Marketers Not Rushing To Blog
A new report from Forrester suggests marketers are not rushing to blogs and the like, preferring to stick with more traditional forms of interactive:
Mobile, RSS and advergaming may get lots of media attention, but many marketers are looking the other way. A new Forrester Research report shows that a wide spectrum of interactive marketers is continuing to bank on proven methods such as e-mail and search, and experiment with rich media and new forms of targeting. Yet most are hesitant to try RSS, blogs, social networking, mobile and in-game ads. – ClickZ News
I’m driving more into blogs, wikis, and search than I ever expected. Executing comes with a mountain of challenges – the greatest of which is getting broad organizational engagement in participatory mediums. Thanks to Steve for the pointer…
Cingularly Bizzare
According to AdAge, the Cingular name will be dropped in 2007 in favor of, wait for it, AT&T Wireless. It was totally baffling to me when they dropped SBC – which resonated as a more contemporary brand than AT&T. But dumping the Cingular brand just strikes me as nuts! So, you build a brand that is a magnet for youth; reflects hi-tech, and attracts a real market – and then you kill it. This pretty much says it:
Karl Barnhart, managing director, CoreBrand, New York, a former AT&T agency, agreed that changing the Cingular name “doesn’t make sense.” Cingular’s brand is “relevant for the younger audience; it’s a fun, hip, interesting, dynamic — everything you don’t think about AT&T.”
I get that if they start doing bundling then then a core brand for all services might resonate. Frankly, I am more likely to buy that brand from Cingular who I don’t associate with slow moving service and years gone by. They should take every dollar they might have spent on this brand transition and put it towards getting consistent billing systems in place, launching new VOIP services and driving the cost of DSL down.
Participation Power Laws
Ross has a fascinating post on Participation Power Laws – along with an interesting diagram. What Ross is getting at is what so many companies miss in creating blogs. It isn’t about the posts and publishing as much as it is about engagement with the community.
When users participate in high enagement activities, connecting with one another, a different kind of value is being created. But my core point isn’t just the difference between these forms of group intelligence — but actually how the co-exist in the best communities.
Congrats to The Southwest Team…
Angela and the crew at Southwest Airlines launched their second blog this week – Nuts About Southwest. It comes close on the heals of the Adopt A Pilot blog which provides a voice for this neat community initiative. Congratulations gang!
The Lark Group provided a helping hand on both projects – but all the credit goes to Angela for having the drive and enthusiasm to get the project off the ground. (And the crew at RD2!)
The blog is getting plenty of attention and feedback. I know Southwest is going to listen to the feedback so keep it coming.
Blog Mood…
Fascinating story in the latest New Scientist on measuring blog mood:
The software, called MoodViews, was created by Gilad Mishne and colleagues at Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. It tracks about 10 million blogs hosted by the US service LiveJournal.
The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.
