Want your marketing to sell? Get focused

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on November 30, 2010.

If Social Media’s “brand chat” is at one end of marketing, hike all the way across the spectrum to the hyper targeted, call-to-action space called local marketing. This is where you can dial up the specifics of your customer targeting and approach them with focused, action-oriented sales messaging. These days it’s direct marketing on steroids and it’s being enabled by some big, new-school media companies.

Google reports that 20% of all searches are from people looking for local places: plumbers, restaurants, and — for those of us living in the Vancouver suburbs last week — snow tire shops. Over the past couple years, Google AdWords has offered the ability to get closer in with our ads, almost down to neighbourhood levels, to ensure we’re only advertising to people that matter to our businesses. It also provides a local business directory, Google Places. Google really believes in local targeting for its advertisers: rumour is that Google is about to buy local deals site Groupon, and is willing to spend in excess of 2.5 Billion dollars to bring a single-offer, geo-targeted, selling tool to its customers.

Targeting is not new; companies like Environics Analytics have being developing lifestyle-based segmentation models for years to help businesses identify the needs, attitudes and behaviours of customers, and overlay that on geography. Some of this is based on the simple adage “birds of a feather, flock together”, meaning consumers tend to live in micro regions where other consumers behave like them. What is new is how this is being transported into self-serve advertising tools, for example Facebook Advertising.

FB supports demographic filtering, but also behavioural filtering in its advertising. The social networking giant has integrated a tag-like filter that allows advertisers to type keywords that are part of users’ collective profile data. Want to target single men in British Columbia, age 25–34, who love to play the Monopoly board game? There’s 420 of them on Facebook waiting to act on your advertisement!

When you put together your next marketing plan, make sure you consider your local prospects and how you can use the new tools to cost-effectively get your sales message in front of your most receptive audience — and them only.

E-commerce is Key

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on September 20, 2010.

It was a simple task: get a spare door key cut for my boat. However, after being turned away by four locksmiths because they didn’t have blanks for my “crazy Swedish key”, I knew I was in trouble. Plan B: the Internet. I searched on the Swedish brand along with a number imprinted on the key, and was surprised by the result. There were only two exact matches, but one of them was a product order page with a picture of my key! The online retailer was an unknown key company in Florida and the e-commerce site was bare bones, but being an e-commerce adventurer I banged in my credit card. Eleven days later, five blanks exactly matching my boat key arrived in the mail: $6.95, plus $12 for the international shipping.

With all the excitement swirling around social media’s new paradigm of brand engagement, it feels like focus has been lost on “closing the deal.” So many organizations are bent on building their online fan base, but how many are then being moved into a seamless online purchasing opportunity? E-commerce has always appeared to be complicated, technical, and expensive. It is a business channel and therefore has implications across multiple company divisions including marketing, IT, customer service, finance, and inventory mangement. This can make it tough for one area of the company to champion an e-commerce deployment. The fact is though, online transactional systems should be a central part of any company’s long-term strategy.

In the past few years, e-commerce has found its home in some unexpected but successful places. As The Economist reported in July, Oscar de la Renta launched a transactional Website some years ago expecting to sell small accessory items. To their great surprise, online customers have been pulling $4,000 cocktail dresses off the virtual shelves, and they recently sold online an $80,000 sable coat! In the same fashion vein, Prada forecasts that within 5 years, 40% of its revenues in America will come from the internet. At the other end of the business spectrum, small companies are also finding online is their goldmine. Thanks to the incredible power of search engines, if you put up a great SEO’d e-commerce system, buyers from every corner of the globe will find you without you spending a dime on advertising. Buyers like me and my crazy Swedish Key.

Dare to Stare Your Online Customers in the Eyes

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on June 06, 2010

Website measurement is now firmly planted in the business lexicon, thanks to Google. “Google Analytics” has become a generic term among companies, meaning that lots of stuff on a website is trackable. It’s true: I was told by Omniture that its premium analytics toolkit, Site Catalyst, has over 100,000 report variations! So, the problem is not measuring your customers’ site engagement, it’s understanding that measurement data to create improvement in the experience. Technologies continue to emerge and evolve that are intended to help us understand what web customers are doing, but sometimes you just have to look them in the eyes and ask them.

Online usability testing is just starting to gain a greater appreciation despite being around from the late ’’90s, and with decades-old off-line roots in advertising focus group testing. Where Web analytics can tell you the, “what people are doing” on the site, it lacks the intuition of the, “why people are doing that” on your site. For example, analytics tools can report that 32% of visitors to a product page are returning to the homepage rather than purchasing, but it’s a darned mystery in that data of why they go that direction. If you want to know, why not ask them?

The discipline of online usability testing involves selecting a representative sample of customers, bringing them into a face-to-face test environment (this can be as simple as a computer and an activity-recording device in a boardroom), and moderating them through a user scenario with a set of associated tasks. The process can be both simple and challenging. As the guru of web usability Jacob Nielsen stated a decade ago, you only need five testers to determine 80% of the usability problems in a particular scenario. This means learning can occur very rapidly, to provide the foundation for some very significant improvements in your site architecture. The challenge comes in recruiting a representative sample of your customers, in effectively moderating sessions to minimize bias and maximize insights, and in collating the opinions into actionable documentation that roadmaps both business and technology improvements for the site.

Technology is even trying to simplify the online usability testing discipline. Usertesting.com is a service where you can just throw in your own site scenarios, define a tester group by selecting ready-and-waiting web surfers with some basic demographics filtering, and ta-da… instant insight! There’s just no substitute, however, for a trained expert to work with you on defining and executing a successful, strategic, testing program that works in concert with your web analytics insights, and can even guide much more effectiveGoogle Optimizer multi-variant test programs.

Social Media: Rule #1

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on January 20, 2010.

Almost every integrated marketing strategy we’re developing right now at Hot Tomali involves Social Media components. However it’s a steep, new, learning curve for many clients as they absorb the changing marketing landscape. It’s difficult jumping into the deep end of a Facebook Fan Page strategy, when someone hasn’t used Facebook.

Our recommendation at the early stages of social media planning is to go out on the Web and see where customers are talking about your brand. Rule #1: Look, Listen and Touch. Work your way across the social media platforms, search on your brand and category terms, and see what people are saying. As an example I recently encountered a company that is participating at a simple level of social media, but already demonstrating great brand expression in a very connected way.

Two months ago I posted a YouTube  video of the trial of a bilge pump I’d installed in my sailboat: an obscure piece of content to say the least! I did take the time to keyword the video with relevant terms including the brand of the pump. A week ago the following comment was posted on my video:

(Simon) I am the designer of the Supersub Smart from Whale Pumps in Northern Ireland. The video is fantastic we are all very pleased. Can I recommend you add a Non-return valve to stop the water flowing back into the bilge. Whale part number is LV1219.

I was shocked! It looks like a company employee had been searching their product terms and came across my video. They then decided to provide some valuable advice. The power of the platform is now the radius effect that’s occurring: I posted this story and link on my Facebook Wall, so my boating friends are telling their boating friends about this great product and support from the company. In the last 10 days this video has garnered 58 views and seems to be gathering 4 new views a day. (And, I’ve purchased the recommended valve.)

As marketers, it’s not until you get out there and look, listen, and touch, social media that you start to understand the reach and potential of your brand. The conversation is happening: go find it!

Goodbye, Sweet Microsite

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on December 17, 2009.

Microsites have been around for most of the Web years. They’ve been the pet of marketers who wanted to create a rich, immersive, consumer brand experience, that didn’t reside one navigation tab away from a corporation’s news releases and annual reports. The failure of the microsite has always been attributable to one enormous issue: lack of traffic. Companies that spent small fortunes on their microsites were not so pleased with their $/visit metric, and more chagrined to find they had to invest significantly more in $/advertisement metrics to generate some interest.

Enter Microsite 2.0: the Facebook Fan Page!

Brands are charging towards the platform that is irresistible with its many hundreds of millions of potential customers just waiting to be with you. Unlike those microsite islands, Facebook is in the middle of the party, and provides huge advantages for brand participation:

• Engagement and “radiused exposure” of brand messaging through the power of the Wall Post
• Automatic reach through its easy external push/pull of RSS, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr
• Developer control through FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that provides surprising openness to the look and feel of the Fan Page, and hooks into a Facebook user’s profile, and feed data
• Built-in Analytics that break down the walls of anonymity with access to fan data including demographics, habits, and contacts

Ironically, along with all the new faculties and connected potential of the Facebook Fan Page, comes the old challenge of how to create a truly engaging brand experience. The toy maker Hasbro has launched a large-scale broadcast campaign driving people to Facebook.com/cranium, but the experience rings hollow with what might be staged videos and Tweets. What looks easy, usually never is. Goodbye sweet microsite; hello, same, old, marketing challenge.

Been bloggin' elsewhere

Hello old friend. Over the last year I've been blogging at my agency's website, but I want to make sure some of the good stuff gets stored on 124people.com. So I'll post a few for posterity, here.

Bryan

Why do Athletes connect with fans through Twitter: because it's easy

Some logical thinking about why Pro Athletes/Celebrities have massive Twitter followings

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/06/05/twitter.sports/index.html?bcnn=yes

Great excerpt:

There are good reasons for athletes to love the Twitter connection as well, not the least of which is the opportunity for no-contact contact. Why get mobbed at the mall when you can charm thousands with a quick tweet from the comfort of your eighth bedroom? And, thanks to the 140-character limit, posts take much less energy-consuming thought than blogs, where readers expect a modicum of literacy. Misspellings and mysterious grammar are accepted tenets of Twitterese.

Convergence 09: any marketers in the house?

What do these jobs have in common?

- fashion/event manager/photographer

- editor/publisher

- chief evangelist, all things mobile marketing

- host/correspondent for CBC TV

- digital marketing and technology leader

- PhD and sessional instructor, school of Communication

- managing editor

- barrista

- currency trader

- product design manager, CBC

- social, search and viral 'scientist' (former Web developer)

- senior manager, communications and marketing

- communications manager

- lawyer/video game producer

- content generator for SEO

- head of community relations department

- veteran marketing connecting consumer products with their markets

... these are the posted job titles of every speaker at Convergence 09--Cossette West's "forum for Digital Marketing thought leadership".

I find it curious that out of the 17 presenters, only 4 use the word marketer in their job descriptions. It does help me understand a key issue that kept surfacing for me during the day. A good, 'old-school', marketing conference would be using the brand word in every other sentence. And the direct marketers would be constantly poking on response/ conversion/ ROI of marketing efforts. But there was really none of that talk in the sessions. Attendees were buzzing about social media tactics: tweeting and texting, blogging and vlogging. And I kept thinking about the stresses of my every-day in trying to prove return on marketing spend.

I had lunch with an old friend of mine: someone who I'd hired into a digital company in the 90s, and who now works as the head of digital marketing for a very large provincial utility. I asked him if they were heavy into social media. His response, "we spent a lot of time in Facebook and other things, but really, I've got huge marketing programs I've got to move through and I can't afford the time and resources at this point."

I guess this means that social media might not be about digital marketing right now. I see PR people and communications managers rushing toward social media because of this really new and cool way of 'conversation.' I'd hoped to have gained from the conference the ways that this conversation was translated to wider and stronger brand engagement that knocks on to more and better business. Nothing yet.

Yelp kicks coffee guy

A couple of days ago an old student of mine, Robert, got blacklisted by Yelp, and in turn he yelped about it on his coffee blog. There's some interesting back-and-forth--another example of randomness in the ratings & reviews space of social media.

Vision 2009: Harley Davidson's Social Networking

Ken Schmidt, former communications director for Harley Davidson, gave an engaging keynote address at Vision 2009. In the Q & A he was asked what HD is doing, in social networking; "well, every month 250,000 members of the Harley Owners Group (HOG) go to their local dealers to assemble for a ride somewhere, or a charity event, or a pig roast. I guess you could say that's our Social Networking."

Yup. I guess you could! For all you corporate marketers out there with a couple hundred Twitter followers, chew on that!

Back in the Saddle

So this social media thing continues to hang on! Since I started this blog in the summer of 2006 a few hundred million people have joined Facebook, and grandmothers are tweeting. I've been busy lately and let 124people.com rest for a while, but I'm inspired to find some time in my digital day to re-engage in the debate and the discusion of social media.

Having attended Vision 2009 yesterday, I found someone who seems to think like me when it comes to the practicality of social media for marketing purposes. Maggie Fox, the founder of Social Media Group, had a well-tenured and healthy perspective on where things are at; really de-hyped it for me, and aligned with my opinion. By taking it out of the realm of the bizarre for me, she's also reminded me the reasons why marketers need to pursue the brand engagement with customers through social media.

I guess I'll start posting again...

Do Home Pages Have a Place in Web 2.0's Future?

Avenue A/Razorfish: Brands' Main Sites Decline in Importance as Consumers' Reliance on Search Grows
By Abbey Klaassen AD AGE

Published: October 01, 2007

Garrick Schmitt was sitting in a meeting, listening to a client talk about the need to make its website "Web 2.0-compliant," complete with tag clouds and profile pages. "Tag clouds?" thought Mr. Schmitt, VP-user experience at Avenue A/Razorfish. "Really?"

The request seemed curious to him -- do that many people really use tag clouds that a brand marketer's website needed to incorporate them? Surprisingly, he couldn't find the answer to that question. So he decided to find out.

The following months, his team conducted a study of almost 500 connected consumers to figure out how people were using marketer websites and forecast what would be important in web design during the next year. It's a prioritization effort, said Mr. Schmitt. Marketers have to ask themselves how do they want to maximize their sites' real estate?

'Sanity check'
The report, out today, will serve as a "sanity check" for some early Web 2.0 adopters and technophiles. And, he said, "for more traditional marketers, there's a whole new world we have to introduce them to."

One of the most surprising things the team found was how many people are starting their online shopping with search -- more than 54% of the study's panel, in fact. The idea that more consumers are coming to brand sites through the side door of search means search engines are starting to circumvent brands when it comes to online shopping. While a consumer looking for a pizza stone offline might drive to her nearest Williams-Sonoma, in the online world she's more likely to just type the product name into Google and see what comes up.

"Marketers need to stop thinking so much about their site and more about what's happening outside their site, such as widgets, viral and search," Mr. Schmitt said.

It also means home pages are becoming less important as search drives those visitors deeper into a site, meaning marketers need to treat product pages like home pages, adding navigation and sharing functions.

Bookmarking together
Speaking of sharing, social recommendations continue to grow in importance. More than 85% of people on the panel used "most popular" links on sites to decide what to look at and more than 55% made purchase decisions based on user reviews.

"Peers still drive consumer preference," Mr. Schmitt said. "Nothing else even comes close."

Another trend: Incorporating more data into design. While designers and developers have many rich technologies at their disposal, they also have better ways to mine behavioral data and adapt their sites in real time. Four tips for digital design

1. Make content portable with widgets and RSS so people can interact with it anywhere.


2. Turn on consumer ratings and reviews and allow commenting wherever possible.


3. Invest in online video.


4. Think outside your site -- how do search, social media, offline ads and blogs relate?

Search logs, site analytics and behavioral data can provide guidance for design, as can offline channels such as call centers. The study highlights Red Bull as a marketer that's making its content fun and portable via RSS and applications for platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone.

"It's baked into its DNA to be everywhere its users are, and it's all fun, custom stuff," Mr. Schmitt said. "None of it pushes product, but it all reinforces the brand."

Oh, and what of those tag clouds Mr. Schmitt set out to analyze? Almost 65% of consumers never use them; a little more than 11% use them all or most of the time.

What's Facebook's cost in Bill bucks?

The chatter about Microsoft mulling a 5% stake in Facebook worth $300 million to $500 million is a sign of just how hyperinflated valuations have become. Consider, Facebook's revenue is an estimated $150 million this year, yet the price of that stake would value Facebook at a whopping $6 billion to $10 billion, less than a year after it turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo.

Of course, $500 million in Microsoft money is not all that much. This is the same company that paid $6 billion for aQuantive. (According to an executive familiar with the company's ad plans, Microsoft is also looking at Yahoo but said it's unlikely such an acquisition would happen.) The Facebook investment was reported by The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed executives and couched the claim by saying the discussions were still preliminary.

A Facebook investment could mean two things: It could signal how serious Microsoft is about data and targeting. It could also be a defensive play to keep Google out of the Facebook fold.

Michael Seidler, CEO of U.S. Corporate Ventures Group, called the stake's price tag "astronomically high" but said it is "indicative of the strategic value of a social-media network to Microsoft. ... It gives them strategic access at a relatively reasonable [total] price tag." In other words, $500 million is cheaper than $10 billion.

Regardless, it makes Interpublic Group of Cos.' investment in the summer 2006, when it received a 0.5% stake in Facebook in exchange for spending $10 million in advertising on the site, look like genius in its foresight. If Facebook is indeed worth $10 billion, a stretch according to many, Interpublic's stake would have quintupled in just over a year. And it got $10 million in advertising on the world's hottest social network to boot.

-Abbey Klaassen, Ad Age

Globe & Mail: Content generators transforming more than just the Web

Here's a light summary of the year that was, in social networking.


'User-generated content" isn't the most poetic phrase. In fact, it's exactly the opposite: a term that sounds like it came from an academic research paper, or some dystopian science fiction novel, describing legions of faceless "users" churning out widgets of "content" in a factory somewhere.

Poetic or not, the phenomenon (which some call "crowdsourcing" or "social media") has captured the imagination of many in the industry over the past year. In fact, it has become so popular that Time magazine made "You" its Person of the Year, that is, the collective "you" who are creating content on YouTube, Flickr and elsewhere.

Some critics have described Time's choice as a cop-out, a way of avoiding a difficult choice for its cover subject, but there's no question that Google's purchase of YouTube for $1.6-billion (U.S.) -- and to a lesser extent News Corp.'s acquisition of MySpace for $580-million -- turned a spotlight on all the "content" being created by users of those and other Web-based social networking services.

YouTube's phenomenal growth has effectively disrupted the TV industry, forcing television networks to reconsider how they are dealing with the Internet. NBC created a separate division called NBBC -- the National Broadband Broadcasting Co. -- to distribute its content on the Web, and it and several other major U.S. networks are now streaming some of their leading shows over the Internet.

Comcast, one of the largest U.S. cable networks, said this week that it plans to create a reality show based on "user-generated" video. The company is soliciting video clips from the public, and says it will choose one idea that will go into professional development to become a new TV series.

Meanwhile, Amanda Congdon, the former host of a popular Web video blog called Rocketboom, recently signed a deal with ABC News to contribute video reports. And a 20-year-old YouTube user nicknamed Brookers (aka Brooke Brodack of Massachusetts) became so popular for the comedy routines she filmed with a webcam that earlier this year she was signed to a TV and Web development deal by NBC late-night show host Carson Daly.

Comedian Dane Cook became so popular, in part because of his MySpace page, that he got a TV special and a movie deal. Two friends who produced their own animated short films and distributed them on the Web through a site called JibJab.com were courted by Hollywood agents and signed a deal with Verizon in October to create mobile shorts. Another duo who filmed themselves playing around with Mentos and Diet Coke were hired by the beverage giant to create a Web contest.

There are several Web services that will take your uploaded content and pay you based on the number of views your clip receives (since traffic equals page views, which means advertising revenue). Revver will pay you a percentage of the ad revenue, while Brightcove pays either based on ad revenue or on a fee-to-download basis.

And it's not just television. User-produced content is disrupting other media as well. Several magazines -- including Teen People and FHM's U.S. edition -- have shut down in part because the Web has eaten into their target market. And MySpace said this week that it has signed a deal with the publishers of U.K.-based Marmalade magazine, in which it will take over one issue and fill it with user-generated content from the site.

In a recent cover story on the "crowdsourcing" phenomenon, Wired magazine profiled Calgary-based iStockphoto, a user-submitted photo site that was acquired in February by Getty Images for $50-million. Photographers submit their shots to iStockphoto and sell them for use by websites or magazines, and the service recently added the ability to handle user-generated video clips as well.

Lise Gagné, a Montreal photographer, started submitting photos to iStockphoto several years ago as a hobby, and now makes her living taking shots that are sold on the website, as well as checking and approving other people's photos (for which she is paid). In the not-too-distant future, a "content generator" like Ms. Gagné may seem less like a strange new Web-based creature and more like the norm.

Read Ingram 2.0 (Matthew Ingram) every Monday on globetechnology.com

Podcasts: (some) People are Starting to Listen

(click chart to enlarge)

According to an interesting survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project, an August benchmark of 12% of Internet users are downloading and listening/viewing podcasts, up from 7% in Q1 2006.

I've been downloading podcasts for exactly a year now, and the content really hasn't exploded. There have been a few highlights: there was the initial series of the Ricky Gervais Podcast where we came to chortle at the right-angled views of life from 'Carl', and for us musician/studio engineering enthusiasts the Barenaked Ladies series was extremely engaging (until this one just fell of the map with no conclusion whatsoever.) The CBC has done a surprisingly excellent job of moving much of its radio show content to the pod. And I think right now the Bill Maher series is incredible (granted it's just a lift from his HBO show.) However, for all its potential, there is very little sustained audio podcast content, and even less on the video side.

It's been an interesting year observing how this new age 'talking stick' could be utilized. Monetization of the content certainly hasn't happened. There have been spurts of inspiration, but the pick up on the listening numbers in this chart is probably due to the massive increase in iPod sales over the year, not in penetration. I'm willing to bet at this point that podcasts will never become mainstream devices for companies, broadcasters, organizations, or individuals to move content to the masses.

(I was tipped to this survey from a blog that Dave Forde's started up: Profectio--bringing together Canada's Connected Community Dave used to be the GM of AIMS CANADA)

MY VIEW: Anti-social Behaviour

I'm worried. When Forrester comes out this week with their latest Trends paper that kicks off with, "...marketing executives and managers: Social Computing must play some role in your online strategy," how far off can the end of all this, be? I'm going to bring more evidence to the table that the cacophony of opinion noise out there will need to be controlled and funneled, or we'll miss the opportunity to tap into the most important social phenomenon ever.

Today, a poke at Sutori.com Here's a site developed by Blast Radius that is a good chem. lab experiment. Blast created it, I suspect, as a chance to stretch their Social Networking chops and see how a white page concept could come to life. You can pick up the premise by taking a read of a couple of my posts.

I've been studying the site for weeks, watching for the firestorm to ignite: the exponential growth of participation. The fuel is there: a catalyst of smart, vocal, social networking-oriented staffers. A platform that supports easy point/counter-point battles, ranking and rating to satiate the egos among the opinions.

All this, and it's not really going anywhere. Why? Certainly being small Beta, it needs some push to get it further out--I'm a client of the agency and nobody invited me to come in. Is the intention, "The Voice of Today's Customer" just too broad or uninspiring? I think what it is, is some sort of guarantee that the object of the author's derision or praise, gets the message. Blast Radius knows this because they've put a bunch of programming into supporting qualification and rebuttal from a company. However I've yet to see an official response.

The premise of the opportunity in Satori needs to be delivered on: the voice of the customer heard and responded to by the company. Otherwise, it's just another Website full of opinionated people blabbing off.

Townshend Talks Web 2.0

The old bones of The Who toddle into Vancouver this week for a concert at GM Place (I can ridicule: I saw them in the Coliseum in 1980--their very first concert after Moon's death.) What's not so pasty grey is Pete Townshend's opinions and involvement in the social networking aspects of the Web and how that's shaping his music:


"The Internet give musicians a false sense of control. I have sold music on my own website for six years. You are selling to a fan club, not to the public. There are some exceptions on the Internet, where artists have suddenly flared up across MySpace, YouTube and iTunes and got a hit, but it is rare. And that kind of hit makes very little money for the artist, only for the people running the sites and selling the ad server space. So much music is stolen, and the people responsible for this are the owners of MySpace, YouTube, and other user-group-oriented sites that are actually owned by large corporations who make their money from ad server hit rates that (with YouTube) can hit eight million a month.
"But YouTube is fun, and a place of discovery too, so it's hard to work out where the exploitation ends and the promotion begins. What I still love about the Internet is the way you can gather people together for special projects, and focus their interest (albeit briefly sometimes) on events and happenings. I published my novella The Boy Who Heard Music as a 25-week serial on a Blogspot weblog. This led directly to me completing the Who album with Wire & Glass, a mini-opera based on the novella.
"I developed the novella as I went along with feedback from about 800 readers who commented. It gave me a real feeling of being a part of a new creative community, and that my fans are often a lot smarter than I am. It was humbling and extremely valuable for me as a writer. I've since met quite a few of those people and I like and respect them. Usually when I saw their faces in the past they would be in the front row drinking beer and screaming like ice hockey fans.
{Vancouver Sun, October 7.06, F8}

MY VIEW: Music Remixes in the Networked World

I'm finding the world of remixing to be a much-needed shot in the arm of music evolution. Sure, people have been sampling (ripping off) music artists' work for about 20 years, but this is the legitimization of it. The artist surrenders the colour palate of his musical canvas and allows the fans and critics a chance to have a go. I find that in the remixes, rather than demolish the intentions of the song writer, the outcome can revalidate the brilliance of the artist.

We have experienced this before with the period of "Unplugged" when the musical artist would rearrange typically an up-tempo rock song into something softer. Quite often it opened up a whole new view of the song (See: Bryan Adams' MTV Unplugged version of I'm Ready.)

But remixes is a whole new bag. The song is stripped back to the core, pre-mixdown tracks, and packaged for download. It's like a chef walking into your kitchen and giving you the precise ingredients to their favourite dish saying, "make of it what you can." Using an application like Apple's Garage Band, you can import the individual tracks and start mixing your own favourite dish.

No surprise, my own, personal, musical genius, ,Peter Gabriel, is one of the leaders in this space. He's offering up a series of remix packages from artists that have spent time in his Real World studios. He's even run a contest for the best remix of 'Shock the Monkey'. (Being a hobbiest studio engineer, I was fascinated to hear the individual tracks of this song recorded in '81. On Peter's primary vocal track you can make out the bed tracks that are bleeding from his headphones, before the noise gate clamps down at the end of the phrases.) The contests specifically leverage social networking, as peers are invited to vote on their top 10, and comment on each remix, with Gabriel and staff reviewing them all. The Shock The Monkey contest generated 738 remixes!

Web 2.0 is enabling a direct musical relationship with artists. It is showing courage on the part of the composer to expose his or her work to public scrutiny and infact, re-interpretation of the creative material. It's also binding a village of the musically inclined as ideas and interpretations are shared. This represents a more sophisticated level of community involvement than video or photo-sharing; it's a significant shift in the way we involve ourselves in music.

Community Sites are Sticky

Wow: people are spending some serious amounts of time on the top community sites.

(This excerpt has been republished with permission from the good folks at eMarketer)

Enterprise Web 2.0 - 5 Good Reasons Not All CEOs Should Blog

It's like when you buy a car, suddenly you realize everyone else is driving the same brand. I've discovered some excellent Social Networking sites. Until (if) I find some time to put some original thoughts together, I'll agregate some of the best of what I see out there -Bryan

Enterprise Web 2.0 - 5 Good Reasons Not All CEOs Should Blog: "For those CEOs who are inclined to pass on the joy of blogging but aren't quite sure why, let me give you five good reasons why your instincts may just be right.
1. The same reason most CEOs don't do their own televison commercials. You may be lousy at it. Writing is a form of public performance and unless you're a natural like Jonathan Schwartz you might embarass yourself and your company.

2. It's time consuming. It took me about an hour and half to research and write this post and I've written for a living for the past 40 years. Unless you can spare (and commit to) the 3 to 4 hours a week it will take you to write a couple of decent posts, don't do it. You'll wind up with a nearly deserted blog like Whole Foods president John Mackey's, which was last updated more than a month ago.

3. The reasons your legal department has flagged: running afoul of safe harbor requirements, intellectual-property issues, possible defamation claims, unhappy employees or customers chasing common-law tort actions for who knows what reasons. Sure, the lawyers are overly-cautious assholes; but sometimes they're right.

4. Blogs are so last year. Blogs can be valuable marketing and public relations tools and most companies should be able to find ways to use them effectively. But, the whole CEO blog thing has been over-hyped and may not age well. (All the cool guys will be doing video blogs next year.)

5. The foot-in-mouth syndrome. Are you really going to provide 'vital' information to investors (or anybody else) in your blog. Are you going to discuss new products that are in the works that your competitors don't know about, companies you may be eyeing for acquisition, talks you're having about being acquired, the suspicion that you may not make the numbers next quarter). As the 'primary' source of this “vital” information to investors (to use Professor Stross’ construct) are you really going to use your public blog as the key method of sharing what you know. If you are, please give me a chance to see if I own any stock in your company so I can sell it before you start blogging.