Advertising Age - CMO Strategy - Rethink Your Web Strategy or Fail is a great article addressing many of the oft-overlooked realities of online marketing. And while I strongly agree with 90% of what Nilofer Merchant has to say, I do differ on a couple of her “Best” and “Worst” examples (none of which, thankfully, are clients). Craigslist, a questionable inclusion to begin with (not really being a marketer, and a proud holder of “.org”), has revolutionized local advertising by being simple and easy to use- the “all text” interface that it is criticized for has not dissuaded millions of users from embracing it. True, it is in no way elegant, but the for-users-by-users feel is one of its strongest brand assets, and has let it succeed where many cleaner, slicker and flashier commercial properties have failed.

However, my larger issue with the top 3/bottom 3 is the attempt to draw an apples-to-apples comparison between widely varying categories and types of sites. What the “Best” share in common is that they are all services/ecommerce sites or apparel manufacturers (and in the case of Threadless, both). Threadless and Amazonall have enormous inventories, and having customers rate, share, and organize the selection based on personal interest is the only viable option, and one where they can take a relatively “product neutral” stance. I.E. “I don’t care if you buy a Sony or a Canon camera, as long as you buy it from me and come back”. Nike, Converse (owned by Nike), and Lego all reside in a space where customization is key to their category, have a short manufacturing cycle, and have enough sway that they can sell direct to the consumer. The Panasonic and Nikon “Worst” sites, on the other hand, represent an entirely different category. Customization from an appearance standpoint, in electronics is much farther down the list of consumer considerations than apparel, and the products themselves are have a much longer, more involved manufacturing cycle. Also, because they are created by manufacturers that are not in market leader positions (like Nike) their ability to own the consumer without ticking off retail partners is limited. Threadless, by seamlessly (pun intended) incorporating community content, digg integration, and strong social network tools is definitely a model to look to, but one has to keep grounded in product, manufacturing, and most importantly, consumer realities.

Digg’s popularity is not news, in fact, many mainstream news sites, like the Washington Post have embraced social news services for some time, based on the fact that a story on the front page of digg can drive tens of thousands of extra visitors in a 24 hour period. What I find fascinating, however, is that marketers have failed, AFAIK, to incorporate social news services on their own sites. The investment to incorporate such functionality on a product page is minimal, and the return can be significant. It also has SEO benefits, and can create a long term presence within social networks for accurate product information. Unlike news organizations, which have to maintain objectivity, companies are also free to suggest tags to shoppers who want to share their finds with others, and while screening out negative tags is impossible, the vast majority of shoppers who have come to a page will follow a recommendation versus creating their own. As we see more and more search engines begin to incorporate user tagging into their rankings, it is likely that experience integrating services such as digg now will potentially give a significant edge to marketers in the not-so-distant future.

Funny or Die, a Will Ferrell-fronted comedy video site, has received plenty of coverage around its launch, more around his involvement and their intro clip, “The Landlord” than around the user-contributed content, which has been more tepid. That said, there is an onslaught of theme-based video-sharing launches, based around humor, non-profits, tech, etc., which brings up a familiar scenario- What if the audience that YouTube has aggregated fragments right as marketers finally figure it out? The struggles that agencies are going through trying to adapt creative to the online video platform will only be compounded when assets will have to be adapted to different formats, channels, tagging systems, and communities in addition to figuring out appropriate length. Clearly many of the start-ups around today will not be around to witness this additional shift, but as marketers focus on the “what?” in a message, they should also be anticipating a much more complicated answer to the “where?”. Oh, and the same thing is happening to social networks as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

iMedia Connection: The Snickers Factor: When Buzz Turns Bad - Thanks to iMedia for giving us this opportunity, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback so far on the piece, which is due to the great work the team here at NMS did in pulling the report together. I also wanted to emphasize a couple things in the article to be clear.

First off, the main angle was about how Snicker’s media strategy made it easier for their critics to attack them, and how that could be avoided in the future by other marketers. Why the creative offended people and whether or not Masterfoods would have been better off addressing the issues involved instead of selling product and promoting the brand is well beyond the scope of the article.

Second, the “five years ago” statement might have been an underestimation- the best comparison I’ve heard to date is to the Miller Lite “Catfight” spot, and that aired in 2003. Though it might be more valuable to the hypothetical question as to what the reaction to the “Mechanics” spot would have been if it featured two women, I think the fact that Miller was able to overcome the controversy and actually expand the schedule of the spot in the face of similar criticism is a testament to the growing influence of the consumer.

LeeAnn Prescott over at Hitwise takes an interesting look at stats that give a “reality check” to recent speculation that Digg’s traffic and new content areas could make it as big as the NYTimes. I like her approach, which doesn’t just look at traffic or pageviews, but also demographics (for instance, the fact that “6% of Digg’s users were in the 18-24 age bracket, while only 9.5% of NY Times users were in that age group“), and where their traffic comes from.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Digg and think they have a great thing going, but I do think we’re looking at two different sets of users, vs. news consumers (and trackers) as a whole.

While you have to register to take a look at stories in the “beta” categories now, but its up. Some of the new stories & categories appear to be slightly less “dugg” than tech and gaming stories, but there are a lot of them - looking to see how they shake out with fuller commentary later this week.

ComScore reported this week that traffic to Social Networking sites continues to grow - worldwide. This is great news, but even more interesting was Stowe Boyd discussion of Fred Stutzman’s analysis of five MySpace competitors to watch out for, highlighting (most notably, I think) that Social Networking sites *just* made for social networks just don’t cut it anymore - users are more interested in doing something with their social networking time than just networking with others. Great analysis on both parts, and highly suggested reading as you coast into the weekend!

Speaking of Social Networking, if you haven’t read Fast Company’s “The Network Unbound” - do so. Right now, if just for the last three paragraphs alone.

Social tagging - the practice of a wide variety of online users “tagging” a piece of content as being about one subject or another (or multiple subjects) - sometimes makes people’s brows furrow as they try to figure out both how - and why - social tagging is so important. A recent post on Online Spin includes one of the best explanations of Social tagging and how it can help you get through all the content that’s on the web at any given time.  From both a professional and personal standpoint, I’ve found that items that have been tagged by others to be about the information I’m interested in or looking for cuts down on the time I would have spent trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of importance and relevance.