Last week, as speculated, Apple announced .99 cent TV show rentals along with the re-launch of its redesigned AppleTV product. Not far behind is the highly anticipated November launch of the Boxee Box and GoogleTV plus Roku’s 1080p personal streaming upgrade.

[We are becoming “source-agnostic.”]
Each of these on-demand, video content aggregation & delivery apps/set-top boxes has their emerging pros & cons. But the one thing they all have in common is the fact that they are, essentially, “source-agnostic.” No longer do I have to know or necessarily care if the original program came from NBC, FOX, CBS or even YouTube.

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

[Align to the content not necessarily the delivery vehicle.]
What this could mean for advertisers is the need to align more to the content itself in addition to (or, perhaps in the long term, in lieu of) the specific delivery vehicle (such as a network, a service, or a device). Since my on-demand content is now portable, I can watch Mad-Men live on AMC, through onDemand cable, my AppleTV, on my iPad, PC, or mobile phone. The only constant, regardless how or where I’m viewing the show, is the actual content.

[Will we have a surge of branded entertainment?]
Advertising that aligns to the content and not the delivery vehicle could take many forms. Branded-bumpers/pre-roll could preceded the program/show. Or we may start to see even more product placement/branded-entertainment since there is absolutely no way to strip out advertising/marketing that is so intertwined into the actual content of the program itself. The advertising/marketing, therefore, follows the content around as it gets delivered in whatever way the viewer chooses to consume it.

[Being Source-Agnostic can lead to greater advertising receptivity.]
In the end, there is still lots to figure out within the complex world of content programming and delivery. What I do know, though, is that the Emmys got me to download and start watching Modern Family (via Apple TV). I didn’t even know (until I looked it up) that Modern Family is broadcast on ABC. And since I’m watching the show commercial free, the brands that made a lasting impression on me were Apple (iPad) and Costco who were a non-intrusive and, actually, welcomed part of the branded entertainment experience.

 

Mike also posted this on his blog Harmonic Aftershock.

I was reading a rant about the new AppleTV on SmugMug's blog and found myself nodding in agreement with "Imagine that the AppleTV ran iOS and had its own App Store."  I then reached into the drawer for the iPad's VGA connector I'd bought a few months back for $30 (haven't seen any cheaper knock-offs yet), plugged my iPad into the flatscreen, and there it was, an AppleTV with an app store. I downloaded a few Stanford's free video lectures  from iTunesU -- the native Videos app supports video-out -- and played them on the large screen. (Other shows rented or bought through iTunes might not play via VGA.)

I watched two movies from the Netflix app; they weren't of Blu-ray quality, but were still very watchable and streamed smoothly over wireless.  You can't charge the iPad while the VGA connector is in, but the battery lasted long enough to provide video entertainment for the entire evening.

Among other video sources that looked fine on the big screen were websites (some through Safari, others through the Perfect Web Browser app that almost lives up to its name), the ABC app, YouTube, and AirVideo for watching video files stored on other PCs at home and streamed to the TV via iPad over the wireless. The Hulu app, too, should work with video-out, but I don't have the Plus subscription to try for myself.  Many more video apps are in the works.

I've been looking for a small HTPC to replace a dead desktop as a bridge between TV and the internet, perhaps an Acer or a Lenovo, but for now, it turns out the iPad will work just fine.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

While Facebook’s announcement of its Places product continues to roll in, I was struck by Mashable’s Ben Parr when he live blogged, “Facebook is playing a movie discussing the advantages of Facebook Places. They’re discussing check-ins, and much of it sounds like Foursquare.”

With over 150 million active mobile users of Facebook versus just over 2 million on Foursquare, one can’t help but wonder what this means to the darling of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs).

And while, Facebook did a nice job of integrating many its location-based “partners” at its announcement (Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp, and MyTown), the language that the mega company used indicates that it is “guns blazing” when it comes to the concept of checking-in: “Maybe one day in 20 years time your children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone thing will start to vibrate and come alive and say ‘this is where your parents had their first kiss and this is the photo their friends took right afterward.’”

But Foursquare still has a few things that continue to make it stand out as the flagship LBSN:

1. Partnerships: Foursquare has built up an abundance of partnerships with media companies and brands that make the act of checking-in that much more rewarding and motivating.

2. Post Check-in Experience: Dennis Crowley’s tenacious focus NOT on the act of checking-in, but on what happens after you check-in will help sustain Foursquare’s differentiation.

3. Social Currency: While Facebook is emphasizing the notion of seeing who else is at locations when you check in with Facebook Places, that’s not the primary motivator of why people check in. Foursquare’s built in “social gaming” experience creates an addicting friendly competition.

The results of Hill Holliday’s recent poll on why people check-in to LBSNs underscores point #3: People want to earn social currency which is not something Facebook mentioned in their announcement.

There’s no doubt that tonight’s announcement from Facebook will have a dramatic effect on the social culture of the check-in…but it doesn’t mean that they will own it. If Foursquare plays its cards right, there’s still the potential for it to become as big as Twitter and Facebook.

Mike also posted this on his blog Harmonic Aftershock.

Here's something I've been thinking about for some time now.

You see, there is this company.

It publishes over a hundred RSS feeds and several email newsletters, but not a single blog.

The only conversations this company entertains are the ones it starts itself or is subpoenaed into.

Conversations it doesn't like, it tries to silence.

It has sued some of its biggest fans.

Continue reading the original article and the follow-up. Both were originally published last fall.

Enjoy August reruns of some of our most popular articles while the editorial team (of one) takes a long-overdue break away from all things digital.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

In its purest form, Social Media is nothing more than a set of online tools/technologies that enable open conversation. The opportunity for brands, then, is to connect with their customers on a genuine, human level. Those that are the most successful in leveraging social media (in this way) already have a passionate customer-centric attitude embedded in every fiber of their culture and operations.

Much has been written about Zappos’ business model and the company’s “social voice”. And while I spend most of my time working with national, large-scale brands, the businesses that have been turning my head lately have been those that are closest to home. Their use of social media on a local-scale creates the perfect storm for a relationship: intimate, genuine, approachable, and human.

I look at companies like Goodies who has become an embedded part of Danvers, Massachusetts’ “real world” community. The brand lives and breathes “social” – not because of its Facebook page, but because of its presence at town events, fairs, and kids’ birthday parties.

And then there’s b.good whose back-story is as genuine as they come. The company isn’t asking you to like them on Facebook or Follow them on Twitter — They are asking you to “become a part of their family.” Their social channels are merely ways to stay virtually connected to a brand that radiates community from the moment you walk into one of their restaurants. (Incidentally, they’ve grown to 7 locations).

I recently found out that a friend’s new store (Skoah) just opened because of a post he did on Facebook. He will be successful if, like Goodies and b.good, his customer experience (at every touch point) is nothing short of positive and makes people feel good.

Don’t believe the hype.
Brands (and marketers) get overly hyped up about social media because it’s often synonymous with word-of-mouth.  And since referrals are the “Holy Grail” to many businesses’ growth, there’s a misperception that simply establishing a presence on Facebook + Twitter will do amazing things.

Focus on great products & service.
As fundamental as this is, it’s great products and great service that create the kind of sustained customer relationships that generate referrals through word-of-mouth. Companies whose very DNA is built from and breathes this are the ones who will get the most of social media as a means to further energize loyal customers into brand advocates.

Relationships do matter…a lot.

Mike also posted this on his blog Harmonic Aftershock.

Just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers – sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

Read on.

Enjoy August reruns of some of our most popular articles while the editorial team (of one) takes a long-overdue break away from all things digital.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

One of the benefits of working in advertising, besides the short hours and the lavish cocktail parties every day at 3 pm, is the fact that we are living in the future. If it’s digital, social, technological, or just plain new, chances are we’re on top of it, and finding ways to use it. So by default, a lot of this stuff is second nature to us.

It’s not that way with everybody, though.

This became quite clear to me during a dinner party a few weeks ago. I was surrounded by several well-educated couples that read books, pay their mortgage on time, and can assemble a gas grill without too much difficulty. The subject turned to things like Facebook and Twitter, so of course I chimed in with my two cents. And then, I very naturally spouted off a few more related terms, to keep the conversation going.

Silence.

What did I say, you ask? Nothing fancy. Things we all talk about every day. But other people don’t talk about these things every day. And I know this, because here is what I said, followed by the response:

LinkedIn
“They make those metal fences, right?”

WordPress
“Is that some kind of panini?”

Apps
“We enjoy the stuffed mushrooms.”

Foursquare
“Didn’t you play that in elementary school?”

Augmented Reality
“Reality tv is stupid. Especially that show about the Kardashian sisters.”

Google Chrome
“It’ll rust if you leave it out in the rain.”

Wiki
“We’ve never visited Hawaii.”

HootSuite
“Oh, that cute little owl that said ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”

StumbleUpon
“Did you fall down?”

Tumblr
“Did you fall down again?”

Needless to say, dinner ended quickly. And I skipped dessert, because I didn’t want to mistakenly blurt out something like “spumoni.”

So if you’re ever at a dinner party, and this happens to you, just give me a call. Better yet, announce that you “have to share something on FriendFeed.”

That’ll throw them into a frenzy.

We have recently built a social network – a community for sharing stories and support – for a CPG client. Our client had no ROI expectations and no comparable past experience. This was a completely new tactic, in a new medium, targeted at unquantified attitudinal goals. How would you benchmark this kind of activity?

Advertisers often struggle over what benchmarks to use or whether benchmarks are even relevant. Here’s what we did to provide accountability and justify the expenditure.

Generally, we can define three classes of benchmarks:

1. Predictive: what we expect to happen.
2. Requirement: what needs to happen.
3. Aspirational: what we hope to happen.

Predictive benchmarks are forecasts based on similar activities or on models that extrapolate from activities that are dissimilar in known ways. Usually, the quality spectrum in this class of benchmarks begins with industry averages on the worst end – they’re especially bad for online measurement, diverse industries and branding campaigns – and bottom-up statistical models on the best-in-class end of the spectrum. Predictive benchmarks are most useful for optimization. They are less useful for evaluation.

For our social media project, we set predictive benchmarks for key operational metrics. The end outcome might have been a new beast, but not all the moving parts driving to that beast were new. Mass media still needed to drive qualified leads to the site. Rich media display ads still needed to engage. The user experience still needed to satisfy. We could set some of these benchmarks using a blend of statistical and judgment-based predictive models.

Requirement benchmarks define what needs to happen. In the simplest case, a DR campaign might have a threshold cost per conversion that the finance group determines to be profitable.

Requirements might also come from strategic plans. If a firm has a strategic goal of 90% customer satisfaction and is currently at 70%, for example, that translates to needing to convert 20% of its customers from not satisfied to satisfied. If the firm projects 10 million customers during the relevant period and has allocated an incremental $8,000,000 across marketing and service business units to solve the satisfaction problem, that means marketing activities need to meet a hurdle of $4 per incremental satisfied customer.

Requirement benchmarks can also be the performance of the best alternative activity. In a champion vs. challenger approach, each test tactic is required to perform at least as well as the best tactic to date. When a firm forays into the online space for the first time, requirement benchmarks can come from offline tactics. This may require measuring offline outcomes from online activities, but we should be doing that already if the offline outcomes are business relevant.

At minimum, all activities are required to achieve some incrementality. A firm whose awareness metrics are stuck, for example, could have a requirement benchmark of “any statistically significant increase.” This definition of a benchmark can be especially useful for secondary objectives that are not business-critical.

In our social media example, requirements contributed to our benchmarks. We looked at a prior campaign that was very different but had some overlapping outcomes. We said our cost per outcome had to be better than that campaign’s cost pers, because that campaign was seen as not very successful. Also, since the client’s brand metrics were flat, we also required that the program drive some statistically significant increase in those metrics, knowing that any increase would beat the best efforts to date.

Aspirational benchmarks say “there’s an elephant in the room.” It recognizes that even if there’s no basis for forecasting results or knowing what is required, there may still be some outcome that will be seen as failure and some outcome that you can defend as success, even if you can’t draw a bright line between the two. What would fail the laugh test in the boardroom? That is a lower bound. Then ask what number would look good in the final presentation? Keep trimming the gap between the upper and lower bounds, then from that range, pick a conservative but tenable value.

Although our client didn’t say how many members they wanted in the community we were building, they had definite reactions to specific hypothetical numbers. What about $500 per member? Clearly too expensive. What about $5 per member? No one would doubt the value of that, they said. We winnowed that gap down, blended in the requirements-based benchmarks, extrapolated possible ranges of outcomes from our prediction-based operational benchmarks and ended up with practical, meaningful benchmarks.

The bottom-line question is, when the clients signs off on the expenditure, what do they expect to get for it? Sometimes, there really may be no way to benchmark the outcome of money spent. But in that case, there might be a better way to spend our money.

"You’ve seen this number before: an average American consumer today is exposed to — or “bombarded by”, or 'inundated with' — 5,000 advertising messages a day. This number finds its way into slide decks, it peppers newspaper articles, and it is quoted in academic papers.

You probably used it at least once. I know I did. Only today, I realized I had no idea where this number was coming from."

See what we found out back in 2007, as well as a response from Yankelovich's J. Walker Smith.

Enjoy August reruns of some of our most popular articles while the editorial team (of one) takes a long-overdue break away from all things digital.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

What I wrote about Second Life four years ago can be applied to Foursquare check-ins and other emerging media behaviors that haven't yet reached enough of a critical mass to be useful to advertisers in a traditional way.

"If it’s not about fame and if it’s not about money, why bother at all? The answer is knowledge.

Some experts predict that in the fairly near future at least part of the Internet will turn 3-D with online destinations either adopting some form of 3-D interface or expanding into the existing virtual environments (3pointD.com is one of the blogs tracking the signs of change). The argument goes that the companies that are playing inside Second Life and similar worlds today will be better prepared for tomorrow."

Read the rest of this 2006 post on Hill Holliday's blog.

Enjoy August reruns of some of our most popular articles while the editorial team (of one) takes a long-overdue break away from all things digital.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

The season premier of Mad Men made us dust off our family album and reach for the pictures from the agency’s first year (which are best viewed to the sounds of the special Mad Men station on Pandora Radio.)

Hill Holliday officially opened for business on May 13, 1968 in 1,500 square feet of space on the top floor of 143 Newbury Street. The company had no clients and no billings – just the conviction that a combination of ability, hard work and determination would enable them to make it, to succeed where others had failed.

There were also no employees, just the four partners: Jay Hill, Alan Holliday, Jack Connors and Steve Cosmopulos. Operating funds were a bit tight. For floor covering, one of the partners found a bargain on some indoor-outdoor carpeting. Another found a good deal on six slightly used metal desks (they were sure the staff would be growing soon). Steve brought in his own drafting table and, all of a sudden, the place started to look like an ad agency.

A labor union strike at the phone company almost derailed the agency’s launch. One of the unions at the New England Telephone Company (predecessor to Verizon) was on strike, and it was impossible for the fledgling firm to get phone service installed. The solution? A roll of dimes. There was a pay phone on the sidewalk in front of the office at 143 Newbury Street and Jack Connors and his partners monopolized it until the strike was over. A local toll call was 10 cents.

Each summer, our interns partner with an organization in the Greater Boston area to volunteer their time and service. Last Friday, 37 of our interns partnered with the Esplanade Association to help clean up the park along the Charles River. The volunteer coordinators from the Esplanade kicked off the day with a history and overview of the Storrow Memorial, and then the interns got to work. Over the course of the day, the interns trimmed nearly half a mile of weeds along the river’s edge, cleaned up litter, and provided playground maintenance.

(photography: Lawrence Wang)

When Lebron James announced his move to Miami in an hour-long ESPN special, the entire state of Ohio was upset. Most notably, the Cleveland Cavaliers Owner, Dan Gilbert, who wrote an “Open Letter to Cavs Fans” and posted it on the team’s Web site.

The following week on the ESPN’s ESPY awards, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd performed a spoof of Lebron’s 60-minute TV spectacle. Their mockery of “The Decision” featured Carell announcing that he would be leaving Chili’s and taking his appetite to the Outback Steakhouse.

We saw an impromptu marketing opportunity. The morning after the skit aired, Dave Gardiner and Joe Berkeley asked for ideas that would capitalize on the buzz. Within the hour, Steven Grskovic, Frank Cartagena and Dan Jordan had written and art directed an “Open Letter to Steve Carell,” which mimicked the irate language of Dan Gilbert and used his now infamous Comic Sans font.

(As seen on Yahoo! Sports, Examiner, CBS Sports, MSNBC, HollywoodNews, E!,  AgencySpy and Facebook)

Operation Hoodsie Cup officially begins today and runs through September 6. At various times, Boston Police Officers will drive the BPD Hood Ice Cream Truck through Boston neighborhoods to hand out Hoodsie Cups and engage with youth. The Hood truck stops will take place along pre-determined routes in each police district throughout the City of Boston and will be announced via BPDNews.com.

Hill Holliday developed the creative concept and design for Operation Hoodsie Cup and partnered with Boston Police and Hood to create the BPD-designed ice cream delivery truck.

Hill Holliday proudly supports General Motors’ goal to raise $1 million for Cell Phones for Soldiers, a non-profit organization founded by teenagers Robbie and Brittany Berguist of Norwell that collects old cell phones, recycles them and turns them into minutes of prepaid calling cards for troops serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

“Americans will replace an estimated 150 million cell phones this year,” says Mike Newman, Vice President of ReCellular, “with the majority of phones either discarded or stuffed in a drawer. Most people don’t realize that the small sacrifice of donating their unwanted phones can have a tremendous benefit for a worthy cause like Cell Phones for Soldiers.” The organization has raised almost $2 million in donations and more than 500,000 cell phones.

Just published some data and analysis behind the Jerzify Yourself site that Hill Holliday built back in January as an experiment in "spreadable design" and that got picked up by celeb publications and got passed around rather nicely. Lots of interesting stuff:  the effect of celebrity tweets, the speed of link propagation in Twitter and Facebook, different levels of "spreadfulness" we saw on different sites -- all right here.------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

It is an unfortunate but understandable reality that while we often marvel at digital projects that spread like wildfire across the web, we rarely get a chance to look at the numbers behind them. Between January and May, we built, launched and monitored Jerzify Yourself (warning: sound on autoplay) to get just such a glimpse into the dynamics of spreadable content.

This is going to be a long post, so if you are in a hurry, check the summary published in AdAge or scroll all the way down to the list of the most important things we’ve learned from this experiment.

The Setup

Jerzify Yourself was created in January a week after the first season finale of a certain MTV show that had attracted an audience of 4.8 million.  The site, written in a few days in Flash, provides a familiar attraction of uploading one’s headshot onto a stylized body, and is packed with references recognizable by the show’s viewers. Or, in the much more lively words of Village Voice:  ”The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-sized jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spraytan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”

The site was created by Bob Gates, Rick McHugh (CD); Frank Cartagena (CW); Carissa DiCenzo (AD); Paul Lenzi, Lisa Belden, Maggie Foley, Kim Ryan (production); Dan Pearce, Greg DeMelo, Jad Mintun, Kelsey Meuse, Nathan Vey, Fred LeBlanc, Dominic Giangiobbe, Moya Hynes (development); Johnny Won and Steve Bagdasarian (seeding).

To monitor traffic and site activity, we used Google Analytics and GetClicky with its real-time traffic statistics and a smartphone-friendly interface.  We tracked pass-alongs with a tool created by our friends at Meteor Solutions. We used an assortment of free counters to look at tweets, bit.ly links and the like.  We have also built a Jerzification Live tool that showed a stream of pictures uploaded by users in real time.

Seeding

The site went live on Thursday afternoon, January 28. We had not bought any media to drive traffic to it, but we did spend some time to alert others about the project. Most significantly, we created an “event” on Facebook inviting some 800 of our personal friends to jerzify themselves, and posted a link on BuzzFeed that has since been viewed 3,150 times.  We have also set up accounts on Tumblr and Twitter; we used the latter to retweet mentions, share the more amusing jerzifications, and reach out to fans of the show, producing a somewhat moderate 190 tweets in two months and attracting 83 followers.

The Pick-Up

Jerzify Yourself was picked by some of the bigger online outlets roughly in this order:

• College Candy (Jan 29)
• @petewenz (Jan 29)
• Huffington Post (Jan 29)
• NY Mag (Jan 29)
• Glamour (Jan 29)
• Gorrilamask.net (Jan 29)
• @PerezHilton (Jan 31)

• TV Guide (Feb 1)
• Village Voice (Feb 2)
• MSNBC (Jan 31)
• Comedy Central (Feb 1, Tosh.0 via BuzzFeed)
• College Humor (Feb 2)
• LemonDrop (Feb 5)
• Radio shows KISS 92.5 in Toronto (Feb 8.) and GNI 102.7 (undated) in Wilmington, NC
• Maxim (Feb 8, via LemonDrop)

The First Week: Celebrities

In the 18 weeks between January 28 and May 19, Google Analytics registered 158,575 unique visits (85.73% were new visits), 242,514 page views, and 02:04 average time on site.

The visits graph looks like a typical “long tail:”

The traffic peaked on Sunday, the fourth day after going live, with 22,717 visits.  This, to me, came as a surprise; I was expecting more of a hockey-stick graph in the beginning with a more gradual build-up.

The week between the launch on Thursday (1/28) and the following Wednesday (2/3) accounted for 58% of the visits (93,069).  These visits were referred by 99 sources who drove the bulk of the site’s traffic; the total number of referrers for the entire period was 367.   The referral stats are somewhat underreported, as some sites published the site’s URL without actually linking to it. Others, most notably Maxim.com,  linked to their “via” source of the news instead of the site itself (a lemondrop.com post, in Maxim’s case).

The top six referring domains during the first week were:

1. Collegehumor.com (12,160 visits)
2. Twitter.com (10,510)
3. Gorillamask.net (5,797)
4. Facebook.com (5,535)
5. Buzzfeed.com (1,536)
6. Huffingtonpost.com (1,415)

The statistics give us some insight into the intriguing topic of Twitter celebrity endorsements.  Assuming, conservatively, the combined Twitter audience of @petewenz and @perezhilton was at 2.5 million at the time (it’s at about 4 million today), and assuming for simplicity that no other account has tweeted the link, the 10,267 visits from Twitter amount to 0.4% clickthrough. Assuming that only 20% of all Twitter visits come from the website (as opposed to desktop and mobile clients), the total Twitter celebrity clickthrough hovers around 2% .

Of course, the celebrities’ influence isn’t limited to the immediate clicks they spur; it would be equally interesting to calculate the pass-along value of such endorsements to account for all visits from the sites of the celeberities’ followers. While we don’t have the exact data just for the celebrity-inspired pass-alongs, we do share our thoughts on this topic further below.

The traffic sent by search engines amounted to 5,955 visits from Google and 255 from Yahoo — about 4% of all visits — with the bulk of search words being different variations of the URL.  We haven’t been tracking the site’s SERP rankings, but it appears that the site was indexed and ranked sufficiently high for “jerzify yourself” on the day after the launch.

The Long Tail and Conversions

I found it interesting that once the traffic hit the tail part of the Long Tail, it remained pretty steady. In the most recent month between April 18 and May 19, the site averaged 142 daily visits with only a slight decline over time, as the graph below shows, with no effort to attract attention to the site on our part.

But now look at this graph:

This is the site’s “conversion” ratio — the number of picture uploads (from server logs) to site visits. The conversions go up even as the site traffic trends down. If photo uploads were our metric of traffic quality, we could argue that the massive early traffic from the first week of heavy linking is actually of lower quality than the “tail” traffic that followed.

The Shelf Life of a Link In Social Networks

The heaviest referrers during the April-May period were Facebook (657 visits) and Google (~400), with Lemondrop.com (147) and Huffingtonpost.com (79) trailing far behind.  Twitter referred nine visitors.

One possible conclusion after comparing the referrers during the first week and the last month is this: Links have a much longer gestation period, but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week.

Spreadability

To understand how the word about Jerzify Yourself was spread around the web, we partnered with a Seattle company called Meteor Solutions; this video from the ARF conference is a good introduction to their approach.  Meteor’s technology creates a unique URL for each person who visits the site by appending a string of characters at the end so that jerzifyyourself.com becomes http://jerzifyyourself.com/?fbid=zu1hD2nJUMK, for example. If this unique URL gets reposted somewhere online and subsequently clicked on, Meteor takes notice. When people click on this tagged URL and come to the site, they in turn receive their own unique URL with a different string of characters.  Meteor follows the entire sharing chain.

One important thing that Meteor can tell us is the total impact of having a link posted on a popular website.  The example below shows the number of visitors to Jerzify that can be attributed to LemonDrop.com.

The 4,051 “Direct Visitors” are the people who arrived from LemonDrop.com during the 18 weeks of the project but did not click on a tagged link. No wonder they didn’t — LemonDrop has stripped the Meteor tag off the link before posting it. This resulted in zero “WOM Visitors” — people who arrived (or, rather, didn’t) to Jerzify via a tagged link.

The “Yield” number is the one we are really interested in. It shows the number of people who clicked on all those unique URLs that Meteor had generated for the 4,051 original visitors from LemonDrop who then shared them elsewhere online. This “yield” for LemonDrop is 3,773. In other words, people who were sent to Jerzify by LemonDrop have brought almost as many people to Jerzify by reposting the link elsewhere. The “Total Impact” number is the sum of direct visitors, WOM visitors and yield, and LemonDrop can be credited with sending 7,824 visitors to the website, first directly and then via subsequent re-sharing by the original visitors.

We used the Meteor data to look at the first week’s top referrers from another angle, ranking them not only by the direct visits they referred, but also by the sharing activity they sparked.   In the table below, “Visitors From Site” are direct visits plus WOM visits, to use Meteor’s nomenclature. “Visitors From Sharing” are the yield, and “boost” is the size of yield relative to the total impact.

What We Have Learned

While Jerzify Yourself has not reached the stratospheric heights of the ROFLcon pantheon, as an experiment it was successful in adding the much-needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as immutable laws.   That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.

Here’s what caught our attention.

1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top-referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks.  It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up as solidly for paid campaigns as it does for “organic” content. If it does — and this difference is measured — it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.

2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Halfdead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead“.  Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.

3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others.  Buzzfeed in particular sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks.  In fact, the number one direct referrer,  collegehumor.com,  will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost”.  These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.

It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites.  On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis due to a technical reason.

4. The Speed of Content Depends on The Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks.  To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week.  This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items.  On Facebook, older news can still be front-page material on the individual, slower-moving walls.  If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.

5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.

Finally, we are well aware of the argument in favor of using “spreadable” instead of “viral” when describing projects of this nature. The irony is that, in our experience, blog posts about viral projects tend to be more spreadable than posts that use the correct terminology. How’s that for a social media Moebius strip?

If you found this post interesting, you will like Mike Proulx’s “Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes” and  Ilya’s “The Spreadable War On Viral Media” that recently ran in Businessweek and Forbes, respectively.

And if you can see yourself working on projects like this,  our R&D group has just the vacancy.

When BP got caught altering one of the photos on their Gulf response press page, whom did they blame? "A photographer."  

Washington Post: "Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank."

AP: "He [Dean] says the photographer was showing off his Photoshop skills and there was no ill intent."

The photographer's name shows up on the image's meta data. He's been doing work for the company since at least 2004. "Showing off his Photoshop skills?"  Couldn't they find someone else to throw under the bus?------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.

It’s been said that everyone in the world has a twin. Well, the folks at Hill Holliday are no exception. Take a look at our recent “Separated At Birth.”

As you know, finding mistakes in Mad Men is "one of white people’s favorite activities on earth", so here's my tentative contribution. Don't these drop ceilings look a bit too modern, especially with those air diffusers?  Drop ceilings were invented in 1958 and were originally glued or stapled. The T-bar suspension system you see here wasn't invented until the 1960s.

Would love to hear from somebody who knows more.

-- the image is from here------ Follow @twadlab for headlines and more.