Will Congress Pull MySpace into Mainstream?

posted by greg…….

I was recently asked to respond to a question for Revenue Magazine’s performance marketing section. Whether or not my comment will be published we’ll just have to wait and see, but I thought I’d also post it here.

Will new age-related rules on social networking sites such as MySpace effect advertising revenue?
Social networking sites are extremely popular because they are an unmonitored playground for personal expression. People flock to these sites because they are unruly and uninhibited. In short, they are fun.

Imposing rules of any type, in this case age restrictions, immediately begin to erode the sites’ legitimacy by pulling them into the mainstream where they will become less popular over time. While social networking sites will suffer the effects of less advertising, advertisers themselves will simply follow the crowd to wherever they next find their outpost of self expression.

More on the topic of laws targeted at social networking sites here:
Congress Targets Social Network Sites

Digital Immigrants and Natives (more)

posted by hal….

Last week, as reported here and elsewhere, Lord Saatchi, the Briritsh advertising icon, pronounced advertising as we know it dead.

One facet of his thesis which kept coming up over the weekend was the notion that the brains of Digital Natives are physiologically different than those of Digital Immigrants.

If you recall, Digital Natives are people under 25 – those who grew up with the internet. Digital Immigrants are geezers over 25. We’ve learned the customs and language of this new land, but will always speak with an accent.

So it turns out that the brains of the Natives have developed differently than our own. They are wired differently. This phenomenon is called CPA, or Continuous Partial Attention (sometimes Constant Partial Attention).

Natives are constantly doing three, four five things at once, processing information, making decisions, taking action on many simultaneous levels. It’s beyond multitasking. It’s hypertasking.

Digital Natives hang out on Web 2.0 places like YouTube and Flickr.To be successful in our brave new world, marketers and communicators will need to learn how to blend in with the Natives and communicate without a thick Immigrant accent.

It might require that we re-wire our brains.

Lord Saatchi: Advertising is Dead

posted by hal…….

As reported in the Financial Times online, Lord Maurice Saatchi has announced “I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.”

More on this shortly, but the gist of his argument is that technology, sociology and psychology have come together in a combustible mix to divide our world into under 25 “Digital Natives” and over 25 “Digital Immigrants.”

If you want a good summary right now, go to Brand Republic.

The New Netscape

posted by hal…….

As reported by Reuters, The New York Times and others, Netscape came back to life this morning as an uber-news and blog aggregator. Jason Calacanis, famous for Silicon Alley Reporter and Engadget, is the driving force behind the push to re-invigorate Netscape in it’s new guise as an AOL service.

Nothing wrong with the concept – a lot of others are doing it, so why not jump on the band wagon? You weren’t expecting anything original were you?

I checked it out. Tried to sign up, maybe loft a comment. Sign-up didn’t work on Safari. Didn’t work on Firefox. I went to the trouble of downloading the Netscape browser (7.2 for Mac) – the site still choked on sign-up.

Honestly – today, tomorrow, the middle of next week – it doesn’t matter when you launch a new service AS LONG AS IT WORKS. This would seem to be especially true for a damaged brand like Netscape.

Will I go back to the site? Maybe. Maybe not.

The New Netscape – probably as irrelevant as the old Netscape.

Write About What You Know

Blogs are all the rage these days. It seems like if you don’t have one you’re out of the loop, especially if you’re an online marketer.

The problem is, if everyone is doing it, it becomes harder to generate an interesting voice amongst all the clutter. It’s kind of like newsletters. They’ve become so easy to produce that everyone seemingly has one. The standard company newsletter has become predictable. People forget – no one wants to read about another company’s news; they want to read about themselves! (Or at minimum, about things relevant to themselves).

That doesn’t mean blogs and newsletters aren’t important and valuable. It does mean, however, that you can’t roll out the standard fare and expect to generate interest. You have to look very closely at what you do well as a company – at the reasons other companies do business with you – and use blogs, newsletters, and other similar forums not as a trendy offering but as another way to further communicate your company’s core value and expertise.

Two articles in today’s iMedia Connection newsletter address this subject, and got me thinking about it in the first place:

Get Started with Email Newsletters

Michael Mayor states that the key to successful email newsletters is staying focused. As an “interest starting point” for your customers, email newsletters need to stay on target and provide relevant and valuable content.

What Matters Most in Email Marketing

Tricia Robinson also acknowledges the importance of email marketing, when done correctly, and applies the traditional 40/40/20 direct marketing principle to email marketing – offering our target audience what they want, when they want it is the key to success.