What’s the last ad campaign that stopped you in your tracks?

There aren’t too many around that can do that, are there? Billions of dollars spent on advertising each year and we can count on just one hand the number of ad campaigns that get above the static. Than makes a brand scoring big worth notice.

I’ve been in Portland a lot lately, where Wieden and Kennedy’s “Just Do It” campaign for Nike is legend. (Here’s a nice case study on that.)  You can also find a copy of David Ogilvy’s best work on my desk, when it isn’t being borrowed. This is marketing at its best. What makes up your cannon of great work?

Guess what, I’ve found another that’s scoring big.

Some of the absolute best social media work anywhere is being done by a century-old firm you probably already know. The Hartford’s Achieve Without Limits, is taking cause marketing to “at-scale success”. They are gaining real social media credibility and capability, and they’re building a sizable engaged tribe of followers. And what makes it work, is this is authentic and aligned with their corporate zeitgeist, or as marketers would say, their brand architecture. This alignment is the table steaks for  moving from good to great.

The Hartford launched a multi-year campaign, Achieve Without Limits to celebrates the firm’s long association with U.S. Paralympics, and the example its athletes set for dedication and achievement.

How would you build a platform based on dedication and achievement? They recruited the talent of Janusz Kaminski, the Academy Award Winner who filmed “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindlers List” to create breathtaking vignettes that introduce the Paralympic athletes. Then, they dedicated their ad slots in the NCAA’s March Madness finals to debut the ads – which carried calls to meet and support the athletes through a robust Facebook Fan page and specialized Twitter account.

Hearing Melissa Stockwell say “no, I would not give back my disability if I could” simply is a remarkable moment. It earns comments and engagement. Great advertising campaigns share four attributes: they are  tangible, approachable, personal, and memorable. This platform gets around those bases well.

The Hartford also pledged to donate $1 to U.S. Paralympics for every “Like” or “Share” that the Facebook page receives.  And, they backed this promise up with innovative paid advertising on Facebook. But most importantly, they delivered prospective fans to social media experiences worth liking. There are parts of this campaign that are transfixing – as in, pausing it to show the rest of the family.

The edge of Sam Kavanaugh’s Excuse Converter has perceptible snark that recalls Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“. Team members share indepth profiles and some of what they’ve  learned through their Paralympic journeys. And The Hartford promotes meeting them on the road to the London 2012 games.  If good marketing is a story, there’s a rich and long enough story arc to hang a novel or series off this platform.

What has the Hartford learned? The created a lessons learned document which they shared as Social Media 101 for the entire Paralympic movement. While competitors were inactive, preachy, commercial, or just chatter, The Hartford did something good to advance a social cause they’re part of. And along the way, they built a social media audience of 105,000 members who are willing to join them in their support of these athletes.

The Hartford treated their social media and cause marketing as long term assets. They avoided being caught up in the tactical questions of lead generation and attribution, and instead did what marketing does at its very best. They used the brand and its values to create a campaign that aggregated and moved an audience.

With another year to go on this story arc, I’m looking forward to cheering on our Paralympic team for the first time, and enjoying the art and spirit The Hartford marshals to take this work across the finish line.  Greatness is within reach.

It’s a pleasure to hold up a relatively unsung campaign as an example of what brand marketers do at their best in cross channel campaigns. Congratulations to everyone at The Hartford, and to Team USA.

Now that you’re in the race, what will you show us next?

The Tweeting world woke up today to find that many Klout scores have dropped, in some cases to nearly nothing.

Regardless of what caused this, it represents a major screw-up for the firm that wants to be the “credit score” of the social media world. This is a serious problem for Klout because their measure of influence relies on so little to start with, and competitors are at the ready with equally as little behind their scores.

If this were an intentional change, the firm would have used announcements to managed this change. But the Klout blog has nothing to say. It’s a malfunction, and for Klout, that’s quite a problem. The “Tweeting class” has actually started to act like this score is a fair judge of their influence, so any arbitrary change, even in error, will set them off.

This looks like a glitch. Anyone who has followed Feedburner subscriber numbers is used to seeing Sunday adjustments where numbers drop precipitously for a day then recover. Even Google Analytics has occasional divot days, during which metrics appear way off but then get fixed. But for a new measure, glitches can turn believers in to skeptics.

Klout’s weakness is that it is so open to trickery. Stowe Boyd blogged about Adriaan Pelzer of Raak, who created Twitter bots that spewed interesting things at one and five minute intervals. Guess what? Klout regarded them as celebrities.

What’s wrong with this picture? To start off with, it should not really be possible for a bot to reach a Klout Score of 50 within 80 days merely by Tweeting random (yet entertaining) rubbish every minute, should it?

What Does Klout Score Really Measure?
“Influence” is a terrible choice of word for what’s being measured. Klout score and the like measure the qualities of ENGAGEMENT.

You see, prime ministers and presidents have INFLUENCE; armies listen to them. Warren Buffet has influence over investors. You can see that through engagement.

One wouldn’t try to measure their influence through tweet analysis. That’s momentary engagement. You can measure how connections are reciprocated. Communist leaders on Twitter tend to have lots of followers, but they follow nobody back. Does that mean they have more influence? Or just that they are selfish and self-absorbed? It’s open to interpretation.

As I said to the Boston Globe back in February:
Of course, influence can’t be reliably reduced to a single measure any more than relevancy can. But such scores can take on a reality of its own. FICO credit scores are more valid than tarot card readings, but they are both dependent on who believes in them.

Let’s see if we can deflate some of the language in our ninja-rich industry. The dot.com smug-fest lived off its own inflated words; maybe we can spare social media, and ourselves, that same fate.

And, if seeing that lower Klout score is getting to you, here are some free or cheap options that provide a social capital/sociability measurement of some kind. Until one service builds credibility and proves validity, people will focus on their score that “feels best.” And today, that sure isn’t Klout.

• PeerIndex – http://www.peerindex.net
• TwitterGrader – http://twittergrader.com
• Tweetlevel – http://tweetlevel.edelman.com
• Twitter Grader – http://twittergrader.com/
• Twitalyzer – http://twitalyzer.com
• How Sociable - http://www.howsociable.com
• Postrank – http://www.postrank.com

One of the most radical things we can do is introduce good people to each other. That’s the good intent behind #FollowFriday, and behind a great event I attended last Friday at Bentley University. I’d like to introduce friends from Bentley College’s Center for Marketing Technology who stood up a fantastic conference on local marketing last week.

Bruce D. Weinberg (@bostongarden) and @IanCross pulled together social media speakers, business leaders, and hundreds of local marketers all through social media and networks to make an electric half-day program.

The Mobile flight included Philip DesAutels of Microsoft, @EricLeist from Allen & Gerritsen, @JohnnyStartup from SCVNGR, and me all talking about how mobility changes local marketing.

Since this was a room full of social media people, it was also full of video cameras. You can see video of our talk, and an extra minute that Eric shot with me after the event, below. If you like social media and mobile marketing, take a look.

All politics is local, and increasingly more of marketing is too. Have a great weekend, and check these new friends out. Happy weekend!

Even though marketers may seem to ruin it today, I was reminded that Mother’s Day in the US actually grew out of the peace movement. It was first proposed by Julia Ward Howe back in 1870 in a  Mother’s Day Proclamation that called for a meeting of all women:

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

This was the same Julia Ward Howe who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and was wife to Samuel Gridley Howe, the first director of Perkins School for the Blind, where Helen Keller would later study. Three of Howe’s children would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for their collective authorship of their mother’s biography in 1916. Who’d think her interests would overlap with Facebook in 2011?

Facebook Friends for Peace
An infographic from Friends Without Borders, posted this week, shows a strong increase in friendships across conflicted borders, such as between Israel and Palestine.

Elite Infrastructure
As some on the net bemoan that “the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click on Facebook ads,” I’d invite you to question the premise. Perhaps the best minds are using ideas to change the world, and those of us who specialize in monetizing the social medium are just their infrastructure.

In Julia Ward Howe’s day, the “best minds” were likely in finance or trade. But on this Mother’s Day, consider that the Howes, who inspired abolitionists, taught those who would teach the blind across the world, and raised devoted, Pulitzer-winning children, seem like the smart ones. And the MBAs of their day were just necessary, talented, elite infrastructure.

Happy Mother’s Day!

If anyone can get social media policy right, it will be the Australians.

They have every reason to do so. Australia is an expansive continent with many remote populations. It’s distant from Western hubs of influence. Being plugged in is a necessity. It’s a culture that adores sociability. So there are many incentives to create policies that encourage excellent social media use.

Good social media policy does  three things:

1. Affirms what staff can do, and defines what social media is.
2. Influences staff to use social media responsibly.
3. Provides a basis for enforcement against bad actors.

The Gold Standard for Social Media Policy
An old friend from Somerville, Pat McCormick, manages digital engagement for the Department of Justice in Melbourne. They’ve launched a social media governance program that should be the new gold standard for public social media policy. It is reasonable, provides examples, and is cool in the act of governing.

Good Policy Sets You Up For Winning
Right from the start, it acknowledges the mixture of work and life we all must deal with, then sets out practical guidelines.

Good Policy is Easy to Absorb
Yep, there’s a written policy everyone must know. But as I’ve said before, reading is for suckers, so its huge that they’ve broken down the policy in to a few key points illustrated with rock tunes and animation. Examples use the social profiles of real staff, including Pat, and their socially savvy HR department, in the video. This is important, as engagement precedes compliance.

Its Not as Easy as They Make It Look
A friend worked for a firm where the policy was to not to use social media in the office, and not to mention anything about work in personal use of social media. Of course, on the same day this policy was issued, the CEO asked people to blast their personal email lists and social networks about how great the firm was (using provided sample copy) and to email him personally once this was done.

See the difference? Corporate culture is bigger than policy. Pat’s team is using the cultural momentum of the organization to make sure their standards lead to good use of the social channel.

Google +1  is the critical priority of the year for our friends at Google. Accordingly, they’ve invested their most prized asset in this effort: space on every single paid and organic search result.

(To get a quick explanation of +1, see the video below.)

Why So Much Urgency?
I see two large drivers for the urgency behind this launch, which makes this akin to Apple launching a new iPad.

Google is Desperate to Be a Social Platform
Google has tried a series of social initiatives: starring results, blocking results, side-wiki and Google Buzz, but none have achieved mass success. Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and others have cracked the code on the social Web 2.0 networked world. Google is still the hub of Web 1.0 webpages. But the social graph lives on platforms that others control, and that’s a threat to Google.

Google Seeks to Restore Integrity to its Search Results via Social Markers
As I noted a few weeks ago, crappy organic search results are a threat to the value position of Google’s paid results. That’s the lion’s share of their revenue.

Google has been off inventing cars that drive themselves and devices that could replace television networks, but along the way they let SEO gamers lower the integrity of their organic search results. Adding social signals to the search formula is a step away from factors that SEO gamers control, such as link farms and exact match domains.

This Beta Is Still Half-baked, But It Deserves Your Attention Now
The rush to release the beta is evident, as all the elements in +1 which take place off the search engine results pages (SERPs) aren’t yet ready.  That’s too bad, because without them, +1 fails; that’s why its a beta.  After all, the purpose of a search page is to get people to content, not to survey them to see if they like what’s described in the search result.

The place where +1 will fly or fail is on the websites of potentially millions of users who will install the +1 button. Yet, just like the iPad2, if you’d like to add a +1 button to your website, “there’s a line for that.”

The other missing element is the special tab in your Google profile that shows people what you’ve +1’ed.  This may be soon to come, but until it does, this beta isn’t very social. Once people can Tweet and link to their list of +1s, and promote the program on their own sites, it will be legitimately social. For the time being, this is just a design shift on SERP pages, and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

In the Long Term, Google +1 Is Promising to Marketers
This promises social proof to validate firms’ search results. Further, there’s the potential of future influence on natural search engine rankings or the quality score of ads (SEO agencies, start your engines).  And if profile pages become social hubs, marketers can gain additional awareness and traffic through social sharing on these.

+1 Is Also Promising to Google’s Future
1. It gives searchers a reason to use Google when they’re signed in, rather than anonymously. This means Google can build richer records of individuals’ use of search and better target ads.
2. It expands the public use for the Google profile page, which can be built into a future social networking play.
3. It is an answer to Facebook’s Like button, which is already on about 2 million websites.
4. It is an innovation that moves the public spotlight off Google’s struggle with link farms and SEO gamesmanship.

Unanswered Questions and Unintended Consequences

Will This Initially Decrease Conversion Rates?
If you follow the UsefulArts Twitter feed,  SEO pro Andy Komack @akomack raised the question of the unintended conversion distraction that Google+1 introduces.  Currently the +1 box is a distraction from the core purpose of search pages: channeling traffic to content.  If a social opportunity interrupts the search experience, click-throughs could in fact decline. This might change over time, but I agree with his concern.

How Will Participation Change Search Engine Results?
Will sites with the +1 box on their pages gain an advantage in SERP rankings? Will sites with more +1s move up in rankings, or end up paying less for PPC placement?

Bold Prediction: This is the start of Google the Social Network
I see this as a move in a more expansive social play, in which Google will combine its Profile Pages, the +1 Button, Google Buzz, Google Chat, Google Phone, Gmail and its RSS Reader into an integrated social network. I suspect we will see these point services substantially repackaged into an aggregated offering. What do you think?

That’s my take on this now day-old initiative.
I’d love to hear your view, so please comment away here or email me your take.

Post update: April 1, 2011, 9pm: after an instance of the +1 button was found “in the wild” running on a non-google website, Google announced it would withdraw the public test of the button. All information in this post continues to be accurate – and this illustrates again Google’s urgency to accelerate this launch while attempting to manage marketers interest in this initiative. (details)

I’ve had a few notes from people who were surprised to come across my Social Media Week interview with Virginia Nusseyover on the Internet Marketng Tools Blog.

If you’re not already following it, Raven Tools has one of the smartest blogs in the business.  They have expert views on SEO, Social Media and how to unify marketing operations with their suite of tools.  I really appreciate being added to their line-up, and the reminders from people who have read it there, to let you know.

Apps vs. mobile
Q: Your session suggests that apps are the next major marketing platform—so-called Web 3.0. What are the basics a business needs to know to engage successfully in the app environment? What shifts in strategy and approach are required of marketers?

All good things that happen in digital marketing are driven by audience, not by technology. I think that change that happens as you think about applications rather than pages of content is, the content is really this neutral idea that we talk about as marketers—it’s really a marketing word. In applications, we’re helping people do things, so content it neutral and in fact helping people is king.

The thing that our audiences are hungry for is taking all of this technology in their lives and all the investment of hours and money and the infrastructure and making it helpful to them in getting some tasks done in their lives. I think that in an application-based environment, we want to think about what tools can we use our content for, what tools can we use our content in to get something done that’s important to them. Two examples come to mind….(continue reading)

It sounds like a lot of the promise of mobile, Web 3.0, getting people when they’re on the go and available to interact with a brand—and the social aspects, and the local aspects—all the promise of what we’ve heard about mobile for so long available as much or more… but in apps?

We’ve heard for probably a decade that this is the year for mobile. I’ve been thinking about what is it that changed and the change, I don’t think, was mobile. It was very convenient, easy-to-use applications that people want to take with them.

Suddenly there’s a reason to want to take computing capability with you. It’s not just a cell phone and it’s not email, but it’s Foursquare or it’s TweetDeck or it’s any number of products. ….(continue reading)

Social media and big business
Social media is an important part of online marketing today. Could share your vision of the future corporatization and de-personalization of social media and what that means for both businesses and everyday users?

You may get the sense from me talking about Web 3.0 and applications that I’m a total fanboy for technology. But a lot of times there’s this shift that happens with technology where at first it’s very high status to be part of something and then it reverses and it’s high status to not be part of something. It used to be that the rich owned cars as a hobby and the poor rode horses. Now, the rich own horses as a hobby and the working people drive cars…(continue reading)

This morning I had the pleasure of finding myself quoted in a Boston Globe article along with the likes of Chris Brogan, Augie Ray and Mark Schaefer on Klout Score and social influence.

As a digital marketing speaker, it matters to me if audiences or events use the Klout Score as “social proof.”  As an acquisition marketer, it matters if Google starts to incorporate this score into how it assigns page rank.  I’ll do a post here sometime soon on the specific metrics I care most about in personal social media.

Though more interesting than vital, having a daily score is fixating. Up or down, right or wrong track, Klout suggests how your brand is faring day to day. It’s all fun until someone who matters to you starts to really make decisions based on this little number. Then, right or wrong, if it matters to people who matter to me, it gets some attention.

There’s a hunger for simple scoreboards and standings so we can know if we’re ahead of the pack or behind.  People are so hungry for direction that quite often they grab on to bogus measures in the hope that being a little valid is better than nothing. Of course, influence can’t be reliably reduced to a single measure any more than relevancy can. But when people do exactly that, it can take on a reality of its own. FICO credit scores are more valid than tarot card readings, but they are both dependent on who believes in them.

The way people use metrics may say more about those who do the measuring than those being measured.  Marketers who measure in terms of revenue and relationship have stayed in the hunt long enough to have some real results. Those who are measuring against an “ego rank” may succeed in moving their score, but most brands want to reach people who connect with their target audiences, and who represent their brand values in a credible way.

So, do I buy Klout Score? There are plenty of examples of how Klout overvalues Tweet frequency, and it reserves the “up and to the right” part of their charts for more general-interest tweets rather than those who come back to a core issue space. There are other metrics that measure engagement better, but none are as fast, as fun, or as clear-cut as Klout. What it sacrifices in validity, it makes up for in snackability. That gives it a narcotic quality. So even if it’s bogus, the faith others put in it makes it worth keeping an eye on.

After all, it probably is a more valid and informative measure than a horoscope or tarot cards.  Want to see what we can learn? Here’s my chart; give me your best reading.  And we’ll see how today’s article changes it. And while we’re at it: How’s your score today? Do you care…yet?

You’re going to miss 2010.

In five years we’ll look back and realize that this was a simpler day. A lack of established business models and rules gave some the belief that a free Hootsuite account, a mantra of “Just do it” and being “open and authentic” would make them a social media ninja.

By 2015, people will already look back at 2010 as a “digital love-in” with the nostalgia that aging hippies harbor for the ’60s. So much was just about to change, and nobody imagined the digital horizon was about to be turned upside down.

In 2015, being socially unlisted will be a status symbol
At first social media looked like a pathway to “hyper-empowered” consumers.  That’s because consumers were first movers in social media. As they connected to each other and shared knowledge, they found  a new source of power

But once firms started to connect and share their views of the social grid, their superior analytic horsepower began to turn the tables on consumers. Phone companies use network analysis of who you speak to, as social networks turn into data maps of association, and location-aware phones tell advertisers which displays slowed you in their stores. Suddenly, automation, analytics and lots of available personal data produced “hyper-empowered” marketers.

Once firms can map who really brings friends with them when they change accounts or promote causes, a new set of social media scores will became  as important and formalized as credit scores. Chris Selland describes this in his post on how Klout Score is the start of corporate profiling of customers, just as FICO credit scores are used to understand credit history. Chris says there’s a business opportunity, but its not what today’s social zealots think it is.

It may have once been liberating to think of “brand YOU”. But once firms can calculate the exact value of your brand to them, they can judge consumers, and to some degree make being their promoter part of your relationship to them. The self-objectifying scoring of social media is training a generation to buy and sell their own bodies by the pound. The game is fun, until everyone’s in on it.

In 2015 Social Media Will Hardly Be Personal
As social media is professionalized, it will also become depersonalized.  By 2015 everyone will know that digital lives are performances. By then, it will seem ludicrous that real athletic or entertainment performers would be personally using social media to connect with fans, any more than they connect with fans call-in programs.

Sure you can “talk with Shaq” on Twitter.  But to work at scale, everyone will know this is a digital characterization, same as when we “talk” online with the Cookie Monster or the King from Burger King.

Naturally, as social media becomes less personal, corporations will be more at home with it. Social media was once the way that geeks could bypass customer service and get to “a person.”  Far before 2015, social media will be just one more incoming line of contact, and you’ll get the same staff that you’d reach through the 800 line. Just as VPs don’t answer many service lines today, they won’t be picking up on social media mentions. There will be a team for that, and what management needs to know will roll-up to a dashboard.

Yep, tie dyes, leisure suits, and button-downs each had their day. The same is true of technology trends. The dot.com smugfest gave way to a crop of “social media ninjas.” But 2010 is when corporations started to operationalize social meda, and use this new channel with skill. That’s a good thing, but its a sign of a maturing space where experts will increasingly have real experience, and hiring managers won’t look to social media gasbags to tell them about openness or to think like publishers.

In fact, it’s 2011 and these old saws already seem kind of quaint. Do you think social media is starting to show its age? Though media never dies, neither does new media stay new indefinitely.

When we get away from the vanity of social media and its self-worshiping communities – we find what we have missed. There are experiences drowned out by the chatter, just as stars are drowned out by the green light spilled by streetlamps. Those experiences – away from the online world, perhaps that’s what you should really be dwelling on, recording, and sharing. All the noise in the echo chamber of social media makes it harder to know that – but it is what we most need to hear.

My friend Constantine von Hoffman was out walking with his wife and son, when his wife stopped, took a picture of a tree and then announced she had uploaded it to Facebook. His son – his teen-aged son, said, “Remember when we just looked at leaves?” Has your archiving and curating gotten in the way of communing?

While traveling to Death Valley it occurred to me that the origin of the great religions are disproportionately in deserts. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed all began their preaching after long stays surrounded by nothing except endless sand and endless sky. In the desert it is starkly clear if one is alone, or with another – and sometime that other isn’t in the mere physical realm. The environment forces a fundamental question: Am I isolated on the world or part of a larger interaction?

This year there’s been a broad discussion on whether social media makes us stupid, or ADHD. I pay no attention to it. Hasn’t this, or something similar, has been said of every emerging media? Some of the ancient Greeks complained that the written word would destroy people’s ability to remember things. TV was a “vast commercial wasteland.” Actually each new media changes us, how we think and how we see. I’d argue that social media can make us creators and greater agents in the world. Living in the city I took to carrying a camera and nailing one fantastic shot a day. It changed how I saw my urban world, perhaps social media does too.

This much I can say for certain about social media: It certainly makes it hard to be alone for an extended time. One morning at 3 AM I posted, “For the record this is when I write UsefulArts.” Moments later the response came from my friend Louis, “For the record this is when I read it”

As a parent I struggle with when to share this connection to the digital world, and when to buffer it so my kids can grow in other ways. And I wonder how my behavior has shaped them. They’ve rarely, if ever, been ignored in favor of a signal from the hive. However, as I write this, I know they’ve waited while I signaled and interacted with friends here.

The wired, global city has banished the night and abolished the dusk. We are free of so much uncertainty and isolation. Mobile media dispels silence. You can find out things almost immediately if you want to and you never have to be alone if you don’t. But have we also banished the poetry of revelation? How do you go on a quest for something when it seems everything can be found?

Through mobile technology social media is now the omni present other, a perpetual connection to machinations of the digital hive. But as we look at it, our eyes grow comfortable with the view, and the heavens are obscured by pixels. Didn’t our eyes look up in to the sky or across the vast ocean and find more than just data?

To grasp again the moral sense of our being, we need to step away from the crowd and recover the gift of the night. Solitude. When we stop speaking we begin to hear; in the darkness we can be immersed by the life beyond the digital media monad.

This season, solitude – something freely available to everyone – seems rarer than all our hand-held technical marvels made of the rarest, most exotic materials on earth. A contrarian voice inside me, maybe a gift from my Cherokee ancestors, says it is best to live in a world of connected dusk, balanced between the individuated light of technology and artifice (techne), and the healing poetry of darkness and mysteries (poiesis).

This solstice, my friend, walk away from the light, and remember the world beyond it.

All the best,
Dave Wieneke