Greg Verdino

Spameken

Heineken is putting their marketing muscle behind the upcoming film The Bourne Ultimatum -- which is perfectly fine, but for the fact that they're doing it by spamming unsuspecting email users.  It has been a long, long time since I've received unsolicited email from a reputable company.  I didn't think this kind of thing even happened anymore.

Tomorrow I'm speaking to a roomful of direct marketing executives -- what do you think I'll tell them about this campaign and email marketing in general?

link for 2007-07-31

• NPR | Alter Egos in a Virtual World
  (tags: avatar metaverse emergingmedia gaming technology socialmedia secondlife)

links for 2007-07-30

• Valleywag | World Map of Social Networks
  Shows popularity of consumer social networks by country.
  (tags: community myspace reference research socialmedia socialnetworks statistics web2.0 youth facebook socialnetworking emergingmedia)
• User Acceptance Virtual Worlds
  Report coming out of a small, qualitative study of consumer perceptions of virtua worlds and Second Life in particular.
  (tags: secondlife research reference community socialmedia emergingmedia technology culture statistics)
• This Blog Sits At The | How Social Networks Work
  Brilliant post about the underlying value of social networks -- it's not what you say it's what you do: stay connected...
  (tags: community socialnetworks web2.0 phatic socialnetworking twitter facebook culture ideas)

Get yer pownce invites

Read what the NY Times had to say about Pownce in this Sunday's paper.

SL relay raises $128,000 for cancer

Amid a wave of Second Life naysaying in the mainstream media and resident head-scratching over Linden Lab's decision (last week) to put a stop to in-world gambling, the Second Life Relay For Life charity event wrapped up with their annual virtual run this morning and has generated L$31,579,522 for the American Cancer Society. 

Translated into real money, that's more than US$128,000 at today's exchange rate, and more than three times the money raised in SL last year.

The typical brand island may be a ghost town, but this is proof positive that the Second Life community will come out in droves for a good cause.

A shower hammock? Of course!

Three crayonistas -- Joseph Jaffe, Scott Monty and I -- spent most of the past week with clients in Mexico.  This is a shot of Jaffe, in a rare moment of business travel downtime, relaxing in his "shower hammock."   Yes, our hotel in Mexico City had hammocks in the showers.  Go figure.

You can find my complete set of Mexico photos on Flickr.

links for 2007-07-28

• The Grid Live | Missing the Mark On Second Life
  Not about marketers missing the mark, but about Wired missing the mark in their recent negative coverage.
  (tags: business marketing secondlife metaverse crayon emergingmedia socialmedia)
• Bruce Nussbaum | Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?
  (tags: advertising business design marketing strategy innovation change socialmedia socialnetworks web2.0 emergingmedia digital)
• Business Week | Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online
  Nice chart based on Forrester's Social Technographics.
  (tags: blogging community internet socialnetworking socialmedia socialnetworks blogs web2.0 content culture emergingmedia statistics reference research)

Mythbustin'

Fellow marketing blogger David Berkowitz mashed up this pic of yours truly as one of the Discovery Channel MythBusters.  Mythbuster -- how bad-ass is that?  Maybe I'll add it to my business card.

Little do consumers know

This quote comes from Bonnie Fuller, editorial chief at American Media and former turnaround queen at Us Weekly, as presented in the recent business book Chasing Cool:

"Before I create something, I figure out what consumers want based on a combination of gut instinct and research.  But the key thing to remember about consumers is that you can't just do what they say.  They don't always know what they want.  They can't imagine what the next better thing could be.  Sure, you have to listen to what their needs are.  But they can't tell you how to fulfill their needs."

So I get it, consumers don't know what they want until the professionals step in and let them know. Huh?  This top-down thinking sounds a bit outdated to me, but then again, this philosophy seems to have served Ms. Fuller just fine in her career.

Thoughts?

Schooling Cisco on social media

I've been invited to speak to Cisco's SMB Commercial Council in a couple of weeks -- this is a cross-disciplinary team inside Cisco that is focused on creating and marketing solutions for the small-to-medium business segment.  My topic is Web 2.0, how SMB decision makers are adopting these technologies and services, and how Cisco can tap into new media behaviors to engage SMB customers more effectively -- in a nutshell, what do new marketing and social media mean for one of the world's leading b2b technology brands.

I'm a big advocate of using new marketing to prove new marketing, so I'd love your help.  How?

Some of you may remember by presentation from the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing e-Conference.  It was a social media primer for business marketers and I leaned heavily on technology industry stats and case studies.  For those of you that haven't seen my slides, here they are:

I plan to use these slides as a starting point and build on them to make my two-hour session relevant and actionable for the Cisco team.

So now I'd love to hear from you -- any thoughts are welcome, but specifically:

• What do you like/not like about the MarketingProfs slides?
• What's missing?
• If you were presenting with me, what are the points you would absolutely want to make?
• If you worked at a company like Cisco, what do you think you would most like to learn about social media and new marketing?
• What are your favorite examples of b2b marketers getting it right?
• More importantly,which b2b marketers have gotten it dead wrong?
• What can a b2b technology marketer learn from consumer social media marketing cases?

I hope you'll join my little experiment in crowdsourcing my presentation.