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The debates about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) appear to be continuing unabated. Integrated Marketing Communications, if you haven’t run in to this phrase before, is a set of strategies that remove the traditional boundaries between public relations, marketing, advertising and other corporate messaging, in both the online and offline spaces, to create an environment where all efforts are coordinated in a synchronized way.

These debates repeatedly raise a few questions. Is IMC a winning strategy? Is it the future? Is it the right thing to do? Can it be implemented in an old-school organization? … and others.

Recently I’ve been attending #IMCChat,  a great weekly Twitter Group Chat hosted by Beth Harte (@BethHarte on Twitter) and Anna Barcelos (@abarcelos on Twitter), and after these sessions and a number of side discussions decided that it’s time for me to weigh in.

Many of the arguments for and against separation of advertising, marketing, product management, branding and public relations are internally focused. Questions abound as to the merits of having silos, or silos with communication, or no silos at all, with discussion focused on whether these approaches work for the organization.

Inward-Facing Analysis is Fundamentally Flawed

I believe that any inward-based analysis is fundamentally flawed, that the battle was already fought in public on the social web, and has essentially nothing to do with the “view from inside the castle.”

Why do I feel comfortable making such a bald proclamation? The answer lies in the social media era itself, which I think of as starting around the time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published ten years ago and recently revised. The words of each of the 95 theses seem to be just as powerful today as they were ten years ago, and perhaps even more so.

Three Reasons IMC has Already Won Read more…

It is getting harder and harder, as a parent, to even pretend that I have visibility into the Internet use of my children. Back in “the good old days of the Internet”, computers were computers. Only things that were obviously computers could browse the Internet. Parents got comfortable with guidance such as “make sure that the only way to get on the Internet is in a common space in the house.” This popular strategy was designed to discourage children from visiting places on the ‘net that were inappropriate, since at any point someone (a parent type in particular) could wander in and see what is happening. Today’s personal communications tools obliterate the utility of that advice, making the computer protection approach ineffective. Pervasive txt messaging and smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry and now Android OS based mobile communicators radically change the landscape for kids and parents. Read more…

We thought we knew the world of public presentations. We developed material, practiced the craft and delivered an experience to our audiences. Our craft was to entertain, to inform, to provide an experience. The audience’s role was to sit, absorb the experience, be quiet, and wait until some lucky few have had their chance to stand and ask a question or make a comment.

Then things started to change rapidly. Technology-enabled societal shifts started moving the ground under our feet.

The Rise of the Networked Audience

Through global communication technologies, people of all types now have access to each other and access to information at any point in time or space. They’ve gotten used to the idea that they can and should be able to discuss, rate, rank, prioritize, link and create conversations in text with anyone, at any time. They comment on and rate everything—movies, web sites, blog posts, music, videos, books, vendors, manufacturers… and you… and me. Social media everywhere has made this hyper-connectedness a part of everyday life.

They expect to do these things with the premise that everybody gains. That it’s their right. That sharing information and opinions is a duty, a core ethos of society. It gives us all the ability to help mold the world by collectively indicating what we think is good, and what isn’t so good. It’s a way to help other people make choices. It’s a new way of looking at the world. It is a new sort of collaboration.

This kind of communication can be terrifying because everybody in the room and around the globe can now Read more…

“How Will Google’s Personalization, Real-Time and Visual Search Announcements Change the World?”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 8th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

How Will Google’s Personalization, Real-Time and Visual Search Announcements Change the World?

When I saw this cluster of announcements in the last 48 hours, I decided to write a brief thought piece about them. The three new announcements, search results that will be personalized even when you are not logged in, real-time search results and visual search, it seemed to me that these create a new ecosystem for thinking about search, potentially new search optimization automation options (read new companies or services) and potentially some changes to the way we think about advertising, marketing, person to person communication, and even how we think about ourselves.

How will these new features change the world? Will they change the way we socialize, the way we think about each other and the way we interact with each other? Where do we think these features are headed? They are early releases of capabilities – what would we guess are the next steps along each path?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The Way Things Were Yesterday

In the land we’ve known, you could do static search engine optimization (SEO) of on-page elements on your web site or blog, consider strategy for offsite, tinker with it for a while, check the results, and have some confidence that the results you just saw reflected what your potential searchers would see 10 minutes later. Although people with personalization turned on may see different results, the issue of search consistency across users seems to not have been a strong focus for search engine optimization strategies to date.

This Is Today

The world of yesterday is about to vaporize, due to the confluence of three Google announcements.

Personalized Search Without Login

First, the announcement that Google will present personalized search results even if you are not logged in to a Google account. This means that if you do not stay logged in to Google, your laptop search results will likely not match your desktop at work, and will likely not match your home computer, because their search history will all be different.

Now extend this to other people on the web. Their search history will likewise be different, and their work Google login may not match their personal login, if they log in at all.

All of a sudden the simplistic “one set of search results per search query” assumption is completely gone, even for users who are not logged in to a Google account.

Real-Time Search Results

Delivery of real-time search results changes the game in obvious and subtle ways. Real-time search results provision leads us even farther down the path of creating, and needing to create, time-sensitive SEO strategies.

Real-time search results for all leads to the possibility of “Just In Time SEO” (to use a phrase from the manufacturing industry). Just In Time SEO changes content in real-time in order to reposition search results dynamically, potentially just before some event or strategic initiative where you would want highly placed results.

Another side effect of real-time search results might be a drive the creation of more real-time search engine optimization monitoring services.

Will we see disruptive corporate marketing strategies that at the surface are similar to denial of service attacks? Perhaps a competitor would create a content strategy that would “lie in wait” for the hour before a major event and the dynamically disrupt the SEO positioning of your firm just in time to intercept your positioning for the event, and then disappear from view after the fact? How many other ways could dynamic repositioning be used, for good and worse?

Visual Search

Google also announced visual search, in particular on the Android phones, with the idea that you can take a picture of something, Google will analyze it and deliver search results. The “something” might be a store front, or text from a book, or other objects around you. While it is clear that this technology is at the very start of its development cycle, the implications are immense.

Do you now have to generate an SEO strategy for pages in books, or screen captures, or for your brick and mortar stores? Do you have to watch out for signage in your stores, or perhaps parts of your web site, that if captured by a camera might lead to search results pointing to your competitor’s products and services? Will we see print advertising with custom graphics designed to link to specific search results?

The area of visual search raises the concept of “Visual Search Engine Optimization”, leading us to choose graphics and video with an eye (pun only sort of not intended) to whether these images help or hinder visual search optimization.

The potential privacy and policy issues generated by extensions of this technology are extensive, not to mention some potentially wild changes to societal expectations. For instance, what if by pointing a cell camera at a person, and not even taking their picture, you could have their latest blog posts, public profile, Tweets, comments by others about them, all show up on your mobile – without even knowing their name a-priori? This would not be possible with the first release. However it is not a long stretch to mash up the current face-tagging technology with this sort of search to enable such a feature.

This will be interesting.

Introduction

I have been thinking about some of the current approaches to measurement of social network strength, and realized that there were a few specific things that seemed to be missing in these approaches. In this post I review why the complexity of social network behavior far exceeds a single simple metric, and propose a multi-dimensional model to describe social network strength and utility towards a selected objective.

Follower Count: The Simple Metric That Isn’t

Follower counts are generally mistrusted for validity, but still used due to simplicity. Follower counts are, in some ways, a somewhat bizarre way to measure social network strength. General follower count is a “feel good number” that in the end means little in terms of viability of achieving a particular goal.

I keep a few examples in hand to debunk the concept that high follower counts automatically create generic utility. Here is one of my favorites. Sockington (http://twitter.com/sockington) is a Twitter account owned by Jason Scott’s cat (well… take a look and you’ll see what I mean). At the time of this writing, @Sockington is closing in on 1.5M (yes million) followers. If you want to send a message to 1.5M people to entice them to, for instance, buy life insurance, would the reach of Sockington’s network be substantial? Maybe in terms of the old school “impression count,” but that’s probably about all. In the process, if you were persistent about it, you’d also see a pretty high abandonment rate, and I suspect that most people who follow Sockington would ignore such a push message as advertising spam. Certainly if the account and Sockington’s network were used more than a very few times in pursuit of this objective, it would likely fragment and be disrupted as a result. Such a message is not why they follow Sockington, and any other sort of message is both out of character and not their impression of why they follow him. (I’ll resist getting in to the psychology and implications of 1.5M people following a fake cat’s Tweets for now!)

Clearly the raw count of followers isn’t what we’re after. Some have proposed measures of engagement, using reply counts and conversation rates on Twitter, or comment posting rates on blogs.

Simple Event Count-Based Aggregate Network Strength Also Misses The Target

Unfortunately, measurement of social network strength also defies a single numeric count of followers or responders or even conversational length. Various client and personal experiences have led me to develop a concept I’ll call a Follower Interest Graph. A Follower Interest Graph is a multi-dimensional graph of a social network that maps several factors that define the strength of the network for a particular utility and goal. Before talking about what a Follower Interest Graph might look like, let’s look at some assumptions and realities of social network behavior. Read more…

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has released a PDF document “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” that describes changes to the rules of disclosure for advertising endorsements and testimonials. These guides update existing rules regarding advertising disclosure to incorporate social media and go into effect tomorrow, Dec 1, 2009. I hope that a brief overview of the Guides will be a useful reference.

Disclosures

I do not work for the Federal Trade Commission, have no connection to the organization to disclose, and since this article is not an endorsement in the first place, I guess I didn’t even need to say that, but… given the topic I figured it couldn’t hurt!

Actually, my important disclaimer is I wrote this post with my understanding of the rules, from reading source documents and walking through the “Guides” PDF document linked above. I am not a lawyer. Nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice. Nothing. At all. In the least. Did I remember to mention that I am not a lawyer?

I am hoping that an overview of the new disclosure rules will be helpful. Please feel free to comment on anything I’ve gotten wrong, right or anything else important that got missed!

Is Every Product or Service Description an Endorsement?

All descriptions of products and consumer experiences in “consumer-generated media” are not considered to be endorsements by the Commission. The Guides state that the rules apply to situations where, “viewed objectively, the relationship between the advertiser and the speaker is such that the speaker’s statement can be considered “sponsored” by the advertiser and thus an “advertising message.”

Why Self-Regulation Did Not Win

Some commenters suggested that the industry should be allowed to self-regulate. The Commission clearly disagreed with this position, stating Read more…

Final edit updated Nov 28, 2009 22:40

Random Connections

Some days I’ll be thinking about a topic, and suddenly an unexpected connection appears. That just happened as I was reading two posts, one about potential changes to PageRank and another about a new protocol that Google is pitching to speed up web page loads. The PageRank discussion seemed to be completely about the marketing impact of this change on search engine optimization strategies, while the protocol discussions were centered on technology and global standards issues. It seems that these two apparently separate things may be very tightly coupled indeed.

PageRank, Page Speed And Marketing Effects

PageRank is supposed to measure the authority of a page, to determine whether
it is “the best” trusted and primary resource to answer the user’s search query. It is hard to fathom how response speed has anything to do with authenticity, authority, correctness of data or trustworthiness. It seems to be much more strongly linked to the cash position of the person or organization who authored the page, and how much they have invested in having the right page design, hardware and network infrastructure (either their own or hosted) to provide fast response.

One quasi-altruistic reason for adding or emphasizing page load in the PageRank calculations may be to nudge the web community to think more about page load speed when designing sites. However Read more…

“Social Engineering Goes Massively Multiplayer – Are You The Next Target?”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 1st, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Social Engineering Goes Massively Multiplayer – Are You The Next Target?

The explosion of social networks has enabled a new level of study in human behavior. Never before have large social networks been readily available easily for interactive engagement. Social media “gurus” proclaim that they know how to generate results with social networks, yet we are really at the beginning of understanding both how networked societies work and how to harness them (or change them) to achieve results.

A week or so ago I noticed this post Social Wargaming – Triangles 2.0, announcing the start of a social network enabled serious game to determine whether “quantitative methods and social network analysis allow us to consciously and precisely craft the shape of social systems online?”

The advent of quantitative research applied to the development and manipulation of social media and social networks may be the start of a new generation of ability for marketers to reach audiences, and a potential dark side, or statistically driven, highly effective social manipulation on a large scale. Public references to various academic work in process in this arena suggest Read more…