[beer + social networking = more sales]

Coors sees social networking as part of a strong marketing strategy:


From the NY Times:

"BEER has long been marketed as a sociable beverage, from a campaign for Budweiser that carried the theme “When gentlemen agree” to the Löwenbräu jingle that began, “Here’s to good friends.” Now, another beer brand, Coors Light, is extending its presence in the new media with efforts on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace.

The initiatives are part of a campaign known as “Code blue,” centered on a “cold activated” feature introduced last year on Coors Light beer bottles: the mountains pictured on the labels turn from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink.

For instance, consumers ages 21 and older will be able to send friends “Code blue” alerts on Facebook.com, inviting them to meet up for a beer — a Coors Light, natch. They can even use Facebook maps to direct their potential brew crew to a nearby bar. The Facebook feature, or application, is scheduled to start early next week.

[...]

“We talk a lot internally about ‘360-ing’ our innovations,” said Andy England, chief marketing officer at Coors Brewing in Golden, Colo., referring to how executives there seek to use all forms of media to reach potential customers in a comprehensive, 360-degree fashion.

When it comes to the new media, “Everyone, particularly in offline businesses like ours, is still in a very experimental phase,” Mr. England said. “We, along with our agencies, are trying to learn what works best and expand on those ideas.”

For instance, “if you put a viral video out there,” Mr. England said, like the “perfect pour” clips posted on YouTube, “How long should it be? How branded should it be?”

“We place bets in the office about this stuff,” he added.

The Facebook application and the Coors Light presence on MySpace (myspace.com/coorslight453) are results of work that is coordinated among agencies including Avenue A/Razorfish, part of the aQuantive unit of the Microsoft Corporation; Draft FCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies; and the Integer Group, part of the Omnicom Group.

“In this new world we live in, it’s something we’re learning to live with,” Bill Lindsey, creative director for the Coors Light account at Draft FCB in Chicago, said of the cross-agency collaboration required for new-media initiatives.

The campaign started with a television commercial created by Draft FCB that shows a man in a bar sending “Code blue” text messages to his far-flung friends. Curious to learn why he is so urgently signaling them, they find him in a bar, eager to share with them cold-activated bottles of Coors Light."

More on the NY Times site.

[social networks & identity]

This article by Scott Monty on his social networks and what it means for his identity fits well with the upcoming NLab Social Networks conference.

"I've been getting a lot of requests for friends on various social networks lately. You probably have been too - there seems to be an explosion of interest lately, particularly on Twitter.

I'm generally encouraged by this, as it means that the space is continuing to grow, rather than to wane like some short-lived fad. But at the same time, it can make life a little more complex or cluttered if you're not ready to deal with it.

But social networks are inherently different from each other. How you use one may not reflect how you use another, nor will contacts be consistent across every one of them. I thought it might be instructive to share how I think about my social networks - particularly focusing on how I consider friend requests in each. I've linked to my profiles, if you'd care to connect with me on them.

Facebook
Ah, Facebook. One of the most visible and recognized brands in the social networking space, where "friend" is a verb. For me, Facebook is a combination of business and social contacts.

I'll immediately accept a friendship request if I know you or follow you on another network. But that's not to say I'm exclusive in my friending. If we don't know each other, just introduce yourself and - most importantly - give me some context as to how you know me.

LinkedIn
I use LinkedIn as my professional social network. Like the old three-ring binders of business cards that I kept, LinkedIn is my real-time virtual collection of business cards.

As you can imagine, my requirements for LinkedIn are a bit more stringent. If you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, we should have met or at least have had some meaningful interaction. I'll also accept introductions via people I know.

Twitter
Twitter is probably the loosest of all of my networks. I generally like connecting with more people there because I enjoy the exchange of ideas, links and quick personal interaction that it allows."

From Marketing Profs Daily Fix.

[online marketing don'ts]

An oldie but a goodie: how *not* to market:





video from here.

[JP Rangaswami on web 2.0, social networking + business]

I've just been watching Dan Farber (ZDNet editor-in-chief) interview JP Rangaswami. Rangaswarmi talks about BT and the role of new media and open source. Some interesting quotes:

"In fact if you look at what I’m doing with Facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous softer discussions. Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work."

and, BT is no longer simply a telecoms company but (here's a mouthful):

"a platform based software driven networked IT services company."

Interestingly Dan Farber asks:

"Now as part of that environment that you’re talking about, the software as a service and exposing the assets to the customer and letting them build upon it, obviously that might deal to some extent with the web 2.0 type technologies, how are you investing in those types of approaches?"

and Rangaswami responds:

"Well as you would expect, I don’t think I could have joined a firm that didn’t believe in collaborative tools and techniques and at BT it’s pretty much part of our DNA. Collaboration is right at the heart of what we do, we have very very large internal use of blogs and wikis, we have considerable use of IM techniques. We also have a growing ability for ourselves to be able use various forms of, I mean if you look at facebook, I think we’re probably up to 6000 people just on the visible BT."

But does social media always work for business? No, not in any generic way, businesses need to use aspects of social media that work for them, their brand and their ethos. The moral of the story:

"I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work."

The video of the talk is here. The transcript here and Dan Faber's blog post here.

[business + social media = search engine optimization]]

Reading Blogstorm and I see Patrick Altoft talking about the possibility of SEO resistant searches. In other words, searches can be powered by what Altoft calls the "social graph" but that doesn't mean the death of SEO, just a different kind of instantiation:

"Imagine how hard it would be for a commercial site to get high rankings on a search engine powered by the social graph. The marketing department probably wouldn’t have a clue where to start and are likely to be labelled a spammer at the first social network they target. The only way for a commercial site to see good results would be to hire a social media consultant / SEO to create a long term social media strategy for them.

Search can’t ever be SEO resistant because any signal can be manipulated - a good SEO consultant will figure out what the search engine needs to rank a site highly and give it to them. No tricks just give the search engines what they want whether it’s links, keywords, bookmarks, RSS subscribers or anything else."

Tyler Banfield, one of Altoft's readers draws our attention to a post by Vanessa Fox where she sums up her view of SEO rather well:

"The bottom line is this. Yes, if you want your customers to find you using search, then you have to understand search engine optimization. And you should want your customers to find you using search because search is the entry point on the web. But if you are operating an online business, you absolutely should understand online marketing. I don’t understand people who say it should all just work and they should be able to concentrate on their core business. (Looking at this from a search engine’s perspective, however, I think they should and certainly they are working on ways to make sure it all just works, because it’s in their best interest to provide searchers the best content on the web, whether the owners of that content understand SEO or not, but that doesn’t negate the point.)

If you have an offline business, you have to understand offline marketing and customer engagement. If you are opening new stores and your core skill set is painting, you will likely hire others for other aspects of your business: determining the best location for the store, branding and advertising, merchandising. You will probably ensure your store is attractive, both inside and outside. You’ll arrange merchandise on your shelves so that people know where to find stuff and can easily reach it. You’ll make your aisles wide enough for carts.

You wouldn’t open your paint store with no sign and a broken door in a back alley that had a brick wall blocking the road. Why would you do the same on the internet and then blame Google?"

The cool image is from RagePank.

[collaborative writing]

Thanks to Gavin for updating me on his cool new project.

Last year I blogged about Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan's "The Age of Conversation--a precedent-setting collaborative book by 103 authors hailing from every U.S. time zone, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India and Oman."

This year Gavin and Drew are embarking on another collaborative (cooperative) writing project. The "kissing cousing" of last year's "book" has now title (yet) and not topic. We (as in readers of Drew and Gavin's blogs etc...) have been asked to vote on the topic via surveymonkey. Choice are between three:

• Marketing Manifesto


• Why Don't People Get It?


• My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

If you would like to be involved you can begin by voting on the topic and then you can get your skates on and e-mail Drew about flexing your qwerty fingers.

Some basics for authoring hopefuls:

You will sign over all rights to your chapter

You understand that all proceeds of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children's Charity

You will promote the book, throughout the process, on your blog if you have one

You'll embrace the cooperative, collaborative spirit that defined Age of Conversation

You'll honor deadlines so Drew does not have to be a nag

You'll honor word counts so Gavin doesn't have to be a nag

[sounds like a hard sell]

received this odd e-mail this morning...looks to be trying either to market myspace or vois or is an attempt to get some extra *friends* hrm...:

"I just wanted to tell you I really love your blog, but I don't always get a chance to come to this site and read it. Most of my time is spent vois.com and also on myspace. I think if you would put your blog on vois.com as well I would read it more often. You would get a huge boost of even more people to read your blog! It is a very good
group of bloggers just like us. If you want to get back to me and talk, here is my profile on vois: http://www.vois.com/user/**** and here is my profile on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/****"

"people like us"....I dunno 'bout that

nb: **** indicates my editing.

[do you think google has too much power]

Well, if you believe that google is ruling the internet world and would like to thwart their hold, try out these steps from the Internet Strategy Blog:

"Marketing your website:

1. Article marketing – Submit articles to article directories is a surefire way to attract traffic. Not only can you establish your expert status, your articles will also be reprinted in various blogs or ezines, thereby increasing the number of links back to your site.
2. Syndicate content – Syndicate your content and increase your traffic with RSS feed
3. Publish a Press Release – particularly if you have an important announcement
4. Social networking – Build social communities in the various social networking sites. More details here.
5. Video marketing – Create a video on anything related to your niche and upload it to Youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, Dailymotion etc.
6. Participate in specific forums – Establish your expert status by providing help and support in forums specific to your niche.
7. Joint Venture – The best way to generate traffic is to leverage on other people traffic. Create a joint venture with the top marketers in your niche.
8. Create free stuff and give it away – Serve as a teaser for your product. Everyone just can’t resist free stuff.
9. Classified Ad– put up an classified ad at Craigslist, USFreeAds, Yahoo Classified, Oodle
10. Submit to directories – Another place to increase exposure to your site

Marketing your blog

1. Blog actively, consistently and constructively – This is really the only way to attract readers.
2. Read other blogs and give comments – You’ll be surprised how much traffic it will bring you, especially when you leave a good comment on the popular blogs.
3. Link actively to other blogs – The rule of reciprocal. People tend to link back to you when you link to them.
4. Guest blog - Invite some big names to write a post for your blog and request him to link back to your blog. It always works.
5. MyBlogLog – Register an account with MyBlogLog and start to visit other blog with the MyBlogLog widget. Your face will start to appear on their blogs. Nice traffic puller.
6. Submit to blog directories – Just another place to increase the exposure of your blog
7. Interviews other bloggers – Especially useful when there are newsworthy topic. For example, during this pagerank event, you can interview Darren of Problogger on how he feels about the drop in pagerank and ways he has come up to counter it. It is definitely newsworthy and link-worthy.
8. Accept interview by other bloggers – This only work when you have established your expert status in the field.
9. Establish good relationship with your reader – Comment on your reader’s comment and if there is any doubts, go the extra mile and provide the solution for them.
10. Pay per post – Get people to review your post.

Social Media Marketing

1. Facebook / MySpace – Invite friends, start a group, join groups, comment on friends space.
2. Yahoo Answers – Help others solve their problem and put a link back to your site in the sources field
3. Digg / Netscape / reddit / stumbleupon – Only submit your best article, do not spam.
4. Helium – Share your expertise and make money at the same time
5. Youtube – As mentioned above in video marketing
6. Wiki marketing – Start a wiki on a topic related to your niche and invite contribution from the public. Include your links in one of the contribution.
7. Flickr – take a screenshot of your site (with the url fully visible) and upload to Flickr.
8. Squidoo – Start a Squidoo lens and participate in the Squidoo community. You could easily drive traffic to your site.

Offline marketing

1. Advertise in local newspaper
2. Publish news in local newspaper
3. Get interviewed in local newspaper
4. Print your website url in namecard
5. Include signature in all outgoing mails
6. Become a sponsor in public events and activities

From Internet Strategy Blog.

[I was part of the herd...]

that went to hear Howard Rheingold and Mark Earls talk lastnight at NESTA's hosted session on Mass Collaboration.

It was fully booked.

Howard kicked things off with some tales of collaboration, or rather lack of: politics is about "your side winning," and biology is war.

But, over the last few years Howard explained that he's been tracking the emergence of a "new narrative; one in which competition is still central but no longer all encompasing and shrinks just a little bit to leave room for some of the new knowledge that's developing over a wide variety of field about complex interdependencies and cooperative arrangements."

Howard went on to talk about three "mythic narratives" one of which was the prisoner's dilema in which (more or less) the prisoners need to cooperate in order to win. (For a little blurb on this see here).

Then Howard brought up his second mythic narrative, the tragedy of the commons (see G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243 (1968).) Basically, human behaviour is dog-eat-dog and when there's something like, oh, let's say a nice green pasture, people will keep adding one more sheep to the field in the end "desertifying" it as Howard says. Moving from that idea that humans inherently want to maximise their own gain, Howard referred to Elinor Ostrum, a political scientist, who asked important questions of groups who did not deforestlands or over fish etc...how did some of these communities manage their resources? Or, in Ostrom's words:

"The central question in this study is how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically."

What Ostrom found was that in each of the groups that successfully managed their environment, there was a set of 8 design principles including "clearly defined boundaries, monitors who are either resource users or accountable to them, graduated sanctions, and mechanisms dominated by the users themselves to resolve conflicts and to alter the rules." The principle Howard focused on is that of "altruistic punishment." To explain the point he Mark {oops, typo: it was Mark's story!!} told us a little story about an honesty box in the coffee shop and if that honesty box had a "pair of eyes above it" then people were more likely to be honest and pay for their coffee... (Read this article for a more recent theorising of community behaviour by Elinor Ostrom, et al in Science).

Mark Earls began by being "outed" as having a background in advertising though his own beginning to the presentation included a quote (seemingly) not about branding or commercial gain but from African philosophy, Ubuntu. Mark explained the quote, and he did say he was explaining it as "he" understood it: "a man is only a man with and through other men." Yeah...what about women? At least the translation might seek to collaborate with the other half of the community; women! I googled Ubuntu as soon as I arrived home, hoping to find out a bit more about this philosophy. Instead, I was reminded that Earls is all about branding because Ubuntu, of course, is the name of that new

"community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more. Ubuntu is free software."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu defines Ubuntu as having "to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life."

Anyway, that invocation of African philosophy came back to Earls during the question/answer session.

Funnily enough, in a presentation about collaboration Earls asked the audience members to collaborate by doing a "Mexican wave." That was erm...fun. With audience members busy scribbling, typing, clicking, and videoing away, we had to be asked twice and indeed, needed to practise. Here we are trying to collaborate:

Earls further exemplified (to me and Jo Howard who later asked him a question about this) an undercurrent in his theorising that doesn't really seem to be about collaboration but more about power. For one, he created a divide between "us" (northern europeans) and "them" (non-northern Europeans) Plus one image he used in his ppt really stood out for me, an image of a young woman pointing up into the sky with the words "bigger boys" at the top.

Earls said he uses this excuse himself, that "bigger boys made me do it." But why not use an image of himself pointing up? Why an image of a woman? The image was related to a story about a handful of "loonies" pointing up into the sky being enough to make passerbys also look up as they're "covinced" they've missed something...this is an indication of how easy it is for other people to influence us.

Again in question time this binary opposition was picked up and someone asked Earls about aligning the west with a more combative approach and the east with a collaborative one. Interesting. In his answer Earls refers to Richard Nisbett's book The Geography of Thought which is based upon explaining these dualities. I like Razib's review at the Gene Expression where he says

"Nisbett's book is worth a read, at least if you are a business-person or a marketer, but he really does not present any new axiomatic constructs that shift anyone's paradigm."

Maybe I just happened to be more aware of binaries or the invocation of "otherness" because of a sign I had spotted in a shop window on the way to the NESTA building:

There are always "others"...


Earls did use some good words though: exogenous, neotenic mutation, Axolotl.



Look at the technologies being used:

NESTA has put up the podcast from the evening: http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/mp3/11-09-07/howard_rheingold.mp3 and http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/mp3/11-09-07/mark_earls.mp3.

[putting the "I" in business models]

AmieStreet.com Announces Series A Financing Led By Amazon.com

NEW YORK, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- AmieStreet.com, a fast-growing digital music store with a unique demand-based pricing system, announced today the completion of its Series A financing led by Amazon.com, Inc. . The amount of Amazon's investment and the terms are not disclosed.

"Amie Street has a very smart and innovative team," said Jeff Blackburn, Senior Vice President for Business Development, Amazon.com. "The idea of having customers directly influence the price of songs is an interesting and novel approach to selling digital music."

AmieStreet.com is the first digital music store propelled by social networking, where members of the community drive the discovery, promotion and pricing of music. All songs on AmieStreet.com start at a price of zero cents. As more people download a song the price rises, capping at $0.98.

For recommending their favorite songs to their friends, members are rewarded by receiving credit for the purchase of additional music on AmieStreet.com. The more popular a song becomes after a member has recommended it, the more credit he or she receives to spend on music.

The recommendation system brings the music discovery process and the dynamic of social networking full circle, giving members the incentive and the means to continually discover and share new music. AmieStreet.com is a music network where people's passion for music, and their desire to share it with one another, generates commerce that benefits the entire community.

"AmieStreet.com grew from the idea that we needed to make buying music social and fun," said AmieStreet.com's co-founder and CEO Elliott Breece. "The Amie Street community took over from there, driving a shift toward a music marketplace where consumers decide what is popular and what music is worth. We're thrilled to have Amazon.com's support in empowering music consumers."

Anyone can upload their music to AmieStreet.com, and all songs are downloadable in DRM-free mp3 format.

In conjunction with the announcement of its Series A, AmieStreet.com is debuting releases from Audio Bee, Daptone Records, Nettwerk Music Group, United For Opportunity (UFO), Dualtone Music Group, RoyaltyShare and INgrooves. As always, all songs start free!

About AmieStreet.com

AmieStreet.com is an online music destination that is changing the way people discover and buy music. Founded in the Spring of 2006 by then Brown University seniors -- Josh Boltuch, Elliott Breece and Elias Roman -- AmieStreet.com is a site where the members of the community determine the price of songs, which start out free and rise in price the more they are purchased. The site also rewards its members with downloads when they recognize and recommend tracks that rise in price, giving users an incentive to find and recommend good music first, while giving artists the platform to promote and sell their music.

Amazon.com Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006, and all subsequent filings.


Contact:
press@amiestreet.com

http://amiestreet.com/page/for-press

[collaborative book]

I've just been reading the Marketing Profs blog again (I highly recommend it) and one of the top five reads of this week is Christina Kerley's post on "The Age of Conversation--a precedent-setting collaborative book by 103 authors hailing from every U.S. time zone, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India and Oman."

"In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication. And in the spirit of conversation, you can follow-up and extend your interest in the topics covered in the book at the Age of Conversation blog — http://www.ageofconversation.com/."

This collaborative novel is reminscent of DMU's online MA in Creative Writing and New Media's One Million Penguins project. I wonder how it might have evolved if the idea was to produce a printable book rather than a wiki-novel? Perhaps a future project for Penguin and the Master's group...

This also raises questions for the concept of transliteracy and collaboration. Is transliteracy analogous to collaboration and community? To be transliterate must one also approve of the spirit of community and collaboration? How might the individual feature in transliteracy (or is there an "individual"?) I suppose we'll need a way of negotiating the wisdom of crowds and independent thinking.

[8 ways to grow your blog]

According to Mack Collier at the Marketing Profs site, following these eight easy steps should pretty much ensure you a bigger blog. Although he has in mind corporate blogs, many of his steps apply to personal blogs.

1. Post regularly
2. Develop a comment policy
3. Reply to comments
4. Showcase readers who make special contributions
5. Build your blogroll with your readers' interests in mind
6. Offer unique content aimed at your blog's target audience
7. Make your blog's feed available for RSS subscribers (this is sooo important as many blog readers catch up on their favourite reads only using a feed reader)
8. Offer email subscriptions to your blog's content

"The best way to grow your blog's readership is to shift your focus to satisfying your readers' wants and needs. If you create an environment on your blog that welcomes readers to participate and encourages their feedback, your blog will blossom.
Instead of viewing your blog as a promotional and marketing tool for your company, consider how you can create a community on your blog. Once you shift your blog's focus toward the wants and needs of the readers, you will begin to see your readership grow, as will interaction via comments and links to your blog."

For further details on each step and actionable points see the original blog post here.

[the business of new media]

With less than two weeks to go until the Women, Business & Blogging conference I found this article timely:From Postcards, to Podcasts.

"According to the American Advertising Federation's Media Investment Survey 2007, 73% of nearly 1,000 organizations polled said they are allotting up to 20% of their budgets for 'experimentation and new media options.' Further, 78% of respondents said they are 'always open to new ways of using traditional media.'"

Blogging is important for business:

Have a look at what Lori Reed, Director of Marketing at InsureMe.com has to say about search engine optimization:

Some key points from the article, well worth bearing in mind: