ChasNote

I came across some eMarketer data this week that initially struck me as obvious: Social media users are more likely to trust blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates authored by friends than those posted by brands. In the “trust completely” column, friends are considered two to three TIMES more trustworthy.

Makes sense: human friendships are built around trust, and while we sometimes trust brands, brands aren’t friends or humans.

Of course brands aren’t people, but they’ve long understood that humanizing themselves (itselves?) — by hiring likable pitchmen and pitchwomen or creating cute animated characters, for example — makes us more likely to think of them as friends. When they act like humans (or tree elves or fun-loving tigers), we often forget they are corporations trying to sell us stuff. We start considering them pals and trusting them.

In social media, though, brands aren’t doing a good job of acting like our human friends. A recent report by digital agency 360i (see Forbes) shows that consumers use Twitter to converse with their online friends — @Replies, in Twitterspeak — while brands predominantly use social media to talk about themselves.

“When marketers use Twitter, 360i says that 75% of the time they are using it to disseminate news or information about the brand, as opposed to actively engaging Twitter users. Consumers are only engaged by the brand approximately 16% of the time. Putting that in perspective, consumers engaged in conversation with each other 43% of the time.”

And it turns out that behaving like a human in social media — listening and conversing rather than spouting from a soapbox — isn’t just an academic exercise or a contest to rack up follower counts. Charlene Li at the Altimeter Group recently ranked brands into a leaderboard of what she calls the Social Media Mavens, the brands that most actively engage with their followers, and cross-checked her data with financial performance of those companies. It turns out that acting more human in social media is good business.

“These Mavens on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.

“Note that we are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on [customers] than the competition.”

From Telegraph UK:

“The advertisement, for WPMI-TV in Alabama, showed the station’s anchors, Greg Peterson and Kym Thurman, with their top weatherman Derek Beasley, alongside the latest headline and the words ‘Right now on Twitter’.

“Unfortunately for the station, at one stage the top headline on Twitter read ‘Three accused of gang rape in Monroeville,’ and the misleading juxtaposition was caught on camera by a passing motorist as he drove through Mobile, Alabama.”

I’m watching CNN on a Virgin America flight from JFK to SFO, and the lead story (at 10:25am Eastern) is the crash of a cargo plane near Shanghai that killed all 3 Americans on board. At the next break, the second commercial is for British Airways — a spot built around China’s Canton Fair, a 3-week event at which (according to the voice-over) $2 billion dollars a day trade hands.

Eek, airline ads bumping up next to news of airplane crashes?!

For years I’ve been asked by marketers how I’ll protect their brands if they run ads on blogs that allow comments or sites like Digg, where readers select the stories that get promoted to the homepage. My answer has always been: The same way CNN does it. “If, god forbid, there’s a plane crash, CNN must cover the story. So someone in CNN’s traffic department immediately pulls all airline advertisers out of rotation until that news cycle passes.” While humans are still better than algorithms at avoiding (or recovering from) these kinds of awkward associations, the CNN approach — as I just witnessed — remains an imperfect system.

Do I now need to find a new example with which to answer that question, or should I just point out that those uncomfortable situations you fear will happen online are also happening on TV?

Wow, was this the work of AOL’s contextual-matching ad network Ad.com? That would suggest Ad.com is matching images in ad units to images in news stories, which — as this example shows — is more likely to create awkward moments than relevant associations. The story on the left is about the Colorado boy who, for a few hours, was thought to be riding on a giant balloon. The Quaker Oats ad on the right features creative a guy riding a personal hot air balloon.

From PaidContent:

“The talks are no where near the formal stage and the idea for a cross-publisher ad net doesn’t seem to be serious at this point. There has been one round of preliminary discussions about the ad net idea and there’s the possibility of another, but nothing has been set yet. So take this with a large grain of salt.

“According to one unidentified Ad Age source, the ad net push is more a wish and expression of frustration than an actual framework. ‘We’re getting killed by ad networks’ Ad Age’s source said. ‘A lot of companies feel like, as consumer companies with a flood of online content, if we could just create some scale on our own and sell across it, we can get a lot better ad rates.’”

I hope it’s not serious, because I like magazines and magazine companies, and I hope they quickly develop ideas to save themselves. This is not one of those ideas. Some of my best friends are ad networks and all, but they won’t save publishing. Ad networks do not drive rates up, and, while ad networks are a nice supplement to other revenue streams, by themselves they cannot support the kind of high-quality, expense-intensive content that differentiates traditional publishers from commodity news.

There’s something magical and irrationally valuable about the content in Time or Vogue or Sports Illustrated. There are other sources of world news, models in fashionable clothes and in-depth sports coverage (respectively), but most of us are convinced these publications do it better. Maybe it’s the quality of the writing and photography, maybe it’s the access they have to their subjects, and maybe it’s just the fact that we’ve grown up associating those names with leadership in those content areas. Whatever the contributing factors, these magazines have built brands with readers around the world. It’s hard to explain the connection readers have to those magazines and the content within them. It’s subtle work. What’s made the business of publishing work is the ability of those magazines — their publishers and sales reps — to explain that magic to marketers, who are then willing to pay premium advertising rates to insert themselves in a premium conversation.

When you bundle up a few hundred magazine brands into a bundled-sell ad network, the “premium conversation” discussion — as well as the premium rates — goes out with the bath water.

From LoLBots.

I found this listing on eBay.

Truth be told, I found it on Digg while I was searching for “advertising” stories. (I’m not currently looking to place the ChasNote logo on someone’s head!)

My favorite part is where the sellers veer from AAAA/IAB standard terms and conditions: “No Returns Accepted.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across enterprising individuals offering branded tattoos to the highest bidder. Three years ago a Salt Lake City woman made $10,000 in exchange for tattooing GoldenPalace.com (in letters an inch tall, per the agreement) on her forehead. By my very rough math, I calculated that she earned an effective CPM of just $11.42.

Dustin Curtis tracks the participation rate by his site’s readers based on the language he uses to invite them to follow him in Twitter.

The basic statement approach (”I’m on Twitter”) delivered a 4.7% click-through rate. Look what happened when he went with a personal command and a literal, underlined “here” at the end of the sentence.

Thanks for pointing me to this, Kortina.

Ok, the 184 million searches on Facebook are still less than 1% of Google’s 13 billion. But Comscore’s May 09 data shows a 5% jump for Facebook over its April numbers while Google remained flat.

As more internet users anchor their web sessions with Facebook, and as those users and their friends use status updates to share news and other content, Facebook search might ultimately be a better mousetrap since it filters search results by content your friends have already vetted. When it comes to all the world’s information, less can often be more.

From Fred Vogelstein’s article in Wired:

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet — its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this ’social graph’ to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

The humans versus the bots.

• Grumpy Old Men buy

TechCrunch points out that my two most recent posts — Steve Jobs’s medical leave and deceptive ads served by Yahoo’s Right Media — have a connection. At least within the flawed logic of the ad-targeting machines used by ad networks and context targeting engines. The screenshot below, from TechCrunch, shows a Kaplan University ad (”Jobs Become Obsolete. Talent Doesn’t.”) alongside a WashingtonPost.com story on the Steve Jobs situation. An added wrinkle: The Washington Post owns Kaplan.