Alan Wolk’s The Toad Stool on Posterous

By PETER WALLSTEN

Sarah Palin will launch her national book tour next week, one part of a carefully crafted strategy that has allowed the former vice-presidential candidate to leapfrog traditional media outlets and appeal directly to her dedicated and vocal fan base.

Palin in the Spotlight

The coming tour through small towns and midsize cities is designed mostly to maximize sales of "Going Rogue: An American Life," which will be formally released Nov. 17. But associates say it also serves as a reintroduction for Ms. Palin and a warm-up for what promises to be a starring role in next year's midterm elections and, if her supporters get their wish, the next presidential race.

Among the features of this new strategy: buying Internet advertising based on Google searches of her name, and using Facebook as a key means of communicating with voters. Her team also has considered filing libel suits against bloggers who spread rumors about her family.

Sarah Palin emerged from two months out of the public view with a September speech in Hong Kong. Above, Ms. Palin at the Hong Kong airport.

Within its 413 pages, "Going Rogue" seeks to blame aides to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain for many of Ms. Palin's worst media moments in the 2008 presidential campaign, such as her interview with CBS's Katie Couric, according to a copy of the book purchased from a bookstore by The Wall Street Journal. Ms. Palin complained that the network "systematically sliced out material that would accurately convey my message." A CBS spokeswoman said the interview "speaks for itself."

Since then, her political tactics have been unorthodox. Her August Facebook entry warning that President Barack Obama's health bill would create a "death panel" inspired "tea party" activists to crash congressional town hall meetings and moved public opinion against the White House. Her surprise resignation from the Alaska governorship during the July 4th weekend helped her dominate the news and drove heavy traffic to the Web site for SarahPAC, her political-action committee.

From 'Going Rogue: An American Life'

• On being interviewed by CBS's Katie Couric: "I have had better interviews…I choked on a couple of responses, and in the harried pace of the campaign, I mistakenly let myself become annoyed and frustrated with many of her repetitive, biased questions."
• After Election Day: Ms. Palin assumed she would "go back to the job I loved. But what a difference ten weeks can make. Before my plane even touched down in Anchorage, shocking character assassinations of those I love had begun."
• On being told by McCain aides that she couldn't speak on Election Night: "This isn't the way it's supposed to end, I thought. I walked toward the stage with just Todd and some of the kids, with a rolled-up speech in my hands that I wasn't going to give."

"She resigned as governor, still has all this power...and her book before it's even published is a best seller," said John Coale, a Washington lawyer who helped Ms. Palin devise her early strategy. "Going Rogue" is published by HarperCollins, a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

The official publicity for the book starts Monday with a conventional feel -- taped sit-downs with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters.

On Wednesday, starting in Grand Rapids, Mich., Ms. Palin will ride a bus adorned with large images of her face and start connecting with supporters in the kinds of places she once described as "real America." The tour takes her to Noblesville, Ind., Roanoke, Va., Washington, Pa., military bases at Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, and the Villages, a GOP-friendly retirement community outside Orlando, Fla.

 

A number of Republican candidates for 2010 races are reaching out to Ms. Palin, hoping she can bring them political good fortune with an energized party base. Ms. Palin met for 30 minutes last week with Scott Walker, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin.

Mr. Walker said Ms. Palin offered no commitments, but made clear her intention to be present in next year's national campaign.

"What we said was she would bring a lot of excitement," Mr. Walker said, describing her ability to bring "a rally-like atmosphere for grassroots folks."

Discussion of Ms. Palin's Internet strategy among a core group of advisers began during the spring. One concern, said a consultant who was part of the talks, was her frequent appearance in unfavorable news articles and blog postings.

Ms. Palin was particularly angry at bloggers and the media, associates said, for speculation that her baby Trig was really the child of Bristol, her daughter.

At one point, according to people familiar with the discussions, Ms. Palin considered pursuing a libel suit against at least one blogger, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Ms. Palin decided against such a move because of the publicity it would bring.

Mr. Sullivan, in response, said asking "factually verifiable questions is obviously not libel."

A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin didn't respond to email requests seeking comment.

Ms. Palin's resignation as governor gave her freedom to try to reshape her image. Her announcement sparked the biggest surge in Palin interest since the election, according to Google Insights, a service that ranks the popularity of online search terms. People conducting Internet searches were directed through online advertising to the Web site of her political action committee, which collected email addresses and donations.

A page on Facebook, the social-networking Web site, became Ms. Palin's main sounding board. Nearly one million people have "friended" her. The page is accessible to people who aren't Facebook members.

"Whereas most people think the Internet is the place you lose control of your message, they have almost complete control of their message," said a consultant who has worked with her.

—Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wallsten at peter.wallsten@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A4

Whatever you think of her, it's a clever marketing strategy: using search ads and Facebook as the key elements of a campaign to reach her core target of passionate, non-mainstream fans.

Search ads let her target people looking for stories about her, many of whom are likely supporters, and communicating via Facebook means she's only talking to fans who are likely to give her strong support. She's completely bypassed the mainstream media, including Fox.

You may not like the message, but you have to give her props for her delivery methods, which are something that inanimate brands with passionate, non-mainstream fan bases could steal a page from.

A simple Facebook status update turned into much more for Rodney Bradford: an alibi after he was accused of a crime.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• 11:49 a.m. October 17, 19-year-old Rodney Bradford updates Facebook status
• A minute later, 12 miles away in Brooklyn, two men were mugged at gunpoint
• Bradford initially charged with robbery in the first degree and sent to Rikers Island
• Defense attorney realized he had an unbeatable alibiIi, with Facebook update

New York (CNN) -- For 19-year-old Rodney Bradford, a simple Facebook status update turned into much more: a rock-solid alibi after he was accused of a crime.

Confirmation of the time stamp on the update and the location from which it was entered showed he could not have been at the scene of a robbery in another part of New York City. After he had spent almost two weeks in jail, the case against him was dismissed.

The story began at 11:49 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, when Bradford was updating his Facebook status at his father's home in Harlem. A minute later, 12 miles away in Brooklyn, two men were mugged at gunpoint.

The next day, Bradford, who is facing a separate 2008 robbery indictment, found out police were looking for him in connection with the Brooklyn robbery.

Bradford turned himself in, confident he would be cleared. But after one of the victims picked him out of a lineup, he was charged with robbery in the first degree and sent to Rikers Island, home of the New York City jail.

It wasn't until Rodney Bradford Sr. discovered his son's Facebook update that the young man's defense attorney realized he had an unbeatable alibi.

"Throughout that week," said the attorney, Robert Reuland, "I worked with the district attorney's office and made them aware of who our alibis were, presented the Facebook evidence and generally tried to convince them that it would be wrong to proceed to an indictment in light of this evidence."

The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook for documentation that would prove Bradford had updated his account from his father's home in Harlem. It worked.

"It all corroborated our alibis," explained Reuland. "The Facebook thing was really the icing on the cake. I think, ultimately, it's what prompted the DA to dismiss."

The district attorney's office would not comment on the story because the case is sealed.

Facebook officials said they are "pleased" they were "able to serve as a constructive part of the judicial process."

The online social network is ready to join telephone records and video cameras as a means of establishing an alibi -- but the implications are both good and bad, says an intellectual property attorney versed in the medium.

"We're in a much more trackable world, and for better and for worse," said attorney Jonathan Handel. "The extent to which it means that the right people get prosecuted and the innocent get their cases dropped, that's all of the good."

But, he said, the issue of privacy is also at stake.

And he pointed out that it could be argued the Facebook update was a set-up.

"On the Internet, nobody really knows it's you," he said. "A kid could set up an alibi by setting up a Facebook update."

Reuland finds that unlikely.

"This is a 19-year-old kid. He's not a criminal genius setting up an elaborate alibi for himself," he said. "This is not the kind of thing someone would fake." And if someone were going to fake it, he said, "They'd do it in a lot clearer way" than the inside joke that Bradford posted: "On the phone with this fat chick... where my IHOP."

The message was met with some incomprehension by reporters first writing about the story, who didn't quite understand the reference to the International House of Pancakes.

Reuland explained it this way: The "fat chick" was a playful reference to Bradford's pregnant girlfriend who was irked that he, his father and his stepmother had gone to an IHOP without her the night before. The update teased that she wondered where her pancakes were.

"He was just kind of taunting her playfully about having been to IHOP," Reuland said. "I know it sounds not very nice but it's sort of a reference to her because she's pregnant. But they actually have a very good relationship. She's cute as a button."

Now that his innocence has been demonstrated, Bradford has hired civil attorney Herbert L. Schmell, who said they are "99.9 percent sure" that they will be filing a civil suit against the city.

"Based upon what I see, there was no probable cause to arrest him at the time," Schmell said. "And to put him in Rikers for 12 or 13 days. ... We're seeking money damages. He's shook up."

 

Sounds like this is ready-made for Law and Order: A New York man's Facebook update is proof he could not have been at the scene of the robbery he's accused of.

Wrigley Drops Tribal DDB, Digitas and Agency.com for Digital

Big Spaceship, Firstborn and EVB Will Compete for Future Projects

Posted by Kunur Patel on 11.10.09 @ 02:21 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Wrigley is yanking digital agency-of-record duties from Tribal DDB, Digitas and Agency.com and shifting to a creative shootout strategy between a roster of agencies including independents Big Spaceship and Firstborn, and Omnicom majority owned EVB, according to executives familiar with the matter.

Yesterday, a memo went out to the confectioner's agency partners that Wrigley will not maintain digital agency-of-record distinctions in 2010 for the majority of its confections, gum and mints brands. Instead, the roster shops will present strategic recommendations across brands and participate in brand planning and execution for particular assignments as needed across websites, display advertising and mobile. The decision was made following a recent review of Wrigley's agency relationships, and the roster was compiled without a pitch.

"The multi-agency roster creates the best opportunity to drive innovation, value and breakthrough execution," said the Wrigley memo.

According to one person familiar with the matter, the digital agencies will work directly with Wrigley's individual brand teams on projects, rather than through its mainline Omnicom creative agencies, DDB and BBDO.

Big Spaceship; Firstborn; EVB; Omnicom siblings Tribal DDB, TBWA Worldwide and Agency.com; and Publicis Groupe's Digitas declined to comment.

The roster shops, especially Firstborn and Big Spaceship, have a heritage in digital production work and have often partnered with lead agencies to execute highly technical creative ideas. Recently, these small independent operations have been winning increasingly more direct-to-client work. Most recently, Firstborn won direct-to-client digital responsibilities for PepsiCo's Sobe.

Tribal DDB has done work for 5, Orbit, Altoids and Eclipse, and Agency.com has done work for Skittles. Digitas loses digital agency-of-record duties for Starburst and retains all digital media duties for Mars brands.

Contributing: Jeremy Mullman, Emily Bryson York

0 Comments

 

 

The first of what I suspect will be many shifts from the "1.0" web shops to the 2.0 ones.

Great quote in this article from Ed Cotton of Influx Marketing:

"Back in the Mad Men era they had the seat at the table when their ads could make or break a company, now it's all about product and service design, that's aligned to a big strategic idea. "

Hat tip to Tom Ajello for the find

 

NTDOY Oct 30 2009, 05:20 PM EDT

31.41	Change	% Change
	+0.16	+0.51%

At Arc90, one of our meeting rooms is proudly called the Wii Room. It’s an informal meeting space with a whiteboard, projector and…a Nintendo Wii. When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.

 

Fast forward about six months from the time we got the Wii and it’s a completely different story. It was hardly being used. Fast forward two years to today and I can confidently share that it probably hasn’t been turned on in over a year.

And this isn’t only about the cumulative short attention span at Arc90. A handful of friends have told me that they hardly ever play their Wii’s anymore. The narrative is fairly similar across the board: “we bought it, played bowling and stuff like crazy and then we just sort of…stopped.”

Beyond my circle of acquaintances, Nintendo is reporting that sales of the Wii are slowing considerably. They cite a few different reasons, but it’s all a fairly strange turn for a product that I and many others were gushing over as a great example of innovative, forward-thinking design. We lauded the approachability of such a simple and intuitive platform. It attracted such an incredibly broad audience beyond the hardcore gamers. From the elderly in retirement homes to little kids barely past first grade, everyone loved their Wii’s (at least for a while).

So what happened?

Before trying to figure out what happened, it’s worth mentioning that the Wii is still, by just about any measure, a resounding success. With less impressive, but more innovative hardware, Nintendo rose from the ashes to become a major player yet again in the console market.

That said, it could be argued that one of Nintendo’s brilliant strokes: to appeal to a much broader, less technically savvy market, actually ended up putting an expiration date on the appeal of the Wii. By winning over the unwashed masses and not just the “gamer” demographic, they Wii’s appeal declined almost as quickly as it rose. In other words, the Wii became a fad.

Merriam Webster defines a fad as “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal.” (emphasis added). Oddly for the Wii, one of the reasons it became a fad are the very reasons it was so wildly successful in the first place. It was easy to pick up and play. The initial batch of games lacked any perceivable depth or complexity and it was just plain fun to wave around a controller. It was a novel experience that nearly everyone could relate to.

As the next round of game releases started to hit the Wii, that same audience had no interest in them. The novelty of waving around a controller wore off and newer titles that were more complex or required more of an up-front time investment weren’t appealing to the population that had found the Wii so compelling in the first place.

And what of the hardcore gamers? They never bothered to come over to the Wii in the first place. It was the gift you bought grandma. You still needed your Xbox 360 to play Grand Theft Auto.

One of the design lessons that can be learned from the Wii’s story to date is to think long and hard about how we can create things that are both welcoming and captivating but also have an eye towards longevity. It’s one thing to initially capture someone’s interest. It’s a whole other matter to have a longstanding, evolving relationship with its user.

In all fairness, the Wii did about as much as it could to succeed with the demographic it won over. While my grandma may love bowling and think it’s an absolute blast, she will never, I repeat never go to Gamestop and pick up a few new Wii games. In fact, she doesn’t even know that games are on DVD’s in the first place. She just turns it on and bowls. That may well be the crux of the issue. The Wii made such a powerful first impression that it narrowly defined itself. It became novelty, no different than the Rubik’s Cube or Beanie Babies.

So be warned product designers, be novel, but be careful. People love to stereotype, and once they do, it’s pretty hard to break out of it.

This post orignally appeared on the author's blog, at Basement.org.

illustration via: SuperMarioLegacy

Interesting take on why Wii's popularity may also be its downfall.

Vaynerchuk, more commonly known as @GaryVee, runs the Wine Library, which just happens to be the local wine store in my neck of New Jersey. (In fact it took me a couple of months to put together that GaryVee's Wine Library was indeed the same store I'd been frequenting the past couple of years.)

As a result, I've met Gary a number of times in person, and he really is all that. A smart passionate guy whose message is spot on and who really believes in what he's preaching. He scares the agency crowd some too, because what he's preaching is an updated version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" aimed at the traditional agency model.

Worth checking out.

The Art of the Spectacular Fail

Your Agency Should Be Kissing More Frogs

Posted by Darryl Ohrt on 10.07.09 @ 10:46 AM

Darryl Ohrt

Our industry is one of the most self-congratulatory industries short of Hollywood. There are award shows for every success in our industry, every market, every town, for every pixel that was ever touched by a creative person. There are top 10 lists, charts, and metrics galore that illustrate just what a big deal our agency's creations are.

Failure is what delivers us to this greatness. Yet most agencies don't celebrate failure. Or at least not to the degree that we should. We were having this discussion at our agency recently, and attempted to name our top failures for the year.

We only came up with a handful of "fails" over the last 10 months. Some would say, "That's because we're successful," but I worry that we may be failing at failing. Here's our top three 2009 fails:

1. Friday Flakes. We believe in video, and attempted to launch a weekly Friday program highlighting the bright spots from the week on our blog. We found that the show didn't really offer much value outside of what already existed on the blog. FAIL.

2. Skype on the tour. Skype is hot. My wife commented, "Even Oprah uses it." So we figured it would be a natural on our road tour, and invited Plaid Nation viewers to "Skype the Flex." Almost 1 million page views later, less than 10 Skype calls. FAIL.

3. Donut Economy. As the economy was tanking big time earlier in the year, we thought it would be super funny to explore a world where the economy was based on donuts. Donut shops would replace the Federal Reserve. Policemen would be rich. We shot and edited a video. Hilarious, right? Not according to the lame video we produced. (It never made the light of day.) FAIL.

I really believe that as a small agency, we should have at least one great failure a month. Doing so ensures that we're pushing ourselves further, learning things that we didn't know before and becoming better creatives.

Segway, a client of ours, has a wonderful program that turns failure into success. Their product development group celebrates what's called "Frog Day." After a period of rapid prototyping, they award the team with the most spectacular failure a heavy iron frog. Eric Fleming, director of marketing, explains: "We call it 'frog kissing' under the premise that you have to kiss a lot of frogs in order to find a prince."

This enables the Segway team to say "don't go there" quickly, before precious time and money is spent chasing something that was destined to never work. The program has yielded several "princes" too, including the four wheel quad and Project P.U.M.A.

From here forward, our agency will be looking for one spectacular fail each and every month. Maybe we'll even celebrate them with cake. What about your firm? How many times have you failed spectacularly this year? Could you fail more?

~ ~ ~
Darryl Ohrt is a former punk rocker, the founder of creative agency Plaid and chief contributor to the greatest blog in all of the land, BrandFlakesForBreakfast. While his business card says he's "band manager" for the agency, Darryl prefers to call himself an internetologist. Darryl knows just enough to be dangerous. He's on the internet right now, playing, investigating and exploring. Watch out.

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Great piece from Darryl Ohrt on the ad industry's fear of failure

YOU can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.

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The Heads of State

Related

Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web (May 12, 2009)

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The Heads of State

Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.

Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

The book industry has not received cheery news for a while. Publishers and authors alike have relied upon sales of general-interest hardcover books as the foundation of the business. The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008, versus the previous year. This year, these sales were down 15.5 percent through July, versus the same period of 2008. Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.

“We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books — pretty much every category is turning up,” said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at the association. “What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy’s a big concern.”

Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, said: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”

We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry’s inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple’s highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads “are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.”

Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. RapidShare does not list the files — a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one.

But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the U.R.L. and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.

“As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material,” Mr. McCoyd said. “Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it.”

When I asked Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, if the company had a general sense of what kinds of material were most often placed on its servers — music? videos? other kinds of content? — she said she could not say because “for us, everything is just a file, no matter what.”

At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that offers publishers antipiracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.

Ms. Scheid said her company complied with publishers’ take-down requests. But the request must refer to a particular file and use the specific U.R.L.; it’s left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers. (I can report that RapidShare acted promptly in September when my publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked it to remove an audiobook version of one of my own books and provided the U.R.L. for the one file.) According to Ms. Scheid, the company gets requests to remove about 1 to 2 percent of the files that are uploaded daily.

To protect users’ privacy, however, she said RapidShare does not attempt to block the uploading of infringing material in the first place: “We don’t do content filtering; we don’t look into uploaded files.” Once a file is removed, the company tries to keep perfectly identical files from being uploaded again, but she listed various ways that determined users can alter the files just enough to effectively circumvent these measures. (My book reappeared on RapidShare a few days after it was taken down.) Hotfile and Megaupload did not respond to requests for comment.

RapidShare and fellow online storage services say that their services help users share large files easily or store personal data without having to carry around a memory stick. On the F.A.Q.’s page of its Web site, Megaupload depicts its customers as the most ordinary of citizens: “Students, professional business people, moms, dads, doctors, plumbers, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, you name it.”

Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”

I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Recommend Next Article in Business (4 of 30) » A version of this article appeared in print on October 4, 2009, on page BU1 of the New York edition.

As Kindle reaches critical mass, it seems that e-books may be the latest media subject to "Napsterization" - widespread free downloading of pirated versions. The effect on the book publishing business will be massive.

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October 03, 2009

Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring.  I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it.  A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it.  I got the typical response.  Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home.  It won't work, or at least not well.  Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. 

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?

Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.

My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest.  This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data.  And we are faced with an immediate dilemma.  How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source.  So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!"  What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website?  Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing".  So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration. 

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days.  And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools  to that slice of the Internet. 

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective.  So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs.  Simple and straight forward, no?  All great ideas are.  Or so I tell myself.  ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view.  And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign

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Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring.  I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it.  A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it.  I got the typical response.  Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home.  It won't work, or at least not well.  Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. 

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?

Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.

My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest.  This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data.  And we are faced with an immediate dilemma.  How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source.  So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!"  What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website?  Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing".  So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration. 

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days.  And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools  to that slice of the Internet. 

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective.  So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs.  Simple and straight forward, no?  All great ideas are.  Or so I tell myself.  ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view.  And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign

Valuable read from Toronto's Sean Howard on smarter ways to use services like Radian 6 to get what you want from the data.