ChasNote

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.)

I love the UPS-sponsored PopURLs Brown Edition, a dashboard of business news. The site is built by PopURLs on top of the site’s system of filtering and aggregating web content. What I love even more than the PopURLs Brown Edition destination site: All of the site’s value is syndicated into ad units, like these on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop. I don’t need to click on the banners to appreciate the value UPS is bringing to me.

(Related: Intel worked with PopURLs on on a similar sponsorship in 2008. The site, PopURLs Blue Edition for Enterprise IT, is now sponsored by IBM.)

All of the above are projects facilitated by my old pals and former colleagues at Federated Media.

A tweet from Dennis Yang at Floor64:

Here’s the accompanying picture:

Intel, you guys are good. Veneski — You going to say you planned this?!

This week at CeBit 2009 Asus unveiled a prototype of a dual-screen laptop, where a multi-touch display replaces the standard keyboard. Asus calls it “a community designed PC” inspired by “ideas contributed from users from around the world” via WePC, a site launched last October as a social-media platform to crowdsource notebook design innovation.

And to go from concept to retail, Asus wants more input:

“As part of the ‘Community Designed PC’ project initiated by ASUS and Intel®, the concept is still a work-in-progress which requires continued feedback. ASUS is thus taking the opportunity to encourage users to participate in the development of this concept notebook. Additional information regarding this concept can be found at WePC.com.”

Asus release.

More at CNET and Wired.

From Springwise:

“Best-selling crime author James Patterson will write the first and last chapters of AirBorne, a 30-chapter thriller that will be released one chapter at a time beginning next month. For those in between, Borders and Random House held a contest to find 28 writers who could each create a fast-paced and thrilling chapter in less than 750 words.”

Winning contributors will get a free copy of the final book, and one grand-prize winner will get a one-on-one writing tutorial (by phone) with Patterson himself. Great way to engage a core audience of fans, who will undoubtedly emerge as evangelists for the book.

Related: Asus and Intel invite their customers to crowdsource the next generation of laptops.

Or did they?

Back in October, Asus and Intel (in partnership with FM) launched WePC, a social media site that invites gamers, business people, hipsters, designers and anyone else who cares about technology to help crowdsource the next generation of laptops. (More here.)

Fast-forward two months to CES 2009, and some WePC participants credit Asus with not only listening to customer input at WePC, but bringing some of the ideas to life within 60 days: Among readers of Engadget’s review of the Asus G50, one commented that the product idea was his, submitted to Asus by way of WePC.

Are the engineers at Asus that good?! I’m sure they’re terrific, but I also doubt it’s possible for any industrial engineering corp to launch a new product design that quickly. In fact, given that Asus is both a maker of Asus-branded laptops as well as an original design manufacturer (ODM) for other leading laptop brands, its product design cycles are likely faster than anyone else in the industry. But still.

Instead, I’d chalk this up to a happy coincidence: An Asus fan submitted an idea at WePC that was already under development at Asus labs. It’s a case of Asus knowing some of its customers well enough to predict what they want. And with this particular customer (and the other Engadget readers), it just got some extra credit for proving it.

UPDATE: I Twittered the above post. Four minutes later @ITProPortal reports back that Asus delivered on his PC dreams this CES, too.

Pretty much every marketer pursues twin search strategies — buying paid links (SEM) as well as taking measures to improve placement the natural search results (SEO). Intel buys text ads from Google for phrases such as “tech makeover.” (See below screenshot: PC.com is an Intel site.) Nothing out of the ordinary here; in fact, Target is buying text ads on the same page of Google results.

But instead of doing what many brands do to improve their organic search performance — hire a legitimate SEO consultant to coach them on how search engines work, or hire a less legitimate SEO firm that attempts to game Google’s algorithm — Intel uses its marketing dollars to become a better content publisher. Its Need A Tech Makeover site, a contest platform that invites people to say what they’d do with a new state-of-the-art computing set up, quickly morphed from a marketing site to a conversational media publication. Content (the individual pitches for a tech makeover) sparked conversation among the site’s other readers (comments and votes), and those conversations continued even after readers went to other sites (mentions and links back to the contest site).

Now when a Google user searches for “tech makeover,” Google points to Intel’s PC.com as part of the the AdWords paid search program (highlighted, by Google, in yellow), and also points to three web pages — in the #1, #2 and #3 positions — associated with Intel’s Need A Tech Makeover project. One is Intel’s site itself, and the other two are promotions at Hot Hardware, the reviews site Intel partnered with on the program.

Engadget readers of a Fujitsu laptop review brought Asus’s WePC project into the discussion. This is a new approach to “conquest marketing,” the tactic where brands buy ads alongside editorial coverage of their competitors. Only this time it’s free and organic — which, I bet, means it will be more effective.

David Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta of Hot Hardware pay a visit to Christine Arehart, aka GetInThruIt, winner of Intel’s Need a Tech Makeover promotion. Christine’s story racked up more than 21,000 votes, and when you hear it, you’ll know why.

More on Intel’s Need a Tech Makeover program.

IBM and Intel teamed up with FM, AnandTech, DailyTech and Hot Hardware to launch IBM Virtualization Little Ashes download , a social-media platform for IT to define, explore and optimize processing virtualization. From one post:

“First dual-core in 2005, then quad-core in 2007: the multi-core snowball is rolling. The desktop market is still trying to find out how to wield all this power; meanwhile, the server market is eagerly awaiting the octal-cores in 2009. The difference is that the server market has a real killer application, hungry for all that CPU power: virtualization.”