Social media is upon us.
It is a fact of life and consumers have made it part of their daily lives.
In other news, brands are still investing small and not so small fortunes creating amazing content for their websites and nobody cares to visit them. On paper, one great solution for this problem is search marketing. You buy keywords, optimize the content on your site for organic search placement, things get better.

Social media can boost a brand even further. And here’s the kicker: it has little to do with the brand website.

The root of the issue is in the following fact: The brand has a website; search marketing looks to drive traffic to that website. If the brand places content in social media, it takes content from brand site and actually puts it, well, away from your website. While you can still link to the brand site, isn’t social media harmful in actually reducing the need to visit that site? If you can get the content on Facebook, where you hang out with your near, far but always dear friends – is it really necessary to go to the brand’s site to get what you are looking for? While intriguing, the answer lies in thinking about what really matters. Skittles, for example, gave up on its website altogether. But three years later, can anyone point out measurable sales increases as a result? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) a brand would care about? While I personally want the website to be stellar, is it as relevant or important as it was, say, four years ago?

Branding is about searing the name, message or logo of a product or manufacturer deep into your head. Whether the brand achieves consumer impressions on its owned web property or not is immaterial. It is even more important to be able to measure if the brand placement, and the consumer impression it caused, increased the likelihood of a transaction or a purchase. While a brand site can help inform about and portray products really well, social media trumps it on this account. Consumers today trust each other more than they trust their brands. Reviews matter, ratings influence, and if a brand does not track them, it may lose the initiative in controlling its message (Toyota, anyone?). I can probably think up a variety of KPIs but overall the bottom line is this: if you can get the brand online, anywhere, it’s a good thing – and if you get it anywhere other than your own brand website, it’s a very good thing.

So where does search marketing figure out into this? Search marketing at its finest does not just drive traffic to a website, it increases brand impressions. It also reinforces positive brand messages and matches the terms a brand looks to associate itself with, to search keywords. Search engines do not care about your brand website if it has no redeeming quality; it must have content to be interesting and useful to the search engine’s users. Social media has value and content, both searchable and private. Search engines want in and try to extract as much as possible out of social media. If your brand is engaged, search engines will find your content. And by connecting users to the relevant content coming from your brand, marketers get the impressions they so desire.

By now you should be sold. Social media is great. Search marketing helps no matter where your brand is. But how do you measure performance for assets distributed far and wide across social media? One big strength of a brand site comes from the control a marketer has on obtaining performance data about it. Social media sites have no interest in letting you shove Omniture tags into their code. You’re a guest. And in reality, the jury is still deliberating. Snake oil merchants and real scientists claim to have the answer for this need for proof and measurement (eMarketer proves this point). We are getting close to definitive solutions. Due to the resources necessary to successfully measure and track vast amounts of traffic and content, marketers may have to patiently wait or accept less definitive conclusions and research. Until then, there’s always the brand website.

Little strings of text are big business – both publicly and inside the corporate firewall. As we all know, Twitter is pretty big – TV and radio ads for major companies mention their Twitter sites and even business cards reference Twitter URLs nowadays. But Twitter cannot be used with internal information, so there’s a lot of collaborative power waiting to be unleashed by microblogging inside the corporate firewall. Consider how much more productive everyday workers could be if they shared a few quick bits of knowledge.

For example, consider this timeline:

Alice: Client loved the sales pitch - we won! #sales
Brion: Vending machine has been re-stocked
Charles: #CSS reminds me of aspect oriented programming #aop
Darleen: Project is progressing according to schedule #project3
Evan: Fellow #project3 members: Is this front end policy useful for us? http://ur1.ca/shyu
Fred: @evan Possibly - let's discuss this with @brion over lunch
Zach: @fred @evan we used those guidelines on #project5 and it worked out well
ITBot: Email server test failed. IT has been contacted.

These examples show that:

• The barrier to entry is incredibly low (Alice posted immediately after a sales pitch, probably from a plane)
• Useful business information is exchanged, as well as team-building (Brion provided non-business information about the vending machine that others will likely appreciate)
• Because discussion is open to a broader audience than email, others participate in unexpected and beneficial ways (see how Zach, who isn’t even on project 3, helped the project 3 team)
• Bots can publicize information gathered automatically. For example, IT could set up a bot to monitor servers and automatically publish status updates. Bots can also subscribe to RSS feeds bridging wiki and blogs with the microblogging world.

There are many other benefits once metadata is considered.

• People choose who to follow. If Alice isn’t interested in the state of IT systems, she doesn’t subscribe to the ITBot.
• Users can mark a message as a favorite. Messages that are favorited many times show up in a “favorites” list, which is a great source of useful information.
• By clicking on a #project3, Brion can find all posts about his project, providing a powerful search option.
• Messages may have optionally location data attached. Users can tell if the person they’re talking to is in the same office as they are, on vacation, working from home, at a client office, or at another branch of their company. This data allows users to make fast decisions about how to further communicate (phone, email, or walk).

At Molecular, we wanted to take advantage of what “firewalled” microblogging has to offer, so we evaluated a few private microblogging tools, looking for software that provides a familiar interface, allows customization of the look and feel, and has clients for different devices (like Twitter has). In the end, we chose StatusNet. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a contributing developer to the StatusNet project.)

The StatusNet software (which also runs the ~200k user identi.ca site) is Free and Open Source so anyone can feel free to install, evaluate, and use it without worrying about contracts or licensing fees. However, StatusNet, Inc (the company that supports the StatusNet software) offers professional services if you chose to run the software on site, or hosting if you prefer it to be hosted elsewhere. If the “go it yourself” route is selected, installation is pretty straightforward as it runs on the popular LAMP stack and has a vibrant community willing to answer questions.

StatusNet can integrate with LDAP/Active Directory and even some Single Sign On solutions. No worrying about managing accounts as employees come and go, so private information stays private.

The software also supports a variety of clients on a number of platforms, from Windows, Mac, and Linux to iPhones and Androids.

After developing a custom skin, selecting which plugins to enable, and testing with a small group, we officially launched “IsoBuzz” to the entire organization last week. We’re already seeing some interesting conversations. Over time, we hope to see IsoBuzz became a powerful tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration, especially among distant offices and between departments.

By now, marketers know that brands cannot fully control their own message anymore. Consumers now have a diverse set of channels through which they can interact with their digital world, and they’ve taken rightful ownership of their own destiny when interacting with brands through those channels.

In an effort to be heard and to increase engagement, brands are turning to new, innovative ways to approach the digital marketing landscape, from social environments such as Twitter and Facebook, to blogger outreach and global alternate reality games. Like anything else new and innovative, the risk of failure in these approaches runs high, and the payoff is unknown.

But failure, if done early and often, can be more instructive than success. Let’s look at four new and innovative ways that brands attempted to engage with their consumers through digital, and see what lessons we can learn.

Lesson 1. Tell a story, but make it your story
In February 2008, 50 bloggers and gamers received mysterious packages in the mail containing clues to an online alternate reality game (ARG) with a clear call to action: Find “The Lost Ring.” These packages kicked off a six-month effort across the globe by more than 150,000 players in seven languages to uncover a lost Olympic game. The game officially ended at the Beijing Olympics, and it generated more than its share of accolades in marketing circles.

But that’s only half of the story. The game is a classic example of what’s known as “dark marketing” — a viral campaign in which the sponsoring brand (in this case, McDonald’s) is barely, if ever, acknowledged. The theory is that mentioning the brand would turn potential gameplayers off when they realize that they’re simply playing a part in a larger marketing campaign. In this case, it wasn’t revealed that McDonald’s was participating until months after the game began.

ARGs have proven to be successful in the past and are an incredibly viral method of participatory storytelling on a grand scale. Yet in most cases where measurable success was achieved, the ARG told a story that was at least tangentially related to the brand that sponsored it. Consider ABC’s “Lost Experience” and “Find815″ ARG campaigns, which gave rabid fans of the hit show something to do during its hiatus while simultaneously telling some of the show’s back story — all without diminishing the experience of watching “Lost” for consumers who didn’t participate. 
 

BMW created an ARG surrounding a fictional town, “Oberpfaffelbachen,” that built a huge ramp up to launch the BMW 1-Series in America. In each of these cases, the story of the game tied back to the story of the brand, even if the tie-in was slight or tongue-in-cheek.

Lastly, in order to measure the success of an ARG, it’s important to understand how the brand is perceived before, during, and after the game. Using sentiment analysis tools to continually measure what people are saying about the brand can identify the baseline sentiment and the brand lift during the campaign, as well as any lingering effects after the game has ended.

Lesson 2: Turn the chairs inward (and take a seat)
It’s become a marketing cliché: Your consumers are talking, and your brand is the topic of conversation. In an effort to show that they understand this, Skittles decided to bring that conversation to the fore in the guise of its official website, which it replaced with an unsupervised Twitter feed that showed every tweet mentioning the Skittles brand. At the same time, the brand allowed website visitors to switch between its Wikipedia page, YouTube account, and other social media outposts using a simple widget. Within 48 hours, the messages on Twitter were littered with expletives.

Skittle’s parent company, Mars, had a great idea, but while it exposed conversations around the brand to the bright, harsh light of day, the company neglected to participate in it.

By participating, Mars could have managed the conversation around its brand, instead of letting it spin out of control. Consider what Pepsi did with the “Pepsi Cooler“ on FriendFeed, a social media aggregator now owned by Facebook. Pepsi managed the conversation through multiple social media channels partly by taking a seat at the table and participating as an equal contributor.

Lesson 3: Behave Yourself
My iPhone is the most personal of personal technology devices. It’s always on my person, it’s always on, and it contains my contacts, calendar, and music; it’s my life in my pocket. It makes perfect sense that a smartphone app can be a great way to increase engagement with consumers.

But remember, when in the personal space of your consumers, it’s vital that you follow their rules of etiquette. Pepsi released an iPhone application to support its AMP energy drink that was designed to help make male customers more successful with the ladies. The app categorized women into types, and it offered pick-up lines targeted to those types. The backlash was so great that Pepsi yanked the risque app from the App Store and offered a public apology.

Mobile apps have been a great way to create a service out of a brand. Molecular worked with Nikon on an app that helps its consumers take better photos, regardless of whether they own a Nikon camera or not.

When you engage with consumers on their turf, on a device as personal as their mobile phones, make sure that service is helpful. To Pepsi’s credit, it admitted the mistake, but it could have been avoided by understanding how far it could take the joke without offending its audience.

Lesson 4: Keep the circle of trust intact
Reaching out to influential bloggers is a great way to generate buzz around a new product launch. The best bloggers will give a fair and honest review of the product, thereby extending the trust that these folks have established with their loyal audience to your brand.

When ASUS reached out to bloggers to review the new Eee PC 901 laptop, it was counting on that trust. But instead of simply letting the bloggers review the product, they made it a competition. They chose six bloggers to write a minimum of three 200-word posts a week about their laptop over the course of four weeks. The blogger with the most readers would win the laptop.

ASUS didn’t expect what happened next: The blogger with the most readers wrote a review that, while honest and fair, wasn’t exactly favorable to the product. So ASUS changed the rules. Instead of the most readers, the winner of the laptop would be chosen by a vote taken by the six bloggers themselves, resulting in another blogger winning in the end. The readers revolted by posting scathing comments on the announcement of the winner.

Product ratings and reviews work because they are written by the folks consumers trust most: other consumers. When a brand tries to game the system, this breaks the circle of trust. Instead of changing the rules, Asus might have been better off thanking the winner for his review, acknowledging (or defending, when necessary) the product’s limitations, and working the feedback into future products.

Conclusion
There are so many new ways of interacting and engaging with consumers today. Their conversation is fragmented, their attention span short, and their tolerance for BS is low. Without well-established roadmaps for success, it is inevitable that we will sometimes fail when attempting to engage with consumers in new and innovative ways. But by learning from failure, we are left with enormous potential to provide exceptional brand experiences that do succeed.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular

Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.

Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.

The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.

1. Find short domains that evoke your brand
Your brand is your company’s face in the market, and the more exposure it gets, the bigger your potential audience. With social media, you’re focusing on name recognition for you and your offerings. Much the same way you may come up with a smaller version of your logo for different ads to fit the space and medium, URL shortening provides you with a short link that drives users to the page with the full, long URL. For example, instead of using long URLs with user-friendly information, like http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536, you will be providing a short link such as http://amzn.com/0321434536

If you’re familiar with traditional vanity URLs, the concept should ring a bell. In many cases, the domain will be your only branding opportunity, so you want a link that contains or reminds people of your brand. Readers will see it in tweets, blog posts, wall comments, you name it, so your short URLs should provide something that both connects users to the original brand, and is short enough for them to re-use. For example, Flickr has set up http://flic.kr/, a shorter alias that still evokes the brand.

Tips: First, find a good, as-short-as-possible URL. Make use of the long list of new generic and country-specific top-level domains. A good starting point is iWantMyName.com. The site searches dozens of domain providers worldwide. (While .com is global, .es for example is controlled by Spain.) Costs vary from country to country, and almost all are in the sub-$300 range, with the majority being around $50. Get creative. Think initials, stock tickers, you name it. Leverage domain name suggestion tools like Domainr. Set up the software to create short URLS automatically (those auto-generated random-looking bits at the end like http://tr.im/zpBD). Make your own short URLs readily available on every page of your site. Get them out there, and they’ll be used. Every time they’re republished as the content spreads, your exposure grows.

2. Third-party short URLs can short-change your measurement efforts
The problem with attributing traffic from third-party short URLs is that most take away the referrer — the part of the request that tells your metric platform how the visitor got to your site. Depending on the vendor, you’ll see either the redirection service or where they clicked the short URL, but not both, providing an incomplete picture. While they may offer the ability for you to view several measurements on their own websites, you do not have access to raw incoming traffic information, and aggregating the data from the mass of vendors out there can prove to be a challenge. What does this all mean? You can’t tell where the bulk of your social organic traffic is coming from. For example, a report showing you top referring blogs is far more actionable than a report showing you the top short URL sites people used. The visitor paths — that piece of the web analytics puzzle that shows traffic sources and behavior — is too valuable to lose.

Tips: Consider implementing your own short URL feature on your site. This approach ensures you get that referrer information back. Once the feature is added, extend your analytics implementation to capture traffic on your short URLs. Although some third-party short URL providers share this data, you will have a more complete picture of user behavior on your site when you start tracking them at first contact (when they click the short URL), through to when they leave your site.

3. Keep your earned media
I doubt you have a service level agreement with a hundred different short URL providers. When the next one goes bust, there’s a strong chance its redirects will stop working entirely, and all of that earned media will evaporate. According to Carat, earned media assets are “consumer driven. They include all word of mouth communications, social media, viral, organic search, fan sites and shared content. To some extent, these communications are Earned through doing Bought and Owned well, but they reflect on the brand’s entire behavior.”

The recent news about tr.im, a service initially slated to disappear, has taken a happy turn, and it is giving the service to the community to maintain and develop. I’d like to think the service’s spirit was universal, but I doubt it. The service Cligs is currently dealing with similar business woes. Why find out how much of your traffic was coming through the next service to go bust?

Tips: Utilize your new branded short URLs in every social media channel. Make them so easy to use that it’d be more work to go elsewhere to generate them. Add an element to your site where users can copy a page’s short URL to their clipboards with one click. For product or campaign pages, try out vanity short URLs like http://molecu.lr/Analytics to increase recognition.

4. Do it yourself
The most straightforward way to reap the benefits and data from URL shortening is to set up such a service yourself. Technically, URL shortening is a low-hanging fruit; it will take an average lone developer about a week to get a basic service programmed from scratch. Simpler yet, there is a variety of off-the-shelf open-source applications that can get you up and running even quicker. Free applications like Yourls, Shorty, or lilurl can be set up in a couple of hours on your server. There are also software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors who can use your domain and give you, for a fee, a variety of statistics and logs. One example is budurl.com’s enterprise edition.

Tips: When setting up a URL shortening services yourself, there are several factors you will need to consider:

1. Think of your audience. Is it going to be used company-wide, by specific team members, or provided as a service to anyone on the web? Normally, smaller audiences will require a simpler and thus cheaper setup, while larger audiences may require multiple servers and continuous feature development. Workflow is another aspect you might wish to explore. Think of how often the tool will be used and whether there will be a need to provision its use and associated approval chains. Also, be aware that it is critical for URL shortening services to act as a springboard to the destination page, imposing minimal delay. Test how well the server performs on your expected load levels.
2. Create a bookmarklet. To simplify the creation of short URLs and increase the adoption of your service, the creation of a bookmarklet is recommended. Bookmarklets are browser bookmarks that will send the URL of the page currently being viewed in the browser and open a window and tab to your URL-shortening service. The page that will open will present you with the shortened URL. This way, a single click of a button can generate the shortened URL. You can also add a “Copy to Clipboard” widget on your pages (check out the lower left side: http://is.gd/4fPnx). Make it so easy to use your short URLs that it’d actually be more work to use a third-party provider.
3. Redirect broken links. One more elegant feature offered by some services that could be of special value to marketers is the ability to edit and monitor the content that you are linking to. If a page on your website is removed, you can point an existing shortened URL to a new version of the content or to an alternative page  . If the shortened URL points to an external site where the page is no longer available, you can detect that and react. Be sure to provide alternative content or present messaging to explain what happened. When you own your short URLs, you have a variety of ways to retain your earned media.

One organization that is already taking this approach is Coca-Cola, which set up a hosted short URL service called CokeURL.com. The service is at marketers’ disposal and gives them the ability to share content on or off Coca-Cola web assets using short URLs. The URLs can be short (CokeURL.com/s) or descriptive (CokeURL.com/fizzyVideo).

We hope the choice here is an easy one. Providing your own short URLs that tell readers your brand is awaiting them after the click increases your visibility. Implementing a short URL service on your own site increases your web analytics value and guards your earned media against third-party failure. Social media is a deep and fast moving channel, so keep your head up.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

Just when you think you’ve got this whole brand experience thing figured out, along comes another form of social media that threatens to shake your grasp on the status quo. Over the past year, Twitter has taken the spanner-in-the-works title from Facebook, which took it from YouTube, which took it from Flickr, and so on. While it can seem daunting to consider managing your company’s image over so many forms of new media, this phenomenon can benefit your company — you have more opportunities than ever to generate positive brand experiences with your customers. Of course, this means there are more chances to make a mess of things as well. So how do you make sure you do more of the former and less of the latter?

1. Be generous
2. Drop the facade
3. Follow through

These principles may be easier for smaller companies to adopt, since they are often in more direct contact with their customers. But just as the web helped to level the playing field for small businesses trying to wrestle mindshare from their larger competitors, social media offers big firms the chance to reconnect with their customers more directly. Perhaps the most appropriate way to introduce the guidelines below is to sum them up in 140 characters or less. Let’s call it the Social Media Golden Rule: Use social media to engage with your customers as you have your vendors to engage with you.

First, be generous
Most of what we think of as social media began life outside the corporation. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, you name it – they all started as the pet project of small groups of individuals. Lacking corporate sponsorship, these sites relied on the support and contributions of online communities to evolve and to expand. This generosity remains part of the DNA of each of these tools to this day — they are referred to as consumer-generated media for a reason. To engage with these community-driven tools credibly, you must utilize their currency of free information and proper attribution.

While it may be appropriate to announce awards and accolades using social media channels, consider the value of that information to your potential and current customers. Does that announcement entertain, enlighten, or educate your viewers? Think of the difference between sharing the fact that your company won an award versus sharing freely the submission that won the award. To play on the old adage, share, don’t tell.

Self-promotion is a type of sharing, certainly, but it is by definition self-serving (or at least self-centered). The rapid growth of social media tools and sites is due to their ability to convey information with high potential for sharing. One of the best ways to raise your social media credibility, then, is to promote others instead of yourself (or your company). By acknowledging the contributions of others and by promoting their content, you engage in these media’s most definitive act: sharing. Doing so consistently and with relevance to your industry may increase both your credibility and your reach. Your company can become a trusted provider of useful and relevant content, regardless of its source.

The biggest downside to the proliferation of social media is the increasing sense of information overload. While it is to your advantage to share useful information, being an information curator provides an additional expert service to your customers. Any content your company generates will benefit from your reputation as a generous and knowledgeable member of the social media community. You won’t need to promote your company — others will do it for you.

Second, drop the facade
Being authentic does not mean simply representing your company accurately, it means stripping away the pretense. Nothing sets off BS detectors more than when companies use corporate lingo on the blog or via Twitter, or when they share only the most sanitized content on YouTube and Flickr. Press releases are not blog entries. Being authentic means being candid and being real.

You don’t have to air your company’s dirty laundry, but openness and transparency are inherent to the appeal of all social media. Whether they are prospective customers or employees, folks interested in learning more about your company and its corporate culture will look to see how you present yourself via these channels. They can sniff your pretense a mile away — and they won’t like it.

By participating in these media more as a member of the community and less as a corporation, you will be seen as a valued contributor to the culture around each of these tools. The bad news is that letting down your corporate guard is only the first step, if a crucial one. Interacting with your customers on their terms gets you into the game. They will appreciate your effort, but will not forget what you represent: your brand.

Lastly, follow through
Though these media may force you to engage with your customers on their terms, it does not change the fundamental nature of the relationship: They are your customers (or at least potentially so). As such, they will expect you to address their questions (or complaints) with the same attention as you would via more traditional customer service channels. These expectations may seem contradictory or even unfair in light of social media’s more informal atmosphere, but your willingness to accept these terms of engagement can set you apart from other brands.

Twitter may epitomize these competing expectations best, with its simultaneous drive for brevity and immediacy. Customers you please may or may not praise your efforts to their followers, but those you don’t will state their displeasure swiftly and bluntly. Whether broadcast as complaints on your Facebook fan page, or as 140-character open letters, your responses must reflect the same responsiveness and professionalism you would show a customer who has waited too long on hold for customer service. Servicing customer needs in such public forums may not be comfortable, but well-handled resolutions will demonstrate — and broadcast — your commitment to customer service more authentically than any slogan or tag line.

Those of you advocating on behalf of a more formal brand may need to shift your tone of voice when utilizing these media, but you cannot afford to make the mistake of thinking professional customer service etiquette does not apply. Edgy and more casual brands will likely find social media to be familiar ground, but may miss the opportunity to enhance their perceived accountability.

Conclusion
Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube encourage candid dialog and responsive interactions. Most people appreciate those qualities in any relationship — not just the one they have with their vendors of choice. When combined with a willingness to be accountable, these elements provide the raw material your company can use to create positive brand experiences.

The barrier for entry to participate with these media is so low that it is tempting to just jump in and figure it out along the way. Some folks may advise you that since these media cost nothing, you have nothing to lose. That perspective forgets the possibility of a company damaging its brand reputation. So while it is untrue that engagement with social media has only upside, it is true that these tools offer potentially huge returns on your investment. Keep the three principles outlined in this article in mind as you craft your social media marketing strategy, but if in doubt, remember the Golden Rule: Engage with your customers as you would have your vendors engage with you.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

On Friday, October 23rd 2009, adidas launched the next generation of miCoach – the interactive coaching system that delivers audible coaching while you run. At its conception miCoach was a means by which to allow users to experience the adidas brand in their daily life.

An innovative blend of hardware, software, and web experience – the system empowers users to set and achieve goals – being coached by adidas every step of the way. The system allows a user to manage their active life, and be motivated by seeing their workout results on a highly immersive web experience.

For adidas, the interactions that users have with miCoach reinforces the users relationship with the adidas. In other words, it creates time with the brand. This approach is a more effective investment of marketing money because of the depth and longevity of the interaction with the target audience. Moreover, the interaction creates valuable insights into customer behavior and allows adidas to market to the user in a more relevant way – in the context of the users life.

The service itself has been extended to allow users to take miCoach into the users social realm – namely Facebook. Users are now able to share their latest workout with their personal friends via Facebook or email. The benefit for the user is that they can share an important aspect of their life with friends. For adidas, this is an invaluable manner in which to get trusted referrals for their service (and brand) to a broader populous.

Molecular has been a key part of the realization of this adidas service from its conception. By partnering with Molecular, adidas has a partner capable of pairing insightful user experience design, stellar creative and deep technical expertise to bring miCoach to life. As the nascent marketing initiative transforms into an exemplary digital and business marketing stalwart, Molecular is enabling adidas to push the boundaries of interactions with its key audiences.

miCoach has successfully bridged the gap between the users analog and digital daily lives. By providing hardware to coach you while you run and then parlaying that information to the web where the users transformation is illuminated, adidas is establishing its brand in the users life. miCoach is the future of marketing and branding.

Interactive Game Designed to Engage and Entertain Fans, Help Team Gain Strategic Insight into Increasingly Important Facebook Fan Base 

Famed NBA franchise The Boston Celtics (www.celtics.com) has teamed up with Molecular to launch a first-of-its-kind interactive Facebook application for fans. The application, called “3-Point Play”, is part of the team’s broader interactive marketing strategy, which aims to harness and draw insight from the enthusiasm of 430,000+ Celtics fans participating in the team’s massive Facebook community (http://facebook.com/celtics). 

How the Celtics’ Facebook 3-Point Play works:

• Fans compete against their Facebook friends and Celtics fans from around the world, challenging each other to accurately predict the statistical output of their favorite players each game by Points, Rebounds and Assists
• Prizes are awarded throughout the season, with top winners competing for highly-coveted playoff tickets
• 3-Point Play is ready to tip off, launching on the Celtics’ Facebook page ahead of the regular season opener on October 27 against the Cleveland Cavaliers
• As fans make their picks, the Celtics glean greater insight into their online fans’ behaviors and preferences

Molecular’s goals in creating 3-Point Play were, first, to create an online experience that would resonate with fans and keep them engaged throughout the season, and second, to design a marketing tool that would help the Celtics get to know their Facebook fans even better, allowing them to create a more relevant and compelling marketing strategy for this community of digital consumers.  3-Point Play is the newest component of the team’s growing menu of digital media offerings, which include the team’s official Twitter feed (@Celtics has 20,000+ followers), its official YouTube page (http://youtube.com/bostonceltics), and GameTime Live, a first-of-its-kind in the NBA interactive game-tracking and blogging application found exclusively on Celtics.com.

Play Celtics 3-Point Play now! Get your picks in for tonight’s game and compete against your Facebook friends for Celtics prizes like tickets, jerseys and more!

More than ever, hard numbers are necessary to demonstrate success; they are incontrovertible, easy to communicate, and can point out what is or is not working. For new media darling Twitter, marketers are finding more tools to help them understand how their efforts are performing.

There are five tools to consider, but first you have to know what to measure. Not all of the tools out there are going to be helpful. Some are introspective, looking at how the Twitter campaign is presented. Others are quantitative tools to analyze traffic, trends and follower count. First, make a measurement plan, noting what is important to the organization and how to justify the success of the campaign. What does success look like? What are the key things that need to happen? List these goals and then determine reliable tools to measure progress. 

Five Useful Tools for Tracking Twitter Success

• TwInfluence. Track not only how many listeners you have, but also how concentrated your audience is, and the rate at which your campaign is growing.
• TwitAlyzer. Measure your popularity, signal-to-noise ratio, and how many times you’re being cited. This is valuable if your aim is to become a thought leader. Twitalyzer also lets you tie into Google Analytics and collect information on site traffic coming from Twitter. This can provide insight into how the digital marketing channel is being influenced by a Twitter campaign.
• TwitterFriends. Get detailed insight on who you’re interacting with on Twitter. This includes everything from a map indicating where your followers are to the average length of a given tweet. This helps provide clarity on who is responding, how frequently and the nature of these interactions. This information can be useful in the planning stages of a Twitter campaign, as well as tracking once the work is in progress.
• Trendistic. Get an understanding of trends in Twitter. Enter a keyword and see how it is referenced in the space over time. It’s possible to see up to 180 days worth of information.
• TweetEffect. Find out how individuals are reacting to your posts. By entering the user ID and clicking search, you get a summary of recent changes, as well as adds or losses based on specific tweets. It’s an excellent way to see what is resonating with followers and what is not. 

As more users flock to Twitter, developers are coming up with tools that enable marketers to measure a multitude of interactions. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it is close enough to accurately capture trends in the space.

Following up on my post on Facebook fan pages, InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon broke the news that Facebook is working harder to verify the authenticity of the people behind fan pages on its site. If you are fan of say, Lenovo laptops, there was nothing preventing you from setting up a fan page for the company. If Lenovo decided to launch their own fan page at a later date, they would wake up to the fact that it was already occupied or taken. Brands are left with little options other than join forces with people who do not necessarily behoove to their marketing message, or try and launch a page in parallel, to varying degrees of success. Contacting Facebook for help does not guarantee you action or relief.

We feel fan pages hold great promise. A story on PRI radio show Marketplace tells the story of The Coca-Cola company successfully teaming up with individuals who set up its fan page before its own marketing team got to it. The brand’s strength and its passionate following helped it garner a following that is almost 4 million users strong.

Hopefully the new verification measures will reduce the chances of such brand name squatting on Facebook.

After years of anticipation – the shift from traditional to digital is becoming real. The UK became the first major economy to achieve this milestone – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau of Britain. Internet ad spend accounted for 23.5% of the British advertising market . Print was still in first place, with 30% of the market, but had recorded steep declines.

As the internet begins to replace print as the primary source of consumer news and information, as well as encroach upon television as a deliver vehicle for info-entertainment, this trend will only continue to be more exaggerated.

The industries recovering from the global economic downturn will demand  measurable channels in which to spend their marketing budgets. Internet has an inherent advantage around measureability – although solid practices enabling this are still in its early stages . As he internet transitions into the central medium around which overall marketing campaigns will be based, digital marketers will be tapped to deliver robust strategies to lead the marketing initiatives within their organizations.