The Carnival of Marketing at Influential Interactive Marketing

Thanks to all for their patience while I pulled together this week’s Carnival of Marketing over the holiday weekend (in the US).  The posts from this week range from new great content online, such as TEDTalks, to new ideas like the Earthboards or marketing in SecondLife, to highlighting several posts from newer blogs out there you may not have visited yet.  Looking back to other Carnival host weeks that I have enjoyed, I realized that they highlighted posts from bloggers outside of our circle.  One of the most useful outcomes of this week hosting for me has been the chance to find new blogs and new ideas.  Here are my seven picks – I hope you enjoy them:

1. TEDTalks from TEDBlog – The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference is one of the most exclusive invite-only gatherings of speakers and influentials.  In a wonderful example of transparency, TEDTalks is their new offering where they share the 18 minute presentations of all the speakers, adding a new “episode” each week.  From a marketing point of view, this is significant for the way that it helps to build credibility and connect individuals to an exclusive event that would ordinarily only reach 1000 individuals and any other individuals through media coverage.  Also, BMW has taken the smart step of linking their brand to the event by underwriting the TEDTalks effort. 
2. Digging into CGM data – Some of the smartest trend information on marketing I have read over the years has come from the folks at Forrester research – but these analysts have a very different business model to blogging.  The interesting question has always been whether there can be a role for both.  Thankfully, the team at Forrester has found a way to do both with their new marketing blog launched two months ago.  This post is about using text mining and analytics to quantify CGM – a big topic of conversation at the recent BzzAgent MBA training I attended in Boston, as well as a key question for many of our clients.  For their insight and the collective smarts of the contributers, this is a blog to add to your RSS readers right away.
3. Polluting the Blogosphere – Another fascinating point of view from Jon Fine – one my favourite "traditional" media sources about how there are new services launching paying bloggers to post in an effort to improve their performance on search engines and sites like Technorati.  As inbound links continue to have a huge effect on rankings, we will see more ways for sites to unscrupulously increase their rankings through artificial means like paying bloggers or launching hundreds of "splogs" to point to their sites.  Fine raises the great point of how this may start to undermine the credibility of blogs as a whole.  Obviously, marketers need to get smarter on this.
4. Ending ‘on point’ is so anti-social – This post from Christina Kerley asks the important question of whether you are truly engaging your audience through your blog posts.  Too often, we all focus on making our point of view heard – at the expense of truly listening or having a dialogue.  On a personal blog, it is easy to make this one dimensional, where you spend too much effort making a point and not enough encouraging a debate.  I’ll carry her final question through here: Are you leveraging the social aspect of social media?  Christina does a great job of this on her blog, dedicated to featuring "idea-rich interviews with marketers and bloggers."
5. Carnival of the Mobilists 34 is at W2F! – If you want to learn about the enormous potential of mobile marketing, you need to look outside of the US.  A good place to start are the wealth of posts from Jan Kuczynski at Wireless World Forum.  This week, he hosts another carnival – the Carnival of Mobilists, where he shares many useful posts for understanding the state of the market (mostly in the UK) and new innovative ideas.  As a marketer waiting for the market to evolve in the US, sites like Jan’s offer therapeutic insight into the future possibilities.
6. SecondLife: It’s Not a Game, The Ultimate Co-Creative Business – There have been many reports companies getting smarter about using SecondLife in their marketing efforts, from the virtual hosting of Vloggercon to Micropersuasion’s report of American Apparel opening a store there.  This post on Karl Long’s ExperienceCurve blog explores the phenomenon of SecondLife in relation to how it maps to the trend of consumer/user co-creation online.  He elaborates on his view that SecondLife is less like a game and more like the Internet in terms of fostering an online network and having many business opportunities.  I suspect there will be new reports of companies entering the SecondLife soon. 
7. The Birth of a New Advertising Medium – In this post, Jos Birken points to a recent promotion by Maxim magazine to place an “earthboard” in the Vegas desert.  An earthboard is a billboard on the ground large enough to be seen by space – and perhaps the start of a disturbing new trend to paint the earth in a form that can be seen from space.  This may have been around for some time with stores painting their rooftops to be seen from planes, but with the rise of Google Earth and relatively easy access to satellite imagery, perhaps this is a new category for out-of-home that marketers will start to use.  I also love this blog’s mission to write for “those with an interest in everything that can make the life of a frequent traveller into something vaguely resembling normalcy.”

Visit the Carnival of Marketing homepage to see the list of past and future hosts and learn more about the purpose of the Carnival and Noah Kagan, who started the concept.

Addendum:  Apologies to Karl Long for misattributing his post to someone else earlier.  Karl also hosts a great podcast on Co-Creation worth checking out for those like me who are following this trend with interest.