Fast-forward to today and the UFC is one of the fastest-growing sports organizations in the world; yet with staunch opposition from certain politicians, lack of licensing in all 50 states (after nearly 20 years of existence, mixed martial arts is still illegal in New York State) and common public misconceptions, the sport itself is still very niche. The majority of events air only on pay-per-view, and unlike in the case of major sports organizations, such as the NFL, NBA and UEFA, fans rarely have the opportunity to see an event live if they live outside Las Vegas.

Despite all those hurdles, the UFC has grown into a billion-dollar organization with a passionate worldwide fan base. (The UFC has hosted events outside the United States, in Canada, Japan, Brazil, England, Ireland, Germany, Australia and Sweden.) What exactly is fueling all that growth? The UFC’s downright mastery of content marketing. From its outspoken, shoot-from-the-hip president, Dana White, to a companion reality show, the company has wholly embraced content for the long haul.

Round 1

The sport, properly known as mixed martial arts, had tumultuous beginnings. While the first official event, in which 180-pound Brazilian Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ace Royce Gracie forced all his opponents into submission, was considered a success (there were more than 80,000 purchases of the $14.95 pay-per-view), the creators of the UFC never intended to establish a series of events, much less a sport. To have any kind of future, the UFC had to evolve the sport itself. It distanced its brand from what Senator John McCain called “human cockfighting” by introducing weight classes, time limits, four-ounce gloves (instead of bare fists) and stricter rules that would govern the sport.

By 2000, sanctioning had taken its toll and the Ultimate Fighting Championship was on the brink of bankruptcy. In January 2001, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, along with Dana White, purchased the UFC for $2 million. The Fertittas and White set out to turn the UFC around, namely by securing big-name sponsors and getting them sanctioned in Nevada, where the Fertittas were executives at Station Casinos. Within ten years, the UFC would be worth 100 times their investment.

As “Reality” As It Gets

As it turns out, the road to recovery was long. As recently as 2004, the UFC was still incurring losses ($34 million, to be exact). Only then did the UFC embrace content marketing in earnest. In 2005, the UFC fronted $10 million of the production costs to create a reality show on Spike TV titled The Ultimate Fighter, in which 16 fighters (eight divided between two weight classes) lived together in a house, trained together and competed against each other for a coveted six-figure contract to fight in the UFC. The popularity of reality TV and the rare look inside mixed martial arts proved a formula for success, even being credited by White as having saved the UFC. The show now is in its 15th season—also its first “live” season, meaning that fights are shown in real time, every Friday night. It also produced a web-only season in Brazil with notable Brazilian coaches and Ultimate Fighting Championship veterans Vitor Belfort and Wanderlei Silva. The reality franchise has since moved to the FX channel as part of the UFC’s recent deal with Fox.

Giving audiences a look behind the scenes is what has made social media and content marketing so successful for brands, particularly sports brands. The Ultimate Fighter allowed passionate mixed-martial-arts fans to get to know the fighters on a deeper level (for better or worse). The UFC has embraced its fans’ desire for “all access” while building excitement about upcoming events by creating a series of video blogs featuring Dana White. The series has produced more than 75 videos, creating nearly 24 hours of free content for little cost (the videos are made with a consumer-based camera with limited editing). All the videos are featured on the UFC’s branded channel, which has been viewed more than 323 million times and boasts more than 373,000 subscribers.

Language in the video below is NSFW.

Long Form Content

Each fight in the octagon features two fighters – two men or women with their own stories, own families, and own reasons for fans to root for them. Leading up to each major card, the UFC produces a show titled UFC Primetime which documents the two main-event fighters during their training camp and creates a three-episode series that creates a deeper understanding of who the fighters really are. This type of long-form content has been extremely successful for the UFC, essentially creating a 90-minute advertisement (available on the FX channel and on the UFC’s YouTube channel) for the fight. When a fan has invested that much time getting to know the fighters, it’s hard to not know how the story ends. If they don’t buy the pay-per-view, it’s like turning off the movie right at the climax.

Leading the Twitter Scorecards

Social media has been a game changer for sports, of course, but many organizations are still leery of their players’ using the platforms. Meanwhile, White has created an incentive-based social-media program that, every quarter, monetarily rewards fighters who made the most of social media. The award categories so far are Most Followers, Highest Percentage of Growth in Followers and Most Creative.

The UFC’s own Twitter account boasts 613,000 followers, but that’s nothing compared with White’s 2,000,000-plus. White is extremely active on Twitter and is known for spending time responding individually to fans and foes alike (tweet him this article!). One video blog featured White tweeting a special cell phone number that followers could call to give their predictions for the fights that night. When White talks about the importance of creating a dialogue through social media, he means it. His approach is unique, controversial, endearing, memorable and strictly for the fans.

Fights on Facebook

The UFC is making all the right moves on Facebook. Besides regularly publishing videos, pictures, articles and more to 8 million–plus fans, the UFC is determined to squeeze every bit of functionality out of Facebook. It has made social-media history by streaming preliminary fights (those not shown on the live card, even on pay-per-view) free (though at a steep cost to the UFC), directly on its Facebook page, in full high definition. The approach has secured hundreds of thousands of additional likes and created an entire other marketing avenue for its matches.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship has embraced content marketing wholeheartedly, enabling fans worldwide to embrace a brand through a constant stream of content and social-media access. As the UFC continues to grow as a media empire, the sport in general will follow suit. It’s only by granting this sort of in-depth access to content and people that the UFC has been able to nip at the heels of larger sports organizations. It’s also forcing boxing into near obscurity (can you name one professional boxer?).

Are you a fan of mixed martial arts and the UFC? What do you think of its content marketing and social-media efforts? What are other sports organizations doing to keep up?

Since the advent of the Internet, blogs have provided the masses with a way to publish content. By the early 2000s, brands were catching on to the benefits of blogging, and those who embraced this new type of content marketing were seen as being ahead of the social-media curve.

Not only did blogs help businesses rank better for SEO, they also permitted customers and brands to have meaningful dialogue. In early 2006, noted tech gurus Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote about the power of blogs to “humanize communication, bringing companies and their constituencies together in a way that improves both image and bottom line” in their book Naked Conversations.

As Facebook was still available only to students at selected universities and Twitter was in development, blogs (fueled by comments) were the best way that brands could facilitate conversations with their customers, fans and prospects.

The social-media boom

Fast-forward to 2012 and the social-media landscape is fragmented—growing and evolving every day. Before your brand has time to set up a profile on the newest social-media site, another site emerges. Diverse audiences engage with each platform differently, and many of your brand’s audiences have audiences of their own. Blogs are still prominent today, but the approach to driving a conversation is very different.

Has conversation left blogging?

Given the presence of so many social outposts on which to engage with a brand’s audience, the idea of hosting a valuable conversation in a blog’s comment section seems antiquated. Matt Gemmell has argued against having comments at all, namely because they don’t contribute much valuable information, are used by only a tiny minority, and enable anonymity, which  can lead down some dark paths. Seth Godin, perhaps the most prominent marketing blogger, does not permit comments.

Are comments really conversation?

The argument is not about whether having a conversation with an audience is valuable. We know it is. But while blogs are still effective in regard to content marketing (you’re reading one now!), this doesn’t mean that in 2012 (and beyond) they’re still the best place to have a dialogue. Even though we have more-advanced commenting systems, like Facebook Connect and Disqus (which this blog uses), the conversations aren’t always fruitful. Some commenters comment and never return; others just want to agree with the author; others are there to promote their own content; and a few are there simply to spit venom. With so much noise, what’s a blog to do?

Don’t delete just yet

While there are numerous arguments for canning your comments right now, not everyone agrees. Matthew Ingram at Giga-Om believes that comments are still worth the effort, and even though Mitch Joel may be on the fence, he still allows and responds to comments every day. If you take a scroll down the page, you’ll notice that we still allow comments too. It’s not a mass exodus just yet, and reports of the death of blog comments (like those of the death of email marketing) may be an exaggeration.

It’s all one community

As a community manager, presumably in charge of all your brand’s outposts, you must understand the goals of each of the channels and design your content-marketing strategy according to those goals. An engaging and effective community requires two-way communication, but maybe your blog isn’t the best place for that. Maybe Facebook is the best place to create a conversation thread about your content. Many email-marketing services enable seamless integration between newsletters and Facebook, so a conversation that’s open to the community is started as soon as your email is sent.

Whether your blog is teeming with comments or completely barren, it’s important to understand in exactly which channels you can moderate the conversation most appropriately, fruitfully and effectively. It’s not a sin anymore to have your blog act as a one-way channel for your brand to use to post articles and resources as long as you’re listening and responding to the conversation wherever it is happening, whether a reader replies at you, writes their own blog response or even sends you an email.

My take

As community manager for Post-Advertising and author for a number of other blogs, I fear that comments are on their way out. I’m not ready to shut the function down, but the sadness I used to feel when a post I spent hours writing didn’t receive a single comment is far more subdued now. I share my articles on a number of channels, and some conversations happen there instead of here. When the article is shared by others, it’s a sign that at least the reader felt there was enough value in the article that their networks would benefit from reading it, and that’s a form of feedback. The landscape has changed so much that the notion of conversing with your audience is quite different, and blog comments aren’t as necessary. Don’t get me wrong; I still love getting a high-quality comment, even if it’s a dissenting opinion. But receiving comments has fallen off as a measure of success.

So let’s hear it in the comments (joke intended)! Are you commenting more or less on blogs than you used to? Are you receiving more or fewer comments on your own blog than you used to? Do you comment elsewhere?

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But since we’ve focused this blog on topics that educate our readers, we’ve spent less time sharing the great work we’ve found with all of you. Last September we decided to feature 10 brands that impressed us with their content marketing and brand storytelling efforts. But as we see more brands embracing post-advertising, we realized that we should start doing our list more often.

So without further ado, here’s our Spring edition of Ten Brands Doing Post-Advertising Right. We’ve included the team member who nominated the idea and penned the description.

SMART Argentina

Jon Thomas

As audiences, we’re fine-tuned to tune out what we deem advertising. Brands have fought back by holding us hostage with pre-roll ads and DVR-busting hidden bits of show content between commercials. But to truly be remembered, brands have to create content that’s entertaining, useful and worth sharing. SMART Argentina used Twitter recently for what is being considered the first Twitter commercial. No, it didn’t buy a tweet from Kim Kardashian. SMART sent us back to our days of AOL chat rooms (A/S/L?) and used 140-character ASCII art to create an animated video (of sorts). Simply head to the @SMARTarg Twitter page and scroll down to watch the commercial unfold. Lesson learned: If you want audiences to share your content, create something nobody else has created.

Shwood

Karen Nagy

The story of Shwood’s handcrafted wooden eyewear collection began with innovation and creativity, and the brand pays homage to its brand story through its “Experiment With Nature” blog. By profiling the Shwood team plus other Portland, Oregon, experimental artists, craftspeople and musicians in Portland, Oregon, Shwood’s hometown, the blog honors the brand’s Pacific Northwest identity and creativity.

Shwood’s latest initiative, “This Is Oregon”, is an interactive photo project that showcases photographs, 360-degree panoramas and Google Maps of 10 stunning locations within a 90-minute drive from Portland. An Instagram contest encourages Oregonians to get out and explore their great state and tag photos with #thisisoregon for a chance to win Shwood sunglasses and other cool schwag.

Virgin Mobile

Katie Edmondson

Mobile-phone providers are often guilty of indistinguishable television ads that fail to resonate with young people, falling into “Wait, was that for AT&T or Sprint?” territory. But Virgin Mobile is doing things differently with a notable online property called Virgin Mobile Live. The blog claims to be “actively stalking your cultural obsessions” with live-streaming music, photo memes and “top” lists of fun and interesting content from around the web. This is a clear play for the elusive and cynical millennial audience, which seeks inspiration online but isn’t quick to trust brands. The design and content of the site are spot-on, as is Abby Braden, the site’s irreverent DJ host. Overall it’s a successful foray into the shark-infested hipster blogosphere.

Deschutes Brewery

Luke Dringoli

Deschutes, a small craft brewery based in Bend, Oregon, has been brewing up something different of late: a brilliant digital-branding approach that emphasizes the can-do carpe diem–ism of millennial drinkers and weaving a narrative perfectly aligned with their roots, spirit and products. Their slick site encapsulates the woodsy beauty of the brand’s home state while embodying the company’s bold brews in equally bold copy (“Not for the faint of hop”), typography and content. Speaking of content: direct your eyes below, to the brilliantly executed Landmarks (“A Deschutes Brewery Film”). The four-and-a-half-minute film documents a spur-of-the-moment road trip by a young couple to locations around Oregon that give Deschutes’s beers their names—like Mirror Pond Pale Ale, Green Lakes Organic Ale and Black Butte Porter.

Besides the usual social channels—Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, used well to offer fans near and far an intimate look behind the scenes at the brewery and on the road—the brand’s Bravely Done Blog provides a well-maintained study of “independence in art, music, beer, life.” Lastly, the craft brewery executes an impressive social-to-local events program. Dubbed “Base Camp for Beer Fanatics,” the effort aims to celebrate one of the company’s most popular brews with in-depth events for beer aficionados across the country. Meanwhile, Woody (an enormous wooden keg on wheels) makes the brand’s presence known at beer events all over. It’s all carefully documented on Deschutes’s social platforms.

Now, this is the kind of beer branding we here at Post-Ad will toast to: work that represents not only the spirit of the brand and what it stands for but where it’s from, who’s behind the scenes and what’s happening next—neatly, succinctly and with real passion and personality. In particular, the brand’s long-form Landmarks video should serve as a case study for how to humanize and localize products and put them into context in four and a half minutes.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

Katie Edmondson

Kraft Mac and Cheese may seem like just another CPG brand, but it is using social media in innovative ways with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Take Kraft’s “Old Birds, New Tweets” stunt, for which it recruited two eighty-somethings to take over its Twitter account for a few days. In doing so, Kraft entertained the masses (because old people are funny) and also positioned itself as an authority in social media (i.e., this is a fun change for us because we usually have super-savvy young people running our Twitter). When several thousand Facebook fans liked one of its posts, Kraft created a musical video to thank them. The “Likeappella” makes a unique long-form video, and it’s another way that Kraft is asserting itself as a presence in the social-media world.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Adam Uhrynowski

Pay no attention to the Nielsen ratings: the late-night host winning the much coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic on the Internet isn’t known for his giant chin or the gap between his teeth. Jimmy Fallon has figured out that attracting young viewers means creating and producing hilarious and hip viral videos. From creating Jersey Shore parodies to rapping with Justin Timberlake (our fave) to getting President Obama to slow jam the news, Fallon’s team develops content that people want to watch over and over. While Jimmy Kimmel has created memorable videos (I’m F**King Matt Damon; I Ate My Kid’s Halloween Candy) and Conan O’Brien’s TeamCoCo has been prolific, no late-night host can match the news-making viral videos of Jimmy Fallon and Co.

Dove Australia

Jon Thomas

As a Facebook user in his early (and I stress early) 30s, I’d love to meet the Facebook folks who wrote the algorithm for ad-display criteria. Reason being, if I paid much attention to those ads, I’d be convinced that I was in desperate need of a second M.B.A., a weight-loss program and yet another credit card. While the ads are not overly negative, the knowledge that for some reason these ads are targeting me makes me feel, well, not so hot.

Enter Dove, Australia. I’m not in its target market, but I still love its recent Facebook makeover campaign. Their Facebook app allows users to take advantage of Dove’s Facebook media buy to replace standard ads (Muffin top? Jelly roll?) with Dove’s feel-good messages about women’s bodies. I may even use it, because, hey, anything’s better than being told I’m a perfect fit for a study on gout.

Absolut Vodka

Eric Anderson

Futuristic holograms, space-age fashion, racing robot greyhounds and, of course, vodka come together to form Absolut’s campaign to promote its newest mixed drink, Greyhound. Teaming up with house-music group Swedish House Mafia, the always culturally hip vodka company has created the first song and video inspired by an Absolut cocktail. The new grapefruit-flavored drink makes a small appearance in the video, but Absolut has managed to create a wildly mesmerizing and one-of-a-kind video that will draw consumers to its brand.

This is not the first time that Absolut Vodka has collaborated with artists to create unique and engaging content (you may remember the short film I’m Here by Spike Jonze in 2010). Its latest creative venture is part of what it’s calling multidimensional cocktail experiences. At the end of the video, Absolut provides a link to its site, where you can actually remix the song yourself via its Facebook app or check out some more mixed drinks.

Coca-Cola

Jon Thomas

Coca-Cola earned its way onto this list even without creating an ad. Instead, Coke has won our hearts by creating a video (split into two YouTube videos) chronicling how it will approach media in the coming years. Jonathan Mildenhall, VP of global advertising strategy and creative excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, narrates the video using language so familiar to our culture at Story Worldwide that we’re convinced he’s a loyal Post-Advertising reader! The video’s visuals are not to be overshadowed either. The hand-drawn storyboard is amazing.

Whole Foods

Luke Dringoli

The Austin, Texas–based Whole Foods Market, now a worldwide chain of organically inclined, eco-conscious markets, has lately made strides in getting its brand across through new and emerging social media. With admirable transparency, Whole Foods has drummed up 40,000+ followers on the burgeoning social photo platform Instagram. The brand celebrated Earth Month in April with a multilayered Instagram photo contest, artfully emphasizing the company’s Green Mission with a new challenge every week.

Building on the success of fun nonbranded activities like #PHOTOADAY and #warbywalk, eyewear maker Warby Parker’s Instagram-based New York City photo hunt, Whole Foods asked its audience of amateur photographers to explore the themes of recycling and reusing, “Earth-friendly” food, sustainable transportation and the overall protection of our planet. Going beyond promotions, Whole Foods is candid in its comments and responses and seems to frequently hand the keys over to employees who are passionate about what they do. One example involves an enthusiastic beer-department employee sharing a few of his/her favorite products on Instagram. When the employee posted a photo of Ranger India Pale Ale, a canned brew by New Belgium Brewery—also an avid Instagram-ing brand—the brewery responded to the photo and a lovefest was had:

In addition, Whole Foods is also an early adopter of the social-bookmarking platform Pinterest, most recently calling on its nearly 30,000 followers via its 900,000 Facebook fans for “Pins for Mom”, a contest that encourages sharing of the brand’s recipe content with one’s mother. It’s a promotion that’s low on cost (three $100 gift cards are to be given away) and high on engagement. Elsewhere, WFM does good work with localized social media for stores in larger markets. For instance, Whole Foods Market NYC posts about new items, sales and events specific to its locations, making the post content more compelling and the responses from community managers more helpful.

Who would you nominate?

This post originally appeared in our April issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

In the days of AOL, our in-boxes were cherished spaces. When we heard the computerized voice proclaim, “You’ve got mail!” our hearts leapt. “Someone cares enough to have written me an email!” we thought. And back then, when it took a good five ear-piercing minutes to boot up your 28.8K modem and dial into AOL, an email was almost as good as a handwritten letter, and faster.

Brands caught on, however, and soon our in-boxes became a seething mess of spam. Any brand communication was seen as intrusive and as annoying as a telemarketer’s call during dinner. Email marketing companies flourished at first, aiding and abetting these brand messages, but around 2007 it seemed (to me at least) as though email marketers were going the way of Myspace background designers and door-to-door salesmen. With the emergence of social media, why spend time dodging spam filters when you could talk directly to your audience on Facebook or Twitter?

IT HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS

Certainly the approach to email marketing has changed in the past decade. In the late 90s and early aughts, brands took shortcuts, often resorting to buying email lists and attempting to close the sale in the first contact. If you’ve ever tried to find a potential mate in a bar, you know that your pickup line can’t be an invitation to come home with you. Instead, audiences wanted (and still want) valuable content that is of some use to them, whether it informs or simply entertains. Not all brands understood this a number of years ago, and, rightly, audiences rejected their pestering, relegating them to their junk folders.

Around 2005, social media grew massively, and the social paradigm shifted. We, as an audience of consumers, embrace brands now more than ever. We let them into our social streams and email in-boxes, to which we’re obsessively tethered. The opt-in and permission-based models have allowed brands to communicate with audiences who actually want to hear from them, as long as they’re delivering perceived value, which can be in the form of a useful tip, a funny comic or a 20-percent-off coupon. There has never been a better time for marketers than now, when the possibilities seem endless.

You don’t have to be an early adopter or the first brand on the next social platform to be innovative. You just have to be innovative. Daily-deal sites are powered by email. We want to sign up to make sure we have an opportunity to snag that deal, especially if there are limited quantities. Daily-deal sites didn’t invent the idea of discounted products, nor did they invent email (that was Gore, right?); they simply connected their audience to value, and email is their powerful vehicle.

So why does email seem like an afterthought for many brands?

Every day, I’m asked to “like” something, “pin” something, follow something, “plus” something, vote something up or share something. Brands are so eager to get me to take action, you’d think that Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were the Holy Grail of marketing, as if there were a proven direct correlation between Pinterest followers and sales in the same way there’s one between eating and staying alive. That’s not to say that those channels aren’t important, because they are (when used effectively), but email marketing is treated like an aging middle relief pitcher. Sure, he’s experienced and reliable and without him we wouldn’t have won as many games, but he’s not sexy and not new and doesn’t look web 3.0 enough!

What I don’t see is that same concerted effort by brands to get audiences to opt into their email lists, where they send content of great value (there’s a difference between that and simply baiting audiences for their email through a single piece of content and then using it for whatever the brand pleases).

EMAIL IS SO VERY NOT DEAD

It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that email marketing isn’t dead, as if people were bailing on their email clients à la the mass exodus from Friendster and MySpace and authors like myself are proclaiming an Easter miracle. We all know that there’s value in being able to connect to the one place we check more religiously than our social channels. Email is not dead, nor has it ever been, but it has definitely taken a backseat as far as headlines and tweets go. But is the backseat designation justified?

In a recent survey by ExactTarget, 91 percent of respondents said they checked their email daily, while only 57 percent said they checked their Facebook accounts every day.

Also of note: 77 percent of respondents claimed that email was their preferred channel for permission-based promotional messages. The next closest, if you can believe it, was direct mail, with a whopping 9 percent.

It doesn’t matter whether email marketing is making headlines or fading into obscurity. It’s been proven that there’s no better time than now to build your list and start connecting with audiences through email.

It’s not lost on me that we at Post-Advertising do a lot of writing about the latest social-media trends, and that we even hosted a summit about the future of advertising. Facebook, Path, Google+, Pinterest: We’ve blogged about them all. But what Post-Advertising is truly all about is discussing the best ways for brands to become publishers and create ongoing content that engages and builds audiences. So while marketers love to play with and explore the shiny new toy, they should remember not to leave the old ones behind.

If you can do it right, email marketing may be the best way into your audience’s hearts and wallets.

Are you utilizing email more than social channels? How much time do you spend on each?

Let me start off by saying that there are plenty of useful, worthwhile social media tools out there. But most of these tools are only helpful to a small segment of the broader social media world. There are tools for following/unfollowing on Twitter, tools for measuring insights and tools for shortening links. These are all helpful. But my real qualm is with the more general, centralized tools that claim to be one-stop shops for all those involved in a brand’s social properties, from analytics and reporting to active listening and response work. While we won’t name names, these range from popular “freemium” choices to expensive, business-grade solutions.

The promise of their pitch—that short work can be made of a variety of tasks, on a number of accounts—ultimately appeals most to the audience management discipline and community managers like myself. Our days are anything but predictable and often require odd work hours be held in order to engage best with our core audience(s). A tool that could—reliably—lighten the load would come as a godsend. And, since more marketing budgets these days are doling out larger slices of the pie to social media campaigns and ongoing social maintenance, new reporting/responding/listening/scheduling tools are cropping up by the dozens.

But hey, how tough can it be to create relevant, engaging content? Industry commentators like Clay Shirky claim that publishing is not a job or a profession anymore. “There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done,” stated Shirky on Gigaom this past week. Any savvy marketer knows that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Once you “press publish”—something that’s accomplished in different ways on different channels—there is the matter of monitoring and syndication. Yes, publishing has changed dramatically, has become entirely democratized, but it’s at the heart of great audience management and every marketer’s content strategy. Each follow-up comment or response sent is a part of a new publishing process carried out by community managers and audience management practitioners everywhere. Social media tools try to make this process more streamlined, but they tend to be lacking in several areas.

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS FAIL

1.) POOR FACEBOOK SUPPORT

The most essential part of any hub-style tool is Facebook Pages integration. And one of the biggest problems plaguing 3^rd party social tools is Facebook’s protectiveness over its native functionality. For example: Facebook’s Application Programming Interface (API) does not always allow external sites to utilize its particular share functionality. When it comes to posting photos on Facebook through a social tool, the photo will not automatically go into the Wall Photos album. Instead, it may appear with a shortened link and be hosted on a non-Facebook site.

It may seem nitpicky, but as a community manager, these are the particularities that make or break a brand’s social profile in the eyes of consumers. If things don’t look quite right, followers may find your Page half-heated or disingenuous. For instance: updates published with a “posted via” indictor—which is the case with 3^rd party tools—indicate that the content was likely scheduled ahead of time, which means the page has a pre-planned content calendar. Knowing the page has premeditated their actions cheapens the experience. (See: Post Advertising’s “5 Rules for Brands to Avoid Being Pruned From Social Profiles”)

2.) FAULTY SCHEDULING

Social media tools allow you to schedule posts well in advance. This is one of their primary benefits. (You know, in case a community manager wants to have a life and go out without worrying about finding a computer at 9pm to post from…) But because these tools rely on communication with external websites and apps, they are sometimes unreliable when scheduling posts. When posting directly on Twitter.com, an error message will instantly appear if the server is overloaded. These sort of notifications are often unavailable with a third-party tool. For a tool to be used consistently, it must be solidly reliable. Errors made by a tool when posting, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, can make the brand in question appear incompetent. Posting errors are unacceptable when a content calendar has been signed off on, or when a post’s effectiveness relies on its timeliness.

3.) NO MOBILE APP

Furthermore, many tools do not have mobile app versions. For a community manager on the go, this is absolutely essential. If I think of a brilliant tweet on a Saturday afternoon at the park (and c’mon, when are they not brilliant?), I want to whip out my phone and quickly post it before the thought slips away. Sure, I could use the Twitter app, but most social tools insist that you post from their platform at all times. You must stay faithful to the platform at all times in order for it to work correctly, and confusion can ensue when you stray from the path. Social tools must work in harmony with the social networks the sync with—and they must be offered on a variety of platforms (iPad, iPhone, Andorid, etc).

4.) AWKWARD INTERFACE

Although native social media sites are becoming increasingly complicated in terms of new functionality and services, their design still remains clean, user-friendly and well thought out. Social media tools, however, tend to be rather clunky and outdated. They simply cannot keep up with fast-moving, well-staffed platforms that have time to spend on user experience, design and flow. These tools are not as intuitive as they should be, and most people will not bother to go through a complicated training process to master them. The flow and interface of a social tool must at least be up par with the networks their potential users access on a daily basis.

5.) NEW FEATURES NOT SUPPORTED

Facebook introduces new features and functionality often. Since most companies developing 3^rd party social tools for the platform are quite tiny, and given the unpredictable nature of Facebook’s updates, any Page management solution outside Facebook will inevitably lag behind and lack functionality for a good while. For example: direct messaging between Pages and consumers—a now-vital feature added the new Facebook Pages Timeline update—hasn’t been integrated into most 3^rd party social tools, but it is yet another space (if enabled, which it should be) that must be monitored by community managers. This means that a community manager still has to spend time on the Facebook platform. And if you are going to be checking direct messages (through their new Admin Panel, which now acts as a built-in “hub”), then you might as well check recently activity on your Timeline. And respond to comments made on your photos. Soon enough, even the most competent social tool falls by the wayside. Developers: keep up with the times!

Still, many clients require that a listening/responding/reporting tool be used by whoever they’ve entrusted to manage their social presence. They may want access themselves, or the ability to approve copy and check statistics in real time. And community managers like myself also want a more robust solution—but a slow, cumbersome platform that lacks the features and interface necessary for great audience management will cause more problems and burn more time than it ever saves. The tools that are robust, full-featured and up-to-date are also—naturally—the most expensive to license, making them largely out of reach to the average social media professional. Popular freemium tools impress, but lack that extra bit of professionalism that’s needed to be taken seriously as enterprise-level solutions.

This much is true: there’s no single tool available that’s trusted by and readily available to community managers everywhere. Will this change? Will platforms like Facebook and Twitter eventually develop their own fully integrated software for social media professionals? Only time will tell.

Which social media tools do you use? What functionality would you like to see in a tool?

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In a world where influence and clout (or, Klout, I guess) is measured by reach, a social network that expressly limits the number of connections a user can have is almost audacious in this day of age. Or is it just what we need?

Enter: The Anti-Social Network

Originally founded as a mobile-only photo sharing application by Facebook executive Dave Morin and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning a little over a year ago, Path—A modern journal that helps you share life with close friends and family—has grown into a full fledged social network with a twist. Path is very serious about it’s approach to building a platform for a “personal network.”

The idea is to create a more intimate social networking experience – and when you think about it, it makes sense.  People are much more likely share personal information with 150 of their closest friends on Path than, say, 500 friends and acquaintances (many of whom may be people they barely know or probably haven’t seen in years) on Facebook. This may seem like bad strategy – especially in the world of social media, where success is based on the number of people using your site – but in December, the mobil app’s user basea reportedly grew from 10,000 to 300,000 daily active users in two and a half weeks, and, as of December, 2011, over 1.5 million and a people have downloaded the Path app.

Intrusion vs. Exclusion

Facebook’s ever changing and arguably confusing privacy policies coupled with their recent integration of Premium Ads into a user’s social feed could be a tipping point that pushes users to rethink their approach to keeping a “social journal.” Are we predicting a mass-exodus from Facebook? No. However, it’s not out of the question to think that in the near future we’ll see social-saavy users shifting from open sharing and limited privacy amongst a large network of mostly friends and acquaintances to a highly private, close-ended network of a smaller number of friends—and that’s just what Path is banking on.

Privacy Problems

Any Google search for “Path” will undoubtedly expose the app’s recent claim to fame: Exposed by a blogger Arun Thampi, Path had been uploading user address books to their servers without the user’s consent or knowledge. Not only that, the information was being stored unencrypted, in plain English.

Although Path never broke any privacy laws and followed all App Store terms and conditions, the breach of trust amongst the network and its user base was palpable. The consensus amongst the majority of users, including Thampi, was that Pat

h wasn’t doing anything nefarious with the information. In his initial response, Path CEO David Morin stated that uploading user address-books “is an industry best-practice,” however this is commonly an opt-in process.

Morin and the team at Path have since made a public apology and all user information has been deleted from Path’s servers. Upon setup, users will now see an opt-in screen to access contacts.

WHAT PATH MEANS FOR BRANDS

The options for brands on networks like Instagram and Path have been widely discussed but rarely agreed upon. Numerous brands have found success on Instagram simply by using it as a channel to provide content that their audiences want. But can Path provide more for audiences than just pictures and check-ins? Will audiences want to follow brands on Path? Or should brands focus on encouraging their loyal audiences to share their own experiences with the brand on Path? If so, Path could be a fertile ground for brands. The whole idea of creating an intimate social network means that Path users are going to trust what they see on Path much more than other social networks.

So what are your thoughts on Path? Will their so-called intimate approach to social networking give them an edge over other social media platforms? What place does Path have in the post-advertising world?

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll pull back the curtain and teach attendees how to truly unearth their brand’s story. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more will be on hand to share their expertise. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today! Use code “PABLOG” for $100 off!

Monday, March 5^th saw the launch of the most successful viral marketing campaign in history, branded or otherwise. Nonprofit organization Invisible Children published their KONY 2012 campaign video, taking the social media world by storm. On the day it was launched, the video was practically unavoidable. It seemed nearly everyone posted it on every type of page and platform. With over 100 million views on YouTube and Vimeo combined in only one week, the video has reached iconic status as the most viral video of all time.

While the video has since sparked a powder keg of intense political debate, there’s another side of this moment that shouldn’t get lost in the arguments: Agree or disagree with the message, no one can argue that the marketing of the campaign is anything but outrageously successful. To help isolate lessons from the campaign that can benefit anyone trying to tell a story in social media, we spoke with Pat Walsh, co-founder and CMO of StayClassy.org, the social fundraising platform behind Invisible Children, for his insight on the campaign’s virality.

Here are five lessons that brands can take away from Invisible Children’s monumental social media campaign:

1. Stories Definitely Matter

With the video’s success, predictably, came significant criticism, but there’s no questioning the primary lesson learned from the San Diego-based nonprofit’s experiment in social activism: Everyone (like every brand) has a story, and those who tell it best, win.

Invisible Children were able to turn their eight-year mission into a compelling story that pulled at the heartstrings of millions. They told the story in a way that nearly everyone watching the video could understand, regardless of age or knowledge. Some have argued that it was too naive, oversimplifying a complex problem. However, if Invisible Children were going to create a video that could both keep the audience’s attention and spark a worldwide movement, the story had to be gripping and easy to understand to be effective

2. Don’t try this at home

The knee-jerk reaction of most anyone who yearns for viral success is to try and replicate the idea. But this is no nyan cat. This video has been nearly a decade in the making, and the depth (and 30 minute length) of the story makes it difficult to replicate with any amount of success. “I have no doubt that the success of the video (seen by more people than any single TV show this week) will lead many organizations astray in the naive belief that they can emulate this one,” said Seth Godin. “If a non-profit board decides to spend precious resources on a video hoping it will change the world in three days, I think they’re misguided.”

However, that’s not to say that brands, particularly nonprofits, have no chance at creating a groundswell that effects change. “One of the greatest effects of KONY2012 is that it’s inspired people to get involved and champion the causes they’re passionate about – whether that’s removing a 3rd world warlord or supporting something more personal to them,” explains Pat Walsh, co-founder and CMO of StayClassy.org. “Hopefully the long-lasting momentum of this campaign will continue to drive young leaders to advocate on behalf of social and humanitarian injustices at every level throughout the world.”

3. Define clear goals

Invisible Children’s success put them under the microscope. Alongside their success, Invisible Children has faced harsh criticism in the last week over a wide range of issues, one of which questioned the effectiveness of the video.

While the video ends with a clear call to action to order action kits (at $30 a piece, or free with a recurring donation), Invisible Children has openly acknowledged that their overarching goal as a nonprofit (and the goal of the Kony 2012 video) is to raise awareness, and no one can argue that the video hasn’t accomplished that. Opponents, however, have said that regardless of video views, this is pointless “slacktivism.” Viewers watch, share, and go back to their lives having felt as though they were social activists for a minute. But the content itself shouldn’t bear the burden of ROI. You can quibble about how much money it did or didn’t bring in (they have run out of $30 kits), but that’s not the point. The point is that a vast majority of the globe now knows about this issue and, most importantly, knows who Joseph Kony is. Invisible Children set out to make him famous, largely fueled by this video, and that’s exactly what was achieved.

4. Give your audience clear calls to action

Creating compelling content can be very effective, but if you don’t give your audience a clear call to action at the end, your audience’s journey with your brand may end right there. Around the 22-minute mark, the narrator (co-founder Jason Russel) proclaims, “We know what to do. Here it is. Ready?” The final seven minutes lays out Invisible Children’s goals and, specifically, what they want the audience to do:

1. Order an action kit
2. Donate a few dollars a month
3. Reach out to culture-makers and politicians to show that you care
4. On April 20^th, paint your town or city with the posters and stickers in the action kit

Not everybody is willing or able to be deeply involved in an issue, but if you give your audience easy ways to begin their involvement with the project, they might find themselves becoming more passionate than they thought they were.

But sometimes asking isn’t enough. You have to make it very easy for them to do what you’re asking. If you want them to share your infographic with their social networks, make sure there are social sharing buttons nearby. If you want them to donate, show them exactly where they need to go to donate and even ask for a specific amount. The KONY2012 site makes it easy for people to tweet at the culture- and policy-makers with the click of a mouse (along with a pre-written tweet, which provides a thank-you if they’ve already tweeted).

But will this viral spread translate to real-world in time for the declared group action date of April 20? “I think it already has,” Walsh says. “Invisible Children has brought an elevated level of awareness and a new call to action to a long-standing silent war. As a result of the campaign, media organizations like NBC Nightly News are sending teams to Africa to further investigate and build awareness around the issues. Politicians are coming out in strong support of taking action. Invisible Children’s awareness tactics have led to tangible action in the past, and I think this latest campaign has the momentum to make their largest impact yet.”

5. Ensure that your audience sees themselves in your story

When your audience can see themselves in your story, the burden of persuading them disappears. The Kony video had a variety of characters that made it easily relatable to viewers of all ages. When we saw Jason’s son, we saw our own sons and/or daughters. When college-aged kids (the primary target audience) saw the video, they saw the hundreds of other kids who look just like them painting the streets with Kony posters.

Of course, you can’t do this for every audience. This video had a negative reaction from those in the areas of Uganda where Joseph Kony’s reign was the worst. That’s an understandable reaction who those who have lived through true suffering, but to be fair, they weren’t the target audience. Invisible Children targeted an audience that could immediately respond to their call of action to share, reach out, and donate. Judging by the rapid sharing of the video, it obviously resonated with the audiences they targeted.

Through all of this, it can’t be forgotten that global storytelling has a long tail. If Rebecca Black is still getting work, then we can expect that Invisible Children’s message will be around well into 2013 and beyond. It’s this widespread success and awareness that may motivate politicians to act. It’s not perfect, but the story is simply too effective to ignore.

For anyone trying to tell a story, the main lesson to be gained from the Kony campaign is to make sure your story is compelling for your target audience. Your brand may not create the next viral sensation, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have your own story to tell—you simply need to determine how to tell it in a way that captivates and compels audiences to share.

Why do you think the Kony 2012 video went viral so quickly? What else can be learned?

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll pull back the curtain and teach attendees how to truly unearth their brand’s story. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more will be on hand to share their expertise. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today! Use code “PABLOG” for $100 off!

Facebook users don’t often warmly embrace shifts in their social media routine, so it’s only natural to wonder how Facebook’s 845 million users will react to these game-changing announcements. What will it take to make sure these new ad formats don’t backfire on branders?

A look at the four new ad types:

While news feed ads actually launched in January, the official announcement came at fMC. (Image)

Ads + News Feed: Integration or Infiltration?

The most notable announcement at fMC—besides Timeline for Pages, which was revealed shortly before the event—was the full launch of the news feed-fed advert. Yes, you can now experience the blissful feeling associated with forced advertisements from the comfort of your news feed!

Let’s be real: this type of ad is nothing new in social media. We’ve seen similar solutions offered by Twitter for some time now (Promoted Trends, Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets), and blogs have long used advertisements between posts and paragraphs. But it’s hard to see Facebook users readily embracing the new, similar style adverts. These ads actually make sense on Twitter—not so much on Facebook. Since they’ll be brand new additions to a feature that’s been used obsessively by millions for years now the spots are bound to feel more like interruptions than invitations to engage.

The Right Way

In reality, there are ways to make the new ad formats work, but it’ll take careful consideration and the right brand. Jamming an ad into a person’s social life is no more than traditional interruption-based marketing in a digital setting. It’s not much different than a commercial or billboard. It’s on a computer, but that’s about the biggest difference. In order for this strategy to pay off, your messages are going to need to be seamlessly integrated into the news feed.

Disclaimer: Facebook is not liable for brand damage inflicted if ads are executed improperly. (Image)

How can these new formats be used productively? Through pitch-perfect editorial content and carefully considered media buys. If these newly integrated ads are going to have a chance, they will need to blend in fluidly and do their best to become a seamless part of the conversation. If done well, there is potential for these ads to grab a viewer’s interest and to take more Facebook users to a company’s page. Otherwise, it’s too easy for a reader to scroll past an ad, especially if it’s irrelevant. Worst case: the poorly done, poorly placed ad will anger the masses, leading to unlikes in droves and very active, very public disdain.

Signing Out?—But Wait, There’s More!

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Another announcement for Facebook is the addition of log-out advertisements. When a user logs out, an ad will soon appear on the log-out screen. Facebook announced that around 37 million people log out of Facebook on a daily basis.

Reaching that large of an audience sure seems nice—especially for a freshly minted IPO—but every corner on every page doesn’t need to be filled with ads. Sure, it’s otherwise empty space, but is utilizing that empty space worth annoying potential consumers? Or is it just as (if not more) beneficial for Facebook to keep this page clean, making the site itself more inviting, leading users to interact more with the ads on their news feed?

With that said, one proposed advertiser, Bing, makes a little more sense for these log-out page ads. Chances are if a user is leaving Facebook they have something else to do. And if that something else happens to be a quick web search, the page is already right there. It’s one example that actually works.

How Bing’s placement on the Facebook logout/login screen looks. (Image)

Anger or Joy: The Choice is Yours

Inserting ads into users’ social lives isn’t going to be a boon by itself. It’s not the silver bullet that unfocused, ill-equipped brands, blinded by the promise of social media, have been searching for. Making these ads engaging and seamlessly integrated into news feeds will be the key. If you can’t pull that off, the ones you’ve spammed—because it’s now truly spam—will be happy to let you know how they feel about it.

How do you think the average Facebook user will respond to the introduction of these new ad formats?

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll pull back the curtain and teach attendees how to truly unearth their brand’s story. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more will be on hand to share their expertise. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today! Use code “PABLOG” for $100 off!

Well, maybe that’s not such a hot scoop, but when you add the words online and social media, the ears of brand managers everywhere start to perk up. According to a new study, nearly two thirds of people on social networks are engaging in “profile pruning,” carefully curating their own social profiles by deleting posts, comments, tags and friends. In order to stay in the fertile flower beds of young social-media users, brands must follow their rules to avoid getting pruned. Cue gardening metaphors.

Rule 1: I want my friends to think I’m cool

People are pruning their profiles because they want others to see them in a certain way, plain and simple. Whether it’s deleting drunken college photos to seem “office cool” or unliking a recently popular musician to be “under-the-radar cool,” young people are constantly thinking about their online reputations. This means that brands must attempt to be interesting and relevant in the social sphere.

We understand that not every brand belongs in the upper echelon of millennial cool with Levi’s and Apple, but there are definitely ways of becoming your own unique and demographically appealing type of cool. It’s good to post about your products and services—that is essentially what you are trying to sell—but you should also be aware of trends in the world around you and embrace a wide range of ideas.

Social-media outlets like Pinterest have demonstrated that brands shouldn’t constantly peddle their products. Rather, they must give off a brand glow, creating a feeling that represents their true brand identity and personality. Consumers will connect with this identity much more than with an individual product or service. If you are lucky, they will then make your brand identity part of their own identity by continuously engaging with your social-media outlets.

Rule 2: I want people to pay attention to me

Just as a flower needs water, people need interaction and attention (I warned you about the metaphors). Brands should embrace the human desire to be loved and interact with their fans, just as a real friend responds to a gesture. Someone wrote on your Wall? Respond. Someone tweeted at you? Re-tweet or reply. It’s that simple. Responding online is like giving fans a pat on the back, essentially saying, “We understand you and respect your opinions.” Fans will prune you from their profiles if they feel that you don’t like or trust them, just like people cutting their fickle friends from their social circles. Responding to posts will keep your online and offline relationship alive.

Rule 3: I want to find cool stuff and share it with my friends

We always preach the importance of content marketing. And we all know the old advice to create engaging, unique content for your consumers. But when it comes to profile pruning, this is truly essential. Fans will quickly lose interest if they find your posts uninteresting or uninspiring. Facebook and Twitter users want their news feeds to be full of brilliant insights and fun content. If your messaging isn’t up to snuff, users won’t hesitate to cut you off. Think of it this way: In your own social profiles, would you be engaged by the kind of content you are putting out? If not, why would your fans? They won’t give you endless chances to impress. They don’t have the time or patience.

Rule 4: Yeah, I want freebies. But that’s not all I want

Money-saving promotions are a sure-fire way to get likes and re-tweets. Facebook ads with coupon or discount messaging often catch the eye of a stingy user. But once the promotion ends, fan engagement often stops. This isn’t good. A brand admired only for its coupons won’t be successful in the long term. Yes, you can entice people with giveaways and discounts, but you have to keep them interested with ongoing content in order for your brand to really resonate. Unless your brand is all about constant discounts, à la Gilt or Groupon, you cannot keep fans engaged through monetary promotions alone.

Rule 5: I am always searching for something new

Stale content never does well online. It’s a fast-paced world, and users don’t have a lot of tolerance for outdated marketing strategies or rehashing of old ideas. Do something new and interesting. Don’t be afraid to take some risks when it comes to outlining your online brand identity. Setting yourself apart from the competition online will give your brand something unique and identifiable that will resonate with consumers. Being the first to do something online is a powerful tool, and it proves that your brand is current, social and now.

Do you have any horror stories about mass profile pruning? Which brands are doing a good job of keeping fans engaged?

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll pull back the curtain and teach attendees how to truly unearth their brand’s story. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more will be on hand to share their expertise. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today! Use code “PABLOG” for $100 off!

If you’re cool enough to call yourself a follower of @PostAdvertising, you no doubt noticed that we were in attendance last Wednesday at the first-ever IN-NW Social Media Conference, in Seattle. Exceptional panels, ranging from those on nonprofit- and cause-based engagement to those on new-media storytelling and musicians gone social, were complemented by enlightening talks by Alexandra Wheeler of Starbucks, Rob Pietsch of Twitter and Ben Huh of the Cheezburger Network (who delivered an impassioned defense of the Internet). That said, one of the day’s most intriguing insights—that the second screen is finally ready for prime time—came in an off-hand observation by David Tedman of Invoke Media (the ones responsible for HootSuite) during a panel on new and emerging tools. Tedman’s mentioning the real-life example of his company’s work with The Voice led to what follows below: our exhaustive report on the efforts of a few television networks that’ve used or are currently using the notion of the second screen to engage viewers in new ways and in record numbers.

Simply put, the second screen means watching your television while tapping away on your iPad. The secondary screen (be it tablet, phone or laptop) is one that a user interacts with while simultaneously consuming media via a primary device (most likely a television or movie screen). Mere years ago the concept may well have seemed impossible, or unlikely at best: how could anyone be expected to engage with media while simultaneously consuming it? Now with the help of smart apps, like GetGlue, Shazam, Viggle and IntoNow, as well as an approach at the outset that stresses full—and I mean full—integration of all channels, the future of broadcast media is suddenly upon us.

1. THE VOICE

Of all the television shows gracing major television networks these days, nobody is second screening more than NBC’s The Voice. It’s done the most work to actively incorporate social channels into the actual cable broadcast and encourage real-time discussion during showtime every Monday evening as well as before and after the main screen action. Having launched its second season hot on the heels of the 2012 Super Bowl (another huge event for the second screen), it’s since made tightly integrated social components part of its value proposition to new fans and part of the way it hopes to hook fans and transform passive viewers into active participants.

What’s most readily apparent when you’re watching The Voice (at this stage in the competition) is the show’s use of Twitter content from its stable of celebrity “coaches” during strategic points in each episode. As events unfold on the show (such as when a contestant chooses a coach), a relevant tweet from the celebrity is displayed , thus adding color and giving fans a bit of added insight.

But that’s not the whole story. An analysis of the February 20th episode of The Voice reveals that celebrity coach Cee Lo Green didn’t tweet once during the episode (although his cat, a running joke on the show, has its own social-media presences on Facebook and Twitter). Christina Aguilera, another Voice judge, tweeted just twice during the show (both were shown on air); Adam Levine’s Twitter feed was also surprisingly sparse. Coach Blake Shelton was the only coach to consistently and realistically tweet along with the show. Elsewhere, the show’s official Twitter account, @NBCTheVoice, did do an admirable job of live tweeting the episode—although such activity is to be expected, and should be required, of any official TV show on Twitter that’s also currently on the air.

NBC’s airing of various celebrity tweets immediately following specific events (and referencing said events) cannot possibly be being done in real time, given the various legal constraints and the suspiciously short time between event and corresponding tweet. The tweets are most likely penned beforehand (perhaps not even by the celebs themselves) and scheduled to coincide with precise moments on the show. And of course the show is taped in advance, meaning that seemingly too-good-to-be-true moments from Monday night—such as when Cee Lo Green whipped out his BlackBerry and typed away, prompting a tweet to appear—may offend observant viewers.

While show personalities can’t be expected to faithfully employ social media in real time, and while preplanned content is to some degree a logistical necessity, there is a clear disconnect when you see how these celebrities actually handle their personal Twitter accounts.

See the bottom of this post for our Storify feed of social coverage from the February 20th episode of The Voice.

Also, in what must be a historic first for social media, NBC hired another celebrity, Christina Milian, as The Voice’s very own social media correspondent, charged with “bridging the on-air experience of The Voice with the online experience and bringing viewers closer to the competition.” Besides tweeting and posting during the show on her own social properties (she has a healthy following on Twitter), Milian appears in on-air promos for The Voice’s social presence (segments that beg for second-screen engagement with the live show). She also produces supplemental content (off-the-air interviews with contestants, candid blog posts) that provides extra value. The fact that NBC values social and the second screen enough to pay a celebrity to be the face of such efforts show that it’s taking digital content and fan engagement seriously.

Last, there’s The 5th Coach. Mentioned by David Tedman of Invoke Media during IN-NW, The 5th Coach is a Facebook game-app that’s deeply rooted in the television show’s proceedings. In what amounts to a fantasy-sports game for talent-competition shows, fans are asked to recruit singers from previous episodes of the show. Points (and weekly prizes) are awarded if your picks make it through to subsequent rounds. The grand prize? A trip to L.A. to meet the season’s winning contestant.

Interestingly enough, little has been done thus far to promote the dynamic fantasy-style fan game across The Voice’s various other social platforms—especially in terms of second-screen-level integration. Only one tweet sent during this past week’s episode referenced the game. While The 5th Coach is reactionary in nature, with game play dependent on the outcome of each television episode, surely some effort should be made on behalf of the official Twitter account to incubate its #5thCoach hashtag. Time will tell whether NBC’s ambitious social game proves to be a flop.

2. THE GRAMMY AWARDS

According to social-TV analytics published by Bluefin Labs, This year’s Grammy Awards show was the most rabidly social program in television history;  13 million comments were tracked. The 54th annual music-award show easily eclipsed the previous record of 12.2 million set by the 2012 Super Bowl. How did the Grammys help attract this year’s record-setting level of conversation? With a number of highly social second-screen initiatives, of course.

The multi-platform Grammy Live initiative used in-depth supplemental content to extend the festivities to three days. Instead of being an archive of content from years past, it paired exclusive pre-taped content with live host introductions to whet the appetite and made backstage webcams available during the show itself. According to MoBlog’s Steve Smith, “much of the recorded material was contextually relevant and well-timed [with] the on-air content.” Available via the web or as an iOS app, the initiative alone garnered more than a million views.

CBS and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences also employed its official partnership with song-recognition app Shazam to offer easy access to iTunes versions of live performances from the show in real time. Shazam not only identified the awards show but also directed users to a page dedicated to the event that featured links for downloading each performance as it happened, Twitter integration for scanning the conversation and a tool that gathered social insights in real time.

Marc DeBevoise, senior vice president and general manager of the Entertainment Division of CBS Interactive, touted the second-screen approach again and again when questioned by MediaPost about this year’s efforts. “There are a lot of guys touting second screens as their thing,” DeBevoise says. “They aren’t necessarily second screen; they don’t have a lot to offer.” In regard to his network’s deal with Shazam, he described it as “second-screen that can build on what is going on on-air.” In his words, it was “not just a light experience.”

3. WGN AMERICA

Full disclosure: WGN America is a Story Worldwide client.

WGN America, a superstation-style television network and the self-described Home of the SuperFan, has made great use of the second screen for one of its most popular programs, How I Met Your Mother. WGN America’s second screens for the hit comedy are YourMother and @MeetAtMaclarens, Facebook and Twitter fan pages dedicated to the show. Besides promoting the show at large, these properties mention upcoming episodes on WGN America and cross-promote with other network shows.

In the past year, WGN America has married social and broadcast screens by featuring fans’ comments, tweets and original content on the air during episodes, offering TV-screen tie-ins as part of second-screen contests, and by live tweeting with fans—not only during episodes of the show that are airing on WGN America but during new episodes on CBS as well, effectively extending the second-screen approach even further.

Attempts by NBC, CBS, and smaller networks, like WGN America, to integrate the screens of social and broadcast more tightly are, if anything, impressive votes of confidence for a new type of viewing experience. These recent examples offer a window onto a world where engagement with a single piece of featured original content on a number of levels has become a natural part of the consumption process. In this age of the empowered consumer, it’s practically an absolute that fans should be given the power to visibly, publicly interact with and affect the media they’re consuming. Tomorrow it’ll be required in order to uphold ratings.

It’s no longer enough to engage viewers with programming alone; you must now be active during the program on other channels. Similarly, a viewer should no longer be expected to sit through a program that offers no opportunities to be engaged with.

Do you think that the power of a traditional-media experience can be enhanced by the second screen?

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll pull back the curtain and teach attendees how to truly unearth their brand’s story. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more will be on hand to share their expertise. In order to get the best price (Early-Bird discount ends February 29th), reserve your seat at the Summit table today! Use code “PABLOG” for $100 off!

We’ve all seen it before: Marketers create an innovative social media campaign only to have it squashed by the legal department into a bland, lifeless lump of the original idea. Sadly, many archaic legal departments are wary of social media at best and digitally illiterate at worst. Their fear of embracing these tools can be a barrier for brands that want to interact with their audiences in authentic, transparent and engaging ways. But that doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t sacrifice creativity (or throw out their old-school legal department) just yet.

The Brand Science Institute recently conducted a study of 563 marketers representing 52 brands in 12 European countries to better understand what goes wrong when a social media initiative is launched. They found that 76 percent of marketers feel that legal departments hinder new projects. We must draft a new set of rules to govern this broadening territory. The same regulations from years past simply do not apply anymore.

Unfortunately, there’s a great divide between real-world issues that legal departments face and what law schools are teaching (or rather not teaching about the impact of digital marketing and social media on corporate law). A new age of advertising requires a different kind of legal department: nimble enough to work in real time, privy to the ever-changing landscape and smart enough to know what’s appropriate in an arena unlike anything the brand has previously dealt with.

Living with Social Media

Social media is here to stay, whether legal likes it or not. Those that are too restrictive will ultimately hurt their brands. There will always be legal hurdles to jump when it comes to digital marketing, especially for more highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Stringent legal restrictions make it so brands in these markets are often unable to follow best practices (or in some cases are barred from engaging through social media at all). But even the most red-flagged industries are slowly beginning to embrace these platforms as valuable tools; just last week an industry group released its own pharma-specific best practices for social media and user-generated health and medical content.

However, when a company first jumps on the social media bandwagon, its first campaign is typically a test (one that’s very conservative and regulated). If it fails for whatever reason, the company’s more likely to kill the campaign and put in place overly restrictive guidelines for future initiatives rather than give it another chance with fewer restrictions. Many lawyers imagine worst-case scenarios and are concerned with mitigating risk rather than the opportunity to innovate.

This must change. And there’s evidence that legal departments are starting to get with the times. But the fact is, many in-house legal departments still have never made decisions about social media before, and their comfort level with it is as low as their understanding.

Insight from Adrian Dayton, Legal Marketing Expert

“What they want is a precedent,” says Adrian Dayton, a self-proclaimed “evangelist of social media for the legal profession”. “So if you want to try something new, you have to be able to show something analogous that another company did successfully, that they didn’t get in trouble for. If you can show someone else is doing this, and not getting killed for it, that’s a pretty good argument.”

As a non-practicing lawyer, Dayton trains others in his field on how to use social media to grow both their own businesses and the companies they work for. In his experience, most law schools are very behind in teaching digital marketing, but he expects that within the next two to three years the majority of them will finally add a social media component to the curriculum.

“As legal departments, their job is always to protect the company and make sure nobody does anything that’s going to harm or hurt the value of the business,” Dayton says. “But they really have a greater responsibility when it comes to social media. And while they’re always going to have the job to protect, they also need to empower their marketing department to use these things the right way.”

Dayton reiterates the learnings we’ve gleaned from dealing firsthand with the in-house councils of brands in industries from automotive to alcohol to pharma and more. It’s essential that brand marketers learn to work with the in-house legal council, and the best way to do that is by establishing a clear social media policy. Additionally, getting to know the people within the legal department, understanding their fears and addressing such fears from the get-go (rather than during final rounds of creative) are key.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

It boils down to the need for collaboration between marketers and lawyers. There is no benefit to either party in a silo or adversarial approach. As legal departments become increasingly involved in social media campaigns (and maybe even sign up for personal accounts), it will become easier for brands to navigate this space agilely without the fear of stepping on a landmine.

When Chrysler came to Story Worldwide wanting to create a syndicated publishing model to captivate loyalists and newcomers alike, we were highly regulated as we developed brand blogs as well as the Dodge and Ram brands’ first forays into social media. However, quickly building trust gave us more freedom in our response work, and we created a hub where it was possible to cover relevant news in real time. In 2010, when Ram was named “Truck of the Year,” we gave online journalists access to the unfolding details and let them tweet questions. This real-time interaction between the brand and audience was only possible by developing a crisis-management system where inflammatory responses could be handled quickly via preapproved responses or forwarded to the proper client contacts if necessary.

With other brands we’ve shown that by leveraging preapproved responses for premeditated questions to increase response times on Facebook, we’ve been able to increase the amount of activity on the brand page fore more fluid conversations and lasting relationships. Some of our clients’ legal departments are already overbooked due to the volume of paid and owned content they must review—there’s just so much they can’t keep up. That’s why it’s vital to gain the trust of the brand manager and the legal staff for more flexibility to interact on behalf of the brand. Ideally, your social media manager will know the client’s product info and legal concerns so stone-cold that you create and phrase things in a way that legal doesn’t need to review the fast-paced social content.

Usually, it’s essential to get the legal department involved early on; leaving legal review until the final rounds of creative is recipe for disaster. In rare (and beloved) cases, social media managers are lucky enough to have a trusting client that agrees with creative without requiring legal approval beforehand. But more often than not, it’s possible to participate in this digital space only after you’ve earned a brand’s trust.

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll stop talking and start DOING with workshops that put pen to paper and truly create a piece of valuable content. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today!

Want in on the unique new ways brands can use advanced crowdsourcing to engage followers? Read on. Each of the eight ideas we’ve carefully chosen has the potential to send your engagement numbers through the roof, as long as requests are within reason and rewards are provided.

This much is now true: fans must be given a concrete reason to create content, be it monetary (how about a 20 percent discount?), fame based (be featured on the front page of our site!) or otherwise. Propositions must also make simple sense to prospective participants. As we’ve said before, the content that’s requested must have some clear and present purpose for the brand—don’t call them “entries” or it a “sweepstakes”—for said request to be taken seriously.

So how do you inspire this level of engagement from followers?

1. Turn Them Into “Model” Citizens

BETABRAND
Buzzy San Francisco–based clothing collective Betabrand, headed by quirky Cordarounds creator Chris Lindland, sells uncommon and often ingenious pants, shirts, jackets and more in small batches. New products are announced weekly through product rollouts meant to heighten anticipation and break through the web’s heavy static. Betabrand’s latest flash of brilliance is Model Citizen, a crowdsourcing platform that rewards past customers for modeling BB duds for all to see with generous percentage-off discounts on future orders. According to a method that’s in some ways an evolution of the points-based system that Threadless has used the past few years (which has evolved into a street team of sorts), the resulting photos are often featured front and center on product pages and elsewhere around the site. As reported by The New York Times in a recent profile of the collective, Betabrand customizes the site’s homepage for participants, making the account holder’s photography appear more prominent in an attempt to play up the fame-based perks of the program.

2. Make Their Rides a Reality

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
In what it’s calling an “experimental crowd-derived combat-support vehicle (XC2V) design challenge,” the U.S. Department of Defense has laid down the gauntlet for vehicle designers, auto enthusiasts, engineers and all other comers: Help us design the shape of the future of military-vehicle design, and potentially win yourself up to $10,000 in the process. What’s more impressive is how the winner was chosen: through the sourcing-obsessed Local Motors and The Forge, the car company’s community of automotive designers. Local Motors’ mission: “to lead the next generation of crowd-powered automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to enable the creation of game changing vehicles.” The chosen design is on its way to becoming a “fully functioning concept vehicle.”

Another aspect of note is the site that launched the effort: challenge.gov. Itself an arm of ChallengePost.com, this government-grade crowdsourcing platform helps the United States and its various sectors enlist talented citizens for myriad projects on a scale not possible in generations past.

3. Help Them Pick Out the Perfect Pair

WARBY PARKER
Warby Parker, the hottest company in eyewear these days, emphasizes a crowdsourced approach right down to the typically laborious process of choosing the right frames. Here’s how it works: Choose as many as five pairs to try on; send back the pairs you’ve decided against. Still having trouble deciding which look is best for you? Post shots of yourself wearing each style, and let Warby Parker’s Facebook community decide for you. (The brand itself also frequently chimes in, offering kind advice.) The concept is wildly successful, and the company’s Facebook page bustles with activity generated by happy customers who’ve turned into unlikely brand advocates by helping others decide between pairs.

4. Enlist Their Services on Instagram

LEVI’S
When brands use Instagram right, sourcing is a snap. Take Levi’s, which is using the social photo platform Instagram to cast men and women for its next collection. Denim devotees can submit photos for consideration by declaring #iamlevis; it’s all part of Levi’s’ ongoing Millennial-targeted Go Forth campaign. How’s that for incentive? “Applying a tried-and-true PR tactic like crowdsourcing to a ‘new’ network like Instagram adds a different dimension to things,” Econsultancy’s Vikki Chowney has observed, “and allows Levi’s to leverage its increasing popularity in the process.”

WARBY PARKER
Taking the process of sourcing product photos from willing wearers to another level, Warby teamed with the booming photo app’s New York City arm, @instagramnyc (that’s an Instagram handle, kids), this past weekend for #warbywalk, a photo walk around the city that garnered nearly 700 photos by the day’s end. Participants were given specs to use as props in what was perhaps the biggest burst of consumer-taken product shots deliberately produced on a brand’s behalf in recent history (Warby Parker put together the day’s festivities, which also included an afterparty). Not all photos tagged were of the glasses, of course, but in most cases that was precisely the point. The glasses themselves are secondary to the overall lifestyle and attitude they’re associated with. When the frames do appear, they’re seen through the stylish lens of the smartphone-wielding fan–amateur photographer.

5. Let Them Create a Brand-new Brew

BLUE MOON
Denver, Colorado–based Blue Moon Brewing Company is deeply involving brew buffs in creating its next seasonal, limited edition beer, to be released in the fall. It’s not simply a one-week one-off contest; participants absolutely have a say in the proceedings. Thus far, through the brand’s Facebook page, fans have whittled down a field of overall flavors to three. Voting on a choice of label art for each of the finalists—Caramel Apple Spiced Ale, Blackberry Tart Ale and Dark Chocolate Bacon Porter—has just ended. Sampling events for fans are up next, and the final decision will be made in April. If anything, it recalls past efforts from non-alcohol bev brands, like Vitaminwater, that have previously crowdsourced a flavor, although it’s more elegant and structured better engagement-wise.

The months-long effort will culminate in one beer emerging fully formed and appearing on store shelves everywhere. It will be a product that’ll no doubt make anyone who’s been involved in it at any point along the way proud. Think they’ll buy a six-pack and gloat to their friends about their involvement? You’d better believe it.

SAM ADAMS
Boston’s Sam Adams is brewing up its own crowsourcing experiment on Facebook. The Sam Adams Crowd Craft Project gives new meaning to the term home-brewed. Fans are able to chime in on color, clarity, body and flavor and receive a bit of education about each stage of the process—which perfectly matches the brand’s no-frills, all-about-the-beer approach.

6. Let Them Choose the Cover for Once!

ROLLING STONE
In a historic first, Rolling Stone decided to let its readers decide its next cover stars. The magazine collaborated with AOL Music and Atlantic Records for the promotion, sponsored by Garnier Fructis, which let readers choose among 16 “undiscovered” acts. Besides picking the cover spot, the winner received a record deal, a slot at the upcoming Bonnaroo and plenty of free hair gel. When speaking to The New York Times about the landmark promotion, deputy managing editor Nathan Brackett remarked, “We’re making it something where we’re involving our readers at an unprecedented level.”

7. Let Them “Democratize Fashion”

MODCLOTH & VELVET BRIGADE
This past December, hip online fashion shop ModCloth announced that it had acquired DIY fashion design community Velvet Brigade as part of its “mission to democratize fashion.” At the same time, it launched “Make the Cut,” a unique opportunity for aspiring fashion designers to see one of their sketches be brought to life as a ModCloth product. Each winning sketch eventually won $500 in cash and a small cut of the dress’s sales. Truly fashion for the people by the people, this ModCloth engagement gave participants an unparalleled opportunity while providing the company with a new array of great product designs to create and sell. Most important, contests like “Make the Cut” draw the tastemaking designers of tomorrow closer to the brand.

Here are the winning names and dresses.

8. Support Their Brilliant Ideas

GOOD
Good magazine’s brilliant Good Maker platform sources great ideas from readers and helps bring them to life. Organizations are invited to create challenges for their communities in the hope of achieving a meaningful impact. Community members can submit their best ideas, plans and designs for review. The community votes to decide the best idea, and the creator of the challenge rewards the winner by giving them the means to make their idea a reality. We all know how powerful a well-organized crowd can be in forcing change. What could be better than using the power of crowdsourcing for social, and cultural, good?

Have we missed any?

Photo credit: Warby Parker Eyewear

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HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR THE POST-ADVERTISING SUMMIT YET?

We’ll be peering into the future of all things content marketing, advertising, journalism and social media at our Post-Advertising Summit, March 29th in New York City. We’ll stop talking and start DOING with workshops that put pen to paper and truly create a piece of valuable content. Speakers including Simon Dumenco (AdAge), Shira Lazar (What’s Trending), Joe Pulizzi (Content Marketing Institute) and more. In order to get the best price, reserve your seat at the Summit table today!

Facebook’s recent integration with various websites and applications is the latest and largest move toward a more social, more streamlined online experience. With this new method of sharing, users can automatically connect their Facebook profiles with apps to instantly stream their online activity. “Frictionless sharing” was recently named one of the top social trends of 2011 by ReadWriteWeb, a clear endorsement of the trend of lifestreaming, in which users collect all parts of their online existence and experience into a unified webpage.

If we are to believe the forecasting of Mark Zuckerberg, the amount of information we share on the Internet will double every year. This may seem like an intimidating figure, especially among users concerned about some old-timey concept called “privacy,” but although online sharing will undoubtedly become more automatic, it will still be an individual, elective choice. All participating apps allow you to opt out of frictionless sharing, thereby protecting your potentially humiliating online activity from your social network.

Let’s not overlook the fact that there are also distinct benefits of this phenomenon. For consumers, it means a more streamlined method of sharing and a brand new way to make suggestions to friends and take advice from peers. For apps, it’s a form of free advertising and a way to start a social discussion surrounding their original content. By automating interaction, the apps appear more useful and involving than the human user normally has time to initiate.

So where does this leave brands?

Because of the diversity of applications using frictionless sharing, any forward-thinking and social brand can latch onto the trend. There are plenty of video and music apps seamlessly connected with Facebook, so creating a brand presence on any of these sites will help crack into the coveted millennial audience. Creating playlists on Spotify, for example, can be an engaging new way for brands to reach a lot of users without a huge advertising spend.

A committed social brand could also use Facebook’s Open Graph Beta to activate frictionless sharing technology in its own app, as it is now available to all Facebook developers. A brand’s blog could enable this feature to become a more prevalent fixture on Facebook. “Katie Edmondson read ‘Frictionless Sharing’ on Post-Advertising” is an automatic and free advertisement that will create brand awareness and add a level of personal connection in the form of a simple referral.

Is Frictionless Sharing an Accurate Indication of Interest?

With manual sharing and content aggregation, users must actively choose which morsels they wish to share from the wide buffet of the web. This means that each morsel is especially delicious, in the eyes of the user. With automatic sharing, users inevitably end up broadcasting content that they did not particularly like, but just happened to watch, read or hear (or, worse, mistakenly click on and then bounce). It stands to reason that it will become much more difficult for all of us to sift through the barrage of recommendations to find the most succulent bites, inevitably leading to oversaturation of recommendations.

There is no mechanized filter in this system—it is an all-or-nothing social experience as determined by the user. This may decrease the quality of content shared, but it will certainly increase the quantity. While consumers may feel inundated by the amount of shared content, they will eventually create their own personal filters about what they choose to engage with.

For a brand trying to enter into this new frontier, great content will still win as users quickly learn to take in and mentally categorize the flood of new recommendations. Something unique and interesting will grab the attention of a jaded Facebook user far more than an endless stream of mediocre material.

What do you think: How else can brands best take advantage of frictionless sharing? Share your own thoughts below.

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The art of tightrope walking is one of those feats whose objective is simple but accomplishing it is not: The walker must travel from one end of the tightrope to the other without falling off. All of us at some point in our lives have tried a version of this, usually on the curb of a sidewalk, and have quickly realized that it’s not as easy as it looks. It takes balance and concentration to keep from falling. Make it a high wire and the difficulty increases exponentially: Failure now has much more dire consequences.

Every brand that has created a social media persona walks a tightrope every day: the tightrope of privacy and transparency. Lean too far to the side of privacy and you’re seen as a cold, faceless company that doesn’t care about connecting with your audience. Lean too far to the side of transparency and you risk spilling undisclosed information, giving incorrect or improper advice, or even breaking the law.

In the past, brands didn’t have much opportunity to walk this tightrope. Because there was no Internet access, employees were seen but not often heard. Customers could try if they wished to telephone a human being to ask for help but usually fell victim to phone trees or endless hold music. Remember the adage “A happy customer tells one friend; an angry one tells seven”? Only seven? A brand should be so lucky!

Stepping Off the Platform

In the post-advertising age, the walls maintaining privacy have come tumbling down, and not just for brands. People who would ordinarily be mere acquaintances now have their fingers on the pulse of our lives. They see our daily updates, the places we go, the pictures of our children, our employers’ names and our interests. They read our thoughts, which spill into blogs and Twitter updates. One ne’er-do-well among those 500 “friends” and 1,000 “followers” could wreak havoc with us if they so desired.

As the social paradigm shifts and consumers allow practically carte blanche access to their personal lives, brands are expected to follow suit. Since brands have extended their reach by creating digital personas across social channels, customers perceive those channels as granting 24/7 access to a human being who is ready and willing to listen to their concerns. But for some brands it’s not as easy as planting a community manager in front of a laptop and responding to Twitter mentions and Facebook comments. Brands, mainly those in the pharmaceutical and alcohol industries, are bound by legal regulations concerning public communications. So what’s a brand to do?

Brands on the Line

In most cases, the answer is “Proceed with caution.” Putting your brand reputation (and legal standing) in the hands of a few employees can be a worthwhile yet dangerous undertaking. Most brands create a hierarchical process for approving content on social-media sites like Facebook. Consumers may like to believe that cool video about winemaking was shared spontaneously with 200,000 fans, but in reality, wall posts tend to be approved well in advance of the actual posting. This process may take weeks, a delay that sometimes keeps the content on a page from being timely.

User-generated comments on Facebook pages can be a trickier situation. When you allow your fans access to your wall, they are free to post whatever they want. Of course, they are subject to Facebook-specific guidelines, but alcohol and pharma are notably stricter when it comes to their rules.

Let’s look at an example. Toasted Head (Story client) is a wine brand (and part of the larger Constellation Wine family). Toasted Head creates an active Facebook community and encourages discussion and interaction among fans. There are times, however, when the brand must delete even a small-seeming comment. Any reference, however subtle, to overconsumption, underage drinking or inappropriate sexuality gets the ax. Even any mention of a hangover is a no-no. There is a disclaimer in the information section of the page, but there is always the fear that someone will be outraged by his or her post being deleted. Or, worse, that someone will go on a Facebook commenting rampage and the brand won’t be able to delete it in time.

But these regulations are nothing when compared to the FDA-monitored pharmaceutical industry, in which everything needs approval. And we mean everything. Change a comma placement without approval and you may be in legal trouble. Change a whole sentence and forget about it. Interacting with people via Facebook, where fingers type so rapidly without thinking of consequences, is very difficult for a pharma brand. This industry is one of the last to enter the social-media sphere; slowly it is sticking a toe onto the dangerous tightrope. Social-media applications like PharmaWall improve the situation by allowing administrators to approve, deny or suggest changes for incoming comments. Whether this approval process will disrupt the natural and immediate flow of Facebook has yet to be seen, but it is certainly a positive step for brands to comply with legal restrictions while still directly interacting with the public.

My metaphor for dealing with privacy and transparency has a flaw, however. For a flesh-and-blood tightrope walker, there’s a platform at the other end: a clear destination. The dawn of the post-advertising age has shone a light on new horizons, but social media is an everlasting effort. As we continue to reach audiences through social media, we’ll continue to teeter on the tightrope between privacy and transparency.

How are your brands dealing with privacy and transparency in the digital age?

Fraud in the world of digital marketing isn’t something new, of course. We’ve written about Amazon rewarding reviewers with freebies calling into question how reliable consumer feedback is. There are also message boards dedicated to the art of black hat SEO where users can chat about buying YouTube views, blog cloning, article spinning, keyword stuffing, Google +1 trading and more techniques that will make your skin crawl (I hope).

The Fate of a Black Hat Social Media Marketer

Any savvy marketer would recognize this practice as, well, just silly. Just because you have fans doesn’t mean they’re actually actively engaged or interested. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee it will drive purchase. Seth Godin has written extensively about the double-edged sword of chasing followers. The value of your audience is entirely reliant on their level of engagement, so passive Facebook fans just boost your ego, not your brand’s worth.

But more importantly, those engaging in black-hat social media are committing downright fraud. They are lying if they tell the world that they have a certain number of fans, when those fans aren’t mildly engaged and many may not even be human. And they will be caught. With the rise of apps like Klout and PeerIndex, the public can measure the effect a brand has on its audience, but even those technologies can be gamed.

Once found out, how do you think the public will view these brands? They’ll certainly lose credibility from the public’s perspective.

Even if they don’t get caught, per say, they’ll quickly find that all fans aren’t created equal and simply clicking “like” doesn’t promise social mentions, purchases, or evangelism, especially if that user doesn’t have a pulse!

The Moral High Ground

Not all brands are involved in this shady underworld of black-hat social media. A few have been extremely transparent throughout the process and personally engaged with consumers, listening and responding accordingly. For example, Burberry launched a Facebook page last year that included Burberry Acoustic, a feature dedicated to entertain users with musical performances from up-and-coming artists. As of November 2010, the brand had more than two million fans. Today, by keeping the content relevant and up to day, these numbers are quickly approaching 100,000,000.

For further reading, check out our free eBook about effective Facebook audience generation techniques.

What do you think of black hat social media techniques? Do you think any major brands are taking part?

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This post originally appeared in our November issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Free music streaming services are here to stay. So when will brands really come out and play? Saviors like Spotify and MOG, plus the now-seasoned vets Pandora and Last.fm—which have dragged the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century—are now the best bets at monetizing and spreading music legally into the future. And now, via social platforms like Facebook and its Open Graph, they’re encouraging more sharing than ever before.

Top that off with the hundreds of ingenious apps and web sites taking shape through music’s newfound online freedom and you’ve got one hell of an opportunity—one that most brands have squandered. Turns out, there’s much brands can do, as both advertiser and Page admin, to utilize these valuable new tools.

Today’s range of music tools and platforms—which help listeners discover, curate, mash up,  and make social all things music—is simply staggering. This graphic from Fast Company (below) illustrates just a small crop of the 200+ apps that utilize the Echo Nest, primarily a searchable database for app developers of every possible data point imaginable of 30 million songs called the Musical Brain. Included in this effort is how the brand has teamed up with EMI to offer a full range of songs and artists for app developers to create with.

In addition, the Echo Nest recently wrapped up their second-ever Music Hack Day in Boston, which yielded over 50 fully-formed music apps using a variety of APIs including the Echo Nest’s database.

THE STATE OF MUSIC: SPOTIFY, MOG AND MORE

As July’s successful launch of Spotify on North American shores proves, music fans are hungry for a free service that offers access a massive library of songs from anywhere. Sadly, brand involvement with Pandora and Spotify so far has mostly been limited to brand-sponsored radio stations and vaguely associated playlists, respectively.

Competitor MOG offers another way to cut the ties that bind listeners to local libraries in favor of the cloud—not to mention countless other applications that are legally using labels’ catalogues in new and original ways. While MOG is perhaps more innovative in their solution to offering free streams of legal tunes, both platforms lean heavy on the ads (banner and audio) to foot the bill—paid placements that are decidedly interruptive in approach and unfitting for forward-thinking web 2.0 platforms.

Running web banners and audio spots between songs is not post-advertising. It’s traditional,  intrusive, and  intolerable in the long run by users. And if having to endure advertising on Spotify encourages a user to pony up for a subscribe just to avoid having to hear and see them, what does that tell you about Spotify’s commitment to advertisers? In this day and age, what brand should knowingly pay for these ads that are so obnoxious and repetitive they inspire the audience to  turn against your brand completely?

While Spotify’s free variant solely supports itself on the back of ad banners and ad spots between songs, MOG offers a more respectable solution: a limited number of songs for a given period of time, as indicated by an in-dashboard meter or “gas tank.” Increase it by performing a number of social tasks like sharing a playlist on Facebook, referring a friend or listening to one of the platform’s currently promoted artists—great ways to encourage discovery and, in the instance of sponsored artists, a great alternative to force-feeding it. Imagine, as an extension, brand-sponsored playlists that earn users more listens or a brand’s own MOG account, which can be followed in exchange for points. It’s not that far of a stretch.

The solution shouldn’t be to use archaic advertising methods as a negative reinforcement for fans to sign up for an unlimited, no-ad subscription (the rate of ads is expected to rise in the coming weeks as the “honeymoon” ends for us users). In the near future, such ad-baiting (if that’s what these services are really up to) won’t be tolerated by users—and, won’t be paid for by brands who will no longer accept anything less than meaningful partnerships that engage their audience.

HOW CAN BRANDS LEVERAGE NEW MUSIC PLATFORMS IN UNTRADITIONAL/NON-INTERRUPTIVE WAYS?

In order to understand how brands might better work with platforms like Pandora, Spotify and MOG, we must recognize what primarily makes these platforms work: music is an inherently social good. As such, every popular music app has experienced an explosion in new sign ups and activity since Facebook made recording, tracking and sharing listening habits simple and effortless. Famously announced at f8 by way of Spotify, another four million people have joined since September 22^nd. MOG has grown by 246% and Rdio 30-fold since the conference, reports Mashable.

What does this tell us? That each and every brand Page on Facebook should be working to include post brand-appropriate Spotify, MOG and similar platform content into future posts: curated playlists, select song shares when appropriate, contests calling for the best playlists or the creation of collaborative playlists. Lindsay Fultz at Middle Child New Media has a number of quick-and-easy ways to incorporate Spotify’s library and feature set. In general, these platforms offer the chance to incorporate music—an emotional touchstone and connective tissue of society—without legalities into any number of situations as a way to color a brand’s personality and content stream like never before.

SPECIAL RECOGNITION: BRANDS TAKING ON STREAMING MUSIC

Brand: Mercedes Benz
Platform/Service: Grooveshark
Campaign: The Coupe Remixes
Why It Works: German luxury automobile maker Mercedes Benz took things up a notch by working with streaming service Grooveshark recently on a full-scale remix contest. Listeners voted for their favorite song from a brand-curated list of 12. The top 8 were chosen to be remixed in an exclusive new album, “generated by you.” Perhaps a basic, limited contest, it still takes MB a step beyond the usual interruption-based advert, successfully getting the brand’s musical tastes across (“curated specifically for you”) while keeping the listener control of the contest (“generated by you”).

Brand: Lexus
Platform/Service: Pandora
Campaign: Engineering Amazing: Campaign site and on Pandora
Why It Works: Instead of simply linking off to a campaign website unrelated to Pandora, Lexus took the opportunity to produce a full radio station curated by Nic Harcourt around the idea of “future proof” as it relates to music. Part of their Engineering Amazing campaign, Lexus also produced a video with their tastemaker further elaborating on theme and how it relates to both music and Lexus’ sustainability efforts. An in-banner text field allows the listener to suggestion their own “future proof” song. Compelling stuff.

Furthermore, Lexus has integrated Pandora functionality into their next generation 2013 GS sedan’s Enform entertainment system, proving, as a brand, that they’re taking the platform seriously. Similarly, Ford announced its new Focus would feature Spotify connectivity.

WHAT DRINKIFY MEANS TO MARKETERS: AN OPPORTUNITY MISSED

Along with the brilliant-but-brand-challenged streaming, socially-spreading heavy hitters Spotify and MOG, there are similar platforms like Grooveshark and Rdio, slick discovery tools like Discovr, Pocket Hipster and Groovebug, uploading and sharing tools like Soundcloud and fun, ingenious one-off ideas like Turntable.fm and Drinkify. All these great tools are life-changing listener solutions, primed and ready to grow with the right partnership. (Case in point: MTV’s Music Meter, a match made in heaven.)

Drinkify in particular resonates as a telling example of a missed opportunity on the part of brands. Created as a part of Music Hack Day Boston 2011, the simple site generates the perfect drink to pair with any given artist or group. It uses a combination Last.fm’s API for photos, name corrections, the Echo Nest for artist info and their own proprietary drink database.

How about if Toasted Head wine (client) had developed the idea themselves? A specific Toasted Head version could focus on entertaining and more broadly play you a genre of music based on, say, type of wine you’re drinking, location (it looks at weather, climate) and environment (indoor/outdoor) in order to provide you a number of pairings—not just what music to pair with your wine, but which food, activities, conversation topics, movies and so on. Or perhaps still, imagine Drinkify as a helpful app from a large alcohol retailer to offer mixed drink package deals and as a way to introduce specials on certain artists/genres/etc.

At the very least, a site like Drinkify is ripe with opportunities for brand sponsorship—try searching for most indie bands and you’ll get Pabst Blue Ribbon or Red Stripe. What if the corresponding brands sponsored these drinks and funded functionality to locate PBR or Red Stripe at liquor stores or bars that offer PBR or Red Stripe drink specials?

On the subject of radio channels available on iTunes-like streaming music platforms that mimic Pandora’s approach, consider Spotify’s radio channel, which picks tunes based on which tag you select. What if Heineken had its own tab, which played pre-selected, brand-appropriate songs, like the ones regularly used in TV ads.

By licensing out their API or capabilities to a 3^rd party, groundbreaking platforms like Spotify and MOG can help sustain themselves better and at the same time stir genuine innovation—a brand’s content must be great in order to captivate and catch on, after all. On thing’s for sure: music’s future does not include ads that hold listeners hostage. In the listener’s world, the brand should be an active participant and have a personality formed around the subject matter. Anything less is advertising as usual.

What branding opportunities on these emerging platforms do you think have been missed?

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The good news is that the days since then have shown that change, while it will always frighten some people (an effect that seems to be amplified a thousand-fold when it comes to Facebook—Pete Cashmore went in a single CNN article from “you’ll revolt” and “you will hate” to “Facebook has unleashed something so remarkable that you didn’t even recognize it at first: A meaningful social network”), will be a good thing for this medium—especially for brands. And it all makes logical financial sense that it should. Although being the biggest player on the social media block will always be important to Zuckerberg and Co., the real success comes from monetizing the network they’ve worked so hard to build and expand. In order to do that, brands need to be successful in the space. As Mashable’s Todd Wasserman put it yesterday, “It could be the Facebook advertising solution that turns advertising partners (brands) into better social media communicators and gets Facebook members to start recommending and sharing advertisers as much as they do the latest cat video.” In other words, in order for brands to be successful on Facebook, they now, more than ever, have to tell a compelling story.

Viewed through that lens, it’s easier to see how many of the changes being rolled out at Facebook over the next few weeks (explained in detail below) will not only make the user experience more engaging, but also will make it easier for brands to tell their story in engaging ways—and to more easily share and spread that story among fans and potential fans. As has been true in the broader advertising realm for a few years now, the key to success for brands will be creating engaging content that fans feel compelled to share and spread.

Timeline

What It Is: If Facebook up until this point has been a momentary snapshot of your life, then Timeline will turn it into a deep digital scrapbook. It’s obvious that this feature is meant to be the focus of the new Facebook; Zuckerberg said they spent a year developing it when they unveiled it last week. “It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up,” he said. “Timeline is the story of your life.” The aim is to make the profile page more accurately reflect who you are as a person, showing your growth (and, crucially, activity) over time, and with a more attractive design with space for a large photo.

What It Means for Brands: This change is an inarguable win, as it allows brands to carefully craft their own story, turning their Facebook profile into something more akin to a visual corporate “about” page with fan interaction tacked on below. Assuming the brand maintains consistent messaging over time, it allows brands to convey that intended message all at once, with more space to present beautiful creative accomplishments. Just be sure that the big beautiful 840×310 image you choose to utilize as your main profile shot also makes sense if you only see the bottom half of it—as that’s what it will be cropped to in the default view.

The Updated News Feed

What It Is: The majority of media attention on the Facebook changes so far has focused on the new News Feed that has already rolled out, splitting the old version into different components determined by relevance and gives greater emphasis to visuals. The main news feed still includes status updates from most of your friends, but much like a newspaper it displays the most important stories (determined by relevance to you) at the top “above the fold,” with other recent stories continuing below. Even these lower-tier stories are limited to those with a higher level of relevance, with a small “# More Recent Stories” prompt in the upper right corner of the feed to click to display those of lesser relevance. (How is such “relevance” determined? Well, that is still a bit of a closely guarded Facebook secret, but it’s an on-steroids version of the EdgeRank algorithm they’ve used in the past. On a basic level, it prioritizes friends, family, pages, etc. based on how much you have interacted with their content, and how recently.) The bulk of other Facebook actions—friends commenting on other people’s posts or photos, interacting with apps (such as listening to music on Spotify) or, crucially, liking a brand page—are now relegated to a Twitter-esque scrolling “Ticker” in the top right corner of the page.

What It Means for Brands: This change, in particular, is a tough one for companies to swallow. Not only are most casual interactions with brands now relegated to a space that people are already beginning to identify as a gutter of unwanted content, but depending on the browser, when users have the window below a certain size, this Ticker can push advertisements below it, inevitably decreasing the number of eyeballs that see a given ad. For most brands, it will be a primary goal to get out of people’s Ticker and into their main news feed. And the best way to do that is by creating content that people are inspired to like, comment on, and share.

Frictionless Sharing

What It Is: No longer will people be limited to merely “liking” or “sharing” a page. They will soon be able to have all sorts of interactions, such as “reading” a magazine article or “watching” a TV show, and more—although Facebook will only initially add this functionality for articles, music and video, they say it will be opened up to developers in the near future, meaning that at some point users could be able to click that they “tasted” a wine at an event or “drove” a specific model of car. And once enabled for a site, this sharing will be done automatically, without the need for a user to click a button to do it manually (or the ability to choose what gets shared and what doesn’t).

What It Means for Brands: This customization phase is still a little ways off, as the first phase has to roll out before it can be adapted by developers, but the possibilities are as endless as the apps that could utilize them. As a brand, especially one with multiple products, it may be important to signify how fans are interacting with your product beyond merely liking your brand. For a feel for how this frictionless sharing or passive application interactions will work, just look at the notifications in your Ticker of your friends’ Spotify activity, where users are automatically expressing their app interactions to their friends without any manual sharing.

Tracking Technology

What It Is: Beyond the class-action lawsuit, Facebook is now facing new uproar over a little cookie that they’ve tried to sweep under the rug. The cookie in question, called “datr” and enabled by the Facebook Connect “like” buttons scattered across the web, tracks and logs browsers’ activity whether they’re logged into Facebook or not, as first reported in May by the Wall Street Journal. Although Facebook claimed it had been disabled, Australian programmer and blogger Nik Cubrilovic discovered last week that it was still busily tracking his movements across sites and IDing him with his Facebook identity, despite the fact that he had already logged out of Facebook. (Facebook has since responded that it was a bug that it is trying to fix, saying that “no information we receive when you see a social plugin is used to target ads.”). With Congress now pushing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook over privacy concerns, this is certainly a developing story.

What It Means for Brands: Despite all the media attention, there’s very little here to concern brands, unless the FTC cracks down hard on Facebook or the bad press causes people to leave the site in droves (the former is highly unlikely, the latter completely impossible). Should the tracking be forced to cease, users would then have to re-log in on a brand site to signify that they “like” that page using the Facebook plug-in…but should we get to that point, Facebook will undoubtedly devise a simpler solution.

Expandable Social Ads

What They Are: These ads haven’t rolled out yet, so information is somewhat speculative (although confirmed by sources at Facebook), but they are intended to expand the reach and influence of advertising on Facebook by combining the custom content of standard engagement ads with the personal touch of Sponsored Stories (which only display that a friend has liked a page, without offering the opportunity to provide additional content). Think of them as a Sponsored Story, but now with feeling.

What It Means for Brands: This feature will further blur the lines between paid-for promotional messaging and social postings, as it looks and acts just like a regular post, with space to comment and discuss in-ad. These new ad units will display comments in addition to the likes offered by Sponsored Stories, offering the potential for instantaneous word-of-mouth endorsements from friends—or, if your brand or message is unpopular or untrue, the opportunity for consumers to blast you in real time, reinforcing the need for regular monitoring in social media. One potential drawback is that interaction with this ad will not appear in the new main news feed, negating the potential for the organic growth that would arise when a consumer’s friend network saw that they commented on your brand. But the inarguable marketing power of recommendations from friends will undoubtedly be worth that price.

People Talking About

What It Is: This new measurement tool works as a way to measure engagement beyond simple “likes,” providing a tally of all user-generated “stories”—basically any interaction with the content on your page that would register in the news ticker (comments, posts, liking comments or posts, answering questions, sharing and checking in), to measure overall engagement with the content.

What It Means for Brands: Not only is this a great tool to measure fan engagement with the content you publish (giving a more complete picture of how much people like, not merely “like,” your brand), it will also be a public-facing measurement that will appear under the number of “likes” on a page—meaning that a visitor can see at a glance whether there’s compelling enough content to keep them around. For brands, this will only make the publication of regular, engaging content more important—and more rewarding.

Friends of Fans

What It Is: This new insight (available only to administrators of pages) provides an overall number of friends your fans have. In other words, it’s a measurement of the potential reach of your content should all of your fans choose to share or interact with it.

What It Means for Brands: Although this number really only puts a value on your brand’s potential energy in this medium, it reinforces the importance of providing interesting, original, share-worthy content. Even if you have only 100 “SuperFans” who are so devoted to the content you provide that they share it with their networks, and they each average 250 friends, it’s safe to assume that a compelling piece of content you publish will quickly be shared with an opted-in network of 25,000 people, many of whom will be motivated to pass it further.

Weekly Total Reach

What It Is: This number (again, only available to administrators of pages) will tally your content’s actual messaging spread for the week—in other words, how many people and organizations used Facebook to spread the word about your page and its content.

What It Means for Brands: This will be an extremely useful measure of the success of your content’s spread (especially when compared against the overall “Friends of Fans” number as a ratio of shareability), but shouldn’t be seen as the be-all, end-all as it obviously doesn’t measure message spread outside of Facebook through word of mouth, email forwards, or other means.

And that’s the most important stuff…for now. Pending the outcome of various litigation and legislative involvement, these changes are expected to roll out over the next few weeks, and more changes and tweaks could soon follow. It’s certainly a lot to adapt to all at once, but the message from Facebook to brands can be summed up in three words: Create. Better. Content. “Those brands will have a better chance of winning over friends of fans either by advertising or by creating something viral,” explains Mashable’s Todd Wasserman. “It’s a cycle that has the potential to redefine the way we interact with brands. From now on, brands will be friends or friends of friends rather than spammers trying to bombard your consciousness.” The overall effect is inarguably to make Facebook a more user-friendly—and, crucially, brand-friendly—place.

But what about the brands we aren’t familiar with? Is the Facebook environment, complete with hyper-targeted ads, a good place to find new customers? According to a recent study by DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research (as reported by Ad Age), 84% of a typical brand’s Facebook fans are existing customers. The implied meaning is that Facebook, while an incredibly effective customer retention and engagement tool, is much less of a customer acquisition tool than most brands have thought.

At first glance, this may be surprising to many brands. With Facebook’s massive audience—currently 750 million active users—brands are practically foaming at the mouth to use the tool to bring new customers aboard. However, it’s not the brand that defines the platform, it’s the users. Facebook is a place where users connect with those they already know, as opposed to a tool like Twitter or a service like Groupon where users are more likely to connect with new people or try new brands. Even Facebook’s worse-than-clunky search functionality makes it apparent that the platform is not the place to find new friends, but to reconnect with existing ones and foster relationships (or reignite old ones).

What does this mean for brands?

The relationship is not fundamentally different between brands and their Facebook fans—users choose to follow brands that they have a preexisting relationship with. The challenge is for brands to adjust their content marketing strategy to address the needs of the users that make up the majority of their fan base. Common customer acquisition tools like coupons, which can prompt a non-user to try a product, may be less relevant to an evangelist. On Facebook, the focus for brands should be on creating content that fans will find useful or entertaining—or, preferably, both. This type of content is more likely to be organically spread by the brand’s fans, naturally becoming a successful customer acquisition tool, even if it does nothing beyond spreading brand awareness.

Successful content creation on Facebook includes creating interactive games, contests, recipes, or simply tapping Facebook as a resource to ask your fans questions that could prompt valuable feedback or new ideas. If you’re looking to truly ramp up your Facebook content strategy, read our post outlining five ways to keep your Facebook content fresh.

Keep it all in context

We’re not saying that this study itself is flawed, but brands should also take this statistic with a grain of salt. This is a VERY broad stroke, and even in their findings they note that it’s for a “typical” brand. Facebook houses thousands upon thousands of brand pages, and no two brands are exactly the same. Some brands are historic and others are just starting out, and each will have different needs and audiences. So while this study delivers a point that is generally correct, make sure you’re taking into consideration where your brand (or product) is in its lifecycle. A younger brand is often more desperate to build up awareness than anything.

Also, understand the difference between a content strategy and a customer acquisition strategy. Targeted Facebook ads can be very useful and cost-effective for raising awareness, especially early in a brand’s lifecycle. And maybe your Facebook advertising efforts remain consistent for years. But what this study truly reveals is that your content strategy should always focus on creating unique, fresh, and consistent content that engages your existing audience. This is something we truly believe holds true for ALL brands (without breaking down content strategy minutia, like posting frequency).

That’s our take—what do you think this study reveals for brands? If you’re a Community Manager, will this change your content strategy?

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This post originally appeared in our August issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Most marketing agencies approach their content with the standard brush. They take a look at the latest tools and trends, and pull together a few tips here and there. That subtle approach is not necessarily a bad thing, but in this difficult economy, that’s no longer good enough. Desperate times call for bold strokes. That’s why we at Story Worldwide have decided to put our money where our mouth is — we’re not only outlining five key ideas for the future of content marketing, we’re currently investing in them.

1. Big brands need editorial councils

Content is the only thing that attracts and truly motivates consumers in this opt-in world. It’s required to start and sustain all conversations in social media. But managing ongoing multichannel content production is complex, combining best practices from traditional publishing companies, marketing consultancies and digital agencies. Not to mention, not everyone is truly a natural storyteller. Real storytelling requires different skills and experience than traditional advertising. It requires a mastery of narrative techniques. Metaphors. Archetypes. Character. Story arcs. It also requires a committing to being ‘always on,’ producing content and managing the resulting conversations on an ongoing continual basis.

Brands that truly strive for effective multichannel content, particularly if it spans borders, languages, and traditions, must establish what we call an Editorial Council. They produce an Editorial Strategy and an Editorial Calendar. All content proceeds from there. The brand feeds the Editorial Council; the Editorial Council creates the Editorial Strategy and the Editorial Calendar, which guide all executions. At Story we’ve seen this work to great success with Lexus, and as big brands begin to embrace content more wholeheartedly, we expect to see it become far more commonplace.

2. Make every employee a content producer

Often brands that create content, especially blogs, have dedicated authors. They’re usually a select few individuals, often in the marketing department (and strangely removed from much of the brand’s day-to-day operations), who gather and produce the content. But we’ve shifted to a place where valuable content lives in every nook and cranny of your brand and business. You’ve got talented team members churning out valuable and unique products, yet their expertise and knowledge is restricted to their cubicle or personal blog.

Leverage the most valuable assets within your company – your employees – and encourage and empower them to share their expertise, turning it into a truly unique piece of content. They don’t have to write the final version (that’s where the real writers come in), but they can be a source of content that no marketing department can ever unearth on their own.

Consider creating a blog post, a how-to series, an eBook, or simply interview them and upload it as a podcast or a Q&A on your blog. At Story, we not only help produce such content for companies like Toasted Head wines, but we’ve also begun producing a series of 16 eBooks (one is available now) written by our talented game developers, writers, designers, and more.

3. Feed your community with fresh content

Simply maintaining a stream of content for your community, whether it’s on a blog or on Facebook, is not enough. In order to effectively engage audiences, brands must constantly produce unique content to keep their audience’s attention piqued. Otherwise, like produce, your community will spoil.

We’re not just talking about the difference between infrequent and frequent content. Simply posting content frequently doesn’t mean it’s “fresh,” in this case. I can eat a fresh grapefruit every day for breakfast but after a while, no matter how juicy it is, I’m going to get sick of it. We’re suggesting that on top of frequently posting content, in order to properly cultivate a community, you MUST continually innovate – create many different types of content, including unique content (think games, live event coverage, innovating upon user-generated content) that can ONLY be found within your community. We go much more in depth here.

4. Be willing to leave your home base

A common strategy for most brands is to create individual  pieces of content that pull the user back to the brand’s home base. This content spreads across paid and owned — from Google PPC to eBooks to social media accounts — with the basic idea that you should reach audiences where they are and bring them back to your brand site (home base) where they can learn more, print a coupon to purchase your product or fill out a contact form to inquire about your services.

It’s a standard strategy and we’re not suggesting you ditch your home base completely (particularly for SEO purposes), but moving forward your brand needs to have more respect for both your individual content pieces and the audiences you’re trying to reach. View each piece of content as a brand advocate in and of itself. Design them in a way that carries your brand objectives and brand values with links to the places you want to take consumers. It’s not reasonable to think that an advocate of your brand actually wants to spend time on your brand’s site. What’s reasonable is to think that your brand advocates will help a great piece of content spread. Experiences are now between the person and the useful content, so focusing more on creating that spreadable content and less on how to get them back to your site will pay dividends.

5. Allow digital content marketing to drive offline behavior

“Involve the fans” is the sine qua non of digital marketing today. But to date, these participation opportunities have been strictly limited. Bringing them into your community is always important, but what happens when they get there? Are your goals loftier than just engagement? Particularly if your product or service is tangible, can you really use digital to move the analog needle? And can generating productive online-to-offline behavior really lower traditional ad spending?

Yes, believe it or not, digital content marketing is not restricted to just driving online behavior (becoming a fan, signing up for a newsletter, sharing a post, or e-commerce). You can drive offline behavior through digital by involving advocates materially in the creation of content, and curating the digital communities that form around it. We’ve seen this happen first hand with our client WGNA and their How I Met Your Mother Superfan community. WGNA features “Superfans” in TV spots, tweeters show up in crawls during shows, and fans program the lineup for episode marathons (primarily achieved through Facebook and YouTube). In exchange, WGNA has been able to leverage the show’s existing online fan base to drive audience, positioning WGNA well for the long-term transition from lean-back-TV to online-interactive experience. Not to mention, it means they can continue to reduce their stake in budget-intensive traditional advertising and move a portion of it towards post-advertising while banking the rest.

(We believe in this last one so much that we’ll be hosting a session at Content Marketing World about this very topic.)

These are five of our big ideas that are brewing at Post-Advertising. Do you think we’re on-point or off-base? What big ideas do YOU have?

And there’s a reason the term “Community Manager” exists instead of “Facebook Page Writer.” Social media provides a place where communities of people with common interests can congregate, and its up to the Community Manager to keep those groups alive and flourishing. For a week, it’s no problem. After a month, you’re still doing fine. But what happens after a year? Two years? How can community managers keep their fans engaged over the long haul?

Here are five ways community managers can keep content fresh on Facebook:

1. Reward Your Fans

Your fans don’t want to feel like they’re just part of the crowd. They want to be recognized for their passion. One common approach (employed by major brands like Oreo) is to publicly select a Fan of the Day/Week/Month and have their picture featured within the profile picture. While it can be very effective, this technique is nothing new and has no barrier to entry. There are now even apps that will automate this process for you. Instead, consider making a low cost investment (even just a $10 t-shirt) and create a contest unique to your page. Fans love to be part of something, especially if a real prize is involved. Put some real effort into your contests and a small investment can turn into major engagement.

2. Improvise on the Spot

Because your Facebook Page is (or at least should be) a living, breathing community, Community Managers have to respond to posts by their fans. I wouldn’t be teaching you anything if I told you to “Respond to as many fan posts as possible.” You already know (I hope) that engaging with the fans that have taken the time to reach out to you on YOUR page is an activity that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Instead, use that user-generated content and turn it into something unique and fun to your page. Did someone just claim that they have the largest collection of your brand’s shoes? Start an impromptu contest to see who can post the best picture with their shoe collection! Did they post that they know the most trivia about your band? Create a quiz! Simply replying to comments from your community and letting that be the end of it is a wasted opportunity.

3. Assess and Reassess your Content Mix

No matter what it is—your diet, your workout, or even your iPod—the same thing over and over again eventually gets boring. Yes, even if it’s as good as the Backstreet Boys Black and Blue album (Nothing but the hits on that album…not that I would know).

Your fans feel the same way about your page, too. Make it a point every month (or even more frequently) to take a step back and assess your content mix. Are you just posting your blog feed? Are you engaging your fans with questions or polls? Are you posting videos or creating games for them to play? How are you constantly encouraging your community to get involved and contribute?

4. Develop Timely Content

Content plans are an effective way to ensure the content you’re providing to your community is on brand, and thereby help prevent social media disasters. But that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone or that it’s the only content you can share with your community. Our world is constantly changing, and the most consumed content is that which is timely – addressing the issues of the day (or even hour). Community Managers should have both the authority and the wherewithal to quickly adapt and address issues that arise. It doesn’t even have to be immediate, worldly news either. If you’re managing a Facebook community of Mad Men fans, what are you planning for the Season premiere? Give your community something to rally around and get excited about.

5. Bring Your Brand to Life with Live Event Coverage

One of my favorite uses of Facebook as a brand is to help curate live event coverage. It’s not a “new” idea, but I think it’s underutilized. It tends to be more of an afterthought – “Hey, we’re a sponsor of that concert. We should go there, take a few pictures, and throw them up on our page! Right?” Instead, plan to attend events that make sense to your brand, even if you’re not sponsoring them, and build a Facebook content plan around it by including as many different types of content as possible. Kim Crawford Wines (client) had Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week covered from head to toe with contests, interviews, videos, pictures, and custom designed applications. Chobani also does a great job spanning the U.S. on their “CHOmobile” attending food and health-related events while updating and engaging their community. Its not only a great way to keep content fresh, but gives the added benefit of showing up IRL (in real life) and putting real faces to the brand.

Remember that communities, just like brands, are unique. They serve varied audiences and, thus, the needs and wants of those audiences will differ greatly. Take these tips into consideration but always make your content decisions based on your audience, what they want, and how they want to receive it.

Keeping your content fresh and cultivating your communities, especially on Facebook, has become of paramount importance. The better Community Managers become at building communities with fresh content, the less tolerance we’ll have as social media users for pages that are doing it wrong. The only way to keep up with your fans’ needs is to keep that content fresh, entertaining and useful.

How are you keeping your content fresh? Let me know in the comments.

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The Facts:

The creators: San Francisco-based agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners — the same heads responsible for the long-running “got milk?” slogan. The client: the creepily named California Milk Processor Board. The campaign: A “funny, good-natured” take on PMS and milk’s purported powers to lessen its symptoms. The light-hearted approach to the touchy-by-definition subject matter offered pre-approved apologies men could tell the women in their lives such as, “I’m sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant.” A tongue-in-cheek microsite called everythingidoiswrong.org (no longer live) provided men with a resource on how to deal with their PMS-suffering partner. The content was linked to from a print campaign whose ads feature damned and desperate men illustrating the question: “Are you a man living with PMS?” For men it’s a solution; for women it’s a flame accelerant. Media, content, conversation…what’s not to like?

The Controversy:

The overall intent appears more to inspire the ire of female sufferers for the sake of publicity than to playfully propose milk as an antidote for not just women, but men. Dysphoria, irritability, anxiety, and a hint of irrationality are just some of the negative emotions the California Milk Processor Board evoked.

The Coroner’s Report:

Why did this campaign go sour so fast, and was its death predictable or avoidable? Did milk go too far? It would certainly appear so… The microsite, planned to run through August at least, has been shut down prematurely and replaced with gotdiscussion.org, a half-hearted attempt to convert all that controversy into a productive sales funnel. It’s easy to argue (and tough to retort) that the campaign’s humor went too far. But the question you always have to ask these days: Was all of it intentional? Is it true there’s no such thing as bad press…is every social media failure a meta-success? Nope. As illustrated in this case, sometimes it’s just a failure.

First step in the diagnosis is to acknowledge that this is nothing new. The technical claim “Milk can reduce the symptoms of PMS,” springs from research dating back to 2005 (featured here), which found that getting 1200 mg of calcium per day (basically, four full glasses of milk) reduced symptoms in 55% of women. Because nothing fights that bloated feeling like drinking four full gas-inducing glasses of milk in a day.

The idea that milk could magically reduce PMS, and thereby produce all sort of positive benefits for PMS-punished men, actually began that same year, as previously advertised:

In fact, as Steve James, executive director of the milk board tells The New York Times, it’s “something we’ve done as a campaign five, six times, in general media and in Hispanic media.” So how come 2005′s spots didn’t offend like 2011′s? According to Goodby, “It was a different world in 2005.” Indeed. To steal a good point from AdWeek’s list of the top 10 most piggishly sexist ads ever: The blunt sexism of previous generations now seems otherworldly, but more fingers are being pointed at ads of today that are significantly less sexist in nature and more humorous and tongue-and-cheek in tone.

But we have to ask the question: Are we not being too sensitive? Is a clever (but admittedly edgy and insensitive) approach to advertising a brand claim being unfairly sunk as sexist? Could be. If these great FunnyorDie.com parody ads are any indication, Milk certainly could have done much worse.

In fairness to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, by all unoffended accounts the spots and supporting digital presence are legitimately funny and, more importantly, very well executed. If they took a joke too far, the original everythingidoiswrong.org microsite did it in style, with a global color-coded PMS system, a “puppy-dog eye-zer” photo app that gives any wrongfully endangered dude adorable puppy eyes, a Sensitivity Vocabulator, and even an emergency milk locator (nice product tie-in, guys). The campaign appeals well to a great number of men, while successfully getting the other gender talking. Which is supposed to be what social media is all about.

THE FALLOUT

But there’s no use crying over spilt milk campaigns. (Come on, you knew we couldn’t resist that one.) Everythingidoiswrong.org was quickly replaced with gotdiscussion.org, a seemingly earnest mea culpa featuring a brief apology on behalf of the brand and a rundown of comments and news articles posted. Agency head Jeff Goodby proclaimed, “I don’t see it as ending it or pulling the plug. We accomplished what we set out to accomplish.” Steve James from the milk board talked to The New York Times when the campaign was set to launch, admitting they hoped to “get attention” and “ignite some social media discussion and conversation.”

Brave talk that explains a well thought-out strategy…but quick research reveals that the domain name for gotdiscussion.org wasn’t even registered until July 18th, after the initial campaign had launched. Bravo to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for cleaning it up quickly, but let’s not pretend nobody dropped the jug. AdWeek declines to accept this success talk, and so do we.

Here’s why: Getting a piano-playing cat or a dentist-drugged kid to go viral is child’s play. But when marketing for a brand, we don’t get the freedom to gauge a campaign solely on the noise it generates—it has to move product. The central communication goal was to make people understand that milk can alleviate PMS symptoms, for the purpose of selling more milk. The perceived sexism of the ads was a major backfire—if someone thinks a creative execution is “wrongheaded,” they’ll be disinclined to believe the point the brand is trying to make. In this case they offended the gender making the purchases. “It certainly wasn’t our intention to offend people. We regret that,” says Jeff Goodby now. “No question, with some people we have stepped over the line.”

To be fair, nobody’s going to boycott milk. The reactionary site gotdiscussion.org contains little more than a collection of inflammatory articles and comments, but the anger is either losing steam or being infiltrated by brand-friend positivity police.

And that, ultimately, is this campaign’s great failure. New social media presences produced nominally to “continue the conversation” are being neglected by the brand—at this point, the brand hasn’t posted on Facebook since July 11^th, when the new campaign first launched, and they rarely if ever respond to the myriad of comments. Hardly a robust, two-way brand-consumer conversation. The missed opportunity is the genuine discussion going on with real people right now at gotdiscussion.org. Milk, or their agency proxies, need to get involved, converting the reactionary anger on gotdiscussion.org to a well-hosted home of milk-related topics. If the California Milk Processor Board is going to follow up with an earnest invitation to talk things out, they must actively participate with no exceptions. It’s a captive audience eager to actually talk about your product—stop covering your ass and dare to meet your detractors face to face.

What’s your prediction on how this running story will end? Talk to us below.

First, the Google+ user relationship experience appears more akin to Twitter than Facebook. Unlike Facebook, which requires a reciprocal acceptance, the structure of relationships in Google+ allows any user to add any other user to their Circles. While these Circles allow for unique segmentation of privacy, data, and more, the “follow anyone you want” structure puts the focus less on mutual personal relationships and more on aggregating larger numbers of followers. (Yes, people still care about # of followers)

Does this mean that it’s Twitter that’s in trouble? Not exactly. Granted, they do need to keep a close eye on the increasing capabilities of Google+, but for the smaller Twitter, simplicity is their core value proposition. The 140-character limit works for a variety of uses, and the lack of comment threads makes content consumption a breeze for those who are browsing their feeds.

Second, as Jason Falls recently noted, time spent on the Internet is not a zero-sum game. No one says you have to pick a monogamous social-media spouse. We spend our time on a myriad of sites, and while the introduction of Google+ isn’t exactly a win for Facebook and Twitter, the grim reaper isn’t on their doorstep either.

Basically, despite the undeniable tension of a Tarantino-style Mexican standoff between the three, there’s plenty of room in this town for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to all coexist, maybe even peacefully, with no threat in the near future of any of these social media behemoths falling.

Don’t get me wrong: Google+ is a very real player in the content marketing space. The platform is built to share targeted content and to encourage sharing and conversations – no character limits, less anonymity, larger reach, easier segmentation, integration with Google search, and an open comment system (as long as the post is public, anyone can comment) make Google+ a fantastic place to move your followers to your owned channels.

But Facebook and Twitter still hold on to unique value propositions that Google+ isn’t positioned to infringe upon, and this type of competition can only mean good things for the social media user. Facebook and Twitter will be forced to continually improve and respond to the needs of their customers if they want to keep Google at bay.

However, there remains a key question born of both corporate and user frustrations: Is this yet another social media profile that brands will need to develop a strategy for? And will users find the time to maintain interest in three separate platforms simultaneously?

The answer to the first question is yes, and it’s not a bad thing. Google+ is poised to offer brands new features to engage with their fans that no other platform can. Your brand’s eggs will need to be spread across another basket, but consider it a new opportunity. With the introduction of Google+, there are even more chances to engage fans where they already are, instead of trying to interrupt them while they’re being entertained, or waiting for a bus, or reading a magazine.

The answer to the second question, will people have time for all three, is a bit tougher to answer this early on — but it will undoubtedly be the mortal wound for whichever of these platforms blinks first by holding back on innovation or not listening to what consumers actually want.

So let’s start the debate here: Will you find the time to be an active user of all three? If you think one will inevitably be the first to fall, which one and why? Is Twitter ultimately too simple to stick? Or has Facebook become such a behemoth that it can’t stay nimble enough to keep up with it’s hopelessly broad range of users?

(image)

So why is Google blocking business interaction on Google+? Some may say that they were unprepared for the influx of brand interest and their experience was not optimized for this type of activity. I think they are just taking their time and trying to create a really unique and functional business layer. “How users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands,” Oestlien argues. Google is trying to be sensitive to this difference by creating separate experiences for the two groups.

While we wait for Google to launch their new venture, we can endlessly speculate about potential features for businesses. Some clever tools could be employed to benefit the brand, while others are just fantasy at this stage. In an ideal world, here are some things we would like to see from Google+ (some are real features, while others were hoping Google will implement):

1. Hangouts with Real Customers

One of the unique features on Google+ is a video-chat function that allows users to communicate with each other in groups of up to 10 members. This would be a great place for brands to get direct feedback about their goods and services, while humanizing the brand (literally) and giving consumers a feeling of closeness to the brand.

2. Customer Segmentation via Circles

Google+ lets you group your contacts into different circles according to your relationship to them. Brands could effectively use this tool to group friends according to target audience. For example, it would be ideal to present special offers to evangelists or create campaigns targeting users of a certain age.

3. Personal Profile Access

Depending on privacy levels, brands would be able to view and analyze user pages in order to gain more insight into who their customers are. Facebook currently does not allow Pages to “friend” a personal profile, but perhaps Google+ will break down this barrier. With the implementation of Circles, we hope to see the ability to segment a user’s private information. For example, sharing all your private info with your Friends circle, but limiting your Acquaintances or Brands.

4. Paid Sparks Sponsorship

Sparks on Google+ allows you to find topics you are interested in through a search function. For now, a search for baseball may link you to a “Baseball” page, among others. With paid sponsorships (not unlike Facebook), a search for baseball could link you to “MLB” or even “Ballpark Franks Hot Dogs,” driving more traffic to brand pages. This is a major revenue opportunity for Google and we’d be surprised if this didn’t come to fruition.

5. Google App Integration

Google has hinted their new business platform will allow brands to connect to other parts of the Google experience, which would be a great leveraging tactic considering the vast resources and applications of the internet giant. Google Maps, Docs, YouTube, etc already play important roles for many brands, and Google+ may provide an easy way for businesses to control these various tools and use them to their advantage. Direct linkages between a post on Google+ and YouTube, for example, may prove to be more fluid than Facebook.

What features/functions are you hoping to see on Google + brand pages?

(Image is a concept design by Sean Percival)

A new study by Meebo, a web platform designed to connect people across social networks, indicates that expertise trumps friendship when people surf the web for specific content. Here is the breakdown of the study, which polled a nationally representative sample of 1,473 people:

- 53% of Web users look for recommendations from ‘everyday experts’

- When it comes to specific hobbies or interests, 39% seek strangers while 28% ask friends.

- In the specific field of travel and cooking, 40% ask strangers and 20% trust friends.

This data indicates that while people value the opinions of their friends, they are often more likely to ask strangers with a certain amount of expertise. This raises questions about the effectiveness of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter as advertising platforms. These sites have enormous benefits for brands, obviously: they provide casual and friendly venues for advertisers, a platform for engaging consumers in active discussion, and the ability to reach a mass market. But if people are more likely to trust strangers than their own friends, perhaps outlets like Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories” aren’t as valuable as originally anticipated.

When Facebook transitioned from individual interests to shared Pages, the opportunities for advertising  increased exponentially. Facebook Pages allow users to interact with non-friends about things they “like” and link them to part of a digital community based on common interest.

With “Sponsored Stories,” Facebook takes these connections a step further by including friends’ new “likes” into the mini-feed. Now, in addition to casually browsing your friends’ interests to learn more about their personalities, you can use them as a source of authority on a huge range of products and services. For example, if your friend “likes” a local Greek restaurant, then you may be more likely to choose it for your next date night.

Although the Meebo study indicates that Web users tend to trust expert strangers over friends, there is still a certain satisfaction and sense of community that comes with trusting your friends. Even if they don’t give you an explicit recommendation, Facebook friends can be a personal source of advice in a sea of anonymous information. For this reason, platforms like “Sponsored Stories” will continue to be successful by combining Web recommendations with a certain level of comfort and trust.

Add your voice to the poll! Do you seek online advice from friends or ‘everyday experts?’ Do you use Facebook to pose questions and get new information about new subjects?

Russian Standard vodka presents Facebook Roulette — the first online game where the loser sacrifices his digital life…forever. The game’s survivors get a remarkable reward: the chance to win an unforgettable seven-day trip to Russia. Ready to put on your ushanka? Just pull the trigger.

Invite four friends to sit around a table on the Russian Standard microsite. You’ll all surrender your Facebook passwords. Then you spin the barrel and pull the trigger. If you make it through the first round, pass the gun to the next risk-taker. Keep going until the bullet is fired. The victim then shares his last words with his Facebook friends before his profile vanishes for good.

It’s a clever campaign execution that integrates Russian Standard’s Facebook, microsite, and sharp branding with a social online experience, plus an offline reward (or great loss, depending on your luck).

How important is your Facebook life? And will anyone miss you when you’re gone?)

IMAGE: lya Malyanov /vimeo.com

(via The Daily What)

My story begins last week when, after browsing Overstock.com for chests, trunks, and various coffee tables, I started receiving targeted Overstock.com banner ads featuring a groovy espresso-colored pyramid trunk I was on the fence about (see below). No doubt, they figured if I took but one more peek at it, I’d spring for it instead of moving on. Much the opposite! Instead, after an satisfying online shopping experience, I found this follow-up weird and off-putting—mostly due to the media’s unexplained, overt nature.

(Don’t judge my taste in furniture!)

Mere moments later: Urban Outfitters, who, after my visit to their online store looking for… cut-off jean shorts — again, please hold back judgements for now — offered up a banner ad specializing in—you guessed it—shorts! Or, er, “bottoms!” The minimalist advert gave no explanation as to why I might be seeing something so spookily relevant to my tastes. Coincidence, or another barrage of wink-wink, nudge-nudging?

(fig. 2, Urban Outfitters)

After some casual shoe shopping, Zappos also approached me, albeit with one crucial difference: transparency. “Some People Prefer Rainbows, And Others Prefer Unicorns,” read the headline of a page-long explanation of personalized, hyper-targeted advertising (easily found by way of a “Why am I seeing these ads?” button in each ad). Only one of the Overstock.com banner ads carried an info button, presumably for more details, but it was nondescript and could easily be missed. Zappos explains, in plain English, why they love personalized ads. Their words: “They display products that are relevant to you versus a typical ad that showcases a limited product offering.”

They also clearly introduce and explain the company working with them to create these ads (Criteo), and how no form of personal information has been shared (your previous shopping behavior, as they explain, is anonymous), your current status (if you have an “active cookie,” etc), and more. Perhaps most importantly, they give users the ability to opt-out of such ads with a single click.

“If you prefer not to see personalized ads, we totally get it. OPT OUT HERE.”

What else? Zappos provides a spot on the aforementioned page to let those subjected to the ads share their feedback, helping to foster a culture of honesty and communication on both ends. I’ve touched on Zappos’ refreshing approach to business before, in stark contrast to malicious brand hijinks elsewhere.

Sure, this may just be an extension of Facebook’s already-rampant use of personalized, contextual advertising (see: Sponsored Stories) — but unlike Facebook, where a certain lack of privacy is generally understood and accepted these days, utilizing basic web behavior for a commercial context is relatively uncharted waters for the general populace. At this point, such media will very likely freak out the average shopper if not accompanied by something of an explanation.

To have near real time web browsing information casually used to entice seems a bit invasive, without being framed and put into context in the way Zappos has done. In actuality, once you get over the Minority Report-level creepiness, personalized advertising does deliver infinitely more relevant banner placements — placements that act more like paid search placements and less like interruptive and out-of-context spam messaging.

I’d just like to see it be less about a single company using such information to draw back near-buyers and recent customers and more about brands and industries as a whole matching up better with our interests and more seamlessly and creatively catering to our needs—and always allowing us to opt-out when things get too real. Bravo to the earnest heads at Zappos for their transparency!

When we feel like we are the target of marketing, our arms fold and we close ourselves off to the message. But when we listen to a story, we open up, lean forward, and listen. No one has 30 seconds to be marketed to, but everyone has 30 minutes to hear a great story.

The power of brand storytelling doesn’t end with acceptance of the message or even the seeking out of specific branded content. The power resides in how far a message can spread, for free, via fans. When audiences find content entertaining, useful, or both, they’ll add, syndicate, and share their own content (comments, links, ratings, and new versions). This is the power of WOM — it creates a talkable brand.

Aside from my presentation at the School of WOM, I was able to sit in on a few other sessions and learn a little more about what makes WOM truly effective. Here are a few tips I picked up along the #WOMMA way.

1. Create messaging that will foster user-generated content

While it can be useful in its own right, it’s not enough to give your audience content that’s purely for consumption. Talkable marketing movements have the added element of motivating fans to create their own content. Of course, UGC offers some risk, particularly if it’s done in parody, but you must risk to reap rewards. Warby Parker Eyewear has received well over 1,000 pictures of their fans wearing a pair of their glasses and posted them on their Facebook Page. The walls of sandwich maker Which Wich are adorned by art drawn on their sandwich bags. Often this UGC can have greater impact and reach than any content coming directly from the brand.

2. Give them an opportunity to participate in something big

Audiences love to be a part of the production. Encouraging them to to answer a question on your Facebook wall is one thing. Encouraging them to like your post to be part of the Guiness Book of World Records? That’s another, and that’s exactly what Oreo set out to do. Even though they held the record for only a short time before being upstaged by Lil’ Wayne, they still made a mark and got their fans to engage and spread the word. For good measure, the Oreo team sent a few packages of Oreos to Lil’ Wayne to celebrate.

3. Embrace your superfans

It’s easy to call oneself a fan. I’m a Red Sox fan. I even have the Boston “B” tattooed on my upper back. However, I’m not a superfan. Not if I’m up against this guy. Or this guy. Superfans are the evangelists, spreading the word about their favorite brand, creating endless amounts of free marketing. It may sound controversial, but they shouldn’t be treated like everyone else, simply because they’re not like everyone else. WGN America (client) is rewarding the superfans of How I Met Your Mother with their “Summer of the SuperFan” campaign. They brought four chosen superfans to New York for a roundtable discussion and promo shoot at McGee’s pub (the inspiration for the show’s fictional McLaren’s Pub), and will feature the videos on their Facebook and YouTube pages.

What are some great marketing campaigns you’ve seen that have created talkability? Have you ever participated, contributed content, or been embraced as a superfan? The comments are yours…

Image via Flickr

The Send button solves the problem that has been nagging the Like button – relevancy. Currently, when a user “likes” a website, it is sent to their entire network through their news feed, whether it’s relevant to the recipient or not. With Send, the user can ensure that their appreciation for the content is shared with only those who care about that same content – especially if it’s something you don’t want your grandmother seeing (who of course is on Facebook too).

The Send button was launched as part of an updated to Groups, which allows users to do just that – create small, private (or open) groups. In the video below, Peter from the Groups team explains some of the updates, including the Send button at the 1:13 mark.

But what does it mean for brands and their communities? Read the full post over at the OneForty blog, where I am a weekly contributor about social tools in the post-advertising age.

Image via skatter tech

The performance, which, fittingly, took a more modern tone to match its new medium, played out in online dialogues between the various characters. After logging in to Facebook, interested audience members followed the story as it developed in their news feeds, with Hero and Claudio falling in love, Don John — the villain —meddling in their relationship, and Beatrice and Benedick skirting around their feelings for each other.

Not surprisingly, the current issue of READ is all about Shakespeare and trying to get high-school students excited about the famous poet and playwright. This experiment was certainly a clever way to reach its intended audience. It’s the perfect Shakespeare play for Facebook, full of Gossip Girl-type drama! Margaret to Benedick: “Beatrice says you’ve been texting love poems.” Benedick’s next status update: “Note to self. Stop writing love poems.”And of course, the audience got to react to each post.

Unfortunately, the Facebook play ended yesterday — but stay tuned: READ probably has something else up its sleeve for the next issue…

PHOTO CREDIT: READ magazine /WeeklyReader.com

Before testing the social waters, brands need to answer some basic preliminary questions:

WHY DO YOU WANT TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA?

I’m the first to admit that I’m a social media fanboy. I spend countless hours tweeting, updating my status, checking in, and checking out, all from my iPhone and iPad. However, that doesn’t mean I believe EVERYONE should be on these platforms. Social Media isn’t a cult and I’m not serving up questionable Kool-Aid. Social media isn’t for everyone, but if it is right for your brand, it can be very powerful in creating a direct bond between brand and audience. It also helps build your owned and earned media channels.

Back to the question — why do you want to use social media? Is it simply because everyone else in your corporate park is using it? Or have you gathered real data about your audience that suggests it’s a good idea? Is your audience using Facebook? Is your audience active on Twitter? Are your customers clamoring for new content updated on a weekly basis (cough, blog, cough)? Answering these questions will help you not only decide if social media is right for you, but which channels you should embrace and which channels should be avoided.

WHAT CONTENT ARE YOU GOING TO CREATE?

Mike Sweeney wrote a fantastic post earlier this year entitled, Don’t Let the Social Media Tail Wag the Dog. This chronicled the common mistake that companies and brands make when they hop onto the very full social media bandwagon without any thought about what they actually have to say.

“While content marketing efforts are absolutely enhanced via social media marketing, content marketing can happen without social media marketing [Hyperlink not in original quote]. On the flip side, social media marketing loses a whole lot of punch without content marketing. Without content, social media marketing stops after 140 characters and only continues when you’re ready to answer the question ‘What’s happening?’ again, or listen to someone else’s response to that question.”

Quality content is essential in today’s marketing landscape. And without quality content that audiences find entertaining, useful, or both, it’s very difficult for a brand to establish a strong digital footprint within social media. There are certain types of companies that have found success simply by being there to listen to customers, but if you’re not a company with constant chatter from bewildered customers, social media channels can be lonely places.

I believe every company and brand has something to offer their audience when it comes to content. Whether it be a fun game to kill a few minutes or an engaging iPad travel application, it ultimately comes down to reaching your audience through quality content.

So what do you really have to say?

Comic courtesy of Tom Fishburne

This post originally appeared in our April issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and…Mashable?

In early February, albeit relatively quietly, the top website for news in social and digital media introduced Mashable Follow – a “social layer” that is the first big move in Mashable’s journey towards becoming a “true news community.”

This seemed to be a long time coming. As the scope of the Mashable blog has increased alongside the popularity and mainstream coverage of social media, Mashable has battled with a signal-to-noise problem. They simply provide so much content — over 40 stories each day — that it’s becoming more and more difficult for readers to find the content they want when they want it without constantly checking the site and clicking through topic tabs.

Carefully named a “layer” and not a “platform,” Mashable Follow allows readers to log in via Facebook or Twitter, set up their own profile page, and through following people and topics of interest, curate their own content and turn Mashable into their own personal social and digital media news stream. Some of the Top Topics include Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Social Media, YouTube and Foursquare. Users can even earn badges, adding a neat gaming element more common in geolocation apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Here’s a brief description of Follow:

We’ve said before that when appropriate, brands need to become publishers. They can’t simply sit idly by as their competitors create valuable content to satisfy audiences yearning to interact and engage. However, when a brand is already a publisher, what’s the next step in engaging audiences? Mashable is laying the foundation for more publishers, and brands turned publishers, to create a deeper level of engagement and customization. It allows the brand to own the channel while its audiences/users can curate the content in a way they prefer, thus making it easier to find and share the content that they’re interested in.

Creating such a robust and personalized owned media channel ultimately empowers audiences to increase a brand’s earned media. This is a feature that I’m sure news outlets have coveted. But only Mashable, with their 3,400,000+ followers across social platforms and 12,000,000+ monthly visitors, has a sample size big enough to see if this idea floats.

Not quite a social network, not your common media news site, Mashable is now a unique dichotomy. The intriguing question is, what’s next? We’ve never seen a publisher move to a platform quite like this. Is this just the tip of the iceberg for publishers? Is Mashable just the first of many on the horizon to gain an audience through content and then turn that audience into a social network?

Some outlets have even taken this a step further, venturing to say things like “nobody actually likes your brand’s stupid Facebook page.” In a world where on any given day one could find a story about the incredible growth of Facebook and its impending world domination, a report that takes a big hack at the knees of Facebook had many people wondering what it really meant for the social media behemoth.

The sky is falling! Get off your social networks and call your local billboard company! And what did I do with those pesky yellow pages?!

Let’s step away from the ledge for a second. eCommerce is just one aspect of business, and if you asked me why a retail brand should be on Facebook, eCommerce probably wouldn’t be in my top three reasons.

While I’m not arguing this report’s accuracy — though I should say that the study’s “half-dozen” respondents, as reported by WSJ, feels a tad thin to me — it casts a large shadow on what I think is a very small problem. Fine, the ability for retail brands to turn Fans into paying customers online isn’t as effective as email or paid search. But there are a few reasons for that:

FACEBOOK’S FOCUS ISN’T eCOMMERCE
Facebook is still young in its evolutionary cycle. Its ad platform continues to evolve and new features and functionality — some very important to brands — are constantly being added. To think that an accurate presumption on Facebook’s future viability in the eCommerce arena could be made seems short sighted. If they wanted to be a major eCommerce player, one of their legendary 24-hour hack-a-thons with a focus on eCommerce would give them a place at the table.

FACEBOOK ISN’T THE END-ALL-BE-ALL CHANNEL
Let us not forget — the medium isn’t the message. The medium is just the medium. Facebook should be one of many channels in a brand’s marketing mix, nudging the consumer along in their journey. Each of these touchpoints, which could include paid media, word of mouth, mobile technology, geolocation and more, helps the brand tell their story, one step at a time. For some retail brands, Facebook may not fall at the end of this journey, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Nor does it mean that certain retail brands won’t ever find success in converting fans into eCommerce customers on Facebook…just not today.

FACEBOOK CAN HARNESS THE POWER OF SOCIAL PROOF
What Facebook has that no other channel has is the power of the “Like” — the ability for friends to see what their other friends like, particularly including them in advertisements (though Google has very recently jumped on board with +1).  It’s social proof, and it’s very powerful. We already know that people trust their friends and complete strangers before advertisers, so it’s no surprise Nielsen found that there is a discernible lift in recall, awareness and purchase intent when an ad was seen with social context (your friends like the page/brand).

As Facebook’s Vice president Dan Rose said, “we found that when my friend’s name is in an ad, I’m over 60% more likely to remember the ad, and I’m over four times more likely to purchase the product.” A concerted effort to harness this power and turn it into eCommerce is at least enough of a viable option to keep them in the game. But the bold statement that they’ll never be a player? Flat out wrong.

Facebook is only 7 years old — it’s barely in elementary school! It’s hard to believe that Facebook won’t be an eCommerce player at some point, but even if it’s not, that doesn’t mean all is lost for brands on Facebook. Brands still have a story to tell, and Facebook pages are a great place to share content and engage with consumers on a one-to-one basis.

Do you think these findings are a big deal? What do you think is in store for Facebook’s eCommerce future? Should retail brands focus their marketing dollars and efforts elsewhere? The comments are yours…

Unlike sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers that poll an untargeted public for open-ended answers, Questions allows brands to target their fans (subsequently reaching friends of fans) with specific multiple-choice questions. Brands have the option of allowing fans to add their own suggestions — useful for open-ended queries like “What new flavor would you like to see?” — or brands can offer only specific choices to find answers to questions like “What is your favorite [brand] flavor?”

When a question is created by a brand, it’s posted in the News Feed. When fans answer a question, it shows up on their profile pages as well as in their friends’ News Feeds, just like any other status update. This can help a question spread virally. Popular questions like “Mac or PC?” and “Coke or Pepsi?” have already attracted thousands of responses.

These features have a few important implications for brands:

1. CROWDSOURCING & RESEARCH
   Aside from asking questions within a status update, there previously hasn’t been an easy way for brands to poll their fans in order to perform market research and crowdsource ideas. Facebook Questions allows brands to accomplish this easily and without intrusion. Since it’s not an application, users don’t have to allow Questions access to their personal information. Now brands can tap into the power of online recommendations from friends and family and from those of online strangers, which studies have shown to be the top two most trusted forms of advertising.
2. METRICS
   Not only does Questions provide another option for simple and quick engagement, it also delivers real-time metrics to help measure sentiment. This is especially useful as your brand’s presence on Facebook grows and it becomes harder to aggregate metrics and measure sentiment simply by sifting through comments. With enough of a response, Questions can help brands make changes on the fly, depending on the answers that come in.
3. REACHING OUT-OF-NETWORK
   Until now, all posts on a brand’s Facebook page were only visible to those who are fans, which put most of the onus on properties outside of Facebook (a blog, Twitter, website, etc.) to attract new fans. Now, the most interesting questions can spread virally from fan to friend, helping to spread the brand’s reach (on Facebook specifically) and helping to increase brand awareness.

At Story, we’ve already implemented Questions into the Facebook pages of a number of our brands. Proving how powerful Questions can be, the very first question asked at Meet at McLaren’s, a Facebook fan page for the TV show “How I Met Your Mother” hosted by WGN America [client], garnered over 8,220 votes. With nearly 115,000 fans (after only 3 months of existence), that’s more than a 7% engagement rate.

Currently brands have to go to facebook.com/questions to enable the feature on their page. A single click will allow brands to put their finger on the pulse of their fans, spread brand awareness, and more.

If you manage a Facebook brand page, have you utilized Questions? If so, how?

At Story Worldwide, we’ve managed Facebook accounts for some of the world’s biggest brands, and we’ve figured out a few things along the way.

We’re proud to announce that a summary of our strategic learnings is available in our very own “Best Practices for Audience Management Thru Facebook.” It’s a living, breathing collection of wisdom on the world’s most popular online social network. Check it out after the jump…

We’ve designed this eBook to help brands build real and thriving online communities of interested, excited brand loyalists and advocates. With instructions on how to publish content that people really want and how to manage audience interaction in real time, it will take much of the guess work out of implementing a social media plan.

Download the Facebook Audience Management e-Book!

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PHOTO CREDIT: Beth Kanter /flickr.com

There’s no doubt that there is serious value in Tumblr’s services. The site attracts 19 million unique global visitors per month with roughly 45,000 new users signing up each day. Tumblr’s unique format, which allows users to simply and easily share images, quotes, and other quick tidbits, has managed to stay more relevant in an environment where young bloggers opt for quick ways to share, and are moving away from blogging platforms that require them to hammer out lengthy posts.

But how is Tumblr staying afloat? In addition to free and customizable templates, they also offer blog themes that users can purchase (ranging from $9 for a basic theme to $49 for premium). These sales have provided a smale-scale revenue source for Tumblr. Of course, patient and supportive investors have helped too.

The question is, what will a seamless, non-interruptive advertising model look like for the company going forward? How can Tumblr monetize their great product without interrupting and diminishing the user experience?

Image courtesy of adfreeblog.org

Most of us tell the same lie almost daily: “I have read and agree to the terms of use.” This lie is so common and so institutionalized that there’s even a lively discussion on a religious forum regarding whether or not it constitutes a sin.

It’s not that we don’t care about our privacy. We don’t read these privacy policies and terms and conditions texts because they’re long, dense, and usually written in legalese.

Uncharacteristically, Facebook could be changing all that.

No other site has stirred as much controversy with its privacy policy than Facebook, where users readily share the most intimate details of their lives: who they are in a relationship with, what their beliefs are, who their friends are, even their home addresses and  cell phone numbers.

Users share all this information on a website that provides social networking services for free. The naïve expectation is that Facebook won’t do anything with their most personal information. However, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly doesn’t believe in privacy, having declared the concept no longer a “social norm.”

Makes sense. For Zuckerberg, privacy is bad business. His website is a goldmine of personal data that companies shell out big bucks to access. Each time a user opts out of an information-sharing feature, that’s a loss of potential profit for the site. So we can understand why he’d want Facebook’s privacy policy to remain as impenetrable and byzantine as possible.

However, earlier this week a strange and rare thing occurred: Facebook got some positive press regarding privacy issues. The website announced it was rolling out a new easy-to-understand privacy policy that would be readable for those of us who haven’t passed the Bar Exam. The new privacy policy is throwing out the tradional all-text, dense language format and opting instead for a more modern approach to the privacy policy, featuring a FAQ section and more visual and interactive features. It should be noted that this move wasn’t entirely motivated by Facebook itself — it was in part, the company’s response to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation into the site’s privacy policies.

Nevertheless, it was good news for users and good public relations for Facebook.

But, just as quickly as Facebook impressed us, they let us down again. Fewer than 24 hours after their new privacy policy made news, Facebook’s newest controversial plan came out: The site would be sharing users’ home addresses and phone numbers with external sites.

This is a perfect example of the dichotomy that is Facebook. One the one hand, the site embodies the ultimate post advertising engine — it’s the new marketplace of ideas where the best content rises to the top by way of likes and comments, whether that content is branded or not. Targeted ads that one sees based on their own Facebook profile inputs aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Same goes for branded recommendations from friends, like the sponsored stories program.

At the same time, Facebook the brand disappoints in its lack of transparency. Users don’t know about changes until after they’ve already occurred. When Facebook introduced Instant Personalization, for example, users were automatically opted-in and required to navigate the maze of settings to opt-out of sharing their personal information with a slew of external sites.

The privacy versus profit battle rages on. What do you make of it? Which will be the ultimate victor?

(Photo: Data Visualization)

Chobani, one of the most popular greek yogurt brands, has embraced digital storytelling by embarking on its first ever national advertising campaign. Launched on Valentine’s Day, Chobani’s Real Love campaign leverages the brand’s passionate customer-base with television spots, out-of-home placements, and social media, all featuring “real stories from real Chobani lovers.”

In their “Cho Theft” commercial, Stephanie Lane, a real Chobani lover from Richmond, VA, has her Chobani yogurt stolen from the refrigerator at work — surely something we can all relate to. The spot goes on to show how she now hides her daily treat from nefarious coworkers.

Stephen Wright, another Chobani lover and Eli Manning look-alike, was featured in Chobani’s  “Cho Bike” commercial, which documented his early-morning 80-mile bike ride to the Chobani factory. They even created a cute “behind-the-scenes” look at the making of their videos, which shows just how real — and nervous — the stars of the commercial are.

Chobani’s billboards even add some social flair by featuring actual tweets from fans, including the Chobani lover’s own Twitter handle.

Where the campaign gets truly post advertising is on the brand’s Facebook page where fans can share their “Chobani love story” via videos, images, and text. On their Real Love tab they share that week’s most beloved fan submissions from across the globe (the photo to the right is one of my favorites).

User submissions can be as simple as a photo from your webcam or as creative as a video of a man singing opera about being “King of Chobani.” Other users can then vote on the images and the most “liked” story gets a free case of Chobani, which the winner can customize with their favorite flavors.

Though utilizing user-generated content (UGC) isn’t a new idea, Chobani’s efforts stand out because they’re finding innovative ways to reward the real people that share a real love for Chobani. These are the folks who are  most likely to become brand evangelists (if they aren’t already). Each week’s Real Love Story winner is featured as part of the brand’s profile picture on Facebook, while a select few get to recreate their love stories by starring in Chobani’s nationally televised ads. Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds cooler than having a pallet full of Wheat Thins dropped off at your doorstep.

For consumers, the most trusted brand marketing comes in the form of recommendations from people we know. It’s been that way since we stepped foot in school and started wearing what the popular kids were wearing. However, according to Nielsen, the second most trusted form of advertising is a recommendation online from a complete stranger. We trust a complete stranger before we trust what a brand is saying on their own website.

By giving a confessional platform to yogurt fans to demonstrate the emotional connection between consumer and brand, Chobani is providing social proof — the most powerful form of advertising available. This could have flopped if Chobani’s fans weren’t as passionate or didn’t get as involved as they have so far. The brand took a risk and it appears to be paying off.

We believe that people can have emotional connections with brands by leveraging digital storytelling. If you’re in the UK, consider stopping by our London (Primrose Hill) office on March 24th for our free seminar on Social Media for FMCG. Learn more about the seminar here.

Then there are those stories that are so powerful that they leave you wondering how your writing could possibly do them justice. Almost as if the reward you got from reading the story was more than the value you could provide in the words you put to paper (or keyboard, in this case). For me, this was one of those stories.

In early 2011 a group of BBH New York interns, Rosemary Melchior, Robert Weeks and Willy Wang, were challenged with creating a project that did something good. In addition to doing something good, they were told they had do it “famously.” They decided was that “famously” simply meant, “make people listen.”

Their response to the challenge was Underheard in New York, an initiative to help homeless residents in New York City speak for themselves. With the help of the NYC Rescue Mission, four homeless men were selected as participants in the project. There was Danny (@putodanny), a former security guard of Puerto Rican descent, Derrick, (@awitness2011) a former intake coordinator and lifelong New York resident, Albert (@albert814), a 1992 immigrant from the Dominican Republic and former welder and chef hopeful, and Carlos (@jessie550), who for 26 years was a paralegal until injured in a car accident by a drunk driver. The project’s mission was to use social media to  increase the interaction between homeless people and the community around them.

The men were set up with Twitter accounts and given prepaid cell phones for the month with access to unlimited texts and Twitter. As of now, the project has chronicled 22 days of their journey together, with pictures and videos of the men and their stories on their blog, with identities on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

As I read through the blog from day one, I found myself engrossed in their stories. I am not sure what my personal expectations were, but they didn’t match what I read. Maybe I expected endless journeys in search of suitable sleeping arrangements. Maybe I expected alcohol and drug abuse. Maybe I expected men with no real grasp on reality or a plan on how to rejoin society. Yeah, I wasn’t close.

Albert can’t go back to his job as a welder because of his vision problems, but he’s got his eyes set on being a chef. He’s taking a cooking class (remember, English is his second language) but it’s hard to find a safe place to study. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, he was recently fined hundreds of dollars for using a student metro card he picked up on the street, obviously lost or discarded.

Carlos is working to start his own credit collection agency. However he walks 70 blocks – 2.5 hours each way – to get to the library so he can use the Internet for a whopping 45 minutes. He can’t afford a Metro Card and the library is the only place he can use a computer with free Internet access.

Danny’s story was particularly moving. He’s appealed to his 3,000+ followers to help him find his daughter, Sarah Monique Rivera, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. Well, on day 23, he received the call he’s been waiting for:

UPDATE: Danny and his daughter have been reunited in person. You can watch the emotional video here (contains a pre-roll ad, of course).

Homelessness is not a new problem, nor will this be the first time that it has been documented. However this seems to be the first time anyone has used the power of digital storytelling to not only keep audiences engaged and updated on a daily basis, but to offer them a way to help the homeless in real time as well.

What will happen after this project concludes unknown. “I think for us the project is over when it’s over, unfortunately. But hopefully the project has a lifecycle beyond what we’re doing. Maybe another organization will adopt our strategies, raise awareness” said founder Robert Weeks in a recent Mashable article.

Most of us pass by the homeless and see them as nameless, faceless people. We may feel for them, but these feelings are probably fleeting. If I asked you how many homeless people you know by name, what would your answer be? Now that I’ve been following Underheard in New York, my answer would be four.

If this isn’t one of the best examples of post-advertising in action, then I’ve totally missed the point. These men are real to me now. Their stories, disseminated across social media channels, have connected them to me as well as thousands others and the help is already coming in. Danny has been contacted by a copywriter in Milwaukee about helping him write his life story.

Carlos’ commute may get much shorter as one individual is trying to arrange space and Internet access for Carlos in his NY office.

It’s clear that a supportive community is growing around the project, spreading awareness about the realities of homelessness and creating genuine relationships. These bright interns are proving how powerful digital and social media channels can be in helping important stories spread.

The news shocked the world on Valentine’s Day of 2004: America’s favorite couple was breaking up after 43 years of going steady. The split even made the evening news. There was public outcry. How could this happen to the perfect pair? Where did Barbie and Ken go wrong?!

Luckily, thanks to some creative marketing, it looks like there is new hope for these star-crossed lovers.

Fast forward to 2011: seven years to the day of their infamous breakup, the dolls are back together, and their recent engagement — Barbie said yes in Times Square on Valentines Day — has been accompanied by a massive, organic, and, frankly, brilliant interactive web campaign.

With these established doll brands, the key was creating buzz. Being a legacy brand had caught up with the couple: enthusiasm had faded and the marketing had gotten stale. The biggest challenge for Mattel was in resurrecting Barbie’s ailing counterpart, Ken, who’s sales had lagged even further behind Barbie’s.

To make Ken relevant, Mattel created an active digital presence for the doll on all social media channels available: Twitter, Facebook, and even Foursquare.

Sure enough, social media made these plastic dolls come to life. Fans got updates about the daily lives of Ken and Barbie in the same way they would with celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber. The dolls were humanized.

Fans have not only been able to follow this love story — they have also been a part of it. Through voting via text message and social media, fans ultimately decided whether or not Barbie and Ken got back together, with the “Love-O-Meter” on the Barbie and Ken website pointing at “Give Him a Chance!” on Valentines Day 2011.

Consumer engagement continued on after they reconnected. Using Facebook and Twitter, fans sent messages of congratulations to the dolls. This was a particularly wise move on Mattel’s part. The brand clearly understands that social media can’t be a series of campaigns with clearly defined start and end dates — it has got to be a constant and ongoing process.

Ken now has over 40,000 Facebook fans and 8,000 Twitter followers and Barbie now has over 1.7 million Facebook fans and 35,000 Twitter followers. More importantly, for the first time since ’04, the 50 year old toys are back in the zeitgeist.

The fact that Mattel made such content interactive led to a sense of investment and involvement on the part of the consumer. Instead of discounts or new accessories — business as usual — they took a creative leap towards personified posts from the characters themselves, and users responded en masse. Tweets, Facebook posts and more showed crowds interacting with Barbie and Ken as if they were real. These are intimate, personal connections with the brand, being formed every day, in real time.

Barbie and Ken’s relationship — with each other and their fans — now seems stronger than ever. And most crucially in this digital age, it’s Facebook official: Barbie has changed her status to “in a relationship.”

Back in college, when everything still seemed possible and the Internet was hardly a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, my roommate and I would sit around imagining ways the future could be improved (with or without our help).

Me: “Dude, what if you released two or three different versions of a movie, and people started discussing it and realizing they hadn’t all seen the same thing? Or, like, what if there was a way the audience could actually see themselves in the movie?”

Josh: Yeah, that would be crazy, man. Don’t you have some studying to do or something?

It’s a conversation that came back to me when Paramount and their upstart, low-budget InSurge division confirmed yesterday they will take the unprecedented step of releasing a “fan cut” of their Justin Bieber documentary/concert film, Never Say Never, to theaters — just three weeks after the premiere of the original. Their motivations: staving off the precipitous drop-off in grosses concert films typically see and extending the narrative that Justin’s output is directly shaped by his fans’ input (in this case, Facebook and Twitter polling about what they wanted to see included).

However one feels about enduring 105 minutes of tween shrieking once — let alone twice — the studio’s decision to reboot screens nationwide with alternate performances and new footage is a remarkable demonstration of the way in which technology has only recently enabled and incentivized an increasingly rapid deployment of content in response to audience sentiment. That’s because it’s the low cost and high speed of digital reproduction, distribution, and marketing that is making this experiment possible.

In effect, not only will there be multiple, simultaneous versions of a movie experience (the new cut will play only in 3D while the original will remain in 2D theaters), but the audience will also be able to see a reflection of themselves on those screens.

That the content breaking this ground is powered by the coo and coiffure of the Biebs, who wasn’t particularly close to being born when the first Web browser was developed, and who was himself discovered on YouTube, is fitting. It’s his generation, after all, that may be best suited to take Paramount’s proposition in stride.

“A play like this is perfect for an audience with a short attention span and a deep enough appetite, like Millennial teens who’ve never lived in a world without this kind of speed and brevity,” says Joe Neumaier, film critic for the New York Daily News, who considers the venture a test foray into what has long been problematic ground for studios.

“The movie industry is a ship that doesn’t turn quickly. Look how slow they were to respond to the pirating issue. How to anticipate audience wants and respond rapidly is more of a TV model, and more specifically, a Web model,” he continues, the newsroom quietly clicking away behind him as he speaks into the phone, as if to underscore his point that most content doesn’t require three years or better to produce. “But DVD sales are declining and the industry is still uncertain about video-on-demand as they wrestle with the question of, ‘Do we want to get this onto iPads and other devices at the same time as theatrical release?’ So this idea is kind of a half-way point to that.”

Even without the new cut, Never Say Never is on track to major success at $51 million gross and counting, having bucked the second-weekend slump typical of its predecessors. Whatever the ultimate publicity and sales impact of this decision, though, it’s hard to overlook the mark Bieber’s brand managers are making on the media business, much of it through free social exposure (a fact rather unfortunately reiterated this weekend when Twitter alerts that Bieber had — gasp! — trimmed his bangs significantly out-trended discussion of the historic events unfolding in the Middle East).

Consider that the film went from in-house concept to completion in just six months and $13 million, and it’s also hard to overlook the signs that with this announcement (along with other recent phenomena like the Old Spice video tweet responses), content and marketing deployment are inching ever closer to taking place in real-time even as they’re being customized for multiple audiences. You can believe that producers of film, television, and Web content will be taking note.

All of which might make this a good time to take a look at how your own content programs can be more responsive. And if you can’t quite find the right model yet, just keep your eyes open: you can bet there are college kids sitting around right now dreaming of ways of telling stories that won’t sound so crazy a few years from now.

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures

This post originally appeared in our February  issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Facebook’s Stories project has, for all intents and purposes, fulfilled its end goal. Now a fully-fledged, first-of-its-kind ad network named Sponsored Stories, not unrelated to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets/Trends/Accounts, it allows brands to affix their name (and corresponding Facebook page) to an organic, consumer-generated activity in the hopes of populating the well-intentioned promoter’s friend network with a more compelling push to purchase. This approach is infinitely more engaging, and invasive, than any brand-spun messaging could hope to be—and that could be what makes it pure (or evil, depending on your perspective) genius. It raises the inevitable question: Is your privacy even more at stake these days? Let’s look behind the stories.

The assumption is this: When we make decisions about what we want to buy, we instinctively look to our friends and family — consciously or subconsciously — for cues and tips. It’s the same guiding principle behind customer reviews—we, as humans, prefer product/service recommendations and information that come from those we already trust. Call it peer pressure if you like, but buying behavior, for many, is determined by what their friends are buying. A friend’s check-in at her favorite coffee shop, a friend’s post on his car brand of choice, or a shared link from a favorite tech blog all conveniently feature the corresponding page crucially accompanied by a “like” button. (Facebook calls these social proofs “cues from friends.”) All data shows that featuring these cues makes for significantly more persuasive messaging.

Facebook explains Sponsored Stories in their own words:

As reported by Ben Parr and Mashable, Facebook is (publicly) quite proud of their new product for reasons beyond an advertiser’s return on investment. As Jim Squires, Product Marketing Lead at Facebook, proclaimed: “The advertiser is not controlling the message; it’s about actions.” What he means is that advertisers—including feel-good all-American first-round participants like Coke, Levi’s and Budweiser—are unable to pick and choose between activity that portrays their brand names in a positive light and those that sling negative, slanderous statements or, in general, just give the product or service a poor assessment. That, crucially, means advertisers have no chance to cherry-pick the best mentions. On the flip side, there aren’t any opt-outs allowed by users, either.

So the ad is firmly in the hands, and at the whim, of those on either vocal end of the spectrum. Democracy in action. If a brand has a legitimately satisfied audience, it’ll be seen clearly—and will spread quickly—through the claims of those actually using and/or experiencing it.

A claim coming through loud and clear, by way of an honest-to-god consumer’s perspective (and a friend at that)—it’s advertising through brand-propagated word of mouth, where only genuine products and messages prosper. Whether a positive or negative message, any given brand can only hope to elevate the conversation and inform a wider (and keenly-interested) audience. The end result is a pure, unaltered suggestion or wink of sorts from a friend, brought to you by the relevant subject at hand.

Ah, but what about the seriously negative implications of all this on your personal privacy? The act of shamelessly converting social escapades into monetary gains is intrusive to say the least. By all means, there’s something particularly unsettling about, as both the Washington Post and CNN have put it, literally being “turned into an ad.” But in this day and age, most users of Facebook have some idea what they’re signing up for—an incredibly useful, engaging, and widespread service that conspicuously charges no fees to use. And when you go through the trouble of not only opting to show your allegiance to a certain brand, but also tagging them in a status update, you honestly can’t have any illusions that your posts will become brand fodder some day.

What perhaps makes the new platform’s success even more notable is Facebook’s reluctance to introduce new advertising methods after the spectacular failure of their Beacon initiative. Another sign that they’re taking brands seriously came when the network introduced long-rumored major changes to the ways in which brand pages are able to operate within the larger social ecosystem. No longer self-contained entities, pages are now able to peruse the profiles of fans and fellow brand pages no differently than a real-life, living/breathing person would. (Scary, sure—but no more scary than when the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 1800s decreed that corporations have the same rights as you or I.)

Look at the bright side: Facebook’s Sponsored Stories initiative is one very powerful way that brands are increasingly being forced by consumers to be honest. It’s music to our ears. It’s also one more reason to place a premium on content—both the consumers’ organic content (which is now advertising copy) and the brand’s original content (which is now the most important asset a brand has). Brand-featured actions are perhaps the most persuasive and genuine advertisements and sponsorships yet—because they’re not dictated by a faceless brand voice, but framed in the actions of a target’s confidantes. With each new, more forcibly earnest form of advertising, the public at large will grow more calloused and immune to the fake, pre-rehearsed attempts at persuasion of old—advertising as it was, and as it will (soon enough) never again be.

However, this year Valentine’s Day conveniences didn’t stop at floral and chocolate ecommerce sites. Oh no. FTD.com partnered with the über-sensitive folks at Groupon to offer a super-sweet deal: $40 worth of flowers for $20. Other than a promise ring, what could be better? Apparently, a lot.

Local mom-and-pop floral shops rejoiced as they heard the collective sobs of sour suckers who took advantage of the Groupon offer. For starters, paying $20 for $40 worth of flowers was apparently a bad deal when compared to standard offers available on FTD.com. There was also some speculation that FTD.com had inflated prices to recoup their losses, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Things got so bad, in fact, FTD.com decided to end the Groupon deal early.

If only it stopped there. Then maybe male FTD.com shoppers could have preserved some of their dignity. Unfortunately, it didn’t.

Already out a few bucks, Groupon shoppers waited patiently for the jubilant calls from their significant others thanking them for their annual bouquets. Only, for many Groupon customers, those call never came. That’s because their flowers never showed up, and many of those that did were wilted and near death.

Is it St. Patrick’s Day yet?

Of course, FTD.com wasn’t the only online florist that under-delivered on Valentine’s Day according to a Consumerist.com post aptly titled, “The Consumerist’s 2011 Valentine’s Day Garden of Discontent.” However, it was the only online florist to leverage Groupon’s daily deal nationwide in order to bolster sales and ride the wave of other successful Groupon campaigns. With such reward comes the risk that they face-plant on their surfboard. And that’s exactly what happened.

Regardless of how hip, trendy, and forward-thinking commerce-based online technologies seem, businesses never will have the opportunity to slack on customer service and quality. It’s the essence of “Great Content Wins.” If your content is not great, you will not win — at least not in the long run. FTD.com’s Groupon experience only magnified the risks of online floral purchases and the difficulty of satisfactory customer service.

Is it worth a little extra to receive face-to-face customer service, accountability, and quality from your local florist? Could web 2.0 actually work in favor of local businesses, which need foot traffic and phone orders to survive? The comments are yours…

Image courtesy of WhatDaveSees on Flickr

“We start with 100 percent USDA-inspected beef. Then we simmer it in our proprietary blend of seasonings and spices,” wrote Greg Creed, president and chief concept officer at Taco Bell Corp. But, as Stephen Colbert pointed out, these are more non-traditional “spices,” such as isolated oat product.

While most of us know that strip mall cuisine is far from healthy, Taco Bell misled consumers into thinking its principal ingredient was something it wasn’t.Thats gross and disappointing. But you have to hand it to them from a PR perspective —the faux-Mex chain didn’t wait to respond.

Unlike other fast-food companies, some of which have senselessly delayed damage control in the wake of negative press, Taco Bell struck back immediately on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and other papers, trying to gain the upper hand. Acting aggressively and confidently in such public spaces, Taco Bell has successfully parried much of the negative news.

While a brand can’t get around a poor product, Taco Bell’s take-charge attitude in addressing the issue is serving it well with its target consumer. Fans are interacting with them, liking or commenting on posts and videos. The public forum certainly hears from both sides, but at least the company is attempting transparency instead of backtracking and covering things up.

And ultimately, do the Taco Bell fourth-mealers — all those 19-year-olds at the 4 a.m. drive-throughs — care what’s in the other 65%? Probably not.

(Via Advertising Age. Read more at Gizmodo or Mashable.)

PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Depolo /flickr.com

Like it or not, consumers are talking about your brand. And while they talk, researchers are taking notes. In an age where consumer-generated content is aggregated and judged for macro-sentiment by a new breed of “social scientists,” customer research no longer means an intrusive site survey or artificial focus group. It’s happening in real time, right in front of our eyes.

As the New York Times Magazine notes in its tenth annual “Year in Ideas issue,” Social scientists have started using social networking data to gauge larger trends in public perception. They’re predicting everything from movie box office performances to stock market movements. Who knew 140 characters could be so valuable?

Well, it’s the “aggregate value” of all the tweeting that’s really valuable. Of course, we all knew that moods and attitudes expressed online could be extrapolated as indications of broader public sentiment, but now social scientists are organizing this user-generated information to predict future trends. For example, just this last October, a team of researchers at Indiana University used 9.7 million Twitter posts to make what turned out to be accurate stock market predictions. To do this, they divided tweets into just six mood categories: “happiness,” “kindness,” “alertness,” “sureness,” “vitality,” and “calmness.” By classifying consumer sentiment, they were able to forecast behaviors and predict fluctuations in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

This kind of social science has big implications for brands, primarily because of what it means for market research. Brands are thirsty for consumer insight and spend a lot time and money on focus groups, surveys, and interviews trying to gather the data they need to make informed business decisions. This could change all that.

Consumers are talking publicly about brands all the time. This conversation is happening whether brands know it, like it, or choose to participate in it. Given that the chatter is out there, instead of tacking on a survey at the end of an e-commerce exchange or interrupting people in their homes with phone interviews, brands can find their audience in their natural (online) habitats and join the conversation — or at least listen in. It may just be the most effective way to understand and even predict consumer sentiment. If you’re a brand and you’re already delivering your message through Twitter or Facebook, that’s probably a pretty good place to do your market research as well.

Of course, if Twitter can be seen not only a social barometer of our society, but as a predictor of things to come, what does it say that a full 3% of its servers are dedicated to Justin Bieber? We’ll need a team of social scientists to figure that out.

In a new social media campaign supporting its first ever Super Bowl ad, Mercedes-Benz has announced “the world’s first Twitter-fueled race,” in which four teams will race suped-up autos from New York, LA, Chicago, or Tampa to the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas. The grand prize is a 2012 C-Class Coupe and tickets to the Super Bowl. Here’s the catch: it will take more than just speed to win. Racers will have to complete to-be-announced challenges along the way and garner Facebook likes and tweets (according to Mercedes-Benz, the winners will need “gallons of Tweets”). Sure, Facebook and Twitter are great marketing tools, but does this make any sense?

Applicants with a “Twitter following with serious horsepower” were encouraged to apply, and the finalists will be announced on January 5. Then, on January 12, the public will get to meet the official drivers on the Mercedes-Benz Facebook page and pick the team they want to root and Tweet for before the race begins on Feburary 2. Twenty “Most Valuable Tweeters” will also win prizes — not Coupes, but tickets to an upcoming event like the 2011 US Open or the Mercedes Benz-Fashion Week are up for grabs.

One look at Mercedes Facebook or Twitter pages, and it’s clear that this marketing ploy has created lots of buzz among German car afficionados who want in on the chance to compete for the shiny new car and score tickets to the Super Bowl. On its face, the campaign seems like a good approach. Engaged audience? Check. Earned media? Almost, but not quite. It’s something more like Bribed media. Here at Post Advertising we define Earned media as “positive brand messaging that’s produced and spread by unpaid influencers.” We’re not sure this qualifies.

Mercedes’ tactic encourages tweeters to promote Mercedes-Benz through their online networks and become “MVPs,” but those Tweeters won’t necessarily be spreading the brand message because they actually find the content worth sharing. They’re not being paid, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the Twitter race. True-to-form earned media carries credibility because consumers are spreading and sharing a brand message that they actually want their digital communities to hear about it. It’s organic, not forced, and it doesn’t just reward those who Tweet the loudest.

So, we ask you, gentle reader, what could Mercedes do to actually harness earned media? What could they do to improve their authority to publish and make people retweet them for their valuable content as opposed to forcing them?

However, now the best cameras in our households are often the ones in our cell phones. The iPhone 4 boasts a 5-megapixel camera that takes pictures just as well as the Canon S90, which retails at over $350.  The iPhone 4 screen itself is so high-resolution that even after a month of owning it, I still can’t believe how sharp the images are.

What caught my eye recently was the announcement that photo-sharing app Instagram (available only on the iPhone) had already surpassed 1 million registered users in less than 3 months existence.  For those not in the know, Instagram allows the user to take a picture (from within the app or by using the camera phone) and post to social sites including Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and Facebook all at once.  Users can also friend other Instagram users and view a feed, comment and “like” Instagram photos from their friends.

Other players in the field of retro-shooting photo sharing apps include Hipstamatic ($1.99) and Pocketbooth ($0.99), though Instagram and it’s price-point of “free” has made it the clear leader.

While the ease of posting is convenient and the interactive photo feed is nice, what seem to be the biggest appeal are the filters that can easily and quickly be applied to actually downgrade the quality of the image, turning them into what you’d normally see produced by an early 80′s Polaroid camera.  These filters add specs of dust, scratches, yellow/red tones, darkens colors, and adds a selection of borders as well.  The result is an image that wouldn’t look out of place in the photo albums of my childhood or even my parent’s childhood.

Are you at the new Boston Garden, or the old Boston Garden circa 1986?

Why would users want to downgrade their powerful iPhone cameras to create a vintage, dusty, overexposed photo?  In other words, why do these photos and this app resonate so well with users?  When I conducted an informal poll on Twitter, most reponses revolved around “because they’re cool” and “unique.”  I believe there is a deeper appeal, one that revolves around storytelling.

People love photos (and LoL cats).  It’s one of the major reasons Facebook exploded and why life-streaming sites like Tumblr and Posterous that cater to shorter, media-rich content, have flourished.  Photos capture a moment in time – a memory.  Those memories visually depict the stories that make up our lives, and there’s something nostalgic about adding filters to our photos, filters that remind us of our youth.

Stories touch us on an emotional level, evoking feeling and meaning. They link us to a moment in time, and more importantly each other. How often do you show someone pictures and not give them any back story? The experience of viewing pictures goes hand in hand with storytelling, and Instagram makes it  easier than any other platform (including Facebook) to share these images.

As soon as I was turned onto Instagram by a friend, I knew it was going to be wildly popular.  It’s seamless combination of sharing and image effects help users create their own stories, and great stories spread.

Why do you think Instagram is so popular? Is it just a social-sharing fad? If you’re a user, do you use the filters and if so, why?

When was the last time you shared something intimate with a brand? Had a romantic picnic on the ledge of a billboard? Or spent a Friday night with a group of friends at the advertisement theater?

We don’t share ourselves with brands in this sense exactly. But our engagement with brands is changing and expanding all the time. We now live in a world where a brand that earns its way into the lives of its fans can engage with them on a daily basis, creating a deeper relationship than has ever been possible.

If you told marketers, or anyone for that matter, just ten years ago that there would soon be sites where hundreds of millions of users log in every day (often multiple times) at home, at work, and through mobile phones to connect and share with friends, family, and brands, I think their heads might explode.

Not long ago it was commonplace to be interrupted at least once by a telemarketer while eating dinner. Nowadays we’d not only be furious, we’d demand to know how they got our number (isn’t everyone on the do-not-call list by now?).

Fast-forward to today. The brands we care about are invited into our lives, as if we’ve opened the door to our homes and sat them on the couch, while other brands are left out in the cold with the onus to earn their way in. Should you walk in to this hypothetical household, your introduction might go something like this:

“From left to right, that’s my cousin, my brother, my sister, the Boston Red Sox, Modern Family on ABC, Klondike (client), and my wife.”

You may argue that this scenario rings true for the last thirty years through more traditional advertising avenues, but I would disagree. I don’t believe that brands were “in” our lives and households simply because they were heard or seen on a TV or radio commercial. That’s an invasion into a household, not an invitation. We now have arenas that allow for brands we know, trust, and like to be invited into our lives for daily or even hourly interaction that adds value to our lives, whether through education, entertainment, or otherwise.

In this sense, the journey into the Post-Advertising age has created more opportunities than it has closed. Brands are integrated into our lives now more than ever. This is not the death of advertising. It’s the evolution.

With every viewer that fast-forwards their DVR over the commercials or favors their iPod over terrestrial radio, there’s potential to engage a consumer with a branded iPhone or iPad app, a flash mob, a useful newsletter, an exclusive contest, a witty tweet, or simply an interesting question that generates real conversation and connection.

Regardless of what content item a brand chooses to engage their consumers with (great discussion about that over at AdAge), it’s amazing that there’s even the opportunity. Brands have always had a story, but now consumers are part of that story, providing their own input and helping to mold brands. They are creating fun branded contest videos, choosing a new flavor of soda, or spreading love to an unsuspecting meter maid.

I’m not simply echoing the idea that marketing has changed. We all know that. My point is that the way we engage is ever-evolving. Brands need to recognize and leverage this evolution to earn their way into consumers’ lives by being useful, entertaining, and real. If a brand can successfully do this, then they can reach a point of engagement impossible through interruptive means.

What new way will you engage with your consumers? As a consumer, what interesting ways have you engaged with brands lately? What brands do you let in and why?

Image courtesy of Todd Baker on Flickr

To launch Bouygue Télécom’s Facebook page, DDB Paris helped print physical books based on fan profiles. The French mobile phone and internet service provider wanted an app that went beyond mere online engagement. It wanted to create something that would last a lifetime.

In crafting their Facebook books, users could control which friends to include over whatever time period they wished. In just two days, Bouygue Télécom’s page gained 15,000 fans and all of the available 1,000 books were snatched up within an hour. Check out the video of what went down.

When we heard about these books, we were skeptical. After all, the Gmail Paper hoax burned us pretty bad a few years ago. But this is real! Aside from offering a fun and incongruous juxtapositioning of one’s fleeting online life inside the physicality of a real book, a facebook book is appealing as a real life archive, is it not? Clever campaigns like this get users excited by offering something unique that they can take with them. Most importantly, DDB and Bouygue Télécom seamlessly integrated social networking and the physical world so online memories last longer than the platform allows (even if the internet is “written in ink”). And as the brand crosses both of these realms, it embodies and stays true to its motto: Bringing communication to life.

PHOTO CREDIT: Siavosh Zabeti /vimeo.com

(via Adverblog)

For World AIDS Day, each celeb posted a last tweet and testament explaining why the cause is important, and then disconnected. They’ve pledged to stay offline until they raise $1 million for the foundation, which was created in 2003 to provide treatment, care, and services to families affected by HIV and AIDS in Africa and India. To raise awareness (and some serious cash), Alicia Keys and her husband Swizz Beatz got Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, and many others to sacrifice their digital lives.

As Alicia Keys told told the Associate Press, “it’s really important and super cool to use mediums that we naturally are on.” These days, most marketing campaigns contain some social media element, but this stunt leverages social media in an opposite and negative way that we can’t help but admire. The hope is that their silence will help put the AIDS epidemic in perspective. Why does the public focus on a few digital celebrity deaths when there are millions suffering worldwide?

Keys and Keep a Child Alive cofounder Leigh Blake hope the campaign will motivate others — famous and non-famous alike — to take a break from the internet in the name of charity. Certainly, it’s got the attention of these celebrities’ millions upon millions of followers.

The good news is that the campaign’s gone viral thanks to the slew of startling “death” headlines. So far, the effort has raised more than $160,000. How much longer must fans wait for Kim’s twitpics and Justin’s backstage banter to return? It’s a great cause, and we hope they hit and exceed the million dollar goal quickly, but we’re not exactly on the edge of our seats.

UPDATE 12/7: Kim Kardashian and the other digitally departed are back on after a rich pharmaceutical executive donated $500,000 yesterday. Although they met their goal in the end, the campaign was a bust because the only people affected were their Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Plus, they couldn’t reach out through these channels to get the support needed. So maybe the lesson is this: Twittercide is never the answer.

PHOTO CREDIT: Digital Death /flickr.com

Just two days prior, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced a feature integration with Facebook Places called “Deals” which allows businesses big and small to offer unique promotions when users checked into their location — er, I mean, place — on a mobile phone. Gap was on the initial list of 21 businesses, including 24 Hour Fitness, McDonald’s, the University of Nebraska, and the San Fransisco 49ers, that were planning deals in the coming weeks. Gap was brave enough to be the first (of record).

The Gap Free Jeans Giveaway Event was fairly simple on the surface. A public Facebook Event invited customers to check-in at any U.S. Gap location using Facebook Places. Customers were instructed to show their check-ins on their mobile devices to any Gap employee to receive a free pair of jeans (worth $59.50 or less). If they weren’t one of the lucky customers to earn a free jean coupon (first come, first served, and stores were given very limited amounts), they were given a 40% off coupon — a pittance for someone convinced their Facebook addiction was about to land them free denim.

The event details even included links to learn about Facebook Places, Facebook Deals, and how to access Facebook Places on web-enabled devices, iPhones, and Android devices.

However, with a quick glance at the comments section of the Facebook event’s wall it was plain to see that many of the Facebook hopefuls had absolutely no idea how the promotion worked.  Though this comes as no surprise.  According to the Pew Research Center, only 4% of Americans use location-based applications like Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla, and only 1% of Internet users are using these services.

The event wall was filled with thousands of comments (as frequent as 5-10 per minute) featuring confused Facebookers typing the words “Checking In” in hopes that somehow they would receive free jeans. I can’t say for sure how they expected to receive those jeans, but this wave of confusion was no doubt going to crash like a tidal wave.

There were some big problems here. Neither Facebook Places nor Deals work on a Blackberry yet (they do now, nearly a week after this event). What’s more, the secondary instructions, including any mention of mobile smartphones, were below the fold. So users had to click “See More” to get the skinny on the free jeans deal (pun intended).

Disgruntled customers also took to the event wall to complain about what they deemed “bait and switch” tactics with claims of being one of the first few to arrive yet Gap employees had no jean coupons left. With only 10,000 free-jean coupons spread across 1,000+ U.S. stores, there was no getting around the fact that many customers would be left unsatisfied.

What alarmed many marketers on Twitter, including me, was the notable absence of a Community Manger for Gap that could have responded to this strange turn of events. Who was minding this event page? Was anyone listening? More importantly, what is the negative ROI that comes from ignoring your customers?

This leads me to wonder whether or not both coupon-hungry Facebookers and businesses are ready for the confused masses to descend upon their “Places.”   Gap was either not ready or not interested enough to dedicate even one person to monitor their social channels for complaints or concerns, particularly their Event page. Lest we forget: Consumers control brands. Ignoring them isn’t an option.

(And yes, I did get a free pair of jeans!)