Nielsen recently released their report “How Teens Use Media“, which covered the myths and realities of teen media trends.  The above chart does a great job of outlining how Teens interact with various types of media.  Personally I was surprised by some of the numbers:

• TV is still an overwhelmingly dominant form of media at 3 hours and 20 minutes.  That is greater than PC + Console Gaming + Internet + DVR + DVD.
• The same # of Teens “watch video on an MP3 Player” as “read newspapers.”
• 1 in 3 are using the Mobile Web (has your brand even thought about this?)

Often Brand Managers jump to the conclusion that Teens are using media in very differently ways.  But according to these numbers, there might just be more similarities than differences.

Over the weekend, Shiv Singh from Razorfish, sent me an advance copy of their soon to be released report on Social Influence Marketing.  Once again, the folks at Razorfish delivered a solid report that captures the essence of what Brand Managers need to be thinking about in a world where “actions speak louder than advertising.”

While I highly recommend reading the whole report, here are a couple of nuggets that really jumped out to me:

• Brands must socialize with consumers: It won’t be enough for brands to craft powerful messages and push them through different media channels. They will need to participate directly in conversations with consumers and provide more meaningful value exchanges.
• Brands must develop a credible social voice: Brands will need to focus on developing credible voices for SIM. These voices will need to be more engaging, personal, humble, authentic and participatory than traditional advertising messages.
• Brands must provide a return on emotion to their consumers: Social media is a great tool for building symmetrical brand relation- ships, in which both the brand and the consumer reap equal returns from their relationship.
• Brands must know the effect of influencers throughout the marketing funnel: It is essential to know how influence changes in each stage of the marketing funnel. That information should drive when to focus on which influencers and how to surface content from those influencers on corporate-owned digital properties.
• Brands lack significant credibility in the digital realm and on social platforms: Brands should explore new ways of marketing on the social platforms that help build trust and credibility first and foremost. It is no use devoting significant marketing efforts to this space unless you’ve already figured out how to serve as a trusted brand. The social platforms require a new marketing language - one that mustn’t be overlooked.

In addition to the above, I was also fascinated by the new Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score that Razorfish has released.  The SIM Score measures two critical attributes:

• The total share of consumer conversations your brand has online (measure of reach)
• The degree to which consumers like or dislike your brand when they talk to each other about you online - consumer sentiment (measure of likeability)

Measurement continues to be a factor that holds back Social Media marketing so it will be interesting to see if SIM begins to take hold.

Finally, the report touches on two remaining trends that I think have tremendous potential for Brand Managers:

1. Social Ads: As the reports states, “Social ads are about infusing social content and a user’s social graph directly intothe ad unit itself.  Advertisers can build social features into the ad units - when and where appro­priate.”  In my opinion, some of the best work in Social Ads comes from SocialMedia.com and their People Powered Ad Products.
2. Social Graphs: Razorfish defines the social graph “as the network of personal connections through which people com­municate and share information online. These personal connections can be based on common interests, professional experiences and offline social relationships.”  As I have written before, Social Graphs may be one of the most powerful forces for Brand Managers in the year to come.

Fluent is a great read and really touches on many key points around Social Influence Marketing.  And I think they summed up the report best with this point:

Being an active brand means accepting the fact that the days of formulating one big idea with multiple executions are behind us.  Being an active brand means that each day you interact with your consumers based on how they interact with you and with each other.

Well said.  Now the hard part for all of us is starting to really act like an active brand.

Now think about that for a second.  From across the country, PF Chang’s reached out and delighted a customer in a way she wasn’t expecting.  And this person wasn’t a celebrity.  They weren’t an influencer in the sense of being a food magazine editor or a restaurant reviewer.  They were just a fan of the place that was sharing how much they love lettuce wraps.

And PF Chang’s had NO expectation of getting anything more out of it.

For me, that is what sums up the benefits of Social Media.  It gives you a chance to put a human face on your company and your brand.  Hell, it gives you a chance to actually act like a human instead of just a marketer or business person.

In it’s simplest form, Social Media gives Brand Managers a chance to thank the people [ie consumers] who make their job even possible [by buying the products].

So if you are in marketing, when is the last time you actually thanked a customer?  When is the last time you tried to “Be Awesome”?  Does your company even have the systems in place to let you do so?  If not, it is time to start making a change.

Thanks to Karl Long for pointing me to this video and Andy Sernovitz for the original version of it.

As a marketer and Brand Manager, you can easily get sucked into an echo chamber.  And from what I have seen, the problem gets amplified in Silicon Valley.  You just assume everyone knows what 3G means or that they guy on the street really cares about your new longer lasting scent (for us CPG marketers).

At P&G, one of the basic principles of the company is that “The Consumer is Boss.”  And building off that, I believe every marketer should keep in mind that they themselves are not the consumer…not even close.  A consumer does not live and breath your product every day.  And while your salary depends on that brand or product, to the consumer it is just another item in their shopping basket.

Sometimes we Brand Managers need to be reminded of that fact.  And Seth is dead-on that video of people on the street is a good way to do it.  For sure it is more effective than a focus group.

Case in point, I bet the Google Chrome Product Team was shocked when they saw this video from NYC.  Watch it for yourself and you’ll see that most people don’t even know what a browser is, much less care about a new one named after a metal.

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world - and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy - everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people - not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value - built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand - it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth - faster. We want to slow down - so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage - to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age - but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome - it’s vitally necessary. Why?

The crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis - and it’s growing.

You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them - and they’re broken. Here’s what I mean:

“… For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink - even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation’s total output of goods and services.”

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn’t be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don’t need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here’s what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours. It’s Gen M’s job to foot the bill for your profligacy - and create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community

I have to admit,this is one of my favorite print ads out there.  But then again, I seem to have a soft spot for great liquor advertising.

In the world of Consumer Packaged Goods, Knob Creek is going through what we call “allocation.”  And allocation is usually a bad thing for a brand… a really bad thing.  But the marketers at Knob Creek have taken the high road and used the shortage to reinforce their equity of “uncompromising quality.”  It would have been easy for them to start using some product that hadn’t aged the “full 9 years”.  But they did what is right in the long run for both their fans and for the brand.  That type of commitment to a brand is admirable and should be a role model for all Brand Managers.

BTW - Special thanks to Jason Falls for helping me get a digital copy of the above ad.

There is one constant when it comes to Digital Marketing: people are always looking for the “next big thing” while announcing the “end” of the last one.  Lately, the digerati have been increasingly calling out “the end of MySpace” thanks to their latest restructuring and layoffs.  And many are pointing to the visitor growth of Twitter and Facebook as rationale as well.  But to paraphrase Mark Twain, I think:

“the reports of MySpace’s death are greatly exaggerated.”

This is a point I have been trying to make to many of my fellow marketers.  After all, it easy to try to compare MySpace to Facebook…or even to Twitter.  The media does it all the time.  But fewer people take the time to look beyond the headlines to see what makes MySpace a unique property.

First and foremost, we are talking about a site that still delivers over a 50 reach with 18 - 24 year olds in the US.  And there are still almost 3 times as many Teens on MySpace as there are on Facebook.   If your brand cares about reaching youth, there are still few places as strong as MySpace to do just that.

Second, MySpace has emerged as an Entertainment Portal.  While it started as a Social Networking site, that really isn’t what the site is about any longer.  Today MySpace is about music, movies and other forms of Digital Content / Entertainment.  I have a feeling that the new management is going to continue to play up this strength and we’ll see MySpace Music and MySpace Video play an even larger role in the digital entertainment landscape.

Finally, MySpace is a prime example of what Alan Wolk calls “NASCAR Blindness.”  It is a condition that marketers and the media suffer from all the time.  As the chart below from Mashable shows, MySpace might not be a dominant site on the coast, but it wins in the Heartland of America… just like NASCAR.

You can’t argue that growth on MySpace has stalled.  But MySpace is still a dominant force in the digital marketing landscape.   They are headed by a group of extremely talented managers.  And most importantly, MySpace is still a force that marketers would be smart to keep an eye on instead of reporting its death.

Over at AdAge, Abbey Klaasen just published a great story on “Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review.“  As the story states:

…for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there’s another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review.

This is a great point that deserves reinforcement.  While it is easy to get distracted by the latest “shiny object” in Digital Marketing, the product review is one of the simplest and yet most impactful, tools for a marketer.

If your brand hasn’t yet embraced Product Reviews, Klaasen recommends 4 steps to get started.

The right way to use reviews

• Embrace the Feedback: Sure, it’s scary to let customers say what they will about your products on your home turf — your website. But both the positive and negative feedback provides hints to what you’re doing well and where improvement is needed. FIGURE OUT WHO NEEDS TO KNOW. Assign a team to read all the lowest reviews. Make sure it includes the right mix of people who can react quickly and fix the problem — before more customers can get riled.
• Tout Your Customers Favorites: While negative ones give insight into manufacturer or customer support problems, positive ones can make great ad copy. Use them in circulars, marketing material and on store shelves.
• Incorporate Customer Service: Negative reviews can tip off your customer service and support teams to issues that they’ll soon be dealing with. Use them as early warning signs.
• Don’t Stop There: Oriental Trading started with reviews but after seeing how people liked to share their opinions, it has turned its website into a more robust community. It asks users to help solve each others’ problems and share their stories, using Bazaarvoice’s other tools.

Team Wins Netflix $1 Million Crowdsourcing Prize:  For several years, Netflix has had an open challenge that whoever improved their recommendation engine by 10% would win a prize of $1 million dollars.  This has always been one of my favorite examples of Crowdsourcing in business and it looks like someone is finally going to claim the prize.

Panera Adds Community Service:  I love the simplicity of MeetAtPanera.com.  It’s a easy way for Panera to deliver brand utility by allowing people to set up a meeting at Panera.

Online Advertising hits a rough patch, while Google and Digg release new ad units:  With the economy putting a pinch on advertising, digital marketers will need to turn to innovation to win new ad dollars.  Google and Digg are doing just that with the introduction of new ad units that give interesting options to Brand Marketers.

Dunkin Donuts Creates Innovative Facebook Campaign:  I love this campaign by Dunkin Donut to its fans into brand advocates.  Simple, straightforward…and effective promotional campaign.

Five Leaders in YouTube Marketing:  Lots of brands are trying to figure out how to best use YouTube for their marketing efforts.  While this post highlights 5 examples, Home Depot is far and away my favorite example.

Facebook Talks about Payments Across the Web:  Micropayments continue to gain traction and Facebook Connect is appearing on more and more sites.  Combine these two things and Facebook might be onto something very interesting as it explores ways to build revenue.

Every Brand Manager and Marketer should have a handful of go-to people who are guaranteed to stretch your thinking.  I am talking about people that live and breath a topic and will put your mind into overdrive with their words and writing.

For me, John Battelle is one of those guys, especially when it comes to the future of the Social Web and Online Marketing.  As Chairman of Federated Media and co-founder of the Web 2.0 Summit, John is someone whose opinion I definitely trust about this space.

At the most recent Federated CM Summit, John kicked off the event with a great opener where he gave an overview of the state of online marketing from his perspective.  Start about 6 minutes in on the below video to see his take on key themes that included: 1.) People Don’t Join Ad Networks, and 2.) Publishers Are Communities of Mind.

RSS Readers - Click through for video