Brand Interactivism

World Science Festival A Big Success

Some of the greatest scientific minds of this generation have converged on New York City this weekend to participate in the World Science Festival. Apparently, nearly every ticket has been sold, making this inaugural event a huge success.

I had the privilege of attending the festival's kickoff event at the American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday night, a result of Abstract Edge having built the festival's website (hat tip to our friends at Six Feet Up who collaborated on the development.) The site was built using the open source Plone content management system. For those who believe that all Plone sites look alike, here is yet another example to disprove that theory! Even the Flash elements on the homepage can be managed by content editors inside of Plone.

The CMS allows WSF staff to keep all of the information about events, speakers, locations, etc. up to date. Site visitors can easily browse and search for events that may pique their interest. Plone automatically keeps track of the relationships between the events, participants, locations, and ticket purchasing. This was critical in helping WSF manage the constantly changing festival information.

So, if you happen to be in New York this weekend, take a look at the site and see if anything is still available. The early reviews are quite positive!

Here are some links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/arts/30fest.html?ref=science
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/2008/05/world-science-f.html
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/media_events/science_festival_kickoff_party_a_whale_of_a_time_85880.asp

(this last one is about the cool party I got to attend...)

Building Online Community Builds Your Brand

As an example of Brand Interactivism at its best, Daily Candy CEO Peter Sheinbaum told an audience at the Direct Marketing Assocation (DMA) Email Evolution conference that building community is the path to brand loyalty. Online Media Daily reports:

Companies that want to build brand loyalty should focus not only on communicating with their customers, but helping their customers communicate with each other, a wildly successful email newsletter targeting young women with fashion and lifestyle content.   

In fact, Sheinbaum, speaking at the Direct Marketing Association's Email Evolution conference, said he thinks of Daily Candy as a community, although it might look like a broadcast medium....

Predicting that online populations will increasingly group themselves into "communities of interest," Sheinbaum advised the audience of marketers and publishers to mine their databases of subscribers and customers to discover commonalities, whatever they may be. Once these segments and subsegments are identified, he went on, the company should equip members of these groups to communicate with each other and form communities--all, of course, under the aegis of the company or brand.

Sheinbaum's advice seems to jibe with two studies from the United States and Britain which found that, respectively, 64% and 70% of online shoppers in those countries want consumer ratings and reviews on commercial Web sites. Respondents said these reviews would help inform both online and offline purchase decisions. The UK study was conducted by Jupiter Research and Bazaarvoice; the U.S. study by Forrester.

Note: You must have an account on MediaPost.com in order to read the full article.

 

CMSWire on Discover and Plone

A case study I wrote on Discover Magazine's use of Plone has been published at CMSWire.

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated Web Content Management infrastructure for www.discovermagazine.com. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

After analyzing current needs and taking stock of the Web CMS landscape DISCOVER ultimately selected the open source Plone platform. This is a two-part series where we look at the CMS features which convinced DISCOVER to chose Plone.

Plone (plone.org) was chosen because of the system’s ease-of-use, robust feature set, strong open source community, reduced vendor lock-in, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation, economics, and high performance.

Heroes, Discover, and Useless Vestigial Parts

It is amazing how seemingly random events can spike web traffic.

Looking at a website analytics report yesterday for Discover Magazine, I noticed that they had a huge traffic increase on Tuesday (more than double the usual.) Digging deeper, I discovered that more than 40% of that day's traffic was pointing to a single article from the June, 2004 issue: Useless Body Parts. Wondering where all that traffic was coming from, I saw that mostly it came from organic search on Yahoo and secondarily from Google.

The analytics tool enabled me to see the exact keyword phrases that people were using to find this old and archived article from Discover's distant past. It turns out that nearly all of that extra traffic was using the exact same keyword phrase - "useless vestigial parts".

Why in the world would thousand and thousands of extra visitors come to Discover Magazine's website in a single day, having searched in Yahoo and Google for "useless vestigial parts"? And then it occurred to me...

Minor spoiler alert - if you have not watched this past Monday's episode of NBC's Heroes, I'm going to reveal an extremely minor detail that should not affect your enjoyment of the show. That said, if you don't want to know anything about it whatsoever, skip ahead.

On the most recent episode, Claire (the cheerleader) is intrigued by her biology teacher's lecture about certain types of lizards that can regenerate lost body parts. They get into a discussion about evolution and whether or not human beings could evolve to do this. The teacher points out that there are many parts of the human body that are now "useless" and "vestigial".

End of spoiler - see, that wasn't so bad was it?

Given the timing, almost certainly, all this extra traffic came from interested Heroes viewers!

Still, it was strange that nearly every one of these visitors used the exact same search keyword phrase. It's impossible that just happened on its own.

Given that a majority of the extra traffic came from Yahoo and not from Google, I suspect that Yahoo posted an article on its portal homepage about Heroes with a link to its search results page for "useless vestigial parts". Discover's article shows up as the third result on that page.

On Google, Discover's article doesn't show up until the third results page. Thus, less traffic from Google.

The next step on this is to figure out how to run targeted SEO/SEM campaigns on Google Adwords or other pay-per-click search ad platforms to help capture even more of these traffic spikes. The tough part is that they are unpredictable. I believe though that if you watch your traffic closely enough, in real time, you might be able to figure out something like this with enough time to do something about it.

Perhaps Discover should be proactive about this and run search campaigns on keyword phrases related to topics that are relevant to their demographics, in particular when those topics are being discussed on very popular television shows that are watched by their demographics. Shows like Heroes.

Why Discover Magazine Chose Plone

Firstly, I am honored to have been asked to present at the 5th annual Plone Conference, this year to be held in Naples, Italy. I have never been to Italy, so I am particularly excited.

My presentation title is "Plone for Media" and here is the summary:

Plone is an outstanding choice as a platform for media websites. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations have all chosen to deploy on Plone for its ease-of-use, advanced feature set, open standards, accessibility, multi-lingual capabilities, and high scalability.

This session will discuss the elements needed for media sites and how Plone (along with many well-supported add-on products) meets those needs. Features such as video streaming, blogging, podcasting, ad serving and RSS will be discussed. Attendees will learn best practices in approaching the development and structure of media websites using Plone.

Discover Magazine (DISCOVERmagazine.com), a leading US science magazine that recently re-launched its website on Plone will be used as a case study.

If anybody has a specific interest on what I should cover, please let me know.

For a preview of what we did with Discover, I just published a highly-detailed case study on Plone.net. Some of the key highlights:

• DISCOVER chose Plone for its rich feature set, development community, ease-of-use, reputation and economics.
• Before Plone, it took DISCOVER up to three weeks to publish a magazine issue online. With Plone, that has been cut to as few as three days.
• Streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and photo galleries are enabled and integrated by Plone.
• Integration of social networking sites like Digg and Reddit has resulted in an increase in site traffic of nearly 70%.
• Any site content can be made "Subscriber-only" by DISCOVER editors.
• Plone automatically generates related articles for each of the thousands of articles on the site. No manual intervention is required.
• Thousands of articles were successfully and automatically migrated from DISCOVER's old CMS into Plone with no loss of inbound links.
• DISCOVERmagazine.com is a high-traffic site that performs extremely well under heavy load.

Starwood's Blog

Starwood Hotels has added value for its guests (and those considering becoming guests) by providing travel blogs written by professional travel writers. This is a wonderful use of the Internet. Instead of spending this money for YAIP (yet another Internet promotion), they are providing users with interesting and informative (and up-to-date) information. I'll bet they're not paying a fortune for this either.

Great job!

Mastercard Off to a Good Start

I really enjoyed Mastercard's ad last night, promoting a consumer-generated content campaign that ties in with their long running and highly recognizable "Priceless" campaign. Mastercard invited the audience to participate by entering a competition to develop the best priceless idea.

By including their customers, they gain awareness, augment their already huge opt-in online customer database, create word-of-mouth, and get people coming to their website where they can promote their products. This is a great first step towards customer empowerment.

Purchasing a 30-second spot during the Academy Awards... $1.3 million.
Allowing your audience to participate... priceless!

Maker's Mark Creates Brand Evangelists

Maker's Mark has a marketing program where they tap top customers to be "Ambassadors". In fact, my wife's stepfather is such an Ambassador. They sent him a beautifully designed folder with a "personal" letter from the president of the company, a bunch of Maker's Mark business cards with his name and status (to pass out to friends), and most clever of all, a "birth certificate". This certificate announces the "birth" of a "newborn Maker's Mark barrel" that has his name etched onto it. This 50-gallon barrel will mature in 6 - 7 years and he'll be able to purchase bottles of it from his personal barrel. He can see the barrel (with his name on it) online.

As crazy as this all sounds, my father-in-law is pretty excited about it. He's been talking about it all weekend. He's a true customer evangelist. He's telling his friends (and clearly his family).

This barely costs Maker's Mark anything at all, and yet has its best customers talking about it.

Ignore Integration At Your Own Peril

So this is what happens if you do a SuperBowl ad with or without regard for the Internet. Most notible is what GM did to Ford. Many of us saw the sweet, nostalgic "Kermit the Frog" ad placed by Ford... "It's Not Easy Being Green". I actually enjoyed that ad, although that might be in part because my wife and I sometimes sing that song to our 15 month old daughter to help her fall asleep.

That said, GM, knowing full well that Ford was going to use Kermit in their ad, bought the keyword "Kermit" on Google! GM created a microsite that focuses on the use of corn-based ethanol as a substitute for oil (a hot-button topic if ever there was one).

What a nice job of using some basic Internet technologies to steal the thunder from a campaign by a major competitor.

And what a terrible waste of millions of dollars by Ford. They couldn't even devote a few thousand of those dollars to a smart keyword campaign?

I'm sure Ford's agency, having placed a $2.5 million ad buy, doesn't believe they did anything wrong...

An Interesting Campaign from Coke

Coca-Cola is trying a rather innovative approach to advertising their sponsorship of the Torino Olympics. They have asked students from a number of different nations to blog and podcast their experiences as spectators. I'll be very curious to find out how successful this is. It's pretty cutting edge marketing. Great stuff.

Thoughts on the "Hilton Journeys" Website

OK, so Hilton's new "Hilton Journey's" site is playful, highly branded, and cute. However, there is a lot wrong with it.

1. I have a high bandwidth connection. It took a LONG time to load. By long, I mean more than 30 seconds. I expect that on dial-up, but not on my cable modem.
2. Every new page I click on has the same loading time problem.
3. Even after the page was done loading, the interface was slow. It took a while for the action to develop.
4. After all this waiting, at least there should have been a nice payoff. Um, no. I finally got to something that implied that if I clicked on it I'd be able to learn more about the beds at Hilton. I was waiting for something innovative and impressive. All I got was two sentences of text and a small picture of a fairly generic-looking bed. Stock photography?
5. The navigation is nearly illegible. It's vertical, the contrast between the font and background is negligible, and the font is very small.

I don't see how this website helps Hilton achieve its goals. They really should be giving people either instant gratification, or a big payoff. In this case, the site visitor gets neither.

Given that the entire site is done in Flash, it's also possible that they won't get good search engine placement for this, unless they took some very specific steps to deal with that issue (I really don't know in this case.)

Evite-like Functionality for Travel/Hospitality

Carnival Cruise Lines has added Evite-like functionality to their website, allowing people to invite family and friends to go with them on cruises. This type of innovation could work fantastically well for any destination-based travel company. Lots of individuals organize group travel, and by using their website to help faciliate this, I'm sure they're booking a lot more cruises. In addition, they are giving their customers the opportunity to meet others with whom they will be travelling. This is a very good example of social networking online.

Hasbro as Innovator

Hasbro is launching an online campaign that's worth keeping a look out for because of their innovative use of interactive video. The ad units use a technique called "hotspotting", which enables a viewer to mouse over a part of the video to make something happen.

It will be interesting to see if more advertisers start trying this as a way of bringing viewers into the experience.

Napster Ad - Not Ready for Prime Time

Perhaps an unfortunate theme in this post and the last, but yes, sex does sell. However, mainstream TV is pretty squeamish about how far an advertiser can go (the recent Go Daddy ads are really pushing the limits, IMO). Here is an example of an advertiser (Napster) who decided to create an ad that would NEVER get TV time, knowing full well that the viral nature of the Internet could make it popular. This ad is clever and funny, if perhaps not appropriate for the workplace. The 30-second spot maybe isn't dead after all, if it's used in innovative ways.

Not Safe for Work!

Whatever you think of the politics, PETA has put up a website fighting against milk consumption. WARNING: THIS SITE MAY NOT BE APPROPRIATE FOR YOUR WORKPLACE

That said, I'm SURE it's going to be viral. People will be passing this around. As always, sex sells.

Of course, there are many OTHER ways to be viral (humor being #1).

Would You Say That On a Date?

Business Week: What a Girl Wants from Advertisers. The article expresses the idea that one way to market to younger women is to think about how you might act on a date.