*supercollider

In my last post we looked at trending showing the destination web is in decline, and we are well and truly entering the era of the social web. Simply stated, over the last three years fewer people are going to destination websites, and more people are spending more time on social networks.

Now we’re going to look at three strategies brands are employing to ride the trend, in order of escalating ‘commitment’ to social spaces vis-à-vis destination sites:

1. Syndicating
2. Integrating
3. Replacing

Before we get started, a couple of notes:

• These strategies are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, at least in the near term they are best employed in combination. Syndication could also be considered a light-weight version of ‘replacing’.
• This post is not about what you can do on social networks, e.g. discussing crowdsourcing vs social currency vs customer co-design. What we’re looking at here is simply the shifting balance of where a brand’s web presence ‘lives’.

Strategy #1: Syndicating destination site content to the social web

The most popular approach to date for dealing with the rise of the social web has been content syndication. Every brand manager or agency exec has heard at one time the immortal phrase “we need to put our commercial on YouTube”, but obviously there can be a lot more to it than that.

The basic premise is if you are creating valuable content and services, you will be doing a service to your potential audience (as well as your brand) by making it as easy for your audience to get to it as possible.

One example of a brand doing it well is Kraft. If you are interested in getting recipes from their site, they make it as easy as absolutely possible to get them wherever and however you want:

You have your pick of channels, from email, RSS, mobile sites, widgets, and iPhone apps. They’ve made a clear decision that with the wealth of recipe sites out there, and to compete they need not to “hoard” the content on the site but rather make it available as freely as possible.

Maybe this concept seems obvious already, but remember it’s replacing the powerful “sticky site” strategy that has dominated for years.

Strategy #2: Integrating social features into destination sites

The next option for brands in riding the social wave is to integrate social features directly into destination sites.

This is also not a new concept, brands have been trying to create their own community spaces for years with varying degrees of success. However powerful new tools like Facebook Connect are allowing brands to tap into the power and scale of existing social networks.

For example, Ben and Jerry’s has made their product section a collaboration with their customers, allowing ratings, comments and declaring yourself a “Fan” of flavours via Facebook Connect.

If you become a fan of a flavour you can post your comment directly to your Facebook wall as well. This becomes promotion for the brand directly in the user’s stream, driving more traffic back to the brand site via the social web. In effect you are mitigating the drop in destination web traffic with the help of the very thing causing the slide.

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Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook says that “sites that use Facebook Connect have seen increases of 30% to 200% in site registrations and 15% to 100% in the number of reviews and other user-generated content.”

Strategy #3: Replacing destination sites with presence on social platforms

Social syndication and integration should by now be requirements for most brand sites, obviously using platforms and channels that best fit the goals of the brand and behaviours and preferences of its audience.

However some brands are presumably looking at graphs of their declining site traffic, and the boom in social sites, and asking the question “do we even need a website at all?”

This leads us to the latest way some brands are dealing with the shift to the social web: ‘Replacement’.

This approach definitely is not for the faint of heart. It’s also probably not advisable for many brands at this point. There are still a good many reasons to have brand sites, and most of them still get millions of visitors.

However the question about what should live on brand sites and what should live on social platforms is definitely a valid one, and here’s a few examples along the spectrum.

Skittles

Yes, we are starting at the deep-end. Skittles turning its homepage into a Twitter redirect is still our high-water benchmark for turning brand presence over to social media spaces, and won’t be surpassed soon because of the predictably ill-fated initial results.

It’s been called everything from visionary to a stunt and a gimmick, and maybe ultimately it is all of those things. Although the initial Twitter default was quickly pulled down, it’s worth noting that months later Skittles.com is still primarily a social redirect. Except now the default destination is Facebook.

Axe (Lynx)

As another example of the social bookmark strategy, check out Unilever men’s deodorant brand Axe’s new site:

It isn’t a site as much as a collection of redirects.

Links to Axe on Facebook and Youtube to get opt-in brand entertainment. A Wikipedia page for more information. A link to buy the products on Drugstore.com. And that’s about it. Again, probably not the right approach for most brands, but for our purposes it’s an interesting object study in brand site minimalism, taking full advantage of the social web.

Pepsi

For a less dramatic example that is likely to be more indicative of near-term shifts, check out the new Pepsi.com:

Links to Pepsi’s Facebook and YouTube spaces take up two of four most prominent spaces on the page, and there’s another big “Find us on Facebook” tout in the bottom-right.

Maybe we are already taking this for granted. However if you take a step back it represents a huge shift away from the rich, “sticky” destination experience built in the hopes people will come back. Instead, we are building out our social spaces in the hope that people will subscribe or fan us where they already are, and ‘like’ our content so their friends see and interact with it too.

What all this means

As this trend away from destination websites and towards social spaces continues to gain momentum, here are some of the corresponding shifts in brand behaviour and activity we’re likely to see:

1. Increasing investment in social media spaces

Social media has to date been considered an experimental line-item for most brands, with limited funding and support. As brands direct their visitors towards social media spaces or look to engage them there in the first place, this is going to change in a hurry.

That said, it will not change nearly as quickly as it should. Just as funding for digital brand activity has lagged the audience’s own shifts in attention and behaviour to digital channels, so will it here. This obviously creates an opportunity. Brands that get it before the rest will reap the rewards.

2. Shift from paid media to social currency that earns media

The next shift is a supplementation, or in some cases replacement, of paid media efforts with content and utility intended to stoke conversation and be shared with friends in these social spaces.

3. Shift from low-frequency, one-message campaigns to high-frequency, targeted interaction

The ubiquitous, mass awareness campaign definitely still has it’s place. However the shift towards social spaces requires a shift in mindset and communication style as well. It means brands can’t just survive on one big static brand expression delivered in blasts that has typified the campaign era. Instead they need to supplement this with an approach adapted to the social media era, featuring many interactions and engagements spread over time.

4. Shift to reactivity, freshness and participation in culture

As the destination web becomes the real-time web, brands will need to become much more agile in order to be relevant. They will need to participate, contribute and stoke conversation on-the-fly. They will need to be acive participant in culture rather than simply a co-opter and long-armed influencer.

Last thoughts

It’s important to make the point that the fundamental goals and objectives of marketing remain the same. Marketers will want to create a connection with consumers, to differentiate themselves positively from their competitors, encourage advocacy and word of mouth. They’ll want to do this in order to increase category size or share within categories, or to encourage existing customers to buy more or more frequently. Those business fundamentals aren’t going away.

What’s changing is the approach. What worked in the broadcast era, and even the destination web era, does not necessarily work in the social web era. And the toolset and expertise required in this new world is much more vast and diverse than any marketer would’ve imagined in the last 50 years.

However the opportunities are there, to create real connections with your customers. And yes, if you do it right you can enable and encourage them to spread the word of your products, services and experiences on your behalf.

So which approaches are you looking at? And where might things go next?

And a couple of parting questions that I’m wondering about right now. Facebook has grown so fast because that’s where the social action was happening. This has sucked attention away from destination sites.

However now that social experience is being enabled on destination sites via Facebook Connect and similar services from Google and Twitter, are we likely to see the traffic slide on destination sites start to flatten out for those brands who use these tools? And what do you imagine the balance of traffic between brand sites and brand presence on sites like YouTube, Facebook, etc will be by 2010?

For more on where are things are heading, check out Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester’s summary of his Five Eras of the Social Web report. His advice for brands around not hesitating, preparing for transparency, connecting with advocates and “shattering” your corporate website is spot on.

The number of augmented reality campaigns launched this week alone is, to the best of our knowledge, well into the double-digits.” Contagious via Twitter

I’ve been meaning to post this since last week, after I saw the Eminem augmented reality execution and thought “I have a bad feeling about this”. Ilya from AdLab has since beaten me to the punch, and as I doubt we’re the only two people sharing these concerns right now, I think it’s worth helping hammer this message home as our industry struggles to be taken seriously and move towards delivering real value.

Let’s first be clear that Augmented Reality is going to be pervasive. It’s not a gimmick, it’s a long-standing concept that is just now becoming a consumer reality.

It’s a catch phrase that seems to be covering a lot of territory right now, but I think the key is the blending of physical and virtual environments in a useful way. That’s the “augmented” part of the reality, it’s enhancing your physical world with a layer of information-based or experiential value.

The concept has been around for ages, at least as long as Arnie’s HUD display in “The Terminator”.

But now we’re starting to see real, consumer-focused practical applications such as this ING Google Android application. It not only helps you find the nearest ATM, it shows you visually how to get there, even showing where you need to take the first steps in the right direction.

You can imagine thousands of useful applications for this. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s worth having a quick refresher on the Gartner Hype Cycle, introduced in 1995 and still going strong fourteen years later:

Here’s Gartner’s description of the first two phases:

1. “Technology Trigger”
The first phase of a Hype Cycle is the “technology trigger” or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.

2. “Peak of Inflated Expectations”
In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

Augmented Reality is in the process of transitioning from #1 to #2, in record time. Which leads us, unfortunately, to stage #3.

3. “Trough of Disillusionment”
Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.

And that was, and two years later still is, the fate of Second Life.

Marketers who didn’t understand virtual worlds rushed in and did all sorts of wasteful things, either out of fear of being left behind or out of greed to grab a few the nuggets from the publicity gold rush.

Unsurprisingly, the bubble burst due to the lack of any consideration for ROI or even whether the applications made any sense at all. And now, virtual worlds have been written off by many in the industry, without any real consideration as to the massive marketing potential of virtual worlds for many brands. Which is a shame, as that makes it a waste on two levels, as well as a scar on our industry’s reputation.

So are we about to do this all over again with augmented reality?

As our techno-savvy friends in Radiohead sang, we do it to ourselves and that’s why it really hurts.

The good news is that ultimately, useful technologies and innovations survive and prosper. And it’s the companies that really take the time to think about how to make them work rather than jumping on the bandwagon that come out on top.

4. “Slope of Enlightenment”
Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.

5. “Plateau of Productivity”
A technology reaches the “plateau of productivity” as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

So how about we agree here and now not to overhype augmented reality, and instead only focus on truly useful applications of the technology, shying away from pointless gimmicks only really intended for trade press anyway.

No?

Ahh well, worth a shot. Please resume your regularly scheduled PR activity…

UPDATE: More thoughts on the subject of AR and value from Martina at Adverblog along with an interesting example from Brazil. The QR code comparison is spot on. The promise of the technology is there, but it’s all too easy to get caught up in the hype.

Very interesting inside story from Whit Scott, one of the guys selected to be part of Ford’s Fiesta social media marketing campaign.

If you’re not familiar with premise of the campaign, Ford had an initial competition where 4,000 people applied with a video to win the chance to drive a Fiesta for six months. Everyone that wins then creates content around his experience with the car.

Although the premise is intriguing because of the scale involved, I haven’t been hugely interested in the campaign so far, mostly because nothing has grabbed my attention in terms of the content being created.

However as Whit Scott reveals, the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the campaign are very interesting, especially that the people involved are being directly rewarded via a points system for the quantity of their Ford-related activity in social media spaces.

Selection criteria was based on the participant’s social media influence and reach

The first interesting point is that the people selected are social media micro-celebs, or the people with the tools to become them. This might not be surprising, but becomes more important when we get to the second point below.

What I quickly learned is that we seemed to have two types of people here. The first were Internet celebs that have their own global micro-brands. Examples of this type were MoonCricket and his followers on Justin.Tv; Olga Kay who has over 8,000 followers on Twitter and 26,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel; Alison Haislip who hosts Attack of the Show on G4; and Danny with gradualreport who has 44,000 subscribers on YouTube and seems to just be an all around hilarious guy with a decent online presence.

The second type of person comes with more traditional media skills. For example, Jonathan 360 has a master of photography and over 62,000 twitter followers; Menace is a DJ in SF with Live 105; and Thomas and I are not web celebrities but have connections all around the web and in the Valley, as well as decent editing, filming and writing skills.

What we all seemed to have in common was a relatively large online ego.

Ford Fiesta Movement’s formula for rewarding social media participation

Now we get to the good part. Ford has assigned relative values to different types of social media content generation, and is rewarding the agents based on the quantity of their activity in these spaces.

Each Fiesta Agent (or team of agents) gets an Agent page at fiestamovement.com. Check us out, we’re agents #89. On top of being given a car, we were also given a little Sony camera to take video with. Now comes the genius. For every Twitter post you do with the hash tag (#) Fiestamovement, you get a point. For every YouTube video you post, you get 5 points and for every view, comment and rating you get on YouTube, you get a point. For every photo posted, you get a point. I think you get the picture. Points put you on the board, the leader on the board wins a prize. What the prize is… we just don’t know.

And, as if this isn’t enough, we are given missions. We don’t really know what a mission looks like yet, but we know they’ll happen once a month, and it’s our one single responsibility to accomplish a mission, and post a video about it. Points aside, missions must be accomplished. We find out our first mission in about 4 days—we’ll keep you posted.

So needless to say the Ford Fiesta went from having nearly nothing about it online in the United States to having 100 x Web Ego + points x 6 months. Brilliant idea.
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Why this matters

There’s a lot to talk about in the above, but what I’m particularly interested in is the idea that Ford has basically just co-opted 100 social media personalities and their subscriber channels, and is directly rewarding posts into their social media spaces on a points-per-activity basis.

That’s a really interesting, if slightly dark, concept.

I think while most people in social media are agreed that pay-per-post schemes are a bad thing, this activity seems to transcend far beyond that into a whole new realm. Ford has not just sponsored but completely co-opted the lifestreams of these 100 people for the next six months.

Not that the ‘agents’ mind, in contrast they know exactly what they are doing and why:

Ford has chose their agents very wisely. All of us seem to have an agenda, and for the most part it has little to do with Ford and a whole lot to do with ourselves. We spend the next 6 months having our brand pimped online by Ford and 99 other Internet-famous Fiesta Agents. Why would we do this for Ford? Because it gives us easier access to exposure—plus we get to win stuff!

I suppose this is just another form of celebrity sponsorship, it’s just being done here with minor social media personalities. I guess the question for me is what happens when you apply this on a micro-scale, if you applied that same points-criteria to your consumers as part of a loyalty programme?

Is this the future of word of mouth, and are all our social media channels going to be for sale to the highest bidder, or at least to the prom king brands we don’t mind talking about a little bit more?

Makes me slightly queasy, but there would have be a natural balance enforced in social media land by the users themselves. You may be my friend, but if you spam me about Charmin toilet paper for the next three months I will hit the block button faster than you can say “squeeze”.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on whether this type of points scheme has legs, and how it might play out on a wider scale in the future.

In Part I, we discovered that fans have put brands themselves to shame in their effectiveness of propagating brands via Facebook apps.

In Part II, we reviewed five of the biggest successes brands have had so far.

Now here’s a look at a few of the most creative and interesting uses of the platform by brands so far.

Cause Marketing: Timberland Earthkeepers

Earthkeepers is a Timberland initiative to improve the way that businesses impact the environment. They’ve got a blog, a YouTube channel, a Changents page, and a their Earthkeepers Facebook app.

The application encourages users to plant virtual seedlings, which Timberland will turn into real trees to aid the fight against deforestation and desertification.

Their goal is one million virtual trees by April 30th, and looks like they may actually hit it. The total as of April 11th was 920,703 trees planted.

April 12th MAU: 50,210
90-day high: 71,854

Social entertainment: CBS Sports Brackets

CBS Sports has developed six Facebook applications. Five of them currently have less than 200 people using them. But the sixth is a smash hit, with close to 460,000 monthly users.

CBS Sports Brackets lets you create your own private NCAA bracket competitions with friends, as well as compete against all of Facebook for a chance to win $10,000, as well as access NCAA March Madness on Demand. At least that’s what it says, as I couldn’t actually view the app. But the high MAU says that they are doing something right.

April 12th MAU: 462,312
90-day high: 497,081

Media platform: Kyte

Kyte is one of the most interesting services out there right now, helping bring musicians and other celebrities closer to their fans via an easy to use publishing platform.

How successful is it? 50 Cent has had a staggering 77 milion views of his Kyte channel. Lady GaGa has racked up over 6 million, and All American Rejects is closing in on 4 million.

Kyte has since brought their channels to Facebook with an interesting platform play that includes a total of 133 published apps. In an extension of their existing channels, 50 Cent’s Facebook app is powered by Kyte, as is Lady GaGa’s.

Interestingly though, the success doesn’t seem to be translating. 50 Cent’s app has fallen from a high of 27k MAU down to 7k, and Wyclef Jean has just 67 people with his app installed.

Still, it’s interesting to see the trends of content syndication and platform plays converging here, and again it’s musicians leading the way.

And if you want your own Kyte channel, there’s a Facebook app for that as well.

April 12th MAU: 31,361
90-day high: 92,324

Content syndication: Electronic Arts - Spore

I’ve talked previously about Spore as one of the first major game releases to really integrate web 2.0 functionality, and the Spore Facebook app is one of the many extensions, allowing users to see the latest creature creations and share their own.

Current MAU: 41,444
90-day high: 41,444

Social utility: Coca-Cola’s CokeTag

Coca-Cola launched CokeTag back in June of 2008 as part of it’s Olympic partnership, but it had loftier long-term ambitions as a social bookmarking widget for Facebook.

A year later it remains one of the more innovative and functional branded utilities on Facebook. As the description puts it:
Use CokeTags to promote yourself — your blog, work, interests, team, band or whatever you like or care about — and then track how influential you are!

The CokeTag editor lets you package your links into a personal widget that you can immediately send to friends in just about a minute. Then sit back and use the CokeTag click counter to track who’s looking at your CokeTag, see where they click and find out how popular your links are!

It’s a great idea, but never took off the way it might’ve. Although in the last three months it was still as high as 55k users, it’s now slipped down to just over 2k. Still, it remains an interesting and innovative use of the platform.

April 12th MAU: 2,293
90-day high: 56,136

Brand-extension gaming: eBay - StyleSlam

StyleSlam is a virtual fashion wars game by eBay that allows players to create and dress avatars, rate your friends, send gifts, and trade your way to new wardrobes.

The game has had some modest success, and it’s a decent idea for building engagement around the brand that might lead to more consideration and usage of the service.

However the comments for the game reveal one of the hard truths about building apps: people expect them to work. And want to see them updated. It’s not good enough to build something without fully testing it, and then let it go without updates. And you’d think even if your standard consumer brands used to allocating budgets by quarters and campaigns don’t get this, as a software developer eBay at least would.

Current MAU: 7,671
90-day high: 10,749

For all the talk about Facebook, I’ve realized I don’t understand nearly enough what brands are doing with it right now, and what’s working and what’s not. And where the opportunities are.

So as a starting point, I had a look the other day through the top 2,000 apps on Facebook, curious to see what brands were doing with the burgeoning social network now that the platform has been open for a while.

The answer? Not much, oddly.

But I did have a few observations I thought were worth sharing. Here’s the first one:

There are tons of successful branded apps. They just aren’t created by the brands themselves.

There is actually a large number of brand-related apps on Facebook. But the majority are being created by people who are spotting a gap in the market, whether wiley entrepreneurs or passionate fans. And if you start including media properties and sports properties, it goes through the roof.

Heres three examples of how this is playing out:

Example 1: The faux celebrity endorsement

Check out this smart appropriation of celebrity endorsement, Quiz Monster’s adaptation of Dr. Phil’s personality test as presented on the Oprah show. 985,000 monthly users make this simple app one of the most popular on Facebook.

Example 2: “Counterfeit” gifts

Next up have a look at the Chanel and Tiffany & Co. gifting apps. Over 120k and 170k monthly users respectively, placing them among the most popular branded apps on Facebook. Except they are created not by the brand but rather by its fans: teenage girls.

Gifts are a popular category of amateur branded content, with lots more “counterfeit” gifts in the top 2,000 apps, spanning virtual goodies as varied as Ben & Jerry Ice Cream, Disney (and again and again), and Starbucks.

Example 3: Brand communities

The New York Giants and Scrubs. Brands in their own right, as well as media properties. Now fan communities are nothing new, but it’s interesting to see that Facebook is absolutely dominated by groups created by two companies: Citizen Sports and Watercooler, who have created networks of these communities, rolling out the same functionality for different sports brands many times over.

In the case of Watercooler, they have created 869 fan communities on Facebook, adding up to 5.7 million users, making them the 14th biggest developer on the platform.

It’s a land grab, and these two companies have done a great job of getting in first.

Part I Conclusion: Thoughts on Facebook fan apps

Getting a sense of deja vu? It’s the web circa 1994. Back then people squatting on domains like mcdonalds.com because the organizations weren’t clued up enough to buy them yet. Now people are creating branded apps on Facebook, again filling the vacuum left by brands themselves.

I came away with three key thoughts:

There is a clear desire for brands in social networks

People ask if there is a place for brands in social networks. The people have answered that question loud and clear, they want brands in social networks so much they are bringing them in themselves. The difference is that role is not the obvious thing that marketers default to, advertising next to their personal conversations, but rather fans want something from the brands to use on the network itself.

Seeing what’s working currently, I’d say social currency is the primary source of value. In the future, I suspect a lot of the value will also be derived from providing community, services, and two-way communication between brands and their most passionate customers.

It’s a gold rush, and app usage is scaling in a hurry

In the month or so that I’ve left this post sitting in draft, Dr. Phil’s quiz has gone from 720k to 950k monthly users, and Tiffany & Co. gift app has gone from 80k to 170k users.

There are certainly many more apps languishing with tens or hundreds of users. But that’s a huge increase in a short period of time, and says a lot about the potential reach of these apps, and how network effects help the rich get richer.

Think about how to leverage what’s already out there

When you see an app using your trademark without permission, before reaching for the phone to the lawyers it might be worth trying to work with the developer to see if they are interested in transferring ownership or at least improving what’s on offer, like BBC have reportedly done with the extremely successful Chris Moyles fan page.

Or alternatively, just develop something better. It’s a free platform, and you have your brand’s resources behind you right? Think about how people are really using your brand on Facebook, and what you could give them that would enhance that experience further.

Though I admit it’s still fun to see the unofficial Starbucks app for “all things Starbucky” beating out the official app in usage.

Next up I’ll have a look at branded apps being created by brands themselves, to see what’s working and what’s not, and try and figure out why.