Gary Sheynkman dot com

I dislike news. It’s always bad. It seems that every day I see another ad agency close up shop or lay off employees. That only means one thing: companies are cutting marketing costs, hard.

I understand. You make widgets. You sell widgets. You can’t stop making them, nor can you stop selling them… so you stop advertising them.

Hi. Hello? Anyone there? If no one knows that you make and sell widgets, who is going to buy them!?

If you are overleveraged and are going into bunker-mode, ok… I get it. But companies that have money to spend on marketing, now is the time!

THIS is the opportunity you have been waiting for. Your competitors are not advertising. You need to push HARD and grab market share, because it is there for the taking. Don’t want to spend money on that costly online re-imaging of your company? Think community advertising is a waste of time? Think your website can limp on for a year or two?

What … people are spending less time online? This reactionary trend is silly if you sit back and look at what your customers are doing.

… Just a thought

I touched on this in my Commenting 2.0 article a bit, but felt I needed to elaborate on the topic a bit.

Large successful networks today are quickly becoming platforms. Applications are a fine and great example, but the next step? in my very humble yet loud opinion, is networks built on other networks. Essentially, any network with an API (application programming interface) becomes the cloud service layer for niche networks on top to use.

How it works

In Facebook terms (though this is certainly not limited to FB), imagine creating whole community sites around groups. Love that San Pellegrino? How about a site with all those group members that google maps restaurants that serve San Pellegrino over Perrier mineral water?

Lets take it one step further. I like to travel and would like to create a tight community of travelers where people can plan and share trips together, connect, and discuss. No need to create a new profile, Facebook Connect has me covered. I?ll need a trip logging and mapping engine. Dopplr has an API that I can use. I want my users to have cool spaces to upload their photos. Flikr will do that. Vimeo can handle the video. You need to send some uncompressed TIFF image files to a member who asked for a print of that vista? Drop.io allows you to build on top of their platform as well. A simple threaded forum system, a blog upfront interviewing members about their trips? and you have a pretty rocking community powered online destination.

The point I am trying to drive is that this if Twitter is built on Rails and Facebook is really a massive mySQL database (lets keep it simple ? ), then the community sites of tomorrow (in, again, simple terms) are going to be built on Facebook and Twitter as their service layers.

Click “Read More” to see hows this benefits us users and most importantly brand managers seeking to harness this social internet thing.

[Read more]

Commenting on blogs/forums/etc is always an interesting phenomenon to observe. Popular sites like Engadget or TechCrunch always have to deal with comment trash. How do I define this trash? Well… the web name for these people is “trolls” but I just call them douchebags.

For every insightful comment there is always a douchebag or 10 that bashes the author, the idea, or just blabs about something inconsequential and thus kills what has the potential to become a great conversation on the topic.

Some new developments on the interwebs will soon put an end to that though (in my not so humble opinion). People are very brave behind keyboards as long as their face is not attached to their anonymous profile.

In a recent conversation with Taj form WeJetSet I suggested a commenting system that might just avoid the douchebag phenomenon. The recent advent of Facebook Connect allows people to post comments as their authentic selves… at least as authentic as their Facebook profile is.

For example, if I use FB Connect to post a comment along the lines of “This is f-ing stupid” … it will show up on my news feed and my friends will likely comment on this event with something along the lines of “Gary, you are an idiot”. Thus I am less likely to post something really stupid.

A commenting system that allows users to just post from Facebook, Myspace, or Orkut (I do not know if other networks allow this yet) will create an ecosystem on the site made up of people who are accountable to their entire social network for their comments. These days you can even have Twitter posts be pulled in as comments with easy to use Wordpress plugins (see below ). This will certainly not guarantee that people will be insightful, but it will add some authenticity to the posters.

Yes, you are alienating potential readers, but at least you are doing away with the persistent problem of douchebaggary…. And who isn’t on Facebook (or MySpace or Orkut) these days anyway?

Video advertising creates an opportunity for companies to build an emotional connection between consumers and brands. My favorite example of this concept in action is BMW films. Sure, BMW could have made a video walkthrough of their cars. They could have had mechanics open the hood and tell you about their fantastic engines. They could have had beautiful models sit inside and tell you about the body hugging seats that are upholstered in the finest leather available. What did they do instead? They made me want to own a BMW because secret agent-like drivers use BMWs to escape danger situations and deliver precious cargo. Watching a Clive Owen smirk in the face of danger while behind the wheel of his trusty BMW made me love the idea of owning one…. and I do.

Sure, not everyone can hire John Woo or Guy Ritchie to direct mini films to inspire love for their brand, but it is a lesson for all to follow. If you can make customers fall in love with you brand… if your brand makes people feel fulfilled, cool, or happy, the dollars follow.