He doesn't use Google to search anymore

Back in February we reported Google Trends data showing search volumes declining for numerous common categories. In the past four years, searches for movie reviews, financial services, florists, digital cameras, cancer treatment and sexy lingerie are all down about 50 percent. Now Alex Campbell, a strategy consultant at DTDigital / OgilvyInteractive in Melbourne, posits that consumers are migrating to social media instead of search engines to find what they need online. He lists three factors:

1. "Social networks have dramatically expanded my network of contacts" who "share similar interests," Alex says, so he trusts their recommendations more than those from Google.

2. SEO experts have killed their own game. "The SEO industry has transformed from 'help Google index my site better' to 'how can I beat Google’s relevance algorithms to show people results they don’t want'." The natural result is many common searches turn up companies that are not the most relevant, but have gamed their way to the top of the listings.

3. "The flow of information has changed," Alex suggests. "In times past, I was always seeking out information through Google search. Now the vast majority of the information I am interested in comes to me, rather than me having to go out and find it." As people become skilled in setting up human networks among experts with ideas they like, they build their own information feeds that often supplant Google.

The movie review test

Here's a test. Want to know if "District 9" is a good movie? Here's what Google returns; and here is what Search.Twitter.com gives you. Which results provide a better feel for the film?

Alex is not predicting the death of Google, and neither are we. Search engine marketing, especially paid search, remains a powerful tool for marketers to share wares with the customers searching for them. We believe, though, that Google requires ever more careful management of paid search campaigns due to rising competition and diminished consumer interest. With only 24 hours in a day, it is obvious that Google will reset at a lower search volume ... because people seeking information via human networks spend less time asking computer algorithms for help.

Schwarzenegger taps Twitter to fix California

California is dying. If you haven't heard, the state is in a $21 billion hole after years of voters bringing expensive spending measures to ballot without any requirement of finding funding to pay for them. Thanks to their crazy Constitution, California voters can lock spending in for the future, but taxes to pay for that spending can only be raised if two-thirds of both houses of legislature agree -- a near impossibility. If California were a family, the kids would be eating candy every night for dinner while the parents argue over who pays for groceries on the credit card.

So Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger deserves a hat tip for bypassing everyone and soliciting ideas from the masses via Twitter. California's new web site MyIdea4CA.com crowdsources potential solutions; anyone can submit an idea by adding the hashtag #myidea4ca to a tweet, and the message will appear on the site for voting up or down by other viewers. Because the site has tweaked Twitter to allow a voting mechanism, the best (or at least most popular) suggestions float to the top. So far California has received 910 ideas from the public, including using aqueducts to generate hydro power, eliminating agencies that are duplicated by the federal government, releasing non-violent prisoners from jail, and, of course, legalizing drugs.

It's worth pointing out that California is using Twitter as a listening device here, not a PR broadcast vehicle. Instead of pushing out hyperbole about how one party wants to fix things, it's asking everyone to pitch in their own ideas. Giant organizations in trouble that listen, instead of spin -- imagine that.

Are you an ex-boyfriend?

There's an app for that. Cute example of consumers modifying an ad message to rebroadcast it in a more meaningful way, cause hey, back in the day, weren't we all ex-somethings?

IBM goes all Economist on us

How times have changed. Back in 1997 when IBM wanted to convince global businesses that newfangled IT systems could help them, it spent $40 million with Ogilvy & Mather on TV spots, radio, and some banner ads.

Today IBM is shaping opinions of itself with the new site IBM.com/think, which combines 90% rub-your-chin content in the style of The Economist or Harper's with about 10% self-promotion. IBM steers clear of politics and instead pushes science-report-toned entries on food, cloud computing, energy and the environment. The site is fed with banners around the web and dovetails with social media outreach on blogs, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Twitter (nicely run by real IBM humans @adamclyde, @jhodge88, @junkstar and others).

The starfish approach

Using quasi-editorial copy for corporate messaging is nothing new; Mobil broke the ground on this with its quarter-page, black-and-white NYT Op-Ed ads in the 1980s. But this feels different both in non-salesmanship of copy and in nuanced outreach. Tech blogger Robert Scoble calls this communication strategy a "starfish approach," where various arms reach far into the web to give your audience multiple ways to receive and engage with your message. Perhaps the growing transparency of social networks, coupled with consumer skittishness of being sold ideas by corporations, is requiring large companies to provide more-objective value in their content. A decade ago IBM was a distant monolith. Now we can ping IBMers by their personal Twitter handles. That makes us think.

Newspaper ad sales fall a whopping 29%

Yesterday the Newspaper Association of America released the worst news yet for U.S. publishers: Q2 newspaper ad sales were off $2.8 billion from the year prior, and ad revenue for the first six months of 2009 crashed 29 percent. Analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell believes only half this decline can be blamed on recession, and the reduced spending level is part of a permanent reset as marketers move budgets to the web.

It's worth pausing to consider the cause-and-effect behind this trend: marketers spend ad budgets chasing results; fewer dollars flowing to newsprint mean results there are scarce; scarcity of results means consumers are reading less in newspapers, and even when they do they are less likely to respond to the ad. We still recommend newspapers in media plans for some demos, but the importance of measuring results with hard data feeds is now greater than ever. The old days of popping ads into newspapers with no tracking are now a wrap.

Image: Pensiero

The CDC's Twitter Swine Flu virus

One of the remarkable things about Twitter is how versatile 140 characters can be. When Jack Dorsey held the first brainstorming meeting at Odeo, where Twitter was born, he suggested calling the service "Stat.us" for updating a small group of friends. No one thought it would turn into a mass networking communication system.

Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has adopted Twitter as a personal, AP-wire-style news feed for updates on the Swine Flu. But the CDC Twitter stream goes beyond wire reports; it provides behind-the-scenes access to how health professionals are fighting the H1N1 virus, including links to planning conference calls if you wish to listen in and downloadable messaging to help cascade the flu-fighting message. It's going to be a difficult flu season; the vaccine isn't quite ready yet, and Americans who wish to get inoculated will need three total shots, one for the regular seasonal flu and two more to keep the pigs at bay. The feed is a good reminder, and taking Americans behind the curtain to show how health leaders are developing plans to fight an outbreak is a nice touch.

Disclosure: the CDC is a past client. Mediassociates is not affiliated with this Twitter program. We update you on their flu effort both for the marketing angle and as a public service.

Via: Benatgeo

Antimarketing: If it works for health care, why not you?

We've been watching the sordid healthcare debates in the U.S. with fascination. 46 million Americans still have no health insurance, medical costs are skyrocketing, total spending is on track to become one-fifth of the GDP by 2020, and the younger population does not have the numbers or tax inclination to support aging Boomers. But toss out one whiff that the government will hold death panels to kill old people, and hey, that sounds realistic, and suddenly people are mad.

We won't say who is right or wrong (although we read pages 425-428 of the actual bill that described end of life counseling and have to say, it's the basic job description of a social worker). The point we can all agree on is casting seeds of doubt works -- as well as spitting in a salad dressing bottle.

Antimarketing works best in politics where you only have to tip a few percent of people in the middle of the spectrum to stop a cause. Political masses act like an inverted pendulum, a tipsy balancing pole with a hinge near the ground that can easily be pushed left or right. Antimarketing also appears in urban legends (remember the early one about not flashing your car lights to someone else at night cause a gang would then come and kill you? Or was that healthcare panels, we forget...). It plays upon our fears. It pushes us *away* from taking an action, and if enough people don't act, your anti-cause has succeeded.

Warning: Our competitors' products might kill you

The puzzle is, why don't more advertisers try this same thing? We've seen whiffs of it -- PETA ads protesting animal furs, anti-clean-coal ads showing nasty dust sprayed around a white house. Our favorite is the recent Australian skin-cancer rap, and not just for the swimsuits. But it is very difficult to push consumers away from buying objects, because the magnetic attraction of food/sex/shelter/status/signaling overrides any counter argument rather easily. We'd be fascinated to see more antimarketing in the real marketing world. Would it work? You fight so hard to attract customers to your product; what happens if you push them away from a competitor?

Image: We Made This

Nielsen confirms advertising impressions are often fiction

You're not paying attention, dammit! Or at least that's what advertisers are learning about consumers, as shown by the cute triangles on the line at above right.

Nielsen recently enlisted the Ball State University Center for Media Design to spend a whopping $3.5 million and observe 476 U.S. subjects directly for a combined total of 952 days to see how they really acted in front of TV sets, computer screens, mobile phones and other media devices. The study found Americans on average:

- watch 8.5 hours of content on all screen devices each day,
- spend most of that time, 5 hours and 9 minutes, in front of live TV,
- pay the most attention to television and video games (and the least to other media, such as radio, which tends to be on while John and Jane America do other stuff).

All sounds good for advertisers until, alas, Page 46 of the report shows that when spots run on TV, the "concurrent media exposure indices" go through the roof. Um. Yikes. You see the triangles above? In layman's terms, that means when ads appear for dish soap, consumers change their environment -- go to the bathroom or kitchen, pick up a magazine, call someone on the phone, or toy with a laptop computer, things other than watch the 30-second spot on TV. "During commercial breaks," the report says, "people were observed shifting their primary attention."

Impressions as currency

We call this the fallacy of impressions. "Impressions," if you don't work in advertising, are the currency used to price advertising. When you're spending ad dollars, you compare cable network A vs. magazine option B based on the cost to make impressions on the target audience. Impression estimates, like prices in a store, help marketers judge which media thing to buy. But just as the dollar bills in your wallet used to be tied to the gold standard but now represent fictional digits in a bank computer, "impressions" in advertising are often more currency used to price media ... than any actual imprint on the retinas of a consumer.

This is not really news. Numerous studies, such as this one by Mediamark Research, show consumers' attentiveness to advertising slips and slides based on the channel format and time of day. Of course advertising still works, but the question, as our esteemed agency chief says, is "how much?" The solution we recommend for clients is to build some form of direct measurement into your advertising media plan. Impressions may or may not happen. The only way to evaluate your real impact in the market is to monitor the response results.

Is crowdsourcing evil?

No, say Edward Boches of Mullen and John Winsor of Crispin. Agencies may not want to compete with crowds, but efficiency in commerce is changing the way that people work. Crowdsourcing in the sense of "building something from the multitudes" is here to stay.

The risk for any business is it could create disintermediation. How will you compete when your customers find groups that build services better than you?

Now on Twitter, bet your followers

One of Twitter's brilliant design moves was putting a psychological device on every page: a "following/followers" count that clicks upward like the high score on a game as you meet more people. It's an addictive bit of feedback, creating the illusion of growing popularity no matter if 80% of the people who connect with you are selling get-rich-quick schemes or porn. More people love you today than yesterday. Your status is rising. You are loved.

Techies John Manoogian, Erick Michaels-Ober and Kevin Hunt have decided to toy with this psychology, launching Bet Your Followers in which you can gamble your online social connections like currency. They explain it best:

"We’ve been enthusiastic Twitter users since the early days and we genuinely value Twitter as a social service ... our own followers are dearly important to us. But as Twitter grows, we’ve watched the race to accrue followers become a strange obsession. Whenever a sizeable group believes something to be sacred, it historically falls to artists, scientists, and hackers to question and play with that assumption."

Human souls as poker chips. Winner rules the social media universe. All in.

Google launches future search

Say you're a wine distributor looking to enter the Spanish market. You could conduct research studies of consumer interest, or pour over industry sales stats, or try to peer into competitor advertising plans.

Or you could just punch up Google.

Google has launched Insights for Search, which attempts to use historical data from millions of consumer searches to predict what people will want tomorrow. The service helps marketers choose advertising messages, predict seasonality in demand, look at geographic variances in interest (say, which areas of Spain want which wines), and even scrutinize competitor brand positioning.

Can Google search engines keep up with search?

Why would Google migrate from being a cash-generating ad channel to a complex research tool for marketing executives and advertising agencies? It's likely a defensive move to shore up Google search demand. The world of search is changing rapidly; Twitter allows real-time search of consumer conversations; Radian6, SocialSense and PeopleBrowsr help marketers monitor broad networks of social media; YouTube is becoming an enormous search portal filtering the equivalent of 86,000 full-length movies uploaded every week; the Google Book Search project can search the full text of 10 million books. And big hurdles remain, particularly how to filter queries for video, the fastest-growing form of online content which typically doesn't have searchable text or tags, or mobile, with 4 billion phones in the world filling up with apps that give consumers other ways to get online than through the Google front door.

Sergey Brin wrote in Google's last annual report, "Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that 'understands' more of the queries and documents than we do today." Predicting the future is one step. With Internet access becoming as fragmented and commonplace as wall electrical outlets, we wonder what the future holds for Google search.

Image: Sebastien B.

Once upon a time I was falling in love

We once worked with a management consultant who drew super-complex flowcharts that basically meant "phase out." This one beats that.

Thanks, Kelpenhagen, for reminding us to be clear.

FriendFeed and the dance of the Free

You may have missed the news that FriendFeed, a free online aggregator that lets you manage updates from multiple social networks, was purchased recently by Facebook. Ad industry observer Bob Knorpp pondered what the acquisition meant for free business models in general, so we responded:

Bob,

Regarding free, all this hyperbole is really just ornamentation on the basic "cross-subsidy" economic model. Television and radio have done this for decades giving away content in return for advertisers funding access to eyeballs (3-party exchange). Google gives away search to attract an audience to attract advertising bids (another 3-party exchange). USPS delivers mail to Alaska for 44 cents because it is subsidized by more profitable routes in urban cities. It's all so simple -- if you draw a circle around all the parties involved in any supposedly free business, someone pays to offset the costs for a profit. People get confused by free because they often only look at 2 of the 3 parties directly involved.

A is free to B as long as B attracts dollars from C that are paid to A.

Cross-subsidies can also pull payment from the future. So any startup -- Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed -- can burn in the red and be "free" when really it is pulling payment from a future IPO or acquisition. Sure, burn $20 million today, but if you're bought for $50 million next year, that's cool. The funding model is simply tied to confidence in the exit strategy.

One future form of cross subsidy is also new products or services. Twitter, for example, could be building up to 1 billion users in hopes of creating the world's largest database of the now, in which that data could be sold to marketers. The exit strategy could be replacing Experian. Advertising may never rear its head in that Twitter model, because the third-party subsidy comes from an entirely new business. Marketers could use that data to serve you addressable TV ads or send direct mail to your home. But again, A is free to B because B will attract dollars from C that are paid to A.

Free doesn't exist. Chris Anderson's elegant argument is really just an articulation of cross-subsidies. His idea that falling data costs will make everything free is false, because as Porter has explained, three things flow in any economic exchange -- information, value, and products. Information may get cheap, but products still come in three dimensions and have costs. And while information could approach free, the ideation of that information still costs money. Trust me, I do this for a living ;)

Now, finally, re FriendFeed -- hey, that was a nice portal play for all of social media. I could aggregate my content from everywhere else and make FriendFeed the center of my universe. If I were Facebook, I'd be messing my pants. "Those guys are stealing our social graph!" Facebook bought it for several reasons, but if nothing else, to take a social media portal competitor off the table.

Nicely played, FriendFeed. Looks like your cross-subsidy from the future finally arrived.

Image: Ana Cotta

Resume of the year

The Denver Egotist says it best: "Give it a few minutes of study. Feel ashamed it's not your idea. Then get on with updating your own."

What if editorial and advertorial had a baby?

Speaking of Starbucks, it pepped up debate over at The New York Times with a new online ad format that could confuse readers. The editorial content of nytimes.com/magazine surrounds an ad box marked Starbucks Mini News, which includes three editorial articles with links to real NYT content and one article that is an ad for Starbucks, but isn't marked an ad. If the box-within-a-box seems tricky, well, that's the point.

Advertorial has been around for a century, but one reason it works is it is always marked clearly an ad, so that readers know where the material is coming from. The problem we see as media planners with blurring the lines of editorial church and advertising state is that confused readers may click, but they won't necessarily convert. Even if one-off campaigns succeed in getting results for the advertiser in question, the overall devaluation of the editorial copy and advertising clarity doesn't help readership circulation or advertiser results in the long run.

Clarity of source is important, because it helps readers decide which path they want to take. If you plan to court consumers with advertising, we recommend an honest marriage. If you, as a marketer, don't think you need to worry about tricking people into picking up your message, we refer you to the history of the telemarketing industry.

Hat tip to NYT editor Patrick LaForge for an insightful debate on this via Twitter.

Starbucks' unbranding and the persuasion defense

Whoa, say brand observers. What's up? Starbucks recently opened coffee shops in Seattle with unique names totally unrelated to the master Starbucks brand. One outlet is called 15th Ave Coffee and Tea, which Liz Muller, director of global concept design at Starbucks, says will make the chain more accessible. "Is this for every Starbucks?" she says. "No. There is a place for this in specific neighborhoods in the U.S. and potentially globally. Each approach will be different to reflect the neighborhood it is in."

You heard that right -- each approach means Starbucks is expanding such "unbranding." Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy seemed puzzled "since the Starbucks brand has been such an integral part of their success." And Starbucks is hiding the master brand well; 15th Ave's web site has no mention of the corporate parent and hints it's run by a pleasant woman named Jenna.

We asked Branislav Peric, social influence marketing lead at Duke Razorfish in Paris, what he thought. "Unbranded, in the case of Starbucks, does not mean another brand, but compromising the Starbucks' difference," Branislav said. "Unbranded also means that this new Starbucks experience will be close to unbranded coffee shops ... unpredictable."

Consumers are building a persuasion defense

Media analyst Gladys Santiago counters Starbucks is making a savvy move, similar to Pepsi's recent decision to allow consumers in Argentina to misspell its name. It's all about overcoming consumers' defenses to your brand, she says, pointing to a landmark 1994 thesis by Marian Friestad and Peter Wright on persuasion knowledge. In simple terms, persuasion knowledge means consumers know that you are trying to seduce them, so they filter every message accordingly. Like a businessman arriving in a foreign hotel who is suddenly approached by an attractive woman, consumers are constantly on guard against the hidden motive.

Consumers know, for instance, that attention, emotion and trust are common tactics in influence. Celebrity endorsements capture attention. Scare tactics spur emotion. Brands provide trust. And when any of these aspects seems suspect -- is William Shatner really your gateway to travel savings? Will health care reform really kill old people in death panels? Is Starbucks really so trustworthy that you wouldn't rather try a little unknown coffee shop? -- consumers move on.

Marketers have known for decades that consumers are gun shy about buying from single brand entities. Brand architecture often creates fragmented options to provide the illusion of choice and to remove boredom; stroll down a convenience store beverage aisle or the laundry detergent row in your grocery store and you'll see hundreds of sub-brands produced by the same five or six corporate parents.

But Starbucks' move poses a deeper question, as well, of whether Jack Trout's 1969 concept positioning has finally met its match in the 3,000 marketing claims consumers must now process every day. Positioning held that a marketer could grab a top rung in a consumer's mind; but if the little brand ladders in our heads are now filled with 1,000 rungs in every product category, perhaps being totally unique is as good a brand position as any. Uniqueness suggests authenticity, and authenticity has value. We hear you can find it on 15th Avenue in Seattle.

Image: Konekotichy

And the Oscar for best stroll goes to...

AdFreak tells us this 6+ minute spot for Johnnie Walker was shot in a single uninterrupted take, making actor Robert Carlyle a genius of oratorical timing. Plus the man has a wee bit of endurance. Carlyle narrates the history of a Scotch whiskey, from its 1820 birth in a grocery store to the iconic, slightly devilish Striding Man logo in 1908 that foretold a century of theories about subliminal messaging in advertising. OK, that last bit was our own riff.

And now we get a guy walking in dry highlands showing that growing consumer comfort with web video may bring back the long form. Walking and walking. Johnnie, we feel thirsty.

Update: This ad is by BBH London, who apparently took the spot down from YouTube claiming a copyright violation. So we found another copy elsewhere. BBH, don't you like to share on social media?

Truth in advertising

Honesty is so refreshing. Via Denver Egotist.

Magazines play with their bill options

We're seeing innovation in the magazine sector, which is good since it is shedding pages and titles faster than you can say Microsoft Explorer. The Economist this week announced UK readers can order a single issue for next day delivery -- just in case you've got to hear about the latest financial panic in 6,000 words or more. Maghound.com lets U.S. readers subscribe to a bucket of magazines for one monthly fee, and mix up the titles mailed to you whenever you want, so you can segue from Maxim to American History depending on when your spouse is out of town.

Magazines have fared better than newspapers with the rise of the internet. Prior to this recession, U.S. ad revenue in glossies rose from $9 billion in 1996 to $14 billion in 2007, hovering at about 5% of total U.S. ad expenditures (which went up in that decade). Newspaper ad dollars fell from 22% to 16% share in the same period.

Still, with magazine ad pages off 26% this year, we suggest anything to get the circulation up.

Social media iTunes?

This one's for the Apple fanboys. A German blogger has posted screen shots of what appears to be a newly planned icon in the popular iTunes interface marked "social" -- at left in shot above -- so you can share music with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.

While this could be a Photoshopped crock, it points to the future Charlene Li has been riffing about for a year now: that social media will become like air, a utility similar to wall outlets that you plug into. The idea of human relationships being tied down by specific portals such as Facebook or Twitter is comical when you think about it. After all, it's your life and contacts -- shouldn't you own your social graph? Eventually human networks powered by technology will disengage from specific applications and instead be a cloud than any program or device can access. Swipe your finger in 2020, technology recognizes you, and the bar tabletop at the hip club in New York City can broadcast your fun to all your 20,000 remote friends. Add in GPS and chips that cost as much as sand, and everyone you want can follow you everywhere as soon as you toss the virtual switch.

The challenge will be setting up logical filters so your boss doesn't hear about the party. Perhaps you'll simply set up friend playlists, just like your music controls now, so you can play to the world depending on your mood -- hip, sexy, family, work. It's coming. Just ask Apple ... or the bloggers who mock up the fake products Apple will eventually make.

Why people don't work naked at Netflix

View more presentations from reed2001.

HR manuals are often a joke. Enron had its value statement chiseled in marble in its lobby, to no avail. So instead of publishing rules and mission statements, Netflix created a missive on how to get people to do the right thing with free will. For example, after one employee noted that people often work nights and weekends, Netflix agreed to throw out its entire vacation policy -- just take the days off you need, we trust you. As one manager says, "there is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one has come to work naked lately."

Netflix has 10 million subscribers, generates $1.3 billion in revenue and ships nearly 2 million DVDs daily. It's a big company. Nice to see it avoiding bureaucracy; we smell future success.

Via Adrian Ho.

Mad Men's Playboy takeover

The hit AMC show Mad Men did more than advertise on Playboy.com this week -- it took over the site, recasting the photos and other content to an early 1960s' flashback. The main page featured drink mixes from the ad days of yore, and the archives focused on the old issues back when bunny ears got guys riled.

This is no silly case study: the mixing of advertising with editorial content is becoming common as publishers and broadcasters struggle amid declining advertising revenues. News Corp. COO Chase Carey said recently that “we have an ad-supported business model that doesn't work," namely that as consumers shift to the internet and social media, online advertising fails to keep up with old 30-second spot dollars. The main broadcast networks have sold $1 billion less in primetime upfronts this year, down from $9 billion in 2008, and all television revenues are expected to be off 10-15% in the coming year.

Advertising still works, but measurement methodologies are vital to identify the waste. Old forecasts of impressions, GRPs and CPMs aren't enough as consumers start tuning out with new technologies. Don't believe us; just look at Playboy.

Laid off Lemonade

When senior copywriter Erik Proulx got laid off from Arnold Boston last October, he decided to rethink life in general. Now his documentary "Lemonade" examines the lives of many who have been downsized from the ad industry, and finds silver linings in this gloomy recession. Inspiration for anyone working through tough times.

Via Denver Egotist.

Luxury resort cuts price to $19 — if you sleep in a tent

The Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego has three sweet pools and a golf course, but like other elite resorts it is hitting a bump in this recession. So it's invited visitors to a "survivor package" in which they pay less for each amenity they give up, all the way down to $19 if they're willing to sleep in a tent. It's all a bit tongue-in-cheek; the staff puts the tent in your room after unscrewing the bed headboards.

Call it the hotel industry's version of a trial offer; your back may hurt in the morning, but once you try the spa, you may return at full fare. Via Dirk Singer. Image: Chicchun.

Newspaper pricing fantasies

The Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch have been making rumblings about charging for internet use of their content (technically, AP is cracking down on users repurposing its reports, while Murdoch will build pay walls around some of the content on his news sites). Economist Jodi Beggs explains why this won't work. Demand curves slope from upper left to lower right, silly. You can't raise prices without reducing demand, especially when 100 million competing sites give away news and entertainment for free.

Why people are screaming about health care (it's all about the middle)

Marketers could learn a thing or two from the ongoing debate on U.S. health care. Namely, in public communications battles, you don't have to convince everyone -- just a few percent in the middle.

First, the news: The United States is embroiled in arguments over whether and how to reform its health system. About 18% of Americans under 65 lack health insurance, and the United States is the only Western industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care. Universal coverage does not necessarily mean socialism or extreme taxes -- there are actually four very different economic models which can be mixed to pay for it, including single-payor, private insurance, public insurance, and compulsory insurance. In a way, the U.S. already has universal coverage: emergency rooms provide last-resort care to the ill without insurance, and hospitals must offset those unprofitable cash drains by earning more in specialties such as cardiology and orthopedics. Critics of reform respond that healthcare will account for 21 percent of the U.S. GDP by 2020, that the free market is the most efficient check and balance on those costs, and that government bungling would lead to rationing and diminished services.

No matter. The issue is complex, so both the left and right have created glowing/demonizing language around the issue. Liberals have coined the positive-feeling "Public Option" title, minimizing future rationing or tax costs. Conservatives have suggested a federal plan (which includes end of life counseling) might kill old people and is downright evil. And so this week townhall meetings erupted into fights, putting people in hospitals. Everyone pointed fingers, with liberals blaming conservatives for inciting riots and conservatives suggesting liberal union thugs were threatening Middle America.

Tipping the scale requires pushing the middle

Why such extremes? It's good communication science. Hyperbole works because in politics or crowds where the average opinion must be swayed, public relations doesn't have to change everyone -- just the central balance of the scale.

For example, the U.S. population remains relatively split between the two major political parties. While the 72 million registered Democrats now outweigh the 55 million Republicans, the recent presidential election was neck and neck until the economy collapsed in September 2008. If the Dow had gone up instead of down, McCain would now be president. The even split, plus general apathy on most issues, means any political consensus could swing either way with enough push.

Communicators influencing the masses know that in the middle of any spectrum, there are a few who can be swayed. Liberals and conservatives are already dug in. But if 1 in 20 people in the central base believe (pick your reality) that healthcare reform could protect the lives of 46 million Americans who don't have coverage / will risk the lives of millions by rationing their current insurance, the issue will tip toward victory or defeat.

Which explains extreme messaging. Everyone on the edge of an issue already hears you. So you have to shout to get to the center.

Image: Room 116

Digg: Advertising you can vote on

Digg.com has a sweet audience. It's the 53rd most popular web site in the U.S., attracts 13 million consumers a month and appeals to upper-educated men (you know, guys like us who spend foolishly on gadgets we don't need). Users of the site can post articles and vote them up or down, tapping the wisdom of crowds instead of editors at The New York Times to elevate the best content.

Now Digg has launched an advertising system that works on the same voting principle. Digg will insert ads amongst its regular content, and users push the ads higher or lower based on how much they like them. If your ad scores highly, you pay less; if you're booted to the bottom, you pay more. Dana Oshiro over at Read Write Web notes "while critics argue that the ads will simply be buried and advertisers will stop paying for placement, others called this 'marketing democracy.' "

Sounds fair. Make sure you use a good copywriter.

SocialSense: Finding conversations you don't know you need

One trend in social media is plugging in with new listening tools to figure out what consumers are saying about your brand. Radian6 and PeopleBrowsr track buzz with all sorts of stats, using Boolean logic around certain keywords. If you're Pepsi, you can hunt for Pepsi + Love, Pepsi + Hate, and find the key influencers on Twitter and elsewhere saying great or awful things about your brand.

But what if something out there is happening/tweeting/chatting and you're not smart enough to search for it? Say, what if you assume people talk about oral hygiene and what people really reference is a toothbrush?

SocialSense is a new platform that, yes, tries to make sense of this. The service has three features: The ability to segment small or large chunks of social media to only listen to the people or outlets you think have real influence over your brand; some media planning tools helping marketers identify sites with highest relevant conversations; and our favorite -- the ability to surface conversations related to your brand that you didn't think to search for.

Moving beyond keywords

"A lot of monitoring tools are very keyword-based," says Derek Hornsby of Networked Insights, which launched SocialSense 2.0 in July. "But if you look at trending topics on Twitter, there are all these conversations out there, and it is very difficult for any one person to get anything relevant to their campaign." In one example, a mobile handset maker did not think to search for the term "roaming" -- but roaming was a main theme consumers brought up when talking about cell-phone service, and elevating it to the marketers' radar allowed them to find new intelligence they would have otherwise missed.

SocialSense cracks the "discovery" challenge by using AI-type algorithms to find themes in conversations related to your brand, product or service, and then alerts you when a concept you did not expect begins to explode. It's an intriguing idea, finding things you didn't know you need. Now if only it could predict what we need in tomorrow's stock market.

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Hat tip to Mark Hancock, who knows how to question an Adweek column.

The moral hazard of superheroes and social media

Say, perhaps in a dream, you are Catwoman. You have to chase bad guys through the middle of a city. On your way you need to smash a few walls, crush a few cars, but that's OK -- superheroes don't have to clean up the mess.

That's one example of moral hazard, the concept that people protected from risk tend to act in different and often unhealthy ways. History is full of unintended disasters caused by moral hazard -- consumers or businesses who pollute the environment because they are decades away from the eventual impact; the recent subprime mortgage meltdown in which unaccountable sales agents or banks made silly loans; or the classic teenager driving his dad's car way too fast, since he won't foot the repair bill.

Which brings us to advertising. Marketers are itching to broadcast inside social media, and some of the best efforts involve innovative personal connections (Scott Monty at Ford is one shining example). However, many companies are beginning to simply buy their way into human networks, and the result is a growing pollution of quasi-authentic messages. We've written before in BusinessWeek on what a future world of sponsored opinions might look like. Since no individual consumer, or business, bears the cost of the broader clutter -- they are protected in moral hazard -- the barriers to entry are small. You can sign up now to have third-party companies broadcast inside your Tweets, and make a few pennies, so what's the harm? The result often looks like this.

Yes, we've been critical of such paid pollution, which at root is different from advertising because it misrepresents the source of the message. So in the coming weeks we'll explore some of the positive ways marketers are using social media, without damaging cars or buildings. Stay tuned.