Takeaways from Nielsen's CGM Event

Emily Riley | October 26, 2007, 08:11 PM

I’ve been traveling lately, and will be for another few weeks. But I did have time to go to the Nielsen BuzzMetrics CGM conference yesterday. Both Fox and CBS were on the publisher panel, and agreed that for media companies, social sites and features are optimal ways to spread word of mouth, but also to get consumer feedback. I was heartened to know that outcry about cancelled shows is actually listened to. Meebo’s Martin Green had a nice observation that today social content is a lot like a collection of post-it notes. Hopefully one day it will become “live;” as in IM, phone, something else?

The other side of the fence included some very large brands as well as Naked, a strategic marketing firm. Both Toyota and Sony considered themselves cutting edge for having a corporate blog. It seemed that for them, internal politics were the biggest barriers, but that executives were fascinated by consumer feedback once they were in place. Naked’s Noah Brier admitted that some products don’t inspire passion, and that associating with a wider subject can help that. He even mentioned lackluster hand soap but neglected to cite Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty as a case in point.

Les Izdebski, who runs the advertising group at Cisco mentioned a great example of the increased circle of influence that comes as a result of social marketing that Adidas gave at the ARF conference. They were able to measure that while about 600,000 people downloaded design elements to put on their MySpace pages from a recent campaign, those elements were seen by over 20 million people. This allows one to start thinking about social marketing campaigns in terms of the same reach as an inexpensive banner campaigns (sometimes.) I hope they have more of an impact.