1. Agencies providing online advertising for top brands have no clue how to target online influencers
   
2. Online advertising skill sets are vastly different from traditional MSM advertising
3. Ad agencies lack understanding of the social web, and still see online advertising as display or pay per click only
   

Point 1: Using Influencer ID Tools Will Deliver The Audience Targets

Peter Whoriskey of the WaPo had a great post, Brought to You by .... Anyone? on how major brands are slow to move their sponsorship budgets to the web. In the article there were some great quotes that struck me:

Penry Price, Google's vice president of North American advertising sales, noted that while it is relatively easy to do demographic targeting in other media, it is more difficult to get precise information about online audiences for a given Web site. Consider, for example, an advertiser trying to reach young women interested in fashion.

"We know they're online, and they may be online more than they are watching TV or reading magazines, but there's no easy way to find them right now," Price said. The process of adapting to online media is "a fundamental challenge for the entire advertising industry."

Okay, Penry, Google VP of ad sales for NA, is right in regards to audiences for a given website, but the fact is the technology does exist today to target young women in fashion. Penry's quote reinforces the point that ad agencies have no clue how to target online advertising to influencers. They are still stuck in the MSM mindset that the site owner will provide the audience stats. There are other means at getting at this data. It takes work, but it is doable.

Coming from the word of mouth marketing and reputation management field in online marketing, we are often shocked at how few online advertising strategies focus on influencer targeting. By leveraging subject matter influencer identifcation tools such as Collective Intellect and Umbria, we actually can narrow ad targets to those sites, blogs and forums where young women interested in fashion visit.

But, again, it's not just the fact of finding those blogs and running banner advertising and sponsorships. It's about creating content that will put your company right in front of those niche audiences.

New analysis tools are there to dive even further into creating deeply targeted campaigns that connect the common threads of your audience. What does this mean? It means that a company just doesn't target fashion blogs. What they need to do is find the common "tribal" thread that runs through that entire target audience of women and fashion.

So imagine the analysis about young women interested in fashion also tells you that these individuals have a high affinity for social causes, discussions on urban travel destinations and a love for Coldplay.

NOW YOU HAVE A CAMPAIGN PLATFORM, not a just a target demographic to push your advertising to.

With this kind of research and understanding of the audience, big advertisers can truly connect through the "passion threads" of their target consumer. By connecting on a deeper, more meaningful level big brands will see greater acceptance, success and visibility online.

What Does A "Passion Thread" Campaign Look Like?

Sticking to the young women and fashion target, imagine a campaign idea that promotes user generated content involvement spearheaded by a fashion icon, donates a certain dollar amount to a major social cause for every UGC upload and awards a grand prize of an all expense trip for four to New York City to see Coldplay live in concert.

So now the targets and messaging go beyond the fashion blogs and sites. You have a common passion thread in multiple niche markets (social causes, music) that gives you the ability to run sponsorship on sites outside of the fashion world and influence and connect with other passionate users.

"If you are responsible for a brand that has been around for 50 years, you clearly are more cautious," said Kelly Twohig, who manages digital investment for Starcom, a media agency. "You have less license to innovate."

I think what Kelly is really saying in regards to less license to innovate is that you just can't take uncalculated risks. So by doing the influencer research upfront and presenting the data about the passion threads, and building the campaign and online media buying targets to tie those passions together, one can signifcantly reduce the risk and increase the probability for success. That's what the client is looking for.

Point 2: New Skill Sets Needed

Another issue is the skill sets required in online advertising. It's not the same game as traditional main stream advertising. There needs to be integration with the interactive team, development of a community manager role, definition of an online conversion, split testing mechanisms in place to make adjustments on the fly, online tracking and sentiment analysis.

I've heard the horror stories from large branding agencies that dived into online advertising only to find out they struggle to understand how to bring all of the necessary tracking, split testing and data and sentiment analysis together to define what would make the campaign a success or not.

For one thing, the largest chunk of money spent for online ads is in search advertising, those little text ads that run beside search results. These ads do not directly benefit companies putting information online. Instead, the money from search advertising is reaped by the search engines -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- that run them.

Listen, PPC search advertising is pretty easy. Yeah there's a science to it and it takes time and attention, but the goal of any brand advertising is to increase awareness and positive sentiment about a brand. So by default keyword PPC advertising is just one of many tools, but it stil dominates the majority of the budget.

Point 3: Embracing the Social Web. Beyond Banner and PPC Advertising

In the WaPo article, Rob Wrubel, chief executive of the online ad company that works for University of Phoenix, the nation's leading buyer of online sponsorship states that he:

...wants to encourage faculty members to have blogs so that when a person searches on a given subject, the results might lead them to the University of Phoenix. He speculates that the company could produce reality-TV "webisodes" involving people going back to school -- a way to find and engage the target audience.

Bingo. Rob has the vision for what is next and what will drive immersion for online branding. I've been saying this for a while, that the most effective online branding tool for companies would be to have their employees actively engaged and involved in social media.

The employee base is the most valuable and underutilized tool in the marketing shed. The more the employees get involved in the medium the more connections there are to spread the word about the organization or campaign. Not to mention the more insights the employees can deliver to the marketing team. I've posted my position about companies embracing employees engaging in social media on the Endless Wormhole blog.

The next wave is about understanding the common threads of your audience and creating content that is relevant and important to them. Brands need to start thinking of themselves as content publishers and looking at ways to increase there social web footprints through employee participation in social media sites, blogs, podcasts, online customer support, events, etc. It's all there, waiting for the taking.

Podcasting
Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don't forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.

The Podcasts Section: what does it offer?

After we all had some time to play around with this section and get a feel for its popularity it is time to get down and dirty and figure out how to use it to promote your podcast. Instead of following the traditional "newest items first" scheme used in every other section, the digg team decided to sort podcasts by lifetime diggs. The basic idea is that each podcast is represented in order from highest diggs to lowest with the image, title and short description of each podcast as well as the good old Digg This button. Those curious enough to dig deeper have noticed that once you are on an individual podcast page, Digg proudly allows everyone to vote for individual shows within a podcast. While the diggs you get for individual shows do not reflect on the grand total for your show, they seem to play a significant role in the "Upcoming Podcasts" section featured on the main podcasting page.

The visibility of the Podcasting section is incredible, but after 2 long months, getting to that page is extremely difficult for an up-and-coming podcast. To make matters worse, and crush your hopes of getting recognized for your great podcasting talent, 6 out of 10 Revision3 (Digg's videocasting company) shows reside snugly on that front page without a chance of being pushed out. To gratify your work and challenge the front-page status quo you must not look to digg, but rather your own subscribers.

Tips on utilizing Podcast Feature to promote your Show.

The plan is simple. You need to utilize your listeners and subscribers to increase your visibility on digg, which in turn will drive more traffic to your podcast and get you more subscribers. To help you through this process, digg has some great tools for us to use. Recently they updated the embeddable "Digg This" buttons for your site in order to be smarter and less intrusive than ever. Here are a few tips on how to take advantage of them while promoting your podcast:

-Include digg button in your posts and on your site. With each blog post or in a designated location on your site there should be a "digg this" button embedded. After these tips there is a quick step-by-step guide explaining how to do it in more detail. You have 2 styles to choose from and you can change out the background color, but that's it, you cannot change the color of the link, nor use something other than yellow if its not your color. If the button does not work with your design or for personal reasons, you can just include a link to your podcast section on Digg with an encouraging and, possibly, a life-threatening message. Before you ask "Can I add the button to my iTunes podcast page?" the answer is "No," iTunes does not allow you to embed or link to anything other than your home page. Your best bet is to verbally ask your listeners to ether go to your site and digg your show, or direct them to your podcast page on digg.

-Include a link to the individual show page in your blog posts. This should be your number one priority because the diggs you get for individual podcasts directly determine if your podcast is worthy to be featured in the "Upcoming Podcasts" sidebar. There is no easy way to do this, and sadly the "smart" digg this button isn't smart enough to recognize the links pointing to the individual pages. To add insult to injury, there is no way to know the link to that page beforehand (although, they are all sequential and you can just +1 the number at the end of the link), so you are stuck with doing some mouse work after you get the URL and including it in your blog post that way. Some of you are beginning to wounder if you can just skip this step, but like I said earlier, the upcoming podcasts sidebar is a great way to promote your podcast. And the diggs that individual shows get seem to be a significant influence in getting featured there, so prompting your audience to digg the individual shows is very important.

-Promote your digg account and encourage your listeners to add you as a friend. Digg is becoming widespread and has accumulated a huge user base. Chances are some of your listeners are regulars on digg. If not, some will definitely like the idea of following what you digg and would love to share some of their interests with you. If you show some love and promote mutual friendships, with a bit of luck and depending on your demographic, you will have quite a few people digging every episode. This will only improve as you visibility on digg solidifies. Also do not forget to digg your own shows, there is no harm in that.

How to add a "digg this" button for your podcast to your site.

The process of this is quite simple. All of this is taken straight from Digg Tools:Integrate page.

1. Make sure your podcast is on digg and identify any mistakes it might have. If you have an iTunes feed, chances are all is well and digg is syndicating your content correctly.
2. Identify podcast URL. Navigate to Podcast Search and do a quick search for your podcast. Take a note of the URL. For these instructions I'll use our own Kris Smith's podcast, Croncast. The URL of the digg page for his podcast is http://www.digg.com/podcasts/Croncast_Kris_and_Betsy_Smith_2
3. Pick a button design you wish to use. You've got 2 to pick from: Plain Vanilla or Slim Peach


If you wish to use Plain Vanilla remember "normal" and for Slim Peach keep "compact" fresh in your mind.
4. Get to embedding! With all info collected, use the code below to embed Digg This Button in a post, or anywhere on your site. It is quite straight forward, just remember to replace bold, italicised parts with your own.

digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/podcasts/Croncast_Kris_and_Betsy_Smith_2';
digg_skin = 'compact';

That's it! You are done. Now comes the time to use the social media reactor and get your audience pumped up and participate in the promotion of your podcast. So that your mad ninja skills can finally be rewarded with some fame.