Recently in Experiences Category
Brief interview post speaking at the Digital Age 2.0 Conference in Sao Paulo yesterday. You can probably tell I was a little jet lagged when I was interviewed.
I also talk about the types of people I'd love to hire. Are you one of them?
I also talk about the types of people I'd love to hire. Are you one of them?
I'm hiring for two different roles in my group at PepsiCo Beverages. If you are interested in applying, please read the job description and apply online. I'm looking to fill these positions quickly. I can promise you it will be a wild ride working with some of the most exciting brands in the world as we reinvent digital media and marketing and explore new ways of engaging with consumers online in a mass scale. My group will be driving digital strategy and executions across paid, owned and earned media so these roles will be able to do exciting things.
Here are the job descriptions -
- The Digital Engagement Manager will act as the strategic partner to PepsiCo America Beverages (PAB) brand teams in developing new models of digital engagement, advising on best practices and managing the planning, design and development of solutions across paid, owned and earned media that help connect the Pepsi brands to its consumers. View the complete job description.
- The Social Activation Strategy & Execution Manager will be responsible for identifying real time social learnings and leading the social media activation teams assigned to each of the Pepsi Beverages brand teams. This person will need to drive our social media strategy and execution efforts working in partnership with the brand teams and the digital engagement managers. View the complete job description.
You can apply for both these jobs online. Ping me if you have any questions. These are opportunities to be at the forefront of digital marketing working for an organization that is pushing the boundaries of digital and social media in fun and exciting ways. Please share this with folks you know who may be strong candidates for these roles. We're looking for the very best!
Here's Jonah's recent presentation on viral media. Definitely worth a scan. He's the founder of Buzzfeed and is someone who shares my "impression plus" philosophy. More on that in this Adweek story, "The Science of Sharing" which quotes me explaining that the future of display advertising has to do with publishers that provide not just the best ROI on impressions but the most shares too.
Jonah's concept is simple - people are bored at work and they're the ones who share. You've got to create content for them.
Don't miss Jeremiah's report on Facebook Success Factors (embedded below). It is a great read. He references a blog post of mine on how Facebook is suffering from the micro-site syndrome in it as well. In the report Jeremiah explains that nearly half of all brands reviewed fell short in how they're leveraging Facebook's social features.
The success factors established for brands participating in Facebook include - setting community expectations, providing cohesive branding, being up to date, living authentically, participating in the dialog, enabling peer to peer interactions, fostering dialog and soliciting calls to action.
I'd like to take the liberty of adding two behind the scenes success factors - establishing objectives and being clear about how the Facebook effort fits and works with the broader digital ecosystem of the brand. The full report is embedded below.
Marta and her wonderful "What the F**k is Social Media?" franchise is out with a new presentation that puts social media in context of why it matters even more today. PepsiCo is featured on slide 40-41 and I'm quoted on slide 63 discussing what I suppose is some of the new risks to all of us with social media (and I'm not talking privacy). Enjoy the deck!
Pete Carter, who's a Director of Brand Communications at P&G and I just did a joint post for the Harvard Business Review about our experiences judging the North America Grand Effies last month. Below is an excerpt and it links to the full post on the Harvard Business Review site.
Last month we served as judges on the North America Grand Effies Judging Committee. For those of you who do not know the Effies, they are considered the top awards for effective marketing communications around the world. Several rounds of judging submissions in different marketing categories result in a list of finalists for the "Grand Effie" or the award for the most effective marketing across all categories. That's what we were tasked to judge, along with nine other senior marketers representing both the creative and business sides of the industry.The winner was a surprising choice. It wasn't a multi-million dollar television campaign for a Fortune 50 company, nor was it a digital media program or some new-age service. Instead, the Grand Effie award was given to the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) for a very simple, and cost-efficient word-of-mouth program to encourage student enrollment. Here's what they did.
Read the full story on the Harvard Business Review website and tell us what you think.
Why this is so irritating to me
We're all so busy building our personal brands that I feel we're reluctant to criticize anyone who could help us extend our brands. Well, maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot here but it is time to do a bit of criticizing and I'm going to call a spade a spade. The Fast Company Influence Project gimmick is exactly that - a gimmick and a disappointing one. It seems to be a way to build a database of people and participate in link baiting more than a meaningful approach to identifying who's influential online.
Sure it looks beautiful and there's something funky about having your photograph appear in Fast Company. But it seems to be more of a whimsical marketing campaign than something a serious publication that covers innovation would do. Here's why I'm really struggling with this "project." And it begins with how it defines influence -
1. Definition of influence is too simplistic
Fast Company says, " Influence is not only about having the most friends or followers. Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation."
There are some problems with this definition. It is a definition that's marginally less simplistic than counting friends and followers. Yes, influence is about affecting behavior but there's more to it than that. It is about understanding the different types of influencers (expert, positional and referent) and the types of influence including compliance, identification and internalization (see the article I wrote back in 2007 about this or read my book). Influence is also about understanding the travel path of information which this project ignores. What we have here is a popularity contest.
2. Clicking a link is not a measure of influence
What's also troubling about the "Project" is that it assumes that re-tweeting something and more directly link clicking is an accurate measure of influence. Not true. (Amusingly, you get extra credit if someone clicks on your link and signs up for the program too) .Getting people to click on a link is an accurate measure of getting people to click on a link not of actual influence which is much harder to define and track.
To assume that the most influential person online is the one that is clicked the most is inaccurate. If anything, this project promotes the misconception that basic clicks are a meaningful measure alone. It is probably the most important visible measure but definitely not the most strategic one in the influence or marketing space. Many of us in the digital marketing space have worked hard to convince companies that there's more to digital than clicks.
3. Publications like Fast Company should never endorse link baiting
What is most worrying in some respects is that "The Influence Project" appears to be endorsing link baiting because that is exactly what they are doing themselves. As Mike Arrington pointed out, watch the Fast Company July traffic numbers they'll be much higher than earlier. Why - because of this experiment. "The Influence Project" is more about increasing site traffic (which will do well I suspect) than it is about influence. As a result, it is endorsing cheapskate tricks to drive traffic to the publisher website in the guise of a fancy name.
So what should Fast Company have done instead?
1. Fast Company should have a more sophisticated measure of influence. Or at the very least, they should have acknowledged that their measure of influence is simplistic and explained why it is being used. I'd in fact recommend not framing this project as away to identify the most influential person online as that sets unnecessarily high expectations. You're also not going to find out the most influential person online through it either.
2. Fast Company could have used a separate URL and website for this project. That way they would have avoided all potential criticism around link baiting. It would have kept the whole initiative neat and clean in a way that it currently isn't. They wouldn't have gotten all the link baiting benefits but they're not supposed to be the point of the exercise.
3. They should have established guidelines with regards to the promotion of the links. I'm already getting spammed with requests to click on links and retweet them. This project promotes spamming without those guidelines and that's not a good thing. It can never be. Fast Company - you're one of the good guys. Don't go promoting or tacitly encouraging spammy behavior. We've got too much of that online already.
4. Make it meaningful beyond Fast Company. Do good. Rather than rewarding people by having their photographs appear in the print issue, better still would be to donate money or online ad space (from all those extra views) to the charities of the winners' choices. That way at least something good will come out of this. To say that this is a serious effort to understand the most influential person online is a little disingenuous as there are many other far more rigorous and scientific efforts in this realm. It also lacks meaning.
Sorry Fast Company but you've disappointed me today. It is not innovative, it is gimmicky and as an avid reader of Fast Company I'd even say that I think its off brand.
