The Web Smart Blog
The Web Smart Blog exists to extend the information provided in our monthly Web Smart Newsletters. Web information changes so quickly that a monthly publication can't cover enough ground. Also, additional information to past topics can't wait for future publication so we add related newsletter information here.
subscribe
Forrester Takes Aim at the Dis-Connected Agency
February 20, 2008 at 9:30 am by Eric
Last week Forrester Research released "The Connected Agency" report by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim. In it they discuss how advertising agencies need to evolve from pushing messages to facilitating connections, from push to pull interactions, and from campaigns to conversations.When I read this kind of report I always keep in mind the kind of agency (and the kind of client) that these changes effect the most. In this regard, I found the report a bit overstated in how they characterize the traditional marketing agency. The report tended to overstate the importance social media trends and used easy targets like consumers' dislike for interruptive advertising to make its case. To be fair, report co-author Mary Beth Kemp did admit that they were directing their declarations and predictions to the top "A" list consumer brand agencies. The drama of the report plays best against these front lines, consumer-oriented brand agencies. But, the typical B2B client or mid-sized advertising agency isn't impacted nearly as much as the large consumer brand agency. Most mid-sized B2B companies barely register in social media "conversations." A few weeks ago, I sat through a demo of Radian6, a very impressive social media monitoring system. My main question for the rep giving me the demo was how the average mid-sized B2B client would benefit from the tool. We ran a few sample reports to see how much attention some our clients were getting. They got very few hits in blog posts, comments, and other social media conversations. The disruption and changes effecting national and global brands with regard to consumer conversation, engagement, and social media activity is very dramatic. The Forrester report does a fantastic job of quantifying these changes and forecasting their impact on the future model for the connected advertising agency. However, the practical realities of low attention volume for the typical mid-sized B2B in the social media universe decreases the urgency for social media engagement. But wait, that does not mean mid-sized agencies and clients can afford to fall asleep here! There is still crucial impact for all companies, even when they rarely get pinged in the blogosphere. Harry Beckwith points out in my favorite marketing book, Selling the Invisible, "More people every day have experienced extraordinary service. Many have seen Disney World; they know how clean, friendly, and creative service can be. They have seen world-class service, and now every service has to accept it." Even small local services who aren't Disney World still get evaluated on a scale that has Disney World on the "best" end of the scale. If I'm a small coffee shop, I still have to compete against Starbucks whether I like it or not. So while the typical mid-sized technology company, whose brand is hardly known outside their specialized industry, and who rarely get blogged about, are still going to be evaluated against a social media backdrop. Mid-sized B2B branding efforts will be seen and judged by the same people who, as general consumers, are being changed by the forces of social media. As social media, conversational engagement, peer-review, open commenting, sharing, collaboration, and all other other dynamics of social media change how consumers relate to brands, all companies will be judged, in some measure, by their responsiveness to these changes. One practical area of change for the typical mid-sized agency with their typical mid-sized B2B client is in their marketing vocabulary. Social media is having the effect of forcing consumer brands to get more real. Hyperbolic advertising slogans, and outrageous and unsubstantiated claims are failing on deaf ears. Marketing language has to change its tone or else risk seeming out of touch and embarrassing themselves. "Marketing speak" has to give way to human conversation. What brands claim about themselves using fairy tale language must come down to earth with real, open and honest talk. As brands are forced to be more real, because they are facing the rapidly changing marketing landscape, the change in tone, and language in marketing as a whole must change. And as consumers adapt to these changes, come to expect them, and even demand them, these same adjustments will be expected of all the marketing they receive. Even small companies will be judged on the basis larger brands are feeling now. After all, we're all consumers, and the service we receive at Starbucks carries over to Open Eye Cafe (Mark's favorite coffee shop). And the same branding language we begin to expect from Dove and Doritos we'll expect from Dover Rugs, and Dominion Technologies. So while the criticism leveled at the traditional advertising agency in the Forrester report may need some context and though it is not as dramatic a report when applied to most mid-sized agencies, it none-the-less underscores some important changes in the dynamics of all marketing that all agencies should stand up and take notice of. Update: Peter Kim just posted an update of all the reactions to the Forrester report--he highlights many of the comments from post. |
Tags: socialmedia blogging web20 agencies copywriting advertising advertising20
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Get Yourself Out There
February 11, 2008 at 2:30 pm by Chris
Brian Solis says that lack of comments means lack of influence, but I say don't expect a ton of comments unless you are approaching A-list (or even B-list) status. In fairness, Solis also says that "measuring the success of a blog based on the amount of comments is just lame," and I completely agree. In fact, according to Jakob Nielsen's study, 90% of online community users are lurkers, meaning they read but don't comment, while only 9% contribute a 'little' and 1% contribute actively. While this study is not specific to blog comment participation, it's likely that the principle is applicable though the numbers may have a "+ or -" factor. This means that the majority of your blog readers will probably not be commenting on your posts anytime soon.As is obvious to anyone who reads this blog, I don't get a ton of comments, so this isn't going to be one of those "I did it and so can you!" posts. Like Brian Solis says above, comments are not always going to be the best judge of the current success of a blog. However, there is always room for improvement, and as readership increases, so, too, should commenting. So, my blog has a way to go. There just is no magic wand to use to instantly get lots of traffic to your blog. There are ways to gradually increase the amount of activity on your blog, but to do it, you've got to get yourself out there. Establish Your Hub The first step is to give readers a way to find your blog. If you already have a website that gets some traffic, your blog can be integrated into your existing site's structure. If your blog is your online hub, you can use your profiles on various social networks to point readers your way (to learn more about this, see an earlier post titled Is that Really You?). Read Other Blogs to Stay Informed Next, you'll need to find and start reading other blogs that deal with the same topics that you deal with on your blog. Being familiar with the larger conversation is crucial to both gaining readers and being properly informed on those subjects that you plan to write about. Use a feed reader (we like Google Reader) to subscribe to the RSS feeds for these blogs and get into the habit of reading through your feeds daily. If you've come to the determination that blogging is important enough to your web strategy to actually create one, you'll also need to realize the importance for making time to read other blogs. Once you've done that, you'll probably find yourself asking how anyone could possibly keep up with the amount of information delivered via RSS to their computer every day. Here's how. Leave Comments, but don't spam. Finally, reading other blogs will help you stay informed, but it won't help you to get noticed. Remember, at this point, you're just lurking (not that there's anything wrong with that!). However, at some point you'll probably have something to add to the conversation that's happening in the comment threads of the blogs you're reading. That's a good thing, and you should do it. Most blogs allow you to add links to your comment, so if you have a blog post or webpage that is relevant to your comment, this is your chance to share it with the community. The more you participate by sharing insightful and valuable comments, the more you'll be able to share links without spamming the other readers of the blog. Participating in this way is crucial for developing recognized authority in regard to your area of expertise. (In the spirit of conversation, here's a link to a blog post which asks how bloggers interact with comments. The comments thread to the blog is a fairly good indication of people's varying opinions on how to interact with comment on their and others' blogs.) Then What? Once you're off and running, there are several other strategies you can employ to get a sense for how your blog is doing, including setting up an RSS feed for search results for your name or your company's name online. If your blog has become a significant part of your online strategy, being aware of your online reputation will become more and more important. It will also give you a chance to respond quickly to those blogs that have noticed and mentioned you (for positive or negative reasons). |
Tags: seo blogging google rss
| | | | | | |
It's All About Skimming
February 7, 2008 at 11:00 am by Chris
Mark and I recently had a chat (of which you can read a transcript on his blog) about how anyone could possibly keep up with the amount of information delivered via RSS to our computers every day. Every day you gasp? How about every hour!? I mentioned to Mark that one of the most important skills to develop (I can't believe I'm calling this a skill, but...) is to be able to skim through that information well. Good skimming means that you can quickly scan an article and determine if its content is relevant to you, then either decide to read it more closely or file it away for future reference, and maybe even share it with a friend who will find it interesting while you're at it. If you can't skim well, you'll never keep up!Skimming might not be necessary if everyone blogged in the same manner. Think about it: if every blogger decided to post one substantial and high-quality post a week, readers would have more time to digest the information. We'd probably have to subscribe to fewer blogs in order to feel like we're keeping abreast of things, too. However, this is just not the reality. Even magazine and newspaper columnists, who have traditionally written daily, weekly, or monthly columns, these days keep blogs on which they post several times a day (if not several times an hour). This is is just the pace at which information moves now. However, because there is so much information being passed back and forth, it's likely that much of it won't be relevant to you. Unfortunately, you won't know one way or another unless you start sifting through it.  If you take a look at my Google Reader trends (see image above), you'll get a better sense of what I am talking about. Notice that over the last 30 days, I read (skimmed, more likely) through 4,715 feeds- that's around 157 feeds a day! You can tell from the chart that most of my feed reading (skimming, again) is done earlier in the morning. This is a good time for me to catch up on this stuff before my phone starts ringing. Good thing I'm a morning person... Also, notice that some of the feeds I subscribe to update between 10 to 40 times a day! Granted, some of them are from fulltime journalists who are paid to do it, but this gives you an idea of the pace and frequency I mentioned above. Believe me, my job keeps me plenty busy, so I don't have time to settle down and really read all of this content- and I wouldn't really want to, either. Remember, much of it is not going to be relevant to me. But, some will be very relevant to me, so if I don't skim through all of it, I won't find the 'some' that is worthwhile. 
One last point. Most people who value reading (myself included), will be initially disgusted by the notion of skimming as a means of staying informed, especially when it comes to content that is professionally relevant. In this regard I think two ideas are important. First, blog content is meant to move at a faster pace, so reading a blog post and reading a book are going to be very different experiences. Blogs will not render books (actual books or ebooks) irrelevant anytime soon. This is a good thing. While ideas can be batted around in blog posts and stimulate lots of conversation, books are still needed to present ideas in a well developed and well researched manner. Second, the accelerated pace of blog post publishing is similar to that of book publishing. In fact, statistics from 2004 show that a new book of fiction is published in the United States every 30 minutes. And that's just fiction. Only in the United States. In 2004! This is why a recent book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard, shouldn't be scoffed at. Bayard points out that the only way for anyone, especially scholars, to keep up with the amount of information being put out there is to simply be aware of what's being published, because let's face it, you can't read it all. He even points out that sometimes it's more important to be aware of how a book fits in to the larger trends/mood/zeitgeist (wow I've used that word twice in one week on this blog) than to have actually read it. Have I read Bayard's book? No. ...His point, exactly! If skimming is legit for books, it had better be legit for blogs. |
Tags: books blogging google rss
| | | | | | |
Search Engine Land: Developing Web Literacy
June 7, 2007 at 11:40 am by Eric| Search Engine Land posted an article called 11 Steps to Developing a Web Literacy by Bill Slawski. This is an excellent post for those just getting started on the web. It can serve as a primer for small local businesses that have subsisted with Yellow Page ads as their primary channel for marketing. Bill makes some good points about how local search, local online directories and local review sites like Yelp are making it more and more important for smaller local business to have a web presence. But when going from no web experience to getting started with online marketing requires a lot of catch up learning. Bill's post is a great place to start. |
Tags: blogging advertising20 rss localsearch
| | | | | | |
Managing Multiple RSS Feeds
April 10, 2007 at 11:50 am by Eric| Subscribing to websites and blogs via RSS (written about in March 2006 Web Smart newsletter RSS: When the Web Comes to You) is foundational to working in the Web 2.0/Advertising 2.0 world. One problem I've encountered is having too many subscriptions. I currently subscribe to 40 feeds--and that's after having dropped over a dozen. Learning how to manage my feeds, and my time reading them has been no small challenge. Here are some tips, tools, and time management techniques for managing multiple RSS subscriptions. read more... |
Tags: webapplication blogging tagging advertising20 rss
| | | | | | |
