Alliance Blog Reviews

Google has again shaken the Internet tree in a way that will raise more than a few eyebrows. In a nutshell, Google is reassessing its working relationship with the world’s largest potential market, China, as a result of recent security breaches. How this plays out over time could have significant impact on how China and the world get along economically. Google’s official blog gives an overview in the first paragraph of the post that is both informative and scary. Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. How it was different is that the targets of much of security breach were Chinese activists (read: people who prefer freedom over censorship) who had Gmail accounts. A quick summary of the main points of this new approach to China from Google is summed up like this. It wasn’t just Google who was targeted and hit. There were 20 other US companies and they are apparently in the process of sorting this out themselves. Google states: “We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves. “ There was routine third party access of Gmail accounts of human rights activists related to China who are based in China, US and Europe. This access is likely due to malware and phishing scams. Google then recommends for folks to be up to date on their security for their computers and is careful to “play nice” with China by saying In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today. They also point out that when they entered the Chinese market in 2006 they were doing it with a watchful eye. So what’s the result of this? These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised. So Google makes a stand that says they are not going to censor their results and if there is no way to reconcile then they may need to move on. While the Chinese people are clearly in favor of Baidu as their engine of choice , if Google were to say that they will not do business in China what kind of pressure does that place on other companies to possibly isolate the biggest and fastest developing market in the world? This could get interesting.

Excerpt from:
Google and China: Maybe They Can’t Get Along

The online space is certainly trying hard to cut the apron strings associated with traditional media techniques and practices. It can be hard though, to completely separate from something that may still have value. Think about how nice it was (or still is) to go back “home” and get that meal that you just can’t make on your own. While you never want to be back there 24 / 7 again there are certain things that are part of our past that will always have great value and we get to take the best of those things with us. The same concept may apply to the Internet marketing world as well. As much as we try to break away and create our own identity separate from the traditional world of content generation, advertising, PR and every other piece of the overall marketing mosaic, there may be some things that will always have a place. One of them might even be snail mail. An article in the Wall Street Journal talks about how there may be certain aspects of snail mail that carry importance even in the rush to digitize everything in our business lives. While not right for every business, part of the relationship building that we talk of as the most important aspect of the social web can be cemented with a good old fashioned handwritten note. For instance: Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company’s annual direct mailing. Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year. “We realized we had made a huge mistake,” says Ms. Settle, president of the New York firm. This is one of the dangers of taking established businesses and preaching that since online is the wave of the future that you need to go there. Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead into the future! Sure businesses do need to evolve but to what extent is completely dependent on what kind of business it is, what their existing customers are used to and how new customers can be attracted to the offerings. As a result, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so there may be room to get rid of some traditional marketing that is certainly unproductive in the new world order while keeping others. These “old school” activities like handwritten thank you notes and other techniques now are part of the whole social marketing fabric that can serve to benefit the new and the old customers. They are actually part of social media. The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners “to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have,” he says. Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. “The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers,” Mr. Anderson says. Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it. So how do you incorporate the best of the old and the new in your business? Have you made a “pendulum swing” adjustment and taken away too much of what was once effective? Did you then find that part of the old way of doing things could still serve you well? Where is the happy medium and what might it look like moving forward?

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Can Snail Mail Be Part of Social Media?

The Marketing Executives Networking Group is a group of 2000 marketing executives (10 points if you already guessed that ) at the VP level and higher. Recently, the group’s leadership asked members to name their favorite blogs by non-MENG members—and guess who was part of the top 20? Oh, I guess the title kind of gave it away, didn’t it? That’s right, Marketing Pilgrim . Seth Godin’s blog took top honors, with 59% of execs naming that as a favorite. Mashable was second with 38%. Tied for third were Chris Brogan’s Community and Social Media and Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World (30% each). One in five named Tom Peters’ blog , tied with Duct Tape Marketing to round out the top five (with six blogs ). The rest of the top twenty: Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba’s Church of the Customer Brian Solis’s PR 2.0 David Armano’s Logic + Emotion David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now Denise Lee Yohn’s Brand as Business Bites Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy John Moore’s Brand Autopsy Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice Mack Collier’s The Viral Garden Shelly Palmer’s MediaBytes Steve Hall’s AdRANTs Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent What do you think? Are there any you’re surprised to see there? What do you think is missing?

The rest is here:
Marketing Pilgrim One of Top 20 Most Read Marketing Blogs

As marketing professionals, we usually have to justify ourselves to our bosses, our clients and everyone in between—especially in the less-tested, sometimes-hit-or-miss arena of social media. But now Ad Age wants accountability, too, as they ask “if you’re getting enough out of all the volunteer work you do for Biz & Ev and Mark,” or, more specifically, “Are we all just toiling mightily to make a bunch of rich nerds (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his employees and investors, Twitter’s Biz Stone and Evan Williams and their employees and investors) richer, while we impoverish ourselves?” That’s both a literal and a figurative question, since using those social networks is exactly what makes their founders and investors money (well, sort of), and, as the argument goes, we’re essentially a volunteer labor force creating content for these sites—an interesting point. Meanwhile, using social networks (at all, as the argument here seems to go) means sacrificing time (true), actual interactions (possibly true but not always)—and our very souls and identities. They mean this to be a discussion on a personal level, since a central thrust of the argument is that these social networks have sacrificed so much of our privacy that we’re allowing them to steal (don’t we call that “giving” in English?) “the sole ownership of our own thoughts, emotions, personal expressions, etc.” from us (yes, if I post “I’m sad” on a social network, that means that they also own my emotion…. right….). Of course, if you’re using Twitter and Facebook as a marketer, you’re there looking for business ROI from publicity—being public. Ad Age (you know, “Advertising” Age? About . . . could it be . . . advertising ?) does acknowledge that social networks might work for these purposes, if they’re worth the sacrifice: If you’re a brand marketer, chances are good that you’re extracting real value from investing time and energy in social media (and you’re happy to have consumers volunteering their time to be your “brand ambassadors” or whatever you want to call them); good for you. (And if you’re a consumer who gets off on connecting with big brands — or just wants to interface with customer service in a forum, like Twitter, where certain marketers seem to be hyper-responsive — well, good for you too.) In general, if you’re soft-selling something — like content or an idea — that can benefit from free publicity, Facebook and Twitter are your friends. Even if, well, they’re the two-faced sort who think nothing of riffling through your handbag or backpack when you get up to go the bathroom — you know, glad-handing “friends” (those are air quotes) who are obviously using you for something, only it’s not always entirely clear what. Um . . . I hate to bring this up, but aren’t we as marketers just using our social networks as those same kind of “friends” (and possibly even the friends and fans we acquire on those social networks)—we’re just using them as the means to an end? I do agree, of course, that on a personal level, excessive use of social media can rob us of time and valuable interaction with the people we care about most. It’s good to examine our relationship with the Internet and social media on a personal level and decide whether it’s really worth the time and effort we put into it, or if we might put that time to better use. While that’s the brief summary of the argument at the conclusion of the article, the main thrust is that using social networks is such a great sacrifice of ourselves (even without a time investment) that it’s not worth it. What do you think? Do you demand ROI from personal social network use? Or are you glad that most people don’t ?

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Are You Getting Enough out of Twitter & Facebook?

We in the online world take every opportunity to turn our nose up at traditional media like newspapers because they are so 1900’s. Just take a look over the past year of posts that I have done and I at times can lead that charge. For the record, I do not relish in the fact that newspapers are going by the way side in many ways. I see that they are and it’s hard not to notice. It’s not the idea of newspapers in general that is the trouble, it’s their slow adoption of the online space and the price they are paying that is most difficult to watch. Put simply I would hate to see newspapers “go away”. It’s not likely that there will be no newspapers someday but it is likely that the consolidation and attrition in the industry will continue. Many in the online space so “So what?! Goodbye and good riddance!” I don’t. The reason I don’t has nothing to do with the nostalgia of newspapers. If I never got ink on my hands again from flipping the pages I would survive. What does scare me, however, is just how the news is actually uncovered and then reported if there was not the front line of the traditional media. A recent study in the Baltimore metro area showed that while there is significantly fewer traditional media outlets in the area the remaining ones are still responsible for the reporting of 95% of the “first run” news. The New York Times reports : Looking at six major story lines that developed over one week last July, 83 percent of the reports in local news media “were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information,” said the study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center. Despite diminished resources of established news organizations, “of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95 percent, came from old media — most of them newspapers,” it said. “These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.” 95%? That’s a little scary if you are trumpeting the end of the newspaper medium. From an advertisers perspective it’s easy to pick on the industry but from a news uncovering and development perspective we need to be careful to not cut our online noses off to spite our face. So is Baltimore indicative of the rest of the country? Maybe, maybe not. What is of interest though is that people crave information. They crave details on events. Let’s forget about the mindless blather of the celebrity world. If you want something that superficial and fluffy then anyone can produce it. It doesn’t matter. If a mistake is made in reporting about Oprah Winfrey’s weight we’ll all survive. In things that truly impact lives it is still the job of “journalists” to report and to hopefully give the information without bias (I know, I know that doesn’t happen but one can dream….). It’s at that point that bloggers and the like can comment and help shape the news. Where are you on this one? Would it really be a good thing if newspapers and their reporting dried up and went away? Are there enough credible and scalable online news agencies to cover the amount of “stuff” that is generated and deemed important in each new 24-hour period? I don’t think so. As a result, I am a little concerned about what might actually happen if the online world got its wish and made the newspaper industry disappear. Your thoughts?

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Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News

It’s true to state that different businesses take different approaches to using social media, whether that is blogging, tweeting, creating facebook groups and fan pages or utilising LinkedIn . Small businesses have gained online advantage with their small size flexibility giving them the confidence to stand out for their brand and engage with their audience. It’s key to online success for all business sizes that the “social” element of social media and twitter is really appreciated. Both the smaller, and large businesses which do well in social media are those who embrace with open arms the opportunities it gives. Small businesses are doing well because: - They are taking advantage of their size and “knowing their customer” - They often have just one person tweeting for the firm and no chain of command to define the social media approach. - They socialise and build real business relationships on Twitter and other social media platforms, in the way that traditionally they would offline at places like the Chamber of Commerce. And – it is much cheaper to do so! Larger businesses shouldn’t be afraid to get involved on Twitter and other social platforms. As an organisation you can learn from listening to what is already happening in your area of expertise by using Twitter Search to check out content, tone and discussions, as well as googling to find out if competitors are using social media, and how. Twitter and other socialmedia platforms can work well because business does work on trusted connections, and the online medium of Twitter is just the new extension of that. Businesses will do best when they work within the context of their own environments and answer the unspoken questions (Is it safe for my business, won’t it take too much time, what if it goes wrong, what if an employee talks about us or our work…) honestly and up front before taking action online. At the same time, if you’re not involved you’re missing a great opportunity, and if you don’t test the waters, you’ll never know if it works for your business. When you do dip a toe in the water, you’ve got all those experiences built from networking offline in the “real world” in the corporate environment. Use the right people, who are interested in social media and your subject, and you’re off and running and born to tweet! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Big Business: Don’t lose out to small businesses on Twitter

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Big Business: Don’t lose out to small businesses on Twitter

It’s been more than two years since Google’s last big big to enter a government-regulated offline business. They offered some $4.6B for wireless spectrum in an auction in 2008, but it seemed that the multi-billion bid was merely a ploy to get some of their demands for the spectrum met. But that’s not quite the case with Google’s recent application to buy and sell power “much like utility companies do,” according to the New York Times . Google told the Federal Energy Regulation Commission that they need this capability to support their power-hungry facilities with more renewable energy sources. Google created a subsidiary last month, Google Energy, to handle this. As the NYT points out, this isn’t Google’s first look at energy: This is hardly Google’s first foray into the energy world. Over the years, Google has invested in renewable energy projects through its philanthropic and venture capital units. It has also embarked on a number of engineering projects and partnerships to, for example, advance plug-in hybrids and offer tools to measure home electricity usage. And it has an ambitious goal to help develop renewable energy that is cheaper than coal. Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar, discussed many of those initiatives and goals in a lengthy interview with The New York Times published on Thursday. Google insists that they’re not getting into the market to trade energy, but if their application is approved, they could sell any surplus energy they own. What do you think? Is this just Google’s carbon-neutrality quest, or a back-door entry into another market?

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Google Applies to Enter Energy Market