Campfire

Engaging Fans in the Digital Era: An Interview with Mike...

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:44:00 -0400

Engaging Fans in the Digital Era: An Interview with Mike Monello

Our Chief Creative Officer and co-founder, Mike Monello, shared his insights on a number of topics with the Web of Intrigue podcast. He discusses the origins of Campfire, the power of engaging fan communities, and some of the structural challenges many agencies face while trying to produce innovative work.

Setting Up Camp

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:59:00 -0400

Shots magazine sat down with Campfire and profiled the agency’s culture of storytelling.

Optionally, you can download a PDF of this article.

Remember 1999? As millennium bug fears ran riot and the world prepared for the mother of all hangovers to usher in the new century, there was an indy movie phenomenon terrifying audiences and, at that point, becoming America’s most profitable movie ever The Blair Witch Project. A large part of the film’s success was fuelled by the online activity that built on the myth and developed the fanbase before the final version was even cut – rewriting the rules on movie marketing.

More than a decade later, lessons learnt on Blair Witch are still being used by two of its makers – Mike Monello and Gregg Hale – at NYC-based marketing agency Campfire. “One of the reasons The Blair Witch Project worked was due to the fact we weren’t a large corporation pumping out a horror movie because there was a market for horror,” recalls Monello, Campfire partner and chief creative officer. “We were fans and part of the culture and community, and we understood what was driving it. We knew there was an undercurrent of people tired of the ironic, jokey horror films. They wanted something that took itself seriously and The Blair Witch Project was a reaction to that. So

“I think for Campfire, one of the key philosophies is making something that we believe will work in the absence of media – that there’s a reason people want to experience this.”

Tales around the campfire.

With participatory storytelling at the heart of Campfire’s culture, today the small, multidisciplinary team weaves its cross-media campaigns through multiple channels, blurring the lines between marketing, entertainment and advertising and shaking up old formulas. Monello and his collaborators’ route into the industry came after signing with Chelsea Pictures, and as the trickle of web projects coming through the door built into a steady stream, the collective saw the potential was there for those with the right ideas.

“We were being brought in earlier in the process,” continues Monello, “and were learning advertising while bringing in what we had learnt from social storytelling on the web through The Blair Witch Project. We saw that the ambitions inthe clients and creatives were greater than the structure would afford, and that, for me, meant there was an opportunity. So Campfire started out of frustration at seeing great ideas sometimes not even make it to clients and thinking that there was a better way.”

Fast forward to 2012 and Campfire’s portfolio includes projects for a diverse mix of brands such as Verizon, Audi, Snapple and Harley-Davidson. Other successes have come from the world of entertainment, with the agency masterminding launches for acclaimed HBO series True Blood and Game of Thrones among others. But whether it’s a brand or a TV show, what unifies Campfire’s methods is its audience-centred approach. “It involves an understanding of cultures and audiences that aren’t seen through the ideas of a media research team,” explains Campfire partner and president Jeremiah Rosen, “but seen through the eyes of people who care about entertainment and knowing what people like, and giving them content that has meaning in a way that they are used to receiving it. It’s not about web videos or Facebook pages, it’s about cohesive experiences that ladder up to something even greater.”

Putting it into cultural context

Rosen elaborates by expanding on the Harley- Davidson work: “They were trying to retain relevance with a market whose fathers’ rode Harleys – so we created content, wrapped it in cultural context, and put it in a place where this young audience were interested in receiving it.” Culminating in online experience The Ridebook, Campfire collaborated with the cultural contemporaries of its audience, such as Fader magazine and lifestyle site UrbanDaddy, and asked them to curate content for the site. A similar tack was used for the True Blood launch. They spent months crafting a prequel campaign that built a narrative around the show’s themes and targeted pre-existing fans, turning them into evangelists for the show, before launching a larger media campaign.

Campfire might have achieved a string ofsuccesses but there’s no resting on laurels, instead there are plans to expand the agency’s offering. As well as opening a social practice, where brands can harness Campfire’s expertise in social projects, Rosen is working on turning Campfire from a boutique shop to a full service digital agency. Soon to add to the list of the agency’s in-house capabilities will be web development, mobile app development, and standalone strategic capabilities – but despite its ambitions, Campfire won’t be getting too big for its boots. “We’re a small shop,” concludes Rosen, “and we put a lot of love and energy into everything we do, and I think that’s reflected in our clients’ appreciation

Thoughts from Futures of Entertainment 5: What does your crowd want?

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:16:31 -0500

Crowd-funding, crowd-sourcing and crowd-collaboration were hot topics at Futures of Entertainment 5, held at MIT on the 11-12^th November. And as I sat in the audience, I wondered: who is in this generic ‘crowd’ they’re referring to?

Beyond the realm of buzzwords and academic discourse, there is no generic crowd. So it was extremely valuable to hear from practitioners who are engaging very specific audiences as part of the creative, production and distribution processes. Their experiences are highly relevant to marketers who want to create participatory programs, and what they’ve learned can help you engage your crowd more effectively.

The ‘Creating with the Crowd’ panel was particularly enlightening. Timo Vuorensola worked with his fans to source ideas, secure production assistance, and fund his latest film project, Iron Sky. Timo explained that within his community, there are different types of participants who are willing to engage in different ways. People who give money to his projects are treated in a different way to his collaborative community, and his Facebook community.

This makes a lot of sense, and follows the skimmer, dipper, diver model that we apply at Campfire. We design a rewarding experience at every level of engagement, while creating paths to lead participants into a deeper engagement, and providing tools to share their involvement and bring in new participants.

On the same panel, we heard from Bruno Natal from Queremos, a group that engages Sao Paulo music fans to help bring international acts to the city’s venues. The model is designed to pay back the fans that help promote the event by refunding their ticket when profit targets are met. But the key to keeping the crowd happy isn’t monetary reward – it’s transparency. For every event, Queremos sends out balances showing the revenue for the event, ticket sales at different prices, and how the money was spent. They can’t always give a full refund to the people who help made the event happen. “We still get positive responses. A couple of times, the early adopters paid more for tickets than those who bought later…but they didn’t care, they wanted to be part of it. It’s about doing something, about helping bring a band to town.”

This is an interesting observation about a crowd’s motivation for participating. If you understand what they really value, and make an effort to deliver this within a transparent system, you’re going to have a happy crowd.

Both of these examples demonstrate the importance of getting to know the communities you’re engaging – whether that’s a Facebook page, a hardcore fan forum, or a crowd of music-lovers. Research and metrics can be a good place to start, but if you really want to move people to participate you need to understand their passion points and their behaviors. If they’re already making content (eg. fan trailers, art, fan-fiction), you may have some co-creators in your crowd, but if they’re passionate conversationalists you’re better off designing something that they can talk about.

Getting to know the fans and the way their communities operate is what turns an anonymous ‘crowd’ into a number of knowable sub-groups who can be understood and catered for. Once you’ve surveyed the landscape of communities that have common interests with your brand’s purpose you’re in the perfect position to create campaigns and platforms that resonate, engage and get results.

The Social Revolution

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:09:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: The Yahoo! Advertising blog recently asked several agency leaders one question: “How are you integrating social media into your creative?” Here is the response from Jeremiah Rosen, President of Campfire.

It’s not how it’s used, it’s what it adds to the conversation

Social media gives marketers the thrill of immediacy. It’s a real-time opportunity to explore relationships with the audiences circling our brands. For an industry that traditionally spends three months crafting 30 seconds of broadcast content, this improv-type atmosphere can be extremely liberating.

The energy created by this immediacy is what ends up making social such a powerful performance medium. We’re not broadcasting brand performance: We’re linking a series of meaningful interactions that bring the brand closer to its fans and that bring fans closer to each other. Social gives us the platform to identify and understand what our audience likes about us, and in return we find new and interesting ways to keep bringing it to them.

Social also provides us with the opportunity to create conversational value — to build equity outside of the brand’s owned and paid media channels. When we talk about “value,” it’s not an isolated metric. It can’t be confined to the number of views, followers and likes measured against how much it cost us to present that message. Instead, we measure the impact of our conversations by how they spread. That’s the true measure of engagement.

Let’s take Campfire’s client, Snapple, for example. Snapple drives brand growth via social conversations in its owned and earned channels. By using social media to instigate and extend the conversation, Snapple is maximizing its more significant investments in cause marketing, movie tie-ins and TV integrations on an ongoing basis. We’re extending its media shelf life so that the impact can be felt and measured for a longer period of time.

Immediacy. Energy. Impact. This all ladders up to something more valuable: helping marketers make better decisions on how to allocate their resources. By looking beyond what social media is and understanding instead the opportunities it presents, you can look forward to a much richer brand experience — and a much better story to tell.

Selling Stories Tomorrow, Now

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:58:00 -0400

Campfire and Mike Monello are profiled in Mediapost’s exploration of “how innovative digital shops are transforming the way stories are told.”

Get a group of advertising executives talking about multiplatform storytelling, and the conversation will inevitably wend its way around to Audi’s Art of the Heist, the 2005 campaign that fired the starting gun for marketers staging alternate reality games (ARGs). One of the cocreators of that campaign (along with more traditional advertising agency McKinney) was Campfire, an ad agency cum production house founded by three independent film producers — two of whom helped create the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project. So invested in the art of storytelling is Campfire that its founders chose a name that evokes the simplest, most elemental form of it.

The Art of the Heist was a real-life adventure in which 500,000 consumers assisted in a 90-day international manhunt for the thieves who boosted an Audi A3 from a Manhattan showroom. Billboards, print ads and TV commercials asked the public for help recovering the vehicle; Audi’s Web site sent them to a site for a fictional investigation firm run by a sexy woman and her geeky partner, which lead them to a suspicious character attending that year’s E3 show, and on and on down the rabbit hole. Not only did the effort win a slew of Cannes Lions, Clios and MIXX awards, it spawned a million imitations from creative directors suddenly obsessed with audience engagement on a mass scale. Since then, Campfire has done multiplatform immersive campaigns (ARGs and otherwise) for HBO, Verizon and the Discovery Channel.

Cofounder Mike Monello says that telling a story through interactive media — one that people might want to get involved with for weeks at a time — means supplementing a storyteller’s sense of drama with a puppetmaster’s cunning.

“When you’re thinking about telling a story across multiple channels, you’re thinking a little less like a storyteller and a little more like an architect, in that you’re going to architect an experience using all these tools and it’s not really complete until all these people are in it,” he says.

Campfire’s particular contribution to the craft of storytelling is the art of using one media to send audiences to another, all the time moving the story forward, so that the audience “feels like they’ve experienced the story as opposed to [feeling like] they’re being told the story,” Monello says.

Take, for example, the agency’s 2008 campaign for HBO’s True Blood, the now-hit gothic series about vampires in the Deep South. The cable network asked Campfire to build anticipation for the show among audiences with a predisposition toward vampire stories: Fangoria subscribers, horror-movie bloggers, members of “goth” message boards, etc. But rather than create a Web series or something similarly passive, Campfire created a mystery for them to follow that jumped from snail mail to social media to Web videos to print ads and back again.

Five months before the show premiered, Campfire mailed letters enclosed in black envelopes sealed with wax to members of the target audience. The letters themselves were written in dead languages such as Babylonian and Ugaritic. Because most of the recipients had no idea what the letters said, they — predictably — went online to their blogs or message boards seeking translations (the agency also set up fake blogs to help move the story along). Once deciphered, the messages led the players to a Web site, guarded by a beautiful female vampire, where they could watch short videos fleshing out the series’ backstory. Next came the nationwide print ads for Tru Blood, a fictional beverage from the show. While most of the country tried to figure out what it was all about, the original participants were receiving vials of actual Tru Blood in the mail.

Key to the success of such “transmedia” campaigns — a catchall phrase increasingly used to refer to stories that leap from one media platform to another — is taking advantage of the unique properties of each platform, says Monello.

“It’s not just like, oh, I’m going take a story and break it down and put it on a bunch of different media platforms and force people to hunt it down,” he says. “It’s how can I take a movie and a comic book and a video game and create a scenario where each one of those elements brings to life some aspect of the story using unique properties of that media channel.”

The result is an experience that goes deeper than watching a movie, he notes, because the “viewer” becomes intensely invested. It also creates a three-dimensional world that can flesh out a simple story in a dozen different ways.

Luckily for agencies like Campfire, more and more clients are starting to see the wisdom of operating that way, Monello says, if only because increasingly savvy audiences are coming to expect it.

“What we’re finding is more and more people are looking at how Alan Ball works and how people like J.J. Abrams and Josh Whedon work and realizing they need to start [to] think about their story — whether it’s a TV show or a movie — they need to start thinking about them as larger than that singular experience,” Monello says.

He is hesitant to discuss how he sees his kind of storytelling evolving in the next 10 years —“I try not to concern myself with what I can’t do now,” he says — but he admits to being excited about the increasing personalization of media, which could give storytellers like him “the ability to create experiences that are tailored to people.”

“Whether it’s the quality of mobile devices — we all have little computers in our pockets now — or the sophistication of the browsers and the programming languages like HTML5,” he says, new technologies “will allow us to do so much more than we can do now.”

Just as they could have done had the technology been around in 2005. Asked if he could imagine doing Art of the Heist now, when most people walk around with GPS-capable phones, he sighs, “Oh, that would be so much different if it were done today.”

This is an excerpt of the full article.

Storytelling in a Hyperconnected World

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:18:00 -0400

Mike Monello, Campfire’s Chief Creative Officer, looks at the power of narrative across channels in this recent piece featured in MediaPost’s OMMA Magazine.

In 1998 I joined four friends in Orlando, Fl., to produce what started out as a traditional independent film project and ended up as The Blair Witch Project. Bringing to life the legend of the Blair Witch across various media - film, Web site, tv special, book, comic-book series and pc games - was the most unusual and incredible storytelling experience of my life.

There was a perpetual adrenaline rush in telling the story online in real time to an expanding audience. Even in those early days of online community, before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we developed a deeply meaningful connection with fans clamoring to see the movie months before it was complete. We drove fan behaviors that were far more valuable from a business perspective than clicking a “Share” button: ultimately, fans called local theater managers and demanded Blair Witch, pushing us from the tiny art-house release we had planned into a mainstream summer hit on 2,500 screens. The experience of making and marketing The Blair Witch Project opened my eyes to the power and possibilities of storytelling in a hyperconnected world.

Fast-forward thirteen years. Hyperconnectivity has given scale and visibility to consumer behaviors that were previously overshadowed by mass communications. We’ve witnessed the emergence and spread of social networks and memes, the democratization of news, the rise of the online influencer, mobile technology, cloud computing and the “Creative Technologist.”

But, hyperconnectivity isn’t just about technology, media channels and networks. At heart, it’s about the power of word-of-mouth and new applications for the oldest of oral traditions - storytelling. In the heyday of the 30-second spot, advertisers used stories to educate and convert a captive, attentive consumer. Today, hyperconnectivity has led to fragmentation. Audiences are conditioned to receive information whenever and wherever they want it, across multiple screens, in 140 characters, in countless newsfeeds editorialized by their friends.

This is disruptive for marketers focused on using the newest technologies to tell a carefully controlled and curated brand story. But it is possible to take advantage of the shifting pathways of hyperconnectivity. The first step is creating a robust world within which a brand’s story can unfold authentically - no matter what direction it takes or who tells it. This type of storytelling can best be achieved through experience design and worldbuilding.

For a marketing campaign, this means creating and facilitating multiple consumer experiences, using as many channels as appropriate, online and offline. Give people the raw materials to piece the brand’s story together in their own heads, in their own ways and in their own words.

This approach inspires shareable, spreadable brand stories in the personalized language of each customer. It also represents a bold but rewarding shift in control of the brand’s voice, from the marketer to the consumer.

Whereas 30-second spots and print ads were about telling brand stories to passive audiences for absorption, an experience design approach to marketing is about giving people a story to tell.

The result is that the brand’s world lives in the mind of a consumer. From an agency standpoint, building multiple experiences that make up a brand’s world is complicated, but campaigns must be simply perceived and clearly understood by consumers.

Building a brand world that lives in someone’s head goes beyond look, feel and carefully crafted messages in a cmo’s brand book. It is accomplished by creating the rules for the world, identifying the communication channels and designing separate experiences that enable the story to take shape organically. However, the campaign must be crafted with the understanding that consumers don’t have to and won’t participate in every experience.

So what does this look like in practice?

To ensure that the first season of HBO’s new fantasy series, Game of Thrones, became a mainstream hit, my agency, Campfire, evoked the world of a show that didn’t yet exist. We designed a series of sensory experiences that invited people to see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world of “Westeros,” as well as conveyed the types of dramatic stories in the series itself. The campaign began with mailing intricately designed scent boxes to online influencers, and culminated in a food truck curated by celebrity chef Tom Colicchio on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. We brought the show to life in the minds of curious fans, turned them into evangelists and helped build an excited audience that made Game of Thrones one of the season’s most anticipated and successful new shows.

Curiosity is an extremely effective tool for driving consumer behavior. Whether it’s tracking down a “stolen” Audi A3 from the New York Auto Show, collecting “Real Facts” from under Snapple Caps or deciphering letters written in dead languages as an introduction to HBO’s True Blood, curiosity motivates consumers to actively seek out the experiences that make up the brand world. It also gives them a reason to share what they’ve learned with friends.

This type of marketing campaign is highly immersive and allows for different layers of engagement with different types of consumers, from the merely curious to the fanatics. For the marketer, it’s a tightrope act that requires consistency and continuity across all pieces of the marketing mix. If a consumer has an experience with a brand that doesn’t fit within the world the brand has created, it will ring as inauthentic and the brand’s story will not stick.

That’s why this approach to marketing requires a deep understanding of the fans and sub-cultures that drive a brand’s business. While Facebook has popularized the word fan, truly understanding fandom is what converts casual observers into customers who want to engage and explore a brand’s world, not just to click a “Like” button.

At Campfire, we immerse ourselves in the fan sub-cultures of our clients’ brands to identify “divers,” “dippers” and “skimmers.” Divers live and breathe the brand world, dippers casually interact with it and skimmers infrequently pass through. Reaching each group separately and fulfilling their needs is not just about covering all the bases.

Thanks to our hyperconnected world, each group influences the other, and understanding this ecosystem provides the insights needed to expand a brand’s reach on a mass scale. By engaging the “divers” (niche audiences) in your brand world first, you will generate word-of-mouth that will in turn create a ripple effect, influencing the dippers and ultimately the skimmers and mainstream consumers.

Regardless of interest level, when consumers envision the brand’s world in their heads to make sense of multiple experiences across platforms, they develop a sense of ownership over the brand. The connection to the brand is personalized, creating a lasting emotional bond.

Hyperconnected storytelling isn’t easy, but it’s crucial to marketing success today. The currency of the social Web isn’t content but stories. Engage and excite people in your brand world, and they’ll help spread your story.

Let's Make 'Brand' a Verb Again

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Mike Monello, Campfire’s Chief Creative Officer, challenges brands to offer bigger thinking in their branding efforts in this recent piece featured on AdAge.

In advertising we toss the word “brand” around quite frequently. But have you noticed we usually default to the noun form of the word?

This may not appear to be a big deal, but let’s take a moment to walk through the implications: This is a word that used to mean searing a mark into the hide of our property. It’s now been reduced to a set of graphic standards and a tagline. The force of action has been replaced with a static identity.

The noun form of “brand” isn’t enough to really move people — it just doesn’t bring the brand to life in a way that inspires customer action.

Why does this matter? Mainly because not every brand has a differentiated story or the advantage of an HBO, with unique programming and great, shareable stories to tell. Sometimes you’re just a consumer-packaged-goods company. And while dog-food makers and soda bottlers can mix the formula a bit and offer new innovations, the only truly differentiating element for these companies is the customer’s experience with the product. Given this reality, the noun form of “brand” isn’t enough to really move people — it just doesn’t bring the brand to life in a way that inspires customer action.

To meet this challenge, ad execs would make up a marketing story and call it “branding.” “Brand fiction” is a superb technique for creating emotional, shareable connections to an unemotional product like laundry soap. But it can become problematic when it’s only a marketing message. Today’s networked consumer has amplification, credibility and influence. And when they complain about a disconnect between what a brand is saying and what they are doing, it impacts effectiveness. If a brand story really is just fiction, consumers will more than likely uncover it en masse and penalize you for it… .

The Awareness Factor

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:06:48 -0400

At Campfire, we believe branding is more than just establishing a look and a message — it’s about inspiring positive consumer experiences that bring a brand to life through the words and behaviors of its customers. As such, when we design a marketing campaign to launch a product or to change consumer perception about a brand, we carefully consider how to leverage broadcast and other mass advertising tactics to complement the overall campaign.

Many advertisers will define the role of television or print as the branding portion of the campaign. These mediums reach the largest segments of an audience to establish the name, the message, the look and the identity of a product or company. All very important things. The trouble is, it’s not branding in the truest sense.

Reaching the most eyeballs is a game of awareness, a very important part of the equation in advertising. Establishing the look and feel of a product is essential for helping a customer identify the offering on the shelves and differentiate it from the competition. But, there is a tendency for advertisers to become too dependent on this form of awareness as “the brand campaign.” Because while it does establish mindshare, mass advertising tactics rarely create enough of an emotional connection to sear a brand into a customer’s heart and win their loyalty. That can only come through personal experience with the brand. And most ad units and ad executions are woefully inadequate for creating this kind of connection.

Branding is not just a mass awareness activity anymore, if it really ever was. Branding is what happens when a person engages in conversation with a company or has a good experience with a product or when a friend recommends a brand. Mass awareness may get a prospect to the door, but only these kinds of small-scale, personal experiences generate real brand affinity.

So what is the functional role of mass of advertising in a marketing campaign? If the sole value is awareness, advertisers may need to make brutal decisions about ad creation. Not every ad can be a home run, after all, so diverting money from ad creation into increased frequency may be warranted — or possibly spreading the buy wider with a variety of ad units keep the brand top of mind.

But most importantly, advertisers need to stop short-changing the relationship building, community creation and engagement efforts. These are not merely good complements to the mass buy, but essential components for closing the loop on the campaign.

Just because mass awareness is the most expensive part of the campaign, doesn’t make it the most important. The most important part of the campaign is the point where a prospect becomes a loyal customer and advocate. Awareness without a means of engagement is a dead end path of rapidly decreasing returns.

Does A 'Like' Mean Love or Just Sex?

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:39:00 -0400

ReTweets. Likes. +1s. We talk about these things as the currency of meaningful social engagement. But seriously, can’t we recognize a one-night stand when we see one anymore?

If we insist that the holy grail of social marketing is to create meaningful relationships, why is it we insist on reducing these relationships to the most tawdry and meaningless metrics? We used to call Likes, “Hand-Raisers.” These were the folks who said, “Sure, communicate with me.” But we never concluded they were advocates and never assumed them to have brand affinity. They were just interested parties. They were leads.

So going back to my original metaphor, a Like or a ReTweet is simply someone saying, “Buy me a drink, sailor?” It’s not a relationship. It’s a hookup.

The reason I belabor this is because too often we forget that the real relationship and engagement happens after the Like. It’s the dance of finding out stuff about each other. It’s the long conversations and special surprises and unforgettable times together. It’s knowing the other party cares about who I am and what I feel. It’s a feeling of safety and trust. The Like is just the tip of that iceberg.

When your strategy is to “get Likes,” without thinking what to do with those Likes after you get them, you’re essentially building a little black book of folks who you can hit up later for some hot sales. And just like with dating, you’re going to get rejected more often than not. Most people have more self-respect than that. They’re looking for brand love. While most brands just want to…

…well, you get the picture.

In all seriousness, though, if you’re initiating a social program you need to think about the entire process, not just the Likes. Likes are meaningless without the hard work of relationship building, and until we understand this and embrace it, we’re going to continue to be disappointed in our social life. And there’s nothing sadder than love lost.

Real Influence Is Not A Data Game

Wed, 25 May 2011 17:52:47 -0400

There’s a bigger problem than finding a tool for measuring social branding efforts or determining the influence of key players within a community. It’s the fact that you need to find 20 tools.

Okay, an exaggeration perhaps. But there’s a point to make here. Because while most of the industry is feverishly searching for the holy grail of social effectiveness and influence measurement, they’re missing the fact that a single source of data or using a single analysis tool is not nearly enough.

Any direct marketer will tell you that the only thing worse than a single source of data or a single model for guiding a marketing program is having no data at all. Why are they so critical? Simply because another thing that all direct marketers know is data lies.

People exaggerate on surveys. People cheat on their taxes. People change titles and fake addresses. And people most definitely game social measurement systems.

There was a recent post by Erik Deckers at ProBlogService.com that actually listed three ways to increase your score on the social influence site, Klout.com. The funny thing to me was that none of the three ways mentioned had anything to do with actually raising your influence. They simply suggested things like reducing your follower count to only those people who interact with you on a regular basis.

And did you know that if you run a Twitter chat, your rating on most services will go through the roof? It’s not because a whole bunch of people “like” you. Itʼs because a standard practice is to tell participants to, “@-reply me so that you don’t spam your followers with the chat.” Except when you do this, you direct hundreds if not thousands of tweets “@” the person running the chat over the course of an hour. It creates instant “influence” as far as many of the measurement tools are concerned.

For their part, none of the companies offering tools to measure sentiment, influence and social effectiveness are claiming to have the problem completely figured out. They would be foolish to do so, because as Edward O’Meara of MediaHound recently told me, some of these tools are offering 60% accuracy at best.

However, that doesn’t stop these services from quietly accepting the money of desperate marketers looking for an easy way out. Millions of marketing dollars can sometimes hinge on a single social influence measurement tool. And that’s where my real issue lies.

Please understand that services like Klout or tools like Radian6 can play an important part in giving us clues as to who an influencer is. But when we rely upon these service exclusively, we do ourselves a huge disservice. We need to cast the net wider and overlay our results to find commonalities in the data. This is the only way we can assure ourselves that we are getting any kind of accurate indicators.

Further, if we assume that any of these tools, even as an aggregate, are giving us the entire picture of influence we are fooling ourselves. At best these tools are only giving us clues. Finding the real influencers within a community takes the hard work of actually joining that community and conducting primary research on the actual interactions. Because many times you’ll find that the true influencer may not even be online or may not be ranking via the influence tools because of a philosophical aversion to participating on the common social platforms.

Now you may be skeptical, but I’ll tell you that Campfire has over ten years of experience building successful campaigns that drive action within fan communities, and we can say reliably that there are no shortcuts. If you want to find and ignite influence within a community, the most consistently effective way is to become part of that community. Because if most computer tools are only delivering 60% accuracy, that’s a little too close to a crap shoot for my tastes.

So definitely use the tools. Explore everything at your disposal to hear the conversations surrounding your online efforts. Just don’t get too attached to those tools. They may not be showing you everything you think. And they are a poor substitute for first-hand interaction with your targeted community.

More Than Just "Audience"

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:58:00 -0400

We often talk about “the audience” in our line of business. Whether it’s traditional advertising or the fan engagement stuff that Campfire is doing, the term is bandied about as a universal constant of whom we should be reaching.

In the strictest sense of the word, the term is accurate enough. But I’ve recently been considering whether the term does justice to what the audiences of fan-influencers represent. And maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at this relationship as something deeper.

I recently had dinner with Chris Baccus, the Director of Digital and Social Media for AT&T. But some of you may recognize Chris from a completely different claim to fame. Chris is also the publisher of The Auto Marketing Blog, one of the biggest auto blogs around. And over the years, he’s built quite an extensive network of both car enthusiasts and marketing professionals.

As friends will do over good food and (even better!) beer, we got to talking about life that night, and the subject of Chris’ recent move to Dallas came up. He moved there last Summer to assume his new role with AT&T, and I asked him if it had been tough getting settled and making new friends in a whole new city. This is where Chris laughed and told me, “No, there are a few people I’ve known from the blog for years living in Dallas. It was like instant community.”

Engaging an audience of influencers on the surface looks like any other audience engagement. … Yet it couldn’t be more different.

Which brings me back to my point. Engaging an audience of influencers on the surface looks like any other audience engagement. We follow many of the same rules, such as identifying common interests, analyzing past buying behaviors and trying to determine if this group is fertile territory for our message. Yet it couldn’t be more different.

If we acknowledge that the people building these micro-audiences are also building real and lasting relationships, we start to realize that marketing within these groups is not something that can be bought and sold lightly. As a brand entering this environment, we have to earn the privilege. This is a sacred trust, because these influencers — people just like Chris Baccus — may be talking to people who one day will babysit their children or go into business with them.

Yet when it comes to many social or fan engagement efforts today, brands continually play a role not unlike that of an insurance salesman who joins a church just to get leads. In the end, it’s a noisy, interruptive effort that’s worse than an ad because it’s betrayed the trust of the relationship.

By contrast though, imagine if a brand were to engage the key influencers within a community with something that enhanced the community. We’re not talking samples and a request to “blog whatever you think,” knowing all along that the “bribe” of free product will at least keep most folks from saying bad things. We’re talking about something that gives them something meaningful to talk about or gets folks excited. We’re talking about some simple ideas that inspire them to share with trust and appreciation among their group of friends and associates.

As Mike Monello, one of the founders at Campfire and one of the original Blair Witch Project team often says, “People love to tell stories.” But I would add the caveat that they don’t just want your story — they want stories of their own to share. This is why people become bloggers or podcasters or YouTubers. They want to be the beloved person who tells the story that everyone wants to hear. And while it seems counter-intuitive to give a fan or enthusiast the fodder to create a story out of your brand, rather than have them repeat the story you want them to tell, time and again we find that this is the way the best stories propagate — both online and offline.

To put it simply, we need to stop taking these relationships lightly. We can’t just take some vague social metric, start sending stuff out and hope for the best. We need to spend time getting to know how these communities work and build a meaningful and relevant reason for participation. Because unlike the broadcast network executives who will always take our money, if you take an influencer’s friends lightly, you may never be invited over for dinner again. And that’s a fact.

Human Insight over Technology

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When Contagious Magazine interviewed Mike Monello about his experience on the jury of the 2011 International Andy’s Awards, he explained that “As an industry, we’re creating digital work that is designed to emotionally engage and comes from human insight rather than being driven by technology.” Read the entire article at the link below.

International ANDY Awards – Contagious Magazine

Lessons from Great Storytellers

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Mike Monello’s recent keynote presentation at the London International Film Festival drills down on the basics of marketing narrativesin today’s technology ecosystem. This is a great piece for marketers interested in telling their brand stories.

Babies, Buns And Buzzers: What 100 years of experiential entertainment can teach us about transmedia storytelling.

Advertising Award Shows - What's best?

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In a recent post on his blog, our Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Steve Wax, talked about his experience as a judge for the IAB’s MIXX Awards.

Always the rational optimist, Steve’s take is that our industry is in fact moving towards an era of enlightened work and an improved way of judging it. Tough questions may remain for marketers and agencies alike, but real lessons and real progress are taking place – thanks to the efforts of a consortium such as IAB in which to learn from each other and raise all boats in the process.

Full post is below. MIXX Awards are on Tuesday, September 28.

Steve Wax’s Standing Room Only

15 September 2010

A couple weeks ago, along with thirty other professionals from brands, agencies, and media companies, I helped pick the winners for the IAB’s MIXX Awards.

With the importance of all things non-TV these days, judging the new work and the issues around it fascinates me. I expressed my frustration about the lack of progress way back in a July, 2006 Boards magazine piece:

“Award shows don’t simply reward people who produce the best work, they also function as barometers for cultural and creative shifts in a business that desperately pursues all new things cultural and creative – particularly at times when the industry is in major upheaval, as it most certainly is now.

“Ad agencies and production companies, who made their reputations off 30-second spots, are resisting the new marketing solutions…” For instance I observed, there’s a “failure of shows to adapt to the format…how do you cope with campaigns that run for months, supplying loads of new material to an engaged audience?”

Although I’ve judged other shows since then, my recent MIXX judging experience was remarkable; the industry has moved a long way since 2006, both in terms of work, and in terms of show judging.

Thoroughness is the watchword at MIXX. The judges spend the equivalent of a full day on their own, reviewing finalists, culled from among thousands chosen earlier by another judging group.

When judging day arrived, my fellow judges and I went back over all our ratings and re-reviewed close votes, spending another day picking the final winners.

The experience of working with peers who commission innovative work, as well as those who create it was incredibly fulfilling; we were able to focus on a year’s output, avoiding the ad-babble about Twitter, the iPad, and Alex Bogusky.

The criteria laid out by our crack IAB leader, David Doty, was to give equal weight to strategy, creative, results, and use of media — to ask what was the most innovative and most inspiring.

Things got heated at times, particularly because many of us wanted to choose winners based on the message we were sending to the industry about where we should be headed. Others thought we should simply pick the best work and not act like self-appointed seers.

Then there was the question of “innovation” – what if someone else had done similar work previously, but the new piece was far stronger?

And, further, is ad innovation about technology or is it about new ideas? Instead of worrying about hardware, platforms and channels, shouldn’t we be evaluating ideas designed to attract an audience?

And, even further still:

• How do you balance creative against effectiveness? It’s easy to say 25% for this aspect, 25% for that one, etc., but we can (and did at times) get subjective very quickly, particularly when results come from the creators, and each project has its own custom collection of metrics.

• And, hey, should the campaign budget be revealed? If a major brand puts millions behind a campaign, brute force may convince us it was effective, but what was the true R.O.I.?

• Finally, do look and feel matter any longer? For fifty years style has driven print and spots, is it important in interactive?

Many of these same questions map across the challenges agencies and marketing executives face on a daily basis. The IAB gave us the best context in which to explore them – over case studies, real work, with our peers – so we took home some real lessons of our own.

At the end of the long session there was a hot debate over two campaigns, one that integrated traditional presence with on-line storytelling – against another that bet its entire budget on a highly engaging interactive experience. Which pointed the way forward, which showed the most imagination?

A moment came when one judge, from a consumer products company, who had remained silent while the rest of us shot off our mouths, stepped up and made an impassioned plea for a particular candidate for Best of Show — and carried the day. I believe everyone from the panel would agree that we all found this moment — and the whole MIXX experience — intensely satisfying.

I’d strongly suggest you attend the MIXX Awards on Tuesday, September 28 to see if you agree with our choices. Did we choose the “best” work? Did we point the way?