For those that missed David's presentation, I recommend watching this video.  Or even for those that saw him speak, you may want to watch this and forward it to some folks in your company.  Tagging, and other user-generated content trends, will have a profound impact on eCommerce over the "long-term" (i.e., the next 1-3 years – remember this is an "Internet Speed" age we live in). 

I highly recommend reading his book as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

During a little downtime this week, I have seen three profound examples of user-generated content in action:

1. Today, MarketingSherpa released a new case study on how President's Choice (large Canadian grocer) is leveraging online customer reviews of their private-label products in their stores, circulars, loyalty program, and product lab.  It is well worth the read; it is one of the most powerful multichannel examples that we have worked on with any client to date.  I also encourage you to look at the creative samples they provided.  Note that free access is only available for seven days from the publish date.

2. Yesterday (and again tonight), I saw a new Ford Fusion commercial that uses customer review content from Yahoo! Autos in the ad as the primary selling message.  I think this may be an industry first.  I have seen user-generated content used in many forms, but not actual customer review content on a major television advertisement (it ran on American Idol's session finale tonight – that can't be cheap).  The commercials are branded with Ford's new website: Ford Challenge.  I wrote about General Motors doing something similar last year, but not quite as profound.

3. On Monday, I read an article on Yahoo! about 45 million people globally voting on the new Seven Wonders of the World.   Quick – can you name the historical Seven?  I couldn't, and only one of them survives today.  This is notable news to me for two reasons.  First, 45 million (and one) people globally are now engaged in caring about important historical places in the world (although it somewhat saddens me that, by comparison, 74 million people voted on the new American Idol winner).  Second, it taps into three trends that I have been following: the wisdom of crowds (and crowdsourcing), the power of the new globally connected individual (see Kryptonite mention), and the upheaval of traditional power structures (this one being the intellectuals in 200 BC that selected the historical Seven). 

On that last trend, I am reading David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which covers this trend extensively.  It is a pretty good read by one of the ingenious authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto (one of my favorite books – I consider Chapter 4 a must-read for marketers).  The basic theme of the book is that the laws of the physical world have constrained the desires of individuals for the purpose of organizing the masses.  For example, you can't dynamically rearrange a physical retail store for a specific niche shopper to make it easy for them, but you can do that online.  This may be obvious to many of you by now, but Mr. Weinberger has a unique style and writes of the history behind (including such topics as the invention of alphabetized lists) and the implications of this very important trend.

I think it is very cool that the Internet has enabled projects that would have never been possible before – like the new seven wonders voting.  Frankly, most would trust the opinion of 45 million people globally than a few intellectuals anyway.

And I was also very happy to see Shop.org announce this week that David Weinberger is one of the four keynotes at the Annual Summit this year in Las Vegas.  I hope to see you there!

Now Kelly is coming out with her second book, "The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World", in September.  Here is an excerpt from ATG's newsletter today.  Kelly will be keynoting their client summit in Charleston, SC next week.  We will also be attending and presenting, as ATG is a partner of ours too (recently announced).  "The Open Brand" is like "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (one of my favorite business books) except it is less of a rant and more prescriptive.  We needed the rant and it was prescient in 1999, but now it is time to take action.  "The Open Brand" is about taking action.  I endorsed it as follows:

“My favorite business books are written by practitioners of the field.  Through Resource Interactive, Kelly Mooney works with the world’s leading online brands.  So when she provides a prescriptive guide, it pays to read it.  ‘The Open Brand’ will revolutionize business as we know it.  The Internet has put the networked consumer in control, but your business can actually skyrocket if you play by Kelly’s rules of an ‘open brand’.”

Kelly interviewed me for a special section in her book, and here is what I had to say:

Q.  Will consumers eventually tire of writing reviews?

That is like asking if consumers will eventually tire of word of mouth.  If you think about reviews as just one form of word of mouth, then the answer to this question becomes more obvious.  As consumers contribute to their brands and communities of choice they will get more engaged.  They may limit the number of places they invest time – as they become loyal to a brand that fosters relationships between customers.  For example, there are almost 500 reviews for Kong toys and Greenies on PETCO.  These reviewers are not writing many reviews of these products on shopping comparison sites like Yahoo!, Shopzilla, or even ePinions (the only established shopping comparison site that is synonymous with only reviews).  Instead, they are investing time in a brand – PETCO – that they care about, sharing their opinion with fellow pet lovers where their word of mouth will have the greatest impact and where the deepest connections with other customers can be formed (due to their shared passion).

Q.  What’s to stop a malicious competitor from marring a brand’s image via bad reviews?   

First, the sheer backlash of engaging in these activities will scare most companies who care about the integrity of their brand from being malicious. Technologies and moderation capabilities are getting smarter about identifying likely malicious reviews.  And the law is evolving also.  The UK recently passed a law to prevent fraudulent reviews.  Second, consumers self-police the community.  It is not unusual to see consumers defend a product or service that they care about when a malicious comment is made (or even a non-malicious but highly negative one).  The wisdom of the crowd ultimately comes to a final judgment about a product or service that no one malicious competitor can shape to their benefit.

Q.    With more than 95% of retail sales still occurring offline, what’s your vision for how store shopping will be impacted by online reviews?

There will be convergence and availability of content, such as reviews, through several devices – such as mobile phones, in-store kiosks, and wireless POS systems (or other devices a salesperson can carry).  In addition, in-store signage will feature ratings and sometimes reviews.  It is just a matter of time when Web access becomes so ubiquitous that accessing reviews online in any channel will be the norm.

Look for my interview of Kelly soon in my ongoing Word-of-Mouth Wisdom Interview series.

However, the highlight of this conference was the panel discussion immediately following mine, named "Engaged Markets: Social Media" facilitated by Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff of Neilsen BuzzMetrics.  Their panelists included Michael Wiley from General Motors and Curt Hecht from GM Planworks.  Michael is the Director of New Media at GM Communications and is responsible for launching the GM FastLane Blog, where Bob Lutz, GM's Vice Chairman, regularly blogs and gives GM a "more human feel".  Curt Hecht is Executive Vice President at GM Planworks, which handles all buying and planning for GM's more than $3 billion annual spend in advertising.

This blog post by Dan Farber at ZDNet does a great job of summarizing the highlights of the panel discussion.  I blogged about GM in April, hypothesizing that a revolutionary in their approach to advertising may be underway.  After hearing Michael and Curt talk, I am now confident that my hypothesis is more concrete.  These guys really get it.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the panel (from the blog by Dan Farber):

• In the context of the social media explosion, Michael Wiley, GM director of new media, didn't hold back. "The existing ad paradigm sucks, it's woefully inefficient. It takes huge dollars to create ads on TV that run for 30 or 60 seconds and give the consumer virtually no information," Wiley said. "The opportunity is to create relatively grassroots ads, six to eight minutes long that give an in-depth brand experience and are released online."
• "Instead of GM producing ads online, we could use testimonials in existing online content as our advertising vehicles moving forward," [Michael Wiley] added.  "Why not serve those up instead of a contrived advertisement." 
• Wiley also said a secret to GM's success is listening to conversations, including the negative comments. GM has blogs and comments on posts [that] frequently bash and criticize the company's products. "You need to be open to criticism and willing to [engage] detractors," Wiley said. "Businesses like GM need to fundamentally change the way they operate. Customer engagement and every customer's opinion counts is just beginning. For years and years you could keep the squeaky wheel happy…now they can talk to a millions of people. The process to change the way business is done is slow process…and still mostly old way of doing business that has been around for 40 years."
• …the voice could be larger than the Wall Street Journal [in influencing purchase decisions]. We just need to find the brand advocates," [Curt Hecht said].
• "We will continue to see the existing power structure subverted," Wiley said. "It's a period of upheaval, and I am confident it will just get better over the next few years," Wiley concluded.

Michael also talked about the effectiveness of their "Google Pontaic" campaign as well as their campaign to point shoppers to Edmunds to compare Chevrolet's features versus competitive models.  The goal here is to say to potential customers, "we know you don't trust us and consider us a stodgy old-world company – so here is some third party credibility that is easy for you to find and mostly consumer-generated" (that's my not so great paraphase, not his actual words).

It was also very interesting to see Ed Keller's groundbreaking research on the word of mouth "all-stars" (the most talked about brands in America in a net positive context).  Chevrolet was #5 on the list.  No other domestic car company was on the top-ten list.  GM is doing something right.

If this doesn't make the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" smile, I'm not sure what would.  Actually, one of them was in the audience and I publicly thanked him for inadvertently helping me come up with the name for our company.  Unfortunately, I didn't see him smile back at me.  Maybe it was my comment about most domain names being taken!

Happy 4th of July and God bless America!     

- from "The History of Great American Turnarounds", 2929 Entertainment, aired on Jan. 5, 2025

This is probably old news to some of you, but I find it fascinating that Chevrolet is allowing consumers to create their own ads for the new Tahoe.  As you can imagine, some consumers have created some very critical ads.  However, I applaud General Motors for finally taking some risk.  I'm sure the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" would also applaud this bold move.

There is no doubt in my mind that we will see more of this.  This is the start of an open and honest dialogue between General Motors and their customers.  Is the dialogue always going to positive?  Of course not.  It isn't always positive offline, but it is too easy for General Motors to ignore private customer-to-customer conversations.  It is a bit different when the conversations are out in the open, staring them in the face.

Sam Decker calls this "customer oxygen".  No matter what you call it, it is healthy.  I have long believed that a company should design its products with customers.  That may sound obvious, but it's not.  I created Coremetrics, a successful Web analytics business, based on the premise that companies like Accrue and NetGenesis had failed to do this.  And their customers defected quickly.

Then I read Ron Bloom's, the CEO of Podshow, article on "advertising 2.0".  Outside of the fact that there are too many 2.0 terms, I agree with Ron that advertising must evolve.  We are more cynical than ever about advertising because we are more educated.  If you are reading this blog, you are likely far more educated about marketing than most consumers.  And you are probably much more likely than most consumers to ignore advertising altogether – skip it with your TIVO, read news online via an RSS feed, get the straight scoop from your friends.  The question is – what form of marketing works or is going to work on you?  Is it "keeping up with The Joneses" all over again?  Only this time, you actually trust "The Joneses" more than you trust any corporation.

Every social networking, blogging, user-generated content, "authentic media", and Web 2.0 company has a common goal in mind: monetize their business model with advertising.  There are a ton of venture-capital and public-market dollars chasing this aim.  My bet is that several will evolve entirely new forms of advertising.  For some, the bets are already paying off.  Last I heard, Facebook is making over $10 million per month on advertising and the buzz is that it may be acquired for as much as $2 billion.  And you probably heard what Rupert Murdoch's #2 is publically saying about their acquisition of MySpace, "MySpace is the single biggest growth opportunity this company has".  Considering the Murdoch empire and the newness of social networking, that is a pretty mind-blowing statement.

In full disclosure, my wife, Debra, just bought a new GM SUV after trading in her Volkswagen SUV, an unfortunate lemon of lemons (it actually pains me to write that after many years of loyalty to Volkswagen).  I also bring this up because I found myself genuinely impressed with the 2007 redesign of the model she bought, and I wonder if Bob Lutz and his team are really starting to figure it out by listening.  It is the first American car that we have ever bought.  Imagine how odd it would be to read that statement if we lived in the 1950's instead of the 2000's.