Web 2.0 is an industry buzzword. It is not just all hype however. I think that when it comes down to it, the term web 2.0 really does have meaning and your actions on the internet are apart of it. O’Reilly breaks it down best. They have a great breakdown of comparisons for 1.0 vs 2.0 – and anyone who has used these services and has a technical background will have an appreciation for the comparison. These simple services have transformed, to make it possible to target markets and segments very easily. It puts so much more information at the consumers fingertips, but also allows you to really get into their faces if you can harness the power of the new internet that is among us. Web 2.0 may not be defined in any dictionary, or be a real term at all. The bottom line is whatever you want to call it, the internet has evolved into a place where you can strategically market yourself, a service, or product and drop it on the lap of the consumer. Going about it the right way is the challenge, and keeping up with it may be even tougher. This is going to be the basis of a series of articles I post in order to educate people on how to use different services and applications to promote yourself or your business and products. How you act on the suggestions is up to you but these guidelines will at least help point you in the right direction and clear up some of the common questions and ideas. (source: SynergyShop)
Welcome Message
Google had made a preparation to grab Internet Display Advertising from Yahoo, a lucrative market that had long been enjoyed and dominated by Yahoo!. Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said repeatedly that display advertising offers one of the company’s best prospects for expansion, now that growth in its text ad business has slowed significantly. The new advertising exchange is a cornerstone of Google’s display strategy, and one of the main reasons Google bought the ad company DoubleClick last year for $3.1 billion.
Google executives say the new system, called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, will greatly simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, allowing many more publishers and advertisers to benefit from it.
Currently Google finds itself in the unfamiliar role of underdog. As one of the Web’s biggest publishers, and a seller of ads on a network of top sites like eBay and hundreds of newspapers, Yahoo is the king of the display advertising business. In 2007 Yahoo bought Right Media, a pioneering ad exchange whose business has grown steadily since, in part because many of the ads that run on Yahoo are brokered through it.
Still, analysts say Google’s push into the business could shake up the market. DoubleClick has had an ad exchange for some time. But the new system will automatically allow hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers who now use Google’s AdWords and AdSense systems to run their ads and ad space through the exchange.
“Marketers are going to be able to effectively reach 100 percent of the Internet audience and do so at a high frequency,” said William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. “That is very difficult to do on the Internet right now, outside of a handful of major Web sites like Yahoo and a few others.”
Ad exchanges have been hailed as the future of the industry for some time, yet Mr. Morrison said that they only account for between 10 and 15 percent of the display advertising business. He said it was unlikely that the DoubleClick exchange would catch up with Yahoo’s exchange within the next year. But the Google exchange could become dominant over the long term, especially among premium brand marketers and publishers, he added. (source: NYT)
Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was holding to find a catchy jingle for the product. Today, they have announced the winner
Sure, the song will get stuck in your head, but so does the sound of seals barking, or cows dying, if you listen to them for long enough.
But as bad as the jingle is, the video is much, much worse. It’s some guy in pajama pants doing really bad interpretive dance nonsense with awful effects and a Bing backdrop. The entire time I’m watching this, I’m thinking: So this is what hell looks/sounds like.
I cannot believe the guy won $500 for this. And I also cannot believe our interns didn’t enter.
Bing, as a product, is pretty solid. This jingle, is not. Hopefully whoever voted on it was just messing around with Microsoft.
“Enjoy” it below.
The success of online participatory media—video-sharing sites and corporate wikis alike—depends on the quality contributions of a small core of enthusiasts.
Jacques R. Bughin
Technologies that foster online collaboration and participation—for example, blogs that solicit customer feedback and wikis that allow employees to work together on documents—are gaining traction throughout the corporate world.1 Few companies, however, have a clear understanding of what inspires users to contribute to such sites. Executives might start by looking to the world of online video sharing, another fast-growing test bed for participation. McKinsey research conducted in Germany finds that motives such as a desire for fame and a feeling of identification with a community encourage collaboration and participation. Such findings, we believe, offer insights into the way companies might tailor their Web 2.0 offerings.
To learn more about what motivates people to participate in collaborative technologies, we surveyed 573 users of four leading online video-sharing sites in Germany and then examined the blogs of one of the sites.2 We observed that users cite a variety of reasons for posting content online—chief among them, a hunger for fame, the urge to have fun, and a desire to share experiences with friends (Exhibit 1). While some users were open to the idea of being compensated for their contributions, that wasn’t a primary driver: the people we studied weren’t paid for their contributions.3
We also found that a few users posted the most popular content. Depending on the site, just 3 to 6 percent of the membership added 75 percent of the videos available for download, and videos from just 2 percent of the member base accounted for more than half of all videos viewed. (As the “long-tail” effect would suggest, half of the videos posted accounted for only 10 percent of all downloads.) These figures resemble those reported in studies of other kinds of participatory media, including wikis, bulletin boards, and photo-sharing sites, where 5 to 10 percent of the users contribute half to all of the content (Exhibit 2).Visitors under 25 years of age made up the bulk of the video-viewing audience we measured, but members in the 25- to 44-year-old age group contributed equally to postings—suggesting that working-age people would be open to participation in enterprise settings. A sense of sharing drives these older users, who tend to forward videos to friends even more frequently than do their younger peers. The presence of tools (such as most-viewed lists or forwarding features) that make it easy for users to see what’s popular or to send favorite videos to friends corresponded, by as much as 30 percent, with more downloads for popular videos.
These findings, consistent with our experience of participatory media in business settings, suggest that executives pursuing such projects should start by identifying and nurturing the small percentage of users who post quality content. At one cable company we studied, for example, more than half of the installers who contributed to an internal wiki said that social factors such as reputation building, team spirit, and community identification were the main factors motivating them to contribute. Only 20 percent cited the possibility of a financial bonus as their main driver.
To encourage well-connected employees to post ideas to the wiki, managers at the company examined its internal e-mail system to identify key staffers with wide social networks within it. They then encouraged these employees to post suggestions about improving the company’s processes. Identifying thought leaders and promoting their participation boosted the number of contributions and improved the quality of the postings. Other companies strive to make collaboration fun: at Google, for instance, employees place online bets on the likelihood that particular ideas will be adopted. Intuit uses a rotation program that invites selected staffers to contribute to the company’s internal online dialogues. Managers should also consider taking a page from video sites by tapping the power of tools that let users share relevant content easily. Likewise, companies should make sure that their employees can access collaborative tools with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle.
Companies will have to look beyond video-sharing sites for approaches to maximize the quality of the content. Those sites are concerned primarily with popularity, whereas corporate wikis and content sites (such as Wikipedia) gain momentum when new visitors discover and contribute high-quality content, which in turn makes the sites worthwhile for yet more newcomers. To improve the quality of internal wikis, then, companies might look to the quality assurance practices of open-source coding projects, which rely on appointed and self-appointed guardians to police quality issues. Companies should also create transparent and enforceable guidelines to prohibit unethical or illegal behavior, such as the posting of copyrighted material or proprietary secrets. They can learn from the examples of YouTube (which attempts to review content for obscenity before posting) or Wikipedia (which has committees that review entries for quality) and adopt similar review procedures for their corporate content.
Companies should prepare now for the day when Web 2.0 morphs into Web 3.0.
JULY 2009 • Donna L. Hoffman
It’s hardly news that the Internet has evolved into the primary vehicle for communication, information, and commerce. But in a surprising twist, today’s online customers—as both producers and consumers of their own content and services—ferociously guard their online experiences. This trend, which goes far beyond Web buzz, is catching some executives by surprise and making others more than a bit worried.
What does this development mean for your company? In effect, that its marketers are being replaced. As markets morph into Web 2.0 “conversations” and consumers gain much greater freedom to pursue their own interests, customers are doing things that online marketing managers don’t necessarily want—or expect—them to do. For example, they can easily connect with one another, often using multimedia sites such as YouTube and Flickr, so they themselves can satisfy their need for information about products. What’s more, consumers may trust information obtained in this way much more than they do information from your company. What will happen when these consumer experiences are much more interesting than anything your marketers have put up on the Web?
Executives can use a model we at the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing have developed called LEAD (listen, experiment, apply, develop) to create a road map that will help companies thrive in the online world’s environment of constant change.
Listen. Your organization should have a formal process to monitor and analyze what its customers are saying about it online and then use this information as an early-warning system. Even casual observation of these online conversations is better than nothing. Indeed, customers are probably already talking about you on sites such as Facebook or Kaboodle, whether or not you’ve set up pages there. They are also using microblogging platforms such as Twitter to broadcast their latest feelings about using your products and services. Some companies (such as Nielsen Online, with its BuzzMetrics services) specialize in analyzing this online chatter, though in-house efforts also can be very effective.
But simply entering the game is only a start. Companies should always assume that the digital environment will change rapidly—so they must adapt accordingly. Rather than pushing messages at consumers, marketers should listen to them and think constantly about ways to engage with them actively. A social Web presence that is tone-deaf to a customer’s needs augers rough times ahead: after one consumer products company, late last year, aired a Web video that some customers perceived as insensitive, many were so outraged that they pressed for a boycott of the brand. Worse still, its besieged managers didn’t bother to listen to the reaction after releasing the video—behavior that further incensed consumers. Social-media experts unanimously turned thumbs down on the company’s lackadaisical response, which led to widely publicized compilations of the tweets, blog posts, and YouTube video reactions; to mainstream media coverage of the debacle; and, finally, to what some considered an inadequate apology from the company. What’s particularly relevant is that most of these events unfolded over the course of a single weekend day.
Experiment. Don’t just monitor social media—engage your newly empowered customers by using the novel tools of Web 2.0 and beyond. Start with simple pilots: for example, create a company profile on social-networking sites, such as Ning, or sponsor a promotion on the innovative social-shopping site Polyvore. Make friends with bloggers and tweet your customers on Twitter. Kimberly-Clark, for instance, used its Huggies “Baby Countdown” widget to engage its customers on their computer desktops. Smirnoff used the viral-video marketing vehicle Tea Partay to promote its Raw Tea product. The campaign was a hit on YouTube.
While return-on-investment metrics for social media are still in the early stages, these experiments clearly pay off big time in greater customer awareness and brand engagement. Unless you have Web 2.0 experts on your team, stick with small experiments, since big ones can fail badly. For example, create a company-controlled community, perhaps through a blog, that gives your customers a place to offer feedback about your products and services—a basic move many companies still ignore. Also, take the first steps toward cocreation: engage your customers through collaborative efforts that conceive new offerings and ad campaigns, as Frito Lay did with its innovative customer-created ads campaigns “Crash the Super Bowl,” “Fight for the Flavor,” and “The Quest.” Remember, though, that there really aren’t any best practices or established business models yet. For now, companies just need to get some experience—and quickly.
Apply. Take the experiments and apply them. To make it easier to reach out to customers, optimize your Web site so that it connects fluidly with online communities and social-media sites. Make it simple for consumers to link to you and tag your content, and find ways to make your site more relevant in social-networking searches. If you have nothing worth linking to or tagging, or if your content isn’t relevant to consumers at all, you’re in trouble. Measuring impact is paramount, so you’ll need to use the Web’s predictive tools and quantitative analysis to track the results of your experiments. As you gain experience, you can apply what you learn on a larger scale.
Develop. The Internet is a social medium and should therefore be a crucial part of any company’s marketing mix. But it is critical to develop integrated marketing programs that use the Web as more than just another advertising channel. Companies must therefore rapidly flee from the mass-media broadcast mentality: for example, rather than simply buying ads on MySpace, they should make interactive Web 2.0 elements part of their marketing programs.
Consider the way GlaxoSmithKline handled the growing consumer confusion and concern surrounding the side effects of its mass-market over-the-counter weight-loss drug Alli. The company confronted the problem directly by setting up the My Alli community site, which includes active forums, videos, FAQs, a membership plan to aid weight loss, interactive diet tools, information on diet and support groups, cobranding, links to partners (eDiets for home meals, links to Alli retailers), and a sweepstakes tie-in to TV and print advertising campaigns. This approach allows the company to address consumers in a direct, nonthreatening way and to use basic Web 2.0 features that wrap these messages in a warm and supportive experience. When consumers search the Web for information about Alli, they see GlaxoSmithKline’s myalli.com within the first three organic search results, the better to counteract paid ads that are either scary (“diet-pill warnings”) or questionable (supposedly unbiased diet pill reviews on Britneys-blog.com), as well as links that emphasize the “icky” side effects. When consumers click through to myalli.com, they find a comprehensive site with straightforward, detailed product information, which helps the company mitigate the effects of information it can’t control. This site is a terrific example of how to integrate social media into a marketing campaign in an effective way
How consumer goods CMOs are coping with complexity
We recently surveyed chief marketing officers and their key subordinates at 20 leading North American consumer goods makers whose collective sales represent roughly 50 percent of the US packaged food, personal and household care, nonalcoholic beverages, spirits, and tobacco categories. Among other topics, we asked them about their approaches to managing the changing media environment, brands and brand portfolios, and the relationship between corporate- and division-level marketers.1
Most of the survey respondents say they are experimenting with new media such as Internet banner ads and paid search, product placements in video games, and cell phones. Further, a significant number of marketers say that their spending on nontraditional media has increased significantly over the past three years. Nonetheless, television is still the most widely used vehicle. Although marketers agree that the world is changing, many continue with the tried-and-true approaches because the available alternatives lack the scale to achieve marketers’ brand priorities fully, and because the absence of a widely accepted independent measure of digital media (such as Nielsen Media Ratings in traditional media) makes it challenging to measure spending effectiveness. These factors may explain why more than one-third of all respondents devote less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to nontraditional media, and fully half of them spend only 10 to 20 percent (Exhibit 1).
In an environment where marketers are experimenting with new techniques, effectively delineating roles and responsibilities between the corporate- and division-level marketing functions is critical. We compared the organizational experiences of respondents in companies that have high-performing brand portfolios with the experiences of respondents in the other companies. (We defined high performers as divisions—units that have their own marketing initiatives and are held accountable for results—with portfolio sales growth of at least 1 percent in excess of category sales growth from 2002–05.)
We found that in companies whose brand portfolios perform strongly, corporate marketing tends to serve primarily as a center of excellence that disseminates information and best practices to line marketers. The other companies’ corporate-marketing organizations report spending more time providing marketing services (for instance, managing relationships with advertising agencies), as well as getting heavily involved with global brand and innovation management. In our experience, these tasks can sometimes be profitably performed closer to the front line (Exhibit 2).
About the Author
David Court is a director in McKinsey’s Dallas office
How consumer goods CMOs are coping with complexity
We recently surveyed chief marketing officers and their key subordinates at 20 leading North American consumer goods makers whose collective sales represent roughly 50 percent of the US packaged food, personal and household care, nonalcoholic beverages, spirits, and tobacco categories. Among other topics, we asked them about their approaches to managing the changing media environment, brands and brand portfolios, and the relationship between corporate- and division-level marketers.
Most of the survey respondents say they are experimenting with new media such as Internet banner ads and paid search, product placements in video games, and cell phones. Further, a significant number of marketers say that their spending on nontraditional media has increased significantly over the past three years. Nonetheless, television is still the most widely used vehicle. Although marketers agree that the world is changing, many continue with the tried-and-true approaches because the available alternatives lack the scale to achieve marketers’ brand priorities fully, and because the absence of a widely accepted independent measure of digital media (such as Nielsen Media Ratings in traditional media) makes it challenging to measure spending effectiveness. These factors may explain why more than one-third of all respondents devote less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to nontraditional media, and fully half of them spend only 10 to 20 percent (Exhibit 1).
We found that in companies whose brand portfolios perform strongly, corporate marketing tends to serve primarily as a center of excellence that disseminates information and best practices to line marketers. The other companies’ corporate-marketing organizations report spending more time providing marketing services (for instance, managing relationships with advertising agencies), as well as getting heavily involved with global brand and innovation management. In our experience, these tasks can sometimes be profitably performed closer to the front line (Exhibit 2).
Blair Crawford is a director and Susan Mulder is a principal in McKinsey’s Boston office, and Jonathan Gordon is a principal in the New York office.
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