Steve Jay's Digital Marketing Blog

Yahoo! Answers & The AA - Glen Drury VP Yahoo! Europe and Scandinavia

Glen Drury talks about search delivering visitors to Web 2.0 solutions with lots of examples including The AA's very own presence on Yahoo! Answers.

A Night Drive in a VW Golf with Richard Burton & Dylan Thomas

An unlikely trio I know.

Kelly on my team sent me a link to this microsite for the VW Golf.

The premise of the site revolves around driving at night, between  3am and 4am to be exact, as the road is yours....

The TV ad above is doing the rounds on video sharing sites with it's evocative music and Dylan Thomas poetry, read by Richard Burton, but the microsite has a richer version of the add and a few other surprises. After the intro you can continue the drive from a variety of views and camera angles all of which show off different features of the car, and seamlessly integrate with the footage. Very clever.

Through a partnership with Jumpcut you can re-edit the footage from the ad to create you own version of the movie and enter it into a competition to win a HD Video Camera.

You can also view half a dozen suggested night drives and view the route via a mash-up with Google Maps. Best of all you can suggest your own route and upload it onto the map. At the time of writing there were drives in the USA, Australia & Cambodia. This gives a great user generated angle to increase engagement.

I believe the campaign was created by DDB London.

Call out the instigator, coz there's something in the air

Jeremiah Owyang has posted a video interview with the fantastic Charlene Li, Forresters Social Media guru.

The interview with Jennifer Jones from Podtech touches on some of the issues from my previous post.

Charlene describes a near future where social media will be 'like air', i.e. all pervasive. Websites that do not have aspects of social media will seem dated and flat.

Good to see & hear Charlene rather than just reading the words. Enjoy.

Why should marketers embrace social media as a media channel?

Mitch Joel from Twist Image & the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast put out a post here about how Digital Marketers are getting their heads around social media, and there are several thoughts here I would like to expand on from a client side point of view.

The biggest challenge I faced when walking the two hundred and fifty online marketers through my Six Pixels of Separation presentation was how to build community and content around a working model that is strictly focused on conversion.

I know how you must have felt. It's a tough conversation justifying additional marketing spend for activity that is not as accountable (yet) as Pay-Per-Click. Online marketing has fought hard to earn it's reputation as a 'cost effective' acquisition channel, and for some companies that can become a drug that's hard to kick.

I see parallels between social media and TV Brand advertising. The effects of TV Brand Advertising is difficult to measure accurately, but there is an over-riding belief that it's is the right thing to do for the following reasons;

• It's gives the advertiser reach to a broad audience
• It can communicate quickly who you are and what your values are
• It casts a positive 'halo' effect over direct response channels that improves response rates

Social Media can also provide these three things, but the real opportunity is in what else it can add on top, namely;

• Cost Effectiveness - It doesn't cost a million pounds to enter a conversation online. It could. But it doesn't have to
• Accountability - tracking tools and analytics will continue to improve in this space giving Marketers an unprecedented amount of useful data
• ....and most importantly communication with social media is a conversation, therefore by it's very nature it's two way. This is the real opportunity

Marketers are increasingly understanding both what conversations that are relevant to them, and how they should take part in a credible way. The 'dad on the dance floor' gaffs of brands who got it wrong should become fewer and fewer.

Drawing similarities between the online & offline world, like the example above, can help more traditional marketeers see through the hype and identify the opportunities.

By the end of 2007 I hope there are some great examples for us to talk about.

Thoughts on 'Bum Rush The Charts'

The results are in for the Bum Rush the Charts initiative on 22^nd March. 

The campaign was attempting to put a podsafe music aritist, Black Lab, at the top of the iTunes charts in order to send a message to the mainstream music industry from the social media community.

As a podsafe music artist myself I think this is a great initiative. 

Unfortunately the single didn’t get to the top but I hope the community doesn’t miss the big picture here just because the main goal wasn’t achieved. It was hugely successful in terms of awareness and the fact that people were motiviated ‘globally’ to do something collectively on a budget of $800. Also the organisers must have learnt heaps about staging an event like this and I’m sure they will be sharing those thoughts on the blog.

So far there have been thousands of downloads and the songs got into the Top 50 in many countries in the world.

I thought I would offer up my thoughts on the results and some suggestions about how to improve the next attempt;

• Community members participated in the event for many reasons but the main one is to be part of an experience. They wanted to take an action and then see the results of that action when they checked the iTunes Top 20. The experiential element to a campaign like this is critical

• The Financial Aid Podcast who pulled together Bum Rush The Charts is a fund raising Podcast that helps provide college fund for US students. To really harness the power of a global audience I think they should look to spilt the charity donation between this and a charity that has a more global appeal ? AIDS, WWF etc. The US angle was too esoteric.

•  Another challenge that the global nature of this initiative presents is tracking web metrics globally. I believe there was some under-reporting because some of the affiliates tags only work within US territories.

• I wondered if the campaign would have been more successful if the time period targeted was a week rather than one day. Most of the traditional music charts run for a week and given the LongTail effect this could have helped the groundwell effect.

• Do it again quickly, build on the buzz !

Want to contact with people who 'think' like you?

A contact of mine at a company called Synature  has launched Qubox.   The site you search for – and be found by – people who think the same way you do. They use a proven psychological technique for measuring like-mindedness, which basically involves you choosing from a series of images so pretty low involvement.

Can Clipmarks help you cut out some time?

C.C. Chapman from Crayon has got me switched onto Clipmarks  in his segment in the latest Crayoncast Podcast.

Basically it enables you to highlight and then 'clip' copy,  images, & video off of a webpage so you can then save it, post it directly on your blog, send it to your friends or share it with everyone on the Clipmarks site.

It looks very interesting and as it integrates with Delicious, it stands a chance of becoming a tool that will enhance my online experience rather than one that stands alone only helping with one small part.

Let me know what you think.