Posts by David Card from September 04, 2008

David Card | September 04, 2008, 12:47 PM
Wieden + Kennedy at Inverge

Wieden + Kennedy's director of digital strategies, Renny Gleeson, gave a very entertaining preso at Inverge on brand marketing in the interactive social world -- bedecked in rolled jeans and red sneakers with lime-green soles (you were expecting dress casual, maybe?) -- but one that raised more questions than answers.

- How much emotional weight do all these new social technologies really carry? And how do you increase that?
- Relationship quality counts, but you probably can measure it by looking at quantity, ie time spent.
- How do you make a brand live (in this environment) when it's not in an active campaign/selling mode?
- How does the brand experience you create social value? (Probably by creating some kind of social cred value for participants.) When you are in selling mode, how do you make this appear to be an organic outgrowth of the ongoing social brand experience?

More to think about:

All these different social media formats and sites have certain social obligations when participating (respond, post, comment, forward etc.) You better understand them before you insert your brand in the middle.

Funny bits:

Most marketers are still in the "Hey, I've got $5 left, let's do something viral!"

"How many of you Elfed Yourself?" Audience: Many. "Who sponsored it?" Audience: Office Depot. "Waaaaaah. OfficeMax." (Make sure your social marketing actually carries brand message, let alone relevance. One of Emily Riley's favorite themes.)

Gleeson also called out some props to Forrester colleague Jeremiah Owyang, for tracking social media jobs and hires.

David Card | September 04, 2008, 09:57 AM
Social Everything?

Met with a handful of clients and prospects yesterday in Seattle. During one pretty free-form conversation with Classmates -- one of the few companies that has pulled off paid consumer content online -- the discussion ran along the lines of, if the Internet was a connection layer, and HTML etc. was a content/presentation layer, and now we're adding a social layer, are there any applications that wouldn't benefit from social functionality? At least from a user's perspective.

Think about that for a second. It's tough to come up with any. You end up mumbling about exclusive access/membership or information that needs to be "pure" -- from a single, identified source (or artist). And even that could benefit from commentary. One-to-one private communications may be the only thing...

Boy, am I asking for a lot of clutter.

David Card | September 04, 2008, 09:53 AM
Invergence?

I'm at the Inverge conference in Portland for the next couple days. I'll post about cool stuff.