Solis Joins Team Altimeter

Wow! Big news today for Brian Solis and the good folks at research-based advisory firm, Altimeter (Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li's gig). According to my friend, Jeremiah, Brian will be joining the firm as a principal focusing on "change management, social business and helping Altimeter's clients adopt disruptive technologies."

Charlene Li, , Brian Solis & Jeremiah Owyang (credit: Solis)

Given Brian's meteoric rise over the last couple of years that culminated with his interview of news anchor, Katie Couric, last fall, this is a big win for Altimeter. It will be interesting to see how Brian -- a two time author that cut his teeth in the PR world -- will make the leap to analyst. Given the content Brian creates and covers on his blog, I have not doubt that if anyone can make the shift, Brian can.

By way of fun background, I've done podcasts with Charlene (co-interviewing Charlene with Jim Storer at the Community 2.0 Conference in 2008), Brian (TechSet, 2009) and Jeremiah (via the phone). I know all three personally and am excited for them as this will be big news for a group that is already moving and shaking. When you see them at SXSW, make sure to congratulate them!

To that end, Altimeter's growth won't stop with Solis. According to Jeremiah, they are also hiring in a few other fields such as mobile, business intelligence, and digital media and advertising.

Sponsored Content: Right or Wrong

Great panel at BlogWorld Expo focused on the controversial topic of sponsored content. Jim Turner, Jason Falls and Rick Calvert nailed the participants for this one (although it would have been nice to have either Chris Brogan or one of Wal-mart's Eleven Mom's on the panel). Either way, here they are:

• Moderator: Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter)
• Ted Murphy (Izea)
• Jennifer Leggio (ZD Net)
• Lisa Borodkin (Callahan & Blaine)
• Wendy Piersall (eMom)

Jeremiah frames the conversation by asking the audience who was pro and con sponsored content. The audience asked for clarification and following that, Jeremiah gave eight examples of sponsored content. After he read these, he re-asked the question and a lot more people were in favor of sponsored content than first go around.

[breaking news via Howard Greenstein: IAB has asked FTC to rescind their ruling due to unfair treatment of online and offline. Here is AdWeek's take.]

Effective as of 12/1/09, here is the high-level overview of the FTC's ruling:

• the new FTC's recent ruling is actually a clarification of a law that has been on the books since 1980 but have recently been reinterpreted by the FTC to cover bloggers. Some of the clarifications included in the recent ruling touch on:
• According to the FTC, an endorsement is defined as "any advertising message that consumers are likely to believe reflect the experiences other than the sponsor."
• Whether the speaker was compensated (including goods)
• Was it given to you for free
• Terms of any agreement
• Length of relationship
• Value
• FTC is holding equally liable the sponsor and the endorser if it is believed that false advertising/influence is applicable
• The FTC is comfortable with sponsored content if proper disclosures are put in place.

Jennifer Leggio:

• Wants to clarify that her stance is that she doesn't believe that while she's against sponsored content, she does see some opportunities where it might be tasteful/appropriate. It can run the risk of damaging a blogger or brands reputation.

Wendy Piersall:

• She agrees with Jennifer but thinks that there are a lot of opportunities where sponsored conversations are appropriate. However, she agrees that it once one "plays the game," one has to be careful about how future non-sponsored messages are interpreted.

Ted Murphy:

• Given the fact that his company, Izea, focuses their business model on sponsored content, it's not hard to guess where his alliances lie. However, Ted did add that he believes that all bloggers should add disclosure to their blogs in a clear, concise fashion.

There was way more to this than what I've covered here but this should give you a flavor of the conversation. For more details, there was actually a separate hashtag -- #sponblog -- that Jeremiah ran for this session. All in all, a very interesting topic.

Facebook Connect: Rockstar Podcast Interview

Cross-posted from blog.powered.com.

In an earlier podcast I did regarding Facebook Connect, I talked about the fact that I think that this is the future of social marketing. I am so excited about it, I enlisted the help of our PR firm, SHIFT Communications, to collect three more big brains including Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, digital editor of AdWeek, Brian Morrissey and marketing blogger/consultant, Susan Getgood.

A few highlights from the session for those that like to read more than they like to listen:

• Jeremiah Owyang (3:49 - 3:58) "In the past, we thought of interactive marketing which is user to Web site. Now, in social marketing, very different, it's user to user. "
• Brian Morrissey (5:18 - 5:43) "What we're talking about here with Connect, is how brands can look at these social platforms and tool sets as ways to really further make connections with their consumers wherever they are. And Facebook Connect has the possibility of allowing them to embed social marketing into how they interact with consumers."
• Susan Getgood (10:08 - 10:34) "Knowing what people find interesting to share is as important as knowing what they are looking at themselves. When we have a Web site, we can look at analytics and see which pages people are hitting and where they click-through and all this other stuff, but the idea that they thought something was important enough to share, that kind of information gives a company of any size the kind of information to know what kind of content really engages your customer and you can build more of it."

During the podcast, I also referred to some engaging statistics put together by the Business Insider regarding the effectiveness of Facebook Connect (thanks to Pearl Russell on the Powered team for finding these):

• Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
• Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
• Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Most importantly, you probably want to know the answer to which successful companies are currently using Facebook Connect? Unfortunately, there aren't many Fortune 500 companies using it yet but during our podcast, Brian brought up the examples of JC Penney (it's number 4 on the list of 10 in a great post by Mashable) and Red Bull. Jeremiah mentioned Volkswagon's Meet the VW's campaign.



To download this podcast, right-mouse click here and select "save file as."

If you're interested, we've got a slick demo of how Facebook will work with some of our Powered clients.

NOTE: The "Back to School" podcast series will be a regularly occurring podcast focused on the business value of social marketing, social media and online communities. Guests will include practitioners, authors, analysts and thought leaders in the space.

Dogfood

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the fact that I/we at Powered make a point of eating our own dogfood. This means living by two rules:

1. Be authentic
2. Give before we get

In the first case, it's hard to be authentic all the time but once you get it into your DNA, it starts to become second nature. For number two, it's a little trickier because it requires a fairly large time commitment and it's easy to fall into the typical marketing/sales trap of "you gotta give me some info i.e. your name and e-mail address before we give you any of our thinking."

Over the last couple of months, I'd like to think we've done a good job of "giving" by writing objective, non-infomercial pieces that have been published in places like:

• ReadWriteWeb - The Semantic Web - A Treasure Trove for Marketers (co-written by friend, John Cass)
• MediaPost 1 - Why Authenticity is More Important than Ever
• DMNews - What's the Future for Social Network Ads?
• MediaPost 2 - Deepening Customer Loyalty through Social Media
• MarketingProfs - Is Your Company Eating its Own Dog Food? (coming soon)

I'm also seriously considering removing any type of login before folks get access to things like research, white papers and even our webcasts. It's based on some research I read recently (thanks to colleague, Jay MacIntosh for finding it) and a post that my friend, Jeremiah Owyang did last week regarding Social CRM. Yup, this is a big deal but I truly believe that this is the way to go.

Are you eating your own dog food?