I was just in a store and heard a song that shot hot liquid brass out of the speakers into my nerves, and 2 hours later I’m here the proud downloader (from iTunes that is) of two of the band’s album. They are the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble and are a Chicago based nine-piece brass band. I had never heard them before today and from a few Google Searches I’ve discovered that they have been gigging for years in subways and street corners, realeasing trickles of singles and lives sets. Their self titled album was released in the US earlier this year and is their first professionally produced album and promises every shade of brass, from rust green bronze to platinum gold, with the power to hypnotise.

So what does this have to do with Marketing.

1. I converted twice in the span of an hour with out any prior brand contact

2. I’m listening to it on repeat

3. I’ve just posted a rave review with a link to the album

These three things are exactly what any product marketing team is hoping their traffic will do, and these three things are exactly what make a brand successful.

This band nor their record label ‘Honest Jon’s Records”, have the funds or industry influence to get much commercial radio play or do the PR, Talk Show circuit and so must rely on their fan base; from individuals telling their friends directly and bloggers/ music reviewers writing pieces on the group – as their primary acquisition channel, which is fairly daunting. However for many smaller companies, bands, designers, artist, NGO, etc – this is the only option they have to work with. But if you can get this to work not only will it provided the strongest ROI, it will also provide you with a long lasting and genuine relationship with your customers.

If you are planning on going for a more grass roots style pull strategy the most important requirement to get you high off the launching pad is amazing product and good timing (find the right people at the right time).

Apple have done this time and time again, from the first PC to iPod’s and iPhones. Mozilla are another example of a no budget advertising campaign that have today achieved them over 1 billion downloads. These organisations not only have quality product to offer they more importantly have a loyal fan base that will taut their tunes for them.

A new study released by Webpaint and the Altimeter Group on the use of Social Media channels by brands has come to a surprising conclusion:

“While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.”(Engagement db Report 2009)

The study evaluated each brand by not only the number of channels they engaged with but how deeply they were able to interact with their audience through them. Each brand was classified into four engagement profiles:

Mavens: Brands that engage with seven or more social networking channels and show high depth scores

Butterflies: Brands that similarly run on a high number of social media networks but their audience engagement is shallow.

Selectives: Brands running on fewer social media channels but show greater depth on their key focus channels.

Wallflowers: Brands that show both lower presence and depth in their engagement with Social Media.

Of the rankings Mavens Starbucks, Dell and eBay achieved the highest scores followed by Google because of the way there were able to tie in Social Media initiatives with their larger scale marketing strategies.

Overall Mavens showed the most growth in the last twelve months in Revenue and Gross Margin compared to the other engagement profiles. The study also provides Best Practices Case Studies on Starbucks, Toyota, Dell and SAP.

Webpaint and Altimeter Group have also launched an accompanying website that lets companies index their own social media use for further research. You can read the full report here.

The release of Office 2010 has been confirmed by Microsoft and to start generating some early PR buzz around the new edition they have invited Dennis Liu, infamous You Tuber from Traffik Film Works to create their promo video.

The result is a cyber-crime thriller style movie teaser about the government on the hunt to find a rogue font released by a hacker that has the ability to hypnotize readers into agreement. It even mentions ex Microsoft assistant ‘Clippy’ the animated paperclip that would sit that the bottom of the Office application screens with helpful hints.

My last post was also on the campaign around IE7 featuring ex Superman Dean Cane suggesting the beginnings of a trend in the tech software sector around marketing. Both of these campaigns take a humorous approach, and combine both tech language with more broad appeal for the mass audience.

Back to the Office 2010 product however, there is no real mention of any technical detail on the Office movie teaser but you can sign up to be on the waiting list to go to the technical prevew next year.

Microsoft has recently launched the lastest version of IE, number 8 with a new ad campaign featuring ex Superman star Dean Cain. With Google Chrome starting to market their browser with a series of artist commissioned ads, Microsoft have tried to appeal more to tech enthusiasts using the infamous acronym style that was popularised in instant chat rooms.

The four ads are OMGIGP (Oh my God I’m gonna puke), FOMS (Fear of Missing Something), GRIPES (Gritting Raging Internet Pathetically Extra Slow) and my favourite SHYNESS (Sharing Heavily Yet Not Enough Sharing Still). They  sit perfectly with the more hardcore tech community (users of LOLBILLIES) but also accessible to a wider audience (users of OMG).

The new features their pushing are their Accelerators, Web Slices, inPrivate Browsing and its Faster

In lauching the new product Microsoft have also partnered with Not For Profit Feeding America, and have incentivised downloads by donating 8 meals to the charity per download.

Have a look at the ads and download it here.

Independent Ad Agency BooneOakley has come into recent blogosphere fame with their bold move to house their company website through a series of interactive YouTube videos. The 2 minutes and 39 second video breaks down the company’s history, ideology and examples of their work. What is great about having your site in a Youtube video is that it can be embedded into countless sites and blogs.

BooneOakley president and strategic director Phil Smith said “we needed to refresh our website but have a lot of work on so this seemed like a quick way… Happily, it also didn’t cost us a penny.”

The site/video is navigate-able through embedded annotations – links within the YouTube clips. The technology has been available for about a year but has not really been explored or executed in this way so successfully before.

Watch it here.

Google Squared was released June 3 and is the latest experiment to come out of Google Labs exploring how to give users more meaningful and structured Searches. Erick Schonfield on Tech Crunch summed it up well: “Puts Web Search into a Spreadsheet”.

The new application gives you the same search results but can break them down by your own topical categories. There are some pre – built squares that Google have put together as examples. The British Poets will give you a list of different poets and certain pieces of info on each one like City of Birth. The Squared engine can pull up images, text excerpts to fit with the categories and saves you the trip to five different Wikipedia pages.

There has been some discussion that Squared was created to try and crush Wolfram Alpha the ‘knowledge engine’ but the two products are quite different. One key difference being that Wolfram Alpha computes answers based on keyword strings where as Squared is more an exploration on how to filter and display data sets.

Still Google Squared, Wolfram Alpha and Bing and other recent forays into the development of the semantic web signal the beginning of the Web 3.0 era which Tom Tague; VP of Solutions and Marketing at Clear Forest, described as “cleaning up the mess we made and harvesting the value of Web 2.0.” (from here)

Build you own square here.

So I Googled the definition of ‘bing’ and turned up a few interesting meanings; ‘Bing is an annoying lizardLizard Lizards are reptiles of the order Squamata, which they share with the snakes”, ” heap eg of coal, debris or colliery waste Blaes – mudstone or shale not containing much bituminous or carbonaceous matter”. But no mention of Microsoft’s brand new Search Engine which launched this week called “Bing“. Named so that it could be turned into a verb, Microsoft are hoping that there new search engine will have us all binging in no time.

The product has been under construction for a long time, initially titled Kumo. You can read reviews of it here on Search Engine Land. The name Bing came into rumors recently and although doesn’t quite have the ring that “Just Google it” does, it’s better than Kumo.

Compared the Microsoft’s other Search tool Window’s Live, Bing is strides ahead with a similar feel to Google but a few key differences. Both share the same clean interface and offer search by image, web, news, video, etc. What’s interesting is the Bing image search tool which lets you sort by image dimensions (i.e if you want it wide, square or tall), style (illustration or photo), color (do you want black and white images or full color) and also whether you want people in the images. This I’m sure will make the job of sourcing images much easier.

Their video section similarly lets you sort by length, screen size, resolution and source. Bing also features it’s own Maps app that is practically exactly the same as Google Maps.

One interesting feature they have is the xRank which they describe as ”a cultural snap shot of who’s hot and who’s not’:

xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Live Search web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. (taken from Bing xRank site)

Another nice detail is that Bing throws up a list of related searches on the left hand side of the page that gives you different categories on the key term – try “turkey” for instance.

From a brief play Bing does the job, and a bit better than Google. It’s an interesting market because for so long there was no point even trying to challenge Google due to it’s sheer domination over the market but when you play Google style you may come out on top binging.

So try “binging” today!

Google’s latest endeavor – Google Wave – was announced on Friday at the Google I/O Developer conference in San Fransisco and it’s already had a ripple effect all over the internet. Google describes it as a new tool to change the way people communicate and collaborate on the web. It’s a new take on emailing that looks like instant messaging but lets you integrate rich text formatting, photos, videos, maps, and other widget, etc you please.

But it’s difficult to summarize the complexity of this product in a post so you can ride the full demo wave at the Wave microsite – the full 1 hour and 20 minutes of it!

Wave is also fully open source and developers can use the Wave API to build their on extensions into it. And whilst the demo presentation is frequently punctuated by applause there are mixed reviews about Wave. Fast Company were quick to release their ‘Five Reasons to be Terrified of Google Wave“, asking:

“what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across America? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile?”

Tech Crunch are more impressed with the product and you can read their in depth review of wave here.

Launching off the Google platform Wave has a very strong likelihood of success, and there is no doubt it offers impressive real time communication tools. You can sign up to get updated about the release of Wave here.

In a recent talk on Ted, marketing guru Seth Godin talked about the development of tribes in today’s mass culture. Whilst this has been around for centuries the internet makes it easier for people to connect and you see it everyday on the internet, facebook is a portal for people to find tribes, social niche groups that share the same interests. What we see is the power of social groups to give rise to massive cultural “movements” like the iPhone, like Susan Boyle, and like Dr Horrible’s sing-a-long blog, etc.

One new start up in line with this tribal mentality is Get Glue. This Firefox add on is a meta social network which offers contextually relevant social information as you browse. Once installed as a toolbar it sits dormant until you hit one of the sites in the Glue network; i.e Amazon, where it will then drop down and show you which of you friends were on a particular product page and what they thought of it. Currently its enabled on major movie, music and books sites like Amazon, imdb, Rotten tomatoes, Wikipedia to name a few, but it’s easy to see how Glue could work across a whole range of categories from restaurants, hotels, services, etc. Also when you are setting up your account there is the option to sync with you friends on Facebook.

Head Up is a similar start up that is also a Firefox add on that can aggregate content based on what you search and also what your friends are searching for.

So what do these kind of technologies mean for marketing today. According to Jerimiah Owyang, writer of Web Strategy ” Marketing as we know it will have to switch to focus on social recommendations.” This is also what Godin talks about is his theory on modern day tribal culture. As technologies like this and the semantic web continue to develop and be adopted we need to develop strategies around hooking the leaders of these tribes or social groups, and then let them do the rest by spreading the word to their friends, and then their friends and it will continue to ripple on.

Watch Godin’s talk on the tribes we lead here.

Leading creative agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently decided to auction off their team of hard working interns on eBay. Creative head Alex Bogusky was behind the idea and launched bidding with a tweet last Saturday, the starting bid at $1.00.

I just had a look, and the current bid is sitting at $5,400 with 6 days and 7 hours to go, that number’s got nowhere to go but up.

So what do you get if you are the winning bidder? The Crispin Porter + Bogusky intern team will put together a creative presentation for you over a three month period, this includes strategies, brand repositioning and concepting. Production or any advertising materials is not included, either is travel expenses or any other collateral for the interns – pick up only.

Every year they spend part of their time working on pro bono assignments so the winning bidder will replace this activity; “It would be great if the high bidder is a cause-related thing,” Mr. Bogusky said. However they have specified that “CP+B reserves the right to decline services in the event of a conflict with any of our existing clients or for any other reason (like if you sell cigarettes) in our sole discretion.”

In a similar vien Art Director Jon Kubik and copywriter Adam Noel who recently left the agency side of life have launched there blog Steal our Ideas.com. Just shy two weeks old the blog is the concepting board for these two creatives to throw out ideas for any agency/ company/ designer to steal if they wish. They have even explicitly stated that they are happy to put together ideas for specific briefs. So if you can’t afford the Crispin interns you can always try these two.