Come bearing gifts

One plus one equals...maybe five. Let's take a look at two breaking stories about online video.

The skyrocketing stat.s detailing interactivity with streaming video are pretty well conclusive: the landslide has become an avalanche.

Parse out what the latest ComScore viewer numbers suggest and things get even more interesting. Note that Facebook has climbed into the top ten; while it's a given that Google's properties lead the pack (eg YouTube et al), that a social media site is rising fast in the video engagement sweepstakes is Big News.

What's this mean to media buyers trying to calculate their best venues for IOB (Impact on Business) in the Age of Pull?

Everything.

Social media consumers are the savviest minds on the web. They're the market niches everybody wants: the early adopters, the influencers, the alpha males and the gamma females whose interactions in online communities shape the power of the web. I'll say that again: they shape the power of the web.

And here's the kicker—these folk hate banner ads. One of the most empowering things these folk do is NOT to click banner ads.

They are less likely to click on ads because they overwhelmingly prefer to interact with video.

To these users, video is a gift, an opportunity to interact, not a flat "push" ad—which (if they're anything like the folk I live with on Facebook, they'll ignore as crude and condescending.)

Here's the killer distinction, courtesy Lotame Co-op's interactive creative insight numbers released yesterday:

"Of the banner types in the social media space, we found that video creatives had higher click-through rates than non-video units, with in-page units performing better on average from a CTR standpoint than expandable ads. When compared on the three most common banner sizes on the Lotame Co-op, we found that wide skyscrapers (160x600) had the highest click-through rate performance, followed by medium rectangles (300x250), and leaderboards (728x90), which had roughly the same click-through rate performance...

The full report's here.

In a nutshell, taken together, the August 2009 video stat.s and the Lotame analysis are yet another nail in the coffin of Push.

The takehome is simple: if you want to create a conversation around your brand, use the creative medium that's not only going to change minds but change the very minds whose opinions shape the web.

Streaming creative video.

It's that simple. Be well.

Trust me...if you can find me

Last time we chewed over the Age of Pull and the new art of listening.

OK: so what do you really want to hear from your business?

The cash register. It's all about return on investment, any media decision, correct?

Well, in the Age of Pull, despite the near-complete inversion of media strategy underway (and wait until we have mobile analytics and addressable TV metrics) there's no doubt we have to keep our eyes on the prize of growing sales and innovating our products. That hasn't changed...but damn near everything else has.

Here's a terrific refresher course in what ROI means in the Age of Pull...and that's pretty well what it's meant since the Age of Steam: for every dollar invested in the company, there's an incremental return. The ROI slideshow's author Olivier Blanchard isn't a social media skeptic: far from it.

While he's 'media-agnostic', Olivier's all for it. He just thinks that the ka-ching off the till is the be-all and end-all.

But here's where he and I part company: where in the Age of Push, media spend used to be a direct linear equation (more or less), as Olivier so wittily and thoroughly details—and I love the slideshow's old sci-fi motif: brilliant—now it's not.

Olivier's analysis of SM metrics is masterful...it's a clear roadmap for the whys and wherefores of social media expenditure vs return. I don't think he goes far enough. But he's built the basement beautifully.

And for media investors looking at their company's value chain (with their customers out there in the haze at the far end, looking like they're beginning to run the show), it's a Wonderland. Where to begin?

Engagement with the brand. That's terra firma.

And what does that mean in the Age of Pull, when the audience is running the show?

It means BEING FOUND.

If your web presence is simply no more than a corporate website glowing with product info...who really cares?

If no one really cares enough to search for you, why will they come to your site?

Here's why...and it's ALL about branding your engagement experience. Nothing else matters.

Why? Because social media is the most powerful tool for creating conversation but it's also an amazing amplifier of your messaging. Right here. Right now.

And I'm not talking flat Twitter metrics or friends on Facebook. You gotta drill down deeper, because in the Age of Pull, it's not mere hits that count—it's what they're saying about you (which you can respond to: it's a conversation out there) and, equally importantly, it's how they're saying what they're saying about you (who are the opinion leaders? why are the lurkers watching and what are they watching/waiting for?)

Check this out. Liana Evans isn't a social media evangelist. She's a hard-core search engine analyst. She loves data. But she also gets PULL...and the conversations PULL engenders. And she knows that people who live on web—for product reference, for consumer advice, for intelligence of all stripes to live their lives better—increasingly trust social media. Why?

Aside from the fact ComScore tells us that YouTube—the king of social media sites—has just passed Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine (my 10 year-old taught himself Photoshop off YouTube in three days FYI: talk about convergence), there's a dead simple answer.

IT'S RELEVANT. I personally source all my automotive repair decisions off the Swedish Bricks blog, dedicated to Volvo owners. I can get complete diagnoses and parts/service advice from Volvo mechanics and enthusiasts...within minutes. Free, from a community of people I trust. I save $70/hr bench time and on parts as well.

That's what I call Pull. Nobody's shilling at me: I'm creating a conversation around my steering rack and there's a community out there just dying to help me. (It works for every consumer decision from lawyers to leaf blowers to laundry detergent. The answer's out there.) Do I buy Volvo parts from Volvo? Yep. Do I overspend on repairs? Nope. I now know what I'm doing when I bring my car in for repairs. Should Volvo be part of this conversation? Uh huh. Are they? Nope.

Liana gets this. I'm not sure Olivier does...and for sure he gets the importance of being found. He just doesn't appear to grasp the pent-up power for changing and opening minds out there is something far deeper than marketing AT people.

It's about trust. Win their trust and you'll be top of mind when they reach for the product on the shelf or click your product into their online shopping cart.

People trust social media now. And their appetite for the abundance of intelligence online is bottomless.

So you have to ask yourself, in the Age of Pull, "how are they gonna find me?"...and—killer question—"why should they trust me?"

Engagement, baby. They'll find you if you've made the effort to engage your audience on their terms, with content they find relevant, useful, applicable, hypercustomized, in a voice they believe, in an experience they find at once authentic and intimate.

Final note: if you have any doubts that social media aren't going to rule the engagement game of the future, take a gander at this demo of Google Wave. Email is going to become realtime chat: out of the inbox and into the conversation. The message is the medium. (Sorry, Marshall.)

Next time around: "come bearing gifts"—comedy and the art and science of engagement in the Age of Pull. Be well.

Listen. Then listen again: welcome to the Age of Pull

We all know there's a supernova of social media out there, a space rich with smart people ready to share opinions and open debate that builds consensus, about everything from online banking to diapers to eco-tourism to...your brand, right?

There's also an attendant terror of "losing control of the message." A valid concern...but one that the history of the web is washing over a warpspeed.

Welcome to the Age of Pull. The Age of Push—one-way communications and marketing predicated on hierarchy and control and enforced scarcity rather than the abundance of online interaction—it's over. So over. (For more on why, read Jeff Jarvis' terrific roadmap to Web 3.0, What Would Google Do?)

What Fresh Baked does with our branded comedy webisodes is engage those "high-value" folk who are your best lifetime customer investment. (There's precious little point in starting anywhere else, is there?) We figure the brightest and most vocal have a real penchant for funny. And they know how to "onpass" conversations authoritatively and objectively.

So who to learn from best? Who best works with the niche-dwellers who lead opinions, who're early adopters, and who beat the drum most effectively for a new brand experience? We'd submit it's those organizations who have most at risk...and the fewest resources: non-profits.

Make no mistake: Fresh Baked wants corporate clients with deep pockets and vivid brand imaginations. But the learning piece for heavyweight corporate clients—the most instructive evidence—may well lie with those organizations who have no choice but to think lean and think creative. They don't have the resources. They need to be smart with the pennies they have (thank you, Bernie Madoff.)

Here's a shop we read routinely, the Non-Profit Marketing Guide, a savvy and simple daily read from the trenches of working the media and the blogosphere for cash-starved non-profits. There's more strategy here than most boardrooms, we reckon.

We'll make it way easy: if you like lists that'll help you clear your head about how best to work with the blogosphere and the battalions of Twitter and Facebook people who're on your radar but not vice versa, check this out: how to figure out your "ROI of Listening" to the digital social media conversation about your brand out there...which is really (of course) in here. Right where you are now: in the digital conversation.

FreshBaked's branded entertainment is one superb medium to engage this conversation, to open up new and innovative ways of having people talk about your brand—with our comedy web series structured around your messaging needs, we're here to launch (and listen to!) a remarkably powerful and memorable conversation about your brand. And—equally importantly–we can help you listen to that conversation in measurable, mission-changing ways.

Laughter—can you beat it for starting a conversation? We think not.

This is gonna be fun...what're you waiting for?