hans.gerwitz

Message about media

Posted on April 6th, 2008

My “no distinction between publisher and consumer” defi­n­ition of social media seems to have caused a little to-​​do locally.

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Traffic as shallow leads

Posted on March 1st, 2008

A brief obser­vation from the IAB perfor­mance marketing forum: the inter­active adver­tising industry seems to consist of people from the direct marketing world, who think in terms of leads, and from media agencies, who think in terms of exposure and traffic.

The DM folks are all abuzz about the varying quality of leads, and there are inter­esting efforts afoot to value leads individually.

The media folks continue to hunt for a single metric to measure traffic by quantity, rather than quality.

As a naïve outsider, my forest view says that traffic is just a form of shallow lead, and like all leads the quality is both variable and relative.

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Adobe on the cluetrain

Posted on January 8th, 2008

A case study worth keeping around for client education:

Via an employee blogging offi­cially but with a personal voice, Adobe has heard public concern, engaged in an open dialog about it, and directly addressed the issue.

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Facebook Yelps

Posted on November 18th, 2007

Facebook’s new adver­tising model includes publi­cation of activity from partner sites in news feeds. Their official list of affil­iates does not include Yelp, but tonight, I had a little DHTML “toast” pop-​​up inform me my latest review would be shared on my Facebook profile.

A little inves­ti­gating shows that this was pulled off via a JavaScript include, http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php and there’s already a bit of kerfuffle about it.

It does appear that authen­ti­cation is being handled entirely via facebook.com cookies, and partic­i­pating in this inte­gration requires they recognize your site as a regis­tered source.

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Churched

Posted on February 25th, 2007

Kristan and I have elected to have our wedding at Old Cathedral. The bureau-​​theo-​​cratic process for reserving the church assumed we were formally asso­ciated with a parish, which I haven’t been for many, many years. (My last one wasn’t really a “parish”, and the politics around my father’s turned me off from formal parish recognition.)

There are a few Catholic churches in walking distance from home, so we had to ask the arch­diocese to learn we fall into the area of
St. John, Apostle and Evangelist. The parish is one of the first in St. Louis, and the present church was built in 1869 by John B. Bannon. We’ve been attending there for a few weeks now, and the atmos­phere is quite warm.

Most important for my continued atten­dance, pastor Msgr. Delaney is a sharp, authentic, and thoughtful speaker. It’s almost jarring to hear him use a conver­sa­tional style when reciting the Nicene Creed, and a storyteller’s tone for the Gospel. His homilies keep the congre­gation engaged with relevant commentary and analogies, none of the usual atmos­phere of “break time” permeates the audience.

It struck me this morning that the attributes that make his cele­bration of Mass engaging are the same that define “clue­train” conver­sa­tional marketing. This made me wonder where the Church is, as an orga­ni­zation, in modern marketing? Why doesn’t every parish have a blog, with every homily posted for moderated discussion? Where’s the social network for members? Do they even have a CRM database beyond indi­vidual parishes keeping simple records?

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