Star Wars: A New Hope... Dot GIF

Someone put the entire Episode IV story into an animated GIF.

Comments on Behavioral Targeting Piece

Ari Kaufman gave me a writeup on his blog Friday, submitting a few comments on this piece about Behavioral Targeting on iMedia. He writes:

Conceptually he did an interesting job of presenting the idea, but I am not sure that with the technology he is proposing to leverage, it is necessarily possible. Or maybe it’s possible but not really reliable.

As a follow-up to that, let me say that I think the idea of boosting profits by getting rid of the customers who actually take advantage of loss leaders, discounts, rebate policies, etc. is patently ridiculous. I wouldn't advocate actually making an attempt to use this approach. Count me as part of the camp that thinks Brad Anderson was nucking futs when he advocated identifying "devils" and avoiding marketing to them.

But on to Ari's point...

There is a huge difference between how Behavioral Marketing is talked about today from a conceptual standpoint and how behaviorally-targeted ad programs are actually sold. Proponents of Behavioral Marketing who have something to sell seem to talk quite a bit about custom segments, recency and frequency algorithms, unique behavioral identifiers for an advertiser's target audience and a bunch of other interesting stuff. Yet, when it's time to actually get down to brass tacks and sign an insertion order, the sales reps push back against anything that's remotely custom and try to sell category inventory instead.

I've been talking to my editor at iMedia about this, and there's some interest. Could be a panel at one of the summits, or it could be a column, or possibly both. I'll let you know once we have some direction.

Some of the companies selling behaviorally targeted solutions are able to demonstrate in theory that behavioral segmentation (and even the elimination of various undesirable segments) is possible. I have yet to see it done in practice, though. I'd challenge the behavioral marketing companies of the world to produce a case study with a testimonial from a client that shows custom segmentation and the elimination of undesirable segments actually worked as advertised.

I have no doubt these things are theoretically possible. It's the implementation I'm concerned with.

In Focus Piece on Conversational Marketing

A couple weeks ago, Brad Berens asked me to look into doing an in-depth piece for iMedia on successful blogging programs and how they might be made better. Here's the piece. I chose to look at GM, Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo for programs that seem to have gotten off to a pretty good start. Among the suggestions I made for Wells Fargo was that they need to make sure comments are addressed, particularly if they ask smart questions that can help steer topics toward what customers need to know. Not too long after I published, I got an e-mail from Ed Terpening, vice president of social media at Wells Fargo, who had this to say:

I manage the blogging team here at Wells Fargo. I was surprised that we had comments unanswered on one of our blogs, so I looked into this today (just back from the Thanksgiving holiday).

Turns out our lead blogger on Student LoanDown was traveling quite a bit this month, and the comments you mentioned in your article had "fallen through the cracks". Staci has posted TODAY a note about this lack of response and her effort to find answers. The questions asked don't have quick, easy answers (financial matters rarely do), so she is getting help from internal experts (see her post today titled "My Bad").

I measure the success of our blogs based not on page views or other traditional "web" metrics, but on _engagement_, typically measured through comments but also via "back-channel" email and when other bloggers write about us on their own blogs. We see this as an important two-way medium and so strive to be responsive and pick topics that start a dialog. I think if you look at our other three blogs (and another launching today), we've been responsive. This was an unfortuante mistake.

In any case, I appreciate both your catching this delay and your coverage of us. It's great to be mentioned in an article that includes GM and Sun, both clearly leaders in this medium.

Indeed, Staci Schiller at Student LoanDown posted that she had overlooked a couple questions from interested folks and that she's in the process of addressing them. Good move.

I like Ed's take on measuring the success of the Wells Fargo blogs. Too many marketing folks want to look at the Conversational Marketing channel as a direct click-to-buy effort, or in other short-sighted ways. Ed seems to get the notion of the value inherent in the dialogue, which is a refreshing counterpoint to all the "buy my crap!" rhetoric from marketing managers who see blogs as broadcast media.

Kudos to Ed and his team. Looks like they're listening.

Edelman Needs to Overhaul Wal-Mart Strategy?

Tom Siebert at OnlineMediaDaily reports that "[P]ublic Relations Agency Edelman will likely need to completely overhaul its online blogging strategy for its large retail client Wal-Mart if it hopes to maintain its membership in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association."  Problem is, he doesn't say in the story what specifically led him to that conclusion.  Did WOMMA give Edelman an ultimatum beyond the 90-day probationary review?  If so, the story doesn't tell me that. But it does carry some kick-ass quotes from B.L. Ochman.  Go B.L.!