ChasNote

Among Jeremiah Owyang’s Best and Worst Social Network Marketing round up, BMW’s Graffiti drawing contest in Facebook gets the top score.

Thanks, Jeremiah!

According to a colleague in Intel’s Latin America marketing group (I missed her data source), 70% of the online population in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia read blogs, and 35% of them write blogs. Sixty-percent of Mexican Internet users and 75% of Brazil Internet users are members of social networks such as Facebook or Orkut — versus 35% of Internet users worldwide.

Lenovo has launched an app in Facebook and Hi5 that allows Olympics fans to root for their teams and follow their favorite athletes through blog posts from Beijing. In the words of my colleague James Gross:

“What an awesome way to showcase that advertising can equal media and all participants can benefit. Lenovo, led by David Churbuck, was visionary to create a strategy with Olympic Athletes and online platforms for long term attention share around the Olympic Games. From aggregating Olympic bloggers, to the application that Citizen Sports built for social networks like Facebook and Hi5, to communication platforms like Twitter. Lenovo has recognized that they can differentiate themselves through allowing people to use their brand to create and distribute media.”

Here’s Pete Spande’s write up.

Social Media’s Seth Goldstein posits that sponsored questions are to social media advertising what keywords are to search marketing: the ad unit that’s native to the user experience. And the performance metric will become “cost per conversation.”

Excerpts of his IAB keynote via 3 Minute Ad Age.

Most people talk about social networking services as platforms on which to build communities and media. Forrester’s Charlene Li goes a step further:

“I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’ Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.”

Your customers are 3 times more likely to trust opinions from their peers than advertising messages from you, according to Jupiter data published at eMarketer. This isn’t new, of course. Peers have always been our most trusted resource for buying information. Only now — in this conversational media world — we can track all those watercooler conversations about our brands.

Jeremiah Owyang, at his site, writes up a case study of Dell’s Facebook Graffiti Contest, part of its ReGeneration campaign. His “what could have been better” section — that conversational campaigns should be given longer life spans, and that the content they produce should be given more exposure too — is worth a full read at his site. His summary of the campaign overall:

“Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.”

And MediaPost’s Social Media Insider blog says:

“There are a lot of impressive stats here: 1.1 million people voted on their favorite illustration, 7,300 people entered a submission, the contest has almost 1,300 friends, and there are currently 209 comments to the post at ReGeneration.org announcing the winners. Clearly, Dell’s ReGeneration effort supports [FM CEO John] Battelle’s contention that social media may finally make online advertising much more interesting to users than the ongoing crop of forgettable banner campaigns.”

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat reports on Dell’s “Green” Graffiti contest, among other campaigns that illustrate marketers are finding brand-building value inside of social networks.

“[Dell] is working with ad company called Federated Media and a Facebook application that lets you draw artwork and feature it on user profiles, called Graffiti. Dell backed a contest for top drawings around its theme of environmental ‘ReGeneration,’ where contestants created visual answers to the question ‘what does green mean to you’ within the Graffiti application. The contest, which ran over two weeks in January, generated more than 1 million votes on more than 7300 Graffiti entries. Check out the top 150 here (as well as the ones pictured, above and below) — you’ll be impressed.

“This campaign was a success because Dell both promoted something people cared about and reached out to them through a medium they cared about. The Graffiti application has more than 8.6 million total members and 253,830 daily active users (as of today). Because Graffiti is a Facebook application, users also learned about the contest through Facebook’s news feeds and user profiles. Federated Media (which, in full disclosure, runs ads on sites like VentureBeat), also featured ads about the contest on sites popular with Graffiti users, including sites like Boing Boing and Make. These ads pointed users back to the Graffiti application.

“Even though this was one of the early efforts by a brand advertiser to reach social network users, Federated Media and Graffiti made money from Dell, Federated Media’s publisher, Chas Edwards, tells me…. Dell, meanwhile, accomplished what it set out to do, which was to reach hundreds of thousands of users and have them engage with its brand in a positive way. Whether Dell actually sells more computers as a result of the campaign is still open to question. This was a brand-building exercise, not a direct-response campaign, and so the idea is that Dell will be able to sell more computers in the future.”

Another powerful data point from JPMorgan’s Nothing But Net report:

“While portals were once dominant, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of minutes spent online in August 2007, down from 42% in August 2002. Meanwhile, blogs, online gaming, and social networking websites have experienced double to triple digit Y/Y growth rates in page views. This fragmented audience not only makes it more difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience through only a few publishers, but also makes it difficult for publishers to attract advertisers given their limited scale. We believe that companies that can aggregate traffic through the development of ad networks or partnerships will be more successful in driving growth in 2008.”

From Seth’s Blog:

“Sure, 1% of your customers blog or post or just plain talk. They’re louder than ever before. But the other 99% represent a real opportunity for you. Figure out how to get them out there. Cajole them to go to a caucus.”

(The 1% Rule explained here.)

I know it worked for Obama yesterday — get of them to caucus — but that might be the harder path, getting your quiet fans to alter their personalities so they become talkative fans. An alternative suggestion: Find talkative folks, and see if you can deliver a noteworthy experience with your brand.