ChasNote

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!

According to CNET:

“Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience, gave her keynote presentation…. [and said] Google is making moves towards cost-per-action as a more ideal auction-based pricing model, but she also pointed out that it’s a long way away.”

That’s bad news for two major constituencies. One, websites that are part of Google’s publisher network. The current pay-per-click structure already short-changes the value of their audiences and traffic; cost-per-action / -transaction goes a step further in reducing revenues per thousand pageviews. Two, brand advertisers, who look to the leading internet media firm to help make the web a better platform for building awareness and creating demand. This news seems to indicate Google remains more comfortable in the transactional arena of direct response.

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

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

Kevin Rose announced big news for Digg: They’ve signed up Microsoft to sell their banners and text-link sponsorships. (FM will keep doing what we’ve been doing — the integrated sponsorships, custom programs and conversational marketing.) From Kevin’s post:

“We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year. This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.”

Here’s Battelle’s comment at FM’s blog:

“Today our partner Digg and our new partner Microsoft announced a deal to work together on advertising across Digg’s burgeoning site. At FM, we’re proud of our partners, and particularly proud when we’ve helped prove their businesses’ value. It’s no secret that Digg is the kind of property - like Facebook - that was bound to get the attention of the Big Guys as they continue to play an ever more fascinating game of Internet chess. That’s why I’m even more pleased that FM is continuing to work with Digg and with Microsoft to further Digg’s goals.”

And here’s the official press release from Microsoft, including news that FM and Microsoft will be collaborating around conversational marketing stuff:

“Microsoft and Federated Media Publishing, Digg’s current advertising partner, plan to collaborate to bring integrated programs to Digg’s users and advertisers. ‘Federated Media has unique advertising sales assets that dovetail with our efforts, and we look forward to working with them,’ Berkowitz said. [Steve Berkowitz is Microsoft’s SVP for the Online Services Group, ed.]”

Congrats, all around!

Here’s the press release. Reuters says the deal is $275MM in cash.

I spent last Friday evening at LAX and the Burbank airport (and trafficky freeways between the two) on a 9 hour quest to get back to San Francisco. Lucky for me, I found myself distracted by an engaging and spirited discussion of advertising models, journalistic ethics and best practices for conversational marketing! A week later I find myself, again, stuck in Los Angeles waiting out flight delays — and collecting my thoughts on last week’s hoopla around conversational marketing.

Earlier this week I had a frank conversation with the folks at Microsoft to get their take. After revisiting the elements of the ad campaign, we agreed that this sort of “conversational marketing” doesn’t violate ethics (marketer or journalistic) or intentionally mislead readers. Still, they are taking seriously the perception among some commentators that we all could have done more to disclose the details on the campaign. More transparency can’t be a bad thing. Most importantly, Microsoft is listening and trying to learn from the feedback. I was thrilled to hear all of that.

That’s what makes conversational marketing so compelling to me (and my colleagues at FM) — it allows our customers to give us feedback. Honest feedback isn’t always nice to hear, but it’s important that we hear it, that we listen and that we grow from it. We’ll keep at it because we’re committed to finding more relevant, natural ways to communicate to our customers, and (let’s hope) we get better each time.

I agree with Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, commenting on what Yahoo should do post-Semel: “Yahoo can’t out-Google Google — and it’s likely that nobody can…. To catch up to Google, much less beat Google, Yahoo needs to change the nature of the game. Here’s a hint: Yahoo should focus where Google is weakest — human intelligence and human relationships (i.e. ’social’).”

In an op-ed in the FT, Lord Saatchi argues that Google and the rationalist school of advertising ignore marketing’s most important function, creating demand:

“People do not know what they want until a brilliant person shows them. Henry Ford confirmed the point. Asked if he had carried out research before he invented the Model T Ford, he replied: ‘If I had asked people what they wan­ted, I would have built a faster horse.’”

An example I’ve used before is this. If car companies wait until prospective customers type “I need a new car” into search engines, those customers will end up buying new cars every 12 years instead of every seven. That might be a good thing in so many ways, but not if you’re in the business of selling cars.

That was Battelle’s money quote on a panel last week at EconSM, his way of describing what FM is doing with marketers to bring them into the conversations at leading independent social media sites (Yahoo Publisher Network blog). Something the ad networks and Google AdSense can’t yet do.

David Eun, Google’s VP of content partnerships, at yesterday at PaidContent’s EconSM: “In talking about the polarization between those who focus on the hit-driven head and the user-generated long tail, Eun said YouTube wants to focus on the middle.”

Reading the rest of the quote (I wasn’t there), it appears Eun is talking about content producers. But I’ve been hearing this sentiment from advertisers, too. Marketers are covering segments of their audience that still visit the portals (the “head”), and they are reaching deep down the long tail with direct-response dollars spent with Google AdSense and the ad networks. It’s bringing their brand message to the middle — high quality niche sites that are taking greater and greater share of high quality audiences — and doing it with efficiency that’s still hard.