This week I am taking part in a fun experiment with a new startup called Roundtable.    Roundtable describes itself in the following way:

At Roundtable we’re all about empowering meaningful conversations – between thought leaders, between friends, and between curated communities of strangers.

It is a really neat concept and one I became interested in after reading a Roundtable on Startup Funding that was hosted a few weeks ago.  I decided to jump at the chance to have Rockfish host a Roundtable on the Future of Digital Marketing.  After all, we call ourselves a “Digital Innovation Partner” so it is a topic that is at the heart of what we do.  My goal was to bring together Marketers, Venture Capitalists and Startups to discuss and debate on where Digital Marketing will go in the next few years.  We were able to pull together a really world-class group of digital thought leaders including:

• Chris Erb, VP of Brand Marketing for EA SPORTS
• Chris Fralic, Managing Partner at First Round Capital
• Jason Falls, author of “No Bullshit Social Media”
• Jon Steinberg, President of BuzzFeed
• Pete Blackshaw, Global Head of Digital and Social Marketing for Nestle

What is really neat about Roundtable is that anyone can join in the commentary with this great group of all-stars. So please take the time to head over to our Roundtable this week and share your thoughts on the Future of Digital Marketing.

Thanks for the folks at SocialTimes, I came across one of the coolest Kickstarter campaigns that I have seen yet.  ”Kentucky for Kentucky” is aiming to accomplish the following:

With your help, we are going to crowd-fund, produce, and air the most epically kick ass Super Bowl 2012 commercial for the great Commonwealth of Kentucky. For Kentucky by Kentuckians. That’s what it means to a be a Commonwealth. It’s a project that Kentuckians all around the world will be proud to be apart of. Join us, become a Kentuckian.

While I was not born in Kentucky, I have become an adopted son since moving here in 2008.  After all, I married a Kentucky girl and enjoy a good glass of Kentucky bourbon.  So there is nothing I would like to see more than our great state celebrated on the world’s biggest stage.

The campaign has raised $70K thus far but they have a long ways to go in order to reach their goal by November 7th.  I’m hoping that one of the state’s large corporations (Yum! Brand, Humana, or even Zappos) might get behind the cause.  If you agree, please do your part and head over to Kickstarter.

On behalf of Rockfish Brand Ventures, I was invited to give a presentation to the CEO’s and Founders of CincyTech’s portfolio companies on digital marketing.

This week, Facebook will hold its annual F8 Developers Conference in San Francisco.  Much like Apple’s WDC, this event has become the time of year when Facebook announces the biggest changes on their platform.  Given the 800MM+ users on Facebook and the $2 billion plus in advertising spent on the site, that means F8 is in turn a must watch event for Brand Marketers.

So what should Brand Managers be on the lookout for this week?  Based on rumors and leaks, it looks like there should be at least three announcements of interest:

Mini News Feed:

When Facebook is testing new features on the site, they occasionally leak out to the general public.  One such escape into the wild was the “mini news feed” that appears on the top right hand corner of the screen, following a user throughout the site.  This change is pretty significant because it has the potential of changing how people interest on the site, increasing engagement as updates become even more in your face.  This has the potential to be a win for brands for two reasons.   First, there is a good chance that Sponsored Stories will appear here, which only increase the visibility of that ad format.  Second, Brand Page updates will also appear in this feed, increasing the chance that consumers will actually interact with the content your brand publishes.

Facebook Music:

The only area where MySpace still had an edge on Facebook was in entertainment, particularly music.  That looks to change this week with the launch of Facebook Music.  Apparently Facebook will be partnering with at least 5 music services including Spotify to launch a platform similar to Facebook Games.  Much like the way Facebook uses game developers to do the heavy lifting on creating the games, Facebook will be the front end / dashboard for these music services.  Given what Facebook already knows about a users interests / tastes, this will be an interesting angle for music discovery.  It will also be interesting to see how deeply Facebook embeds their Credits system into the music services.  Regardless, music is one of the most popular marketing channels of brands and there will be immediate opportunities for a multitude of music promotions with Facebook now.

Facebook iPad App:

TechCrunch confirmed the news of this launch several weeks ago but this one is way overdue.  Tablets are a great viewing platform for Facebook and its been a glaring miss for both that no app existed.   The launch of app itself doesn’t really create any new opportunities for Facebook but it does create another channel for increased engagement on the platform.

This week The Brandery received some nice news coverage courtesy of local ABC affiliate WCPO.   The coverage came in parallel to a press conference by former Sequoia Capital VC Mark Kvamme who recently served as the Director of the Ohio Department of Development.   The coverage revolved around the effort by The Brandery to create high growth jobs through Consumer Internet startups.

If the above video doesn’t work, you can see the video at http://youtu.be/Z_jH5SRuMbQ

The following post was originally written as a guest post for Rob Go from NextView Ventures.

As LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and other Web 2.0 darlings file to go public, we begin to get a glimpse into the financials behind these companies.  This naturally leads people to speculate on the still private financials of other Web 2.0 leaders such as Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter in particular is an interesting one given that they raised another $800 million at an $8.4 billion valuation.  This valuation is for a company with 200 million users and estimated revenues of around $200 million, equating to a steep multiple of 40 times sales for the microblogging service.

If Twitter is going to prove deserving of this valuation, their success will be directly tied to brand marketers continuing to embrace the service, especially with their ads platform.  In other words, Twitter needs marketers to spend money with them, and in order to do so, it must prove that it is an “effective” tool in the marketing mix.  It is that word “effective” that often proves the stumbling block in these digital discussions, largely due to how the word is misunderstood and in turn, misused.

Generally speaking, when a brand marketer talks about a tool being effective, they are referring to the ROI it generates.  For the most sophisticated marketers, this is accomplished through Marketing Mix Modeling where they can directionally attribute a dollar spent to the short-term return in sales. To further explain this, Forrester has a great overview on the subject.  Direct marketers and retailers take a more direct path in ROI, directly attributing sales to a particular channel. A prime reflection of this is how Dell can claim to have sold $6.5 million through Twitter in 2009 (though it is surprising that Dell has not shared any additional information since 2009, especially given the growth of Twitter’s audience).

Effective can also refer to how well a tool works in the Marketing Funnel.  The traditional funnel includes Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action and Loyalty, though some marketers have reclassified that funnel to instead include Acquire, Engage and Convert.  If a tool is effective in the Marketing Funnel, it means that it allows a brand to succeed in driving one of these strategies.  For instance, TV – or any mass media for that matter – has proven to be an effective tool for driving awareness for years, thus the reason that Super Bowl ads that are known to effectively do this with a very large audience.

So with this definition in mind, the question that naturally arises is if Twitter can be an effective tool for marketers.  For me, I am bullish overall on the potential for Twitter to be effective across each area step in the “Marketing Funnel”.

Twitter’s Role in Acquire

Twitter is a very effective tool for awareness, offering brands a quick and affordable channel to distribute content around a brand launch or campaign.  But one of the other biggest opportunities for Twitter comes from the data that the platform can provide marketers.  As Mark Suster recently wrote, “Twitter is really the place where the public conversation is happening. It is the town hall.”  In this town hall, marketers can uncover significant market research, not only about their brands but also about their competitors and consumers overall.  The Market Research industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and companies like Nielsen and dunnhumby have become massive businesses by providing data and research to brand marketers.  This research and data serves as the first step in almost every marketing strategy as brands determine how to acquire new customers.  One could argue that Twitter is not a representative sample of the population and that is probably true.  However, the heaviest users of Twitter also tend to be influencers and early adopters.  As such, this vocal majority is a solid indicator from a data standpoint of what an influential core of customers might believe.  The data might not be completely scientifically validated but it should be enough to be a basis to guide brand decisions.

Twitter’s Role in Engage

Engagement is one of the areas that Twitter talks about most for their platform.  In fact, they even define engagement with a promoted tweet as being “clicks, retweets, favorites and replies.” There are two major areas where Twitter can drive engagement for brand marketers: customer service and engagement. In regard to customer service, the digitally connected generation turns online before they turn to a 1-800 number.  When a customer today has a bad experience with a brand or product, they often turn online to vent their frustrations.  In the past, an upset customer may vent by just yelling at the person on the customer service hot line and maybe tell two of their friends. Now a simple tweet or post can reach thousands, and maybe even millions.  In turn, brands can use Twitter to engage with their customers and solve customer service problems before they become big customer service problems. The second area of engagement is capitalizing on the trend of brands as publishers, which might be the biggest trend in marketing over the next decade.  Twitter is a great channel to leverage to have your consumers engage with your content.  This is at the heart of what Old Spice did with the “Responses” campaign last year.  It is also one channel that American Express uses for distributing their OPEN Forum content to drive engagement.  This type of positive engagement drives conversion and ultimately advocacy.  Twitter’s business challenge will be how to monetize their role in Brands as Publishers, but they are starting off in a very strong position.

Twitter’s Role in Convert

When it comes to convert, it is really about driving purchase.  Surprisingly, Twitter is emerging as an effective example of social commerce in this regard.  For years, Dell Outlet has famously used the platform to drive several million dollars’ worth of sales.  Meanwhile, fans of LivingSocial have extensively used Twitter to promote the “Share for a free deal” feature, frequently becoming a trending topic on Twitter when they do a national deal, like the Amazon gift certificate deal.  Deals have become a form of “social currency”, often leading people down the path to purchase when they discover a great offer that their friend promoted though social media.  One of the reasons that Twitter has emerged as an effective tool for convert is the “factor”.  When I hear about a deal on Living Social through Twitter, it is coming from a person that I follow and I follow them because I either know them or respect what they have to say, further indicating that this filter is a powerful tool in driving people to convert to purchase.  On the flip side, Twitter’s role as a massive driver of purchases will depend on it further attracting mainstream users, while also recognizing the uniqueness of commerce.  F-Commerce (Facebook commerce) has emerged as a real trend because of the massive share of mainstream users on the platform and high frequency of usage among those users.

What does it all mean?

In many ways, Twitter is at a tipping point when it comes to adaption by brands as a core marketing tool.  As outlined above, Twitter has the potential to be an effective tool for Acquire, Engage and Convert.  However, many brands today are still in experimentation mode with the platform, realizing they need to be there but not knowing best practices for leveraging it fully.  How Twitter engages, educates and ultimately monetizes these brands will make all the difference.

The folks at Get Satisfaction released a simple but telling infographic that shows the top reasons people follow brands online.  You can click through for the full infographic, which covers things like:

• How many brands do people follow on Facebook?
• What happens when people follow a brand?

A couple of weeks ago, the folks at iMedia Connection reached out to me with a provocative question – could I write an article on the 5 startups that could take down Facebook?  I couldn’t resist the prompt so I proceeded to reach out to some of the folks I respect the most in the digital media space including entrepreneurs, investors and brand marketers.  What I uncovered along the way is that Facebook’s biggest threat wont come from a single startups, but likely several emerging trends that could pose a threat.  I’ve reposted the article below or you can read the original over at iMedia Connection.

5 trends that could take down Facebook

It’s hard to argue Facebook’s momentum. We are talking about a company that has over 500 million active users, was valued by Goldman Sachs at $50 billion in January 2011 (and $75 billion by secondary markets in March 2011), and is so popular that Hollywood made an Oscar-winning movie about its beginnings. You are also talking about a platform where every month, more than 250 million people engage on external websites, with 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites having integrated with Facebook.

Given this momentum, it’s tough to envision a future where Facebook is not one of the dominant players in the digital landscape. But at the same time, history is littered with the stories of digital goliaths who stumbled from their pedestal (think Netscape, AOL, Myspace, etc.) Could this same fate be in store for Facebook?

That is the very question I posed to a group of entrepreneurs, digital marketers, and venture capitalists. Could they see a future where Facebook’s dominance has been challenged by a new breed of start-ups? And if so, what start-ups today could one day “take down” Facebook?

From those discussions, it appears there isn’t a single “Facebook killer” that will sink the social networking giant. Instead, Facebook is faced with the emergence of several themes (and multiple start-ups) that could one day prove a threat to their business.

Here are five emerging themes that Facebook should be afraid of.

Creation of vertical, interest based networks
The very thing that led to Facebook’s growth (a standardized and unified experience) could also prove to be a kink in its armor. Gautam Gupta from General Catalyst Partners pointed out to me that “Facebook’s market share of time spent on web is driven by the utility it provides to consumers as a social network.” This broad social network will continue to have its place, but people are increasingly being drawn to vertical and interest based networks to meet specific needs.

A prime example can be seen in the business world where you have LinkedIn going public with over 100 million members, Quora gaining tremendous traction through its appeal to the start-up ecosystem and ResearchGate connecting 900,000 scientists in more than 192 countries. You could argue that any of these communities could be built on Facebook, but their success proves the appeal of a concentrated, interest based network. The appeal of niche networks extends beyond just business. For instance, GirlsGuideTo bills itself as the “ladies only” guide to 20-something lives on everything within the good, bad, ugly, and taboo.

Notions of trust and privacy
The issues Facebook has faced with privacy have been well documented, ranging from the launch of Beacon to debates around privacy settings on the site. This has continued with their latest product launches, as some have remarked that a major barrier to Facebook Places is the fact it broadcasts to an extended Facebook social network versus the more curated personal networks of a service like Foursquare.
This notion of trust and privacy is going to continue to grow as a theme that consumers are deeply concerned about in the coming years. For instance, Diaspora is a new, open-sourced social network that was created specifically as a response to the privacy “hiccups” of Facebook. Its mission is pretty succinctly stated through Diaspora’s tagline of “Share what you want, with whom you want.” Path builds upon this by creating what it calls a “personal social network” composed of only your closest friends and family. This “personal social network” is reinforced by limiting a person to only 50 connections on the site. In a more practical application, Ziplist creates a private way for me to easily share my grocery shopping list with other household members. After all, the entire world doesn’t need to see when we need to pick up toilet paper.

Discovery of people, places, and information
Some of the most interesting start-ups today focus on helping people with “discovery” of new people, places and information. For instance, Color provides “elastic social networks” based on where you take photos, what’s in them and what’s around you when you do. StumbleUpon and Tumblr provide a similar sense of discovery on the web. At the core of this discovery ability is the “permission premise” that was called out by Nick Seguin, a partner at Dynamit and Manager of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. As Seguin pointed out to me: “The majority of people utilize the Facebook platform to keep up with acquaintances versus consuming important information. Twitter and Tumblr allow this discovery of information without having to worry about a relationship (or a perceived one.) It’s important for individuals to curate the information I consume in those environments. The friend dynamic is great, but also restrictive for Facebook in this regard.”

Joe Medved from Softbank points to mobile as another particular area of “discovery” that could prove a hurdle for Facebook. According to Joe, “Social networking services focused on discovering others, where you can build a somewhat virtual persona, or better yet an embellished version of your real persona, have potential. Ninety percent of social networking users in Japan don’t use their real name, which is why there are 3 social networks, 4 if you count Twitter, with around 20 million users, as opposed to one dominant player like Facebook. The vast majority of social networking activity in Japan is on mobile phones. As smartphone penetration goes more mainstream in the US, mobile centric social networking services leveraging smartphone capabilities have the potential to take share from Facebook.”

Need to motivate human contact
With the rise of digital over the past decade, the definition of “friends” has certainly changed. While Facebook was started with the intent of being only focused on real relationships, the site has evolved to the point where your social network is much broader. At the same time, you could argue it is really not enough to have an online only relationship or even one that is primarily digital (i.e., the folks from high school you haven’t seen in over a decade but are “friends” on Facebook.) This has left the door open for companies who motivate in person interaction. One such company that capitalizes on this inherent Facebook weakness is Meetup, whose mission is to “to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize.” It is a mission that is definitely working, with over 250,000 monthly Meetups in over 46,000 cities worldwide.

While Meetup was one of the first to recognize that digital could actually be an enabler of human contact, many more have followed suit. For instance, Skillshare allows you to “learn anything from anyone” by connecting with folks in your community who have a skill to share. GrubWithUs tackles the problem of meeting new people in the years after college by “building friendships over food.” Wednesdays takes a similar approach of meeting over food, but is instead focused on coordinating lunches within an organization. All of these companies are capitalizing on the basic need for human interaction, but using digital in new and unique ways to do so.

Consolidation, curation, and control of entertainment
On the backs of social gaming companies like Zygna, Playdom, and Playfish, Facebook has emerged as a major player in the world of gaming, helping invent a new category along the way. But outside of “social games,” Facebook has been slow to capitalize on entertainment as an overall vertical. This was one major reason that Myspace briefly attempted to rebrand as a “social entertainment” site focused on sharing and finding music, television, games, and movies. And in a more successful example, this is why services like Pandora, YouTube, and Hulu have been able to flourish in their respective spaces.

Given the size of the entertainment vertical and its importance to consumers, it is somewhat surprising that Facebook is still largely ignoring the space. This opens the door for additional companies to move into the consolidation, curation, and control of entertainment. For instance, Rovio was able to create its Angry Birds franchise without overreliance on the social graph of Facebook, instead focusing on iOS and Android. This move towards mobile also opens up new opportunities to monetize entertainment leveraging platforms like TapMe. Outside of gaming, you have other start-ups combining elements of social networking with entertainment. As an example, Spotify has 10 million subscribers — one million of which are paying subscribers — in Europe that have created 200 million playlists. Spotify specifically calls out “social music” as a feature that makes it easy to share everything you listen to on Spotify with your friends including tracks and playlist.

Conclusion: Facebook is the suburbs
There is no question Facebook will continue to dominate the digital landscape in the coming years. But there is a very real chance that alternatives will emerge reflecting the evolving needs of our population. As Phin Barnes from First Round Capital stated when I asked his opinion: “One argument is that Facebook is the suburbs and we need to see networks that more closely resemble the diversity of dense urban living and the trust/community of small rural towns.” In this regard, Facebook’s biggest threat might just be the needs and wants of the same constantly evolving community that built it in the first place.

The other day, my friend Gareth Kay was saying that his meme on “we need a new idea about ideas” was growing tired.  Leave it to Gareth to make that comment only to have a new idea in his back pocket to unleash on the world.

Which leads us to the below presentation entitled “Think Small” that Gareth presented this past week at Future Flash 2011, an event in Collingwod, Canada curated by Contagious Magazine for the Institute of Communication Agencies.  In the presentation, Gareth rips against the idea of “Big Ideas” and “Big Audiences” , arguing that “we’ve confused the end with the means.”  In the midst of this argument, he even manages to mix it some brilliant Tom Fishburne cartoons.

All in all, its a great new presentation by Gareth and one I hope to see in person someday soon.

Side note – Slide 42 might just be the most brilliant t-shirt ever… “Houston, we have an opportunity.”  Well done.

On Saturday, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the inaugural Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Florida.  As you would expect, Mashable put together a stellar line-up of speakers (myself excluded).  The below is the presentation that I gave on how brands and startups can work together in mutually beneficial partnerships.