'Cross The Breeze

Building relationships

September 18, 2008 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

This is truly brilliant! Thanks Darryl for sharing, it’s probably the best take on brands building direct relationships with their customers ;) And I guess for all women who can relate to this… there’s always The Women of course.

Check it out.

advertising, ageofconversation, branding, consumer, fun, influence, movies, pr, social media, video

marketing, megryan, movie, relationships, viral, women

Adopting change

September 16, 2008 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, Louis Gray posted a good article on the five stages of early adopter behavior, find the graph about the five steps below.

Although not literally mentioned the graph shows an important ‘early adopter’ characteristic that we underestimate all to often: the need for change. The last few years, with the rise of web2.0 etc it seems like all you need to become successful is connect with early adopters and allow them to spread the word, eventually resulting in everybody using your product/service. Now you won’t hear me say this approach is not important but there’s a rather big disconnect between early adopters and the mass out there and that’s related to this need for change.

I consider myself an early adopter, I want change. It’s like when you’ve signed up to something new and after you get used to it, you’re slowly looking out for something else, that excitement to try something new again… hoping it will surprise you with some nifty innovations. That said, most of the people around me aren’t like that at all. They aren’t early adopters in the technology space, and more important they don’t like their tech to change at all. And there’s nothing we can do to change that, just don’t forget that when you want your service to spread beyond the early adopter sphere you will need more than just buzz. You’ll need a reason for change, and a pretty darn good one.

beta, blogging, consumer, influence, signup, technology

adopter, discovery, engagement, influence, migration, promotion, technology

A quick one on Twitter

July 16, 2008 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

I liked this quote from Tim O’Reilly on a post related to Micro-blogging and how that compares to ‘regular’ blogging. Now I didn’t find the post itself that interesting, but Tim’s comment certainly was (emphasis is mine):

“Also fascinating to see different tweeting behaviors evolve in real time. It’s like watching evolution in bacteria vs. mammals. For example, among the top twitterers, it’s pretty clear that many of them are simply following anyone who follows them, which drives their "popularity." But that makes clear that they aren’t actually following any of those people — the volume is just too great. So ironically, if you follow everyone, you follow no one. (Unless you "friend" them, and only really follow your friends.)

So you can see that there are three categories of twitterers: those who use it for its original purpose, by following and being followed by a small group of friends; those who use it for marketing, by broadcasting to many but following none; and those who recognize the asymmetry, and are followed by many, but follow fewer.”

More than with blogging or anything else so far, Twitter has been a lot about quantity for many people. Metrics that ‘matter’ are number of followers, number of tweets, … and I’ve always thought of that as rather ridiculous. I’m more interested in the ratio of friends vs. followers, the number of links clicked, (comes in bit.ly?), clicks compared to the number of followers, re-tweets, replies, other tweet referrals, … anyway a lot more than is measured today.

blogging, community, influence, internet, social media, tracking

follower, friend, quantity, tracking, twitter, volume

Engagement tracking

July 16, 2008 by Kris Hoet 6 Comments

When I wrote about AideRSS for the first time about a year ago the company was only a couple of months old. Their slogan said best what it was they tried to do (and succeeded in quite well): Read what matters. AideRSS was built as a service that would help you overcome the struggle keeping up with your RSS feeds. Ideally you would upload your OPML (or add feeds manually) and you could then based on a few metrics skim feeds to only the most popular posts. On top of that it would allow you to create a new feed of that… basically mashing up feeds to make them more readable. I loved it instantaneously (as did Marshall Kirkpatrick apparently).

Not long before that post on AideRSS I had written about the lack of innovation at Technorati and where they were missing some opportunities. Today Technorati has made itself irrelevant: there are way better blogsearch engines out there (like Google’s) and their so-called Authority metric is ridiculous. Anyway – back to the point – the opportunities I called out for Technorati are still there and when I saw AideRSS for the first time I considered they could be the ones to deliver upon these opportunities. Interestingly enough, it looks more and more like it that they will. AideRSS isn’t just that ‘read what matters’ service anymore, it has grown into an engagement tracking service, measuring storytelling ROI as they call it. And that’s a great evolution. They’ve even gone beyond keeping their ranking method as they released a new site dedicated to that ‘Postrank’ and also developed a Google Reader extension for Firefox which I’ve been using for a short while now.

Hopefully they don’t stop there. When I look at the stats for my own feed, I can only notice that not all metrics are correct: too many comments counted, not enough delicious bookmarks counted, … so some finetuning is still in place. But it remains an overall solid service. And I’m pretty sure Melanie will pick up on this as well ;)

Finally I believe they should give access to the full metrics AideRSS gathers for each blog (delicious, comments, …) and not only the Postrank itself. Imagine that you want to build your own bloglist with the top ‘x’ blogs in category ‘y’ but unlike Mack Collier or Peter Kim you don’t want to look up all this data manually to collect in XLS etc etc to make your weekly or monthly list. What if I could enter all the blogs I want to track against each other in AideRSS where they let you choose which metrics you want to track them with (only Technorati? or maybe subscribers as well?…) and have AideRSS build my list automatically based on the weight I defined for each metric? You define how often the list needs to be re-calculated. You create a widget for your and participating blogs. You create a weekly/monthly autoposting rhythm to your blog etc etc… Wouldn’t that be a compelling offer? And of course AideRSS can take the learnings for what happens in the backoffice because all of that.

ageofconversation, blogging, influence, internet, research, social media, technology, tracking

aiderss, feeds, postrank, ranking, roi, rss, storytelling, technorati

Doesday

April 17, 2008 by Kris Hoet 4 Comments

Embracing a philosophy. A couple of weeks ago I met with David Bausola in London and at some point he brought up his Doesday philosophy – Tuesdays are for doing. I liked the idea immediately, signed up for the Facebook group… and forgot about the whole thing :(

A couple of days ago David blogged about the Doesday idea again and how he still dodges meetings every Tuesday, making it one of the most productive days in the workweek – and a day to look forward to. So from now on – before I forget about it again – I’m adopting this right away and consider myself a fellow … Doesdaian?

Adding the ‘Doesday – Don’t even think about booking a meeting’ message to my calendar as a recurring meeting on Tuesdays. Thanks again for bringing it up David.

Read more about this on the Doesday blog.

influence, microsoft

agenda, calendar, doesday, facebook, gtd, meeting, philosophy, planning, tuesday, work, zeroinfluencer

Club Social

April 8, 2008 by Kris Hoet 4 Comments

When brands make that step to be more social and decide to let go of control, we should applaud that. Sometimes we tend not to notice this, and focus just on those brands (still the most) that don’t get it at all.

Club Med is making a first step to engage with the community and in a very nice and smart way if you ask me. Interel – Club Med’s PR agency – worked with Caroline ‘Rolling Talks’ Maerten and Adhese for this first campaign. They asked blogger/photographer Ine if she was interested in going to Chamonix to one of the Club Med Villages. Nothing extraordinary here, but the nicest part of all this is that a special banner (developed by Adhese) is showing the latest updates of this trip tapping into Ine’s Twitter and Flickr stream. These banners are shown on a selection of Belgian’s most important blogs.

Here are 2 screenshots of that banner:

I don’t know about you but I think that Club Med has made a very smart move here. And the choice of Ine as the blogger to be invited is a very important part of this smart move.

Congrats to Caroline for setting it up with the agency and for Adhese to keep innovating, also within the banner.

advertising, ageofconversation, blogging, bringtheloveback, community, influence, internet, marketing, pr

adhese, banner, chamonix, club med, enchante, flickr, holiday, ine, matuvu, monuments, rolling talks, sushi, twitter

Euroblog 2008

March 16, 2008 by Kris Hoet 7 Comments

This last Thursday and Friday I attended and participated in the Euroblog 2008 event in Brussels organized by Euprera – the European PR Education and Research Association. The symposium was very much an academic event with a lot of academic speakers and attendees, and less practioners (at least that’s how I experienced it).

That wasn’t a surprise though, as the event was clearly set up to try and have the academia embrace the need to change. Still, sometimes, I felt like I didn’t belong there. Now I don’t mean anything bad with this, there’s just a very clear gap between the way we all approach things. It made me think of trying/testing out the water in a swimming tool. If you’re a practioner like myself you will get ready for the pool, put your toe in to get an idea of the temperature, probably feel like it’s colder than you would have wanted it to be but you’ll get in the water anyway and start swimming. You’ll talk to other people in the pool, maybe about the water, or maybe about that new glide which you then try out as well. This is the way me (and other people) started their blog, signed up for Twitter, Friendfeed, etc etc. After the presentations from the academia, it became clear that they approach ‘the pool’ in a different way. They talk to people outside and next to the pool about the temperature of the water, use a whole bunch of metric equipment to test the water conditions, relate all that info to ideal human body conditions, etc etc (this still fully dressed of course) to work out a project trajectory to get into the water at some point in time.

And I know this analogy is a bit black&white, but I think you get my point. On Friday I sat on a panel myself that was a mixture between academia and practitioners and there the difference was less visible (on the panel itself). The discussion itself with the panel and audience was pretty interesting to me as well. It highlighted once more some of the fears but also strengthened the idea that there aren’t enough case studies to go by. At one point I feel this is just another ‘reason’ to keep away of change as long as one can. But as you (might) know from an earlier post I do feel we have to reach out more to get more people embrace the need to change so maybe we should just see what we can do about it – there really is more than just Kryptonite you know ;)

Don’t get me wrong, I did like the event. Some discussions where pretty interesting, some presentations like the one’s of David Jennings and Martin Oetting where very enjoyable and it was very good meeting up with the Edelman Digital crew: Steve Rubel, Marshall Manson, Rick Murray, … but also David Weinberger or Neville Hobson, the latter whom I met in person for the first time after being in several online conversations before.

bringtheloveback, conference, consumer, influence, internet, marketing, media, pr, presentation, social media, technology

2008, academia, brussels, case study, euroblog, event, panel, pr, report, social media, symposium

One by One

November 22, 2007 by Kris Hoet 6 Comments

“Done, done; on the next one
Done, I’m done; I’m on to the next one”
- One by One, Foo Fighters

It’s hard to believe that yet another year has passed. It just seems like only a few weeks ago I celebrated my first year of ‘Cross The Breeze and yet today a second year has passed. And it has been fun again, although I am wondering more and more lately where all this is going. Funny enough, shortly after my first year on this blog I started a new one on a totally different topic (and a lot less serious) which has recently passed ‘Cross The Breeze in traffic.

There are some things that happened this last year that marked the year. The first one happened in January when The Blue Monster cartoon became a bit bigger than just a cartoon. Many Blue Monster related ‘things’ have happened since then, quite a nice adventure to be involved with. Another exciting project that became bigger than I expected was Bring The Love Back. The reactions on the ad were beyond what I could have imagined and knowing that something new is in the works makes it even better.

In the meantime I changed the theme of this blog away from the dark background to a lighter one and was fortunate to have one of the readers to design a funky new header as well. Thanks again Dr. Pixel.

Another fascinating project to be involved last blogging year was the Age of Conversation. A fine idea, a fine bunch, … and still very much alive. As said, I’m quite proud to be part of that. On top of it all I was just in NYC when the book was launched and that called for a celebration as well with CK, Mark Goren & David Reich. The fact that you meet new people through conversations on blogs is still one of the most valuable surplus about blogging and also last blogging year a few new connections were made.

A last thing I noticed while going through last year’s posts is that I’ve become more fascinated about the concept of influence and hence wrote about that quite a lot. I’m working on a little project right now that should provide some more information around all that soon.

That said, let’s just kick off this 3rd year shall we ;)

Technorati Tags: influence,blue monster,aoc,ageofconversation,bringtheloveback,anniversary,design,celebration

ageofconversation, blogging, bringtheloveback, community, design, influence, internet, social media

What’s holding you back?

October 10, 2007 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

There’s an interesting conversation going on at MarketingProfs Daily Fix about what should come first: the policy or the blog?

“Should a marketer simply start blogging or wait instead until all of the blogging policies and procedures are established before beginning? Although the absolute answer is that it depends on the organization, the industry, the product or service, I suggest strongly that the blog come before the policy.”

I think that is very well put, especially by adding the notion that it does depend on the organization or product, but basically saying that you should just go and try for yourself. It’s how I started little over 2 years ago and I it really is the only way to really understand what this is all about. I thought I knew as well, but the experience learnt me different.

Stephen Denny adds to the conversation by saying the policy should definitely come first, and I see his point. but too many people use this lack of clarity, this lack of rules as a reason for not trying out for themselves. And that’s my main reason why I wouldn’t focus on the policy first. Ideally you have a small guideline, but like Cam comments: common sense should apply. I couldn’t agree more, remember my chapter in the ‘Age of Conversation‘: you get a long way with common sense.

Also don’t forget that engagement with social media already starts by reading, leaving comments, … so there really is not that much reason not to try this out for yourself today. Congrats C.B. for your first post at Daily Fix – it’s a really good one ;)

Technorati Tags: marketingprofs, daily fix, conversation, policy, blog, ageofconversation, procedure

ageofconversation, blogging, community, consumer, influence, pr, social media

Brands on fire

October 1, 2007 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

There are a few reasons why I got very interested in the email Chris Abraham sent me a week ago about Firebrand. Not only did it seem to be about a very interesting project, but also the approach Chris and Firebrand took to get the news spread was a good example of good engagement in social media. Since Firebrand is not live yet for public viewing (launches on October 22nd) I will talk a bit more about their outreach to bloggers and leave the review for once I get access.

Here’s just a little introduction to Firebrands though, so you know what I’m talking about:

“Firebrand is a new, opt-in entertainment and marketing destination that gives consumers interactive access to their favorite brands, products and promotions. Firebrand programs the “coolest” TV commercials the way MTV used to program music videos and its multi-platform network, slated to launch on October 22, is the first to go “live” simultaneously on TV, the web and mobile. Firebrand even has CJ’s (commercial jockeys), the same way MTV had VJ’s, who will contextualize the commercials as art and entertainment, and guide consumers through playlists, contests and promotions.”

And while the above copy may sound like your average PR speak (and it is from the press release obviously) the approach taken by Firebrand is interesting:

The email from Chris Abraham announcing Firebrand was personalized enough to make it feel personal. I know many people will have received an email that was pretty similar to mine, using my name and blogname in the email shows the effort to make it personal. And I can tell you that – even though that simple – that doesn’t happen very often.
They invited influential bloggers to their press event together with press, not as a separate event.
It’s right on target as well. Advertising, marketing, etc are amongst the topics I cover regularly so telling me about Firebrand makes sense. Again, pretty obvious to some, ignored by many. I receive emails about the most random things and I don’t even consider myself influential… think about the silly stuff bigger bloggers are getting.
Apart from their blogger approach, they also used social media in a smart way. Not by just creating the next Youtube video, but really making good use of the power of MySpace, Youtube, Delicious, Flickr and Facebook. All links which were included on the PR site (click on the links to see the examples).

It remains to be seen whether the service will become a success but I can only notice they seem to have their act together at Firebrand and given some of the most popular videos on the web are actually ads there’s definitely potential. Hopefully I can tell you more in a few days/weeks.

Technorati Tags: firebrand, blogger, outreach, mtv, brands, advertising, tv, mobile, entertainment, promotion