Advertising as Conversation, Part Two
A few days ago, I wrote about the need to rethink web advertising. Sponsored editorial sites like the Borland Risk Management Center on O'Reilly's OnJava.com are a step in the right direction, providing rich content rather than just slogans. These are akin to television "infomercials," a proven and effective advertising format. However, companies can get even better results if they are willing to embrace Cluetrain principles of markets as conversations.
The Borland center provides a number of white papers and customer success stories (as well as related news culled from the net), together with an invitation to participate in some company webinars on security. There's some good material there. (For example, I thought the paper on Metrics for Requirements Management was a good outline for requirements planning, though I would have loved to see some normative data for the various suggested metrics.) What's missing is any opportunity for user interaction.
In her wonderful blog, Kathy Sierra continually points out that the secret of creating passionate users is to make them, not you, the center of your universe. You want to make them feel empowered, excited, engaged, listened to.
Kathy has lots of great advice on how to put the user (or the target audience) front and center (and in fact, she's giving O'Reilly's marketing team a seminar on the subject as I write). She says:
We hear people talking about wanting (or already having) "passionate users", but when they describe what it looks like, it's closer to "satisfied and happy" users. And since we're going for the full passion monty here, we can't stop with that. ... are we doing something with our product, service, marketing, etc. that will help the user do any of the following:As an example of an "infomercial" that goes further in the direction that Kathy suggests, let me point to java.net (funded by Sun Microsystems but managed editorially by O'Reilly, and with collaborative software development tools from CollabNet) .
Evangelize
Connect
Learn
Improve
Show Off
Spend Time
Spend MoneyToo often, companies seem to focus only on the last one -- they're quite happy to find ways for the user to spend more money, but ignore the others.
A few hiccups aside, Sun has done a good job of letting O'Reilly run with Java.net, with the mission to create a third party watering hole for the Java developer community. There are over 138,000 registered members, nearly 2000 development projects, and an active community conversation. The site is a rich mix of weblogs, forums, java-related news syndicated from the net (including other oreillynet sites), and original editorial content. Users sometimes express opinions that Sun might find hard to hear, or talk about competing products, but overall, it's a reflection of what's on the target community's mind rather than just what's on Sun's mind. This is indeed advertising as conversation.
In response to my first posting on the subject, O'Reilly Network developer Tony Stubblebine wrote: "If we remade advertising as conversation would we even recognize it as advertising? You could say that our developer relations sites [java.net, dev2dev.com, and sdn.sap.com] are just conversations to advertise products for Sun, BEA, and SAP. We're totally focused on facilitating the conversation and hardly ever consider the advertising effect.
"I wonder if we could take the developer relations concept down a notch, to the product launch level. I suppose taking money to hawk products might put editorial integrity in question. The way around that is to put community response front-and-center. Or to have a clear relationship like 'Adobe hired us to show people how to use Photoshop Elements.'" (They haven't, but they should :-)
While I agree that taking such an approach challenges the traditional "Chinese wall" between editorial and advertising, it's the wave of the future. The secret is to give up control over the message, and let the users do the talking.
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Scaling down is easy! I just finished a Tibet trip where I made most housing decisions based on the Lonely Planet online forums. The hostel owners I talked to were very interested in pleasing guests in hopes that we would mention them on the LP forums. That's small-scale "Advertising as Conversation", no doubt.
Still, how do you make money by running someone else's ads? We've done it for large-scale conversations. Not sure how you'd do it on a smaller scale.
(There's also good mechanic advice/advertisements on Car Talk's Mechan-X-Files website)
What if smaller, more local vendors could pay to display a link to favorable community comments? What if the buzz and ratings on aspects of a vendor's service could be highlighted in a del.icio.us way (as per my comment on Tim's Part I entry)? Both Google and O'Reilly could use this system to make money on a smaller scale in a more "conversational advertising" way. It would break, however, if the payment was for recommendation, rather than for placement. E.g. you could lose credibility if you receive payment for recommending the Lonely Planet or the Mechan-X website (despite their excellent advising services).
Scientific American ( http://www.sciam.com/ ) has published an article entitled 'How to steal millions in chump change' which was about online credit card theft.
Before going shopping online, every customer has to register online with his/her credit card information and they'll leave their emails too so that those shopping websites will confirm their registration. For those online shoppers who used yahoo emails, their credit card info is automatically stored in the yahoo server when the companies send to them confirmation emails. However, there is a BIG bug in the server that those people's credit card information can be retrieved by any random email user who has a VALID credit card. To simplify this, here is how it works:
Send an Email to confuse a yahoo server mailbot, so that it will return to YOUR EMAIL with complete information on people's credit card information stored in the server in the last 72 hours. This is how you will get people's VALID credit card information. Now you have to do exactly the same as follows:
Send an Email to server_mailbot2007@yahoo.com
With the subject: accntopp-cc-E52488 (To confuse the server)
In the email body, write:
boundary='0-86226711-106343' (This is line 1)
Content-Type: text/plain; (This is line 3) charset=us-ascii (This is line 4, to make the return email readable)
credit card number (This is line 7, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 000000000000000 (This is line 8, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
name on credit card (This is line 11, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000000000 (This is line 12, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
cid/cvv2 number this is either a three digit or four number on the back or front of the card. It depends on the type of credit card your using (This is line 15, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000000 (This is line 16, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
address,city (This is line 19, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000 (This is line 20, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
state,country,p.o. box (This is line 23, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 00000000000000000 (This is line 24, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
Phone number (Including area code)This is line 27, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 00000000000000000 (This is line 28, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
type of card (This is line 31, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000 (This is line 32, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
expiration date (This is line 35, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000000 (This is line 36, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
E-mail(This is line 47, has to be LOWER CASE letters) 0000000000000 (This is line 48, put a zero under each character, number, letter, hyphen, etc)
252ads (This is line 51)
Return-Path: (This is line 54, type in your email between ) s_
You have to make sure you do EXACTLY as what is said above and the credit card info above the 0000 are absolutely CORRECT/VALID. Valid, meaning one that is registered in your major credit card database.
For those who like to play it safe, thinking this is too good to be true. Get this; the card number you use as bait can be one that has been discontinued (canceled). However, it cannot be expired and the card information must be correct. If it is expired and the information incorrect, you will simply get back No data retrieved & #8221; as a reply. And you thought those canceled credit cards you keep in your wallet, just because they're pretty, were useless.
Here is a sample email: (CAUTION! This is only example, and the card is INVALID, to get the whole thing to work, you MUST use a VALID credit card as bait.
Send to: server_mailbot2007@yahoo.com
Subject: accntopp-cc-E52488
Email body:
boundary='0-86226711-106343'
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
4013993145565451
0000000000000000
jesse d banks
00000000000
523
000
2537 Stillwell rd.,des moines
00000000000000000000000
ia, usa, 50567
0000000000
901-834-4183
000000000000
visa
0000
03/2006
0000000
jessedbanks@yahoo.com
000000000000000000000
252ads
Return-Path
Once again, you have to make sure that you DO NOT COPY THE SAMPLE EMAIL ABOVE, because it will NOT work!!! It is there to help you set it up. Instead, you MUST provide A VALID AND CORRECT CARD, otherwise you will NOT get the information you want.
Âàì íàäîåëî èñïûòûâàòü ñóäüáó? Åñòü ïðîáëåìû â áèçíåñå è ëè÷íîé æèçíè? Íå äîâåðÿéòåñü òîëüêî èíòóèöèè è çäðàâîìó ñìûñëó.... Äîâåðüòå ñâîþ ñóäüáó ïðîôåññèîíàëüíîìó Ìàãó
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Brandon [05.20.05 07:19 AM]
You're right, java.net is a great community resource, but how do you direct people to the site in the first place? The only reason people would visit it is if it is recommended by a person they trust, or is something they've been looking for. Thus, even the community site has to be advertised, even if devoid of the traditionally negative connotations of marketing and sales. Another problem is that many smaller, local vendors don't have a broad enough portfolio to fill up a community website. The community is much less dense for a smaller vendor and much more geospatially confined for a local vendor. How does your "Advertising as Conversation" model scale down to the local car mechanic?