Hasta La Creative!

Leading up to the Zimmerman verdict last Friday, Trayvoning, or the act of photographing oneself in the position of slain teen Trayvon Martin hit a fever pitch across social media. Much like planking, Tebowing or Kaepernicking but lacking any sense or humor, wit or modicum of sensitivity, Trayvoning initially appeared last year just after the crime was committed.

Images, which insensitively mock the 17-year-old’s death, depict mostly white teens laying on the ground wearing a hoodie and holding a can of iced tea in one hand and a bag of Skittles in the other.

Various Facebook pages, such as this one, have popped up featuring many versions of Travoning along with commentary decrying the practice.

Planking was fun. This is not. Of the recent rebirth of Traynoning, Greater Scramento Urban League President james Shelby told Fox 40, “It hurts me, and it’s not my son. We need more conversations in homes about how we can all get along better. In turn, our kids are educated in things we shouldn’t do.”

If you’re like the majority of marketers worldwide struggling to prove ROI from your social efforts, we have good nes for you. Check out this five-step plan to make proving ROI a breeze.

Taking into account the collective insights of over 2000 of the world’s leading brands, this Bazaarvoice report, Real ROI from Social in 5 Steps, will show you how successful brands and retailers capture results and prove social ROI. In this whitepaper, part of the Adrants Whitepaper Series, you’ll learn how to:

– Be social where shoppers are buying
– Enable conversations that help consumers buy
– Get found with fresh user-generated content
– Use multiple paths to show ROI
– Measure your social mix to optimize results

Download the report now and make sure you are getting the most out of your social investment.

When Oreo placed its Dunk in the Dark ad in social media channels immediately following the power outage during the Super Bowl, real-time marketing was brought to the forefront of the marketing community. David Berkowitz, then-director of emerging media at Oreo agency 360i (and now CMO at MRY), stressed that care must be taken to properly collaborate with key decision makers in order for real-time marketing efforts such as Dunk in the Dark to be successful.

To move at the speeds required by real-time marketing, you need fast-moving teams powered by key decision makers and you need collaboration processes firmly in place. There is no time for lengthy approval processes.

More…

In reaction to a recent survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers which found 42% suffer from “Pinterest stress,” Planet Fitness, purveyor of the Judgement Free Zone and No Gymtimidation philosophy, aims to help de-stress the web with No Pintimidation.

It’s a Pinterest-based effort that starts by pinning perfectly imperfect images that people can feel good about. The effort was developed with Philly-based agency, Red Tettemer + Partners.

Planet Fitness is encouraging people to visit No Pintimidation to engage in the effort by first uploading an image they might find “Pintimidating,” and then de-pintimidate it by adding embellishments like cats, unicorns or phrases that call out the unreachable perfection.

Clearly no one in Cannes this week will bother with this since, as we know, everyone in advertising is so hot and has no need for this sort of therapy.

Say what you want about Domino's (it's an abomination unto the Lord), but it has one of the better branded Pinterest projects I've seen in a while—Second Hand Logos. Since Domino's recently redesigned its logo, Crispin Porter + Bogusky got to thinking about what happens to a company's old signage, clothing, store materials, etc. So, the agency commissioned 10 artists to make stuff with old Domino's employee shirts, pizza boxes and other company ephemera. Lots of it is for sale, and Domino's is being gracious enough not to demand a cut of the artists' sales, which is pretty cool of the company. More of the work will roll out in the coming days. Doesn't make this any less accurate, but this is a good example of effective consumer outreach.

If you are male, the moment you have a child you are required to drastically alter your sense of humor in ways both profound and irreversible. Where before you were witty and sharp, you must now become broad and pun-heavy. This is mostly so you can embarrass your offspring, although, counterintuitively, it is also guaranteed to make them love you more. (The whole thing is probably evolutionary in some complex way.) This Sunday, for Father's Day, Heineken will celebrate this oddity of the human condition with a #dadjokes campaign from Wieden + Kennedy in New York. You submit your cheesiest dad joke with that hashtag to @Heineken_US, and the brewer will meme-ify its favorites—posting your joke next to stock photos of awesome dads through the ages. Heineken will add its own #dadjokes throughout the day, too, and all of them will be archived on a special #dadjokes Tumblr. Join in Sunday, and make it the most groan-inducing site on the Internet. Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Heineken
Project: #dadjokes
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, New York
Executive Creative Directors: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal
Creative Directors: Erik Norin, Eric Steele
Creatives: Mike Vitiello, Jessica Abercrombie
Designer: Cory Everett
Account Team: Patrick Cahill, Jacqueline Ventura
Brand Strategist: Jeremy Daly
Art Producer: Michelle Chant
Interactive Producers: Mutaurwa Mapondera, Victoria Krueger
Director of Integrated Production: Lora Schulson
Director of Interactive Production: Brandon Kaplan
Business Affairs: Quentin Perry

Jell-O's new "Jigglevision" social campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky is not quite as titillating as it sounds. You write a brief message on the brand's Facebook app using various "Jigglevision" patterns as camouflage, then share the note with friends via email or social media. Recipients decode the message by reading it through a red Jell-O gelatin snack lid. Just like they do at the NSA! Integrating social and real-word elements is cool, in theory. But if someone sent me a Jell-O jiggle-message, my first and last thought would be: #FML. Also, needing a Jell-O lid to play implies that you have to actually buy some product. Come on, that's not what social media is about! Kids will probably love this modern spin on a throwback idea (assuming they don't make a sticky mess of the computer), but to me it just feels a little insubstantial. Then again, given the product, what did I expect?

Um dos maiores obstáculos da disseminação da leitura tanto no Brasil, quanto no resto do mundo, é também um dos mais absurdos: pessoas não lêem porque acham “chato”. Da mesma maneira que é preciso tentar entender as razões disso, também é imprescindível buscar soluções. Uma que encontramos e que chamou bastante atenção nesta era de popularização de e-books é o aplicativo ReadSocial. Criado pelo Dopa Labs, o app gamifica a leitura ao propor desafios que ajudam a entender melhor as ideias mais importantes de cada capítulo.

Geralmente, são desafios divertidos, rápidos e fáceis de serem solucionados, mas que ajudam a mapear o progresso do usuário na leitura e até mesmo a desbloquear conteúdos exclusivos. Só que isso é apenas o começo da história.

No ReadSocial, é possível construir comunidades em torno dos livros, que permitem que seus leitores se conectem entre si e diretamente com os autores, para a troca de ideias e maior entendimento do conteúdo. Desta forma, o que para muitos é visto como uma atividade solitária, ganha um estímulo, como uma espécie de clube do livro digital.

Além disso, também é possível criar, ler e compartilhar anotações, explorar indicações de conteúdos relacionados com determinados capítulos e, acredite, até mesmo criar analytics da experiência de leitura, o que poderia ser bastante útil para editoras e autores.

Fiquei imaginando como este tipo de aplicativo seria interessante tanto para o mercado de livros quanto para a educação, uma vez que poderia potencializar a absorção de conteúdo e, quem sabe, até mesmo ajudar a superar um pouco a ideia de que ler é “chato”.

Eu ainda gosto do modo analógico de ler livros, mas boto muita fé no digital para estimular um pouco mais uma atividade que parece estar cada vez mais desvalorizada.

Só para lembrar, o Dopa Labs é um braço da agência Dopamine, que tem Gabe Zichermann como CEO. Para quem não ligou o nome à pessoa, Gabe é um dos principais divulgadores da gamificação nos Estados Unidos. Por enquanto há apenas três livros disponíveis na biblioteca do aplicativo, mas há um formulário para autores interessados em gamificar suas obras. Será que rola algo assim por aqui?

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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If you’re a marketer placing sponsored content (also known as native advertising) with a publisher — or a publisher accepting sponsored content — there are a few things you should know about how Google News, and Google in general, views this particular form of content.

In a recent blog post, Google Senior Director of News and Social Products Richard Gingras wrote:

“Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site. It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines … if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.”

Hmm…

And on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team wrote:

“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or ‘advertorial’ pages on your site that pass PageRank [sharing your site’s authority with the site you link to]. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.”

Just this past January, Google penalized UK floral site Interflora for buying advertorials on over 150 UK newspaper sites as part of its promotion leading up to Valentine’s Day. In fact, the newspapers themselves were penalized as well. Since then, reparations have been made, and Interflora is back in Google’s good graces — but only after they had been erradicated from Google’s search results for over a week.

OMG! What Do I Do Now?

At this point, you may be experiencing the shakes or cowering in fear over the ramifications of your sponsored content placements. But don’t fret. As with all things Google, there are guidelines. And if you follow the guidelines, you’ll have nothing to worry about.

In terms of how Google views different types of content, if you dig into Google News’ quality guidelines, a statement reads:

“If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content.”

So what, exactly, is promotional content? Google defines promotional content as “affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party).” Sponsored content and native advertising certainly fall within that description.

So what can marketers and publishers do to ensure their sponsored content doesn’t run afoul of Google News’ quality guidelines? A few things — none of which are terribly difficult. So read on, content creators, and all will be right with the world (and with Google).

How to Separate Sponsored Content From Organic Content

There are several things you can do to specifically delineate between sponsored content and organic news content:

1) Give Sponsored Content and Organic News Content Separate Homes

This option suggests placing all of your non-news (sponsored) content on a separate host or directory so the Google crawler will be able to distinguish between these different content types. Care should also be taken when internally linking from one section of your site to another. Google News notes that, when its crawler scans the section of your site that contains news content, it may find links to other non-news content that may not meet its guidelines for News inclusion. Use caution when linking between the two.

2) Create a News-Specific Google News Sitemap

If you create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only (which you can easily do if you separate sponsored content from news content as mentioned above), you can automatically inform Google you’d prefer to have news articles crawled exclusively through your sitemap. Once you’ve created it, notify Google.

3) Set Up a Robots.txt File

Set up a robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot-News (or Google) from accessing any folder or directory with non-news content. A robots.txt file is a file in your website’s top-level directory that, among other things, can inform which sections of your website search engines should crawl or ignore. To inform Google News to ignore your sponsored content that you have placed in a specific directory, place this code in your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /sponsored/

“Sponsored” is the name of the directory in which all your sponsored posts will reside. For more information about the robots.txt file, check out this section of Google’s Webmaster Tools.

4) Use Page-Specific META Tags

If you want more granular control over which sponsored content is blocked from Google News (or Google — a good approach for separating blog content), you can use META tags to block the Google News crawler from following links to specific pages. META tags are small pieces of code that are placed within the section of a web page.

Below is the specific code (and screenshots) you’ll need for different scenarios. But first, some definitions:

• A “noindex” tag informs search engines that the page should not be indexed in its search results (but links on the page will be followed and indexed).
• A “nofollow” tag informs search engines not to follow a link on a page or transfer PageRank value to the site being linked to (but the page itself will be indexed).

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site and not following links within, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:

To allow non-Google robots to index a page on your site (and to follow links), but prevent the Google robot from indexing the page or following links within the page, use the following tag:

To allow robots to index a page but disallow them from following outgoing links, use the following tag:

*Use googlebot-news if you only want the rule to apply to Google News.

Here’s the beginning of the header section:

Here’s what the META tag looks like within the header:

This is the end of the header:

If you use WordPress, these tags can be easily applied on a post by post basis using the WordPress SEO Plugin or the All in One SEO Pack.

Your Sponsored Content Will Not Become Invisible

It’s important to note that adding nofollow tags to your pages does not make them invisible. From Google’s own Webmaster Tools page on the topic, Google explains how it handles nofollow links, saying, “In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow.”

While it would seem marketers and publishers should do everything they can to get as many people to see their content as possible, skirting these guidlines and running afoul of Almighty Google will, ultimately, do more long term harm and irradicate any short term gain that may have been achieved.

If you are a publisher or a marketer using sponsored content of native advertising to promote, we highly recomend you follow Google’s guidelines to the letter.

The ubiquitous Twitter hashtag #FML (there have been 37,000 #FML-tagged tweets in the past seven days alone) is generally understood to be short for an obscene phrase uttered when things are at their bleakest. But now, Jell-O is here to help. The Kraft Foods brand and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky are trying to hijack #FML and make it stand for "Fun My Life" (rather than doing something else to your life). Between now and June 14, everyone who tweets the #FML hashtag is entered into a pool, from which a certain number will win "Fun My Life" prize packs "specially created to get their life back on track." You can follow along at jelloFML.com, which also shows how the brand is tweeting at #FML-ers.