Jaffe Juice

The Links Course of Thought Leadership

Been a little busy (understatement of the year) lately, but didn't want the following gems to slip through the cracks:

• Logic + Emotion's Levels of Influence post
  • Follow up post from "Shake well before use" (love it)
• Militants ambushing brands in Second Life from IF!
• 7 Deadly Sins of Advertising via Viral Video post (via Fresh Glue) from "will video for food.com" (lol)

Eat up!

The snake's out the bag (or is it?)

Warning: Watch out for loose puns ahead. Proceed at own risk.

After much venom in the social media land, soap opened to what is considered to be a rather toothless performance.

Will Waugh from the ANA Marketing Maestros Blog reminds me that I was rather bullish (snakish?) on the anticipated outcome of this movie:

- Tagworld post

- Across the Sound episode with Jackie Huba and Pete Blackshaw

I'm not sure I as much predicted it would be a smash as I hoped it would be, based on the exponential validation it would have lended to the still-young and oft misunderstood social media and new marketing worlds. THAT SAID...

1) The snakes not quite out the bag...it is early days and after a weekend of great weather and a long tail (with a rattle at the end of it) that has yet to wave, I'm reserving judgement on the binary "success"/"failure" of the movie and its marketing. Despite preliminery (or is it premature) judgement - even from the studio - it did come in number 1 (or very close to it) based on early box office estimates...

2) Ultimately this movie is highly specialized in terms of its genre and expected audience. That's not a cop-out, but it remains to be seen whether love = $$$. Did Jackie Huba sleep outside for 3 days to be at the first screening? Probably not

3) Ultimately we should be looking at very simple metrics.

• How much did it cost to make?
• How much did it cost to market?
• How much did it earn?

4) What did the studio learn in the process that they can use for future marketing of movies with much more risk at stake?

5) Arguably most importantly, was the movie so great that Sam Jackson already signed up for soap II or so bad that it will be destined for cult status immortality? If this movie was truly embraced by the people, then it will ultimately live and die by the hands, mice and wallets of those same people.

Early days my fellow reptilians, early days...

Paid and Social Media Report Card

Long Tail's Chris Anderson gives this report card on media, affectionately titled "Media Meltdown"

Here are the lowlights for you:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Eric Kintz, via DailyFix, originally reported on Anderson's post He adds a great social media flavor to it, including some of these highlights:

• YouTube announced in July that viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site.
• The blogosphere is 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago
• MySpace has 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is now a solid second to Yahoo in terms of pageviews!

ATS #50 SkypeCast Details

Bryan Person suggested I give a little more information on tomorrow's SkypeCast. Good suggestion...and the only reason I didn't sooner is because I'm rather clueless myself :) He points me and so I'm pointing you to the following link from FIR's SkypeCast for more details.

Here's how I see it playing out:

1. At 12noon EST on Sunday (tomorrow), August 20th, you'll either click on THIS LINK which will take you to the ATS Skypecast page directly, or alternatively go to www.skypecast.com and just type "Across the Sound" in the search bar.

2. After 12noon EST, you should see a link which says "Sign in to join" under the Across the Sound banner. After clicking on this, you'll need to use your Skype ID and password (obviously if you don't have a Skype ID, now would be a good time to do this)

3. You'll then click on a "Join this Skypecast" link and once you do, you're connected.

4. The only other nuance is that your microphone might be muted and you'll have to request the mike if you want to contribute. It really depends on how many people are participating in terms of whether it makes sense to periodically mute/unmute people.

5. Other than that, come armed with ideas, themes, memes, rants, winners, losers etc. and have fun!

Grand Theft Auto Slice of Coke Side of Life

Check it out...it's a slice of Grand Theft Auto life, or is it?

General blogo feeling right now is that this is great (4 out 5 stars on YouTube from 30 ratings...although this could be from the agency - good message everything u give come backts to u :))

Low views, but this could be the very beginning of the viral spiral...

I don't think you need to be a pimp-bashing, rampage-loving, pig-whacking GTA fan to enjoy this and quite frankly, I'm impressed with the nerve and resolve to have produced this (clearly some of the approvals came from those who have never played the game)

Good snuff all round (he-he)

23 things every company should be monitoring...

Here's a threat worth following and continuing. It deals with things every company should be monitoring (and resulting implications) I have contributed items 18-23

Started by Cameron Olthuis on his blog, Pronet advertising:

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Public facing figures
4. Product names
5. Product URLs
6. The industry “hang outs”
7. Employee activity/blogs
8. Conversations
9. Brand image
10. Competitors

Amplified by Steve Rubel on his blog, MicroPersuasion

Extended by Jeremiah Owyang on his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah:   

11. Images/video like YouTube and Flickr

12.  tags and Social search tools like Del.icio.us

13. Social Voting tools like Digg.com and Techmeme.com

14: "Advanced Listening"

15: Feedback URL and link threads

16: “Voice of the Customer” log to track sentiment, instance, and/or voice.

17: Develop new roles to such “Brand Monitor” or “Blogosphere Watcher”

...and enhanced by me on Jaffe Juice:

18. Self-clipping services like Google or Yahoo alerts for keyword mentions, but also audio and video hits as well...services like PodZinger for example to ascertain conversational audio levels

19. Utilize RSS and aggregators like Bloglines in order to aggregate, integrate and assimilate all relevant incoming and outgoing moments of truth (perceived truth perhaps, or even truthiness according to Rob Stevens)

20. Use wikis like PmWiki to discuss and debate pretty much everything from 1-19 and most importantly attempt to turn all the talk/conversation into walk/action.

21. (ending on 20 would have been so contrived) Repeat steps 1-20 to look outside of your own circle. Evolve the perspective from yourself, through your direct competitive set to your indirect competitive set and ultimately to your aspirational/non-endemic/non-competitive set. This is where you want to follow the leaders so to speak - Apples, Nikes, Googles or whichever company you admire.

22. Create a PROACTIVE capability/budget in order to QUICKLY execute against everything you're monitoring - specifically opportunities like Fedex Furniture, Tiger Chipping in on the 16th.

23. Conversely, have a REACTIVE process in place to comprehensively and compellingly respond, especially when you're on the bumpy receiving end of the stick.

Pongey Kong

It must be US Open time again if Andy Roddick is taking on the Mighty Pong. I saw a link to the game via "paid media", but what really caught my eye was the embedded HTML code which allowed me to do this:

It's an interesting move, namely allowing bloggers and the like the opportunity to help spread the....'er.....advertising.....hmmmm, but neverthless I just did it and there's something there, no doubt.

I just made the top 100, but I fear I was only the 100th player :)

PS Wonder what would happen if I took out the "bl" (as in blogger landing) from referring URL: http://www.stoppong.com/bl - come on Amex, share some results with us!

ATS #49 - The New Marketing Podcast with Adam Curry and Ron Bloom Part 1

Part 1 of a 2 part interview with PodShow's Adam Curry and Ron Bloom is up.

Episode and shownotes link here

iTunes subscription link here

Yo, yo...where my wasps at?

Via Silva, this is a long-form content piece for Smirnoff Raw Tea. What impresses me is the extent of product mentions (which I feel many advertisers seem to either forget...or play down due to some kind of apologetic subservience) and more importantly, 525,000 views and counting.

Over half a million views is not a viral O' the day blip...this is serious viewage my friends. It certainly rivals many cable networks AND if you chose to weight this based on a) permission based, b) credibility from friend recommendations and c) it's length (2m15), we're talking that voodoo cliche, "engagement"

The only nagging question is the ROI one. Now I'm not talking about a stupid binary "99 bottles of raw tea on the wall" sales metric...and certainly not one that would ever be bound to one particular component of an assumed larger integrated plan, but I do feel that we need to start challenging ourselves to demonstrate and validate the business impact of "viral"/communal/CGC et al.

Now if we did that, well then that would change everything, wouldn't it?

Rules for Viral/Social Media

Via GapingVoid and Karl Long, a thread with potential on rules for social media and viral.

Karl comes up with 3 ideas under the banners of experiment, monitor and respond: (expanded explanations via the link)

• Success bares no relation to investment
• Viral Marketing does not have a timeline
• Number of views bare little relation to reach or impact of Viral Marketing

Karls adds 5 implications for social media (inspired by the Agency.com kerfluffle) - expanded version here

1. Interactive Agency business models are subverted by social media.
2. Failure is not just acceptable, it should be encouraged.
3. In Social Media Everyone is a Critic.
4. Experimenting Meaningless Without Measurement.
5. Viral Stewardship - Virals Are Unpredictable So Pay Attention.