American Idol in Habbo

American Idol has chosen to become a sponsor of the Teen Virtual World Habbo Hotel.  This was widely reporter — see PaidContent article here.  This is an interesting space to keep an eye on.   As virtual worlds become increasingly popular marketers will need innovative ways to tap into the audience.

Quantcast puts Habbo’s US Quantified unique visitors at 640,000 and is mostly teen girl.

Thoughts:

• Sounds like this was a pretty straight forward sponsorship deal — nothing fancy.  I’d like to see some more integration like allowing the kids to vote on the American Idol contestants from a Habbo chat lounge.  Or at least have the American Idol contestants “live” virtually in Habbo so fans can interact with them.
• Marketers need to be concerned about advertising to kids — Webkinz had a bit of backlash when they introduced banner ads last year.
• When are we going to see online only game shows from the networks?

New report from PEW (link here) came out with some great data points on who is using Social Network sites like Facebook and MySpace and why they use them.  When presenting Social Networking as a valuable online strategy I’m often confronted by traditional marketers being skeptical about adults usage of Social Networks.  Well, if you where ever in doubt — take a look at these numbers:

PEW Data

Growth in Social Networking Sites

From my experience we can separate folks into three categories:

1)  40+ year olds that went to college with slide rulers.

2) 30 – 40 year olds who grew up with the PC.  Playing the Atari 2600, using Windows 3.1, and connecting to the college mainframe.

3)  0 – 30 year olds that grew up connected electronically to everything.

In my opinion that 3rd group is a new being that business leaders truely have a difficult time grasping.  I’d go as far to say that they are wired differently from the first two groups.

Take a look at this Presentation PEW gave at this years CES to get a feel for how that 3rd group grew up. (link)

Thoughts:

• This thought has been around for some time — kids today have grown up with a revolutionary technology.  That fact is well established — what’s interesting is the first group inability to adapt.
• I’ve read dozens of articles on how business today needs to embrace the online social landscape and be apart of the conversation.  The reality is that businesses do not get it, don’t act on it, and don’t profit from it because the business leaders simple cannot embrace the mind set of a consumer that is wired in a post 1995 mindset.
• Traditional brands need to be concerned — without leaders embracing the way today’s consumers engage brands, each other, and purchase decisions there are big opening for new savvy competition to fill the holes.
• Web 2.0 is not profitable – YET.  Five years into Web 1.0 no one was profitable either.  Web 2.0 will be profitable and will change the landscape — if today’s business leaders don’t get a handle on this now they will be left behind.  Web 3.0 is only 5 short years away (check out HTML 5 to see the future).

A “Websert” (as called by DM News and others) is a third party offer added to a transactional email.  For example, the image here is of a websert added to my hosting bill.  Every month my web hosting company sends me a bill and add in a third party offer.  I’ve bought this kind of placement in the past and found that if the product / service being offered has some synergies to the email the recipient is receiving that conversions can be surprising.

In my experience, these webserts cost similar to sends emails to third party lists.  They greatly depend on the quality of the list.  Expect to pay between $10 and $100 CPM but could go up to $300+ cpm for certain lists.

We all know there is a lot of discussion around brands getting involved with online social marketing.  The opportunity that has been leveraged the most to date is “blogs”.  In an earlier post I discussed the specific oportunuties that blogs offer marketers (link). Now let’s talk a bit about how to get started with blog marketing.

The first thing you need to do is figure out your brands current level of buzz in the blogosphere.  There are some paid services out there that can help you — I prefer digging into the free services first.  The free services I

BlogScope.net Sxample

use are:

www.blogscope.net -Just type in your brand name and see the blog posts the mention your brand as well as a graph that measures your mentions over time.

www.blogpulse.com -Same as Blogscope with some additional features.

With these two free services you can get a feel for how the blogosphere is talking about your brand, where they are talking, and what the conversation is.

A good practice is to dump the blog post results into excel then apply a “tone” rating to the posts.  This way you can rank the tone of the posts on a scale like “positive for the brand” to “negative to the brand”.  Once you start taking part of the online conversation you can trend over time how your influence improves the tone of the conversation.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, Blog marketing is not easy.  If you really want to get some bang for you buck you need to develop solid goals and a plan to achieve those goals.  It takes time, resources, and analysis.  But your first step is to figure out what the current conversation about your brand is.