It is my theory that human beings are inherently self-obsessed and in need of constant attention.

For years, people had to call or meet up with friends to update them on the latest happenings in their lives.  As lives became busy and distances grew, that evolved to emails sent to friends.  A circle of friends was limited to 20, maybe 30 people.

But that wasn’t enough.  We wanted more friends, more attention.

Enter Facebook.

At first, it was great.  It brought long lost friends together, reunited families across the world, allowed young men to gaze at bikini pictures of young women they barely knew.

But then it got worse.

There came a point where it basically allowed people to broadcast to the world what only their Toto used to know.

Just ate a ham and cheese? Why not tell Facebook about it.  Caught your bus on time?  Facebook would want to know. You favorite baseball team just won one of 162 regular season games? Facebook’s gotta know.  Went to work on a Monday just like everyone else?  You get the point.

If there was an inane, vapid comment popping up in your brain, you had a medium to broadcast it.  What was worse was that there were people commenting on those posts, encouraging and enabling that behavior.

Enter Google+, the anti-Facebook.  Social networkers weary of the Hyde Park podium that is Facebook rejoiced.

Ah, circles.  Circles, where you could create little groups of friends and post information that was relevant just to those friends.

Did your team just win a cricket match?  Celebrate with your “Cricket Fanz” circle.  Found out about a job opening at your company? Help out your buddies in the “9.2% of My Friends” circle.  Just won the lottery?  Oh, what the hell, post it to everyone.

But it didn’t work.  Man’s inherent need for unwarranted attention and self-importance came in the way.

In my three weeks of using Google+, I have seen it become yet another extension of Facebook.  In an absolutely unscientific survey of my stream, 85% of the posts are still sent to the “Public”.  Even “Limited” posts are addressed to over 50 people.

Could circles already be dead?

I hope not, because I think it’s an idea Facebook was never able to figure out (or maybe didn’t want to figure out).  It could be that people are still warming up to the idea and we will see more use of it in the near future.

Until then, I look forward to the day I will have only relevant content in my stream.  Sorry, friend-who-just-saw-a-puppy-and-decided-to-post-a-picture-of-it, I really don’t care.

Are you having similar experiences? Will Google+ ultimately succeed? Click the link to vote!

As a continuation to the post Moments of Truth to Equity Clicks, let’s start thinking about the Multiplicity Factor of Pageviews for Digital Branding.

Maybe we’ve been thinking about pageviews all wrong, or at least not giving them enough credit. The measurement of “time on site” has been used often to evaluate branding campaigns, but many marketers are beginning to move away from that metric.

Maybe a pageview can deliver the same message, or more messages, in an even more impactful manner than print insertions. To that end, you don’t hear of print advertising being measured in “time on page” or “time before page flip” (read: sarcasm). You read flowcharts and see insertions by campaign by publication by weeks, months, and quarters. The placement of these print insertions throughout the publication also plays a vital part in delivering your branded message. To make a rough comparison, digital pageviews are print insertions within the publications that your brand owns.

Think about and compare the consumer’s experience with these two mediums (visualized below).

During section A, a consumer is exposed to an offline television spot or print ad. If only section A existed, the brand experience and delivered messages would stop here until the television spot aired again (frequency).

However, sections B, C, and D illustrate how digital can augment the brand experience and extend the equity chain.

Section B, the connection from offline to online, can take on many different forms: Display Media, Paid Search, Organic Search, Facebook ads, etc. Search can create a bridge for offline mediums or it can start the journey.

In section C, we see the multiplicity factor of pageviews for your brand. This section can act as three additional uninterrupted insertions.

Lastly, section D is where your excellent brand experience pays off even more. Your consumer shares their experience with friends, family, colleagues, and more. This stretches your marketing dollars and expands your brand’s reach. Summed up from the movie The Social Network, “The question is, ‘Who are they going to send it to?’”

The actions taken in sections B – D are also consumer driven and engaged, while section A is much more passive.

This process of digital branding presents numerous points to be discussed, but these four should help frame your brand’s thought process for digital branding:

1. The Power of Sequential Delivery

Let’s examine the flow of a theoretical magazine.

Starbucks, CONTENT, McCafe, CONTENT, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks. You are Starbucks.

You have to contend with quite a bit of noise between your messages.

Now imagine this process as a consumer browses online (with a heavy dose of multitasking).

Facebook, Bank of America, Facebook, Facebook, Email, Yahoo News, Email, Facebook, Google…

Now begins the power of sequential delivery with an engaged consumer (and why none of this is linear).

Starbucks (Search Ad), Starbucks (Landing Page), Starbucks (Pageview 2), Starbucks (Pageview 3), Starbucks (Pageview 4).

If you have a good content strategist and user experience lead on your team, you can make these five insertions into an advertising masterpiece and leverage the power of sequential delivery.

Moreover, ever watch a P&G-sponsored event or Guiding Light? It would seem that over 80% of these ad inventories are spots for P&G products. From a corporate point of view, this ability to leverage synergies among numerous brands’ target consumers offers a unique opportunity to maximize R&F (reach and frequency) across the P&G portfolio, while driving down holistic costs.

2. The Psychology of Consumer-Driven Actions

Passive or engaged. Is the bond between consumer and brand stronger when the consumer clicks through their own journey and drives the experience or when a consumer is being shouted at? Yes, that’s an extremely biased way of asking that question, but the answer also seems quite obvious. Think about your days at school, sitting in a classroom. Many have always performed with the “If I write it, I’ll remember it” strategy. The visual, or photographic, memory stems from an engaged student taking physical actions to remember information, feelings, and experiences that are relevant to them. Or, that are perceived to be relevant in the future, i.e. final exams.

The same holds true for your consumer. Put your brand’s offering into a relevant context for your consumers, and allow them to create their own experience with a unique set of feelings. This will help facilitate better recall for your brand at time of purchase.

3. Take your brand 20% and let your consumers take it the next 80%

While watching NYC blizzard coverage on CNN from the comfort of my Kentucky home over the Holidays, one of the broadcasters made an excellent point about the cleanup. He encouraged each and every person to do just a little shoveling and snow clearing around their sidewalks and street drains to ensure melting snow did not create floods or ice. His rationale was that NYC has a few thousand workers on the cleanup, but there are millions of people living here who can each do just a little to help flip the situation for the better.

This same philosophy works in marketing communications, too. You have a few advertising mediums and a handful of ad variations within each trying to reach millions of consumers. Meanwhile, what if the millions of consumers begin communicating these messages on behalf of your brand? Not only will this add a meaningful layer to your marketing communications, it will also elevate your brand’s reach to levels that you can’t grasp within scarce budgets.

4. The Poor Man’s ROI

These days, we’re all poor. We have developed a new competency: The Scarcity Mindset. It’s been said that recessions drive innovation because creativity is an absolute necessity needed to stay afloat in the economy. This time, in the age of measurability, we have developed a new type of innovation within analytics, one that mandates “ask not what your marketing dollars can do for your brand, ask what your consumer can do for your marketing dollars.”

For example, let’s say Starbucks received 39,684 likes from their website alone. How can we formulate a model to calculate the ROI of this? Consider the following:

# of likes or shares

Average # of friends for Facebook user

Show rate of your friends’ likes in activity feeds

Average CPC (and CTR) or simply CPM of ads on Facebook

Example:

39,684 likes  x  400 friends  x  50%  x  $5 CPM = $39,684.

Using this example, the math works out to conclude the value of a like is a perfect $1.

The more friends a user has or the higher the show rate for a given user’s network increases the value of a like, assuming CPM remains constant. This is the incremental value to your advertising, which can be modeled further to deliver the incremental value to your business (once media mix modeling catches up, that is).

Digital branding should focus on augmenting the brand experience to create a longer equity chain. Marketers and media planners must start thinking forwardly and resist the temptation to simply weight marketing mixes heavily in Section A. Use the bridge mediums… the grass is always greener on the other side.

In the US, online advertising spend has tripled over the past five years, due in part to increased targeting capabilities.  Agencies and client-side advertisers have access to a wide array of tools, which allow them to specifically target their chosen demographics in unprecedented ways.  But every advancement comes with its own hiccups and the question of ethics often surmounts.

What would you do if you knew a certain picture would increase your click-through rates twofold?

Or let’s say you are able to figure out the religion of your targets. Do you use it to your advantage?

Has user targeting become the new pop-up?

When advertisers target too specifically, use weird bearded men in financial ads, or introduce interesting interactivity (such as the “tickle the fat kid” ad) … well… it’s just plain creepy. With the media recently focusing its attention on the quality and legitimacy of search results, will we see more efforts to clean up the internet advertising world?  Or, will it just get more interesting?

And, when we say interesting, we mean…

Advertisers using the self-service ad tool for Facebook can now show friends who have liked the brand’s post(s) in the ad unit itself. In order to take advantage of this you must be targeting ads to your Facebook fan page and the new ad format is brought to you by the activity of your friends. When comparing against the Facebook Beacon incident of 2007, we don’t see a huge difference between the ads. But with a few hundred million more users and improved privacy settings, Facebook feels it is time to bring these back out.

Below are two examples of what the ads look like and how to align your customers with your marketing goals.

Another ad upgrade is that advertisers can now easily direct traffic to custom tabs. This will allow for better A/B testing to drive more efficient Cost Per Likes. Depending how advanced your site is, you can test between Events, your Wall, Photos or even custom tabs. Razorfish has built dozens of custom tabs, such as our in-app shopping experience for JCPenney. We’ve also partnered with some great developers like Buddy Media and Wildfire. These customized apps can increase engagement through surveys, contents, games, video and more. Before focusing on driving traffic to your page, find out what your customer wants!

Below is an example of how easy it is to pick a landing page. In order to execute landing page testing for each tab, you will need to create a new group per page, since you are only allowed one ad per group per page.

These new features keep users within the Facebook ecosystem, while giving them more relevant information about what their friends and family enjoy. As consumers spend more time on the Facebook site vs. being driven somewhere else, we expect conversion tracking and social CRM to evolve. If advertisers create more experiences for users to buy, sign up, and interact with their brand right on their Facebook page, profit synergies can only increase with earned and owned media alike.

Zuckerberg struck again on Sunday night, making his second career appearance on one of the top-rated news programs in America, 60 Minutes.  Aside from the onslaught of investigative questions from Lesley Stahl, Zuckerberg found time to introduce Facebook’s User Profile Redesign. The new profile format immediately informs visitors of a profile page who that person is, but this change means that users will be encouraged to provide even more data about themselves. Surprised, right?

This article from Josh Costine goes into depth about the Facebook display changes and how they improve the accuracy of Facebook’s growing data set. Marketers use this data set to target Facebook users who are most interested in the product they are advertising. Key to this ever-growing targeting pool is the newly designed Profile Info Summary. The “Summary” is the first thing that catches your eye on a profile page, as it is right beneath your name and above your most recent photos. It provides a quick rundown of your job, your school, your current location, your relationship status, the languages you speak, your hometown, and your birth date. Costine explains, “It’s therefore in Facebook’s interest for users to provide and keep current this information. Prompts for users to enter absent information and the increased visibility of these fields to a user and their friends should ensure this.” Costine goes on to provide further information regarding the User Profile Redesign. However, no aspect of the New Facebook Profile is more important to marketers than the Info Summary, as it will prompt users to reveal more about themselves.

On a side note, the 60 Minutes interview was very entertaining. You should watch it here if you missed it. Zuckerberg seems as composed and confident as ever. He preaches the growing importance of “social” in every decision that an individual makes, from buying groceries to watching television. He answers all questions as honestly as possible… for him. Which leaves the general public with only one question: Who wins in a fight? Andy Rooney or Mark Zuckerberg? Let the argument begin…