So the biggest non-surprise of the social-media business occurred last week when Twitter finally introduced its advertising model, Promoted Tweets. We all knew that the company had to show some significant revenue model in 2010, and we all knew that it would work to “monetize its traffic” by, we guessed it, placing advertising in front of people’s searches and tweet stream. Now it’s time to address the unanswered question that our clients are already asking us: “Should I jump into Promoted Tweets?” My simple answer, “Yes, and…”

Promoted Tweets basically applies the Google AdWords model to Twitter. Brands buy keywords based on what Twitter users are saying and searching for in hopes of getting a positive brand impression, click to website, or retweet of the ad to friends and followers. A very basic example is the one above: Search for “Red Bull” (full disclosure: a Bridge Worldwide client) and the first result is a Promoted Tweet that the brand created. Twitter is slowly and cautiously rolling out the service—starting with a handful of A-list brands such as Starbucks and Best Buy, and only using it on search pages. But the company promises to add this to the regular stream of tweets users receive, both on Twitter.com and the many third-party applications that use the Twitter API.

So what is a marketer to do? Especially one that is still not sure what to do on Twitter to begin with? This is the question that kept me up all Friday night as I pondered this blog post and a Digital Alert that we will send to our clients next week. There is a simple answer and a complex answer.

The simple answer is that marketers should definitely experiment with Promoted Tweets. Once it opens up to more than the first handful of brands, Promoted Tweets will likely be very easy to set up by anyone on the brand team. Like Google or Facebook, a very small amount of money can be used to start testing results. (I’m talking about even a few hundred dollars.) For brands that are already buying Google or Facebook ads this is an opportunity to divert a tiny amount of that existing budget to send traffic to the same places and gauge click-through rates and cost-per-click among these three options. Easy enough, right?

But the complexity comes when a brand manager opens a Promoted Tweets account—as this simple step can open up a can worms. First, you have to start thinking about people who like your ads and want to follow your Twitter feed. Uh, oh—you don’t have a Twitter feed. And if you start one, who is going to monitor it? After all, people expect brands on Twitter to be there for them and truly interact. This is what makes Twitter a “social media” after all. So when they complain about your service or rave about your new product, what do you do? Suddenly your work got a lot harder, legal wants to review your tweets, and your customer service and PR people are coming to your desk. Maybe it’s not worth the effort after all…

Don’t panic.

The lesson here is that it is time for your brand to start playing with Twitter and engaging with consumers through this new but high-growth service. The real first step is to create a Twitter account on your own and spend a few minutes per day playing with the service. Then read Advertising Age or Brandweek and see how a handful of marketers are using the service in new ways. By personally diving into the space you will quickly have the smarts to deal with the right approach to engaging with consumers as well as your organizational hurdles.

You will discover as a new Twitter user and already-smart marketer that the interruptive advertising model represented by Promoted Tweets is interesting, but by far the least meaningful to your consumers. Promoted Tweets will work best if you are already “out there” with added value. Red Bull, for example, bought its brand name on Twitter so that it can highlight its killer content and existing high-quality Twitter account.

But there are many more meaningful ways to use Twitter to create marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that adds value to people’s lives. For example, here at Bridge Worldwide, we recently gave Healthy Choice coupon downloaders the chance to share a product review on Twitter. Subway is giving people a chance to win gift cards by tweeting about their favorite celebrity. Dell sold more than $6.5 million in product through its Dell Outlet Twitter feed. And Southwest Airlines uses its Twitter account to live and breathe the fun that its equity represents. The possibilities can vary widely based on your business goals, customer insight, and the creativity of your team. And although you will have to put in some work to understand this new medium and get your organization comfortable with it, Twitter is an incredibly cheap and potentially powerful tool.

Just as Twitter is evolving as a company by experimenting with an ad model, your company should be evolving its marketing by experimenting with Twitter.

This week our strategy team got up in arms around a question from a partner agency that focuses on traditional (i.e., non-digital) marketing, and I felt it was worth sharing and discussing here. The agency was working on a project for one of their clients and asked the question: “What percentage of tweets are seen?” The data team at this agency was sitting down to build an algorithm to model tweet impressions and was looking for our digital/social expert opinion. An interesting question, indeed, and an example of how much baggage we need to overcome to move to the next evolution of marketing.

First, to address the question directly, our own Jonathan Richman provided some insights on the challenges of measuring how many people see a given Twitter message. He brought up the points that tweet readership varies by the time of day, how many people retweet a message, how many followers they have, the number of lists people might be on, the use of hashtags (#), and the types of Twitter API readers that people are using. There are challenges such as the fact that the more people you follow and more people who follow you, there are more “impression opportunities” but the ability to pay attention to any one of the individual tweets goes down. Richman’s answer as to how you can calculate all of these impacts: You can’t.

I added my own two cents to his response: You shouldn’t.

I didn’t have to ask my partner agency for an explanation to see what they were trying to do for their client. In the traditional marketing world that still dominates, clients want to measure marketing in common terms. For years this least common denominator has been the “impression”; brands have bought TV, print, and radio ads in the cost-per-thousand-impressions format, which allows them to compare spending across any form of interruptive media. In theory, this also helps marketers decide where to focus their budgets and time. Our industry’s most-frequent response to new media is to try and stuff it into the box of old media, so that dollars can flow from one to the other with confidence. So the question: How many impressions does each tweet receive?

So lots of very smart people are now spending their time modeling impressions per tweet, just because it’s the model we’re used to. The very obvious problem is that this is the wrong way to measure new media and new marketing that tools such as Twitter are bringing to brands. If we want to win in a world of exploding social change and killer competition, we must invent new measurement models rather than forcing ourselves through something that means less and less.

Last fall I wrote about how we marketers must abandon the common yet meaningless measure of impressions and instead begin to measure engagement—a key step on the path to Marketing with Meaning. Engagement to most of us in the industry occurs when a customer chooses to spend time interacting with marketing. It’s actually something that can be measured across all media as well. You can count the number of people who, say, choose to watch your YouTube video, subscribe to your email list, or become a fan of your brand on Facebook. Sorry, you do have to do a little more modeling to gauge the value of these different types of engagement—but this is how we marketers must earn our salaries, rather than just turning our jobs over to algorithms and up-fronts.

So instead of trying to count how many people view a branded tweet so that we can compare impressions to TV and print, how about we count something related to engagement? On Twitter, this would be the number of people who sign up for a brand’s Twitter feed, click on a brand-related URL through Twitter, mention the brand in Twitter posts, or retweet something about a brand. These are all examples of customers choosing to engage with a brand and share it with their friends. These activities (note the root “active” versus “impression”) show times when someone is consciously, choicefully dialed into your brand.

And, of course, we could develop similar metrics for traditional advertising. We could count the number of times people subscribe to your commercials on their TV sets, or how many people bring in print ads and hand them to their friends. Wait a minute: You can’t do that. No one does that. Which is exactly the point.

(Today Megan West, one of our rising star strategic planners, takes over for a guest blog post about a program that she and our ConAgra Foods team at Bridge Worldwide led for the Healthy Choice brand. I think this is another example of how social media is not a strategy, but rather offers many tactics that can help deliver better results on a strong overall marketing strategy. For more examples see my previous posts on Golden Tee, Estee Lauder, and MoMA.)

In September 2009, Healthy Choice launched a new TV spot featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in which the main call to action was to drive consumers to the brand website to print a high-value coupon. This was a first for our Healthy Choice team, and the number of people who would actually visit the site was a complete unknown. To be clear, this wasn’t just a 3-second tag or 10-point font callout at the end of the spot, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus herself telling people to go print a coupon online.

This was big. We were going to give away massive amounts of $2 printable coupons for two Healthy Choice products. And we also saw an opportunity to capitalize on this influx of visitors by giving them an opportunity to register for the Healthy Choice relationship marketing program after they printed, which offers a promise of more offers and goodies in their inbox.

Because this campaign was about trial of the new Healthy Choice products, getting a bunch of new registrants into the database was a tertiary benefit for many of the key stakeholders on the brand. But the digital team challenged itself to make sure these new people stayed active and engaged with the brand far beyond a commercial message and coupon redemption.

The Idea: Bite-Sized Reviews

We saw an opportunity to hit our trial goals and build long-term loyalty by implementing a “Bite-Size” review program. Here’s how it works:

• Two weeks after printing the coupon (i.e., enough time to go to the store, redeem it, and try the meal), consumers who registered for the Healthy Choice newsletter are sent a welcome email.
• The email invites them to come give a mini-review of what they thought about the product in exchange for another coupon. We offer $1 off any two products to encourage repeat purchase of different varieties.
• At the review site, consumers choose the product they tried, rate it, and post a 140-character or fewer review of what they think.

They then get a preview of the review and the opportunity to share their review in real time by pushing it out via their personal Twitter or Facebook accounts. The tool makes it simple for consumers to sign into their account and update their status.

We put a lot of thought into what information we want them to be able to share via Twitter. As marketers, our immediate thought was, “Make sure to get the URL in there,” but after really thinking about the true objective of pushing out reviews (awareness for the products), we decided to leave it off to give consumers more space to write their review.

Why It’s Meaningful for Consumers:

• It sends them an email soon after signing up, showing that the brand is going to deliver on the promise of “More Offers” and validating their reason for signing up.
• It gives consumers a chance to post their actual thoughts about the products they tried, with no content censorship by the brand. This lets people know that the brand believes in its products and really wants to know what people think about them.

How It Delivers Marketing Results for the Brand:

• It leverages our consumers’ social-media networks to build awareness of the brands’ products in the form of actual consumer language.
• It keeps news registrants active and delights them with additional offers and a chance to share their thoughts, hopefully turning them into brand advocates.
• The brand soon hopes to launch a Rating and Review section for all of the products on HealthyChoice.com (because they have recently re-launched the brand with all new food formulas and tasty new dishes!), and this helps us to build a repository of “seed” reviews that can pre-populate that section. We planned for this by asking consumers who submit reviews to agree to let Healthy Choice publish them for marketing materials later.

It’s far too early to report in results of this campaign and the specific review tool, and this gets into the area where we want to keep data confidential, anyway. But you can see for yourself the amount of reviews posted to Twitter by checking out the responses to @Healthy_Choice. As you can see, the reviews are starting to come in nicely in terms of amount and reaction. Taking just one example, @debbiemekler says: “Tried @Healthy_Choice Grilled Chicken Marinara. Tasty and well-seasoned. Would try move in the future.” This great, personal review went out to her 50 followers, who trust what she says as word of mouth, not advertising.

This goes to show that brands can benefit by finding ways to turn traditional marketing programs such as coupon offers into a way to tap into consumers’ growing desire to share socially.

My buddy and our agency’s President, Jay Woffington, is a master of comparing diverse data and figuring out how they add up to a common issue or opportunity. One of his favorite sayings is, “Two points make a line,” meaning that there can be a direct link between seemingly unrelated data or events. Well, it seems that we have another genuine trend on our hands, as now there are three prominent examples of companies that have turned over their websites to open social-media input by featuring unedited Twitter comments, Wikipedia entries, Facebook friends, and blog posts. First was Modernista!, an advertising agency, and next came the Skittles brand. Both experienced a mainly positive burst of buzz. The third example comes from another ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which has a live beta site that is attracting attention. Although the trend seems real, the questions linger: Is it meaningful… and it is worth the risk?

On the first question, I increasingly believe that adopting social media into your home page can be a powerful positive for customers. I say “increasingly” because the social-media space is evolving with the new digital social norms that are still self-organizing before our eyes. It is clear that already people are using social networks to judge any brand that they come across, whether it is posting a question to friends on Facebook, reading a review on an e-commerce site, or using Google, which often draws from personal reviews on blogs and discussion boards. So at the same time that people are visiting your brand’s website, they have a few other open browser tabs with this information. For forward thinkers such as Modernista!, Skittles, and Crispin, the logic is that they might as well go ahead and showcase this social media on the home page. So in this basis alone the approach is meaningful marketing.

The biggest marketing benefit can come when the brand website visitor first arrives and sees several positive stories, tweets, and blog posts. People judge a website and brand within microseconds, and some trusted, impartial comments on the home page can make a big impact. Instead of cluttering this moment of truth with ad copy, why not defer to the more-trusted comments of other customers? That’s what a billion-dollar brand that I used to work on, Tide, figured when it recently launched a home page redesign featuring actual user reviews front and center. And Juicy Juice is testing a banner ad that presents live tweets from moms.

But what about the risk and bad stories and comments that might appear at this moment of truth? Well, Crispin saw just what that looks like last week. First, it lost the Volkswagen account, which led to a rash of negative tweets and stories. It’s never fun to lose a big client, and worse to see the news everywhere. Second, the company took a lot of heat for running a contest in which it invited designers to create a new logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo for a $1,000 top prize. Many in the design industry felt that this was undermining and cheapening their craft. Again, another round of negatives has filled its beta home page. In fact, the very public space and open ability to add a negative comment likely invites a much more negative response than one would otherwise see. It’s the chance to hold a virtual picket sign on the company’s front lawn.

So Crispin would call this a failure, right? I don’t think so. They are smart enough to have anticipated the negatives that can happen and I believe they fully embrace the haters. Even negatives can end up being positive in this case. First, it shows that the company is in the center of the action and they matter. This falls under the age-old line that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. The second benefit is that this open acceptance of hate media actually helps them attract the right clients, those who want to take risks and want to build a brand with a little controversy. Jason Bender, one of our top Creative Directors and leader of the team that recently won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a Pringles banner ad (that was somewhat controversial), said it best in our conversation about the issue:

“This shows people that Crispin is not for everyone, and that they don’t mind alienating the tight-asses they don’t want as clients. This helps them weed out the bad prospects.”

With this open site, negatives and all, Crispin as a brand is living and breathing the kind of marketing that it does for its clients. Brands such as Burger King, MINI, and Microsoft hired the agency in order to stir up attention, and they’ve all gotten what they wanted. In fact, Volkswagen chose to look for a new agency because it felt it needed to broaden its marketing to a wider audience. This will likely mean more watered down creative and Crispin wouldn’t want to do it anyway.

Interestingly, this Crispin story comes just as we at Bridge Worldwide have started to dabble social media on our Web presence. You might have noticed that we just launched our new Marketing with Meaning site, and on the home page we decided to feature a live feed of Twitter posts that include anyone who uses my handle, @mktgwithmeaning. We actually got to this idea in a roundabout way. We asked Ryan, our Web developer, to try to increase interest in our Twitter account on the home page, and he wrote an Ajax widget that brought in live tweets. We loved the idea, but I hated seeing my picture 15 times running down the screen. Someone mentioned that we could bring in retweets and other @replies. I immediately loved the idea because it would show the new visitor at this moment of truth that this is a popular topic that others are talking about. Second, I knew that the people who followed the Marketing with Meaning cause would appreciate that we were giving them at least a few minutes of public attention on our home page. And this in turn would lead to more tweets.

But what about the negatives of our modest effort? Jay and I actually had a long conversation about what could go wrong. Our agency recently got dinged a bit on something we shared publicly, so we felt the need to be cautious. We thought about the worst that could happen: Someone could, say, protest our work for a client and flood the site with negative tweets. If a client CEO with no social-media understanding (rare, I know) visited the site and saw this on our own home page it could be a huge negative. However unlikely, it is possible, so we made some plans to deal with it, but launched the tool regardless.

Bridge Worldwide is no Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We don’t believe that we need to embrace controversy to build brands. However we do have a very defined point of view on the kind of work we want to do for clients: Marketing with Meaning. This blog, the Twitter feed, the upcoming book, and more all are tools that we use to put ourselves out there for client consideration. When I speak with clients and prospects about this concept I say that sometimes our work will be interruptive and less meaningful if that is what is called for; after all, we exist first and foremost to serve our clients’ needs. But I quickly follow that this is our starting point for all recommendations, and that we’re going to challenge them continuously to move in this direction.

Just as Crispin has successfully attracted clients that follow its brand belief, I hope that our focus on Marketing with Meaning will attract more of the clients we want: brands that buy into our concept and are ready to buy meaningful ideas. The more public we are with this statement, the more likely we are to succeed.

A few weeks ago I shared in a post here that I was working with a small group at Bridge Worldwide to develop a business model for Twitter. Quite a challenge, of course, but we came up with a very compelling idea that fits with our belief in meaningful marketing. At worst, it is giving us a nice strategy-plus-technology learning exercise. Since we started this R&D project a few weeks ago, I’ve been paying more attention to other developers’ attempts to wring cash out of the mighty growth of Twitter. Over the weekend I discovered a service called “Featured Users” and wanted to share my experience here. Overall, it looks compelling at first glance, but my results suggest this is not a big idea for marketers or investors.

Featured Users is an advertising network for Twitter application developers. The home pages of services such as Friend or Follow and Twibes.com agree to place a Featured Users ad unit prominently in their pages. The general idea and hope is that users of these free and valuable services feel compelled to repay them by visiting their sponsors. I decided to test the service because of the lost cost of trial ($10) and the chance to learn something for our work and this blog.

Setting up an account and program takes just minutes. For $10 on PayPal, I was able to buy 1,000 impressions. In the screenshot above you can see what that unit looks like. It is automatically generated by your current Twitter account, and thus includes your regular icon, Twitter address, account description, and the three most recent tweets. The results-tracking interface is basic but effective, showing the number of impressions, which sites they appeared on, and information on clicks (who clicked, when, and from which site).

My going-in assumption was that I would get something like a 2% click rate, or 20 clicks. This is far higher than the industry average for banners, which is about .1% and falling, and the rate on Facebook ads, which I have found to be as low as .02%. My rationale for believing in better results was that: (1) the ad placement is front and center; (2) Twitter users tend to be very interested in finding new people to follow (and getting followers in return); (3) this type of ad unit is novel, which means people haven’t learned to fully tune it out of their visual fields yet; and (4) I felt that there would be some “karma power” as people felt compelled to pay attention to sponsors for this free service. I believed that my Twitter account description, above, was fairly interesting. While my guess was higher than most ad units, I also went in believing that the results could be a lot worse. As a marketing investment, $10 for 20 new followers, or $.50 each, “felt” like a pretty good result.

The Results

My 1,000 ad impressions were exhausted within about 24 hours. This is the first lesson: It takes a while to burn through a very modest media buy. This suggests that the traffic on these affiliate app sites is fairly low. According to Featured Users, I received 6 total clicks on my ad. That’s a click rate of .60%, which falls below the service’s total average of .87%. That means the cost to me is $1.67 per click. That’s far less than my gut opinion.

Now, what I don’t know for sure is how many of these clicks resulted in followers. But if I look at my email account for messages about new followers, and compare them to the time on the clock that people clicked on my ad, then it looks as though I recorded zero new followers among my 6 clicks. Again, I might be wrong, but the evidence I have does not look good.

There are many reasons why results are so poor. First and foremost is the fact that people are just not interested in clicking ads—period. They are on the sites for a very direct purpose, and cruising off to a sponsor’s page is not on the agenda. Second, the ad units are completely untargeted. My marketing-related Twitter ad goes out to every single user, and I am guessing that click results would be better if I could, say, choose to show it only to people who have “marketing” or “social media” in their profiles. This would actually be simple for Featured Users to do, but it would mean far fewer opportunities to show my ad. This, in a nutshell, is the main reason we don’t see much hyper-targeting on the Web.

Now, there are probably a few things I could have done to improve my results slightly, of course. Featured Users suggested a few things such as ”include the words ‘if you follow me, I’ll follow you’” and “original and odd bios tend to fare better.” Yes, yes—this might help a little bit, but these “tips” are fairly gimmicky, and a slight improvement in the click rate would not have helped my total results much.

My Take

Featured Users is difficult to justify as a marketing investment. I love the fact that I can see clearly the cost of each new click at $1.67, but I likely gained zero new followers for my money. And even if I picked up a few followers, it is difficult to put a dollar value on the type of person Featured Users sent my way. We all still have a difficult time estimating the benefit of a subscriber. For me, the goal is to attract people who may be interested in buying the services of my company (Fortune 500 marketing employees), or those who buy my book when it comes out in October. It is certainly possible that new followers will somehow drive revenue, but it’s not clear enough to keep investing confidently.

The best way to attract Twitter followers is to create great content and work with your social network to spread the word, and this is a microcosmic example of what’s going on in the marketing world today. I attract dozens of followers on Twitter, for free, when I share a thought-provoking comment that my existing followers choose to “re-tweet” to their own networks. I received 18 new followers yesterday alone because people discovered my blog (more content) or found me through other search and recommendation services. People don’t see, want, or trust traditional “telling and selling” ads, but they will heap attention on those that provide valuable content—in other words, Marketing with Meaning.

Finally, I believe Featured Users is not a big idea as a business model for Twitter, either. On paper it’s a great way to bring a service to marketers and a business model to many app developers. Like Google AdWords or Amazon affiliate programs, it attracts some money for sites that have zero today, but the traffic isn’t high enough and results are not strong enough to attract a critical mass of opportunity.

So we’ll keep our Skunk Works R&D project on a meaningful business model for Twitter going—and I’ll keep creating content here and on Twitter to earn your attention and word of mouth.

A few of my close friends know that I have a habit of working on new product and business ideas in my spare time. It usually happens when I’m on a long flight from one end of the coast to another. Just as I lean back and close my eyes, inspiration hits and I am literally forced to pull out a notepad and start outlining the idea in great detail. In my past few flights, I have been inspired to work on a business model for Twitter. Sure, it might be a quixotic quest, but it’s an incredible mental challenge and just might help make money for our company and clients while making the world a better place.

I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi author William Gibson, and see myself continually using his famous quote: “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” I find this quote useful when I think about the companies that we work with every day. Each is at a different comfort level with digital marketing; some are still learning about email and websites, while others are challenging us to bring them the next cutting-edge technology. Our job is to adjust to their “base” comfort and keep stretching them a bit with each interaction or idea.

One of the reasons that we and our clients are not fully living the future today is that we don’t always see how the next digital bell or whistle can grow our business. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all great services for consumers on their own, but where’s the opportunity for advertisers? There are many creative ways to win on a case-by-case basis, but there is no one easy solution (certainly not banners, which are virtually invisible to visitors’ eyes).

And so the following quote came onto a PowerPoint slide over the weekend:

The future is here; it just needs a business model.

I’m sure a quote alone is not going to bring millions of visitors to this blog, but when I threw it out on Twitter this past Sunday afternoon, a few followers re-Tweeted me (gotta love the instant feedback)!

On Sunday I sat down at my laptop and created a presentation about a way to monetize Twitter and Facebook. A daunting task to be sure, but the idea rolling around in my head just seems too good to drop into the wastebasket. In fact, the couple of people I have verbally shared the idea with loved it. And I’m going to have a more serious discussion with my Tech team on the feasibility of it tomorrow.

In case you’re wondering what it is, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to keep it under my hat for now. But rest assured that it is completely grounded on the idea of Marketing with Meaning, and when I share something with the world you’ll hear it here first. For now, wish me luck that my fellow board members don’t laugh me out of the room.

After learning a lot at the Economist Marketing Forum in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to head in the complete opposite direction for the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Fort Myers, Florida. As usual, the iMedia folks hosted a great event that brought together people from the brand, agency, and media sides of digital marketing. Once again my notebook was full of some great insights and ideas that only seem to result from being there. Of course, my goal is to provide you, dear readers, with as many of those insights and ideas as possible in this blog—with a meaningful marketing spin, of course.

Overall, the two main focus area of the event were Twitter and mobile. It seems that the consensus from all was that mobile is close to going mainstream, while Twitter was the exciting new tool that promises to explode. Here are some of the specific takeaways that I collected from the guest speakers:

Christi Day, Emerging Media Manager, Southwest Airlines

I don’t think I have seen anyone who has a brand personality that better matches the brand she works on than Christi Day. Her goal was to make us smile as well as learn as she described how she got Southwest into the world of Twitter. She and her team in media relations first tried out Twitter on a lark in July 2007 and quickly gained a following. Eventually it became so successful and followed that Christi brought in people from both media relations and customer service. Instead of outsourcing Twitter responses to an agency or team, Christi takes the responsibility for herself, 24-7. Her tips for other brands joining the Twitterati: (1) Be Fun—connect to events, stories from real flights, and viral videos; (2) Be Real—show your personality and what’s going on in your real life; and (3) Be Relevant—provide information and notices, and promote fare sales. I was a little surprised to hear that Southwest is not tracking how the Twitter account leads to actual sales, but that is in the works. You can follow Christi at twitter.com/southwestair.

Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation, Kraft

Ed is the newest marketing rock star in my mind after hearing his story of the launch of the Kraft iFood app for the iPhone. It is already a huge success according to Kraft’s expectations, with downloads in a few weeks that met its three-year objective, and PR coverage valued in the millions of dollars. Ed talked about how the iFood app “brings us closer to becoming an indispensable food resource for consumers’ meal planning, preparation, and shopping needs.” This is a perfect example of how a great brand purpose leads to marketing with meaning.

I loved hearing some inside lessons about how Ed’s team got this remarkable innovation through the company by “keeping it under the radar,” and that a big key to success was leveraging Kraft’s database of 15 million consumers to drive initial awareness (another benefit of a decade of meaningful relationship marketing). Another huge help was Apple’s decision to feature the app on its App Store front page, which drove traffic “better than any paid marketing.” The tool is catching hold with new consumer targets including Gen-Y and Men (35 percent of users, “far above” the percentage in the Kraft database).

This is just the beginning for iFood. Ed alluded to upgrades on the way and said that it was built to be a platform for retail customers and even external marketers. Even working with competitors is possible, as Ed said that, “If we really want to fulfill our goal, we have to allow others in.”

Lara Green, Digital Marketing Manager, CoverGirl and Max Factor (P&G)

Perhaps the quote of the event was Lara’s claim that “mobile is no longer innovation” for her brands at P&G. In other words, it’s just the best way to reach the young girls and women that her brands target—and they have done enough experimentation to feel comfortable with this space. Another key to success is the fact that mobile has gotten a strong read in marketing mix modeling, which is the single best way to compare ROI across media alternatives. As evidence of the mainstream nature of mobile for CoverGirl, the brand actually has four mobile focus areas: (1) a strong WAP site; (2) a text-to-sample program; (3) a mobile CRM program; and (4) integration with other marketing activities. I was a little surprised to hear that a beauty product can “look good” in the small space of mobile screens, but its banners are getting 1 percent to 2 percent click rates, and when text-to-sample offers appear in print magazines, the supplies are exhausted in days. Another great example of meaningful marketing from CoverGirl in mobile is a ColorMatch tool that helps people make the right choice on the go and at the retail point-of-purchase.

Dr. Spencer Wells, Genographic Project Director, National Geographic

iMedia consistently mixes in pure digital marketing presentations with diverse speakers such as Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games. I specifically enjoyed the presentation by Dr. Wells, who is in the middle of a long-term project to categorize and glean human migration insights by sampling the DNA of thousands of men and women around the world. The Genographic Project is a long-term investment by National Geographic and partner brands such as IBM. It began way back in 2005 and is now starting to spin off insights. I loved the fact that National Geographic is funding the project and building personal connections by selling a $100 kit that allows anyone to submit his or her DNA and receive insights into family history. According to Dr. Wells, his management worried that no one would buy the kits, and hoped to sell 10,000; but more than 297,000 have been ordered so far.

So, another great collection of insights, some of which will make their way to my upcoming book. For more, check out the Twitter stream here. I hope to see you there next year.

Only a little more than 30 days ago my team at Bridge Worldwide and I entered the “Twittersphere” by creating an account in this fast-growing social networking tool. As I wrote previously, the main rationale for Twittering was to provide additional, meaningful content related to our Marketing with Meaning concept.  Instead of just two to three blog posts a week, I figured that believers in our mission would appreciate more, shorter examples. Little did I know that it would provide us with a great deal of benefits as well.

Frankly, I have to admit that I had purposely avoided Twitter for a while. In this business there are so many new technologies out there that you could waste a lot of time following failed ideas. In my brief look-sees at the technology, I also saw too many examples of posts like “just ate pancakes.” But the chance to provide meaningful marketing for our readers was too tempting to ignore.

Overall, I can definitely say that I’m loving Twitter and I think some version of it is here to stay. Over the past week especially, I feel like I felt back in the days when I first started reading blogs, or when I first found RSS feeds, or even when I first got on email. In the early days of such technologies, there is a common feeling that you have discovered something amazingly useful and interesting – something that will improve the quality of your life.

In terms of an assessment of Twitter, I really like Forrester’s take in the book Groundswell, where the company uses a tool to evaluate new digital marketing tools, and gives this service a thumbs-up.  Here’s my take:

What Works

• Accelerates the spread of knowledge (both ways) – There is a very rich stream of news and links that members share with each other. I’ve discovered some great data and case studies that I would not have found otherwise. It is also a powerful way for me to share Marketing with Meaning examples, which is helping to drive record traffic to this blog.
• Reaches the most advanced digital thinkers – In marketing this concept and the book, our general target is anyone who is responsible for marketing or agencies who work for marketers. But there is a more core group of digital influencers who will do the most to spread the word. They are the ones who the mass of marketers (and media) look to for suggestions on what’s new and important.  And they are all over Twitter. I really like the Twitter social etiquette that people should always give credit, and almost always follow whomever follows you.
• Creates new opportunities for partnership – I have just dipped my toe into the water of actually using Twitter to ask for specific help, but the community is often sending notes asking for examples, facts, or people connections. Just the other day someone in my network saw an exchange between a friend of mine and me about a specific marketing program, and out of the blue a person related to the company offered to arrange an interview for our book!
• Add-ons keep the service improving – There are countless tools that you can use to make Twitter more effective, which will keep advancing the usefulness of the service. I really like TweetDeck (better interface), SocialOne (allows auto-messaging for new followers), Twitter Search (find people easily), and Mr. Tweet (helps you find people with similar interests).  Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for great guidance on these.

Improvement Needed

• It’s marketing to the choir – The biggest downside for me is that everyone I tend to see is a fellow social/digital maven of some kind. So this is not where I’m going to be able to reach the general  marketer we need to connect with. I know of only two of my agency clients on Twitter, Kevin and Dave.
• Still lots of junk out there – Some Twits are interesting, and a lot are not. I think the community is still feeling out what is appropriate to share and what isn’t. But I’d like the signal-to-noise factor to be a lot better. And with all the noise coming through I know that I’m missing lots of really good links and comments.
• Huge time suck if you let it be - In the week since getting TweetDeck, a tool that makes your feeds much easier to follow, I have felt myself spending far too much time on this thing. It is addictive to “surf the community” with Twitter, similar to how some people find Facebook.

I am very, very excited about how Twitter will help us bring our Marketing with Meaning concept and upcoming book into the market successfully. We have more than 200 followers now and people keep finding us every hour or two. I can tell that this audience believes in the concept, and that they will use their network to share it with others. I am even more excited by the chance to recruit true believers who will take on the challenge of making the marketing they work on more meaningful.

Whether you’re new to Twitter or a seasoned veteran, check us out at: https://twitter.com/mktgwithmeaning.

(Updated link from Seth Godin – adds to this theme of this post, in that TV is a broadcast, push medium)

If you’re an avid marketing blog reader and writer like me, you probably logged on this morning and were surprised to read about the debacle for the Motrin brand around its new 45-second commercial.  Many people are offering advice and lessons, but let me be the first to say this and other inevitable controversies will destroy the TV commercial marketing model.

In case you haven’t heard the buzz, here’s a summary of the Motrin issue: Its new ad (above) attempts to connect with moms by talking about how some people “wear their babies” in things like wraps and Baby Bjorns (my wife’s choice for our kids, btw). The ad is an attempt by Motrin to convince mothers that the brand “feels their pain.” But a certain, very vocal set of moms is inflicting pain on the brand. They find the language of the ad offensive, and they have started a “Twitter Storm” of sharing their anger with friends and followers. The brand has since taken down its entire website, and is sending a letter to some angry customers.

Many important mom and marketing bloggers have hit on key lessons. For example, Dave Knox makes the great point that brands must continually monitor what people are saying about their brand. And Karoli wonders why the brand didn’t test this ad in some focus groups that have… um… moms with babies. Adam Kmiec counters that the brand team lacks courage.

But I think the “meta lesson” here is that this shows how hard it is to win with interruptive commercials. Let me first say that I’ve been there. Working on the Tide brand at P&G, I made a few ads that pissed people off. We ran a campaign called “Family Ties” with commercials that showcased family challenges, and how Tide could help solve problems and increase bonds. A lot of people loved the ads, but we always got our fair share of angry letters. People complained when we portrayed an interracial couple, and again when we featured a 40-something new mom. With each occasion we huddled as a team to consider our reaction and whether to pull the plug or not. We survived each scare, but this was back in the late ’90s, before the modern media world arrived…

Today, both general consumer groups and special interests have powerful tools at their disposal. Blogs, discussion boards, and Twitter are now used to spread and incite anger quickly. Search results keep the mistakes top-of-mind for years.

And while the pressure from consumers increases, the need to be noticed is forcing advertisers to take more risks. Brands are buying edgy creative that catches attention above the other 3,000 ads we see each day. And while they might connect with their majority target market, they end up inciting the vocal minority groups (who never asked to have the ad shoved in their faces).

The result is inevitable: GM is blasted for showing a robot that commits suicide. Snickers pulls its ad in which two guys accidentally kiss, and another with Mr. T firing candy at an effeminate jogger. State Farm pulled an ad that humiliated people who bike to work. There is even an organization called Fathers and Husbands that regularly protests ads that make fun of white male men.

What should the GMs, Snickers, State Farms, Motrins, and every other mass marketer of the world do about this constant, growing risk of angering an ever-more-vocal percentage of the population? It’s simple: Stop working to create the perfect 30-second story to interrupt them, and start figuring out ways to add value to their lives.

As regular readers have probably noticed, I’ve been posting less frequently in the past couple of weeks. My goal is to have three entries per week, but I’ve dipped down to one to two lately. Don’t worry; I have not run short of content and I think this is a temporary situation driven by a burst of travel and new business work in my day job. But I do wish there were a way to keep the conversation going when these periodic time crunches happen.

Today I had an “aha” moment when Alex Rolfes, my right-hand man at Bridge Worldwide on this project, asked me if I would be interested in setting up a Twitter account for Marketing with Meaning. My first thought was, “Why?” For those who have not run across this yet, Twitter is a service that allows you to send and read short (140 characters) comments throughout the day. Think of it as “micro-blogging.” I have been watching Twitter from afar for some time. Working in a digital agency means we have to stay ahead on new media concepts like this. I have a few friends and clients who are Twittering, but I have not jumped in myself yet. I haven’t gotten in mainly because I don’t see the use for my life.

Some brands have gotten into the Twittering game with mixed results and commitment. Delta Airlines got some positive buzz when it suddenly started Twittering last year. Alas, their feed has been untouched since May 2007, lasting a whole 30 entries. I found their Twits interesting but random. On the other hand, some brands seem be using their Twitter feeds for focused, meaningful purposes. For example, Dell has a price deal alert; the BBC is using it for news alerts; and Barack Obama is using it to communicate where in the world he is campaigning every day. All of these examples offer valuable information within the benefits of the Twitter format.

Overall, my early take is that Twitter is a useful tool when a brand has something short, fast, and meaningful to say to its audience. For the Marketing with Meaning brand, our marketing objective is to drive awareness and adoption of our core concept. I think Twitter could help us do this. First, short, fast, meaningful observations and examples will help us share our message under my personal time constraints. Second, I believe that our audience (you) finds it meaningful to receive these short bursts of content on a frequent basis. We will judge the results over time based on the number of subscribers and comments received. At worst, we’ll learn together about this new medium….

I’m looking forward to the experiment and hope that you will join our feed!

Here’s our URL: https://twitter.com/mktgwithmeaning