A month ago, sniffling from office germs, I sat down to watch Funny People, the 2009 Judd Apatow comedy featuring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan. The most interesting part of the two hours I could sit through was George Simmon’s/Adam Sandler’s performance at a Myspace corporate event. This was enthralling to me because I hadn’t thought about MySpace since I shut down my profile last December.

Back in 2006, I couldn’t decide between MySpace and Facebook. MySpace was customizable and catered to music lovers. Facebook was rigid in design and seemed to focus more on relationships, whether it be with people or the things we love. Today, computers and mobile phones are saturated with more exciting choices – we tweet with Twitter, check in with Foursquare, kvetch on Yelp and, well…facebook with Facebook. Consumers make sure they’re dedicating time to managing personality extensions that are worth their while.

Take a look at interest in MySpace over the past few years:

This scathing little article, written back in October 2009, succinctly describes MySpace’s current presence. In “Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail,” Kyle James writes that “it will never be the same beast that claimed over 75% of the market.” Other disruptors have prevailed in the social media battleground because they continued to innovate and listen to consumers, while figuring out sustainability.

Dan Reisinger reports in his CNet blog, The Digital Home: “’We’ve been clear that MySpace is a problem,’ News Corp. President and COO Chase Carey said yesterday during [a call with analysts]. ‘The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable. Our current management did not create these losses but they know we have to address them.’” Over the past two months, MySpace rolled out a spiffy new logo and a site redesign, catered toward Gen Y, and now claims to be a “social entertainment platform.”

Is anyone even paying attention? Is there hope?

What’s a fan worth? Easy: $10. Read on for details.

Though the word “ironman” is often used to indicate a particular race distance – 140.6 miles of swimming, biking, and running – or as a metaphor for a physically daunting effort it is, in fact, a trademarked term. A brand. These generic uses show that, on a smaller playing field, it is as dominant as Google and Coke. As such, the events and products stamped with its mark command a premium. Their events sell out, often in minutes, a year in advance.

The corporation that owns Ironman, WTC, recently announced an “Access” program that would allow 1,000 to register early for races. For $1,000. Race entry itself is around $600 and is not included in the Access fee. Access is merely a privilege; a purchased pass to the front of the line. A recent New York Times article – Triathletes, 40-Somethings, Going for Youth – estimated that the average triathlete spends $22,000 per year on the sport. The triathlon community is an affluent one … but not a stupid one. The uproar was loud, instantaneous; the program was so misguided that it demonstrated a fundamental disconnect from their customer base.

Their Facebook page was deluged with critical commentary, 330 comments to the original announcement alone.  Their logo, which many people proudly tattoo on their bodies after finishing races, was lampooned:

And their CEO issued a public apology along with a retraction of the sold out program.

So, what’s a fan worth? Their 90,000 “fans” were worth approximately $10 each: $1,000,000 in Access program fees were refunded.

One interesting twist is that the story didn’t die with retraction and apology; few consumers bought their stated motivation for the program. WTC claimed the program was intended to help athletes: they could get into the races they wanted and not register for multiple; since people weren’t registering for multiple races, there would be more space available in previously sold out races. The problems regarding race entry are real and resonate with consumers; their connection to Access rung false. Setting aside the class system problem – many options for the bourgeois, none for the proles – there are simpler solutions, such as offering refunds and reselling the spots, that look a lot less like greed and a lot more consumer centered. The fanbase is now attacking them over a disingenuous explanation. Snowball effect or avalanche?

Again, WTC is called to task for being tone deaf.

So why should we care? What does Ironman have to do with our marketing efforts, let alone search? Monitoring conversations at any point in the process would have put them in touch with consumer sentiment: it’s easy to find old tweets complaining about the expense of Ironman (see below) or after the retraction showing that nobody bought his rationale.

WTC was in touch enough to identify the problem but too self-absorbed to put forth a customer centered solution. Search and the direct connection it provides to the customer push us to constantly become more externally oriented: what are our customers looking for, what experiences can we provide that will increase their loyalty? Furthermore, search as a tool for generating insights, particularly in the form of a social media monitoring program, provides large scale de facto focus groups. Our customers tell us, in droves, every day what they desire, what they think about our products and services, how we can better meet their needs. Social media aggregates the power of individual voices: we can embrace this and all the new opportunities it provides us as marketers; we can gnash our teeth and rail against it, waxing nostalgic about the good old days when we could broadcast our message, take it or leave it; but we can’t turn a deaf ear or blind eye.

Hopefully WTC got the lesson: ignore customer conversation at your peril.

Our very own Maaria Husain recently attended the Twitter & Automation session at SES San Francisco. There was a lot of debate around Twitter automation and whether or not it is actually effective.  The key learning is that a campaign should focus on the quality of Twitter followers, and not the quantity.

Communication entrepreneur Jeff Pulver opened up the session claiming “follower count” is a flawed metric, and that the key impact Twitter has had on this world is its “homogenization of communication channels.”  Pulver drew upon examples of national disasters, e.g., how Twitter closed the communication gap during the Haiti earthquake, and how it could have benefited relief efforts during 9/11.  We appreciate his take on Twitter; the reason it’s so sticky is the level of authenticity and realness it provides to users.

The discussion started heating up as Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive took the stage. Her take on Twitter is that users should spend time upfront understanding the space and then create a customized Twitter campaign.  Falke promotes launching, then “listening;” rather than having a CMO, businesses should have a CLO (Chief Listening Office).  Here Jeff Pulver disagreed, questioning how many hours a day she spends monitoring the tweets and retweets.  Tracy responded with the 80/20 rule (nothing new), where 80% of effort is spent creating content and pushing it out, and 20% is “checking in on the content responses.”

What Husain found most useful were some of tools Falke uses to monitor and manage Twitter.  Here are her top three:

1)      Cotweet: Tweets between different brands

2)      Hootsuite: Allows you to segment across different issues or topics (e.g., defects with new iPhone 4)

3)      Social Oomph: Automated segmentation platform (pick time of day, day of week, promos, etc., upload and push out via social oomph)

The last speaker up was Paul Madden of Automatica.   Their business model is based on making a Twitterbot look like a real person. Frankly, this turned me off, as it seems to defeat the whole point of Twitter, which is all about communication with real-time authenticity.  Madden went into some technical details, but all in all it was packaging black hat tactics in a pretty box.

While many people and brands feel like they need massive Twitter campaigns with large numbers of followers, we agree with Jeff Pulver:  Twitter should be used as a communication platform, simulating an in-person conversation, expressing yourself to individuals who care about your brand or opinion.

We leave you with a favorite Pulver quote from the session: “It’s loneliness and laziness that lead people to innovation.”

There isn’t a lot of variability when it comes to text ads. A search for mortgages leads you to ads that repeat the word ‘mortgage’ several times with perhaps a couple of rates thrown in. Most other keywords produce similar outcomes.

It’s rare that a simple text ad stands out among the crowd. And if it does, one is usually witnessing the work of an inexperienced search marketer (see our Playing with Matches column). So when there is a search campaign that thinks beyond normal constraints, it certainly needs to be called out. Tide’s search ads for its Loads of Hope movement break the traditional “rules” of search and build a brand in a channel typically seen as a simple direct response medium.

Though the ad in the screenshot broad matches into a less relevant query, there’s no denying that the ad has a couple of things going for it. At first you might wonder why Tide is showing up for Nashville, but in this case it only adds to the intrigue. Additionally, the landing page leads, not to the Tide homepage, but to a Twitter page where Tide can continue to have a conversation with those already interested after having clicked on the ad. Lastly, the Twitter page highlights Tide’s generosity with free laundry tweets for Tennessee flood victims rather than selfishly demanding something from its visitors. I don’t know how Tide is measuring success from this campaign, but from our point of view, it’s already successful.

Snaps for Tide.