Emerging Media Demystified. From Upshot Interactive.


Upshot advances interactive capabilities by acquiring Emerge Digital.

Today we break the silence (has it really been over a month since our last post?) with the news that Emerge Digital has been acquired by Upshot, a Chicago-based marketing agency with vast expertise in brand, promotion, retail and regional marketing. Combining these capabilities with our own experience with web design, online promotions, social media, mobile phone marketing and branded interactive games is a a natural fit allowing both camps to become more competitive in the marketplace.

This acquisition comes at a time where marketers are seeking agencies with deeper capabilities and a greater knowledge of the digital space and social media. Not surprisingly, growth in interactive is projected to outpace all other areas of marketing over the next few years.

“Our acquisition of Emerge reflects our commitment to consumer engagement,” commented Brian Kristofek, Upshot’s President and CEO, “Interactive is an increasingly important piece of the integrated marketing mix today.”

To those of you who have been following our work, this should come as no surprise: we’ve enjoyed partnering with Upshot over the past few years on client projects for Kraft Foods, MillerCoors, and Aircell’s Gogo Inflight Internet. Moreover, our campaigns together have been recognized in the industry with numerous interactive awards.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that our cultures, our philosophies and our work approach mesh well together.

As of October 15th our cadre of producers, developers and designers have relocated to Upshot’s headquarters (at 350 Orleans in Chicago) under the Upshot brand name. We are happy to report that the transition has been seamless and we are looking forward to bringing more interactive solutions to Upshot’s diverse blue chip client roster.

To learn more about Upshot visit http://www.upshot.net

To visit our rebranded site visit http://www.upshotinteractive.net

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Visit our main site or check out our social & viral marketing services to learn more about Upshot Interactive. Also, feel free to drop us a line anytime.


Has Twitter opened up the desktop? Marketers: take note.

We published a piece late last year called “Why Online Marketers should care about Adobe AIR” If you aren’t familiar with Adobe AIR, it allows you to create or port web applications for use like a traditional computer desktop program, but with much of the interactivity and connectivity of the Web.

This past year has seen AIR’s popularity rise mostly in part because of apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. These apps, along with scores of others, allow you to plug in one or more of your social media accounts (usually Facebook and Twitter) and then track your social network’s status updates in one application, including posting out your own updates. With people having multiple accounts, hundreds of followers, and continuous updates, launching a bunch of websites to maintain your social existence can quickly become cumbersome. Having an application that sits on your desktop all day becomes an easy way to manage your social-self while still getting some semblance of work done.

Beyond facilitating social media, these apps have clearly gotten people more familiar with downloading and using applications other than a web browser to connect and interact. Further, while a mobile device is a different animal than a laptop, an argument could also be made that the wildly popular iPhone App Store has also made people comfortable downloading, installing and using apps over purely visiting websites.

Branded Desktop Apps (BDAs) have been around forever—remember Southwest Airlines’ “Ding!”? However, the new desktop revolution (read: Adobe AIR) creates more widespread opportunities for marketers. Ever since we began preaching the virtues of branded apps (check out myvisa.com for an example of one of our early efforts for Visa or their current Visa Signature Access Widget we also brought to life), we’ve always tried to hammer home the idea that desktop apps were one of the best ways to gain and maintain consumer mindshare. If a person downloads your application and uses it on a daily basis, what better medium could you possibly invest in than a branded app? What medium provides more consistent brand engagement? You own a piece of real-estate your target consumer looks at nearly every day: their computer.

We surmise the reason more marketers haven’t embraced the space is simply lack of familiarity and that apps are viewed as being “an I.T. thing.” It’s doesn’t necessarily fall into the white-hot social media realm or other common interactive plays like banners, microsites, or even mobile dabbling.

But some forward-thinking marketers who have realized desktop apps are not much different than building a website are thinking big. Last year we worked with the team at HARPO (Oprah.com) to launch the O Dream Board, an AIR creation (note: the HARPO team has since enhanced the application and it now integrates with Walgreens photo technology). Major brands like FedEx, Fox, ebay, and Nickelodeon have also launched AIR apps. Whether these innovations start with I.T., new product development or marketing departments isn’t clear to us in every example, but the point is they are consumer facing, and whether they provide content, entertainment, utility, or all of the above, they are a marketing communication tool.

We encourage our marketing friends to put down the 10th social media whitepaper they’ve read this month and start consider the desktop as an untapped frontier. If you want to check out some cool apps out there, take a look at the Adobe AIR Marketplace.

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Visit our main site or check out our social & viral marketing services to learn more about Upshot Interactive. Also, feel free to drop us a line anytime.


Now how much would you pay? Investing in Facebook content.

funnelOne of the topics talked about ad nausea in online marketing circles is measuring social media ROI. Another topic of equal weight is building your Facebook Fan base. For obvious reasons, the more Fans, the more of an audience you have to talk (and let’s face it, by “talk” I mean “market”) to, and more people who will share those messages with others.

If you look at your Fan Base as a group of individuals who have opted-in to receive messaging from you, beginning to calculate ROI becomes easier. For example, if you bought a list of people who fit your target demographic, you might pay anywhere from $5 to $100 CPM depending on the quality of the list.  I’d peg Facebook Fans as premium simply because A) they’re willing to receive messaging from you once they are a Fan and B) because there’s a greater likelihood for that message to go viral.

One of the ways to build a Fan base, and keep them engaged is to invest in building a Facebook App to integrate into your Facebook Fan Pages.  In a recent Forester study, it was reported that 55% of tweens and 42% of adults want to see social applications from their favorite brands. Audiences are definitely there, and willing to interact with quality applications from brands they use, follow and admire.

Facebook application development runs the gamut. We’ve done apps for less than $10K, all the way towards $100K. Let’s assume you invest $5K to initially create your Fan Page (anyone can create a Fan Page free-of-charge, but we’re taking the leap you’re investing a little in an agency to design and configure something nice), and then later add a Facebook App at a cost of $20K, you can establish an ROI funnel to measure the impact the total investment ($25,000) adds to your bottom line over time. So an ROI plan and funnel may take the shape of:

  1. Correlate expansion in Fans to app usage/adoption
  2. Send messaging to Fans that includes links to specials, coupons, etc. via your Fan Pages Wall (which subsequently appears on Fans Newsfeeds)
  3. Measure click-throughs on links, and ultimately, conversions
  4. Calculate cost-per-conversion against total Facebook investment
  5. Calculate direct sales from Facebook

Based on this, let’s assume Brand X builds a Fan Base of 50,000 people, and sends out specials once a week. From this, 5% click-through and 20% convert.  Extrapolated over 12 weeks, (assuming 500 conversions per week), that becomes a cost per conversion of $4.17 if measured over a 3 month time span. With a Fan Base of 250,000 we get as low as 83 cents—not even considering repeat business.

However, this assumes that things remain static, and in social media, it’s anything but. Inevitably, you aren’t starting out with 50,000 fans, and over 12 weeks, the Fan Base may grow past 50,000. Also consider some of your messaging may reach people (through social sharing) that aren’t Fans. As more time passes, as long as your conversion percentages remain consistent, and your Fan Base grows, your conversions costs get exponentially lower.

This last part, really, is one of the primary reasons to invest in Facebook Apps and Facebook Fan Page content. Chances are pay-per-click campaigns on Google will only rise in conversion costs, not go lower. What other online marketing medium around today can you identify where your cost per conversion falls the longer you market? Email? Well, maybe, but let’s face it, email is tired and attrition is high. SEO? Yes, but you should be doing that anyway. Twitter? Sure—same principles apply, but users are only engaged through your messages, not content they can interact with.

While investment in Facebook Development is front-loaded, it pays off the longer you stay engaged and relevant to your fans. Additionally, some agencies (ourselves included) create arrangements where development can be paid over time, so that ROI can be realized more quickly, and in parallel to development fees. We predict once the Facebook Gold Rush settles, more agencies and marketing departments will adopt similar ROI calculation models, further justifying investment in the platform.

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Visit our main site or check out our social & viral marketing services to learn more about Upshot Interactive. Also, feel free to drop us a line anytime.


Worst. Quiz. Ever.

sharkWho doesn’t like a good online quiz? Take a leftover from Web 1.0, add a dash of social networking, and it would seem quizzes are the hottest thing online.

Of course, we all complain we’re inundated with Facebook quizzes, but hell, we all take them now and again right? These quizzes help broadcast our personality, provide a sense of voyeurism into our Friend’s lives, and create a distraction from, well, the economy for one. They are also an easy way for brands to create content for Fans (see our last post).

Which brings me to (insert Simpson’s Comic Book Guy voice), the Worst. Quiz. Ever.

Last night kicked off Discovery Channel’s Shark Week 2009, and Emerge designer extraordinaire Josh Webb turned me on to the “What Type of Shark Are You?” quiz, found on the Discovery Website promoting, you guessed it, the ever-popular Shark Week. I hesitate to even share the URL, but to truly get a sense of a quiz so horrific I would rather take the What Mr. Belvidere Character Are You? Quiz (doesn’t really exist) you can check it out at:
http://dsc.discovery.com/sharks/what-kind-of-shark-are-you-quiz.html

Let’s break down this marvel of Web technology:

  1. The quiz looks like it was designed, and written, by a high school student.
  2. It asks TEN (yes, 10) completely nonsensical multiple-choice questions about your life, and to prolong the pain, actually provides a “witty” summary after you answer each one, making the time to take this “fun” quiz excruciatingly long.
  3. The questions are accompanied by some the worst stock photography ever. It looks like they bought a stock photography CD from 1996 and used every photo on it, along with attributing each photo in the quiz to Getty Images. (Did Getty pay for this mention? Were the photos so expensive Discovery had to get Getty to subsidize the project?)  C’mon you are THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL! How about some really freakin’ cool pictures of sharks or even what they eat? Better yet, how about a few badass videos of a Great White jumping out of the water in between answers? I realize the point is to show pictures that are associated with the questions, but really, do we need to see a picture of a “sensitive guy” when we’re asked about well, whether we’re sensitive? We get it.
  4. The results make zero sense and I’m pretty convinced it’s flawed. The quiz tries to take your answers and summarize them in the form of whatever shark you happen to be; however, the responses did not match the answers I gave. In fact, Josh, his wife, and myself were all Hammerhead Sharks. This leads me to believe all results are, you guessed it: Hammerhead Sharks.
  5. You can’t share the results. I can’t post my results to Facebook, invite my friends, or even email them. Yes, the page has the standard “Share” button on it, but this is likely simply because it’s part of Discovery Channel’s sitewide template.

OK, I realize I’m picking on Discovery Channel, but like every other red-blooded American, who doesn’t like Shark Week? For shame. Admittedly, I have no idea when this quiz was created. For all I know, this quiz was created in 1996, by an intern before social sharing existed, and the idea of using good content to help promote your brand—in this case, Shark Week, was commonsense. Maybe they are just repurposing old stuff.

However, the quiz is featured right on the Shark Week homepage, and, like I said, it is…um…Shark Week right now. Summary? Just another fine example of putting up content for the sake of content, and alienating your fans.

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Content Darwinism: what to say?

Charles DarwinMy wife, a long time rabid e-newsletter subscriber recently “discovered” RSS Feeds. Of course, I believe I had casually mentioned “you should read some of those via RSS” about 400 times over the last few years, but people are habitual creatures.
Naturally she loves the idea now, but commented, “there’s just so much content!”

With the advent of Twitter and massive surge in brands on Facebook, it seems our information overload has not only increased, but it’s coming at us from all angles. Brands, who would formerly just create a pretty microsite and call it a day are finding they actually have to come up with good things to say on a regular, if not daily basis. Imagine that, you have an opportunity to have a conversation with your brand loyalists at the Social Media Party of the Century, and you’re swaying back and forth, 2/3rds empty drink in hand, searching for something good to say to someone who might potentially pass your good thoughts onto others.

Not long ago, Wired ran an article basically encouraging people to forget about starting a blog. The land rush was over, the biggest blogs had the mindshare. Pack up the car, the pool is full-up.

It makes sense—smart brands have known for sometime now that relevant, valued content, not pushing an ad in people’s faces, is the path to the hearts and minds of consumers online, and to those that have embraced this idea, consumers have reacted in-kind. The by-product, unfortunately, is a glut of content, and much of it mediocre at best. It seems the battle cry is now, “Stay top of mind! Stay top of mind!” so we’re just pushing out content for the sake of pushing content.

So what you should be saying and how often should you be saying it? I can’t answer that in a single blog post. What I can say is follow some basic rules:

  1. When the industry finally figured out email marketing (I’m guessing 1999), the mantra was “relevancy.” Yes, that still holds true for all the new media—Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Mobile, etc. Duh.
  2. Invest in truly good content that speaks to your target audiences. License it, sponsor it, buy it, or create it. Online content can have a long tail and can be repurposed when done cleverly. Think all media: text, video, games, apps. Then talk about it. Use it to drive awareness, and ultimately brand loyalty.
  3. If you have no truly relevant content, and aren’t willing to invest in any, don’t say anything, or say very little. Hire an agency (like us—shameless plug) or just don’t play. You’re hurting more than helping by posting meaningless content that is just an intrusion of someone’s day because the CMO wants the Facebook Page up-to-date (read: people on Facebook will hide your posts)

Did I eat my own dog food here? Did I actually say anything meaningful and relevant? God I hope so…let me know.

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