It's All About the Conversation

So, I know the actual birthday was October 8, but, I still wanted to create a bar code with one of the many free bar code generators out there.  So, happy belated birthday to the Bar code! (Here’s the one I used).

For a couple years now I’ve been feeling the need to not promote building traditional websites anymore, but instead to help clients be part of the conversation around their product and let that lead them to what they need to do online. Back when we started building websites more than 13 years ago, they were a very static thing. Difficult to build, modify and add on to, and yet, the thing everybody wanted and needed to help market themselves. So how’d that work out? Pretty well for a while, until 2001 when people finally realized a sock puppet couldn’t sell dog food very well.

Their motto? “Pets.com, because pets can’t drive.” Well, they can’t buy online either…

Where am I going with this? Well, today I saw a twitter feed from @LenKendall that went to a website  from DigitalBuzz.com with stats for website trends for large brands and then stats for the social media websites.  Company website stats are falling while social media stats are rising… quickly.

The author, Aden Hepburn, suggests two main reasons.  First, that people are spending all their time on social networks and getting the info they need there, and that they’re getting info via RSS feeds and from the very same social networks to which the brands are pushing information.

This doesn’t really mean that the big brands are getting less and less popular, but that they are and need to be pushing more content into Social Media to be successful.  And sure enough, many of them are.

And while the Pets.com sock puppet was funny for a while, it didn’t yet capture the social media in a way that was meaningful and profitable (according to Wikipedia, they were “selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.”)

So, according to DigitalBuzz.com:

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking…!

In short, It’s all about the Conversation.  Are you being part of it?

I was listening to Jimmy Buffett Live in Hawaii in my car when I heard the news.  The only word that came to mind was “AWESOME!”

Jimmy is a brand unto himself.  So are Parrotheads.  And now, he’s taken the stadium naming rights away from Corporate America and into the social, entertainment, fun world.  Too bad this is only for one year, and that it’s supposed to end by the Superbowl, but, I expect it will live on forever and this will always be Landshark Stadium as Jimmy Buffett turns corporate branding on it’s ear.

Many of the articles say that one of the primary reasons is to get more people to football games.  I didn’t actually think that declining attendance to football games was a problem, but I bet this will work in terms of making them more fun.  You know he’ll be at many games and I expect he’ll play a lot too.  It’s the next step in the Margaritaville world.

Read one of the articles here.

See a short AP video here:

AWESOME!

I was watching Idol tonight with 100 million other people and remembered an article I read in Advertising Age about it’s brand marketing.   I have one question.

What brand is on the judge’s glasses on the table?

I’m sure you all guessed correctly that it’s Coca Cola.

From the article:

The biggest TV success in history, “American Idol,” seemed an obvious place to begin. Season after season, three brands — Coca-Cola, Ford and AT&T (formerly Cingular) — have been the proud sponsors of a show that continues to boast high ratings. The reported $26 million-a-pop sponsorships are arguably some of the most valuable in North America, which explains why the sponsors have been just as loyal as the audience.

But when Simon Cowell sips out of his Coca-Cola cup, Randy Jackson comments on the latest Ford and Paula Abdul encourages everyone to cast a vote using AT&T, does it work? Quantitative and qualitative statistics say it does, but does a couch shaped like a Coke bottle really make people consume more cola? We were able to find the answer in only one way: by understanding what really goes on in our subconscious.

~~~

Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola did well; the brand had clearly increased its equity during “American Idol.” The couch, the red room — the entire setup seemed to fit with the program and thus had a very positive effect on the brand. Cingular (now AT&T) did well too. Its results weren’t as impressive as Coca-Cola’s, yet the fact that the network provider was an integrated part of the show that allowed people to cast their votes seemed to do the job: The brand increased its equity through the sponsorship.

If you get a chance to read the rest, it’s pretty interesting to show why we all remember Coke with Idol, but not for the Olympics in China…  And why Ford wasted 26 million bucks on Idol.