Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

The Last 24hrs at Threadless

1. Got interviewed by a Threadless community member for a long running series of staff interviews. So now I have somewhere to point people if they ask what I do and what my philosophy of life is. Getting the Skinny with Cam (thx Lunchboxbrain!)
2. Threadless showed up on a hugely cheeseball show called "Extreme Workplaces" along with my former employer Google, eBay and some other crazy pads.
3. Tried to do the Facebook Thursday hourly giveaways, but the hourly video clips kept failing. So we went ahead with houry comments and we still had HUNDREDS of comments from Threadless fans, including these 200+ people sharing mini life stories (factual and fictional) and these 700+ people suggesting captions for a picture of Bob in a Banana suit.
4. Launched a new mini app on Facebook to get more sharing of our tees going. Early results strong.
5. Watching the twitter counter tick towards 500K and wondering what new portal of the marketing universe will spring open then. 
6. Planning more awesome extremeness and extreme awesomeness that will have to wait for another update. No holds barred.

blogging the process

GE Adventure: cool idea. let's hope they can keep it going...

This is a blog about a project we are doing for GE. We are from The Barbarian Group, an online marketing company, and GE hired us to help them with their internet behavior, so this is our marketing journal where we will show you what we find and talk about what we might do next.

The line between flogging and word of mouth

Whatever else it produced, P&G's recent social media "hackathon" (of sorts), it gave one blog maven a first-hand experience of the inherent challenge of marketing to your personal network:

The fact that P&G was willing to experiment publicly (especially in the wake of recent backlashes, e.g. Motrin) is courageous. They took us all right out there on the limb with them, but for some of us climbing back down before we broke any of our personal network's branches, was the only thing to do. ("Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins)

Let's hope all parties involved bear this lesson in mind when the ask consumers to "participate" in their social marketing campaigns...

Dan Buzcazcer on brands as curators at OMMA Social - 1/26/2009

MediaPost Event -OMMA Social.

• about 4 clients at OMMA Social. a few vendors. Vast majority of attendees from agencies.

Dan Buzcazcer from Denuo

• Dan Buzcazcer's rules to play by as marketers in social space
• • facilitate what consumers already do;
  • be personal but keep your role as a brand;
  • no hard selling
• Brands can play a key role as aggregators / curators of the long tail of content
• Purina
• • tons of great dog content on youtube. dogs and cats are always top videos. how can purina facilitate
• Purina had 16 different websites and huge cost for producing content.: feeding the beast.
• www.PetCharts.com: finds the top photos, videos, blog posts re dog and cat.
• formerly aggregated from other sites. now users submit
• users are now promoting their presence on petcharts.com
• Champion
• • can't chase top sponsors
  • own the everyday athlete: extend this to young audience online
  • homestyle sports. what everyday athletes accomplish
  • themes for each webisode. sports show for unsung sports hero
  • champion as facilitator/sponsor
• meant to be used in 5 min per day
• digg style voting

Social exploding in UK

According to Hitwise, Twitter in UK has grown almost 1000% in one year. It's penetration in UK is now greater than in UK. Social sites make up 10% of total site visits in UK, with Facebook now owning 38% share of those sites.

Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK: Twitter traffic increases 10-fold in a year.

AOL-Bebo analysis from eMarketer

Nice analysis from eMarketer: Why the AOL-Bebo Deal Matters

AOL hooks up with Bebo

AOL Buys Bebo for $850 Million (WSJ). An significant step towards the future of Social Performance Marketing that I'll be talking about at the IAB Performance Marketing Forum next week...

Keynote at IAB's Performance Marketing Leadership Forum

I will be keynoting at next week's IAB Leadership Forum: Performance Marketing next Wednesday 3/19 afternoon in Chicago. My topic is performance marketing on social networks, a key emerging trend in accountable online marketing. Hope to see you there!

O'Reilly Radar at GSP/ETech

koan-like notes from Tim O'reilly's "Radar" session at ETech / GSP:

• I love hackers 
• Etech is about the edges
• Received knowl v original knowl 
• Wikipedia: no original research
• Polyani: personal knowl commits us. Like love. Shirt of flame 
• Passion of hackers. Swivel. Choose the cookie!
• Wright brothers. Pythagorus. Joe kittinger. 
• Space hackers.
• Believe and create. 
• Web 2 successes created in yrs after the bust
• Open source hardware. Liam Casey supply chain. 
• Ambient computing added to web 2: sensors and pple away from the keyboard. Openmoko
• Dash express. Swarming internet devices is openmoko. 
• Path intelligence measured by cell phone home signals
• ms photosynth 
• Social graph from cell usage logs: megaphone
• Hackers change the world by having fun.
• Willow garage personal robots 
• Open CV computer visuals
• When you follow the hackers you don't know what it means. You just know something is up. 
• Collective intelligence. Coding against corruption. Matt cutts of govt.
• Worldchanging 
• Rilke. Man watching

More Social Network Anti-hype that Misses the Point...

I guess this is what counts as "bad news" for social networks. Anecdote reinforcing a single data point spun into a death nell for social networks: Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up. This is a bit of buzz backlash: anti-buzz buzz.

While the reporter barely comprehends the social network ad space moderately well (Beacon isn't an ad platform), I agree with the implication that "banners don’t work on social networks"… that is: when they are CPM buys. CPC media looks like it can work. We've got a testing going for instance that is delivering a nice order volume at a CPO half of search. Not as much volume as your average Google campaign but huge impressions and good conversions off of the clicks, even though CTRs are low.

Let's call this "Social Performance Marketing", realize that this doesn't mean flooding users with undifferentiated and untargeted banners and get on with figuring out how to engage and connect with the people now "living" on social networks...