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A few months back Aki Spicer of Fallon and I presented at the AAAAs Account Planning Conference on the topic of ad agencies and blogging. We wet out and did a little bit of research to uncover what planners throught the advantages and disadvantages of blogs and blogging are. The presentation can be found below and it contains a pretty compelling argument on why agencies and their planners should be blogging.




Posted by Ed Cotton It appears that PR companies are way ahead of the curve in coming to terms with understanding bloggers as an important audience.

It's interesting to see what this means for media planners and buyers.

Are bloggers on media schedules?

Who is dealing with them?

Do they get forgetten about and left to the PR agency to handle?

If it's about doing more with blogs than running banners, then there's some potential overlap here.

Ogilvy PR recently took the unusual and important step of issuing a code of ethics that defines how they plan to work with bloggers.

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea> for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

It will be interesting to see what bloggers make of this.

Via Karl at Experience Curve


Posted by Ed Cotton Yesterday, Aki Spicer of Fallon and I presented this at the AAAA's Planning Conference.




The great news is we are already getting hate mail on Adpulp, from people who suggest they never surf the web for inspiration, then what the %^^& are they doing on Adpulp?

"Yes, while the creatives are busy working and MAKING sh*t happen...these 'cultural anthropologists' will be surfing the web and reposting what they find as 'insights' that try to validate their usefulness.

Give me a break."



Posted by Ed Cotton Interesting presentation from Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku about "Microblogging".
A new form of communication that's all about regular contact with your network. Simple messages and information sent evey hour. This is obviously far simpler and easier than blogging and an interesting alternative to help people stay connected. Similar to Twitter.

Posted by Ed Cotton Bill Tancer of Hitwise recently presented some interesting stats on participation levels on Web 2.0 sites, his research found that only .16% of all YouTube visits were to upload video and only 0.2% of Flickr visits were to upload photographs.

As we are in the “Participation Age” there seems to be a need to expand the number of participants. It’s questionable if brands are doing enough and by brands, we mean these Web 2 brands and creative brands in general; video cameras, computer brands, digital camera brands, printer brands, etc….

Obviously, the 1% rule is being played out, but think of the market potential if that 1% could be increased to 2%.

Brands in this space need to think about how they can encourage participation, this is part incentive and partly education. The education part is important and can obviously there need to be different streams for different segments; from the non-user, to the user who isn’t interested in sharing.

Clearly all brands that want to move into the Web 2 space and create community and conversation need to listen up, this stuff doesn’t just magically happen, it needs encouragement and education.

One interesting example is the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, yesterday it launched a blogging service for its readers. For many, this could sound foolish, given the abundance of free blogging platforms, but this is smart as it’s going to attract their readers who trust DT more than the small blogging brands. In addition, in a challenging time for newspapers, there is a lot to gain by doing this and is reaching out and providing education and utility for a new group of participants.



Participation is the tangible offshoot of engagement, which has become the fashionable thing to try and measure these days.

It’s clear, if brands want thriving communities and strong brand relationships, they need do more than pay lip service to the notion of participation.

Is participation a new metric for engagement?

Jeff Jarvis had drinks with Dell's PR people and tells an amazing tale of a company that appears to be getting the customer revolution.

"The team said that IdeaStorm was Michael Dell’s own idea and passion. And before we met, the company announced that because of IdeaStorm they’d decided to offer Linux now not just in servers and workstations but also in desktops and laptops. The people at IdeaStorm pushed this hard. Dell came back worried about how many flavors of Linux it would need to ship and support. They wrote:

The IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux on Dell platforms has come through loud and clear. Many of you have suggested a survey to help Dell determine which distribution is most popular, and we think that’s a great idea. Based on your idea, we now have a short survey, which will be open until March 23, where you can tell us more about your favorite distribution of Linux, your preferred method of support, and more.

More than 100,000 people took that survey, leading to Dell’s announcement. And the discussion continues on the blog.

Welcome to the age of customer control. This isn’t just crowdsourcing. This is crowdmanaging. Companies still fear this. But, hell, if even Dell can lean back and let its customers begin to take charge, anyone can."