Introducing Blippy, where ca-ching connects with the social web

I just checked out Blippy, which, if you’re a cynic, you might just think of as place for a new consumer segment — the shopping exhibitionist — to indulge a perverse desire to show the whole world every purchase they make.

When you register a credit card on Blippy, your purchases show up on the Blippy feed.  It looks a lot like a Twitter feed except the only thing it says is “So and so” (that means you) spent “so much” at “such and such a place.”  It also shows a list of what you bought. You can imagine what kind of trouble that could get you into.  But like most social media sites, you can limit who sees and who doesn’t see that you just spend $180 at the Filene’s basement designer wedding gown sale, even though you’re a guy.

I don’t quite know what to make of Blippy.  But it has some cool functions.  You can follow and be followed, so there could be value in keeping tabs on people who make frequent purchases in the same categories you do.  You can click on people to see a record of their purchases.  Or you can click on a location to see a list of everyone on Blippy who bought someting there.  You can also comment on purchases, which might include tips on where the person might get the product for less the next time, or make suggestions of related goods that might interest the buyer.

Apparently there’s no revenue model yet, but one can imagine that the data collected here could be a gold mine for retailers to connect with their most loyal and valuable customers.  Check out this New York Times article for more information.  I learned a new term there.  It’s called passive sharing.  That’s what Blippy does because your posts are automatically uploaded every time you buy something with the designated credit card.

If you’re not careful, that really could get you into trouble!!!

The agency of the future will be a horse of a different color

Brian Morrissey recently wrote in Adweek about the “great race” between traditional and digital shops to become the lead agency, that is, the agency that leads all brand communications efforts for the client among a stable of shops covering specific specialties.  Morrissey’s piece reports on a Forrester “state of interactive agencies” survey showing that only 23% of global interactive marketers believe that the “the traditional brand agency is capable of planning and managing interactive marketing activities.”  Conversely, only 22% think their interactive agency is ready to assume the leading role in managing all brand communications.  Thus the great race for world domination of brand stewardship between the traditional and digital agencies is off! To quote Morrissey, “…traditional shops scramble to add digital know-how and digital shops seek to move up the ladder to become brand stewards…”

Joseph Jaffee, in his latest installment of JaffeJuiceTV suggests there’s a third horse in the race, the social media agency.  (Thanks to Joe for drawing my attention to the Morrissey article in his video.)  You have to admire Joe for waving the social media flag, since his company, crayon, was just acquired along with two other companies by powered to create the first “social media agency with scale,” as I believe he calls it.

When a traditional agency acquires digital know-how — usually that means buying a digital agency — that’s one thing.  Integrating that expertise with the brand strategy capabilities of the acquiring agency is quite another.  Whether it’s a two or three-horse race, ultimately it’s about tearing down the walls that stand between traditional, digital and social in our minds and in the way we work so that ideas move freely, are informed and work across all three. It means bringing people of different minds, with different perspectives, together, ideally in physical space, not separating them into silos, so they can create something better and more powerful together.  The agencies that get that right will be the ones that win.  And then it won’t matter if they’re traditional, digital or social.  Because at that point they will be a horse of a completely different color.

Ikea’s Easy to Assemble video series breaks new ground in branded entertainment

Easy to Assemble is a wacky online video series created and written by Illeana Douglas and sponsored by Ikea.  It’s based on an earlier online show created by Douglas called Supermarket of the Stars. Douglas later pitched it to Ikea and adapted it for the Swedish home furnishings giant.  In both series, Douglas and the other stars (including Justine Bateman, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Pollak and Jane Lynch) play fictionalized versions of themselves.  The basic idea is that they have decided to get out of show business and start new careers as co-workers in the Ikea store in Burbank, California.  Sounds like a stretch, but the series is incredibly funny and entertaining.

And that’s the secret to its success as a brand property.  According to Advertising Age, Easy to Assemble has racked in 5.1 million views since first going online last year and the numbers are still growing.  Ikea had the vision to give Douglas the creative freedom to place entertainment ahead of marketing.  That doesn’t mean the brand is relegated to the sidelines.  The story takes place in the Ikea store, Ikea branding and products (including those famous Swedish meatballs) are weaved naturally into the story lines, and the brand isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself, or at peculiarly Swedish traits that are at the heart of the brand and the company.  The ability not to take itself so seriously, something most brands sadly lack, makes Ikea all the more approachable and human.

In one of the spoof training videos that come at the end of many episodes, Nicole Bateman advises Ikea trainees not to inform customers who have left an important component behind by mistake.  When they get home, they’ll realize it’s missing, come back to buy it, and will probably pick up other items as well.  “And that means repeat sales.”  Of course everyone watching knows this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but most marketers would lack the courage for that kind of humor.

I’m also impressed how Easy to Assemble has engaged with Ikea’s online fan base to promote the show.  For the launch of the second season, Douglas engaged the services of CJP Digital Media, a company that creates, distributes and promotes branded entertainment properties.  CJP approached fan communities like Susan Martin’s IKEAFANS.com, which receives over 320,000 unique visitors a month, according to a post on tubefilter news.

CPJ went beyond just providing brand enthusiasts with YouTube embed codes.  It approached the top four Ikea fan sites and gave each an embeddable online player that only works on that site, where visitors could watch the shows.  The one that gets the most people to view the series will be rewarded by getting written into the second season finale.  This provides benefits for everyone involved.  Ikea and Easy to Assemble profit from the increased buzz and word of mouth.  The fan sites are rewarded by repeat visits thanks to recurring, relevant and entertaining content.  October was IKEAFANS.com’s best month ever for traffic and unique visitors, and Martin credits this in part to the show appearing on the site.

The influence and effectiveness of Easy to Assemble will grow in future.  Initially distributed only on YouTube and Metacafe, it now can be seen on CBS’s TV.com, My Damn Channel and Blip.tv.  And it should be showing soon on Hulu, Verizon FiOS and The Hotel Network’s DoNotDisturb TV channel, if it isn’t already.

I loved this quote from Susan Martin in the tubefilter news piece:  “Ikea has that most elusive combination of respect and love from their customer base.”  At Saatchi & Saatchi, we call brands that achieve that elusive combination Lovemarks.  Ikea certainly is one.  But as in any relationship, brands need to find ways to continually fuel that love.  By taking branded entertainment to a new level of comedy and quality, Easy to Assemble is a great way to do that.

Instapaper and Skitch are two useful tools you should get to know

Many thanks to Mitch Joel for introducing me to Instapaper on his Six Pixels of Separation blog.  It’s a simple tool that lets you file web pages to read later.  It works on your computer with a “Read Later” tab that instantly saves the article, and it can be synced to your iPhone.  So items that you come across on both devices can be filed, accessed and managed from both.

I love Instapaper because I receive many links to online articles and blog posts through Google Alerts and Google Reader and the amount of stuff coming in can be overwhelming.  This lets me quickly run through the items, delete the ones of little interest, and quickly save the ones I don’t have time to read at the moment.

I also like that Instapaper re-formats web pages for the iPhone, making them easy to read on the screen.  Instapaper also lets you organize your finds into different folders by topic, and it has an archive for the things you want to keep.  For anyone doing research on the web, this can be a fantastic tool.

Skitch is a new application that lets you quickly capture a screen shot and then edit or resize it, as well as superimpose text, pointers and other graphic elements.  Skitch lets you easily share the shot in emails, on blogs and in forums or build it into other documents.  You can also upload it to your mac.com or a personal Skitch page where others can access and work with it further.  Thanks to Dan Landin who recommended Skitch on a Twitter post.

I’m just starting to play around with Skitch.  I think most of the functionality is available elsewhere, but Skitch seems to put that functionality all in one place to eliminate steps and save time.  Here’s my first experiment with Skitch, in which I personally “defaced” my Facebook page.  A masterpiece!

Socialnomics — this video speaks for itself

Four minutes well invested (and the music is hot!) …

Social media? Let Mikey do it? I don’t think so

Many voices in the blogosphere are saying that 2010 will be the year that social media will move from “nice to have” to “must have” for brands.  Maybe it’s true.  But a conversation I heard this week on episode 85 of The BeanCast makes me think that CEO’s still don’t get what is happening here.

The topic of the conversation was the newly emerged position of community manager, who many companies are now putting in place to “manage” their online relationships with consumers, bloggers, etc.  (There must be a better term than manager.  Managing sounds pretty close to commanding and controlling, which is precisely what social media is not about, but that’s a whole different blog post.) It seems that in many cases these jobs are being assigned to junior people, just out of school, for salaries in the $20K range.  What that says to me is that the CEO is thinking, “Okay — there’s this Facebook, Twitter, blogger thing happening on the internet, I don’t really get what it’s about, but hey, it’s another way to get our message to consumers so let’s put the new kid on it who knows how to use this stuff.”

Mikey, our new online community manager

You’ve got to be kidding me.  The new kid?  The one with this least experience and the least understanding of what the company and the brand is all about?

Social media isn’t some hip new communications channel.  It is a different animal — an amazing, completely new and ever changing way for brands to interact and collaborate with their consumers and stake holders and address their needs.  What happens in social media is exposed to the entire online world and all it takes is one well connected blogger, enraged or enthused, for a company’s words and actions to be seen, discussed, praised or picked apart by everyone.

This person needs to know how to deal with a disgruntled customer, build a constructive relationship with an influential blogger, understand the complexities of how to be transparent without revealing confidential company or client information, work within the organization with all departments to guide them in understanding their role in social media and its benefit to the company.  He or she needs to understand strategy, and think creatively about how to integrate social media strategically with marketing, communications, customer service, internal communications, R&D and sales to achieve business objectives.

Scott Monty of Ford and Richard Binhammer of Dell, two social media evangelists within major corporations whose efforts have become case studies for innovative and effective social media engagement, aren’t kids.  They are seasoned business people who have been around the block a few times.

If you’re a CEO who thinks this social media thing is simply another communications channel, best handled by one of the kids in the organization just because he’s had a Facebook page since high school, you really need to think again.  Put somebody in place who not only gets the space, but has a few years under his or her belt in communications, marketing, branding building, customer relations or sales.  And who has gained some wisdom and experience in dealing with people and building relationships.

By the way, I’m available.  But not for $20,000.

Why can’t The New York Times be like iTunes?

Everyone knows newspapers are in trouble.  The business model based on advertising revenues that served them well for decades no longer works in a world where people can get their news online for free and audiences are fragmented like never before.

What’s a newspaper to do?

Well, one thing is to try and force people to subscribe to online editions, as Rupert Murdoch would like, by not letting content loose for free, not even in your Google news feed.  That’s one model, and it seems to work for The Wall Street Journal.  Whether it will work for Murdoch’s other newspaper properties is another question.

But a better model might be to be more like iTunes.  I can’t imagine that someone hasn’t already thought of an iTunes-like model for newspaper content before, but I haven’t seen one.  If you know of one, please leave a comment.

Here’s what I imagine. Each day I receive a digital copy of, say, The New York Times.  It’s organized as I remember seeing it on the Kindle.  (I don’t have a Kindle – yet.)  There’s an initial page that lists the sections of the newspaper.  By clicking on a section, I then get a list of the article headlines, perhaps with the first one or two sentences of the article itself.  If I decide I want to read it, I click on it and a charge is automatically deducted from my New York Times online account.  I might also  subscribe to one or more sections, if I wish, rather than the whole paper.  Or even to specific topics, or a particular columnist or reporter.

Simple. I click and pay only for the content I read.  For the stuff I don’t read, I don’t pay.

How much would The Times charge per article?  25 cents? 10 cents? 2 cents?  (That would certainly give new meaning to “getting my 2 cents worth”!)  It’s hard to say.  They would probably have to experiment with different price points to see where the sweet spot is – where they get the greatest volume of click-through’s from the greatest number of readers.  But I could imagine that when people only pay for the parts of The Times they want to read, and the price threshold for that is fairly low, “pay per article” could potentially generate volume and revenues exceeding an online subscription model.  iTunes certainly made a killing, one 99-cent download at a time.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually still love newspapers.  I’m old fashioned.  I enjoy getting the whole paper, touching the actual paper, leafing through it on my sofa, discovering stories of interest that I would have missed if I preselected the content through an RSS feed.  And I also want to know that my news provider is trustworthy, which means it has an organization in place that upholds certain journalistic standards, checks facts, investigates stories.  That costs money and requires a healthy revenue stream.

iTunes freed people from shelling out the money for a whole CD when all they really wanted to hear were one or two songs. And made lots of money.  So maybe being like iTunes is a way for newspapers to generate the revenue that maintains quality, depth and breadth of content, in a world where more and more people want to pick, choose and pay only for the part of that content that’s relevant to them.  All I have to do is give up the paper.  But since I also love trees, that isn’t a bad thing either.

Vote for this man and help Hugo Boss democratize the modelling world via social media!

My friend Andre Zaremba has entered the Hugo Boss Runway Model Contest on Facebook.  (Is he hot, or what?)  You can vote for him there.  Just find him via the search box and vote.  He has also created a Facebook fan page.

Hugo Boss will select one male and one female winner who will walk the catwalk at the Boss Black Fashion Show in Berlin on January 21, 2010.  The event will be live streamed on Facebook.

Andre asked me for ideas on how he might rack up the votes.  Here’s what I told him.  Perhaps there are some ideas for you to promote your own personal brand.

Happy holidays!

Hi Andre,

here are a couple of thoughts.  The cool thing is that your fans can vote for you once every 24 hours.  Since they’ve already done it, they’re likely to do it again.  So they’re the ones from whom you are most likely to source the votes you need. “Strategically” it makes sense to give them a little nudge each day but do it in a way that’s interesting/entertaining, not annoying.  You do that by creating some content, that’s fun or interesting to watch, look at and read, indeed so fun and interesting that it’s “spreadable”.  I.e. people will send it on.

You could set up a YouTube page, give it a theme title related to the Boss contest, shoot a short video each day (do you have a Flip camera?) and post it there.  For example, each daily video could be about a different reason “Why Andre will be the Boss model to die for.”

Video 1 “Andre has a great body” (Andre posing like a muscle man in a bathing suit)

Video 2 “Andre has class” (Andre reading the Royal Opera House bulletin)

Video 3 “Andre has great taste” (Andre eating pate)

Each day a new video.  And each day you send the link to your network, post on your Facebook page, etc.  Get the drift?

Add a “call to action” text with a link to the contest.  And a call to action to “Please send this video to your friends.”

You could easily do the same thing as still-photos that you send out in an email to your fan base every day, or as a message on Facebook.

Set up a Twitter account.  You could build on this theme there and send out tweets to your Twitter followers.  A Twitter post can contain links to your Facebook fan page, or to the photos.  But you’ll need to build a group of followers fast.  First, search all your friends to see if they are on Twitter.  Then there are all sorts of offerings that help people build their followers fast. I don’t remember off hand any specific ones, but if you search “Twitter follower” on Google you find one.

Check out Buzzom.  This is a service that let’s you find Twitter users who are more likely to follow you because you have a common interest.  (Click on the people search option and then on bio).  Important is that the little bio on your Twitter home page reflects that interest.  So your bio might include words like style, fashion, aspiring model.  Buzzom lets you find others with those words in their bio and enables you to follow them several hundred at a time, and a day or two later, delete those who didn’t follow you back.  You can then repeat the process, and there’s a tool that allows you not to repeat following the people you’ve already contacted.

I like the idea of creating a blog.  Again make it fun, and about your quest to win the contest.  Send the link to all your friends, and invite them to send it to others.  Post daily or more often – your posts could be blog-appropriate versions of the above, you could update your followers on the number of votes, talk about your latest idea to help win votes, you could even ask your blog readers for their ideas.  Makes sure to include invites in the side panel for you readers to receive automatic notifications of your posts via RSS feed or email.  I use WordPress and it’s pretty easy to set up.

You should register at StumbleUpon and Delicious.  StumbleUpon is a site where people find sites, web pages, blogs, etc. by entering key words relating to a topic.  Delicious is a public bookmarking site. When you’ve registered, you can pretty much post any content to them with tags relating to the content (so again in this case your tags might be fashion, style, Hugo Boss, Hugo Boss contest, and other related words).  People searching StumbleUpon and Delicious can discover your content in this way (e.g. your YouTube page) and may vote for you.  Especially if they encounter engaging content and a clear link to the voting page.

Consider if there is anything you can give your community of fans that they would spread to others.  So maybe you could leverage that great body of yours to make a calendar, or post card of some sort, that straight gals and gay guys would send to their social online networks.  Think in that direction. What else could you create online that’s fun, related to the contest, that people would like to spread to their networks.  Of course whatever it is, include a call to action to vote for you and a link to Boss page where they can vote.

So those are a few things off the top of my head.  Now I have to go and vote for you again.

Pioneer Woman — how marrying a cowboy can turn you into an emerging web 2.0 superstar

The Pioneer Woman is Ree Drummond, a former city girl who met a cowboy, married him and ended up “in the middle of nowhere” with four kids on a cattle ranch.  Her original blog, which she started writing in 2006, has grown into a significant online media property.

As beautiful and polished as it looks — the photography and overall layout of the site are fantastic — and that fact that Ree clearly has a good instinct when it comes to creating a personal brand and public identity, she still manages to maintain her honest, down-home, “I’m just a wife and mother out in the boonies like you” soul.  Perhaps this, as well as her many recipes presented with easy-to-follow photos, is what keeps her estimated 2 million monthly readers (according to the LA Times) coming back to the site.  The photo archives of Charlie, the basset hound who thinks he’s a cattle dog, is just my favorite among many examples of the content on Pioneer Woman that keep it intimate and personal, indeed sometimes just down right corny.  (You can’t say that about Martha Stewart!)  It also helps that Ree has a style and a way with words that I suspect connects perfectly with her audience — like the way she refers to her husband only as Marlboro Man.

Pioneer Woman shows how web 2.0 enables us all to share our personal passions, lifestyle, thoughts and ideas with anyone, anywhere, and that even a mother-of-four, thousands of miles away from a media metropolis, can transform those passions into a commercial media property, while staying true to herself at the same time.

Still, it can’t be easy.  Wife, mother, household, 2000 head of cattle.  How does she do it?  It’s a challenge for me to write this blog at least once a week.  And the only animal (or child) around here is a parrot.  (Uh oh.  I hear him in the bathroom throwing the shower stopper around.  That means he wants to take a bath.  Gotta go!)

A fun activity for Christmas if you’ve failed to board the social media train so far — enroll in SMUG

Two-thousand-and-nine will go down as the year when social media and marketing finally moved beyond the fishbowl of early adopters and entered the marketing mainstream.

I first started getting involved with social media in lurker mode — that is, subscribing to blogs, listening to podcasts, digesting the emerging literature on the topic, but not personally writing or commenting — toward the end of 2006.  As my interest and knowledge grew and I began to breach the topic with colleagues and clients, no one knew what the heck I was talking about.  Even at the beginning of 2008, when I began this blog, there still wasn’t a whole lot of attention being paid to social media by mainstream marketers or the press.

In the meantime, every other article in Advertising Age touches on some dimension of social media, CNN and other traditional media outlets invite you to follow them on Twitter, my clients are experimenting and creating social media staff positions, Ford’s Scott Monty, who was virtually unknown outside the social media fishbowl three years ago, is a marketing superstar, and even my 86 year old mom is on Facebook.  If there’s anyone left in the marketing community who hasn’t at least thought there is something definitely HAPPENING out there, he or she must be living under that proverbial rock.

Okay — but what if you’ve come late to the train?  You’ve recognized something is going on, but for whatever reason — you’ve been buried under the weight of your anachronistic to-do list, your boss has his head in the sand (or worse places) when it comes to social, or 2009 was the year you finally got to the final round of American Idol — you just haven’t had the time to look into it.

Here’s what you do.  Go to SMUG — Social Media University Global.  SMUG — an unfortunate acronym, as there is nothing smug about it — was created by Lee Aese.  Lee is the manager for Syndications and Social Media for the Mayo Clinic and has been a pioneering innovator in the application of social media strategies in health care.  (I have written previously about the Mayo Clinic’s social media efforts here.)

Enroll in the SMUG curriculum.  That sounds kind of old fashioned and boring, but it’s anything but.  The SMUG curriculum consists of Lee’s own clear and concise explanations of social media strategies and tools, as well as links to articles, blog posts, etc. relevant to the topic at hand, authored by others active in the space.  Add to that a good dose of charm and humor that Lee brings to the party and you’ll find that getting up to speed on the new world of social media and marketing can be an awful lot of fun.  Best of all, it’s free.

So in between the figgy pudding, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and your annual viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, why not log in to SMUG this holiday season and give yourself a gift that will truly last the whole year long and beyond.