ChasNote

On Wednesday at the Conversational Marketing Summit, Isobar / CaratFusion CEO Sarah Fay likened marketing today to planting a tree — the beginning of a process that will grow and requires nurturing over time — rather than the old approach to marketing that, like a house, is finished (and has begun its decay) on its first day as a completed structure with dry paint. Wonderful metaphor.

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!

Conversational marketing in action!

In mid May, Intel sponsored Digg’s new visualization widget, Digg ARC. Now, based on feedback from the Digg community, Digg has released a new and improved version of the ARC application (see Digg’s blog). The front door of Digg Labs has added an explanation of Intel’s involvement with ARC. Oooh, I like that!

Nick Carr’s recent column for Guardian Unlimited is called, “How corporations still control the marketing conversation.”

I like the implied admission that these conversations — what we used to call publications — are controlled at some level by the corporations who pay the bills through advertising. (Excluding, of course, Ms Magazine and Consumer Reports.) Hey, admitting the problem is a great place to start! He even turns the mirror on his own sector of the media business:

“Even in traditional media, the line dividing marketing and editorial content has long been a blurry one. Many newspapers and magazines publish in their pages advertorials written by companies, even though they know that many readers don’t distinguish the paid content from the articles written by journalists.”

But, ironically, he concludes with this:

“It has long been assumed that the internet, by democratising media, would level the playing field, shifting power away from corporations and to individuals. A lone person, using a computer and a web connection, could broadcast his opinion about a company or a product to the entire world. There’s truth in that, but it’s not the whole truth. As the line between media and marketing blurs further, corporations are finding that the web may give them more power to influence what people see and do. In the end, conversational marketing is more about marketing than about conversation.”

When the NY Times let ATT wallpaper the print pages of the business section in January 2007, horrified readers didn’t have an easy channel to voice their feedback. Or when it has launched new sections of the newspaper — such as Automobiles or Small Business — not because there was suddenly more news about those topics, but because advertisers would pay the Times more if they wrote more stories on those topics, there was no forum for public discussion. When the Wall Street Journal promoted Dell advertorial videos as video news coverage (with another tech vendor’s commercials running before and after the advertorial, to make the ruse complete!) the traditional journalists at the Journal and its competitors looked the other way. When CNET, ZDNet, PC Magazine, CNN, Fortune, or Car and Driver have lent their voices, words, logos and names to advertisers for use in ad creative — it’s something we consumers just have to deal with, quietly.

When websites — especially the new generation of “conversational” sites that , oh my!, make it easy for their readers to express themselves right there in the publications (attached to the story itself, not on page 28 where “letters to the editor” are hidden) — explore more relevant approaches to advertising, they DO open themselves up for criticism, actively. They invite it, in fact, because they recognize their survival depends on listening to reader feedback and improving from it. Conversational media and conversational marketing certainly “level the playing field” and “shift the power away from corporations” more than old school media and marketing ever has. It ain’t perfect yet, but it’s a move in the right direction.

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.

Over the past 2 years, FM has worked with dozens of advertisers and 100+ leading independent authors, editors and publishers in an effort to give readers and marketers a better opportunity to talk to each other. We call it “conversational marketing.”

The idea is simple. The best publications have always been dialogs between great writers, passionate readers, and, yes, advertisers. This “conversation” is more obvious and more iterative among today’s social media communities, but it’s been happening since long before the Internet. The most successful advertisers have always been the ones that recognize and respect this conversation — rather than those who see media as a “delivery platform” for their pitch or an opportunity to “target their demo.” Advertisers that license New Yorker cartoons for their print ads in that publication, Wired advertisers that write ad copy in the definitive grammar of that publication, and tech advertisers that re-use in their ad units favorable reviews from CNET and PC Magazine are three examples.

To be clear, I’m not talking about advertorials; I’m talking about ads, those things that every human over the age of 7 recognizes as paid messages from a marketer. Provided publishers follow two long-standing guidelines — be transparent, listen to reader feedback — advertisers can join the conversation without tainting anyone’s credibility.

During the 1990s hey-days of tech magazines, readers of PC Magazine and PC World said they spent as much time with the ads as they did the editorial content. And that’s not because IT professionals are so dumb they can’t tell the difference (please!) — it’s because ads that work hard to join the conversation, to be relevant to participants in that conversation, are more valuable than generic ads that attempt to interrupt the conversation and steal your attention for half a minute.

This is all to say: I’m a believer that highly relevant advertising — advertising that joins the conversation — is better for all involved parties.

So I took issue with Nick Denton’s Friday post on ValleyWag accusing some of the web’s most highly respected, most experienced professional journalists of selling out their credibility to help Microsoft bring more relevant ads to their readers.

One of Microsoft’s marketing messages is built around the phrase “people ready,” and the equation “software + people = business success.” It’s a mouthful, and — to me, anyway — not immediately digestible. So, working with FM, Microsoft invited 8 FM authors to talk about the concept of “people ready” in their own words, in language that might resonate better with their readers. What those authors wrote was featured in the campaign that ensued.

Did Microsoft ask the authors to endorse their brand, use their products, or tell their readers what to do? Of course not.

Did Microsoft or these journalist try to sneak these ads past their readers, in a costume of editorial or even advertorial? Nope. Microsoft paid for ad impressions, and the rates for advertising on each of these sites is published at FM’s website. Quite obviously, Microsoft was running paid ads on their sites. John Battelle took the added measure of blogging about his participation in the campaign (see Searchblog) — and that’s a great idea to make the self-evident even more evident!

Did readers get confused by what they were looking at in those ad banners? Well, Cisco did something similar last fall, around their “Welcome to the Human Network” campaign. A dozen leading tech and business journalists affiliated with FM wrote their own definitions of “human network” that they let Cisco use in ad banners on their sites. Like Microsoft, Cisco didn’t guide or edit or participate in the copy written by these journalists. And readers seemed OK with the project. Thousands of them clicked on the Cisco ads to read more definitions and voted on their favorites. Nearly 900 of them went back to their own blogs and wrote up the experience (not all were positive reviews, but most were). The Wikipedians added “human network” as entry to their encyclopedia, and made reference to Cisco’s “commercial use of the phrase,” so the distinction between advertising and editorial was clear to them, too. And for the past 2 months — the Microsoft campaign started running on these sites in April — readers of those sites haven’t raised an outcry.

So there’s a fair amount of evidence Denton is raising a stink all by himself. Or perhaps his disdain for the advertisers that support his business (Gawker Media), our business (Federated Media), and every other ad-supported content business online or offline, is so great that he feels they don’t belong in the conversation at all. Except, of course, the conversation in which they agree to pay him, then shut up. At FM, we think that — for commercially supported sites, anyway — marketers might just have something to add to the conversation. And we’ll keep working on innovative ways for them to do just that.

Other coverage:

Robert Scoble at Scobleizer.
Fred Wilson at AVC.
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.
Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web.
Don Park at Daily Habit.
Neil Chase at FM’s blog.
John Battelle at FM’s blog.
Om Malik at GigaOM.
Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed.

Zach Rodgers at ClickZ wrote up Ask.com’s experience with their Ask A Ninja sponsorship:

“Question: What do you get when you cross a ninja with one of those live-read radio sponsorships of old — you know, the ad spots news hosts and celebs used to read on-air?

“Answer: Ask.com’s latest digital ad initiative.

“The IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned search engine has paired with goofball video blog Ask a Ninja on an ad deal in which the show’s host and namesake reads the sponsor copy himself — and then offers bonus clips to fans who query Ask with special ninja-themed search terms. The three-month relationship, which also includes run-of-site display ads, was brokered by Ask a Ninja rep Federated Media Publishing….”

“Early response rates are good. In the first two weeks of the campaign, 8.3 percent of viewers have searched on Ask.com’s ninja-related terms and watched the videos.

“‘There isn’t advertising that is able to drive that kind of response rate,’ said [ChasNote's own] Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at FM Publishing. ‘But there certainly is opportunity around the ninja to drive that response rate around himself and his content’ by incorporating a call to action and a pay off that takes place within the search experience.”

Thanks for the coverage, Zach!

Building off the success of last fall’s seed campaign, where FM business and technology authors supplied definitions of the human network for ads on their own sites, Cisco’s latest creative units allow for readers to submit their own definitions within the banners themselves. Here are samples.

From the NY Times:

“these companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.”

There has to be a better way, one that produces high-quality messaging that’s relative to the brand, engages consumers and isn’t harder or more expensive to create. I have some ideas! See what Ask.com did or what Intel did or what Cisco did. To the chagrin of the sales reps here at FM (!!), not one of these brands spent a million dollars to create these successful examples of consumer-involved conversational marketing.