Matter/Anti-Matter

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction business model (a portal for public-facing aggregated customer support) into the broader realm of brand management. It aggregates the aggregation, if you will, and centralizes what Modernista, Skittles, and Crispin Porter Bogusky did on their own sites.

The cost of participation for a brand is US$400 per month, and the incentives are threefold: First, brands can publicly demonstrate their commitment to transparency. Secondly, because the portal presents branded conversations just one click away from each other, brands might benefit from an attention spill-over (while of course also having to fear a cannibalization of their feed). Finally, the aggregated conversation tracking comes with some metrics, kind of like FriendFeed and Google Analytics combined. The dashboard view puts brands in control of the conversation, or at least suggests as much.

However, I have a feeling that Brands in Public will fall flat. As with the new Google Sidewiki, one could argue that community dies in the very moment someone tries to "own" it. If it's true that 'your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room,' how interesting then is what these people say when you're not only in the same room (any social network feed, i.e. Twitter, Facebook) but actually on the same stage with them (Brands in Public)? The outcome of Godin's and BuzzAgent's experiment remains to be seen: It may mark the next stage of the 'conversation economy.' Or the end of the conversation.

(Hat tip to Kristina Loring)

Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And now the world’s hottest advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), has done it, too: the NY outfit has re-launched its corporate web site as a conversational social hub that curates what is being said about CPB rather than staging what CPB has to say. Some may scoff at this move and denigrate it as “sooooo six months ago,” but I agree with Paul Isakson when he heralds the influence of the new CPB site on the rest of the industry as potentially paradigm-shifting.

The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early adopter: CPG is the latter, no doubt, and while there’s nothing really innovative about the new site, it is nonetheless still radical relative to the vast majority of corporate web sites out there. Bringing CPB’s client portfolio to life by marrying the Kantian “You are what you do” with the Twitterian “You are what they say about you,” it certainly sets a new standard for the online presentation of creative industry brands. And – the proof is in the pudding – it accomplishes the ultimate goal of any conversational site: it is the talk of the town (or at least that of Madison Avenue).

However, as I was browsing through the plethora of content on the new (beta) CPB.com, an unsettling feeling came over me. It occurred to me that the trend of conversational corporate web sites going mainstream might trigger an unexpected, inadvertent effect. With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf.

Similar to Google’s profiting from original content on the backs of original publishers, brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of original brands’ social universe. In other words, what if Skittles faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than Skittles.com itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and XING, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web.

This scenario will hardly be a conflict that brands can legally solve, and it may therefore present a troubling blind spot in the social media ecosystem. Sure, brands can claim their corporate URLs and even their Facebook profiles (not always their Twitter feeds, as you can see exemplified by http:/twitter.com/ted – “I got it first, I win.”). Aggregators, however, operate in social web’s no man’s land, in indisputable territory.

Brand value, extremely volatile anyway, would then become completely unmanageable for the original brand owner. The very transcendence that is emblematic of powerful brands, may become their curse: brand loyalty is not so much loyalty towards a certain company; rather it is – as the name implies – loyalty towards a brand, wherever it lives and however it appears, both of which not limited to the confines of the official representation on the brand owner’s properties. It is the conundrum of successful brand builders that the bigger their brand becomes, the more likely their risk that they lose it to the social commons. Skittles and CPB have recognized that the main threat for their brands is not coming from competitors at the center of their industry but from outliers at the fringes –and they have preempted it, at least so far. My advice for all the others, the late adopters: Take action quickly and launch your own branded aggregation portals before third parties beat you to the punch!

While third-parties might try to benefit from curating branded conversations, Twitter produces the reverse trend as well: brands acting as parasites of existing third-party conversations. UK furniture retailer Habitat had to apologize for referencing the popular hashtag #iranelection in its Twitter feeds. (Over)-eager to drive eyeballs to its feed, it had committed the ultimate sin of social brands: it had stolen a collective currency that no one brand could possibly own.

Another scenario is brands initiating Twitter conversations that are essentially solipsistic. Web-site building company Moonfruit conducted a campiagn offering10 free MacBook Pros as prizes randomly awarded to Twitterers who would use the hashtag #moonfruit. The result: #moonfruit became a trending topic, attracting 400 tweets a minute, more than 10,000 times per hour, and 200,000 per day. Moonfruit’s Twitter followers rose to 23,000, and according to a Moonfruit spokesperson, visits to its site were up 600% on day two of the campaign. Some bemoan it as a "tragedy of the commons" or caution that "unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam." I'm not so worried. The different responses to Habitat's and Moonfruit's campaign show that the Twitterverse can self-regulate attention-hijacking attempts and tell the cool from the not-so-cool. Let Twitter do what Twitter can do. All is fair in the conversation wars.

Several blog posts this week, combined, pinpoint what are arguably the two most influential trajectories for the impact of communication technologies on business these days: from real-time web to real-time business, and from social media to social business design.

Let’s start with the former. Referring to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his presentation at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco last week, DigitalBeat claims that the real-time web is not only shaping the future of all computing but also that of business overall: “In business it’s real-time or it’s no time.” It goes on by quoting Benioff: “Customers (…) expect everything to happen right away— if they update their data, they expect those changes to appear immediately, not an hour or two in the future. (…) Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. (…) Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.”

Sure, you may say, customers always want it faster and cheaper, that’s not news. But the implications Benioff talks about are more profound and affect the way organizations operate and adapt their business models to the new and ever-changing demands of immediacy. Some examples: Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses customer feedback to develop new clothes, in near real-time. TCHO, the San Francisco-based chocolatier, relies on continuous flavor development and customer feedback to drive constantly evolving versions of its dark chocolate, with variations emerging as often as every 36 hours. Status updates, embedded news feeds, and Twitter apps have injected some “real-time-ism” into professional online social networks such as LinkedIn and XING, converting them from address books to conversational circles, from networking forums to collaboration platforms. Zappos, the online retailer, successfully combines real-time customer service on Twitter with near-real-time delivery – having established a powerful, dynamic brand before letting its customers decide what business it was actually in. And Skittles, the candy brand, ingeniously replaced its corporate homepage with the 'Interweb,' a collage of real-time social web conversations not by but about Skittles – essentially recreating itself as the first ever real-time brand. All these models show that the news industry’s big conundrum applies to every other business, too: It used to be that there’s nothing more boring that yesterday’s newspaper. Now there’s nothing more boring than today’s. When you relaunch your business model, product, brand identity, web site – it’s already too late. Real-time beats planning to the punch.

Real-time businesses therefore must get rid of long-term strategy plans, product road maps, goals and objectives, and all the other superfluous documents that distract organizations from focusing on their true mission – the here and now. Most of these documents are inward anyway and can be easily replaced with one strong and permanent mission statement (which, if your company culture is intact, does not even need to be verbalized).

Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social. The more businesses open up their organizations and invite external voices into their inner sanctum, the more real-time they will become. Getting social will help companies gather customer intelligence in real-time and use it to move faster. In the future, real-time businesses may deliver before their customers even articulate their needs. And they will provide immediate value without immediate return, in other words they will over-deliver – free for now but with a material or immaterial return later. What is the inadvertent business model for media might be a fulcrum for companies that manage to achieve a brand premium through customer participation as a part of real-time product development: “building a plane in the air,” together with their customers.

"The process is the product,” as Trendwatching writes in its latest report, in which it also claims that the real-time the web is breeding a new quest for longevity or “Foreverism”: “the new popularity of technology that allows consumers to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.” It’s not as paradoxical as it may sound. Living real-time means living in the ongoing – forever. If everything happens in real-time, nothing is ever final and always in permanent beta. Conversely, if everything lasts forever on the Google web (your emails, networks, conversations) and your digital presence is only as good as your latest search results and Twitter updates, you better utter some digital impressions NOW.

And yet, what’s required is a shift in thinking and ultimately a new organizational model that goes beyond feeding the social media beast on the real-time web: “If the big picture is business transformation, it's going to take more than a few tweets to get there,” David Armano writes in his post on ‘social business design,’ and argues that ““Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business where everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with business intent from the beginning.”

For centuries, organizations have considered it their task to conquer chaos and manage people, now they have to embrace the sudden chaos instigated by unmanageable throngs of instantly and elegantly self-organized individuals. Whether that will lead to the end of organizations remains to be seen; it will definitely lead to the end of organizations as we know them.

There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.

Scarcity seems to be at the core of all marketing: an exclusive, unique value that can be reproduced; an original idea replicated for many. That's how markets work, how marketing works. Branding is effective when it keeps the aura of an original idea intact despite its mechanical reproduction. Apple's original idea, for instance, could be described as "technology must be fun and human," and it has not lost an inch of its integrity. That's the trait of a strong brand: the idea remains scarce while its distribution becomes abundant. The scarcity of all branded, manufactured products is of course artificial. If it wasn't, these products wouldn't need to be branded. That's the whole point (and the difference between water and bottled water.)

Some brands have taken this concept a step further by creating a special type of artificial scarcity: "democratic exclusivity." Sounds paradoxical? Well, it is. But it works. Gmail has pioneered it: An (exclusive) invitation-only service that pretty much everyone can get invited to (democratic). As another example, take Apple's strategy with the iPhone app store. It is a closed system (exclusive) but principally open for third parties (democratic). Look at the Kindle that Amazon purportedly shares as an app for other mobile devices. It shows that it's certainly good to have recognizable hardware (exclusive) but the true value lies in the software that you own and that you can use to extend the reach of your brand (democratic). Or Radiohead's pay-as-you-like release of "In Rainbows": Buyers could determine the price (democratic) but the offer only stood for a limited period of time (exclusive). The album - online and physical distribution combined - sold more than Radiohead's previous releases, and the radically democratic way of pricing created a significant amount of brand equity for the band. Democratic exclusivity at its best: artificial scarcity in abundance.

The third and perhaps most game-changing model for marketers is selling relevance rather than scarcity. Jeff Jarvis points to Digg's new advertising system that enables users to vote on ads. Techcrunch calls it a "self service advertising product" that is "somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist." The twist is essentially a reversal of the traditional advertising paradigm: The most popular ads, as voted on by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click. In other words: The more users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. "The Digg system rests on a Cluetrainy need to deliver authentic value and relevance - like Google's ads," Jarvis notes, and he argues "that's the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you'll have to pay to market it." Jarvis is right: "The future of advertising needs to be selling - that is, enabling - relevance instead of selling scarce space, time, or eyeballs. The future needs to be about adding value - relevance - rather than selling scarcity (extracting what the market will bear)."

Equity is the accumulation, the repeated occurrence, of actions, interactions, and transactions that add value. The best way, then, to build brand equity is to repeatedly and consistently add value through all your interactions with customers. Advertising doesn't add value; branded content does (information). Promotions don't add value; branded entertainment does (entertainment). When you brand something, you don't just market scarcity and advertise your products and services, you market your ability to add value that is relevant.

The web, and the social web in particular, reconciles artificial scarcity with relevance, and that's why more and more branding dollars are moving online. It is the ideal forum for creating an abundance of scarce moments, thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one. These small great ideas come to live in brief moments of attachment with customers that are personalized and truly relevant for them.

"Advertising is failure," says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks "media only get in the way of customer relationships." And indeed, how will you make more friends at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says "I am a great friend" or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers, listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that's what we should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity - creating publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.

By Nick de la Mare

I saw an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend titled "Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise." The premise of the article goes something like this: because the web provides functionality to test every variation of a banner ad for effectiveness, the next big thing is tailoring advertising in the moment, and leveraging findings from click-thru rates to construct more relevant offerings for consumers.

If I had to construct a tag-line for the so-called "data practice" services cited in this article it would be "downstream solutions to upstream problems." From the media-buying perspective I understand the argument: if the chosen vehicle for the ad is wrong, the advertiser will recognize it faster and will be able to adapt on the fly. Quick changes in placement and timing make ads more effective at targeting particular populations. But from the standpoint of advertisers and brands trying to understand the consumers they serve, this service misses the boat.

Coming from a research-heavy design consultancy, I believe this effort represents not a huge step forward but a band-aid placed over a much larger issue. Ad agencies and the companies that hire them should be doing a much better job understanding their consumers before they ever put their banner ads out there.

The article cites a Vespa campaign of 27 web-based ads, with variations in messaging ranging from "Pure fun. And function" to "Smart looks. Smarter purchase." The second message, combined with a no money down, zero-percent interest offer, attracted 71% more responses than the average of other Vespa ads. The two underlying value propositions ("Vespa, all about the fun" vs. "Vespa, it's a prudent financial decision") represent wildly different core assumptions about the product and its users.

It seems like a no-brainer to assume that doing a little research before designing the ads, speaking to customers and employees in-store, conducting contextual inquiries into existing owners and trend-scrapes tracking the rise of couponing and price consciousness, would yield the same results as the results of click-thru rates, as well as revealing additional deeper data that could be leveraged to fill out the campaign and adapt the product offering itself.

I'm not saying that tracking click-thrus isn't sensible and smart; it's just reactive. Only after you put something out there can you judge the validity of your messaging and when you do, your tool for judging that response is relatively blunt and binary (and the product, if off-base, is fundamentally unchanged).

By taking a proactive approach instead—i.e. talking to people and testing your assumptions before ever constructing an ad, and then altering the product to more closely align it to your findings—allows you to build your offering holistically. Now your banners reflect your product, and vice-versa, and there will likely be less need to retrofit the argument around a leap of faith.

The rise of data practices in digital advertising appears to be more of an effort to retain relevancy on the part of the agencies than something that fundamentally creates value for the consumer. And calling it new is a bit of a misrepresentation. Many of the old lessons of direct marketing are simply being ported over to the web by advertisers. Like the good-old days of 800-numbers and rebate codes, I'm sure it'll be successful. But calling it a "radical new approach" may be an overstatement.

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, Germany, one of Europe's leading digital-creative-marketing forums. This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and executives from German corporations (from BMW and Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

 

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google Do?" PowerPoint deck. While a terrific thinker and speaker, for some reason he and the audience did not really click although he presented a lot of thought-provoking content. The rather stiff response may be attributed to the fact that the attendees were either too familiar with what they heard or felt slightly overwhelmed. Or maybe they were indeed excited--but too German to show it…

Umair Haque, who followed Jarvis, faced an even tougher, albeit partly self-inflicted challenge: explaining the new paradigm of "Constructive Capitalism" in 45 minutes. That's like asking Marx to walk you through his Communist Manifesto in Twitter. It didn't help, certainly, that Haque used the much gushed-about Prezi presentation software; all the zooming in and out was dizzying and, if anything, exposed the lack of stringency in his outline.

Fortunately, Haque had an opportunity to correct this first impression and reiterate some of his thoughts on a panel with Jarvis a day later, which turned out to be a much more suitable format for his ideas on the transformation of capitalism. He also took the occasion to rebut the attacks of Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur"), who, on the opening day, had chastised Haque (and all the other thinkers he considers to be under the dark influence of Silicon Valley) for propagating rampant free market liberalism and a dangerous new radical individualism in the guise of the social, consumer-empowered share economy that the conference was celebrating. Keen poignantly remarked that Twitter was getting us back into the 18th century, rather than liberating us from institutional hierarchies. He said it would reinforce an old power structure and an all too human division of roles, between those who follow and those followed.

 Andrew Keen: "Digital Vertigo"

Jeff Jarvis & Umair Haque: "When Money Talks"

Keen accused Haque et al of naivete and insisted that Google and the other Web juggernauts were not "leveling the playing field" through link love (by sharing the scarcest resource on the web: attention), as Haque had claimed, but were rather using it to expand their pursuit of world dominance. In Keen's eyes, Google's openness is nothing but a suave mechanism to foment a monopoly in the attention markets. In the same vein, a party pooper in the audience asked Jarvis: "If free sharing is the future of business, why doesn't Google share its page rank algorithm?" Jarvis' response wasn't all too convincing, "concerns over malicious abuse of the data." So much for radical transparency and trust as overriding principles in the share economy.

To Google's (and Jarvis') defense, one could counter with Haque's sharp line: "When we're all hyper-connected, the cost of evil goes up." True. Moreover, Google does provide real value as it has created a win-win-win business model (advertisers, consumers, Google) that is vastly different from the toxic chunk Haque bemoaned in the nonsustainable and ultimately value-free products that toppled capitalism as we knew it: the Hummer, fast food, derivatives, and so on. And yet, if advertising is the admission that you have a mediocre product, and that it is in fact an expression of "failure," as Jarvis put it, then it is hard to reconcile this view with the fact that advertising remains the main revenue stream in the very Google economy from which Jarvis wants us all to learn.

Despite the flaws in Jarvis' and Haque's thinking, however, I am eager to defend them. It's easy to deconstruct constructive visions of the future as ill-informed descriptions of present realities but it is a much bigger task to actually come up with a positive vision. Keen, the rebel with a good cause, does nothing but throwing a bomb, which he readily admits, but he falls short of offering an alternative to the frameworks Jarvis and Haque and others provide in response to the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

Google wouldn't care about any of this intellectual arm-wrestling all that much. It is fully consumed with doing what it does best: firing out beta-products and services, successfully failing by failing rapidly. One mistake that it made, however, may arguably have lasting implications. It didn't buy Twitter. And so the question, it seems, is no longer "What would Google do?" but "What will Twitter do?" Does Twitter mark the beginning of the end of the Google economy?

Jyri Engeström, who sold Twitter-competitor Jaiku to Google and is now a Google employee, might have a clue. On a panel with social media guru Chris Messina he offered some good insights on microblogging trends on the Web and defended the new Google Profiles ("you have to opt in"). Messina seconded him and brought up another interesting point that established the context for upcoming business models in the Twitter economy: the "glocalization" of Twitter. He described how Twitter is failing to extend the real-time conversation to the whole world, simply because of time zone differences: one part of the world is always sleeping when you're tweeting. The instant social Web conversation is therefore asynchronous, after all, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envision services that bridge the time zone gap and deliver tweets when the recipients can actually receive them (keeping them on the top of the feed), almost like an echo across time zones. What if the real value of real-time was the delivery of tweets when it really mattered?

The whole time dimension of Twitter is uncharted but valuable territory, and there are other add-ins, integrators, and localization services that will emerge in this vibrant new ecosystem. The conversation on the social Web is as rich as the human communication (if not richer), and it is just beginning to fully emerge.

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the Web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn, or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and, in fact, for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, and so on) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: health care, finance, news, energy, government--you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy--transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing--and you have a winner.

AUSTIN, Texas--Someone blogged that South by Southwest Interactive is just like the Internet itself: disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on.

In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference here is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta conversation.

That was already the case before Twitter entered the scene at SXSW two years ago, but the microblogging service has certainly amplified the effect. It was both comical and frightening to see the uber-individualistic geeksters at SXSW captivated by the invisible rules of an ostentatious behavioral uniformity: within 1 mile of the convention center, you could observe the strange ritual of groups of people standing or sitting together, chained to their iPhones, twittering instead of talking: "SXSW. Twittering about SXSW."

The real conversation was often limited to a quick "What's your name?" or "Where's the next party?" just to have some input for the next tweet. It is indeed a read-write generation that is coming of age in the wake of an all-dominant present, with no particular loyalty to the past and maybe not even an interest in the future (see Peggy Orenstein's recent piece on "Growing up on Facebook" in The New York Times Magazine).

Yet the rise of the social digerati is unstoppable. New data by Nielsen Online shows that social-networking sites (which encompass social networks and blogs, by Nielsen's definition) are experiencing growth rates of twice as much as any of the main destination sites (search, portals, PC software sites, and e-mail). The time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth. Furthermore, social networks are gaining traction among new audiences.

... Read more

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008

Nice clip from the German ad agency Scholz & Friends. Nothing new but good ammunition for convincing the few who have yet to see the light...

Via Federated Media