CopyDiva

It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what aImage via Wikipediabout the rest of the people interested in these topics that frankly don’t have the travel budget and don’t live within driving distance?

Well, Bryan Eisenberg has done all of us a favor, and posted an online virtual conference mashup of recorded presentations from conferences he’s been to recently. At the very least, its a great place to start.

Here’s a data point. I was at a Business Marketing Association meeting last week, talking to an agency principal who’s recently started using a social media monitoring service — the name of which I frankly can’t remember (I hadn’t heard of them before anyway). He had also demo’ed one of the bigger players in the space as well, but chose this new vendor because he liked the user interface better. In his mind, the actual data collection were comparable amongst all the vendors he looked at.

His need was not focused on real-time data — he needed brand-related data, which any of the vendors have, some of it real time, some not, some more robust and complete, some with more sources available.
What I wonder, from this very unscientific singular data point: Are measurement and social media monitoring services losing differentiation? Are they all delivering the same promise, or is it time for these folks to really work on that differentiation among the brands?

Certainly, there are differences — in everything from data quality to the analytics. But, are the vendors in this space doing a good job of letting the market know their differences? Do they need to at this point, or is the market big enough for continuing generic explanations of what social media monitoring or listening services offer?

Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:

• I have heard many people talk about how every company should have a blog, which I really disagree with. Seems BL Ochman and I follow the same line of thinking.
• Discussions of measurement and ROI abound, both in the context of scalability (and here) and justification of paying for social media engagement.
• And yet others on measuring Word-of-Mouth and standardizing metrics there as well.
• Ways to bucket social media technologies.
• Should corporate communications people show their true colors when engaged online, or does that deflect from “the brand?”

Recently, David Alston of Radian6 posted a picture, using Twitpic, of a current magazine ad for FruitLoops that freaked him out. I got the idea that he wants his kids to have healthy eating habits.

He was incredulous - is FruitLoops really trying to pass off their cereal as a good snack — a good breakfast? It tells moms that they can “feel good giving their kids a nutritious snack that won’t come back in their lunch box.” Here’s the offending ad (sideways, unfortunately, can’t figure out why it doesn’t orient properly):

A nutritious snack? FruitLoops? Last I checked, something that had a first ingredient of sugar was considered junk food. But, lets just check the nutrition label from a box of FruitLoops:

Yup, just as I suspected. High sugar, no fiber, a micron of protein - which certainly means energy, but a short burst, instead of a real satisfying snack that would keep you going.
Have advertisers really come that far from these ads, circa the 1950’s and 1960’s?

Doesn’t seem so to me. Here’s an ad from the 1950’s I’ve lovingly titled “7Up Baby.” Though its hard to read (but is easily found online), the gist of the ad is that 7Up is so natural, that its ok for even a baby to drink it. So go ahead, give that 7 month old a good chug-a-lug of 7Up and build up that lifelong craving and desire for white sugar.
How about this one, which came out as a response to artificial sweeteners being added to make low-calorie soda:

Seems like if you’re a good mom, you’ll give your teen (girl) sugar so that she will have the energy to get through her day — and its low calorie, at just 18 calories a teaspoon. ‘Cuz you wouldn’t want Mary to get fat.

My point is, advertising to moms hasn’t changed much. Now, instead of appealing to wholesome American-dream type values, its positioned around the convenient packaging of a ready-to-eat plastic bag of sugary-ness, so that you can spend one less minute making your kids lunch — since we’re all too busy to spend 5 minutes making a healthy lunch. That’s right, kids, a sugary snack is a nutritious snack.

Seeing these ads - and as many on TV that make moms/wives look like stupid dolts who get supreme life satisfaction out of: getting their husbands to eat oats, or a clean toilet bowl, or a really good dustrag - makes me downright depressed about how wives and mothers are still portrayed in media and advertising.

I guess my point is I am not surprised at the FruitLoops ad. Apparently, the market research shows that parents think cereal is a healthy snack (though this and other stories tend to refute that), so, as an extrapolation, FruitLoops must be too. But really, how many parents really believe that? And, have advertisers, who’ve been criticized for targeting children with ads for unhealthy food, really done much to change?

Oh, and don’t think I have it in for just FruitLoops and Kellogg’s. Plenty of the high-end brands sold as “natural and healthy” have as much or more sugar in their cereals, too. Organic sugar isn’t any better than plain old sugar, when it comes to sugar cereal. It’s just more expensive.

Interesting posts I read this week, so far:

• Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
• WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
• Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
• Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang’s tweet last week, I found out about BrandTags, an interesting experiment being pulled together by Noah Brier. Basically, you visit the site and get presented with a logo or brand name. You type in the word or phrase which comes to mind when you think of the brand. It aggregates all the data from what people enter and creates tag clouds, based on the frequency of what people say, with the largest words or phrases being the most frequent from all taggers.

There are a few very interesting things to me about what I am seeing on BrandTags:

• stalwart brands in CPG are easy to identify based on their tags: I tested my mad branding skills, and was correct 100% of the time for consumer products such as McDonalds, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, etc. Interestingly enough, even though the biggest tags for most of these products were negative (for McDonalds it was fat), their brand message was still easy enough to pick out. Overall, their strong efforts in branding, I suppose, have paid off, as the message still comes through.

• Internet brands were difficult to decipher: I could just suck at it, but, the tags for msn and for Facebook were very similar - I thought Facebook was Myspace. To me, this speaks of the more difficult task of brand marketers in the constant state of flux that is Internet properties. Its hard to have clear branding when your brand promise is changing ever 3 to 6 months. Also, some Internet brands — such as ReadWriteWeb, Gawker, Digg, had large tags for question marks, meaning they have no brand recognition with many of the participants in this experiment.

Now, I have no idea how many people are participating in this experiment, but clearly these are Internet-savvy people who probably use many of the Internet properties listed, just like me. And, who spend more time online than watching TV, where most of those consumer brands live.

I am a rare user of many of these consumer brands and I spend more time online than watching TV. So what gives? Are CPG messages still so ubiquitous that I cannot otherwise tune out? What would Rob Walker have to say about this?