ChasNote

American Express announced their new “plum card” earlier this month at the Inc 500 event in Chicago. Two FM authors, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, attended the event and covered the launch. (Amex runs ads on both sites.)

Googling “plum card” gives you a glimpse into the new dynamics of influence. Business Week and Inc. have more reach (unique users and pageviews) than sites like Duct Tape Marketing and Small Business Trends, and American Express owns the “plum card” trademark, but Google ranks results in order of relevance. Which sites, Google’s algorithm asks, are most trusted by others, based on their in-bound links? It turns out Duct Tape Marketing (the #2 organic result) and Small Business Trends (#3) are the marketshare leaders when it comes to trust influence in the world small business. American Express’s own site ranks #4.

Archetype Media President Joe Marchese’s latest MediaPost column summarizes his experience at our Conversational Marketing Summit last week. He hones in on two Conversational Marketing best practices:

“the one area where there is actually consensus among conversational marketing practitioners is the rule that marketers must first evaluate how they can add value to individual or communities before beginning a campaign….”

“One of the other best practices echoed at the CMsummit is that you, as a marketer, should be prepared to finish the conversations you start. Meaning, if you launch a conversational marketing initiative, you are accepting that the other parties in the conversation have a say in where the conversation goes and when it ends. Ending conversations abruptly in the real world will get you disinvited to dinner parties; ending conversations abruptly in conversational marketing can be significantly more damaging….”

Thanks for coming, Joe!

FM’s Fall Shopping Guide, sponsored by JCPenney, rolled out last week. Earlier today, I searched for “fall shopping guide” at Google. Among the 44,600,000 relevant sites Google identified, the JCPenney-sponsored Fall Shopping Guide is the 3rd result. In the #2 position is a post at Craftzine, one of the participating sites, on a page where they tell their readers about the sponsorship program. Wow, what’s going on here?!

Here’s what the Fall Shopping Guide is:

“The Federated Media Fall Shopping Guide, brought to you by JCPenney and the new Chris Madden Collection, is debuting for the 2007 season, bringing together the most influential voices in the parenting, women’s lifestyle, travel & leisure communities.The Fall Shopping Guide features authors of the best and most influential independent parenting, cooking & home accessories web sites that exist today.”

The site aggregates editorial content from leading, independent sites affiliated with FM such as Dooce, Celebrity Baby Blog, Amalah, Parent Hacks, The Mommy Blog, Paper Napkin, Sweetney, Craftzine, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, and The Pioneer Woman Cooks. JCPenney doesn’t review or influence the content provided by these sites, though the sponsorship includes banner ads and product promotions for the Chris Madden line on the Fall Shopping Guide site.

If Opening Weekend is any indication, JCPenney also gets the benefit of engaged audiences that come for the third-party content, but find themselves talking about the JCPenny brand. “Giving Up My Vanity for a Laundry Room,” a post from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, published to the site on Friday, September 14. In four days readers have posted 77 comments.

One reader, a fan of Pioneer Woman, gives JCPenney full credit for the site:

“I never knew JC Penney even had a blog. But even moreso, I never dreamed I’d be reading it. And yet here I am. And there you are with your lime green countertop. And I’m going to have to subscribe to the dang thang to get the rest of the story. Darn you Ree.”

Another:

“As if I don’t spend enough time reading Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and The Pioneer Woman Cooks, now I’ll be checking in here regularly. Clearly, less sleep is the only answer!”

And:

“Ree, your writing is like crack cocaine to me (or how I imagine it would be anyway.) Last spring I stumbled upon your blog-I think it was the chocolate cake recipe before your ‘cooks’ site came along, started reading previous posts, and unless we’re camping in the woods away from internet connections, I MUST read it everyday. At least it’s a healthy addiction-provided I don’t cook your recipes every day. Thanks for all you put into it for all of us strange people who just can’t get enough of what you and your family are up to. I can’t wait to hear the solution to the vanity delimma!”

And:

“I am right there with OMSH. You’ve done it again Ree…and all of your faithfuls are following you. JC Penney has no idea what they have gotten themselves into do they?”

Or maybe — just maybe! — they do. By leaving the content decisions to established third-party authors, they allow the “sponsored” site to maintain the authenticity and active audience engagement that makes the participating sites themselves successful. Because the Fall Shopping Guide site assembles editorial (not advertorial) content, several authors, including those at Craftzine, invited their readers to have a look. When highly-influential, highly-trusted sites feel a sense of ownership over the project, it’s a winning formula for the marketer.

The FM team that built out this program includes James Gross, Sam Kahn, Matt Jessell and Pamela Parker. More on them here.

UPDATE 10/2/07: We’re just a few weeks into JCPenney’s sponsorship of FM’s Fall Shopping Guide, but today I came across an interesting stat: Among the top 5 URLs driving traffic to the Guide is Google’s RSS reader. In other words, visitors to the site like what they see, and they’re subscribing to RSS updates to the site.

UPDATE 10/4/07: Someone who’s enjoying the JCPenney-sponsored Fall Shopping Guide added it to social-bookmarking site StumbleUpon, and 500 StumbleUpon members paid a visit to the Guide. I have to admit, I don’t know much about StumbleUpon or the usage patterns of the self-reported base of nearly 3.6 million users. But if one-tenth of a percentage of them click through to the sites listed on a given day, that says 500,000 StumbleUpon users were exposed today to a free promotion for the Guide. Maybe a full percentage of StumbleUpon users click through, which would say 50,000 of them saw a link to the Guide. Either case, thanks for the love, Stumblers!

UPDATE 12/18/07: Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion applauds JCPenney’s Fall Shopping Guide sponsorship as a model for an emerging trend in digital media: brands “investing in creating their own content.”

Eric Wilhelm, the CEO and Chief Project Doer at Instrucables, recently accepted ads from Sprint on his site — ads promoting “Sprint Cuts” at Sprint’s WaitLess.org site. Then, in his words, “After watching the ‘Sprint Cut’ on how to peel an egg at http://www.waitless.org/ I was intrigued. I thought this might be useful for Tim and me considering how many hardboiled eggs we eat. So we gave it shot. Results are below…. We’re not certain whether it belongs in Handy Tricks or How Not To…” Here’s the post.

The post also includes a disclosure, “Sprint is an advertiser on Instructables, and waitless.org is part of their advertising.” To be clear, Sprint and their agencies (Goodby and Mindshare) bought ads on Instructables, but did not ask for or expect any coverage on Instructables. Instead, the fact that Eric tried his hand at one of the short-cuts featured in Sprint’s advertising is an unexpected (if wonderful) outcome to a well-crafted creative concept. Among the 40 comments submitted to this post, I couldn’t find anything negative toward Eric, Instructables or Sprint. Nor could I find anyone who seemed confused or upset that Sprint made its way from the advertising section to the main projects section of the site.

On the conversational nature of brands, Intuit founder Scott Cook says it best: “A brand is what friends tell their friends about it,” he told the audience at the Conversational Marketing Summit. His implication is that good marketing has always been conversational marketing; the internet just makes it easier to eavesdrop on the conversation our customers are having about us. The statement also reminds us that — despite the recent trade-mag headlines about the loss of control brought on by the rise of blogging — we’ve never really controlled the conversations our customers are having about us.

Given that Fortune, CNN and Money rank Intuit the #1 most admired software company, maybe Cook knows what he’s talking about.

Ogilvy Interactive’s Co-CEO Carla Hendra used her slot at FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit to present the case study of Dove, and the heart of her message was this: While Dove gets credit for last year’s most successful viral campaign (Dove Evolution), a video produced on a shoe-string, watched by millions and the inspiration for YouTube spoofs such as Slob Evolution, Carla underscored the conversational success of the broader Dove Real Beauty campaign — fuller-figured women (and now nude models in their 50s, 60s and 70s) on billboards, which sparked a conversation by Oprah and her tens of millions of fans.

That’s the headline used by Steve Safran in his post at Lost Remote. Lost Remote works with FM, and Sprint is running ads on Lost Remote as part of its Sprint Cuts campaign.

“Have you checked out the Sprint ads that cycle through on the right of LR? Pretty good. Fast, funny, and — I have to say — clever. They’re part of their ‘Waitless’ campaign — ideas to save you time in your life. Now keep in mind that our ads are sold by Federated Media, so we have no idea what’s going to go into that space. We’ve also dissed ads that have appeared there, and so we’re not trying to suck up. (Much.) No — I think the Sprint ads are an excellent example of ‘advertising as entertainment.’ I went through a bunch of their quick videos, and spent time on their site. That’s worth pointing out on the rare occasions that it happens.”

Readers at Lost Remote, at least a few that commented, agree:

“Agreed. Clicked through to their site from here and I wasted a good 15 minutes going through the different clips. Though I still can’t get the hang of speed tying my shoes.”

And this one, which ought to get FM’s critics riled up:

“Those are sheer genius. (The ‘Turbo Parking’ one worries me a little, though.) Thing is, I would never have clicked on one if you hadn’t drawn attention to it… “

Steve and Lost Remote readers: Glad you like em!

Update 9/16: Another brave man, Eric Wilhelm of Instructables tries his hand at one of the “Sprint Cuts” being advertised on his site.

I spent 6 years selling adverting and other marketing services for CNET — asking, as part of my job, for marketers to join our readers online. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to sell against that headline when I was there!

Elinor Mills at CNET’s News.com asks what she takes to be a rhetorical question, “Want to ‘converse’ with marketers?” and provides her answer in the headline to her piece, “Me neither.”

I wonder how Intel, the advertiser running alongside that story, feels about CNET’s point of view, that Intel doesn’t belong there, that marketers aren’t adding to the CNET experience except insofar as they pay their bills.

Mills also challenges the founding concept of conversational marketing:

And what’s this with the slogan of the conference — “Brands are conversations”? No, they aren’t.

Oh my goodness. Forget about the sometimes-controversial programs called conversational marketing. Great brands have sparked conversations since before there was an internet, conversations that often don’t even require that we open our mouths. We tell our friends, our colleagues and communities something about ourselves (I’m not saying it’s always something good) by the brand choices we make — the cars we drive, the sneakers we wear, the cellphones we use. I don’t know Elinor personally, so perhaps she doesn’t engage with brands or people who use, wear or talk about brands. But if that’s the case, she’s part of a very small segment of population.

On Wednesday at the Conversational Marketing Summit, Isobar / CaratFusion CEO Sarah Fay likened marketing today to planting a tree — the beginning of a process that will grow and requires nurturing over time — rather than the old approach to marketing that, like a house, is finished (and has begun its decay) on its first day as a completed structure with dry paint. Wonderful metaphor.

At FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit this week, Comscore announced its new methodology to track readership and usage at conversational media sites such as social networks, participatory news sites, blogs and wikis. With the improved approach, Comscore reports that Federated Media’s sites reach 42 millions monthly uniques and Facebook’s audience is about 60 million uniques.