December is already upon us which means the Big Game is just around the corner. Super Bowl XLII television spots are already drawing new media attention. Following an Ad Age article that claimed 90 percent of the game day slots had already been purchased by October 30th, an onslaught of conversation surged, drawing conclusions and allegedly disclosing which companies are reportedly participating in Super Bowl XLII.

While tracking Super Bowl Advertising in Collective Intellect’s interface, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of companies that are allegedly paying the 2 million plus it costs for a 30-second spot during this season’s game. My hope is to have gathered a complete list of potential advertisers and check my findings against the Super Bowl XLII advertisements.

Let’s begin with this year’s most aggressive move which came from Bridgestone Tires. Dale Buss reported - in a blog that examines the automobile industry involvement this year - that Bridgestone not only purchased two spots for the game, but has also signed a contract to sponsor Super Bowl XLII and XLIII half time shows.

Other automotive company decisions in this piece came from GM who is only airing one commercial and Cadillac, who will still sponsor the MVP of the game, but will build-up to this moment with placement during the NFL Playoffs. Buss reported that the remaining major car companies are all on the fence.

If these car manufacturers are on the fence, than GoDaddy.com is this wood, white-picket, boundary of indecisiveness. A Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons blog post in August, titled The 2008 Super Bowl. Why Go Daddy might sit this one out., in which Parsons presented a very convincing argument why the Web Domain specialists should pass up their coveted slot:

“And then there’s always the risk that our ads on the Big Game might stumble. For our ads to work, they need to be “super” edgy — or they don’t work. There’s always the possibility that we might not be able to get an appropriately edgy ad approved. All this considered, there’s a strong argument for staying on the sidelines this year and taking that Super Bowl advertising money and using it for other opportunities.”

For this reason, I penciled Go Daddy on my list of Super Bowl no-shows. But on Tuesday, Parsons’ blog was titled The 2008 Super Bowl is a go! A hilarious ad gets rejected. You’ll never guess why. Go Daddy had not only bought spots for Super Bowl XLII, but some of their potential spots have already been denied by Fox for “poor taste.” The controversial blog post by Parsons has generated more conversation in media and new media domains, than any other Super Bowl advertiser. This only confirms that Go Daddy is the champion of controversial and successful advertising.

Some other Super Bowl advertising rumors include a Universal spot for The Incredible Hulk, Gatorade’s first Super Bowl spot since 2003 and Cars.com’s rumored purchase of two spots this year. And big news that Pepsi will be launching a campaign during the game that will involve free music downloads and feature Amazon’s new music purchasing site.

Look for part 2 of this post to see what new rumors have surfaced around advertising for Super Bowl XLII and if I missed any, please comment with links so I can make my list as full as possible.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

The other day, CNN Money’s Paul R. LaMonica posted an interview with Jim Nail of Cymfony, positing the inevitable bubble of social networks because marketers won’t be able to monetize them in the typical traditional way that advertisers expect.

His point is that there will be consolidation in the social network market, some will go under and VC money for social networks will dry up.

Well, sure, that is definitely inevitable.

Bad ideas will naturally die, but the whole idea behind social media means that marketers will just have to work that much harder to get the attention of consumers out there. Because really, it is all about attention, and wake up folks, people are not paying attention to your ads, except as entertainment — and even that has no correlation to brand loyalty.

The social graph is giving shape to narrower and narrower online communities. Its not a container for marketers to hawk their wares to people, and people stuck in the mindset of a traditional advertiser will continue to stumble in their forays into “social media marketing.”

The mass media approach is broken (and has been for a long time), and the continued fragmentation of media means that marketers and advertisers actually have an incredible opportunity to reach just those people online who might care or might be interested. Decentralization and fragmentation of media just means that targeting is more strategic and more measurable.

It’s time for marketers to realize that trying to maintain control, to a great degree, will only fall flat. That means sticking with the endless banner ad route will only accomplish so much, and pushing endless ads on MySpace and Facebook will just cause people to tune out — Do you pay attention to the Flyer ads on Facebook? I don’t. I join groups, answer questions, use and try out apps and generally participate in the areas that interest me.

The most successful social media campaigns are the ones that let users take over an idea and run with it. Companies that embrace the decentralization of media will see value from the social graph. Those that approach it like yesterday’s banner ad will continue to be stuck in the paradigm of mass media.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

So maybe Stephen Colbert’s “presidential run” was just a publicity stunt; an extended, glorified book plug (I’ll help him out– I Am America, And So Can You). For a brief week or so, I suspected he might have a grander scheme in mind.

Every year, The Daily Show people show up to the national conventions and run amuck. I believed this was an attempt to up the ante–to actually have an official candidate on stage to help take satire to a whole new level. I also believed Colbert might announce his retirement as a “pundit” after his inevitable flame-out. It would be the perfect exit strategy.

Well, I was wrong, obviously.

But then again, who knows how it would have turned out if the South Carolina Democratic officials had voted differently, or if the writers’ strike hadn’t occurred at exactly the wrong time.

Regardless, Colbert’s brief time in the media’s political spotlight made for a much more interesting and slightly surreal couple weeks in the political blogosphere. It was funny as hell to read respected political commentators and online publications talk themselves into accepting a basic cable late-night comedian as a viable presidential candidate. They investigated the legal precedents, and tried to quantify and analyze the effects he’d have on the race and the other “real” candidates. But really, how could you consider Colbert any less “real” than the wild-eyed and vaguely terrifying Mike Gravel, or Tom Tancredo, who in one early debate asserted that he wouldn’t rest until he didn’t have to press 1 for English, and 2 for Spanish when calling customer service. And kooky, cuddly Kucinich–the man once stood on a balcony with Shirley MacLaine, watched a triangular UFO split open the sky like a sheet, and it gave him “directions in his mind.”

It’s no surprise then that in a national poll, Colbert was favored higher than both Kucinich and Gravel (as well as Bill Richardson–another avid UFO enthusiast). What was a bit surprising was when I took a look at blog mentions of each of the Democratic candidates across a wide range of political blogs, the amount of mentions of each candidate was almost identical to their poll positions:

Republican polling firm “Public Opinion Strategies” conducted a national poll on Oct. 18-21 of 1000 likely 2008 voters:

“In the Democratic primary, Colbert takes 2.3 percent of the vote — good for fifth place behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (40 percent), Sen. Barack Obama (19 percent), former Sen. John Edwards (12 percent) and Sen. Joe Biden (2.7 percent. Colbert finished ahead of Gov. Bill Richardson (2.1 percent), Rep. Dennis Kucinich (2.1 percent) and former Sen. Mike Gravel (less than 1 percent).”

Is this congruence between the poll and online buzz a lucky coincidence, or does polling match social media buzz? Perhaps it’s one of several incidents in which online chatter mirrors real-life buzz. However, this POS poll does seem to be blanketed by a thin layer of Truthiness. Inexplicably, the numbers only add up to around 80 percent with no explanation–and I refuse to believe that MIA Chris Dodd has more votes than Obama. In my opinion, other polls on the issue used vague, somewhat-truthy wording to get a good lead.

Colbert’s presidential run, though obviously tongue-in-cheek, fizzled out before it had a chance to truly shine; but for a while it did help illuminate how bizarre and unreal politics can sometimes be. Oh right, and his book is currently number 8 on Amazon.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Mass Media/Culture // Add Comment »

Should have done this last week, but I never did get a chance to put my spin on the BlogWorld experience. At my session with Ari Newman and Howard Kaushansky, not only did we discuss tracking corporate reputation, but also about personal reputation. With so many people now putting out a public persona as part of life and work, anyone working in the online space also needs to pay attention to their personal reputation online.

We had lots of good dialogue with the attendees, as well as amongst us. One of the key points raised, from me as well as through the discussion, was that deciding when to respond to potential reputation-dinging posts can be a difficult decision, because not everything is worth responding to (basically not everyone is worth having a dialog with).

Some good questions to think about before responding about an issue:

• how big is the blogger’s audience? Or, if posted on a message board, how active is that board?
• is the issue delicate enough that you might rather it die quietly, or would posting a response add more fuel to the fire?
• how forthright can you be? Since being authentic is key, if you can’t be, then perhaps leaving it alone is a better solution?

I’m not saying that these are the only things to consider, or that I am even right. My experiences with Collective Intellect’s customers vary — sometimes addressing a blogger or community directly is a good idea. Other times, a phone call or an email is a better approach. Other times, it makes sense to just watch and wait.

The key is, if you’re not watching, then you can’t make good decisions. You’re working with limited and potentially inaccurate information. Access to a dedicated service such as Media Intellect gives you the data you need to make better decisions in reputation management, and gives you the tools you need to track what happens with your response afterwards.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Reputation Management // Add Comment »

Lee Odden has a great post outlining uses of Twitter for marketing and PR, and for enhancing personal reputation online. He’s also posted links to other guides to using Twitter.

What I want to know is, who, besides me has two different tweats going, personal and work?

Tags: Brand Management, Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) // 1 Comment »

This workshop was presented by the very dynamic Avinash Kaushik. Avinash really set up the story well, in that measurement of traffic doesn’t work anymore (”google analytics only gives you a slice“). He spoke about know you need many different measurement tools to measure success of a blog and in general of online presence because the way content is distributed is radically changed. So, it is now much more challenging to measure engagement online, because there is no one tool that does it all.

Big lesson: Blog audiences build gradually, just because you make it to the top of Digg, doesn’t mean you are going to stay there. A regular audience grows gradually. He considers FeedBurner subscribers to be the most loyal, because they allow him to push content to them.

He is a unique blogger in that he writes long posts, not a lot of posts. His purpose is to write about complex things in an easily understood way, so for him, the conversational aspect of blogging is a key to his success — meaning, do people comment? His commenters write more words than he does (interesting).

He talked about Technorati Rank as relatively useless, because it is too general by putting every blogger in the same bucket. Here’s how I think about it.

Measures of influence are subjective — they depends on who the audience is. If you’re blogging about sports — about hockey — does it really matter if your Technorati Rank is really low? No, because if you have a large audience interested in hockey that’s engaged in a conversation with you (comments, links to your posts, etc), that’s the true measure of your authority and/or influence in the topic of hockey.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics // Add Comment »

This morning at 10:15m, I will be co-presenting a seminar on Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere, with two of my Boulder colleagues, Ari Newman of Filtrbox and Howard Kaushansky from Umbria. If you’re in Vegas for BlogWorld, stop in to our session, ask questions and stay and listen for a while, it should be an interesting conversation. One of the things I will discuss in whether reputation always matters for companies in every industry. Plus, just like in middle school, reputation is only as good as the people who like you, so understanding who those different influencers are is very important to gaining understanding of your reputation.

Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to blog other sessions later — at the very least, I will Twitter my experiences. Follow me at CollectiveIntel.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Brand Management, Public Relations, Reputation Management // Add Comment »

Toyota has launched an ad campaign to revive their green “halo” in the wake of the bad press that they have been receiving over CAFE standards. The campaign price tag could run around $40 million. Since the consumer seems to have a short memory, one has to question whether this is money well spent.

Tags: Reputation Management // Add Comment »

As part of my ongoing analysis of the Oil & Gas sector for Collective Intellect’s customers, I’ve noticed Alberta’s oil sands are getting hammered from every direction. First, the Albertan Premier announced the New Royalty Framework which includes an increase in the taxation of oil sands.
Five days later a Guardian article revealed the inhumane conditions at Fort McMurray making it a popular topic of conversation in the blogosphere. On that same day, to add insult to injury, advancements in the United State’s plan to curb global warming gas emissions listed oil sands as a main target:

“Pumphrey said there are more than a half-dozen bills before Congress that would introduce a national system to cap greenhouse gas emissions and establish a market for emissions credits. Several of those bills would ‘penalize’ energy sources like Alberta’s oil sands, which produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than conventional, lighter crude, he said.” -From
Price of Oil

I examined the sentiment and activity around these events. It appears that news of the Alberta tax hike caused the largest spike in activity, news and message board traffic, seen on 10/25 and 10/26.

The Guardian article and the development of a US assault against global warming may not have produced as much overall activity, but did create a spike in blog posts and negative sentiment on 10/30.

This leads me to believe that the increase in taxation - however important to officials, investors and companies dealing directly in the oil sands industry - will not effect oil sands operations as much as the developments on 10/30. It is the only day to scale where negative sentiment is greater than positive and includes by far the most blog activity.

Either way, it’s been a tough week for Alberta oil sands.

Tags: Analyzing Consumer Generated Media, Social Media Analytics // Add Comment »

Last week Google updated its PageRank algorithm, which lowered the PageRank of some fairly well known blogs. This PageRank change caused quite a stir on Techmeme, upsetting many bloggers. And rightly so, as Google is responsible for bringing their message to the masses in the same way that Primate Legend Jane Goodall has brought us fantastic stories about the princely chimpanzees.

But did these complaints affect Google? A look at Collective Intellect’s sentiment data tells another story.

The graph to the left shows Google’s daily sentiment as compared to Oct. 24th, the day the PageRank change was made. The sentiment data shows that Oct. 24th had the fourth highest sentiment of any day over the last to weeks; and the day following the PageRank change had the second highest sentiment over the same period.

After looking at this data, it is not surprising to note that the PageRank discussion died down within a day.

Tags: Blog Analysis // Add Comment »