YouTube views as a proxy for web success
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March 30th, 2008 by Alex
We're often asked how organizations can measure the return on investment from social media. Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times effectively uses YouTube views as a proxy for the overall success of the Obama and Clinton campaigns in tapping the power of the web:
The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece [broadcasting Hillary Clinton's arrival in Bosnia, with no evidence to support her recollection of dodging sniper fire] transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.
The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.
Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.
New look & feel, kind of almost there
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March 23rd, 2008 by Alex
The new and much improved look of my blog is based on the blog style template at Open Designs, created by fellow-Canadian Collin Grasley. Rob hacked it into Wordpress-iness for me, a process that’s still being debugged.
Open Designs is a very cool site that offers more than a thousand different blog and website looks, all available for repurposing. Once we finish adapting the theme to Wordpress, we plan on repaying the open source goodness by contributing the Wordpress version to the Wordpress theme garden — if that’s ok with Collin.
Please standby while this leopard changes its spots
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March 22nd, 2008 by Alex
We’re retheming alexandrasamuel.com tonight. Could get funky, people!
Good parenting 2.0
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March 13th, 2008 by Alex
Yesterday I Googled each of our kids for the first time, in the form "John Smith".
No, we did not name our kids John Smith. And here's why: there are 4,640,000 results for "John Smith" on Google.
But for each of our kids? None. Zero. Zip.
Sure, our kids may eventually complain that we took them to MacWorld instead of Disney World. Or that we spent too much time blogging, when we could have been bonding.
But they will never, ever have to worry about being unfindable on Google.
And isn't that what good parenting is all about?
Wrap your brand in reflected glory
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March 2nd, 2008 by Alex
Someone needs to tell the folks at Glad: Unless your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, don't build an online community around your brand. That's rule #1 in marketing with social media -- and reason #1 for instead taking an approach we call reflected glory marketing. In reflected glory marketing you create a web site that resonates with your brand, but focuses on something your customer cares passionately about. Think of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, or Amex's Members Project. Or think of some of the projects we've launched in-house: BC Hydro's Green Gifts application for Facebook, or Vancity's Change Everything.
In my keynotes and presentations about marketing with social media, I often make this point by referring to an over-the-top scenario: a company that tries to build an online community about plastic wrap. It seems obvious that people just aren't that passionate about plastic wrap.....but it wasn't obvious to the folks at Glad, who launched the 1000 Uses site in 2006 to promote their Press 'N Seal product.
The site solicits tips on all the different ways you can use plastic wrap, organized by room. It's got a very swishy interface that lets you click on different rooms in a house to see the fantastic things you can do there with plastic wrap. And it aims to incentivize user contributions with a chance to win $1000 each month by submitting a tip.
That's a pretty generous prize, and it succeeded in eliciting well over 1000 tips between the site's launch in October 2006, and the beginning of August 2007. At that point the site appeared to go into....hibernation. That's right, not a single tip posted between August 2, and December 10.Well, not a single tip published.
In an obsessive quest to plumb the psychological and managerial depths of the 1000 Uses team, I spent a rather enjoyable evening in early November coming up with tips that I hoped would give me a sense of the Glad team's tolerance for creativity:
The first two were attempts to test the level of moderation (are they moderating for tastefulness? public safety?) I added the third just to have something I'd feel confident about them posting, but none of my entries made it onto the site. I'd chalk it up to clever sleuthing on their part -- perhaps someone thought to google my name, and figured out I'm a social media blogger? -- except for the conspicuous four-month dead zone between August and December. There was a batch of twenty tips posted between December 10th and 13th (evidently I'm not the only one who thinks of mid-December as plastic wrap season) but nothing since.
I'm going to go out on a big, tightly-wrapped limb here and suggest a few general lessons that can be inferred from the Glad example:
- User-contributed content isn't enough to create a community: even if you can incentivize people to contribute, unless they actually care about the topic (and each other) they have no reason to come back.
- You may spend your way to traffic, but you can't spend your way to success. Glad's traffic strategy seems to involve pointing a kabillion high-value URLs at the 1000 Uses site (http://www.tapwater.com, www.eating.com, and www.whiten.com were just a few of the URLs that I found pointed towards 1000uses.com when I searched on google). I guess if you have a whack of unused URLs sitting around, why not, but a site full of interesting content would be a far more efficient way of generating traffic.
- Contests can't motivate people to write about something intrinsically boring. And of course, before people can be motivated to contribute to a contest, they have to know about it....which is tough when you give other sites and bloggers absolutely no reason to point people your way. (Until now!)
- Don't spend big bucks to build a pretty site -- spend big bucks building a living community. Glad should be grinding its teeth at the four-month gap between contributions, and at the three months since the last batch went live. (Which leads me to wonder...where did the January and February winners announced on the site come from, given that the most recent tips are dated in December?) I'm guessing that the flurry of tips between December 10-13 didn't represent a spike in tips; it's just that someone finally took a few days to go through and post. More regular infusions of attention wouldn't make the site a humming concern, but it would at least convey some sense of sustained interest on the part of Glad consumers.
But this is exactly where reflected glory marketing can offer a better way. Instead of creating a site around its immediate product, Glad could have launched a useful, engaging community that resonates with the market for its product. For example, it could have built on themes like
- Home organizing: Broaden the request for user-submitted tips to any tips about home organizing, and you'd tap into a massive community of interest in topics like home storage and family organizing. Plastic wrap might be one tool to highlight....along with baskets, boxes, label-makers, etc. Even the room-by-room structure could work, but by inviting users to talk about a wider range of topics, you can create a real community rather than a vaguely interactive ad. Turning user-contributors into "curators" of special topics like closets or craft organizing, and you'd deepen the legitimacy and commitment of the site.
- Leftovers: Unleash a passionate community of family cooks with the features of a web 2.0 foodie community like Group Recipes, crossed with the leftovers focus of a LeftOverchef. Invite people to exchange recipes for using leftovers along with food storage and safety tips.
- Preservation: With more and more attention on sustainability, preserving things -- whether it's food, sofa cushions, or kids' art -- has a new urgency. If we can be careful with what we have, and use it as long as possible, we reduce our need for new products or chemical cleanings. Much of the Glad site focuses on preservation uses of its wrapping; why not open a larger conversation about the value of preservation? From preserving art or historic buildings to storing wedding dresses and mementos, many people are passionately committed to some aspect of preservation. Bring them together to talk about what they are keeping, why they are keeping it, and how they are keeping it safe, and you engage them at a far deeper level.
And unlike a brand-centric approach, reflected glory marketing doesn't have to be wrapped in contests to stay alive. It's sustained by the energy and passion of the community itself. And there's no better way than true community passion to ensure your site has a nice, long shelf life.
How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0: Intellectual property
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March 1st, 2008 by Alex
This week, I return to the questions I recently posed about social media and social enterprise:
- How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments?
- And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?
One potential answer lies in the value of intellectual property that non-profits create or distribute through their social media projects. The creation of a sophisticated web site involves the creation of a lot of intellectual property -- property that has financial value. This property can be monetized in a number of ways:
Software licensing: If you create a software service or web platform that is useful to other nonprofits, too, they may pay you to use it. You can license your software by selling it (one-time fee), by licensing (monthly or annual fees) or by hosting (including web hosting along with the software license itself). Before you take this opportunity, though, consider the potentially benefit -- for your mission and your brand -- of giving the software away to the people you serve, or organizations that are working for the same ends.
Content sales: If your staff or site visitors create original content on your site, you may be able to resell some or all of that content to other sites or media outlets. Just be sure that you are completely clear with your contributors that you will or may repurpose their work -- even if the contributors are staff. Make sure your user agreement on the site reflects how you're re-using content, and consider sharing revenue with your users (à la Squidoo, among others) as a way of motivating their contributions.
Data sales: If you have a high volume of site traffic, or serve an influential or sought-after audience, data on your site's users or usage patterns may have financial value. This an area in which you want to tread VERY carefully -- respecting your users' privacy is crucial to building site loyalty, and is also just a good thing -- so we'll return to it in our "gray zones" post. But you are probably ok if you are selling aggregate data, rather than individual data. For example, you could survey your users and sell the results of that survey -- perhaps as a quarterly "subscribers only" report. Here more than anywhere it is crucial to be 100% transparent about your use of data; burying this aspect of your business model in the fine print of your user agreement may provide legal coverage, but it won't make your users happy if they're caught by surprise. If you can explain how data sales support your work -- ideally, not just financially, but in some way supporting your mission -- so much the better.
mini-case: the Environmental Defense Fund launches GetActive
Environmental Defense is a large US-based non-profit that works on environmental issues, with a 300 person staff and a $72 million annual budget. In the late 1990s, Environmental defense had a total of about 8 staff on its online team, which was responsible not only for maintaining the main ED web site, but also a couple of related projects. One was scorecard.org, which provided information about environmental performance to the public. The other was actionnetwork.org, a site that gathered supporters' email addresses and turned them into online activists -- winning an early victory when they mobilized thousands of supporters to win a ban against the practice of "shark finning" (where hunters catch sharks, amputate their fins for sale, and return the sharks to the ocean to die).
As the team behind these two Internet projects outgrew its place within Environmental Defense's organizational structure, it came up with an innovative solution: spin the Internet project team off into a separate company. The new company launched in 2000, and eventually became GetActive Software. GetActive supplied software and services to Environmental Defense, and Environmental Defense got an ownership stake of less than 20 percent in the new company. GetActive earned an estimated $13 million in revenue in 2006, making it one of the largest software vendors to the non-profit sector, before selling to competitor Convio in early 2007. Later that year, Convio announced its intention to go public -- putting Environmental Defense in a position to reap the rewards of a still-forthcoming I.P.O.
For more see:
- Environmental Defense: From Brochureware to Actionware (2001 interview with GetActive founder Bill Pease)
- Taking Stock:There's Profit in Nonprofit Groups ,(Information Week, 2003)
- Aquisition Frenzy (The NonProfit Times, 2007)