A very good example: Mokummercials

Mokummercials was founded in 2005 by 3 young ambitious bastards with a different view on how an ad agency needs to be run in a modern age and how campaigns need to be handled.

Mokummercials has grown to a new generation, full service, no BS creative company without boundaries. We don’t have account managers in expensive suits, no creative teams that play darts half of the day, but a team that is involved in the whole process. We make the idea, do the production and post production in house. Direct lines in the communication and the creative process are fundamental.
Click here and play their reel

Quirky’s Social Product Development

Laurens Bianchi @ viralblog

Today I bumped into Quirky, a very interesting community. Quirky is a social product development company. The idea is simple: your product ideas come in, the community works on them, Quirky sells your product worldwide, and 30¢ of every dollar brought in gets distributed amongst you and the product’s influencers.



The great thing about Quirky is that it takes the idea of community websites and applies it to product development. The community, which is free to join, suggests new ideas for products, inputs design ideas and the audience can vote on them. The most popular ideas can even make it into pre-production.

The site owners work out a minimum quantity needed for a manufacturing run and people commit to buying – once the required number number of pre-orders has been taken the product is produced. Finally, as an incentive to get involved the top collaborators on each product receive a cut of the sales.

Quirky is a perfect example for brands that really want to engage their audience by evolving them into product development and help them to create new products or make existing products better.

Check their product page to see which products the community has in production right now. One of the latest products is the Powercurl, a clip on cord wrap for your Apple Power adaptor.

Health Care Meets Online Social Media

Contents:

• Social Networks Come to Health
• What Is Health 2.0? The Power of Collective Wisdom
• The Business of Social Networks and Health
• Health Ratings Platforms That Make Health Consumers and Clinicians Peers
• Knitting Communities Together
• Disruptions Through Collaborations
• The New Health Company, v 2.0
• Going Mobile
• The New Patient Opinion Leader

Download the whole document (pdf)

The Guardian - The Observer: The Word of Mouth

An excellent overview, a must to read presentation.

To understand language 2.0: categories and definitions of social technologies

Click here for bigger size

The Social Media Guru movie :D

Be careful! They are everywhere ...and hunting for you.

The Myth of the Viral

Kaitlyn Wilkins @ Fresh Influence

I was fortunate enough to spend the last few days at WPP’s annual Stream Conference - which brings together some of the brightest minds from around the network in an unconference format to discuss the what’s next in digital and technology communications.

Some of the best sessions I attended were the ones organized around lists - be it potential “truths” presented for discussion, or co-created outputs. One such session was The Myth of the Viral presented by YouTube.



“Viral success happens, but it doesn’t just ‘happen’”.

Myth 1: I don’t have to promote it
The most successful videos are rooted in smart creative and promotion. Videos need a robust syndication and promotion plan that incorporates elements such as video ads, brand integration on .coms, influencer outreach, and social networking plays.


I think this is the most frequently overlooked aspect of video - today YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the US, so the Field of Dreams approach to posting your content is definitely not enough. Any time you want scale in social (and who doesn’t?!), a promotion plan - often rooted in paid media - is a must.

Myth 2: I can just put a video on YouTube and users will find it
Naming, tagging, and engaging content people spend time with all help you index on YouTube. To stand out you have to understand search terms that people use, and search optimize against those words.

Search is IT - for video and anything a brand puts on the web - 80% of web sessions start at a search engine, and 91% of Internet users search daily. Search intent modeling is now essential to everything from SEM/SEO to messaging to consumer behavior research to tagging.

Myth 3: Consumers don’t like branded content
Branding is ok if it’s tasteful and appropriate to the content – stripping the brand out, or having all UGC content is not necessary. Examples: Samsung Omnia i900 Unboxing, riffing on the unboxing video trend (3MM views), or my favorite Smirnoff Raw Tea Partay (5MM views).

Consumers are accustomed to contextually appropriate branding - as long as your adding value (humor, knowledge, exclusivity…) you can “get away” with branding that delivers on your messaging in a subtle way.






Myth 4: It’s not just about one video
Come up with ideas that people can replicate easily, so that viewers feel empowered to create additional content in response to the original piece. If you’re smart, you can build an ecosystem around your content.

This was a really smart point - think of things like the Cadbury Gorilla, which spawned so many spinoffs that Cadbury at one point set up a shadow site to house them. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Myth 5: Being in control is a good thing
Take advantage of your accidental spokespeople who are creating content without the brands “permissions.” For example, McDonald’s has leveraged a UGC McNuggets rap in advertising, and UK’s Cillit took advantage of a popular UGC techno remix of one of their commercials. Another common YouTube fear is the inane comments that are often left on videos, the discussion group felt that brands need to have tolerance for the YouTube community and the good/bad comments – and be confident that silly or unnecessarily disparaging remarks are often shouted down.

Ahhhh, control! The age old question. One of the best arguments against leaving your head in the sand is that, in many cases, consumers are *already* appropriating your brand in some way. Listening to the conversation gives you more control and a platform to start a dialogue that could be leveraged proactively or reactively in the future. One of the best examples of nimbly reacting to video content was how Chris Brown and Sony responded to the JK Wedding Dance video, in which a couple danced down the aisle to Brown’s “Forever.” Instead of wigging out, Sony Music used ContentID to claim the audio content and opted to put music purchase buttons next to the video and use YouTube insights to examine a new demographic and “come up with new distribution, sales and marketing ideas.” Sales of the song jumped from 3,000 to 50,000 in one week in July.

Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies

Enter the Hybrid Marketer:
Where Mad Men Meet Tech Nerds

Allison Mooney @ Advertising Age


At the Apps for Brands event this past Wednesday, I moderated a panel that looked specifically at how marketers should attack the construction of a branded application. But one question we didn't get to address was: How much do marketers need to know about app development anyway?
The truth is, advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world -- one where code is on par with content. The 21st-century ad isn't something to be looked at, it's something to be used. Our reliance on mobile tools, such as apps, position them as the perfect vehicles for brands. "Consumers" are now "users." So are "marketers" now "developers"?

"In order to make a successful app, you need to have these core competencies, or work with companies that have these core competencies, that are beyond marketing," said Ad Age's Nick Parish during the pre-panel call. J.B. Holston, president-CEO of NewsGator, saw this as his company's role. "Our clients would rather not have to worry about keeping up with latest and greatest [in platform releases]," he said. "They can focus a lot more on the brand, more what is the right expression of the brand here, rather than 'How do I use the video capability of the next generation iPhone?'"

But Matt Galligan, CEO and co-founder of CrashCorp, also a tech company, said that having someone who at least can help a creative team understanding how the software should look is very helpful. "I think having somebody like that, even if they are not the ones coding the app, helps bridge the gap between the technical and the creative," he said. "As we talk to various brands and agencies about working with our technology, there is sort of a disconnect."

AKQA gets around this with a "creative developer" role, which I've also heard referred to as a "creative technologist." People in this hybrid position work directly with developers to oversee the realization of an idea. "Pure creatives don't have the language to speak with developers," said Rei Inamoto, AKQA's chief creative officer. "These people act as translators."

Inamoto also pointed to the need for brand managers to have a new hybrid mind-set. "We need to educate and cultivate a new breed of people who understand tech from a marketing and brand perspective, who have a consumer mindset." These "brand technologists," as Parish called them, also lend a software company vibe around an agency.

This idea of agency as software company was the founding principle of The Barbarian Group, a boutique digital shop with offices in New York, Boston and San Francisco. Co-founder Rick Webb believes that the advertising industry has only had one major take-away from the web 2.0 world: User-generated content.

"What they should have been taking away all of this time -- and have increasingly begun to -- are the concepts of the constant beta and agile development," he says. "Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline. They should think of their marketing the same way that Facebook puts out a new feature every two weeks, tweaks it, changes it, and re-releases it. It's not a coincidence that's brought Facebook 400 million users and Twitter 40 million. We've been applying them to Kashi.com for three years now and have seen results beyond anything that a single campaign could do on its own."

These hybrid employees that can bring digital know-how to Madison Avenue should not be hard for companies to find. Rising college grads have grown up using digital tools for their creative expression and academic pursuits. Even established employees are taking up code in their spare time, not only recognizing its value on the job, but also to realize their own ideas.

Agencies need to recognize that this digital and mobile literacy is essential to their survival -- both on the creative side and the account side. They need not do the building in-house, but they need to know how the bricks are laid. Just as Salvatore Romano, Sterling Cooper's Art Director, transitioned from drawing storyboards to producing commercial, this generation's mad men will need to make a similar leap into Advertising 2.0.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Mooney is VP-director of trends and insights at MobileBehavior, an Omnicom Group Company, and runs their blog Next Great Thing.

Beyond PPC and SEO Integration: Display-Search Integration

Daniel Riveong @ Emergence Media Blog

For a number of years, I’ve spoken about SEO-PPC keyword management integration and I’ve spoken a few times about the need to integrate Social Media and SEO efforts. But what many of us have forgotten from time to time is that awareness via display can significantly impact search traffic and conversion.

Josh Dreller of Fuor Digital writes:

“As we move away as an industry from 'the last ad click' methodology and start measuring all of the media interactions that influence users to perform our converting actions, it's become clear that other engagement strategies should be considered within the media mix. In a recent campaign for one of my clients,39% of all search conversions had a previous banner view in the mix. It's very possible that a portion of those conversions would never had happened unless the banner drove a user to search.” (Emphasis mine)

Thirty-nine percent is a lot of paid search conversions that were assisted by display. Indeed, back in 2004, DoubleClick, working with Continental Airlines, did one of the most thorough and often referenced studies on view-through and found the following:

Click-through rates dropped slightly from 0.48 percent in the first quarter of 2004 to 0.43 percent in the second quarter, but view-through rates (which measure responses over time) grew considerably. According to DoubleClick, the view-through rate for Q2 measured 0.73 percent compared to 0.59 percent in Q1.

Take Aways

1. Is your team doing cross-channel tracking?
   People don’t experience media (and your brand for that matter) with a series of separate discrete media channels, and you shouldn’t track it as such.
2. Are you needlessly cutting Display for the sake of the ROI safety of Paid Search?
   Your C-level boss is breathing down your neck to ensure all marketing activities are ROI accountable and this sometimes means that display (online and offline like TV) gets cut for the sake of the trackable paid search. But maybe those sweet ROI numbers you’re getting on Google Adwords is driven by your local TV campaign?
3. Paid Search has limits.
   Many folks talk about paid search like it is the only game in town, but as Josh Dreller points out, conversion is a multi-stage process. Search is sometimes simply the final click before deciding to make a purchase.
4. Understand each stage of your customer purchase relationship lifecycle
   …And how you can help move the customer from awareness to customer to repeat customer and evangelist. Here’s how SocialRep define the customer relationship lifecycle, but your company is probably slightly different:

Can you name the companies from their logos?

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