Social Media brings new hope to the Commercial Enterprise

For ten years now, I have been working with web content management solutions. Right now, the excitement and innovation level is the highest I’ve ever seen. With the rise of social media, web and enterprise 2.0, there is a feeling that significant change is on the way. And it will deeply impact society and cultures through engagement with web content and rich media.

Here at Open Text Content World in Orlando, there is a great deal of buzz as customer, partners and even employees start to really understand the massive opportunities — and challenges — we are facing with the rise of web 2.0 and social media.

Major Shifts and Changes

We are experiencing a major shift from traditional content consumption. Brand and content is no longer expressed to the consumer in one direction – now it is a more interactive model.

Modern and emerging media provides a more interactive, involved and engaging experience through a bi-directional channel. This is at least the case for the young, connected and digital savvy generation who are becoming harder to penetrate through traditional advertising for a variety of reasons.

These reasons include physical and technological factors like e-mail and spam filters connected communities (such as Facebook, MySpace) to browser pop-up blockers, on-demand TV filters and voicemail to text services.

It seems the only way to connect with your audience is to join them in their space on their terms.

Even if the message gets through to this new digitally competent audience, it has to be engaging, relevant and useful in a world connected through reviews, opinions and recommendations that can be socialized in a contextual way. After all, it is this medium that will build greater trust with your customers, partners and employees.

Also if companies look to invest in developing web platforms that empower people to create, share and engage with new immersive content types, then it’s very important that this content can be managed, measured and for some organizations be compliant with the laws of that country.

Warming Up to Social Media

Based on what I’m seeing at Content World in discussions with representatives from some of the world’s top brands, it seems that the enterprise world is now ready to adopt and embrace social media through social business design that not only empowers their employees to create and communicate far more effectively but also enables them to get closer to their business partners and customers.

Take the example of a fax management company. A representative from the company explained to me over lunch that they realized the power of social media when they implemented a wiki platform that helped them on RFP processes.

By collaborating with their customers and partners through the wiki, they were able to build up a stronger RFP that in turn helped them win the deal. This is the classic case of the “what’s in it for me” moment when the value of social media business design through a managed and compliant process helps build stronger relationships.

Content World is helping organizations to understand that social media is not just about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — it’s about harnessing content through social constructs over the web as a platform and in turn building new business models or creating more efficient ways to do less with more.

From life sciences, banking and government, it’s clear that all industries are starting to see the real value of creating more robust web platforms and implementing social solutions that help bring content and people closer together through managed and secure business processes.

Drains, Strains and Pains: Four Productivity Risks Enterprise 2.0 Defeats

Social media has become the norm in Europe, with social networking having a penetration of nearly 75% among European internet users*. Statistics such as this have spurred corporations worldwide to adopt social media practices for their employees that increase productivity and grow ROI. Let’s look at four employee productivity challenges Enterprise 2.0 tackles head on.

The Intranet Time Drain – The Nine-Headed Hydra

How would you rate your corporate intranet? Many would compare theirs to the mythical Hydra: You have to chop off several heads (and keep chopping) in order to find needed information. Whether looking for the right person or the right document, employees can run up a sizeable bill when it comes to wasted time. Consider this: If an average employee spends 30 minutes a week looking for the right resource, then a mid-size company of 1,000 employees wastes 30,000 minutes (500 hours) per week in lost productivity.
The Training Strain – The Dreaded Ramp-Up Time

Companies face huge costs to replace employees. The average on-boarding time for a new employee can vary from weeks to months. Accelerating ramp-up time by even a small percentage can produce significant savings. The impact is particularly compelling with sales generating professionals – the quicker a quota-bearing representative is able to start generating revenue, the more profitable your company will be.

The Learning Change – Lack of Participation

Social media continues to change the Internet by making it a hub for participation, empowering every user to contribute their knowledge with content, ratings, votes and opinions. When a company ignores Web 2.0 principles such as user-generated content, employees are denied the opportunity to collaborate, share and participate.

The Silo Pain – Hording Knowledge

Most organizations have no systematic way to retain an employee’s knowledge before he/she leaves. Individuals and project teams are often driven by deadlines which don’t allow them to discover how other teams or geographies could benefit from their work. How much time do your employees spend today reinventing the wheel or duplicating past and current efforts?

The Answer: Enterprise 2.0

Now that we’ve identified problems that tax employee productivity, let’s see how Enterprise 2.0 can address them.

Bye-Bye Ramp-Up Time: Knowledge isn’t just stored in the form of traditional documents: it’s inside blogs, threaded discussions and wikis. Successful Enterprise 2.0 allows knowledge types to be centrally stored and organized based on relevant categories, tags and user ratings. When employees transition out of their roles or leave the company, their knowledge is retained in a way that new employees can easily access, enhancing their own knowledge at an accelerated pace.

Go Beyond the Written Word: Successful Enterprise 2.0 hinges on respecting each employee’s unique way of learning, be it verbal, visual or aural. Savvy businesses are seeing the power of video and podcasts to promote social e-learning and provide an engaging way for employees to share expertise. Push your organization to excel beyond text-based Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Create Collaborative Workspaces and Useful Tags: Harness the true power of Enterprise 2.0 by helping your employees find the right information through collaborative workspaces and tags. With user ratings and comments, your employees can easily score the usefulness of information and grow knowledge-based communities information is centralized around a particular topic – all actions that significantly slash productivity risks.

* comscore World Metrix, February 2009

Engagement Marketing 2.0

I was recently asked to detail my thoughts on email marketing and the shift towards social media marketing so i thought i would post the responses for peoples thought. IT seems if i really think about it email still has a core function in marketing but the way to engage people has changed dramatically as you will read below.



Why is e-mail currently marketers’ most popular tool?

Email has been the tool of choice for the past ten years and beyond because it’s a communication channel that instigates a direct response. Email is by far the most widely used and adopted communication tool in the world where marketers have the power to deliver content rich offers and services directly into customers inboxes.

TV, print and radio advertising are all reasonably expensive marketing platforms with a limited range where as email is more cost effective and the problem with traditional media is that you are never 100% sure who is going to receive or read that content, so it makes it harder to deliver a heavily targeted campaign and decipher what has been effective and what has not.

With email the marketer is able to track every email, every click, every view and embed rich content within each email. This makes it a very effective way to communicate with current and future customers in a direct communication channel with complete visibility of the campaigns success or failures.

Is there a danger of overkill (as we saw in the past with telesales)?

Yes we are already seeing email marketing being saturated, the challenge came when consumers’ inboxes started to receive a mixture of important information, i.e work emails and messages from friends vs secondary information from markers etc and then the final straw was spam. A massive overload of content and information being pushed into peoples email inbox has driven the need for new types of communication platforms such as social networks, instant messaging and more recently twitter.

The mass of unwanted or semi unwanted information has lead to users becoming disillusioned and traditional email marketing has become quite destructive and ultimately caused the advent of spam filters. Email systems are now vastly more sophisticated and can easily filter unwanted or irrelevant email. As a result marketers now have to become more innovative in the way they develop email marketing.

How can you make sure your audience doesn’t unsubscribe or stop reading your messages?

Traditionally marketing emails were direct along lines of “I have a product or service, do you want to buy it and here’s a picture or website link”. However, this is now regarded as possibly to sales focused. Marketers now need to be me much more sophisticated about their approach. Consumers now want less marketing and sales copy and more interesting information that engages them, they don’t want the hard sell they want valuable information that helps them make informed decisions.

Consumers have now started to unsubscribe to the pure sales and marketing emails and are now more focused on content that deliver additional value in a contextual way. For example instead of sending an email that says buy this car, why not embed in the email an interview with Jeremy Clarkson test driving it round the track. This offers the consumer more insight and valuable knowledge and makes them feel they are getting entertainment as part of the marketing or sales process. Other examples such as Advertorials or product placement within TV and movies. eConsultancy and Digital Strategy Consulting are also great examples of newsletters that provide interviews, best practice tips and expert advice on their services and products over direct sales.

Which e-mail software packages work best and why? Should marketers outsource?

It is always worth looking at solutions that are specifically designed to manage email, because there are a series of best practices that people tend to ignore. For example all companies need to send all emails from a registered email services with an IP address that sits on the anti spam networks, if they don’t comply with this or try to send out massive email lists without understanding the technical best practice then their content will most likely end up in the customers spam folders.

A specialist agency will make you aware of such practices and advise you on the best way to implement them or even manage the delivery process on your behalf. If these are dealt with in house it can often lead to technical and compliance issues.

What are the e-mail no-nos? (Pictures? Long subject lines? Misleading teasers? Excessive in-message advertising/sponsorship?)

The key is to keep the size of an email to a minumum and where possible have a text and graphical version available as an option for the customer. Large emails can clog up a user’s inbox or take a long time to download if the user is working remotely using a wireless card.

The subject line should always be engaging and relevant to the context of the email. Misleading headlines, large email file size, badly formatted content can cause consumer to become annoyed and then unsubscribe to the email service who then become very difficult to get back.

Any links within the email need to be related to the corresponding article not just to the company’s homepage and deep link to the contextual web pages online. They need to enhance the readers experience not frustrate them.

Finally, never try to fool or deceive the reader by indicating the email includes content that it actually doesn’t, as this is by far the number one reason why people unsubscribe.

How can marketers combine social networks with other digital marketing?

I have always been a huge proponent of of using traditional marketing methods along with new digital marketing strategies such as social networking to ensure companies can join up the various streams of interest and maximize consumer call to actions.

Marketers need to ensure that what’s being offered on their websitesis being posted on Twitter and being discussed on a Blog, within facebook or a youtube channel and so on. These can then be linked using hash tags. and then aggregated into social media web pages or hubs. This ensures all of the great marketing content and social media content can come together to maximize the product or services being offered.

There are so many campaigns where you visit the website and it’s totally different to what’s being discussed in the social landscape, new marketing methods need to move away silo strategies and come together as one voice, one message.
Do social network aggregators offer additional opportunities for marketers?

Yes more so then any other form of of market or customer intelligence. The reason being that social network aggregators provide very detailed and contextual information on customers through life streaming, which is basically streams of information taken from peoples social media feeds whether that be facebook, friend feed or twitter. They are snippets of information about a specific individuals that can be built up to offer a bigger picture of the individual and their buying habits, locations, holidays, interests etc. Marketers through social frameworks like Open Social or Facebook Connect can then use this information to pitch the most relevant products to that particular person.

For example, if you take a facebook connect API from a particular user and see he has just booked a trip to Australia you can then promote relevant product information back to the user in real time. Nothing else in the world can tap into a current or potential customer’s life more then social network aggregators and open social frameworks. The colonization of people and networks through lifestreams can provide some of the most detailed and valuable insight into user behaviour of which we have never seen before.

Are specialist social media agencies beginning to emerge?

You are going to see a rise in specialist media agencies, because traditional agencies are finding it difficult to move away from traditional creative campaigns such as TV ads and websites etc. During this evolution of the social marketplace specialist agency will continue to develop to fill the knowledge void and push forward the social media landscape and the respective benefits.

How can marketers analyse and measure social media activity as part of an integrated online campaign? Is it a waste of money?

The social landscape is qualitative not quantitative, so you are more likely to see specialist agencies employing sociologists to analyse this information and then develop a theory on where the brand should go. Any agency that is able to understand the social landscape and social framework will succeed, it’s no longer about looking at the simple ROI of a campaign it’s about measuring the deep contextual elements that can be achieved through social media.

The key difference here is understanding the two forms of both traditional and new media. Both offer great value to the business, but one is harder to measure than the other. For example it is fairly simple to measure the effectiveness of an email, TV or radio campaign, but what is harder to do is measure the benefits of monitoring a facebook conversation or developing discussion groups in Twitter.

However, marketers are able to set up systems and applications that can scan social networks through active listening services to provide a contextual view of what people are saying about their brand and then respond in real time. They can then review the conversations that follow and see what impact this has on the perception of the brand.


Whilst this doesn’t give you a table or a graph it’s not as waste of money as it gives a clear contextual view of how people perceive your brand. In the new digitally connected social landscape its going to be imperative that companies protect their brands and respond to negative content quickly and tap into the collective wisdom and positive feelings for self benefit.

Enterprise 2.0 in Boston defines the new Social Workplace

After spending the past 3 days attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference it has become even clearer in my mind that social media and social networking has an important part to play in the future of enterprise collaboration but requires a great deal more education and understanding by the key decision makers. We need to spend more time understanding the use cases and cultural challenges of creating social wrappers around corporate information and seeding these inside corporate social networks, its not about replacing email as much as empowering your employees to connect with people, customers and partners in a way that's more socially engaging. Its important to remember that if we are to learn anything from the adoption success of web flavoured social content its that its not about IT or technology - its about user experience. The companies who put user experience above IT and Technology will create a competitive advantage by attracting the best employees who can be far more productive while still ensuring that content and information is secure.

Another key challenge is going to be scalability and enterprise standards for social collaboration platforms in the workplace not to forget the compliant and secure nature of content management required in many sectors such as government, banking and legal.

It seems that the social workplace is going to be an increasingly important evolution for business but we are still in the very early days of understanding the key use cases and value propositions experienced by the social marketplace through web 2.0 but what is clear will be the requirement to have far better methods of sharing information and working in virtual dispersed teams, email is not dead yet but we must find better communication methods like micro-blogging, video sharing and social bookmarking if we are ever going to be able to work effectively in the digital world.

Winning Advantages of Social Media in the Marketplace

I was recently asked to help describe the competitive advantages of social media for the salesforce and how they can get the most out of these connected networks. I felt it was important to identify the best practice and ethics of using social media as described below. Would be great your thoughts, ideas and success stories of using social media is this way.

- which are the best social media for salespeople to use?/ - how can they get the most out of them?

LinkedIn is the best and most obvious choice as it really delivers all the key ingredients a sales person needs, customers name, contact details, company, work history and specific business sector. The best way to interact with any social media tool is to be subtle, offer input and make it worthwhile to other people in the group so they want to interact with you.

One of the key areas you should look to focus on in LinkedIn is the professional groups. LinkedIn gives the user the ability to create professional groups focusing on the specific business or technology they are involved in. Sales people should focus on finding the groups that are most relevant to their business and what they are trying to sell, then start interacting with these groups and communities , offering engaging conversation, recent research, industry statistics and any tips or hints that may be helpful. This shows you are offering value to the community and they are more likely to interact and eventually engage with your product or service. By using the professional groups it allows the sales person to be able to target their specific areas of interest and build up trusted relationships with people. By being useful, relevant and engaging in your network it will build trust over time and create a strong networking opportunities for you over the long run.

Another application , which is fast becoming a must have for sales teams is XOBNI or inbox backwards. Basically it is a plug in which links to your outlook so when you receive an email from a potential lead for example, it automatically pulls together their information from LinkedIn, Facebook and shows their network of contacts in real time . It also links into Hoovers the business information site and can give details on the company’s current performance.

Essentially it aggregates all the key business and social content available about the lead/customer who emailed and delivers it to you in a simple, concise visual way allowing the user to gain key areas of knowledge instantaneously without the need to search the web for hours. This information can then be used to develop a more all rounded pitch.

Facebook is a tricky one as it can be beneficial, but only really if you know the customer very well and want to invite them more into your personal world. I look at LinkedIn as inviting someone into your office, you don’t need to know them well, it’s just business. However, Facebook is more like inviting someone into your home or for a barbeque in the garden. If you feel you have that level of friendship with the customer then Facebook can be a good tool to reinforce these relationships. It’s not really an effective tool for sourcing new leads

Twitter is a buzz word at the moment and rightly so as it’s fast becoming one of the most exciting forms of social and broadcast communication. However, I think people are still unsure of how best to use it in the world of sales. Where I’ve seen it being used successfully is a tool to gain tacit knowledge about past, present and potential customers and prospects . By following customer’s on Twitter you gain access to their interests, likes and dislikes and build a profile around the person thus giving you key information that will help with potential pitches etc. You can also setup key words searches on Twitter for example if you are a seller of enterprise software you can have this as a key search term and Twitter will alert you to conversations which include this term. This allows you to see what people are saying about the product, their pain points and what they want out of their software. You can then use this information to filter who’d be looking for new software and to find out if they are unhappy with their current supplier. Again its important to point out that Twitter is a broadcast channel where you need to build up trusted followers to be effective so its increasingly important to add value and share information or knowledge which will help your community which in turn helps you build leads and opportunities.

- what are the pitfalls to look out for?

The key pitfall in social media is when people look at it the same way as say cold calling. You need to be subtle, engaging and relevant you can’t just jump in and start selling. Social media is very unforgiving and if the group your are connected to feels you are spamming them or adding no intrinsic value they will block you straight away. I like to look at it as if you were trying to sell something to a group of friends down the pub. The topic has to be initially engaging on a social level, be contextual and then slowly deliver the sales message. They want to feel like they are getting something out of it not just being sold to.


- What examples are there of companies using social media to sell?

I actually have been following the Dell social media campaign via twitter and must say they have done an incredible job off communicating useful and product based content without being overly commercial, tweets have been engaging and I have shared offers and deals with friends and family which I would never normally have been aware off.

The DellOutlet now has over 15,000 followers who are receiving marketing messages from Dell via Twitter. Dell has now taken its Twitter campaign to a new level but offering discounts exclusively to the 11,844 people who follow @DellOutlet . For instance, there is a Tweet with a link to save 20% on Outlet Latitude™ XT tablet PC. When you click on the link, it takes you to this product page on Dell.com. http://forwebsake.blogspot.com/2008/12/dell-claim-twitter-contributed-to-over.html

Another great example would be Zappos, a US based shoe company who have managed to build a massive following of customers on Twitter and actively encourage their employees to blog and engage with customers - they have proved that empowering their employees with the tools to connect with customer through social media can turn a relatively unknown shoe website into a massively profitable business. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php

The social marketplace builds customer engagement and loyalty...

The Traditional Marketplace is changing…

Would it be fair to say that we are experiencing a major shift from traditional advertising methods? From television, radio and traditional publications, brand and content is expressed to the consumer in one direction. Modern and emerging mediums provide a more interactive, involved and engaging experience through a bi-directional channel. This is at least the case for the young, connected, and digital savvy generation who are becoming harder to penetrate through traditional advertising for a variety of reasons. These range from physical and technology factors including email and spam filters, connected communities such as facebook, mySpace, browser pop up blockers, on-demand TV filters such as TiVo and voicemail to text services such as SpinVox, it seems the only way to connect with your audience is to join them in their space on their terms. So even if the message gets through to this new digitally competent audience, it is more important that it is engaging, relevant and useful in a world connected through reviews, opinions and recommendations. After all, it is this medium that will build greater trust in a brand and in turn, improve a brand's reputation. It is no longer what you are being told by marketers that resonate but what peers are recommending or reviewing on your behalf.

Measuring success of the social marketplace.

Just look at successful marketplace sites such as eBay, Amazon, Dell or Zopa (social lending) or sites such as Digg.com, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor and Yelp where the main drivers behind their continued ascendancy are reviews, opinions and recommendations by a connected community who pride themselves on credibility and reputation by being engaged – What is the value of this engagement? How do we measure this? And ultimately what is the ROI of creating such a social marketplace. The question remains; how do you drive the value of engagement and how is this impacting your business and reputation online?

Lord Leverhulme, the soap powder magnate, once famously said: “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half”. This was of course in the context of traditional TV advertising. In contrast, today we have the benefit of digital content and interactive media which allows us to measure customer engagement in real time through analytics, digital footprints and online monitoring – making it, in theory at least, possible to measure 100% of spend accurately although I challenge any online business to actually be dedicated to making this happen. However, there is a continued frustration with traditional web analytics, in that the measurements employed define success via traditional click-based and time-based metrics, instead of genuine engagement and influence based metrics.

Be Engaged with your customers where it matters

Engagement is a holistic characterisation of a consumer's behaviour, incorporating more detailed behavioural characteristics such as loyalty, satisfaction, involvement, word of mouth promotion and complaints but very few businesses or organisations are measuring this let alone actually integrating it into any of their digital marketing strategies when building a social marketplace.

The days when a customer’s only touch point with a brand was the URL of a website are well and truly over. Now it is increasingly important to have knowledge of how your customers have interacted with your brand. Who has subscribed to your news RSS feed and product offers, downloaded a podcast from your website, reviewed your book or product on Amazon and eBay, downloaded a news or product widget and blogged / commented about your product or brand while sharing this with friends and family through facebook, or MySpace. This new shift in consumer behaviour, enables people to engage with your brand, which allows them to collectively shape and influence your reputation. It is this that requires monitoring and understanding in the new social marketplace.

Tough times call for innovation and new ways of communicating

We must also start to consider that as we face one of the toughest economical times in our lifetime, any competitive advantage or social marketing strategy must include an engagement framework that allows businesses to filter through the noise and focus on the important digital influencers that are either positively or negatively impacting reputation or success in the connected world. In times like these its increasingly important to be engaged with your customers by working smarter to maintain an ongoing relationship – its cheaper to keep an existing customer than to attract new ones as many CEO’s and business development executives always tell us.

I would say it is no longer good enough to rely on traditional metrics, which provide inadequate insight or ROI, and rather focus on preparing and developing an engagement framework. In my experience from the travel sector a product with a neutral or positive review for example will outsell a similar product at least 4 to 1. How many times have you looked up Trip Advisor before booking your hotel or read a blog on a particular location or resort, before buying a book I can guarantee that most of you would have read a review or searched on Amazon for comments and blog posts. How many of you have asked a friend or colleague for their opinion or advice about make a decision? This all relates back to measuring the value of engagement through being involved in your networks via blogs, wikis, forums and communities. Helping people make advised decisions and then measuring the value of this response is what’s important.

Giving some serious thought to planning how to measure your reputation and success through a social marketplace based on measuring Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence is a fundamental step towards figuring out which 50% of the advertising budget has been unsuccessful and which 50% has engaged with your visitors will be a huge leap forward for digital marketers. If this all seems to make sense then why not turn your business into a social marketplace where being engaged through customer networks will bring success in the modern web.

The web is rich...with audio and video. Rich Media is the new king!

A report from Hitwise todays shows that online video traffic is up 41%; BBC iPlayer 22nd most popular UK website

BBC iPlayer 22nd most popular UK website. UK Internet traffic to Video websites has increased by 40.7% over the last 12 months. During February 2009, 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits went to a specialist Video website, up from 1 in every 50 in February 2008.

Source: Hitwise UK

With that in mind i thought i would share some of my thoughts on using Audio and Video as part of your online strategy and some best practice experience over the years.

What is the best method for using video and audio as part of your website?

It is important to think about the context and use of the media you are planning to create, share and deliver. For example a furniture company or clothing brand should look to create reasonably high quality professional video that provides the customer enough detail and confidence to purchase the product. Where as a travel company for example could be better positioned to create an online platform which enables their customers to create and upload their own user generated videos as this would provide a more authentic and trusted perspective of their products. From my experience you can increase conversions at least 4:1 with video content within the travel sector. Also don't stop their ensure you allow visitors to share, comment and rate your video content to see what content is having the most positive or negative impact which can then help you decide on what products to remove or improve. I would also add that its best to use the defacto standard Flash Video (.FLV) format to provide improved streaming and maximum audience reach.

Audio content works well for newspapers and magazines where visitors can listen to an article or interview while still navigating other content within the website. Audio works well for longer content articles and should be created to a high quality that can be played inline with a browser as a streaming format. As web natives become more distracted with visual content it makes sense to try and adopt audio where possible to capture your listeners for a longer period of time. A great example is the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/mar/17/sxswi-startups1 and the NMA podcast section http://podcast.nma.co.uk/ (which i actually listening to while writing this article)

What works best – video or podcasting?

As described in the response above their are various options but should be considered in context to your brand, how this will be delivered and who will be listening or watching your video / audio content. A very interesting use case my team are working on currently is to look at how banking organisations can use video for example to help better engage with customers when selling a financial product. As most people know the process and paperwork involved in completing a banking product can be very frustrating and complex but using a video or audio platform to explain the benefits and talk the customer through the application procedure would certainly see a major increase in conversions. My feeling is that we could increase by at least a 6:1 ratio purely as a unique proposition and more engaging way to explain a banking product which could then be rated, commented on and shared with friends and family.

I would also say that video works best for content in length of 1 - 10 minutes max but then audio becomes a better method to communicate in order to allow the listener to carry out other tasks while listening to the content. I also find that audio advertising can be better incorporated unobtrusively than video where the visual of an advert can upset the viewer.

According to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data, 64% of US online consumers watch online video on any subject at least monthly. Interactive marketers in travel and hospitality already embrace online video as an advertising medium — they plan to spend $200 million on pre-roll, in-player, in-stream, ad overlays and other video ad formats in 2008 and will spend $1.6 billion by 2012 Source: Forrester

Measurement: how do you measure effectiveness of a campaign (purely on views/downloads or conversions?

Lord Leverhulme, the soap powder magnate, once famously said: “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half”. This was of course in the context of traditional TV advertising. In contrast, today we have the benefit of digital content and interactive media which allows us to measure customer engagement in real time through analytics, digital footprints and online monitoring – making it, in theory at least, possible to measure 100% of spend accurately. Using tools such as www.feedburner.com, www.google.com/analytics, www.clickdensity.com or commercial tools such as webtrends or omniture its is possible to monitor views, visits, interactions, sharing, customer comments and then see how these create a networked effect with traction to your website or booking engine. Feedburner for example provides some excellent tools which show how many subscribers' of your podcast have listened to your content and how long each person listened for in length so you could easily identify if they reached that crucial advert in the 3rd quarter of your interview for example. Video can provide physical heat maps and trends of click paths within the video element which can be tracked to a specific website or page URL. The question for the business would be the importance of engagement (views) over interaction (clicks) virility (sharability) or comments (sentiment). It would then be possible to look at scoring these actions based on importance to that use case.

I truly believe we are going to see many challenges going forward managing rich media assets as part of an overall web strategy, i don't believe posting all of your video content to youTube directly is the best approach for your long term content management solution. I think companies who are smart enough to manage their own rich media through proper integrated solutions will gain the greater benefit for the long term.

Into the Twittersphere....

I received a link to this excellent video today from @esegar (much appreciated) and made me laugh. This takes a very satirical view of Twitter but will make you laugh. The fail whale scene is brilliant!