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Our new marketing campaign features key achievers such as Gwen Stefani or Jake Burton. But every person I know has a story -- lots of ‘em, actually. Some are good. Some are funny. Some should be made into Hollywood movies. We are leveraging the stories of our customers as part of our marketing campaign and allowing them to express what they have to say. I decided to ask Angela LoSasso who is running this part of the campaign to discuss our plans.
I am starting a new job today at HP as Vice President, Marketing for our Digital Photography and Entertainment businesses. Think digital cameras, photo compact printers, Snapfish, retail photofinishing and DVD on demand. I am very excited by the tremendous growth opportunities in all these businesses for HP and by the market disruptions that digital technologies provide us. I look forward to leveraging my customer centricity and web 2.0 experiences to compete with the likes of Kodak. So here are my recommendations for your summer vacation shopping.
Those who follow regularly this blog know that I have a keen interest in viral marketing and in better understanding how to make it effective. The Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs recently studied the subject of collective attention, central to the effectiveness of WOM at a point of time where people are bombarded with information. They analyzed the behavioral patters of one million Digg users, the digital media democracy, which allow users to submit news stories and “digg” them. What they showed is how the interplay between novelty and popularity determines the growth and eventual saturation of viral transmission.
I must admit that I have always considered Facebook as a college focused social network and did not pay much attention to its marketing potential beyond that specific target audience. However a few events and stats caught my attention recently.
My blogging friend BL Ochman recently criticized Dell and HP for “hiding in plain sight”, by not linking to our blogs from our corporate home page. She went on to argue that “lawyers, CFOs are other suits” still worry about the loss of the message control and therefore hide it from the homepage.
Although I understand BL’s perspective, I think it is more valid for tightly managed, unique corporate blogs like Dell’s or Southwest’s , where one single multi-authored blog represents the voice of the company. At HP, we have chosen a different approach by allowing any employee to blog on any topic, from Sundance, Corporate Social responsibility, LaserJet or Professional photography to name a few. In our case, search optimization and landing pages become as critical as the often over-emphasized home page. Our readers and customers do not search “HP blogs”, they come across us through searches such as “HP advertising campaign”, “HP green strategy”, “HP blades” and search engines connect them directly to the topics that are relevant to them.
Following BL’s posts, I connected with Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research, our resident expert on web experience and usability (Congrats for joining the blogosphere, Nan!) to validate my assumptions. Extracts from our conversation after the jump. Let me know what you think.
Time for a little shameless self promotion….. I was very excited to be selected by Brandweek as one of the 2007 top 10 next generation marketers, “who know where marketing is heading” (I wish...). We had fun for the photo shoot at the HP Garage – those are Bill and Dave’s tools behind me. For the record, the viral marketing campaigns mentioned in the article were instigated by my colleague Hani Dabbagh, not by me.
Above all, I wanted to thank all of you, marketers, bloggers and readers – you were the reason I was selected. THANK YOU! Many thanks also to Peter Kim for his great quote.
Read the full article here.
I have been analyzing Second Life for months, but a great article in Brandweek titled “are marketers dying on Second Life?” prompted me to write this post.
Second Life is the Internet-based virtual world, which has been a center of attention for mainstream media after IBM, Dell, American Apparel, Adidas, Starwood Hotels, Nissan and many others developed a presence or bought islands. Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables its users, "Residents", to interact with each other through avatars in a virtual society. Residents can explore, socialize, participate in group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. Second Life has roughly 3M subscribers.
I really believe that Second Life is another example of a web 2.0 property that marketers should explore and understand. It opens up a window into the future of 3D web, but I still need to be convinced about broader marketing activities and here is why.
Many friends have been asking me why we acquired Tabblo since we already owned Snapfish and whether we were planning to integrate both. Rather than repeat the same story, I thought I would blog about it!
Photo site Tabblo is not a traditional photo sharing site; Tabblo makes it easy to import photos from sites like Flickr and arrange them with text to make large posters, called Tabblos (from the French word tableau), to print directly from the web. In the last nine months since its creation, 150 thousand tabblos were created, using 5 million photos.
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia built collaboratively, is to me one of the most fascinating developments of the web 2.0 era. Since its creation six years ago, the online encyclopedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits contributed in a predominantly unscheduled and uncontrolled fashion by 5.77 million unpaid contributors. Wikipedia has experienced an exponential growth over the last years (up 200% since September 2005) and ranks now among the 20 most visited internet domains in the US, according to Hitwise. I very much enjoy reading the research papers authored by HP’s Information Dynamics Lab – one of the leading authorities in the relation between local actions and global behavior of large distributed systems. One of their recent studies assesses the value of collaboration in Wikipedia by measuring the correlation between the 50 million edits in the English-language Wikipedia and the quality of its 1.5 million articles. Here are some of the key findings.
John Battelle had a great post on one of the greatest blogging dilemmas. Blogging is about an on-going dialogue of the author with its audience and blogging brings this great immediacy to their discussion. BUT … A very large percentage of readers (35% in my case) come directly from search, typing in key words in google and landing on this blog.
Not surprisingly, most people find me by typing in google: “what is marketing” (by far #1), “Cyworld Korea”, “video marketing” or “viral marketing”. But the long tail of searches reveals more unexpected searches such as “2 headed person”, “it does not matter anymore”, “growing pains TV show”, “reasons why people would like to live in Russia”, “French sms love”, “java script rolling bar”. Ok, ok, I chose the most extreme ones; most do relate to hp, marketing and social media.
The google searcher/reader lacks the frame of reference about this blog, reads one post, leaves no comment and moves on. John provides great suggestions on how blogging platforms could evolve to “merchandize” blogs, but his post prompted me more tactically to highlight for a new reader the main highlights of this blog.
As 2006 comes to close, it’s a good time to reflect on the impact of social media (aka peer media, new media) on the marketing and PR professions. So much happened during the year that will significantly change how we will do our jobs in the future. A highlights reel would include such notable developments as:
PR 2.0, Social media press releases, Second Life, Wal-Mart and Edelman, the Dell corporate blog, YouTube, Amanda Congdon and Rocketboom, Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft, Ambushed AOL/Comcast call center reps, Social Media Club, GM's Response to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, viral videos (Coke and Mentos), user generated content, customer engagement, Chevy Tahoe ads
Collectively, these news events and trends reflect shifts in who controls the message and how and the message is delivered. To gain some perspective on the year, a group of us bloggers
Todd Defren http://www.pr-squared.com Dan Greenfield http://bernaisesource.blog.com Kami Huyse http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com Eric Kintz http://www.hp.com/blogs/kintz John Wagner http://wagnercomm.blogspot.com agreed to share our perspectives on the following question:
What was (were) the most notable PR/marketing social media trend(s) or event(s) in 2006 and why?
I decided to focus on the rise of Company Generated Media.
I have blogged a lot recently about the future of online advertising and the influence of video. Most people associate this trend with the consumer world and the rise of the likes of YouTube. I see the same sea of change impacting the Business to Business world.
Case in point, we recently launched a new online program “Change Artists” (free and requires registration). The program’s central element is a series of webcasts, which feature unscripted discussions pairing CEOs and CIOs from the leading companies around the world regarding how they embraced change within their organizations to gain competitive advantage.
My title may seem obvious after the acquisition of YouTube by Google but I was interested to see some good data from Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley.
Her major point is that 60% of all Internet traffic may be P2P file sharing of un-monetized video (with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of the traffic). Despite challenges in copyright management and infrastructure stress, the ramp in tagging for search and the growing partnerships with content providers will create opportunities for monetization – especially through advertising.
The movers and shakers of the web 2.0 movement are all here and I was particularly interested by what Eric Schmidt had to say.
I was speaking this morning on a panel at the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Conference on the topic of “Just How Far Will Madison Avenue Go To Reach the Consumer?”. The other panelists included Larry Gerbrandt, General Manager of Nielsen Analytics, Nick Pahade, President Publicis Denuo and PJ Pereira, Executive Creative Director AKQA and was facilitated by Kevin Delaney from the Wall Street Journal.
Here is how the panel was presented: "With traditional TV, radio and newspaper advertising not working as well as they used to, advertisers are increasingly utilizing newer mediums to push products and services. But how far are they willing to go? What do they think of trying to reach consumers through their cell phones? How about video sharing sites? How do they look at evolving technology for both downloading video and playing it on an array of devices?"
I thought I would share some of the key points I made this morning. Let me know what you think.
Marketers have recognized the need for a fundamental re-design of marketing practices linked to the technology-driven explosion of media vehicles, from the Internet, to cable TV, blogging or gaming. They have reacted by shifting their advertising budgets from traditional TV and print to online media. They are now experimenting with new technologies and viral marketing. However, new technologies are enabling a more subtle shift that marketers have yet to recognize and adapt to – I call it “dissociative identity marketing”.
I blogged on May 1 about the amazing success of YouTube and the impact on viral marketing strategies and wondered how quickly the medium would take off with mainstream advertising. Since I posted, YouTube’s traffic has doubled (yes, doubled!!!) and we decided that it was time for HP to get in the game. I thought I would give you the story behind the story of yesterday’s announcements and share my discussion with Tracey Trachta, Director WW & US Consumer Advertising, who manages these new online campaigns.
Some bloggers will accuse me of doing PR for HP, but I just think these are cool initiatives :-)
Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron parted ways yesterday at Rocketboom, the pioneering video blog. Rocketboom had been the flagship of a new type of media, experimenting with innovative models (see my post on Rocketboom).
Too bad, I was a huge fan…. But the temporary ending to a great story triggered a few thoughts on the social web.
“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging. Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?
Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a web 1.0 mindset and early web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.
