A new report from Yahoo! and MediaVest describes the behavior of a group of consumers called “Passionistas.” With only the press release to go on, I’m assuming what sets these consumers apart from brand “evangelists” is overall involvement in an interest versus a specific manufacturer. The stats that they released are interesting:

While this speaks volumes about the value of aligning an image with a lifestyle segment, and the importance of psychographic targeting, it does not address the potential threat that this group can pose to a company. The study also mentions that this group performs over 100 searches a year related to their interest area and uses tools such as RSS to stay updated with related news and sites, implying that they are hyper-aware of related developments. This hawkish attention can result in teapot tempests around developments that would be considered minor by the general public - say an inattentive rep at an event, discontinuing distribution through a store, or a trademark dispute. All of these relatively trivial business decisions have caused real-life outrage among isolated groups in the past, as once fond consumers turned quickly on brands they had embraced. A high-profile example of this is the current iPhone unlock/bricking “scandal”, where a software update temporarily rendered a tiny portion of phones inoperable. But the small number that were affected are owned by the “Passionistas” of tech, who are the most vocal and connected. And though Apple has a stellar 20+year record of embracing its evangelists, the last two months (starting with the $200 price drop) have created an increasingly negative perception of a formerly “untouchable” brand. An extreme example, to be sure, but one that advertisers would be well served to keep in mind as they look to engage their customers through personal interests, and realize that the commitment needs to extend much deeper than hanging a logo at an event.

Local Online Advertising to Nab $7.8 Billion by 2011, released by eMarketer today, sheds light on how far local advertisers have to go to reach their increasingly online audience. While the revenue crunch for newspapers and the stagnant state of the radio industry (overtaken by online this year in the US) is due to national advertisers moving their budgets online, $97 billion is still spent on offline local advertising. In many markets, the decline in offline usage is far outpacing online growth. The current projections look mainly at display and search ads, and rightly so, as they make up the lion’s share of local advertising options currently. But one would think that in the near future, a bevy of new options will be open to smaller businesses. Local bloggers are growing their audiences by leaps and bounds, with restaurant reviews, local events, community news, etc., and smaller businesses are usually a key component of the neighborhood. A blogger relationship program is low cost and high impact, especially when the marketer is a known personality. Likewise, when mobile finally finds a way to use GPS-enabled ads on a wider scale, the threat to radio potentially becomes much greater. While the barrier to entry with these mediums is more knowledge/comfort than financial, it is only a matter of time before spending accelerates to catch consumer adoption.

From DM news, via MarketingVox: Internet may be a threat to local newspapers - while not a shock to anyone that has used craigslist, digg, Citysearch, or Google News before, the outlook is probably gets even worse as media evolves. I mean this not just from the shift of news consumption from dedicated news sites to news aggregators, but also from the growing incorporation of news feeds into social media platforms. With the recent hype around Google Reader on Facebook as an example, more and more users will consume their news in areas where the editorial board is composed of your peers. What’s more, these platforms have much greater resources to develop new ways of consuming raw content and much higher reach to make it worthwhile. Once integrated into mobile (which is already happening, albeit slowly), the relevance and utility of a local newspaper will slip even further. Of note is the fact that national newspapers actually increased online traffic over the course of the study cited in the article. Areas such as international news and government access are ones that it will be difficult/impossible for bloggers and citizen journalist to replace, and the larger papers will continue to grow their value based on that. What brings this back to marketing, however, is that the decline in readership on- and offline is far outpacing local marketers adjusting their media plans, leaving a gap that no new platform is completely prepared to fill.

Virtual worlds: The next Facebook? - CNN.com is an interesting article about the predicted boom of the “metaverse”, 3D interactive worlds where users interact via avatar. While I understand the attraction of immersion and rich experience, I think many of these studies overlook a key point- to truly represent a physical world there needs to be some perceived separation of the user from information. I.E., for me to believe that I’m on an island, the palm tree needs to be certain distance from me, the cabana another, and the sponsored kiosk yet another, and the time I spend getting from Point A to Point B helps reinforce the perception. When I’m online now, I have the convenience of accessing a multitude of information and sources immediately from my homepage, facebook page, search results, etc., and that’s a key advantage that I’d be sacrificing in 3D. Also, it is much easier (and faster) to scan text than other media- I would be hugely annoyed if the Washington Post or BoingBoing were only available via video or podcast, and the same is true with over 90% of the content I read everyday.

Much more intriguing, however, is the theoretical inverse of the metaverse, the geoweb. As dorky as it sounds, the ability to bring online in to “meatspace” will be much more valuable, IMHO, than bringing the inconvenience of the physical world online for most non-social, recreational uses. Being able to access limitless information wherever I am about a certain place, and read messages from other people about where to go, historical info, and which of my friends are nearby is very compelling, and has been hyped at this point much less. It also has the potential to be much more powerful for marketers in the next 3-5 years (think retail promotions, travel info, mobile advertising) than the metaverse will be in 10. I got through that whole post without mentioning the recent Second Life bank run! Whoops…

As it has now become obligatory to write up a post on Facebook on any blog with anything to do with Web 2.0, I will now end my holdout with a hopefully original take on the hype. With the growth of the “fb” population coming from mainly the 25 and older crowd, the groups and communities are beginning to reflect the aging populace. And while the hype among marketers has been focused on how to tap into the platform to reach user communities, something I haven’t seen covered is how the platform could change the game for b-to-b marketers. While this might seem crazy from a traditional media planning perspective, the tools being used by coeds to plan keggers can easily be adopted to hawk consulting services. The groups on Facebook range from niche to mainstream, but there is a much higher rate of participation, and there are a surprising (at least to me) number of media and industry influencers who regularly participate and engage members of the public groups. True, being a member of the Web 2.0 (and Redskins) groups will skew my opinion, but groups are being formed at a pace that it is easy to imagine a much wider range of industries and professions with similar representation in the near future. The normal playbook for targeting a specific industry is composed of a combination of email lists, trade media, SEO, and events, which all carry a heavy premium to micro-target. A B-to-B marketer can easily identify, join and participate in groups as an individual (though if you’re spammy, you’ll be kicked) and create a targeted widget for a fraction of the cost of any of the traditional strategies. Combine this with the higher response rates (versus email and banners), and a Social Network strategy suddenly seems less insane. Now, if only Linkedin would allow pictures….

Digg founder Kevin Rose made a brief but momentous post on his blog yesterday, announcing that Microsoft was now the exclusive ad provider for the premiere social news service. While more than a few have commented on what this will mean in the near term, I haven’t seen as much attention paid to what this might mean for Microsoft’s AdCenter platform and its customers. Digg announced a while ago that they would be extending the service to product and restaurant reviews which will be a very compelling offering for marketers. While too much of the content voted to prominence now focuses on wacky pictures and fringe politics (mixed with great tech news), the real potential of digg comes into play when it can help users not just find what’s what’s massively popular, but also discover peer-vetted niche areas of content. And as great a tool as it potentially could be, it becomes extremely compelling when integrated with the Window Live Services. While it is great that Google Maps now includes reviews when it can find them, a consistent and comprehensive review source such as the diggnation would be much more predictable, and in the long term, reliable. The same kind of potential can be seen when looking at Search or MSN Shopping as well. Combined with earlier Facebook agreement, Microsoft is doing more than gaining eyeballs, they are advancing a smart web strategy.

Advertising Age’s “What’s Plaguing Viral Marketing” is an interesting counterpoint to the excitement about viral marketing. Based on conclusions of research that discounts the importance of “influencers”, the article presents the idea that marketers are headed in the wrong direction focusing on finding the few people with disproportionate influence that will transform a campaign into a phenomena. It is true that majority of such campaigns fail to catch on, and too many marketers try to catch lightning in a bottle with me-too tactics that have worked for others without considering that what worked for sneakers might not be right for pet care. But this article goes even farther based on what I am sure is a very elaborate computer model. Tom Hespos gives a good overview on why creative shortcomings might be responsible for most viral campaigns falling short, versus concluding that good ol’ mass marketing is what brands should consider (which is oddly enough what the article seems to suggest). I think there is an even bigger hole in this line of thinking, however, and it is based on the assumption that influencers are solely individuals that interact with one community.

Without knowing the ins and outs of Mr. Watts’ model, and drawing on the experience that we have from creating and planning campaigns that get picked up and spread by users all the time, I can say with confidence that it over-simplifies the real world landscape by a large margin. First, the idea that that an influential individual is “several times” more influential than an average consumer is bizarre, considering that an “ordinary” person may or may not blog, and if they do, their average readership is usually less than 10. Most of the bloggers that marketers target have audiences in the tens of thousands or even millions, which would seem to indicate there is a large magnitude of difference between the model and reality. If this difference is because the research uses a flat, peer-to-peer network as its basis, fine, but the article should have mentioned it. Also potentially misleading is the idea that marketers focus on finding individuals as opposed to groups or communities. A person who’s opinion carries weight in one community might be meaningless in another, or may be regarded as scripture in yet another. Knowing what to place where is often more important than who, and only by having a comprehensive understanding about how different communities (vs individuals) feed each other can marketers change viral from hit-or-miss to a key part of their strategy. Users will embrace great ideas, and the challenge is having them in the right format at the right time, not so much hitting up the same .1% of the population over and over again (or hiring a network of people to chase them, for that matter). I don’t know many people in marketing who really believed that if you found the 10 super-influencers you could collect your check and go home, but it is a stretch to apply an abstract model to a much more complicated environment.