by the comments that they leave, but that’s only a small amount. When I announced that I’ll add anyone who ads me back in Facebook, I ended up really getting to know my community, it really brought a depth that I didn’t have before.

Some of you are saying, “that’s a lot of marketing mumbo jumbo”, but if you can’t define who your customers are, then how can you possible connect your products to people who you don’t know.

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Fedora and Data Portability Logos, too similar for comfort. (image via Techcrunch)

Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.

The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.

Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.

The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.

The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:

“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”

Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.

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Social Media impacts every aspect of our cultures, from business, politics, journalism, media, and advertising. Within just the business realm, it impacts research, marketing, support, product development and employees within the firewall. Despite the vast impacts of this shift “power has shifted from large organizations to individual participants” as humans connect with other humans, we often forget to see the larger picture.

Aaron Wall is someone I respect, he is certainly a domain expert in search marketing, in his recent post The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing, he gives a perspective –that’s limited from a search marketers perspective –is bearish on social media marketing. Several people asked me to blog my responses, so here it is:

[Social media marketing has it’s challenges, yet success should not be measured on ’search marketing’ alone]

Social media has many problems on it’s own (and I’ll frequently point them out) but we should remember that while search monetization is a dominant form in our industry, it’s not the only way websites are monetizes, in fact the complete list is here of the many forms of web marketing.

We’re seeing many more cases where marketers don’t want to monetize directly with ads, but would rather be part of a community of dialog with customers, so they can listen to the marketplace and learn. Also, we’re seeing examples where companies want the message about a product to spread (but not from their own mouth) but from word of mouth marketing. Companies like Dell want to build next-generation products using tools like IdeaStorm –where the customers define the product specs –in order to build better.

In each of the above cases, social media is used in a way much more than just search marketing and advertising.

[The greatest opportunities lie where companies be part of communities where ads may not even be present]

So before we suggest that social media marketing is ineffective, we should first look at the bigger picture, and perhaps revisit the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Think bigger my friends. (Update: Steve Rubel is)

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Update: A few hours later… I was away from the web for a few hours, and Guy left a few comments with corrections. I incorrectly assumed he was an investor in Popurls, secondly, there is no technology sharing between the sites. The talented Thomas Marban the creator of Popurls sent me an email also as confirmation. As soon as I saw these comments, I immediately made the corrections on the post, and responded with a comment. Sorry Guy for the incorrect assumptions. Despite these incorrections, the rest of this analysis (esp the marketing) I still stand by.

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In the following analysis, I’m being very unbiased and third party to this week’s product launch and marketing of Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop product.

Alltop, a Vertical feed aggregator
Recently, Guy Kawasaki launched yet another new web venture, Alltop. The site which offers a series of aggregated web pages that show the top feeds of any given industry, are what I call a vertical feed aggregation. There are versions for Autos, Celebrities, Fashion, Green, and one called Egos. Guy is an investor in popurls, the engine that powers the many versions of Alltop. (update: correction, Guy is not an investor, nor does the Popurls engine power Alltop)

[Guy Kawasaki launched a commodity vertical feed aggregator, leveraged existing content, and use influencers to market the product on his behalf. Although lacking in product innovation, it was saved by clever marketing.]

Low development costs
The fixed cost for creating a single master template and stylesheet probably took a talented UI designer less than 4 hours. Coding it for development probally took less than one day, there’s not a lot of new functionality added. The production work to analyze all the right feeds to put into the site, and populate each version took the most time. (Update: Since this was not powered by popurls, then Guy’s comment below is correct, there’s other development beyond UI)

Leveraging existing content
Here’s the brilliant part: the content creation. Rather than creating new content, Alltop is simply an overlay over existing content, and by aggregating to one location, creates marginally increased value for someone that doesn’t already have these feeds in a reader.

Marketing launch: the Influence model
Guy lead with the egos site, which contains the feeds of some of the top tech blogs in the industry. There’s a diversity of different races, a few women involved, and it played well to the egos. Techcrunch and many others fell for the bait. Speaking for myself, it was exciting to see myself on this site (top right, above the fold) and of course, that encouraged those who were on the site to blog about it, including taking screenshots.

Guy’s Self-Contradictions lead drama
To further the flames, former Apple evangelist Guy contradicts himself with his recent post on how we can forget about the A-listers (yet launches a website promoting them) Drue has a fiery video, where she pins Guy against the wall for his inconsistencies off camera.

Controversy spurs interest
Guy chose sort of a controversial name, as “egos” excited some, and caused Doc Searls to be repulsed and blogged: “But if you insist on labeling me an ego, I’ll insist that you take me off.” He then wrote a follow up post with additional clarification.

Quite honestly, this is commodity software, there is nothing special about what Alltop, but it comes down to marketing. If Guy can market these products so they become industry starting points (Techmeme failed to expand to new verticals) then he has a chance to create a unique starting point –an index and roadmap of each industry.

[This gimmick site had some creative marketing flair and very low costs, yet the real challenges lay ahead: building an active reader base, and then monetizing]

A gimmick site with marketing flair
“C” for Product: This is not an innovative product, it’s simply a bunch of feeds on a webpage, users can create their own with netvibes or pageflakes.
“A” for Marketing: Guy used the influence mode, segmented by vertical, and leveraged his clout to get exposure, well done.

Results:
As such, Guy will tout this as a success (he’ll likely factor in the low costs of the project) and spur him along for more keynotes, presentations, and accolades as a marketing extraordinarine. Another term for this is a celebrity product, which Guy clearly knows how to leverage. Of course, the next steps will see how he monetizes, clearly an advertising or sponsorship opportunity is likely. (or alternatively, could read on the many forms of monetization)

What do you think:
Don’t just take my word for it, I asked my 3000+ Twitter network what they thought of Guy’s product and here’s what they said:

steven mandzik robotchampion @jowyang brilliant, include the most influential web personalities on ur site, marketing is done!

Rob La Gesse kr8tr @jowyang - all I read about it was on Fake Steve Jobs (but it’s been a busy day for me)

Kristasphere @jowyang: so what is your take on the Egos blog? I was shocked. didn’t see it coming as a formal site about 9 hours ago from web in reply to jowyang Icon_star_empty

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This was the quote I heard last night from someone I know, his impression was that the role of Marketers was: “to get people to buy stuff that they don’t need”. Partially, he is right. The reputation of marketers is often negative, where marketers are considered to be involved with trickery, deceit, and mass consumerism.

In business school, we learned that the classical definition of Marketing was to connect customers with products, yet the defintion never included tricks, lying, or manipulation. If you’ve read Seth’s book that All Marketers are Liars, you’ll quickly realize that the premise of the book suggests that marketers actually tell consumers the stories that they want to hear. I know most marketers will feel better about their profession after reading this book.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, while many may despise marketing, great products without great marketing often don’t get to customers. Ok products (or crappy ones) may get sold to consumers due to great marketing.

Here’s where social media counts, as it levels the playing field between marketers and consumers. The promise of social media is great, consumers an directly share their opinions with each other, leaving marketers in the wake.

Question: Many consumers loathe marketers, now consumers can bypass marketers with social media tools, the power has shifted to the participants, how do marketers stay relevant?

Answer: Marketers must participate, or let consumers participate on their behalf, it’s a new world.

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Congrats to college graduate Andrew Cafourek for getting a job with Outrider. How’d he do it? by creating a professional looking site, being an excellent blogger, posting his resume, and learning how to use the tools to network with others –he demonstrated his web marketing prowess by doing it.

I’m always thrilled to see when the community connects, especially if it happens on my blog, and this is no exception. Andrew read my people on the move series, and connected with the folks at Outrider and received a job offer (read his post). He’s now packing his gear, moving to St Louis to start his new career, and life, straight out of college.

Jobs aren’t the only thing you should be thinking about, vendors should realize that where conversations are about their industry is there marketplace. In many cases I know the savvy buyers and savvy sellers are checking each other out in my comments, this is all encouraged as long as everyone is adding value to the conversation and not just taking.

Congrats to Andrew and the Outrider team for connecting!

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Why Web Strategists should consider widgets
Expect widgets to act like a network, the span over many different containers like social networks, websites, and blogs. Since widgets are opt-in by the publisher or social network member, it’s a great way to track who’s actually interested in the content. As a result, the opportunity for more sophisticated marketing and advertising moves from carpet bombing to opt-in nearly GPS radar-like accuracy.

First, understand the distributed web strategy
Need to get up to speed on this, start with my primer on web marketing is distributed, not on two domains alone, followed up by a former CMOs perspective on the distributed web. Getting users to come to your corporate website is not the only goal, savvy fisherman fish where the fish are.

New players as widget networks emerge
I’m closely watching the widget industry with colleague Charlene Li. This time last year, there were no widgets in Facebook, and now there are over 13,000. I recognize that this is a growth market Widget ad revenue was estimated at about $20 million in 2007, or about one-thousandth of Internet advertising as a whole. According to the new comScore data for November, Slide claimed almost 144 million unique viewers, for a 16% market share, and RockYou claimed a 11.7% share, with 104 million individual viewers. In July, Slide had 130 million individual users, or a 15% share, while RockYou boasted 96 million users, or 11.1% of the total. (stats via MSNBC)

Spending low, but expect growth
According to the data (from Comscore) that 6% of internet advertising dollars were being spent on social networks, and only a fraction currently is spent on widgets. Expect that to grow in both camps. Widget networks aren’t limited to social networks alone, in many cases, they can be repurposed for mobile devices as well as standalone embeds on websites and blogs.

Measurement key as dollars shift
The article states that some of the growth is capped due to lack of measurement (a good reason why I created this list of widget measurement companies). You’ll need to measure to show success, as well as make in-flight course corrections in near real time.

Expectations in 2008
So, expect widget networks like Slide, Rockyou, Widgetbox, Watercooler, and many many others, to become like syndicated networks, offer self-serve advertising, begin to offer metrics, and offer unique co-branded, and co-sponsored marketing campaigns to brands. Two of these networks will likely be acquired by large media or internet companies in the next 11 months.

Case Study: Forbes Widgets
Here’s a case of a company letting go to the distributed web, I just ran into the Forbes site, and saw they had a full page devoted to widgets, that let it’s content, and brand spread of it’s site. Interesting that it’s sponsor, in this case Visa, goes with it.

What you should do
First, determine if your community and marketplace is using widgets, do research. If so, seek one of those widget networks, and trail an advertising campaign that will match to your right community. Don’t try to recreate a widget, leave it to the experts, and likely, your interactive firm won’t do it well, these are very specialized products. Rather than have the widget network vendor recreate a new widget, leverage an existing one by sponsorship, rebranding, or integrating with a unique marketing campaign.

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Bombardment should wither
Traditional marketing is usually a head on approach where marketers carpet bomb screaming messages fighting for the attention of their community. Today, social media is really a lateral strategy. The most savvy brands will figure out how to “energize” customers so they tell others about the company and it’s products. There’s no argument that prospects trust actual customers more than marketers or advertisers.

[Many marketers get social media wrong, they apply traditional marketing tactics (yelling) to the new tools, and miss the biggest opportunities –letting customers tell the story for them]

I did a boomerang trip to Las Vegas (in under 24 hours) to speak at Intel’s annual sales and marketing conference, (alongside with Allastair Duncan of MRM, John Battelle of Federated Media, and good friend Jennifer Jones of Marketing Voices) they completely packed the venetian as over 5,400 employees assembled to talk about how to best connect with customers. While I’m not going to share any secrets, I can tell you that the focus on Social Media at Intel is moving at full steam. Out of the B2B tech companies, they’re one of the ones that are applying it to events, interacting with customers in communities such as Open Port, hosting blogger dinners, have a presence in SecondLife and are creating many videos and podcasts. For the most part, Intel gets it right, social media is being used by a wide group of marketers, and with varied levels of experimentation.

Benefits: When customers sing your praises
For a company that’s a component of an end product, being top of mind is a key. I learned that 25% of the global audience prefers Intel over other brands, 75% may be indifferent. I suggested that new marketing using social media is a great way to get that 25% to tell the other 75% what they like about Intel. They should develop a platform that enables customers to be the voice of the company, and to gain more, they need to let go. How to do this? let customers create messages, create advertisements, let them sing the praises from their blogs, and social network profiles. The company should be a supporter, echo and amplify customers, not force them into a corner.

Risks: Letting go to gain more
Sure there are risks of customers saying negative things about your brand, or competitors jumping in to derail, but with it comes rewards of authentic testimonials from customers, nothing is more powerful than that. Negative feedback? Consider it free customer insight, where you can then use it to fix your products, and come back to customers and show them they impact they helped you make. Develop a comfort zone by setting expectations up front to management and internal teams that like the real world, uncertainty is part of this.

Lateral marketing energizes your customers
Rather than focus on bombardment and forced marketing, companies like Intel, and perhaps yours, should consider that the most effective marketing, is the lateral approach where customers evangelize to your prospects on your behalf.

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Yesterday, I spoke on a panel to over 100 of Cisco’s global marketing professionals with Jennifer Jones of the famed Marketing Voices podcast, and Nancy Bhagat of Intel’s integrated marketing department. Jennifer who is known for assembling the greatest social media marketers on her podcast is now doing a great job coordinating real world panels with some of those same folks. Nancy, who has increased her integrated marketing budget 40% to online (that’s amazing!) shared a fantastic case study of how Intel is embracing customers using social media, while meeting their objectives, or learning from mistakes.

“So, who owns social media?”
One member of the Cisco global audience asked a question around the concept of social media ownership. Although he didn’t ask the following questions specifically, many corporations are having a hard time answering who manages the tools, who manages the relationships, what do you do it analyst blog, press blogs, or customers blogs, and who controls the budget and headcount.

Past: Marketing as the Controller
In the past, marketing has been much of a controller; responsible for direction one-way communications through advertising and press releases, this is how it was safe. The books Cluetrain and Naked Conversations tell this story well. During this time, there was a very thick membrane around the sides of the company that prevented employees that were not in this central group to openly talk to customers and the market. That’s all going away.

Future: Marketing as the Enabler
One of the concepts that I enjoyed from Nancy was her perspective and approach, how marketing is now an enabler. That solid communication membrane is now blurred, as adoption of social media tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, are really going to drive this, esp at the younger generation) and in order to do their job, many employees must interface with others using these tools. Marketing becomes a group that enables other groups in the company through leadership, education, setting up social media workshops, and letting go a great deal of control to product teams, support, sales teams, and other client groups that will start to use these tools to communicate.

Many challenges
Of course there are some real challenges: real-world (positive and negative) conversations (two-way, not one-way) will be decentralized (most off the corporate website), so marketers need to take leadership to understand the many different community discussions and respond. Now don’t get me wrong, marketers still have power, I continue to express that the power has shifted to the participants, so in addition to enabling, marketers must participate. For some marketers this will be a challenge, but by doing this, they will become more relevant.

[To be successful, corporate marketers must shift from controlling to enabling business groups to use social media to connect with customers]

In my research, I’ve found that successful companies have at least two new roles, the Community Manager (focuses on interactions with the community) and the Social Media Strategist, who helps to work internally to drive adoption, evangelize, and prove value. More on that as I dive into that research.

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Click To Play

If you can’t see the above video (perhaps you’re in a feedreader, or one of my email subscribers, please access the post directly)

While in Barcelona recently, I got a chance to interview folks from the local blogging community, there were quite a few ex-pats, such as Lennert de Rijk Managing Director Spain, who focuses on Marketing in Spain. He shares his views on online marketing, how the culture and demographics are different in Spain compared to the UK, and other insights. You can find Leonard at this Spanish site called OnetoMarket, or this English version.

What you’ll learn from this video

Find out why companies fail when trying to market in Spain.

Discover which age is still considered “young” (not the same as US)

Learn how search is used differently, and how your SEM campaigns must change

Thanks for bearing with me, the lighting was a bit dark, yet the focus should be on the content.

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Linda and Shawn were up in arms that Affiliate Marketing didn’t receive it’s own sub bullet in the recently published The Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008. I don’t blame them, this is a core form of marketing that they’ve built their business on, so it deserves it’s own bullet as it’s unique from advertising. Affiliate marketing is really about working with partners to help market or even sell your products. Think of how authors often put the Amazon widget on their blog to sell their book –in hopes they get a small residual.

Of course, there are criticism of this type of marketing, as some companies may work with content partners to strategically place products next to articles, sometimes not in full transparency according to this definition in Wikipedia. For anyone selling a product, idea, or service, you’ll want that product to be seen by the folks that are interested in it, and it’s really a tactic to extend the reach of your current product.

I’ve since added the Affiliate marketing in it’s own section in 4F on the Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing, thanks to Shawn for his input into the definition. Also, I hope it’s clear to you all that I’m actively listening and want to improve –although I may not always agree– your opinions are heard and acknowledged.

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