Tweet and Meet

People leave for something better.  I’ve been hearing about the World of Warcraft killer for years now.  There has been none.  People complain, whine, bitch, and moan, but they keep paying their money to keep their account live.  Here’s why:

No one has been able to make a product to appeal to the masses like World of Warcraft.  No one probably ever will.  The era of Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games is coming to an end.  Yes, there will be a couple games that come out that will shake things up, but nothing will eclipse WoW.  It’s like the blockbuster movie, epic book, or pop culture album, nobody cares anymore.

So back to Facebook.  Will it die?  Like everything else, online…yes.  It will be a slow painful death, but you’ll never see anything as large, as everything else that comes after will be much more fragmented.  It’s ok, you didn’t like playing that Orc Warlock anyway.

"Man with Briefcase"

Let’s get this out of the way. You either have an online footprint, or you don’t. If you have used a card with a VISA, Mastercard, Discover, etc… logo, you’re being tracked. Facial recognition technology is so prevalent, you’ll soon get automatically tagged in photos uploaded online. This is not the future, this is today.

Experian and Equifax have a pretty complete profile of you. Marketers only need your first and last name, and zip code to pull over 50 data points like, marriage status, purchase habits, if you have kids, etc… Pair this data with your social graph, and their prediction modeling will only become more accurate.

It’s only a matter of time before online listening tools become sophisticated and inexpensive enough to track individuals in real-time. These tools will alert listeners to mood, likelihood of purchase intent, location, or even predict major life changes like marriage/divorce, pregnancy, and death.

So you have two choices. Start erasing your digital footprint now, pay for everything in cash, and move to the Ozarks, or accept the fact that your personal data is valuable, and even Facebook is willing to sell it to the highest bidder. It’s your choice.

I buckled.  I had told people in the office that I wasn’t getting one.  I lied.  Saturday morning came, and I got up, drove down to Best Buy Roseville, didn’t wait in any line, and was out in 5 minutes with the 16GB iPad.  I had left the house with the intention of getting one, if there were any left, for my wife.  I’m more interested in how my wife and kids use the thing, especially my 2 1/2 year old.  She has a lot of experience with our iPhones, so I was really excited to see how she used this bigger screen, and boy was I surprised.

Here’s the thing.  Most of use grew up with using the traditional mouse input.  One hand performs multiple tasks, and at most, two fingers are used.  This is why the iPhone / iPod Touch were an easy transition.  There’s a couple gestures to learn, and you’re off to the races.  The iPad has the ability to throw that all out the door, but the app developers haven’t caught up yet.  We haven’t caught up yet.  My 2 year old, immediately wanted to use both hands, and all her fingers.  No dice!  The SketchPad Pro app is wonderful, but it only recognizes 1 finger while drawing.  To be fair, there are a few other drawing apps that do recognized multiple finger inputs while drawing.  We’ll all have to re-learn how to interface with the computer to unlock the potential of this 9.7″ screen.  It’s going to take some time, some tears, and a little bit of patience.  I can tell you that my youngest children probably will never use a mouse, and it’s about time.

I had a younger cousin pass away a few weeks ago.  We hadn’t spoken in probably a decade.  It wasn’t because I didn’t want to talk to him, but life gets in the way.  You know?  I’m sure you have a family member(s) you haven’t connected with in awhile.

Before making the trek to “God’s Country” for the funeral, I decided to look him up online.  Nothing.  Nadda.  Zero.  We sometimes take for granted all the content, ideas, things we share that help people shape an opinion of who we are or in his case, were.

I’m not close to any of his friends, so I’m left wondering details of his life for the past 10 years, and there’s nothing to fill that void left with any digital footprint.  He’s a digital ghost.

We’re about a week away from Apple unveiling a tablet computer, and the New York Times to announce some payment option.  There’s so many questions surrounding how the news industry will survive.  Online ad revenue is not supporting the news websites.  This leaves us with subscription service platforms like iTunes and Amazon to provide these services for traditional print news.  This leaves me with a lot of questions.

• If all newspaper websites go to subscription services, will inbound linking diminish to a trickle?
• Will news organizations police all blogs and social platforms for usage infringement of their material?
• Will torrents play a role in distributing news like it did with the music and movie industry?
• Will newspapers, magazines, and  local TV news start to look identical in product?  Newspapers with more video / TV with more writing

It seems pretty clear devices like the Apple Tablet, netbooks, and even future eReaders will provide a platform and distribution system for delivering rich content and experience, but does the newspaper industry have the chops to provide a product worth paying for again?

I laid in bed, unable to sleep, like most other nights my mind zoomed through dozens of scenarios.  It dawned upon me that a logo design, that was a alternate concept for a client, was actually a perfect fit for a new project.  The thing that freaked me out the most, the colors matched exactly, and the shapes “hearts” made more sense for this project (which is heart related).  So how does a concept that was nearly 5 years old, find more a home that makes more conceptual sense?  I did the design for a project that didn’t exist, yet given a long enough timeline and enough projects, it’s bound to happen.  Has anyone else experience this kind of design deja vu?

With the new FTC blogger guidelines going into effect on Dec. 1 2009, I had to pause for a second, and figure out how we got here in the first place. Slate.com does a pretty concise overview of what’s being changed in the FTC Act, which is the first update since 1980.  WSJ.com even has an update that the IAB is finally getting involved.  Every story I read about these guidelines, triggers my BS alarm.  The whole thing sounds so silly, rediculous, and proposterous, that I can hardly believe it’s actually going to happen.

Slate.com claims the blog-for-money business was worth $1.35 Billion in 2007.  The FTC claims it’s not after bloggers, but agencies, and brands that use this online tactic.  At $11,000 per violation of non-disclosure, it can add up pretty quick for something agencies have very little control over.  It doesn’t stop at blogs, but could happen on sites like twitter, facebook, and virtually any platform.  Obviously enforcing this will be next to impossible, so this begs the question, why are they doing this?  This has been the question I’ve been asking myself for the past couple months.  The next question is, who gains most from this update to the FTC Act?

The Suspects:

Big Media: The past couple years have been rough on traditional media advertising.  Many budgets are shifting to online, and it’s not a trend because of reduced spending during the recession.  We’ve all seen the projections, and newspapers, television, and radio are all on the decline.  If you essentially kill any organized online advocacy, where else are companies going to spend in their advertising and marketing budgets?  Bingo!  The ole’ standbys.

Traditional Advertising Agencies: Let’s face it, they’re the biggest pusher of big media budgets.  Blogger advocacy programs are a drop in the bucket, in terms of dollars, for these guys.  They’d prefer to do it, like they’ve been doin’ it for decades, take their media commission and run.  They dislike anything digital, and fight change.  They just want it back to the way it was before the internet.

The Big G: Government has a pretty bad track record in terms of keeping up with technology legislation.  They’re usually years late to the table.  So it’s suspect that this is even being handled by them, at this juncture.  It’s a small section of spending, and there’s no way to enforce other than by fear.  I highly doubt this was their idea.  It completely reaks of power play by Big Media, and traditional advertisers have nothing to loose by keeping their mouths shut through this ordeal.

I think this whole thing smells like BS!

Just like the death of the phone booth, the phone call is on it’s way out. How often do you reach a voice mail when you dial someone? How often do you actually leave a voice mail? Do people respond faster with text message? Do you get more rapid response off of sites like Facebook and Twitter, or even IM?

I’m tired of leaving voice mails, people never check them, or if they do, they respond after the urgency is past. I’m close to done with this medium of communication, at least done paying for it.

I’m going to be honest.  I haven’t completely cracked this nut.  My gut tells me I’m going down the correct path, but I don’t have all the answers.  I’ll give you what I have thus far, and a glimpse of where I’m going with this problem.

My motivation for answering the Social Media ROI equation, stems from our clients’ needs.  They want proof, and I’m going to do my best to give them that proof.

In the most simple terms, if you believe that positive word of mouth generates an increases sales, then increasing word of mouth online should logically have a similar effect.  This is my starting point.  It sounds simple, but it has become a lot more complex, as I started peeling back the layers.

My next step was to look for correlations of month to month sales data, with increases or decreases of online mentions of brand x.  We had some initiatives to spur an increase in online conversation of brand x.  You could see the increase, it was very apparent, and there was a lag effect from the inception of the campaign.  It generated initial momentem for the span of about 1 month, then it hit a plateau, but sustained for about 3 additional months, then settled down to a day-to-day volume that was still 100% increase from before the initiative, where it still sits today.

When looking at sales data, from whatever source, you have to take into account numerous data points which affect this overall number.  Distribution changes, mechandising changes, TV, Print, Radio, FSI, Consumer Confidence, the wind blowing a butterfly in Africa, but seriously, there’s a lot that effects that number.  This is where a good analyst can sift through those data points, and give you a clearer picture of influence.  This is why it’s much easier for small business, who don’t always put money into those areas, see a much more dramatic increase in sales from an increase in positive online coversations.

So what does something like that look like?  Well, Mark Addicks – CMO of General Mills, showed the audience at Blogwell exactly what it looks like (via @josephrueter).  It maps online conversations/mentions of Fiber One to sales data.  According to General Mills, online conversation was the second leading driver of sales, while distribution was number one.

And I rest my case.

London School of Economics study finding an increase of online share of voice of 7% increased a business growth by 1%.