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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Enter BidMillerLite.com an unprecedented new website allowing Cowboys fans to obtain promo codes from Miller Lite packaging, stores and events, and then use points to “bid” on various items like VIP access to the season opener, tailgate parties, tickets, memorabilia and more. Each point qualifies as a sweepstakes entry—the more points used, the better chances of winning.

Working closely with Upshot, we developed BidMillerLite.com including a one of a kind, auction-style sweepstakes engine. On the site, players can create accounts, enter codes, manage points, and of course, use points to enter sweepstakes. In addition, we added features to build excitement around the Cowboys and Miller Lite, including games, interactive experiences and the ability to share with friends.

The promotion is limited to Texas resident only, so if you live in Texas, be sure to check it out. If not, you click on the thumbnails below to  view some screenshots:

Obviously, it would be easy to go overboard with something like this, so before we began we created some ground rules:

1. Avoid defining ridiculously well known terms like “Blogs” or “Social Networks.” Forgive us if some of our choices are still a little obvious.
2. Don’t define companies directly. Defining a service within a company, like “Facebook Fan Pages” for example is OK. Specific software is OK too.
3. Add a  “Benefit to Marketers” statement with each listing, where applicable. It’s all about you guys right?

Over the next week or two, we’ll publish the full glossary, culminating in offering it as a PDF for download, or maybe a Wiki. So with that…

A

AIR: stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, a technology that allows people to take web code (think Flash, Flex, HTML/Javascript/CSS) and deploy it as a desktop application. Tweetdeck, a popular desktop Twitter client was built using Adobe AIR.
Benefit to Marketers: an effective way to get your content portable and out of the competition of a web browser into a dedicated application that can stay top of mind with its users.

Advergame: see “Branded Games/Entertainment” below.

Avatar: the picture or icon one uses to represent themselves online, predominantly on social networking sites.
Benefit to Marketers: think avatars, think branding. As you represent your brand(s) through social networks, your avatar is an important brand element. Think about how it appears to others. Is it legible? Is it recognizable?

Authenticity: being true to yourself (i.e. your brand) and your customers when using social media. Some of the biggest social media marketing train wrecks have occurred when marketers weren’t completely transparent and authentic.
Benefit to Marketers: isn’t it obvious?

B

Blidget: “WTF is a Blidget?” That’s exactly what we said too when we first heard the term. Quite simply a Blidget is a widget that displays your blog. Blidgets use your blog’s RSS feed to populate into a portable widget that can placed anywhere widgets live. As far as we know, the term was created and popularized by Widgetbox.
Benefit to Marketers: you’ve got a blog, why not a Blidget? Get your content portable and sharable. Services abound to create a Blidget in minutes.

Blogroll: a list of sites displayed in the sidebar of blog, generally for the purposes of advertising who the blogger reads regularly.
Benefit to Marketers: give a shout out, get a shout back.

Branded Games/Entertainment: an online game or entertaining content that is based on, or features your products or brands.  With social media the potential to share games, play on social networks in multi-player environments, share images created from entertainment apps, and create status updates based on game activity abound.
Benefit to Marketers: where do we begin? There’s a massive shift in online marketing to create content to keep brands top of mind. What better way than by entertaining your audience? Some of the most fun casual games and apps have been created by brands, and with the introduction of social media, have much more potential to go viral.

C

Community Building: the process of forming an online community around a common goal, passion or interest utilizing social media’s capacity for sharing text, images, audio and video.
Benefits to Marketers: marketers who create forums for people to connect around their brand while helping facilitate—not control—the conversation will only continue to build brand followers.

Conversation: the threads of exchanges through social network posts, tweets, and blog comments are often referred to as conversations in the context of social media.
Benefits to Marketers: start one, be part of one, have them often.

Crowdsourcing: essentially tapping into a collective of like-minded people to solve a problem or generate content. Popular example: Wikipedia.
Benefit to Marketers: what a great way to inspire conversation around your brand or sponsor a promotion where people are invited to solve a problem.

D

DM: short for “Direct Message” a term used to send a private Tweet from Twitter.
Benefits to Marketers: what, you’re not using the Twitter?

Dave Albert: the president of Emerge Digital, a social media agency that writes this blog. Dave loves feeling smart by helping write glossaries.
Benefits to Marketers: have you seen some of the campaigns Dave’s devised?

Stay tuned for Part II, E-J coming soon…did we miss a term? Leave us a comment below.

Based on some current client work, I wanted to locate articles that talked about successful launches of Ning sites–that is, the social network platform that allows anyone to create thier own social networking communities. So I fired up both Google and Bing and typed, “successful Ning sites”

Now I realize this is a fairly ambigous phrase. Successful how? But if Google or Bing could read my mind, they’d know I meant successful in the sense that the resulting site got a lot of people signing up, participating and generally staying engaged (making money helps too).

The results? Well, both search engines gave similar results, but Bing seemed to work more like a reference tool for the term “Ning” than give me actually relevant results around what constitutes a successful Ning website. In the top results were ning.com, the Wikipedia entry on Ning, and a couple Ning websites. Google on the other hand, had at least 3 articles on page 1 that were inline with what I was looking for–while not perfect, at least I was able to glean some valuable information.

OK, so winner: Google. And yes, it is a completely unfair one minute comparison. However, how many chances do you think people testing Bing out will give it? That’s right: one. For all  Microsoft’s millions of dollars in Bing promotion, they’re only going to have one shot to get this right. Personally, I don’t think Google has much to worry about.

What my 20-something naive head failed to realize at the time was how unnatural and foreign these concepts were to other marketers. The book was eye-opening to say the least.

Our last post talked about how Facebook Fan Pages could very well eclipse brand landing pages and microsites as the leading method way to drive people to an online “home” for  brands. That post, and being reminded of Godin’s landmark book got me thinking about how Fan Pages also fit in so well with opt-in marketing–that permission to be marketed to–to be part of the conversation.

For example, I presently have 1,668 emails sitting in a “to be read” folder in Outlook. These are all email newsletters I’m interested in. I genuinely want to read them, but of course, I rarely find the time. Contrary, I do read my favorite blogs via an RSS reader (mostly now lying in bed with my iPhone). However, if I become a fan of a brand on Facebook, I fully expect the occasional post to show up in my News Feed. In fact, I want it to because I’m that invested in that brand. For example, I love the show “Pitchmen” on Discovery. I became a fan of their page and occasionally Billy Mays (or someone pretending to be him) will shoot out a clip, or when the next episode is going to air.

The posts are short, I can breeze right past em, or click through if I want. And I actually perk up a little when I see a new one. When’s the last time a marketing message did that? Conversely, I would NEVER read an email newsletter sent from the show…Billy, I love ya, but stay out of my inbox.

And yes, I realize this all takes a page from Twitter, but having the posts integrated with the Fan Pages keeps the conversation and the interaction all in one place. I can see it all during my 10 minutes a day of “Facebook time.”

Facebook even announced the ability for people to Become a Fan of your page right from ads you run on the site.

It’s unlikely Mr. Godin could have predicted all the wonderful places permission marketing would go…but we’ll always thank him for getting us started, and continuing to be a thought-leader in the field. Viva La Godin. Viva La Facebook.

Some firms have only dabbled in social applications, often with less-than-stellar results. (One infamous example was Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, which may have received more attention through PR than the application itself.) Clearly, some brands are good candidates for Facebook Apps due to the nature of their brand—such as how they fit into people’s lifestyles or have reached coveted cult-status—and some brands aren’t. (For example, who really wants to interact with toothpaste on Facebook?)

That leaves most brands with the option of advertising on Facebook, or creating Facebook Pages, which essentially provide the ability for them—entities that aren’t “people” per se—to create a presence on the site. While Facebook Pages have existed for some time, until recently they were pretty static—templated and limited in functionality. Back in March, however, Facebook launched an entirely new Pages strategy, making them more like user profiles, and equally important—much more customizable.

This new approach gives brands a greater presence on the premiere social network, and the primary reason to be on Facebook; to connect with others by letting people “Become a Fan” and following the brand through status updates, photo galleries, videos, widgets, apps, links, custom content, and offering the ability for fans to post their own content and comments (brands have some control over this). It’s starting to catch on.

For example, the other day I saw a TV spot for Vitamin Water, specifically advertising their Vitamin Water 10 products. Did they put a URL to the Vitamin Water website on the screen? No, they directed people to their Facebook Pages. (If you’re interested, you can see it at: http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater10).  I find this move telling, because the actual Vitamin Water site is beautiful. It’s a highly immersive whiz-bang Flash site that Vitamin Water undoubtedly paid handsomely to build—but really, it’s nothing more than an advertisement online. The Vitamin Water Facebook Pages? OK, I have to admit: they’re pretty well done. They could have created some custom pages, and touted their  “Animal Attack” Facebook App a bit more clearly, but the presence is really pretty well thought out—there’s some Flash allowing users to learn about the flavors, watch videos, and do fun stuff. As of this writing they have about 22,000 fans (up from under 20,000 just last week), and seem to be updating their Wall posts fairly regularly with real people actually commenting and rating the posts. (And by “real” I’m assuming not paid agency people or Vitamin Water employees.)

Despite the naysayers, it’s easy to see that people do want to interact with brands on social networks—as long as there’s a story to tell and a reason to share it. While 22,000 Fans might not sound like much for a large consumer-brand, these represent the people who actually thought enough to follow the brand—actual visits to the pages are inevitably much larger. To that end, consider Victoria’s Secret’s PINK Facebook Pages, another consumer brand active on the site, at over 1.2 million fans. Now those are real numbers.

Will Facebook become the new home for brands? Or just a short-term fad? Are Facebook Pages the Golden Ticket to reaching a vast audience sharing and passing along brand info to their friends?

On second thought, maybe I would become a Fan of toothpaste. Aquafresh anyone?

(Note: as of this post, Aquafresh has 396 fans and hasn’t updated their Facebook Pages in what appears to be a little less than a year. Tom’s of Maine is doing much better…)