Bo Jacobson's Posterous

Measuring social media is important, and it’s also difficult. Social medias bridge (or infringes upon, depending on your opinion) so many aspects of communication. Businesses already have established channels and metrics with which they account for these engagements through separate processes.  It’s only natural that, as companies begin to participate in social tactics, they look for specific and easily agreed upon metrics for success. One of these is the “brand mention”, which is what you call it when a user includes the name of a brand in his/her blog post, tweet or status update.  But I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the importance of the brand mention.

To start with, all mentions are not created equal. The phrases “this commercial really makes me hate brand X” and “that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen! I need some brand X” aren’t differentiated. And that’s just twitter-size bites. Then there’s the problem of public v. private sharing. There are very distinct personality differences between the people who Tweet and Digg and the people who might only share through email. You have to ask yourself if the audience you’re trying to engage with even wants to engage in public sharing, because catering to the audience that does can change the way your brand is perceived among the people that don’t. 

Any company wants to be top-of-mind, and even better to have one’s name on the lips of a target audience, and while mentions are often a symptom of success, I don’t believe that they are a stand-alone virtue. I have far more questions than answers on this so I’m going to leave the topic for now with what I do know: (1) We are still in the early days of two-way communication between brands and the recipients of marketing messages, and (2) I’m interested in far more than a Twitter search and a calculator to indicate positive communications. 

Before too much time passes I wanted to get some words down on what I saw with regard to the ads during this year's Super Bowl. First off, I'm not a believer that TV advertising is dead. I'm just not. There are still legs on the medium, it's a good way to reach lots of eyeballs in a more controlled environment without worrying about things like banner blindness or flash blockers or other technological challenges that you face with digital media. And I've seen stats indicating that as little as 30% of the American TV watching public even owns a DVR/TiVo. Add to that the least likely programming to be time-shifted is live sports and the Super Bowl is still an excellent opportunity to reach an amazing number of people at a common time. (There's also the increased media attention to commercials because they've become their own event)

Which leads me to the big negative statement that I'm so fond of: The Super Bowl ads tend to be examples of what not to do in broadcast advertising. Let's start with any ad that ends with "go online to see more video". I'm against these for two reasons: (1) the "more videos" are usually not worth the trouble of going to the site for and (2) the ad that invites me to go see more videos is not compelling enough for me to take the action. 

If a brand has a new and simple idea with broad appeal and needs a ton of audience on the quick (and some significant spare cash lying around), then the Super Bowl is the way to go. If a brand is trying to stay top-of-mind I think there are far more engaging communication media through which to reach a target audience. As a side note, a brand could make a great impression by following up on a heavily criticized ad with detailed explanation of why it was actually genius and everybody else is wrong. (I'm looking at you Dodge)

So what did I love this year? In a completely unoriginal move on my part I really liked the Google ad Parisian Love, which I first encountered online. (I actually love the whole search stories campaign both for the storytelling ability and the flexibility of concept). I also thought the McDonald's spot was a cool throwback, though I wish they had gotten Michael Jordan as well as Larry Bird. 

Here is the Google ad "Parisian Love" that they played during the Super Bowl

 I actually like the Batman Search Story the Google put out in late 2009 as well. 

Google Search Stories "Kevlar" from Mixtape Club on Vimeo.

It's day 1 all over again. I'm relaunching this blog and trying to elevate myself from a "bad" blogger to an unknown blogger. The two new tactics that I'll be employing are frequency and, for the most part, brevity. Trying to get what I see and what I think into consumable chunks can be a challenge because it usually requires that I complete a thought before espousing it. (which I simply don't always do)

So here's to me, and to you for showing up. Let's see what happens.