All About Content

3M Corporation is attempting to generate buzz for its sticky notes product with a user-generated content promotion about creative ways to use Post-it Notes. The displays promoting the contest — prominently displayed in Staples, Office Max, Office Depot and other office supply stores across the country — features a photo that might look familiar to people who spend time on Digg, YouTube and similar social sites.

Here’s how a $24.5 billion multinational corporation fubars an attempt to do a viral ad campaign by refusing to pay a small licensing fee to the amateur photographer who inspired it.

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Eight Four years after the launch of the community site Digg, three years after media giant Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing site Flickr, and the same summer that YouTube reached one billion video views per day — it’s not unusual for corporations to try to reach consumers through social media channels. Savvy execs understand that social media success can equal advertising gold.

There are a couple of ways a corporate marketer can leverage social media’s power to take things viral. One of them is to find something that is already enjoying viral success and ride its coat tails. That’s apparently the route 3M wanted to take with its current promotion.

The perfect idea already existed for the 3M campaign, ready to be exploited: the Post-It Note Jaguar.

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In December 2006, a bunch of people at an Internet company went down to the parking garage and covered a coworker’s beloved Jaguar with tens of thousands of Post-It Notes. Scott, a photographer and Flickr enthusiast, posted the evidence of the prank in progress to his Flickr account intending to show it to the Jag’s owner.

View the entire Post-It Note Jaguar photo set on Flickr.

Next thing Scott knew, the Post-it Note Jaguar started to spread on the Internet. The photos took on a life of their own, generating tons of comments and faves from the Flickr community. The photos got reposted on blogs around the world (including the very popular blogs Neat-o-Rama and Boing Boing), hit the front page of Digg more than once, were circulated in millions of emails, were featured as a Yahoo pick of the day, and even appeared in a filmed segment on ABC News.

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More than a year passes before the maker of the Post-it Note thinks to capitalize on the viral success that was this Post-it inspired office prank. After all, large multinational corporations aren’t the most nimble players — they can’t just shoot from the hip; after all, they have to dot their i’s, cross their t’s, and generally make sure everything gets approved by lawyers and stuff, right? RIGHT?

So when in the Spring of 2008, the 3M Corporation finally contacts the photographer to ask about using the photos of the Post-it Note Jaguar photos in a marketing campaign, he’s pretty sure they’ve already thought this through. He asked a friend in the photo business what a typical licensing fee for a national marketing campaign would be, and quoted that amount to 3M.

Their response? They tell him they’d rather not pay when they can just recreate the photograph themselves.

Here’s what floors me: 3M doesn’t even try to maintain plausible deniability. The 3M representative who contacted Scott comes right out and says it would be cheaper to copy the photo than it would be to license the original photos.

Scott responded to the email from the corporation’s eMarketing Supervisor and gave the company another chance to do things properly, by lowering the license fee he originally quoted (to a mere $2,000 for the entire campaign!). He was met with complete radio silence.

That was the last he heard of it until the Flickr pages and YouTube channel started getting a whole new spike in traffic, along with comments like “Hey man, I saw this photo at Staples. Congratulations!”

The point-of-sale displays prominently placed in office supply stores around the country would easily have run 6 figures in production costs alone. And if you know anything about in-store promotions, you know there are plenty more expenses associated just with getting the display space. In other words, this was a big budget production… the extra $1,000 to actual license the original photos would have been insignificant in the greater scheme of 3M’s budget for this project.

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Putting sticky notes all over a car, admittedly, isn’t a completely original idea, but 3M went to pains to make their photograph look very similar to the original Post-it Note Jaguar photo that garnered all the publicity. They could have done anything, but they did this:

It’s clear they set out to create a replicate of the Post-it Note Jag and they were counting on people “recognizing” the photos. Why else contact Scott about getting copyright permission in the first place? Even the work-in-progress photo montage 3M posted on YouTube looks eerily like Scott’s Flickr set.

Now, I’m not a copyright attorney, so I’d love for someone with an intellectual property law to chime in here, but just for kicks, let’s do my layman’s check for violations of fair use:

1. The copied work is for commercial gain: Check
2. The work copies substantially from the copyrighted one: Check
3. The effect of the copied work undermines the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: By definition

But let’s pretend the legality of this move wasn’t even a question for now, and focus on this: Social media marketing campaigns rely on the social media community to carry them. As a marketer, you have to respect the community and its members. Ripping off community members and then turning around and asking that same community to generate buzz for your campaign is just ballsy… or stupid.

The irony: The YouTube contest rules say “Remember, creativity and true brilliance will get you noticed.” I’m hoping that 3M’s “creativity” and true chutzpah get noticed as well.

The original Post-It Note Jaguar

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Lest anyone think I’m slamming all companies and corporate marketers for wanting to take advantage of social media, I’m not. I think there are plenty of creative ways to get your product’s name in front of social communities in ways that don’t disrespect the users.

For example: create an original marketing campaign around a concept specifically designed to be share-worthy. A recent example of this tactic is Extended Stay’s “Very Clean” Video (Disclosure: New Media Strategies, my current employer, helped promote this campaign).

Of course, corporate attempts to become viral can ring hollow, so smart social media marketers know that it helps to let the fans come up with the idea as well as leaving it to them to drive the campaign’s popularity.

Therefore some companies ensure the campaign is going to reach a wide audience by latching on to something that’s already gone viral. There are legit ways to do that. In fact, that’s what Stride Gum did with its sponsorship of the Dancing Guy (aka Matt Harding).

If you’re a corporate marketer interested in getting into social media marketing, viral video promotion, link bait, etc., I suggest consulting with people who know the communities you’re targeting. Any of us could have told you that stealing photo ideas from the community and using them to pimp your office supplies is not a good move.

You don’t see me posting about “how to do social media” a lot because I think it’s one of those things that gets talked about to death by so-called social media marketers who seem to think their job is to win a popularity contest on the likes of Digg, Twitter, Sphinn, etc, as if that were the ends instead of the means. Anyone with profiles on these sites seems to think that having managed to drum up a few votes about some article somewhere somehow qualifies them to be a social media marketer, despite often having absolutely no idea what the “marketing” piece of the puzzle entails. As long as you can blah blah blah about using top 10 lists to get popular on Digg (usually just copying someone else’s blah blah blah), you’re somehow an expert.

One of the worst trends I’m seeing in social media is using social media sites to blatantly promote stuff on other social media site (which is usually promoting something else). Here’s a great example: http://sphinn.com/story/53302

What’s going on here: Sphinn is a social media site devoted to online marketing stories - it votes up stories that are particularly interesting or educational on topics in that niche. Sphinn user BrentCsutoras submitted a page from Digg. Digg is a social media site where users vote on interesting stories on all manner of topics (with a lot of focus on odd humor, technology, politics — and it is known for being very unfriendly to SEOs). The page that was submitted on Digg (to the Travel section??) points to a Sphinn submission from user AnkitRawat - with this description: “Yes this is true .. Mozzers got there Webs2.0 page back into Google index !! Congratulations rand for this achievement.” This page (the one submitted to Digg) is a page on Sphinn, which happens to be a submission of a page on AnkitRawat’s own blog, which is a 3-sentence summary of a comment on an article on SEOmoz.org.

Brent was pointing on the Digg page as an example of what not to do, so let’s cut that part of the equation out and dissect the rest:

AnkitRawat blogged about a post on SEOmoz.org, which is great if he thinks this is of value to his readers. Rather than repeating someone else’s post or talking at length about something to which there isn’t much to add, he writes a quick summary. So far, so good, except that he doesn’t link to the original.

Rather than simply going to Sphinn, seeing that the SEOmoz article was already submitted and voting for it and leaving it at that, the user then submits his own 3-sentence summary of the primary source to Sphinn. Not only do most social communities not like submissions of derivative work, showing a preference for the original source, but they really don’t like it if the derivative work doesn’t have any meat to it whatsoever.

Understandably, that Sphinn submission only got a few votes. Rather than take that as a sign that the community just isn’t that interested in the story, the author/submitter then goes to Digg to submit, not his original article, but the page showing his submission on Sphinn. Presumably the goal of submitting to Digg was not to drive up views on his own blog but to increase the vote count on the Sphinn community.

The problem, of course, is several fold: People don’t like following a Möbius strip of links into a dizzying vortex of self-referential self-promotion, so it’s simply understood that you don’t submit links of social media submissions to other social media sites. Two, Digg users aren’t interested in the topic of whether some page they didn’t care about in the first place had its PageRank dropped and reinstated. Three, Digg users really don’t like SEOs, so any post that simply congratulates SEOs on managing to salvaging their Google PageRank is not just going to be of interest to no one, it’s probably also going to piss those users off.

So what did submitting a Sphinn submission of a 3-sentence summary of an update to someone else’s blog post to Digg actually accomplish (except maybe give more ammo to Digg users who already think SEOs are scummy spammers)?

Here’s what’s even crazier about that little story (and dare I use the word “ironic”) - if you take a look at the original article, it’s indirectly about the Web 2.0 awards, which were already the topic of a big “moral of the story” discussion regarding how Digg doesn’t like self-congratulatory SEOs, prompted by the failure of the Web 2.0 awards to make it big on Digg (the latter link is worth a read for actual technical SEO info).

A few of the lessons I enumerated about that story, lessons that apparently bear reposting, included these:

• Know your audience, what they like or dislike
• News Flash: most regular social media consumers don’t like SEOs
• Don’t go all “I’m part of the cool kids club and know the inside jokes”. It doesn’t make you look cool to strangers, it’s actually a big turn-off.
• Practice what you preach - if you’re a social media professional who advises clients on how to engage with communities, be respectful in your non-client interactions with those communities as well

So what are the lessons that can be applied outside of the Sphinn community to the broader world of wanna-be social media practitioners?

• Know your audience, what they like or dislike
• People don’t like blatant marketing or self-promotion
• Pulling the “I’m part of the cool kids club” routine doesn’t make you look cool to outsiders. Worse, if you’re not actually part of the cool kids club, the real members of the cool kids clique make fun of you too.
• Know when to back off - you can only promote yourself (or promotions of promotions of yourself) so much. If no one bites, leave it alone.
• Only submit actual stories to social media sites; don’t submit submissions of stories on other sites

In that same comment, I also pointed out:

There’s a tendency to operate in an echo chamber where everyone pats everyone else on the back for being part of the club. On the one hand, it’s great because it’s overall a very friendly and welcoming group. But it also has a tendency to be a little too self congratulatory. Every once in a while we need a wake up call that reminds us that SEO/sphinn/etc isn’t the “real world.

Certainly, this issue isn’t limited to the online marketing community; it happens in a lot of micro-communities. People forget that the just because their group cares passionately about something (even if it’s that they care about each other), the rest of the world doesn’t, nor should it have to. The greater irony is not only that we as marketers should know better, but also that we’re the first to point this out to our clients.

The reason it bothers me when this echo chamber pervades in my little world is that we spend so much time talking about marketing, and marketing marketing, and striving to dominate social media, that there’s no longer any there there.

Instead of trying to become great marketers, so many marketers fall all over themselves to become “A-list bloggers” - as if that were an end in and of itself.

Or as Gaping Void doodles so succinctly:

What happened to the products and services? What happened to substance? What happened to results and ROI? There are a lot of people for whom the whole concept of marketing on the Web isn’t actually proven yet — so let’s prove that we add value and that we’re not really just goofing off on the Web all day.

I, for one, welcome the day this unfortunate trend reverses and we get back to doing our jobs — in most cases that does not involve marketing social media platforms to other online marketers, or poking at our navels.

“Just ‘cos you work on the internet, and Twitter happens to be on the internet, does not mean Twitter is work.” - Matt Davies

From 21 Reasons Twitter is Bullshit. And I think I just killed a kitten.

If content is king, then context is the set of guards who protect the king’s castle. That’s a terribly tortured analogy, but my point is that one needs the other. What is content without context but just so much noise?

This week one of my coworkers wrote a post about another mutual colleague calling him a creepy old guy. [damn, there's that word again]. The post enumerates reasons why the guy is creepy, including “he tries to be cool by writing a blog” and “He has been out of college for like 5 years”. I knew it was satire as soon as I glanced at it.

About half the commentators were outraged though. One writes “Is it really ethical to attack a fellow blogger without provocation?. He tries to be cool by writing a blog? Ummmm Does he really need your approval to write a blog? this is over the top.” Yes, it’s way over the top … clue #1. But the broader context in this case was the relationship between the people involved.

My office is a very friendly, laid back place and everyone enjoys joking, teasing and engaging in animated political arguments. Reading the post as an extension of their office interaction, I knew it was intended to be, and received as, a funny prank. (The author’s response to the first comment was another big clue.)

In a recent post on this very blog, I appear to berate a commentator for being a total hack Making fun of people who read your blog is a pretty dumb practice, and anyone who stumbles across that post without knowing the context would probably be less than impressed with my social skills. [ed. but he really does run the worst SEO blog ever, honest.]

The context in this case is a long-standing (well, long enough) history of being friendly snarky at each other on his blog. In fact, I remind him he’s a hack all over the internet like here and here, too. But there isn’t any hostility or malice behind it, and he knows that (I think, yes?). He’s even so kind as to find opportunities to link to me using really good anchor text, and I return the favor.

But understanding the context of a conversation, from which the content derives meaning, doesn’t have to be as difficult as researching everything about a person before leaving a comment on a blog. Sometimes you just need to pay attention or put your critical thinking cap on. A blog I’ve just started reading, InternetMarketingSucks.com has a warning label right across the top of the page and another one right below: “Best viewed at 1024×768 with a sense of humor.”

Lots of people pan stupid products and level large doses of sarcasm at their objects of scorn, but few go as far as the sucker who runs InternetMarketingSucks.com. Take a look at the level of detail on that site/blog - that’s a PhotoShop license going to good use right there. If you spent just a few minutes looking around the site before leaving a comment, you wouldn’t make the mistake this commentator did:

Why are you such a loser dude? Seriously, if you think that Internet Marketing sucks then why do you blog about it in the first place? And just cause you have failed at Internet Marketing does that mean that everyone else should fail? I guess NOT! Why do you think conventions such as Affiliate Summit are organised? Because people are actually doing money off Internet Marketing! Duh! Bleh you and your blog suck!

So, the thing that all these examples have in common is … hm… that what you perceive as me being mean and nasty is actually me being very funny, so lighten up and get a sense of humor, will ya? … no, that wasn’t it. Ah, yes, what I mean is this: step back before you post a comment and make sure you actually understand what’s actually going on.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with leaving drive-by comments, but be aware that you are walking into someone else’s conversation. Unless you stop and listen for a minute, you might not have any idea what the conversation is really about*, and you risk making a fool of yourself.

I’ve done it plenty of times. New motto for this blog: I make mistakes so you don’t have to.

* Or you might understand the topic of the conversation perfectly fine, but not the people involved in it, leading to confusion, paranoia and possibly the need for restraining orders.

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ComScore’s Year in Review press release seems to underscore the principle that the rich keep getting richer: Google, of course, saw more gains, as did Wikipedia (which some conspiracy theorists seem to think is in cahoots with Google somehow) and Craigslist.

Facebook traffic jumped 81% year over year to 34.7 million visitors, now that registration is open to non-students (including quite a few pets, if Stewie’s ever growing circle of Facebook friends is any indication).

The release goes on to say that “the top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear.” Not to be outdone by current events of any gravity, sites devoted to celebrity entertainment news, “from Britney Spears’ meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smiths death,” kept up with an equally impressive 32% increase in visitors.

In total — including all searches for Britney, Anna Nicole and even “poop porn” — more than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. last year, with Google representing a 56% share of the market.

Fred Thompson’s campaign has no love for Wikipedia editors. Explaining to the Washington Post why the Thompson campaign isn’t weighing in on whether the former senator should be listed as Freddie (his given name) or the more common Fred, Karen Hanretty scoffs:

“I’m pretty sure the people debating ‘Fred’ versus ‘Freddie’ are the same people who debate whether or not Britney Spears looked too fat at the MTV music awards. Seriously, how many hours do these editors spend on the site?”

Seriously, you’re basically calling Wikipedia editors losers? You realize that “the same people who debate whether or not Britney Spears looked fat” are also good ol’ Middle America voters, right?

Wait for it, wait for it… I think that’s the sound of thousands of editors adding to Thompson’s profile: Thompson is a pathetic, out of touch, old geezer.

Doesn’t it seem like there was a time — somewhere between Mahir (”WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!!I KISS YOU !!!!!”) and [anything] on YouTube — when you didn’t get inundated with the same forwarded email from at least half a dozen of your friends telling you about “funniest thing you’ve ever seen”? Probably because that’s when the effects of Bubble 1.0 were really starting to hit home and the dot-commers didn’t have time for such inanity. Not that I have nostalgia for the bad old days of the recession, but …

Inanity abounds again, via content sharing sites like Digg and YouTube, etc. As a marketer, I always wonder, without fail, “how in the world did that become such a hit?” The answer seems to be two-fold. If you want something to spread across the Internet like wild fire, it needs to be 1) ridiculous and 2) photo documented.

What prompts this post? None other than a joke played by a bunch of pranksters at InPhonic, which has become a pretty hot topic in the Blogosphere, as far as these things go. The tale of what happens when you take a half a dozen employees, someone’s precious Jaguar, and 14,000 Post-It notes has been blogged in at least half a dozen languages.

Seriously? This is viral material? I can swear with 100% confidence that this was never intended to be anything more than a practical joke on a particular InPhonic employee. The photos were published to Flickr in the hopes that the joke’s target would find them before he went down to the parking garage — that’s it. Yet this non-story about the prank’s popularity has been on the ABC World News homepage for 3 days, For God’s Sake!

(Note for those who are still keeping score: It would not be an exaggeration to say that being one of the top stories on ABC’s homepage was meaningless in terms of traffic and popularity next to to getting to the homepages of Digg or Boing Boing. New Media definitely wins this round in the ongoing battle of New Media versus Old Media.)

Take-aways:
- do something unique and unrelated to any product or promotion
- the more ridiculous, the better
- take photos and videos!! (and be sure to assign Creative Commons licensing)
- don’t use your own bandwidth, host on a third-party platform
- share!

Oh yeah, and if you enjoy the photos and want to blog about this yourself, be a dear and link back to Scott’s Flickr page in your post.

The Federal Trade Commission last week issued an opinion that bloggers being paid to engage in word-of-mouth marketing must disclose that relationship. According to the Washington Post, WOM advertising is already covered under existing FTC regulations that govern commercial endorsements. The opinion meant to clarify that “such marketing could be deceptive if consumers were more likely to trust the product’s endorser ‘based on their assumed independence from the marketer.’”

Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear … if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

On Monday, PayPerPost sent its bloggers an email titled “PayPerPost Requires Disclosure / by Marketplace Participants”

Company Follows Disclosure Policy.org Launch with Transparency Mandate

ORLANDO, FL – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace connecting marketers with bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, announced the second phase of its full disclosure model, whereby participating Consumer Content Creators are required to disclose their sponsored status. The new Terms of Service, effective today, will bring greater transparency to the growing Consumer Generated Advertising industry.

Read the full release here

I’m signed up for Blogsvertise, PayPerPost and ReviewMe. PayPerPost is the only service that emailed me about the new requirement (although ReviewMe already had this requirement in place).

Hitwise did a webinar today covering social media networks and their relevance to retail traffic. The research company says that sites like MySpace, Facebook and others have become jumping-off points for people to get to a retailer site; up to 5% of the upstream traffic to online businesses came from a social network. (Email, by comparison, drives traffic at nearly twice that rate.)

But to keep it in perspective: 25% of traffic to retail sites starts with a query in a search box, according to the same research company.

As regular readers may know, I’m endlessly fascinated with how del.icio.us pages end up ranking well in search results, considering each page has robots noindex and noarchive instructions. About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that the snippet for the result (in Google) had changed. Whereas before it only displayed the URL, it now was also displaying text from within the page. (Compare this to what the same search result looked like earlier.)

Does this mean Google was not ranking the page based only on a “guess” regarding the page’s relevance, based on the combination of domain and URL? Consider, it had to actually crawl the del.icio.us page to display this snippet. It’s reasonable to assume that if it’s displaying the snippet text, it’s also reading and storing it somehow.

[So if "noindex,nocache,nofollow" together don't mean "don't crawl"... is there a robots tag (not including a robots.txt file) that would instruct a spider not to read the content at all?]

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us add the noindex robots instruction to discourage SEOs from gaming the site. The idea is that no one would bother posting not-bookmark-worthy links solely for the “link juice” — those links are not supposed to “count” (for link weight, not traffic, obviously). But I also thought noindex and nocache was supposed to prevent Google or other SEs from displaying snippets from the page, and that assumption was proved wrong.

If the del.icio.us page for a specific tag — your company’s name, for example — has PageRank value, ranks well for that keyword in a Google search, and lists your site at the top of the page, it becomes harder to believe, in light of this snippet being displayed, that there still is no IBL value in making sure your site is frequently del.icio.us’d.