Tropical Gringo

During the last couple of weeks, quite a public battle was playing out between NBC and, now, former The Tonight Show host, Conan O’Brien.   Moreover, as announced a few days ago, the embattled comedian and his staff will be leaving the network with an exit package worth approximately $45 million.

Ironically, his ratings jumped substantially during the brouhaha as well as his online support.  Though NBC to some extent uses social media tools such as blogs and twitter, one wonders if the company could have employed such tools to engage more with audiences and come up with a different outcome?

One example of the online support that Conan garnered during the impasse is that created by designer Mike Mitchell.  Mr. Mitchell created the “I’m with Coco” image along with a campaign in support of the late night television star on a Facebook fan page that already boasts more than 300,000 members and has engendered a number of rallies in support of the late night star.

In contrast, Jay Leno’s Facebook fan page has less than 50,000 members and, incredibly, was hacked on Sunday evening to display an image of Conan. Finally, checking blog activity on Trendpedia shows a spike in activity for the keyword “Tonight Show,” among others during the last several days.

Would it have been possible for NBC to translate this Internet and social media interest into a more profitable business result for the network?  One thing is for certain, achieving such a result would have required more than simply using social media tools.  It would have required an organization willing to listen, react and respond relatively quickly to new and interesting options that pop up from such “digital” conversations.  It would have required a mindset where mistakes, such as this particular programming mishap, could be admitted and where fan criticism or suggestions would be encouraged and not lamented.

The actual form that such a strategy should take is debatable. Nevertheless, one company that seems to be embracing social media tools and, possibly, the ensuing organizational transformation that could result is MTV.  Recently, Carolyn Everson, EVP of strategy and operations for MTV Networks, stated that “digital learnings” are making their way into the linear business.  It’s interesting to note that within the list of Top Social Brands of 2009 recently released by Vitrue, MTV ranks as number 4 on the list while NBC is number 68 – CBS and ABC are at 32 and 33, respectively. This would seem to indicate that the network might have some work to do in terms of more fully embracing audience engagement through social media.

Ironically, Comcast, the company due to acquire NBC Universal shortly, has been cited as an example of a company that embraced the use of social media (e.g.,Twitter) as a catalyst to improving their customer service.  This fact notwithstanding, Comcast is probably at the beginning of any transformational process and is actually ranked #100 on Vitrue’s list of Top Social Brands of 2009.

Indeed, It’s possible that the current industry dynamics and prior decisions made by NBC Universal management have placed them in too difficult of a position regardless of their use of any social media tools.  As mentioned above, companies such asMTV proactively mines social media activity related to their brand and culls valuable insights that inform their business decisions.

Conan certainly enjoyed much support through the Internet even mentioning as much in his farewell address.  Nevertheless, the question still remains.  Could NBC have produced a more positive business result by making better use of the increased social media “conversations” around this story?

Today, I had an interesting experience at two prospect meetings.  I was meeting with organizations who are just starting to employ digital innovation strategies in Colombia (one of them is farther along than the other one).  In general, I am truly amazed at the disconnect between the user population in these countries and the companies who actually leverage digital tools to join the conversation with their customers.

One of the most exciting recent developments within the Internet space has been the rapid uptake of social media tools and, even more interesting, the adoption of these tools on mobile platforms.  Just was with their record-breaking mobile adoption growth rates several years back, Latin Americans are also breaking records for adopting social networking platforms.  For instance, Colombia is number six in the world in terms of the total number of facebook users.

I just read a post by Shane Gibson, who is currently in Colombia talking precisely about social networks. Incredibly, companies in the region who take advantage of the fact that their customers and prospects are having conversations using these digital tools are few and far between.  What are they waiting for? Instead of spending beaucoup sums of money on traditional media spends, they could be “mixing it up” and including solidly planned online iniciatives to promote their brand, products, services, etc. through direct advertising, community building, word of mouth enabling or other strategies.  An added benefit is the fact that, by doing this in virgin territory, any well thought out strategy strongly executed will be seen as digital innovation by the market place.

Anyhow, this will all play out as it always does in the region.  The market will await some solid successes and then a mass of followers will dive in head first trying to imitate their models. When this will actually happen is the big question.

Yesterday’s announcement concerning Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture signifies the first salvo in a race to establish leadership in what the company calls an “integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools.”  It’s clear that Adobe’s digital innovation vision is to redefine the process of the creation and deployment of digital iniciatives.

According to Forrester, the market for Web Analytics is set to grow at a CAGR of 17% reaching almost $1B by 2014.  The company foresees a market where analytics and optimization solutions are embedded within marketing applications.  Apparently, Adobe believes this is the case and yesterday embarked on a road to make this vision a reality. (more…)

In terms of gaining entry into the minds of Twitter’s management team, the last couple of weeks have been quite unique.  From the subset of confidential internal documents that Techcrunch recently published to the recent launch of the company’s Twitter 101 site, the company’s vision and a bit of what its leadership thinks about its future have become less murky.  For armchair CEOs, this is an opportunity time to speculate on how they would steward the company, but more importantly, on the direction of the social media space in general.

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During the past few weeks, I’ve had an opportunity to read to articles (in Spanish) about the web for a Latin American audience.  The two articles include one about how Colombian politicians are using the web and another one about how people around the world are using the Internet for their news gathering using as a specific example the tragic passing of Michael Jackson here.

The first article is really designed show how compelling web strategies can be by providing an example close to home of a group of people (Colombian politicians) that need to get something done (get people to vote for them now).  These people are looking for a tangible result and are basically voting with their pesos and choosing to invest heavily in the web for only one reason: they believe this channel is paramount for their getting elected.

It’s actually quite interesting to be in this type of emerging market (Colombia) where the Internet is just at the very early stages of being taken seriously.  It’s really like Internet circa 2002 in the states.  Online advertising is just over 1% (about USD $20 million) of the total advertising pie, but is expected to represent 8% of the pie by 2013.  That is explosive growth and it’s quite an interesting matter trying to get corporate executives and small and medium business owners to understand the power of marketing over the Internet (if done correctly).