ChasNote

Nice to see that block in the upper right hand corner on Business Week’s business blog section is now featuring some of the FM sites!

For those of you who missed yesterday’s coverage by every site I can think of, here’s the official press release on Boing Boing’s redesign, including comments and a new gadgets site edited by Joel Johnson (former editor of Gizmodo).

Some of that coverage: CNET, CrunchGear, FM’s Andre Torrez, Mashable, SF Chron…..

Thanks, HP for sponsoring the new comments feature, and Jawbone for sponsoring the launch of the gadgets site!

At AllBusiness, Om says:

“The focus here is 80 percent original reporting and 20 percent opinions…. People want real information. They get tired of opinions quickly. You use that kind of opinion-style blogging as backfill for information, like what traditional news services do. What we are doing is analysis and original reporting, which means we actually go out and talk to people.”

Excerpt from today’s NY Times:

Online advertising in the United States is expected to increase 28.5 percent this year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. AOL’s ad revenue increased 16 percent in the last quarter after gaining 40 percent in the previous quarter. Revenue at Yahoo, the No. 1 Internet portal, rose 8 percent in the latest quarter.

Part of the challenge for portals is that people are starting to approach the Internet in a different way. A new generation of Web users has grown increasingly adept at finding what it wants online and is less reliant on portals for guidance. What is more, younger audiences are spending more time on social networking sites and less time on traditional Internet portals.

“Just like Yahoo, AOL is fighting MySpace, Facebook and others for audience and ad dollars, and those are tough competitors,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Social networking sites are not the only culprits. Thousands of smaller Web sites, like blogs, news collectors and niche content sites, are also attracting growing numbers of Internet users and advertisers.

According to Forrester’s Charlene Li (see VNUnet):

“Social networking sites cannot be treated as channels because their members are not passive web pages.”

Every brand marketer, these days, wants his or her brand to be “part of the conversation.” Last month’s launch of editorial voice posts on a handful of FM sites, and HP’s sponsorship of the series, reminded me to review data from WebEx’s sponsorship of several editorial audiocasts earlier in Q2.

Sponsored editorial webcasts raise the same questions as does HP’s un-meddling sponsorship of the voice posts: When it’s your advertising money, why fund editorial projects over which you have no influence? When there are ample opportunities for advertorials about your own company and products, why pay to sponsor content that isn’t a direct plug for you?

The WebEx experience provides one answer. As part of a paid sponsorship arrangement with several FM sites (John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing, John Battelle’s Searchblog, and others), WebEx asked authors if they’d host one thread of their conversations-in-progress — their on-going, organic, editorial conversations — on a live, webinar platform. In other words, WebEx was not involved in the content, just the format. WebEx provided the technology platform and bought co-branded ads on each site inviting readers to join the events. In John Jantsch’s case, he picked as a topic “Feeding the Small Business Ecosystem” and blogged an invitation to his readers to join the live discussion. Battelle invited his readers to help him pick the topic (fifteen of his readers volunteered ideas here), then reminded them to tune in,
and finally thanked them (and WebEx!) for making the event a success.

Why would WebEx do this, pony up sponsorship dollars but give up control of the message? Well, they recognized that it’s easier to join an organic conversation than to create a new one, especially if your expertise is in software, not conversation-starting. So they tracked down their customers (business professionals) and found them already engaged in a variety of conversations — at sites like Duct Tape Marketing and Searchblog — on topics of their own choosing. When WebEx paid to sponsor a new technology platform on which to host those same conversations, they found themselves, obviously, sponsoring web events that their customers wanted to join, so the ad units promoting the events delivered click-through rates on the high end of the spectrum.

The campaign succeeded in another way, too. Since the authors of these sites signed up to host the events, they had skin — or at least some ego — in the game. Above and beyond the promotional units WebEx bought to promote the events, the authors used editorial real-estate to encourage their readers to tune in. To be clear, the authors were not obligated to talk about the WebEx brand or services. And these editorial plugs didn’t say anything nice about WebEx or their products (other than “thanks, WebEx” in cases where the authors opted to say so) — that, or course, would jeopardize their journalistic cred — but they did drive more business professionals to the events, where each one gave the WebEx platform a test drive.

In the case of the Duct Tape Marketing webcast, in fact, 93% of the traffic to the registration page got there by way of the editorial promotions versus the ad units.

Update 9/19: Here’s a screenshot of Searchblog with a co-branded ad from WebEx.

Yesterday, Om Malik announced a new special-report mini-blog at GigaOM, The Future of Software:

“a micro site that over a period of one month will take a look at some of the major trends that are changing and influencing the software business…. [A] variety of contributors (including myself) will explore these topics. At the end of the month I will offer it to you a neatly packaged report as a PDF download. This concept is really a twist on one of my favorite sections in the old Red Herring, Briefing. It took an analytical look at one thin slice of the technology industry, say optics, from many different angles. I have sorely missed, and hopefully, this special mini-blog will fill the gap.”

Om says this will be the first of many “Future reports” on a variety of topics, underwritten by sponsors initially (but written, of course, by the editorial crew at GigaOM without any help from the sponsors!).  “The plan is to evolve these special reports into premium for-pay briefings, but for now we are going with the ad/sponorship model. Sun Microsystems is the sponsor of this inagural effort.”

Congrats, Om, and thanks for the support, Sun!

According to IAC CFO Tom McInerney during this week’s quarterly call (from PaidContent):

“As you know, the business is related to driving new users, obviously frequency and retention we have seen good improvements in frequency and retention, but it’s offset by not having the growth in new users on the Ask.com business…we can very scientifically look at the marketing spend in the US and relate that to new user growth and so the way to measure it is by new users showing up at the site and we’re not seeing it with this marketing campaign, the way we have seen it with prior marketing campaigns. What we’re doing on that front is retooling the marketing campaign, making it a much stronger call to action and much more product demo spots for later in the year and we hope that will have some effect.“

I hope he means fewer ads on billboards, and more stuff like Ask’s sponsorship Ask A Ninja. Can’t be a bad move to “retool” toward more tactics that deliver 8.3% trial rates!

In his post yesterday, “Songs for Ice Cream Trucks,” David Pescovitz at Boing Boing uses the voice post technology to play the music, literally.

Original post on voice posts.

FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit is offering early-bird discounts, register here. The speaker roster is filling out, too:

Jay Adelson; CEO, Digg.com.
Heather Armstrong; Founder, Dooce.
Jon Armstrong; Founder, Dooce.
Paul Beck; Senior Partner, Ogilvy.
Barak Berkowitz; CEO, Six Apart.
Matt Cohler; VP Strategy, Facebook.
Laura Desmond; CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group/The Americas.
Scott Donaton; Publisher, AdAge.
Sarah Fay; President, Isobar US.
Shawn Gold; SVP Marketing & Content, MySpace.com.
David Grubb; Worldwide Media Director; Microsoft.
Curt Hecht; EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group.
Carla Hendra; Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America.
Casey Jones; VP Marketing, Dell.
Patrick Keane; EVP, CMO, CBS Interactive.
David Lawee; VP Marketing, Google.
Ross Levinsohn; Former President, Fox Interactive Media.
Daina Middleton; Dir, Global Interactive Marketing , Imaging and Printing Group, HP.
Jon Miller; Former Chairman & CEO, AOL Inc.
Kent Nichols; Writer, Performer, Beatbox Giant Productions.
Greg Ott; VP, Global Marketing, Ask.com.
Randall Rothenberg; President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Suzie Reider; Head of Advertising Sales, Youtube.
Douglas Sarine; Writer, Performer, Beatbox Giant Productions.
Tina Sharkey; Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter, LLC.
Suhaila Suhimi-Waldner; East Coast Director, Digital, OMD.
Rishad Tobaccowala; CEO, Denuo.
Johnny Vulkan; Founder, Anomaly.
Jeff Weiner; EVP, Network Division, Yahoo!