Peter Imbres - Point Oh! - perspectives on emerging media

As many of you know, I have had a long love affair with the South by Southwest interactive, music and film conference, both in my previous life as an aspiring rock star and my current life as a guy who is fascinated by how the Web is changing the way the world communicates. I still say that I learn as much in a week at SXSW as I do in a month in my job.

Last year I had the privilege of putting together an amazing panel to talk about how social media has changed the news cycle. I had panelists from GM, NPR and the University of Miami and we were lucky enough to get a large engaged crowd in one of the better panel rooms. It was easily one of my professional highlights for the year.

This year I’m proposing a different angle and would love you vote and/or feedback. Here is my official blurb:

“Viral Semantics: Dissecting the Modern Marketing Vocabulary”

Make it go viral! Drive eyeballs! Engage the influencers! What do these phrases really mean? Are they misleading or are marketers just finding new ways to describe impact in a new landscape? Discuss with champions and skeptics and decide which words or phrases can stay and which can be buried forever.

The idea behind my panel submission was that SXSW needs a Suxors (a panel dedicated to the worst in social media marketing) for all the marketing jargon that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement. Much of this language does nothing more than hold the industry back as it confuses people as to the real value of what can be achieved through effective online communications. I’ve been trying to bury the term “viral” for a long time due to it’s almost universal misuse but there are lots more to choose from. The format I’d use for the panel is to let each panelist suggest two terms that need to buried forever and then select a winner based on a running tally on Twitter. We’d also take suggestions from the crowd along with their rationale. Overall, I think it should make for a spirited discussion and, in a small way, help to eliminate some of the language that holds this industry back.

Like the idea? Please click the link above and go vote for it. Don’t like it? I’d love to hear why in the comments. Panels are ultimately selected by the judging committee at SXSW but the voting always helps (they claim it’s worth 30% in selection).

Also, I don’t normally do this on this blog but some of my colleagues at Hill & Knowlton also submitted great ideas that would be worth checking out as well. Please click on their links below and vote for their submissions if you’d like to see them make it to Austin.

Boyd Neil: “A Different Documentary: Online Storytelling & Social Change.”

Activists, enthusiasts & evangelists seek new ways to raise awareness, affect social change & fundraise. A documentary can effectively transport your story online to achieve these aims. Any organization can learn how serializing content, engaging an audience in the filmmaking process and involving supporters in the project itself is transformative.

Meghan Warby: “Passionate People: The Key Ingredient to Social Media Success”

Regardless of the different avenues an organization takes to inform online audiences about a cause, there is but one vital factor that successfully binds social change and social media – passionate people. This panel’s roster blurs the line between personal and professional to achieve unparalleled success on behalf of their cause, workplace, employer, and ultimately, values.

Troy Ross: “Gaming’s Final Frontier – Moving Towards Monetization & Improving Experience”

The gaming sector has evolved to incorporate online collaborative role-playing & improved visual experiences. There is much to share between the monetized industry of internet wagering & the visually immersive & increasingly sophisticated gaming sectors. Witness the exchange of ideas, learnings & discussion of future collaborative opportunities between industry heavyweights.

Thanks again for reading (and double thanks if you voted)!

The Golden Goose Egg of Twitter

Aug 26

Kudos to TechCrunch for finally pulling the veil off the one of the biggest myths in social media right now; that you can gauge influence by how many followers someone has on Twitter. MG Siegler hit the nail on the head when he said that it’s not the number of followers you have as much as it is about the ratio between followers and people you’re following.

Any novice Twitter user can spend an hour or two each day following people, which will result in a lot of them following you back. This will also attract the spam bots and within a month or two you will have thousands of followers. Congrats!

The result is a lot of these “social media gurus” who you’ve never heard of popping up in your inbox with 29,999 followers and 32,853 people that they follow. At first glance, it may look like they’re probably producing decent content since the majority of people that they follow are following them back. Unfortunately, most people always follow you back or have use a service that auto-follows anyone who follows them. They want to build their precious follower number too. Add a healthy percentage of spam accounts to the mix and you have a very misleading stat.

I firmly believe in the golden ratio for Twitter and rarely follow anyone that appears to be on a quest to accumulate followers (with the exception of some members of the Twitterati, like Scoble and Calacanis). I want the people I follow on Twitter to be about 20% broadcasters (people who post content and don’t engage) and 80% people who I can actually have a conversation with if something they post inspires a response. The 80% have much more value to me than the 20%.

The one thing I’d add to this is to watch the number of people that your prospective Twitter friend follows. There are a lot of great tools out there to filter Twitter but you generally won’t get any traction with someone who is following more than 1,000 people unless they have a good reason to flag your tweets. Are you comfortable with adding someone to your micro network if they aren’t ever listening to you? If so, go ahead and add them but don’t be under the impression that @nytimes wants your feedback.

As Twitter matures as a platform, it will be interesting to see how they address these kinds of problems. Being able to easily judge the authenticity of someone who wants to be a part of your micro network of content is a crucial step in transforming Twitter into a mainstream social utility and one that I hope they address soon. Well, right after taking care of those spam accounts.

Earned Media: Certified Organic

Aug 25

There is a lot of talk about the “fine line” in PR now that social media has been pushing the envelope on what is acceptable to traditional PR practitioners (read: media relations). You’ll hear that there is a “fine line” between PR and advertising now that PR is incentivizing non-journalists to broadcast various messages on behalf of their clients. There is a “fine line” between Pay Per Post and paying a PR agency to try to get placements for you. There is a “fine line” between sponsored posts and banner ads.

The lines get less fine when you revert back to definitions that few will disagree with. You generally won’t get into a big argument when you separate PR from advertising as the difference between paid media and earned media. Paid media has certain benefits, like being predictable, as does earned media, like generally being more trustworthy.

If you’re paying for placement through a company like Izea, Pay Per Post or BlogHer, you’re not doing PR…or you’re just doing it badly. Clients pay PR people to craft persuasive messaging and develop assets to support this messaging, which can then be used to reach influencers and shift sentiment around an issue or news item. These services aren’t necessarily immoral (thought I don’t personally like them) but they are paid media and should be purchased by media companies and advertisers and held to the same standards as other media buys.

Why is this an important distinction to make?

Put simply, it’s because organic impressions are worth so much more than manufactured impressions. Social media, blog-related media in particular, is going through something that search engines went through a little while ago in that they’re trying to figure out the right place for sponsored content among organic content. Today search is a more mature industry and the brands that are investing in SEM have a clear understanding of the difference in value between paid search and organic search results.

PR can play a very strong role in organic social media marketing if it’s willing to distance itself from paid media. I won’t argue that paid media doesn’t have a place in this mix (in fact, this looks about right to me) but public relations needs to take it’s discipline a lot more seriously before someone else steps in and becomes a better resource for working your brand into this media segment organically.

Mommy Blogger Boycott? Sign Me Up!

Jul 20

You may not have heard but one of the denizens of mommy blogger communities that have popped up to exploit marketers’ fascination with this fashionable demographic have declared that August 10-16th will be the first official “PR Blackout,” because mommy bloggers are “simply doing too much.” While Momdot may not have the influence of larger blogger networks that more successfully pimp out mommy content to the highest bidder, the initiative has gained some steam, at least in the insular worlds of PR and mommy blogging.

I’m with the mommies on this one. I propose that PR practitioners join this fight and show their support by taking it one step further and blacking out mommies for the remainder of 2009. No more free iPods or trips to LA to demo your client’s product. No more free rides to the BlogHer conference from their hotel or subscriptions to services they would never pay for. Just flat out cut them off and give them the freedom to resume their non-branded activities for the remainder of the year. They’ll be better off, you’ll be better off and your clients will be better off. More importantly, maybe somewhere a child will get a little more attention.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate mommy bloggers. In fact, I think mommy bloggers are one of the most closely knit online communities that have emerged from the social media cloud. They understand the tools at their disposal and have been great at building a network that is obviously very attractive to marketers and, subsequently, PR people. They’re often smart women that control substantial portions of the total household income. Moms buy products for their sons, daughters and husbands so they super consumers, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Yes, mothers are extremely important, if you can reach them in a meaningful way. The marketing data doesn’t lie about the role these women are playing in thier families. For me, the part where the fog starts to roll in is with the mommy bloggers and what weight they hold with larger networks of mothers. I’d argue that the influence of mommy bloggers is completely overblown for a few key reasons:

Echochamber – Mommy bloggers are read primarily by other mommy bloggers. They are all fighting for SOV so they all link to each other, follow each other on Twitter and, in many cases, click on each other’s ads. Sound familiar? Yes, this is the same thing that happened in tech until the industry realized that Robert Scoble‘s endorsement isn’t going to make anyone buy stock in your company.
Oversaturation – Mommy blogs and the networks that pimp them out have created a totally oversaturated media segment that makes NASCAR look organic. Brand sponsorships of confessional parenting diatribes that range from voyeristic to flat out spam are not only bad media buys but also put an ugly tint on your brand.
Trust – Because you can buy a mommy blogger from a variety of different networks and get them to do just about anything, a mommy blogger endorsement isn’t exactly what it appears to be. There have been so many glowing endorsements of Swiffers and Tide that people who read these blogs have trained themselves to ignore them and treat them like banner ads. When you lose the trust of editorial content, you can’t claim the same value as editorial content (regardless of your disclaimer).
Numbers – Since mommy bloggers live primarily within the world of social media, they’re subject to all the meaningless friend/fan/follower numbers that boost up people with limited influence in the real world. You can get a lot of Twitter followers if you have a few hours of free time every day but that doesn’t make you influential.

There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Only a fraction of moms who blog end up falling for the blogging-for-dollars schemes but it is a very vocal minority that does and that affects the whole segment. Mommy bloggers are right to step away from PR people for a while and PR people should do the same. It’s fad PR and there are better way to spend your client’s money. Maybe there is a creative way to connect with the 99% percent of moms who don’t blog.

Marketing to the Sleeping

Jun 09

Sleeping. The average person does it an average of 7.5 hours a day. It skews evenly across all demographics, including affluents, mothers, hispanics, the c-suite, iPhone users and residents of the greater Miami metropolitan area. You hear people talking about it everywhere. Then why is it so hard to market to people through this universal channel?

Does this sound familiar?

The average US Internet user spends about 6% of their total time online on Facebook. Over 90 million people a month are using the site. You hear people talking about it everywhere. Then why is it so hard to market to people through this (somewhat) universal channel?

The reason is related to how you’re reading the marketing data and some larger issues related to receptivity.

Baby boomers, for example, are one of the groups that are flocking to Facebook. The problem is that they’re not coming back. Sure, you could look at the data and see that in February and March there was an increase of more than 1,500,000 new users over the age of 55+ to site. Get out the checkbook! Call the PR firm! We’re going to market our Matlock DVDs on Facebook!! Unfortunately, you’d be sad to find out that the number of active users actually decreased April and May (by about 650,000, no less). What went wrong?

There were many reasons that baby boomers visited Facebook in February and March but apparently most of them were not there to make a commitment to social networking. The numbers were there but the audience wasn’t receptive to the media, which led to them not being receptive to your marketing.

Receptivity to marketing can come down to a science, like choosing the right color, or a degree of common sense. Interactive media, as the name suggests, offers a wider range of interaction than any form of media to date. Most people simply read their newspapers but on an interactive media property you might be playing a game, creating something, organizing photos or any range of activities that all greatly affect your receptivity to marketing.

People using social media, in my opinion, have a low to average receptivity to marketing due to the reality of what people do on social networks. While someone just killing time on a social network might be receptive to interacting with your brand on a meaningful level, those that use it as a social utility (a segment that generally has the most valuable networks of “friends”) aren’t going to pay attention to your display ads or promote your social applications unless they’re extremely compelling or add to the utility of the site. Can you improve upon the experience of the site or are you merely looking to co-op SOV?

It’s sounds like one of those typical “make better ads” rants but it’s not. There are opportunities for every brand to sponsor emerging technologies that are adding to the value of social interactions. Want to get involved with Twitter? 12seconds.tv has a unique way to add video to the microblogging experience. Looking for an in on Facebook? Why not build something that improves upon the terrible photo gallery features offered on the site. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit, you just have to wake up and pick it.

Does the Creative Dept of Your Agency Need to be Shaken Up?

Apr 30

Social media presents an interesting challenge to agency creative departments. In many ways, the rise of a largely consumer generated media entity is a potential pitfall for ad creatives. By definition, it seems that they are almost completely unnecessary in a consumer generated world yet they’re still part of it.

Fortunately for the creative class, brands have been elbowing their way into this space for a few years now and most of them aren’t willing to give up control of their brand to the masses. Instead, they’re always looking for new ways to “get their message out” at any cost through these channels and that falls squarely into the strength of the modern agency structure. “Help me push in an environment I’m not comfortable in!”

This has created an interesting distinction between paid media and earned media. In areas of the world like China, where BBS dominates, brands have been more reluctant to jump in because the channels provided few, if any, safeguards. Brands haven’t made as strong of a shift away from paid media in these markets because the opportunities in social media haven’t really matched up to many of their strengths as marketers. Why waste resources in earned media when you get a better return through traditional channels?

In the US and UK, things are different. The social media market for advertisers has largely adopted a version of the traditional advertising model. If you look at the glorified brochureware sites that support most packaged good brands, you’ll often find a social media element squeezed in amongst a heavily manicured Flash animation or a wrapper for video. Design a can, submit your picture with our product, make our next commercial, tell us what this means to you…rarely a compelling interaction and usually a behavior that needs to be significantly incentivized to be successful.

Why is this?

The reason is largely due to the pedigree of the creative class. With few exceptions, most creative professionals come from a background in visual design or film. It’s no wonder that agencies have embraced the concept of the “viral video” when it is primarily a version of the 60-second spot with less constraints.

There is a problem though. Social media isn’t about video or visual design.

Yes, video and visual design play an important role in some aspects of social media but it is, by no means, a requirement. When you look at actual creativity within the social space, it’s not something that’s clearly driven by titles like designer, copywriter or producer. It’s a new kind of creativity that involves almost a mix of UX and sociology. How do people want to engage with this brand in a social context and what is the most compelling way to facilitate that engagement? Hint: it rarely requires a Flash microsite or shooting a video.

What is required is shaking up the creative structure of most agencies. You’re starting to see plenty of social media strategists at big interactive firms but how many social media creatives do you see? How many creative directors are really experts on social media and don’t come from design backgrounds? How many even understand basic principles and ethics of word-of-mouth marketing, which is the closest discipline to social media?

As always, I love to be corrected so if you know of any social media specialists that sit within the creative department of a major agency please let me know and I will post an update. If you’re in a creative director role and think you’re doing just fine, I’d be equally interested to hear from you.

Bud Light: The Difference is Friendability

Apr 02

Brands have struggled with how to integrate with emerging media channels for a long long time now. Social networks are no longer “new” to most people under 40-years-old. Brands have been creating MySpace pages and online communities for almost a decade. Unfortunately for many companies, not all brands are the kinds of brands that people want to interact with on those platforms.

Some brands, like perhaps an online shoe store, fall into this category. Do I really want to be “friends” with the company that ships me shoes? This is the challenge that Zappos must’ve felt. However, Zappos is a company that has a pretty clear idea of who their customers are and how they might want to interact with their brand. If you look at how they use a channel like Twitter, you can see a somewhat organic conversation taking place between Zappos employees (including the CEO) and a select group of stakeholders. If you’re really interested in how the company operates, they even offer a variety of behind-the-scenes content on their Facebook page. It’s not for everyone but it’s a way to build a deeper connection with a select group of stakeholders who have a pretty high probability of becoming advocates for your brand.

That’s fine for a company that ships shoes but what if you’re a beer brand? Your brand is synonymous with fun and socializing. There are few brands that would seem so uniquely suited for seamless social media integration than an alcohol brand that is so closely associated with the very behavior that these platforms are trying to extend.

Then why do brands like Bud Light fail so clumsily in this regard?

As I was traveling and concerned that my favorite hockey team might be falling out of playoff contention, I checked ESPN, only to find a prominent and expensive banner ad from Bud Light asking me to become their friend on Facebook. Being somewhat nuetral to Bud Light as a brand but fascinated by what a company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising would do with a platform like Facebook, I clicked through and prepared to become a “fan” of the brand.

Unfortunately, once you click through, you’re greeted with BL Central. At BL Central you either send a beer (or a basketball[?]) to a friend, which is quite possibly one of the most innane and low level social interactions enabled by Facebook, or you can watch a series of commercials, which you may have already seen a few dozen times depending on whether or not you own a TV. What else does one of the largest media buyers in American advertising invest in? How about some desktop backgrounds and a PDF of the March Madness basketball tournament that hasn’t been updated since the tournament started?

So why does Budweiser have such weak profile of their customers compared to a company like Zappos, who has a much smaller and difficult customer base to reach? Why can’t a relatively bottomless media budget and the help of some of the most skilled agencies in the country do anything to convert someone like myself into a brand advocate?

The difference is the brand culture. Bud has bought their way into our culture through paid media in an era when brands had limited options to reach consumers in a meangingful way. Yes, “friending” Bub Light will result in a certain amount of advocacy when your social network sees your association with the brand but it’s unlikely anyone will see your desktop background and, if they do, the reflection isn’t wholly positive on the brand.

It’s worth noting that this hasn’t hurt Bud Light. The company sells a lot of beer and shows no signs of fading. Similarly, their activity in social media is hardly a huge part of their marketing expenditures.

The failure is in the missed opportunity. How could Bud Light fund a social utility that would promote their brand image for the same amount they spend on disposable media? How could Bud Light’s numerous sponsorships – real brand experiences for many people – leverage social media to enhance the events and places that now only act as logo holders for the brand? How could Bud Light come to life online like it does in a bar or any of the settings it exists organically? If Zappos can invite you to their water cooler what’s stopping Bud Light from clinking glasses with you?

The answer is that they can and probably will but, for now, companies that were born into this environment will excell at building their brands in this tiny corner of the media universe while the brands that are positioned to benefit the most will continue to stumble around looking for ways to replicate the simplicity of how they originally carved out their niche in our culture.

SXSW: Facebook Connect + iPhone = Love

Mar 14

Just saw what might turn out to be the biggest announcement of SXSW. Facebook just announced the latest development in their Facebook Connect platform, which enables iPhone applications to be social. Put simply, you can now play games like iBowl against friends based on who is online (in realtime!). You can also use it with applications like Urban Spoon to see what restaurants your friends are reviewing and whatnot. The possibilities are essentially endless.

Of course, this all begs the question “what is Facebook gaining from being a portable social network profile company?” Sure, in the short term, it may drive more traffic to their site but what happens when people only log into Facebook to change their profiles because they get all the social utility they need from the micro networked FB Connect sites?

Still, very interesting announcement. It definitely gets you thinking about the possibilities.

SXSW: Interactive Beyond the Screen

Mar 14

sxsw-2009 Jamie Monberg just finished a panel on taking interactive beyond the screen and into real interactions with stakeholders. One great example used was McDonalds, a company that spends millions in marketing but has done very little to improve the drive-in experience. Another example used on the power of interactive design was how Apple overcame Xerox through interface design and understanding that their success depended on personal interactions (although I’m ot sure if Apple is a great example due to their limited communications strategy).

What I Talk About When I Talk About What I’m Talking About at SXSW

Mar 13

So I’m off to SXSW today so I thought it may make sense to talk a little about what I’m going to be talking about (actually, I hope my panel does the majority of the talking).

The title of my session on Tuesday is “Digital Tsunami: Breaking News at Breckneck Speeds” and you can find more information about it here if you want to attend (there’s even a Sched* for it). You can even follow along/heckle me and the panel using #bneck on Twitter.

In a nutshell, my panel is about how the rise of social media and the increase in the overall speed of the newscycle affects brands, the media and us as a culture. Is it an opportunity or a liability for brands to communicate with their stakeholders? Has it improved or eroded journalism? Is our culture better positioned to use it as a utility or does it only serve to drives us further apart from each other?

Luckily, I have a great panel to help me tackle the issue from a few different angles. First off, I have Scott Monty from Ford to talk about the implications for a multi-billion dollar brand. Next, I have Andy Carvin from NPR to discuss how the media is adapting. Last but not least, Alex de Carvalho from StartPR to talk about some of the larger cultural and humanitarian issues at play.

So that’s the basic gist. I will post some observations from the many other sessions I will be attending and then do a follow-up on the panel when it’s done. See you all in Austin!