ChasNote

Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute has put together a concise cheat-sheet for CMOs looking to understand how to leverage social media platforms in support of their brands. Color-coded for easy reading: Green represents opportunity and red equals waste of time.

I’m thrilled that the IAB and 4As have rolled out Version 3.0 of the standard terms and conditions for online advertising. The two sections I love the most: One, that v3.0 addresses auction-based ad platforms such as Google’s AdWords and Digg’s Digg Ads. Two, indemnity for publishers and platforms — like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo — where some of the content is links to other publishers’ content.

Make the move, agency friends!

Two articles and a post at Digg’s blog this week all discuss the progress of Digg Ads, the Digg-able, bury-able ad units on Digg’s homepage.

Mashable describes the Digg Ads product better than I do:

“DiggAds is powered by a complex auction-based system that attempts to serve users with the highest quality ads — Digg assigns its own quality score to ads — while factoring in the advertiser’s bidding price. It’s like Google Adsense but with quality scoring. The idea is to reward high quality ads with lower CPCs; the more diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays.”

Bob Buch on Digg’s blog says:

“In the first four months, DiggAds has been extraordinarily successful for Digg. From a revenue perspective, things have been great — we view this as a positive sign that giving users control over the advertising they see is a good user experience.”

And Liz Gannes at GigaOM says:

“Social networking behavior — endless repetitive page views, unvetted content — isn’t a great fit for traditional forms of online advertising. Early attempts to bring search or brand ads onto sites like MySpace and Facebook had pathetic results compared the trajectories of the sites’ popularity and attention. But now, a few years in, social media companies are starting to discover how to advertise to their own audience. And in the last five months, Digg has figured out a model that makes sense. So much so that its new site-specific ad formats already account for more than a third of its revenue.”

(Liz interviewed me for the article.)

Earlier this month GE brought its HealthyMagination campaign to Digg. One aspect of the campaign encourages the Digg community to share health-related stories with others by drawing attention to the sharing features (and GE’s logo) at the bottom of each health headline on Digg.

And the approach is earning GE some praise from the notoriously tough crowd at Digg.

A Digg reader posted a screenshot of the GE sponsorship to Imgur.com and submitted the image (with his commentary) back to Digg: “New UI feature for digg.com debuting early? I think it’s a classy and non invasive way to feature revenue generating links.”

Another reviewer, the author of the respected brentcsutoras blog, reminds his readers that on other occasions he’s come out as a critic of ad integrations on Digg — before going on to say that he’s impressed with the tastefulness of the GE program:

“Clean, non-intrusive or annoying, the click-able banner takes you to a pretty cool landing page off HealthyMagination, which is GE’s attempt to help people become healthier ‘through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions’ by helping gather, share and discuss healthy ideas…. I have to say I am rather impressed with GE and their use of social media.”

The brentcsutors blog isn’t just respected by its readers like me, either. It’s highly regarded by Google’s PageRank algorithm too. Here’s how that benefits GE. Right now when a user goes searching for that high-profile socially-curated news site called “Digg,” Google returns brentcsutors’s favorable review on the first page of results.

GE has gone one better than “positive association with the Digg brand,” it has literally inserted itself into the online conversation about Digg.

TechCrunch reported its traffic numbers for 2009. Google is still the #1 source of traffic to the site, bigger than direct traffic. Digg, Twitter and Google Reader round out the top 5 sources:

“Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.”

It’s interesting to see that Facebook doesn’t make the top 5. I’m also surprised that Twitter represents such a small percentage of total traffic, given TechCrunch has more than 1.3 million followers in Twitter. But, hey, I’m not complaining: I love to see that Digg remains TechCrunch’s biggest source of traffic after Google.

More stats on where big sites get their traffic.

But, hey, this may help me explain to my kids what Digg is.

From Global Post:

“Lentz has been on an old media blitz all week, yapping to everyone from the Today Show, to ABC News, to NPR about how it’s safe to drive a Toyota.

“But the Digg Dialogue is different. In essence, Toyota’s U.S. boss is laying himself out before the site’s 40 million rowdy users, any of whom have a chance to ask him — in no uncertain terms and in a most public forum — WTF?

“As of this writing, Digg’s minions have submitted 1,076 questions. They are, naturally, diverse in tone and subject. But they seem to be falling into several important categories….”

I stole that headline from brentcsutoras, in a post which begins: “It appeared today as if Digg had been hacked. If you visit Digg.com and view the page source, you will see the following in the code….. Which makes you wonder if this might not be a hack after all, but rather a pretty clever marketing campaign made to look like a hack.”

It is, in fact, just some fun with advertising — a nod by Electronic Arts to the ASCII art geeks at Digg. Thanks for the kind words, Brent!

UPDATE 8:36pm: The brentcsutoras post was submitted to Digg (here) and was promoted to Digg’s homepage — based on Diggs added by other readers — 7 hours ago. With nearly 1000 Diggs, it’s one of today’s 10 most popular stories on Digg. Well done, EA.

If you’ve spent time with me in the past few years, you’ve likely heard some variation of my recommendation to “market in the vernacular of your customers.” (More here.) By that I mean: Figure out what attracts your audience to a particular media product or platform (whether it’s Vanity Fair, MTV or Facebook), and then speak to that audience with the same grammar, tone and format as the medium that attracted them.

This isn’t new. If I was among your target audience in the late 1970s, you were likely to find me watching the groovy kids on the sitcom What’s Happening. When Dr Pepper ran commercials starring a guy dancing his way across town dressed like the kids on What’s Happening, surrounded by a group of back-up dancers that looked like extras from the show, it got my attention. The commercial was nearly as much fun as the program, only shorter. I didn’t yet have an iPad and I had recently burned out on Atari Pong; the vernacular I spoke most fluently at the time was TV, and that’s the language in which Dr Pepper spoke to me.

Fast forward to today. If your customers get their news from Digg (where I work), they are speaking a vernacular in which yellow boxes next to blue headlines help them discover content they better not miss. The bigger the number in the box, the more they are likely to pay attention — since it’s a content item that has been vetted and recommended by influencers in their community.

Brands that speak to Digg readers in the vernacular of yellow boxes and blue headlines are succeeding with the Digg audience more than advertisers running more traditional banner ads. By an order of magnitude, in fact, if you’re looking at click-through rates.

Earlier this month, Intel took the idea a step further. They used Digg Ads units (Digg-able, bury-able ads between the 2nd and 3rd story on Digg’s homepage) and IAB-sized Content Ads to drive Digg readers to page filled with news stories breaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The page wasn’t a collection of press releases on Intel products, or even a list of editorial stories picked by an Intel employee because it said something nice about Intel. It was a round-up of CES stories that were vetted by the Digg readers themselves. Intel’s sponsorship created something that Digg itself was lacking: One page assembling the most important gadget news from CES for the reader who doesn’t want to be distracted by any other kind of news. (You know who you are.)

And Intel’s campaign took advantage of something else, too. While nearly 40 million people come to Digg each month, they’re not the only ones speaking the Digg vernacular. Readers of most content sites on the web have noticed yellow buttons and invitations to Digg stories right there on the site they’re reading. Like a Briton coming to America and finding out that we too speak her language. So Intel took IAB-shaped Content Ads and ran them on other sites — such as Wired and CNET — that also attract Intel’s customers in a context where those customers would understand that yellow boxes with big numbers in them mean there’s socially-curated content they might want to check out.

According to Intel’s David Veneski:

“The ability to ‘Digg’ something on the Web has become a ubiquitous sign of approval from a content hungry audience throughout the Internet. With our content ads the goal was to team up with Digg to provide genuinely interesting stories coming out of CES across a wide landscape of sites where our customers seek information.

“Recognizing the aggregation of compelling content was brought to you by Intel in a social friendly, audience approved ‘Diggable’ format gave us the ability to add value to our audience’s experience rather than just paying for an impression that may or may not be of benefit to them.”

Advertising that seeks to improve the audience experience? I like it. And I’m betting website audiences will too.

(Credits: Dave Veneski at Intel; David Zamorski, Sarah Reed and Melissa Sabo at OMD; and Elyssa Wilpon, Erin Coull, Dav Zimak, Eric Hoppe, Dan Contento and Mac Delaney at Digg.)

If you weren’t already hooked on the Golden Globes by the red carpet and drunken celebrities, now there’s an angle for geeks. From Geek Sugar:

“Since yesterday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC have been gearing up for the big show by streaming events on Facebook and Ustream to bring you retrospective recaps of all the award-show goodness you can handle, and have also partnered with Digg and Mashable for daily updates and countdowns. “

Digg’s daily videos and other Golden Globes stories here.