Hi. My Name is James Gross

More on brand marketing.

The talk around, brand marketing online is all about CRM, has reached a point where I believe it could potentially start to break the valuations of media companies that are struggling to find their revenue models.

The future of marketing is not CRM. CRM is CRM. The idea that brands are going to use the most trafficked sites on the web to service customer complaints will not shift dollars online. It is going to displace the 800 phone number on the back of the package. That doesn’t bode well for growing media companies, their investors or digital marketers trying to find ways to bring their brand online.

We all have an interest in seeing dollars flow online and in order to do that, we need to showcase that the medium can be an effective branding channel at scale. Facebook is the closest big media company digitally to really understanding this and they are rolling out some solid ad products to support it. Twitter, by comparison, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Caught in the spiral that Twitter is a great place to shout at brands when something is wrong and have that shout routed in the exact direction it is suppose to go in order to get a timely response. Again, it is conceivable that this model could replace the 800 number, but it isn’t going to displace the TV commercial.

When Twitter first announced monetization plans, they called their ad product, Resonance. I really liked the concept. From the early news on it: 

Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.

If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post. That means that the company will not have to pay for it, and users will not see ads they do not find useful, Mr. Costolo said.

Resonance is similar to the type of factors that Facebook uses for Edgerank. This model would conceivably reward brands who were creating interesting content that was being brokered across user’s interest graphs and would ideally fuel a promotional model that would make a brand’s content ads cheaper, the more effective they were, in a similar manner to how adsense works. In many respects, everyone wins, the user sees the most interesting tweets from brands and the brand’s biggest challenge is to be interesting.

15 months since the announcement and no product like resonance exists and with the brands I have talked with, very few have direction from Twitter on what they should be doing… On Twitter. What is left for a brand to do? It seems, listen to people talking about you and respond to them. And where does this communication get routed to within an organization? The CRM team, not the same as the brand marketing team. 

Let’s fast foward to what a lot of smart marketers and media companies are talking about online. Brands as publishers. Something very near and dear to me and an area I have spent much of my career focused on and an area I’m very excited to announce soon on what I’m up to next.  

I do believe with the rise of social and the acquisition of audiences by marketers on platforms like Facebook and Twitter this concept of brand as publisher is more true and possible than ever. But Publishers are not in the business of having a direct response conversation with their audiences. Look at the NYT or HuffPo, in social they are broadcasting and brokering content to their audience as a service. They listen as a form of consumption in order to create, not as a CRM channel. This is where I find myself disagreeing again with some of the smartest folks I know, who think Twitter can be a holy grail of marketing, by listening and responding directly in concert with consumers. This has never been what publishing is directly about and definitely not what branding as a proxy for demand creation is all about. 

People like other people that send them interesting things on Twitter and Facebook. People like brands as witnessed by how many likes and followers brands have acquired in social channels. Brands can be interesting if they have time to think about how to be interesting. Unfortunately, that time is currently being spent apologizing to people for being on hold as they work hard to re-route their call.