DuPont's viral video pitch

by Josh Bernoff

Dan Buczaczer of Denuo (a Publicis unit) and his client, DuPont had a problem. How do you take a corporate brand with a 200-year history and remind consumers what it stands for?

DuPont is responsible for brands like Teflon, Kevlar, Tyvek and, as you can see in this clip, Nomex, which helps prevent firefighters from overcooking. These are ingredient brands -- you don't buy them, you buy stuff that incorporates them. And these brands already have decent name recognition, but DuPont has a lot less. You could do a bunch of TV ads like GE and BASF do, but that's expensive. And if you remember DuPont at all -- if you're over 45 like I am -- you may remember "Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry," a tagline that has developed some unfortunate resonances in the last half-decade.

DuPont's solution, which I like, was to hire Amanda Congdon (ex of RocketBoom) and a bunch of indie film types and make some mini-documentaries they call "DuPoint Science Stories." I don't even know what to call these things -- they're not quite ads, not infomercials, hell, you can shoot me but maybe brandumentaries? (Ick.) Anyway, they're entertaining enough to watch for a few minutes, especially with the bits of retro footage they unearthed from the lab.

The key from here is, they were smart enough not to take the astroturf route and pretend this stuff was homegrown. Instead, they're actually paying for ad space on blogs like Boing-Boing. But these fun little bits will doubtless get picked up by other blogs (like this one), cross-posted on YouTube, and develop a second little life beyond the site where they live, stories.dupont.com. This only works if they get spread around.

Now like the Chevy Tahoe folks, DuPont is going to be in for some spoofs -- there's plenty of parody potential here. But the next step is when Ad Age or the Wall St. Journal starts writing about the strategy behind the idea. Which will get people looking at and spreading the videos. Which will boost DuPont's association with these "miracles of science." Which is what they were looking for in the first place . . . without spending $10 million for ad avails on CBS or Fox. Nice work.

Tags: DuPont, brandumentary, DuPont Science Storiesonline video, Denuo, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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Upcoming Forrester Boot Camps

by Charlene Li

You may have noticed that the tag line for this blog has changed – a key goal is to help people do their jobs better, to “win” so to speak with social technologies.

To that end, I thought you’d like to know about a few upcoming boot camps Forrester is running. These events are different from large scale conferences – they are typically 1-2 Forrester analysts with a small group of participants, usually around 20 people. We spend an entire day discussing the strategy and tactics needed to win with new technologies. And I personally love the format because it’s a great way for me to immerse myself in the day to day issues that people are facing.

So here are a few highlights of upcoming boot camps – there is also a complete list of all boot camps being offered. I hope you can join us, and please contact me if you have any questions.

Emerging Interactive Marketing Channels Boot Camp
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 in Cambridge, MA 
Analysts: Brian Haven & Christine Overby

This Boot Camp will introduce new marketing channels and provide techniques for successfully exploring and leveraging the marketing opportunities that each offers. Marketers will learn how to determine if each channel is right for their brand and develop a plan for how to get started.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions covering how consumers have adopted each channel, how marketers use each channel today, and how to best leverage each to target consumers.
•    Sessions covering rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), user-generated content, social media (social networks, wikis, widgets, tagging, etc.), word-of-mouth marketing, mobile marketing, and others.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public      relations firms have used these emerging marketing channels.

Social Computing Boot Camp: Tapping Into The Power Of Connect Consumers
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions on consumer adoption and behaviors toward blogs, RSS, social networking,      word-of-mouth marketing, and podcasting.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used social marketing — and how to avoid the pitfalls.
•    Hands-on training on how to create blogs and RSS feeds, as well as podcasts. In addition to a      technical overview, the training will include best practices on how to manage the internal process of setting up these social marketing tools.
•    A best practices panel of marketers, agencies, and technology providers.

Blogging Fundamentals: Building A Business Strategy
Friday, April 13, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

Blogs are evolving quickly as a communication medium and influencing the development of communications and marketing strategy. With more than 27 million blogs being written today, it is impossible not to find a niche community that can influence customer perceptions of a brand.

As customers increasingly tune out traditional advertising and turn to new communication channels to fill the void, companies must learn how to join in the conversation. Moreover, besides connecting companies and their customers, blogs are also becoming an invaluable collaboration tool within companies to facilitate knowledge management and cross-functional communications.

This Boot Camp will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues.

Pork board vs. Lactivist: everybody wins

by Josh Bernoff

Postscript to the story about The Lactivist, Jennifer Laycock who was asked to stop selling a T-shirt featuring the slogan "The Other White Milk" by a lawyer for the National Pork Board.

The National Pork Board recognized it made a mistake and reversed course instantly. You don't mess with motherhood! Because of its corporate structure the Pork Board can't donate to charities but its employees are now supporting Jennifer's charity, a human milk bank in Ohio. Which is why she was selling the shirts in the first place.

And Laycock, who "respects copyrights" according to her latest blog post, will no longer sell the infringing T-shirt. Her substitute is shown here.

Is there a lesson? Sure. First, everything you do is now public. Every customer support call. Every lawyer's letter. Every sleeping cable guy.

Second, you can make amends if you move quickly. Kudos to the Pork Board for doing so. Now that Laycock isn't in the crosshairs anymore, she's unlikely to try to make this any bigger.

Tags: PR, breastfeeding, lactivist, National Pork Board, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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Pork board vs. breastfeeding moms: No contest

by Josh Bernoff
I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. I had to weigh in on this one simply because it's such a mismatch.

Jennifer Laycock, a mom and blogger in Ohio, is a "Lactivist" -- that is, a mother who wants to support and promote breastfeeding. I know a litte bit about this -- I've been helping out La Leche League, an international organization that promotes breastfeeding because it's better for babies.

To raise money, Jennifer made a promotional T-shirt for "The Other White Milk." I'd like to show you a-picture but I can't find one. Why? Because the National Pork Board sent her a cease and desist letter because they felt she was infringing their slogan, "The Other White Meat."

Forrester notes from DEMO 07

My colleague (and book co-author) Josh Bernoff is at DEMO 07 this week covering the happenings there on our book blog. In four different posts, he provides quick reviews (done in real time) of 33 companies. It's quite the feat!!

Some things that caught my eye from Josh's posts (see the individual posts for Josh's take on these companies):

From Post #1: Worklight: Secure RSS for the enterprise that pulls information out of enterprise applications. This sounds very much like what KnowNow does with its RSS/alert service. Josh also saw a product called Reqall from Qtech that turns phone messages into text and delivers it via email. Reminds me of another start-up, Jott that does almost exactly the same thing.

From Post #2: Josh has a short-hand way of thinking about the widgets/gadgets someone can insert into Web pages like MySpace -- he calls it "MySpace furniture" which is very appropriate. I can build and insert these widgets into my page, arrange them to my liking, and invite my "friends" over to check it out.

In one afternoon at DEMO, Josh saw five companies that fits this definition: panjea.tv, Yodio, VUVOX, Splashcast, and MixPro. I've used several Web page widgets like these and while each offering has it's cool, neat spin, I can't help but feel that this is turning quickly into the "me too" category in much the same way that photo sharing sites are variations on the same theme. Just how much traction can any player get?

From Post #3: At the end of the post, Josh raises two questions about new mobile applications like BUZ Interactive and Jyngle:

The main question is 1) are the mobile operators going to allow, encourage, or block any of these, and 2) how will the user determine what's actually useful to him or her?

From Post #4: (As I'm reading the last post from Josh, I have to wonder how he's doing it -- I'm tired just reading his posts!) Lots of good stuff here -- groups get more firepower with CircleUp and Nexo, but I have to wonder if they will be pushed aside once Yahoo! redesigns Yahoo! Groups.

ZoomInfo caught Josh's eye because of it's core and expanded people search capabilities. I've been following ZoomInfo for quite a while and it's good to see them at DEMO (disclosure: I did a Webinar for them last February on the future of online recruitment.)

Lastly, Helium joins players like gather.com, agoravox.fr, and associatedcontent.com to pay contributors of user-generated content for their work, based on how much traffic and advertising views they generate. Helium's twist: it ranks the comments and articles based on what users find the most interesting, relevant, and helpful.

New ROI of blogging report from Forrester

Back in October, I posted our initial research on the ROI of blogging. Many of you contributed your ideas, thoughts, and criticisms – thanks so much as it was extremely helpful.

We’ve (finally) published the report – and actually, there are two of them. The first is “The ROI Of Blogging: The “Why” And “How” Of External Blog Accountability”. It’s available at URL for Forrester clients and also for purchase. I’ve included the excerpt below:

Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

We also published another piece of research, “Calculating The ROI Of Blogging: A Case Study, A Look At The ROI of General Motor’s FastLane Blog” which applies the framework we describe above. Again, here's the excerpt:

Forrester used the process outlined in the first document in this series to calculate the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane blog; but, this is not merely an exercise to generate a number. Using scenarios, General Motors can understand the risk and impact of increases and decreases of a key metric — the number of press mentions — on the value of the blog. With this knowledge in hand, General Motors can make critical businesses decisions, such as whether to invest heavily in innovations that will rekindle press attention.

We developed a framework that allows companies to track and measure the benefits of external blogs. From the companies and individuals we spoke with, the most common benefits are; increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency. The hard part is coming up with metrics that reflect these benefits, and more importantly, how to value those metrics.  Here's the graphic from the report:

 

Let’s take for example the FastLane blog. One of the key goals of that blog was “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers”. So a key metric would be to see how many times customers wrote a comment. FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila – there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white. The case study contains a full-blown Excel model (Update: this is available only to clients) showing how we calculated the FastLane blog ROI in excruciating detail.

But the key metric that we think drives the value of the FastLane blog was the number of press mentions it received, which we valued on the basis of "advertising equivalence" -- how much would it have cost GM to buy an ad in the same news outlet? This is a long standing metric used by the public relations industry to measure its value. We found that this metric drove a significant amount part of the FastLane blog's value -- and that press mentions were decreasing significantly over the last two years. With this knowledge, GM can decide whether to take steps to increase press activity -- or to de-emphasize this metric in favor of other ones in the calculation of the blog's ROI.

As you can see, this process and framework is not cut and dry, black and white. Rather, it’s highly subjective, requires tremendous judgment, and is open to interpretation. But it is a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.

We invite you to provide your ideas and feedback as this is an ongoing exercise -- we believe we're just starting to scratch the surface when it comes to blog measurement. As the number of companies with blogs grows, we'll be able to add to and refine the framework.

Finally, here are some frequently asked questions that I’m getting about the ROI of blogging, which I thought would be helpful.

Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.

Q: What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a blog? A: Again, it starts with the goal of the blog. I strongly suggest that companies start with the goal, develop metrics that measure the attainment of that goal, and find ways to assign value to those metrics.

Q: But aren't blogs risky? How do you take that into account? A: We definitely take risk into account by generating scenarios that show the impact of low-likelihood but high impact events -- such as a lawsuit.

Q: Our CMO/CEO/CFO won't let us have a blog until we can show him/her the definitive ROI of a blog. Help!! A: It's not an unreasonable request -- they don't really understand the value of a blog and see just the potential cost and risk. By going through the exercise of defining and quantifying the benefits, costs, and risks of a blog, you'll be educating your C-level executives while also demonstrating the discipline that they expect.

Q: But this is heresy - you can't put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You've just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.

 

Verizon's new policy blog launches

Verizon quietly launched its new telecomm & telecommunications policy blog yesterday. The focus is on policy issues, and Tom Tauke, Executive VP of Public Affairs, Policy and Communications, writes:

The intent of PoliBlog is to present perspectives on issues of importance that intersect public policy, politics, markets, and business in the broadband world...It’s my hope that PoliBlog will be most focused on the emerging issues that policy makers and consumers and businesses must start dealing with now to ensure the future of converged communications and broadband deployment. Those issues include privacy and security, data rights management and intellectual property protection, and access to broadband networks. And there are whole new perspectives and opportunities that the widespread deployment of broadband will bring to other important challenges facing our society, including the delivery of health care, education, and government services. None of these topics are out of bounds on PoliBlog.

I thought this was quite smart of Verizon -- to start blogging in an area where it has a clear position on a topic, and where there will be plenty of discussion and engagement. It remains to be seen how the blog will shape up, as there are initially nine bloggers on the profile page.

I'm sure product-oriented blogs will be forthcoming (or at least, they should) but getting started in a relatively "safe" area where customer service and satisfaction is less of an issue is a wise.

So welcome Verizon to the blogosphere and I hope you'll prove to be a good example for your fellow corporate counterparts.

Aside: I can't resist adding Verizon Wireless's famous tagline, "Can you hear me?" Well, yes, Verizon can hear us now -- and even better, they are listening.

Calculating the ROI of blogging

One issue that keeps coming up over and over again is how to measure the ROI of blogs. I’ve written about this in the past and have been stewing over how to go beyond the intangible “blogging is good for your business” exhortations to quantify blogging’s benefit to organizations.

Well, we’re getting close but we could use some help. My colleague, Chloe Stromberg, and I have been interviewing companies about how they measure ROI and realized that we needed to throw the net wider – this is where you come in!

The working idea is to create a framework for measuring the ROI of external blogging efforts for medium- and large-sized companies. Below is an outline of ingredients for the framework.  Please help us by fleshing out sources, providing examples, and adding/editing our ROI factors – feel free to add comments to this post or to email us directly (if you’d prefer, we’ll keep specific numbers and examples confidential and use them only as background).

In turn, we’ll cite significant contributors in the upcoming report and will also send the contributors a copy when it is published. The report will also include information we’ve gathered from our research, as well as our synthesis and analysis. I’ve also included a few links to resources we’ve found helpful so far.

The ROI Of External Blogging Framework

The ROI of blogs can be broken down into three components: 1) Benefits; 2) Costs; 3) Risks

Potential Benefits & Measurement

One of the hardest things to do with blogs is to quantify the benefits, mainly because there’s a blog for almost everything under the sun. For example, you can’t compare the ROI of Direct2Dell.com to Microsoft’s Jobsblog as they have completely different goals. Hence, measuring just traffic to a blog or the number of comments on a post means little unless the traffic or the comments are linked to value creation. This gets at the task of measuring intangibles – what does it mean for an additional visitor to come to the blog or contribute a comment?

One parallel to consider – how do companies measure the value of public relations? We found one paper by Fraser Likel, et. al. “Perspectives on the ROI of Media Relations Publicity Efforts” that was helpful in this area. Likel, et. al. break down the ROI of PR into four approaches: 1) return on impressions; 2) return on media impact (akin to market mix modeling); 3) return on target influence; and 4) return on earned media

I currently suggest that companies start with metrics that they already use within the company so that 1) the metrics are familiar; and 2) it makes it easier to compare the blog’s value to other marketing and communication channels. So here’s an attempt at some of the ways intangible value can be quantified. I’d love to get your thoughts on how feasible it is to actually measure these things and also, how your company measures blogging’s benefits.

                                   

Benefit	Appropriate   measurement
Consumer self-education	Higher conversion rate for blog visitors
Greater visibility in search results	Increased traffic from search to blog
Lower the cost of public relations	Generate the same level of awareness as PR
Reach an enthusiast community	Lower cost communication tool
Address criticisms on other blogs/news stories	Measure the slow down of bad news spreading
More responsive to consumer concerns	Track customer satisfaction and retention
Improve employee innovation and productivity	Track employee satisfaction and retention
Improved stock price with greater visibility into the   organization	Connect improved investor sentiment to blog readership

Potential Costs & Measurement

This section is pretty straight forward and is separated into set-up and recurring costs. Some obvious areas include blogging platform costs, training, policy creation, and employee time. The biggest area of feedback I could really use is how you have had to scale up as your blog has grown more successful. Have you had to invest in more hardward/hosting costs to handle the traffic? How much more time does it take to handle incoming comments, trackbacks, and spam? And there’s also the additional time it takes to monitor and comment on topics that appear on other blogs.

Potential Risks & Measurement

The perceived risk of having a corporate blog often overshadows all of the benefits that can accrue from them. One best practice I have seen is when the senior executive asked the blog champion to come back with a list of the top five things that can go wrong – and to also include the training and policies he would need to have in place to mitigate that risk. To calculate the impact of risk, it needs to be quantified. So here’s an example.

Let’s say that the risk is someone divulges confidential company financials just before an earnings release. The risk can be quantified as $1 million in legal fees to deal with the SEC and another $2 million in lost goodwill from the company’s brand and reputation. The risk mitigation plan is to provide $10,000 in training to the bloggers and to have all posts reviewed by Investor Relations. With these policies in place, the team expects that only 1 post out of a 1000 (0.1%) may contain any confidential company information, and that 1 in 10,000 (0.01%) would actually result in the full loss. Do the math and multiple the probability by the cost of the risk and you’ll come out with 0.01% * $3M = $300 in factored costs against which to weigh the benefits. The real impact on the ROI will come not from the probability-weighed cost of the risk, but from the risk mitigation efforts required.

Putting It All Together

Once you have the benefits, costs, and weighted risks figured out, simply divide the benefits by the costs + risks to arrive at the ROI. The key is what to use it for – it’s not enough, I believe, to use the ROI calculation only to justify a blog. It should also be used to manage and optimize the performance of the blog on an ongoing basis.

So I hope you find this interesting and helpful – and I encourage you to add your suggestions, ideas, and examples to the discussion.

Additional Resources

Constantin Basturea’s del.icio.us page for the “ROI” tag. Constantin is currently at Converseon and was a co-founder of NewPRWiki, one of my favorite reference sites.

“Perspective on the ROI of Media Relations Publicity Efforts”, by Fraser Likely, David Rockland, Mark Weiner.

“Market Metrics: Measuring The Impact Of Blogs And Mainstream Media To A Brand”, a podcast interview with Deborah Eastman from Biz360 on Marketing Voices

“The ROI of blogging and whether Jonathan Schwartz’s blog pays for itself” from Jason Stamper’s, Computer Business Review Online

Lastly, this is very last minute, but I will be speaking on Tuesday, Oct. 3^rd at a free Webinar on the “ROI of Blogging”, hosted by Cymfony. If a link is available to a recording, I’ll post it here as well. (Disclosure: the host of the Webinar, Jim Nail, is a former colleague of mine at Forrester.)

Should B2B marketers blog?

My colleague, Laura Ramos, researches B2B marketing and is doing some work around B2B blogs. She has some thoughts on how B2B companies should be approaching blogs, which I've included below -- it's a cross-post from Forrester's Marketing Blog on which she writes. Any additional thoughts about the success and applicability of B2B blogs would be most appreciated -- we'd especially like to hear how companies are going through the decision making process of whether to have or not have a blog.

On to Laura's post!

Along with podcasts and RSS feeds, blogs are showing up on business marketers’ radar. Of the 210 B2B marketers who told us that they use these emerging tactics today, over 70% said they planned to boost their spending on social computing tactics during the next 12 months. But just because firms like Boeing, HP, NetApp, Sun, and Unica have entered the blogosphere, does that mean every marketing executive should as well? My answer today is a qualified “Perhaps.”

Successful blogs have two interconnected ingredients, a community that finds reading the blog -– and contributing to it -- valuable. Outside of high tech, B2B marketers will find it hard to hand content control over to customers, prospects, and public commentators. Mainly because they worry that bloggers might say things that hurt their company’s image, brand, or standing in the market. So although many B2B blogs use an authentic voice, they come across as more promotional than openly communicative. Jim Firestone’s “Big I, little t” blog is such an example, although Xerox gets credit for taking steps to get closer with customers.

From our own experience at Forrester, blogs are a bit like children –- they demand constant attention and nurturing to grow up properly –- so deciding to initiate a blog is not a decision taken lightly. Questions marketers should answer are: What is the purpose of the blog?  Who is the audience?  Will the blog encourage participation? And, who should own the blog’s content?  Beyond these, B2B marketers should know:

• Does our business – or industry group – change quickly enough to support the realtime publishing model? While innovations among industrial components like ball bearings, pumps, and compressors may not keep pace with Moore’s Law, their manufacturers shouldn’t rule out blogs entirely. Niche industry publications like Chemical Week, Masonry Magazine, and Scrap (the bimonthly magazine of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries) have readership that blogs, as a less expensive publishing media, could supplement or enhance.

• How does the blog fit into the rest of our communication (notice, I didn’t say “marketing”) strategy? Consider whether the blog community can help boost customer service, innovate new products/services, or enhance the flow of information inside the organization. Promotion is not the sole reason to establish a blog.

The bottom line? Get familiar with blogs by reading and contributing to relevant, related ones. But don’t prioritize blog investment above other interactive tactics like search marketing, email, and Web seminars where the results are easier to measure and the value is easier to quantify for now.

And let me know if you disagree or see things differently.

Listen up marketers: 24% of Gen Yers read blogs

We recently published a short piece, “Marketers: Keep A Keen Eye On Gen Yers” that looks at how these young adults (aged 18-26) use the Internet differently from their older brethren.

Here’s the short executive summary:

Gen Yers — 18- to 26-year-olds who came of age with broadband, cell phones, and iPods, among other things — stand apart from older generations because of their hands-on approach to the Web. Marketers trying to anticipate future consumer trends should tune in to Gen Yers. As these do-it-yourselfers become a primary consuming audience, they will carry with them their cross-channel shopping enthusiasm, active blog usage, and reliance on the information-scouring powers of Google.

One key data point that stood out for me: 24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief and look to at least one bellweather demographic to get an idea of how widespread blog readership can potentially grow in the future.

So if you’re a marketer that targets Gen Yers, you should at a minimum be monitoring what your audience reads. Tools to monitor the blogosphere include paid services like Nielsen BuzzMetrics and WebSideStory’s HBX or do-it-yourself sites like Technorati. And an excellent “how-to” resource is this iMedia Connection article, “How to Measure Blog Influence”.

This then begs the question whether marketers should have a blog themselves to connect with blog readers. I usually answer with a qualified "yes", with the huge caveat that companies shouldn't have a blog just to have one. The better question to ask is whether you are interested in engaging in a different type of dialog that this generation seeks in its regular interactions -- one characterized by give and take and a culture of generosity. All too often, I talk with marketers who see blogs as yet another channel through which they can foist their existing marketing messages. So Gen Yer marketers, I encourage you to tap into the power of blogs but beware as this group can sniff insincerity out in a nanosecond.