Frontiering Talk

Paul over at Zealot, pointed me to this site today and I was amazed at how a simple idea that was only launched about a month ago, has already earned it’s owner about $300K.

The site is getting lots of comments from bloggers and perhaps explains a possible new “go to market” approach for companies. That is, launch something, tell enough seeders who have blogs and get to a tipping point.

The site ? Million Dollar Home Page.

Shankar Gupta of Mediapost has written this gem of a story of how a Movie “Serendipity”, tapped into the Blogosphere to help generate stories about the movie.

Shankar reports that “As of Thursday afternoon, a Technorati search on the phrase “Serenity movie” returned almost 14,000 blog posts, compared to 1,538 posts returned on the phrase “Flightplan movie.” The two films opened on the same date last week.”

I think this is a sign of things to come, as companies experiment on ways to create interest in their brands on the blogosphere. And here’s where it gets interesting. Companies are used to paying for PR, and the blogosphere is more about reporting about things that the authors are passionate about. I believe companies should embrace blogging as part of their advertising mix, but care needs to be taken that this medium is different to standard advertising.

I stumbled across this site which is produced by a Satellite TV business in the US. The company is called Current and here’s how they describe their TV station .. with a focus on “Current” stuff, based on Google’s Current. Much of the content comes from everyday people.

Right now, at this moment in history, TV is the most powerful medium in the world.
Its reach and influence are unparalleled. It makes or breaks products and politicians alike, paints our picture of the world, and glues our culture together. And yet, who controls it?
Now, you do.
This is our outpost in a locked-down television landscape. Here, the channel goes two ways. Here, you are viewer and producer. Welcome to Current.
Current is a new, independent cable and satellite TV network, available in 20 million homes around the United States — and growing.
Current is about what’s going on.
We follow the global pulse via Google Current, a real-time view of what the world’s searching for, presented every half-hour around the clock.
We slice the rest of the schedule into short pods — each just a few minutes long — that range far and wide, from international dispatches to profiles of cool people to intelligence on new trends. This is not a traditional TV network; watching Current, you’ll see more, on more topics, from more points of view.
And much of it comes straight from you.
We call it viewer-created content, or VC2, and it’s created in the Current Studio, an online extension of our real studios in San Francisco and LA. Anybody can join in to produce VC2 (and get paid for it) or watch and vote for what goes on TV.
See those four squares in our logo? We call it the cursor, and like an old-school command prompt, it means we’re awaiting input.
From you.

They have a mascot called ViC .. and are currently inviting input for Vic promos at the site abtly named AwaitingInput.
Kind of like .. Open Source TV !

Favourite brands such as IPOD are now more than ever appearing as clothing items. You can even cloth your baby in this cute IPOD gear, thanks to IPODMYBABY.

Now .. how can you make your brand so incredible that people want to wear it?

Do you have a department for Consumer Generated Media?

Most people might guess that their call centre is the closest thing to a Consumer Generated Media team. Perhaps this is the closest, but most call centre metrics are based around call rates, response times etc. Hardly any are given the freedom to help generate and nurture consumer generated media.

Pete Blackshaw suggests that Consumer Affairs should be the new Advertising department.

Sites like Lovemarks are filled with examples of products that consumers are only too happy to talk about. Read the comments about King of Shaves. Now I then went searching for the King of Shaves website to see if I could find some consumer generated media. They have an area for people to tell them about their product experience .. but I was amazed that I could not find 1 testimonial of an existing consumer?

So when are companies going to put resources behind the discovery and propagation of consumer generated media?

I am starting to read more and more articles on the concept of Blogvertising. I like this one from Gappingvoid.
There are probably a few kinds of blogvertising.

1. Google or Overture Ads.
Many blogs have a revenue stream by placing Google ads relevant to the topic they are passionate about.
2. PR / Endorsements
Some bloggers are in the business of doing reviews of new products, and therefore become a PR source for independant reviews.
3. Consumer Blogging Media
Most bloggers are writing about things that they are passionate about. Things that inspire them, or a deep cause they relate to. In such articles, recommendations of products or services are sometimes made. But these discussions are the same discussions that you hear when consumers talk to each other about something they are passionate about.

Pepsi has launched a website called Heaps Poor which is a spoof on it’s current tv commercial.?

Certainly humerous it is, in a tongue in check Australian style.
It contains a rather lame “I never” ,or “I did” game.

I would like to have seen more interactivity such as the ability to click and drag components of an ad to create your own version, then a send to friends option … but then again, it probably wouldn’t qualify for a “Heaps Poor” theme? With a reported 160,000 visitors it does seem to be making an impact !

Here’s a post from Shankar Gupta.

Included in his post is something that a Panelist said at the recent OMMA East Conference ..

Panelist Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled “The Art of the Heist.” Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds–a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign’s landing page.

Blogs are usually real stories by real people about real things. Most are reasonably well categorised and therefore target a particular niche, so advertising on leading blogs is probably something that is going to continue to grow.

Launched at the recent Demo conference, a company called Picture Marketing demonstrated an interesting product that allows marketing campaigns to links photos taken at events with a unique code that consumers are given after their picture is taken. The consumer can then access these pictures online in return for answering a few survey questions about the event or product. This links the picture with the consumer as well as providing insight for the campaign.

Check out their presentation here.