Are you kidding me with this?  Nike does yet another brilliant ad.  This time featuring rappers KRS-One and (one of my favorite rappers) Lupe Fiasco.  This time, it’s an all out (MVpuppets) Christmas rap battle.  Let’s touch mics gentlemen muppets and keep it clean.

Santa = KRS-One
(smack talking reindeer) Blitzen = Lupe Fiasco

Blitzen calls up Santa with some smack talk, “I hope y’all ready to get served cuz beating Blitzen is gonna take a miracle cuz last time I checked this wasn’t 34th street.”

Lyrics to Santa’s response to Blitzen…I can’t believe I just wrote that. (if you see any corrections, comment or tweet me)

Yo, how you calling me a old timer, a old rhymer,
when i’m getting it in, in oh nine, suh
Ya’ll got issues and i’m not a subscriber
You the reindeer, i’m the driver
Kris Kringle, the gift’s in my saliva
I got every address in the hood.  I’ll find ya
Ya’ll dude’s minor Kris Kringle is major
it’s a good thing it’s Christmas you gonna need a savior
you aint even —-, ya’ll nose is black
and the last rhyme you kick you know was wack
I’ll flying around the hood cruising fast
my sleigh be moving snow you eating grass
think fast stay in line you know me well
keep talking Imma ring your jingle bell
I got work to do I cant flirt with you
Kris Kringle, I’m out!

Of course, Blitzen MUST respond by proclaiming he’s the “#1 reindeer in the world”.

Lyrics to Blitzen’s response to Santa…I still can’t believe I’m writing this. (if you see any corrections, comment or tweet me)

B to the l-i, t-z
3 suckas plus 1 me equals too e-z.
Believe me the top of your wish list
Betta read a chance to beat me
Cuz you never got that
And you never will
The thrill of the victory is something that you’ll never feel
something elves can’t build
and shout out to the workshop
you can get to 1st, 2nd, and the 3rd shot
don’t mean nothin
when the rein get to jumpin
and that deer get to dunkin
see the fear in your frontin
santa lookin shook, kobe lookin shook, lebron lookin shook
i throw the ball on the roof

The two unite for the ultimate collaboration aptly named, “Dunking on Reindeer.”

Lyrics to the collaboration – Dunking on Reindeer.  (if you see any corrections, comment or tweet me)

(Santa rap)
1, 2, 1, 2, King James and Kobe too
It was the day before Christmas day
I just put brand new rims on my sleigh
in the kitchen cooking, eggs and hash
I got a call from Blitzen talkin some trash, sayin

(Blitzen )
Oh saint Nicky, don’t you see
you and your boys you’ll never beat me
So you can tell Kobe and tell LeBron
that they can meet me on the court and it’ll be uh-uh onnnn

(Santa)
Now Blitz ice grillin, like put em up
it ain’t take long for Kobe to shut em up
(Kobe)
Alright Blitz, the game is to 10
LeBron, check it out and show em how we get it in
(Santa )
now he all nervous, tension brewing
Vixen was trying to talk some sense into em
LeBron threw the ball and he began to giggle em, like

(LeBron)
look at this reindeer, he can barely dribble
(Kobe)
c’mon Bron, show some respect
he got hooves, not hands, what the heck you expect

(Santa)
Kobe stole the ball, crossed him up
runnin around his back, tossed it up
Vixen crying to Blitz, like

(Vixen)
oh no, lebron took off from behind the free throw

(Santa)
LeBron rose up looked at him again
said, Merry Christmas Blitz and shattered the rim

The game is over, the game is over
The game is over, the game is over
Dunking on the reindeer, dunking on the reindeer
Dunking on the reindeer, dunking on the reindeer

This SES Chicago recap will cover the last two sessions of Day 2.  This recap includes “Igniting Viral Campaigns” and a sponsored session named “Social Media Strategy”.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 2 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Igniting Viral Campaigns

Moderator:  Tessa Wegert (Enlighten)
Speakers:  Greg Finn (10e20), Denise Chudy (Google/YouTube), Jennifer Evans Laycock (SiteLogic)

This session was about how to leverage web 2.0 technologies (such as YouTube) to give companies the opportunity to stand out.

• Identifying and maximizing viral content
  • Humor
  • Educational resources
  • Comprehensive lists – not your typical top 10 lists, but full blown lists /Nick Shin – An actual example of a “comprehensive list” was not given, but my example would be the AdAge 150 list.
  • Breaking information – exclusives, leaks, etc.
  • Infographics
• What to do
  • Ensure proper formatting of your content
  • Make sure the content is easy to consume
  • Be sure the content is very visual
  • Look for a social tone, i.e., be human
• Viral mediums – utilize popular destinations such as FunnyorDie, Break, Ebaum’s World, YouTube, Flickr
• Social news and networking
  • Largest source for igniting viral campaigns
  • Be as non corporate as possible
  • Corporate and brand promotion is not the only angle
  • Helping the community is better than helping yourself.  You want to make sure you are part of the community before participating.
  • Digg – not just for video games and gadgets
  • StumbleUpon – a possibility for all viral content; user proper/niche categories
  • Reddit – use subreddits for best relevancy
  • Facebook – don’t only send your users to your “wall”. Make new tabs, add new apps.
    • Example: Overstock.com, Best Buy, and Radio Shack”s default facebook landing page is a holiday promotion, not their “wall”
    • Make sure you have approval on promotions
    • Make content easy to share
    • Spend money on facebook by sending traffic to your page using Facebook ads and Facebook events
  • Twitter
    • Make it easy to tweet your content
    • Allow for easy RTs
    • Promote during peak hours
  • Entice others to ignite your campaigns using the “original social media” through blogger outreach and forums
  • Fanning the viral fire
    • Stagger approaches for optimum visibility
    • Provide alternative ways to share on social networks.  A good one is to use buttons (tweetmeme, digg, Facebook share) because people are lazy.
    • Cross promote to maximize exposure
  • Leverage viral mentions to continue momentum
  • Repeat underperforming campaigns with fresh “coverage content” by pointing to other people’s coverage.
    • The “Google Chrome OS” example: initial coverage of the Google Chrome OS YouTube video was weak.  It only received 4 diggs.  However, after bloggers began covering the new OS, they began submitting their own links to digg with the embedded YouTube video.  That article ended up receiving over 400 diggs and caused the video to receive over 1 million views.
    • 

• When doing viral campaigns, know your goal.
• Viral goals include: building the brand, driving sales, driving traffic/links
• Rosen Velocity Scale (V1 to V10): V1=extreme brand/emotion and V10=extreme direct/SHAM WOW!
• 

• V1: extreme brand represents brand awareness and is not about the offer.  Example: Dove Evolution

• • Between V3 and V4: Medium brand awareness + offer example is the OfficeMax’ “Back to School for Pennies” campaign

• • V6: Brand awareness + emotion + sales= Innocent drinks’  The Big Knit campaign.  Buying a “knitted” Innocent drink smoothie donates money and the knitting sparks interest.
  • V8: Uniqueness + sales message = Blendtec’s Will it Blend campaign.  If you have never seen or heard of “Will it Blend”, please come out from under that rock.
  • V10: Pure purchase driven immediacy.  Buy now = Shoebuy.com. When finishing the checkout process, they give you an option to give a $10 coupon to friends via different methods including social media.
• Viral is as simple as enabling the share of your message.
• 

• Building the brand leads to slower sales.  The break even occurs later with a lower velocity.
• Building the sale leads to slow brand.  Raising the velocity brings profit much sooner.

Denise Chudy from YouTube was the last presenter and I’m particularly glad that she presented some nice stats along with the presentation.  The numbers certainly made it more interesting.

• Successful viral videos are: captivating, interesting, intriguing clever, exciting, creative, though provoking, compelling
• 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• By the end of the panel, 1500 hours or 62.5 full days of video content will have been uploaded to YouTube
• Get good videos discovered
  • Making them findable – YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine with 3.6B searches/month; use SEO techniques for organic results
  • Use offline to seed
  • Leverage existing networks
  • Leverage recognizable people – original placements account for only 40% of total engagement on YouTube.   Example: Kobe jumping over Aston Martin.  Original video= 5MM vews, 8MM views including copies, and 14MM views including derivatives
  • Use advertising; market your video – homepage exposure generates a 4.7x lift in action
  • 

SES Chicago Sponsored Session – Social Media Strategy

Serengeti Communications Speakers:  Nathan Linnell, Nan Dawkins, Liana Evans

The Serengeti group provided some useful information.  Did I learn anything new?  No, but it was a great refresher.

Social Media Strategy

• Applying marketing tactics in the absence of strategy is like doing nothing at all.
• Start thinking about engagement, ways to make friends, and how to serve.  People create the content and the community.
• There are no “cookie cutter solutions” when jumping into social media.  Understand the why and how and what your end goal is.  Do your research first and understand where your audience is, who your audience is, and what your target audience is doing.
• 

• What you do is just as important as where you do it.
  1. Start by finding the conversations
  2. Understand the conversations
  3. Use your monitoring data to understand who you want to reach and engage

Social Media Measurement

• Impact can be observed internally via corporate website, company blogs, sponsored communities, external online via social media, and external offline.
• Sources of data: internal web analytics – what to measure
  • Direct traffic
  • Brand searches
  • Visits referred by key social media sites
  • Social media referred visits attributed to company social media efforts
  • Conversions (not necessarily a sale) generated from social media sites
  • Engagement metrics
  • Blogs and communities – subscribers (views/clicks), comments/posts, incoming links, ReTweets of posts (via Twitter), unique visitors, members

• Sources of data: external online – social sites
  • Facebook – fans/active fans, media consumption, total interactions (likes, comments, wall posts)
  • Twitter – followers (unique/quality followers), retweets, mentions, brand mentions
  • YouTube – channel (page views, subscribers, friends, comments), videos (views, ratings, comments, favorites, video responses)

• Sources of data: external online – monitoring tools
  • Aggravated view of buzz across the web – volume of mentions (brand, competitor, topic, share of voice), share by social media type, top sources/locations, sentiment, influencers

• Sources of data: external offline – research
  • Surveys and focus groups – brand awareness, purchase intent
  • Viral video campaign example
    • Target=caregivers, campaign site with coupon, goals=branding and sales
    • Measurement of video views, video mentions (buzz), video submissions, engagement (votes, comments), coupon redemption, buzz volume/brand, share of voice/brand
    • Sources of data include social media monitoring, web analytics, YouTube, and sales data
• Building a measurement framework – implement what you can measure
  • Financial impact = revenue generated, cost savings, cost avoidance
  • Non financial impact = brand awareness, purchase intent, willing to recommend
  • Define what constitutes success – branding goals? direct sales or lead generation? both?
  • Think through the buying process
  • Map metrics to goals – quality not quantity
  • Do I have the right tools?
  • 

Every Friday, I plan on posting the most useful online marketing stories of the week.  The majority of you have probably seen the top marketing news via Twitter, but it’s also a way for me to archive for my own benefit and learnings.  Selfish and helpful at the same time right?

Most popular post on Marketing Shindig – How to Optimize Your Twitter Page

My Personal Favorites for the Top Online Marketing Posts of the Week

1. 50 Blogging Lessons To Know If You’re Starting Today by Adam Singer of The Future Buzz
   • Okay so we all know the benefits in blogging.  Still not sure?  Then be sure to read Technorati’s 2009 State of the Blogosphere.  There are numerous benefits to blogging, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.
   • Why I liked Adam’s post so much – Everyone likes lists, but everyone loves lists that are beneficial in helping one succeed.  I agree that the lessons will help those starting a blog, but it will certainly benefit those who have been blogging for years.  Don’t let the title fool you, it is NOT just for those starting a blog.
   • Out of the 50, below are just some of my favorites:
     • If you wouldn’t do it for free, don’t do it at all.  In other words:  do it for passion and for yourself and you can’t lose.
     • It’s not going to be easy – nothing rewarding is.  /Nick – this applies to life in general, but when it comes to blogging, it takes commitment; no joke.  Many of my sites have fell by the wayside because I just didn’t have the time.
     • …and get involved in conversations with smart, interesting people.
     • The best blogs are products of success from pull, not push.
     • Realize that promotion is secondary to content.
2. HubSpot Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk by HubSpot
   • Why I liked the interview with Gary V so much – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) is one of the more influential social media users and success stories today.   The “Social Media Sommelier” has used social media to successfully grow his family’s wine business.  HubSpot does a great job interviewing internet celebrities and asking insightful questions.
   • My favorite quotes from the interview:
     • “I don’t feel like a rockstar, I feel ridiculously lucky…” /Nick – love the humble attitude.
     • “Passion gives you the drive it takes to make a product awesome and convince people that it’s awesome…” /Nick – awesome.
     • “…realize that I wasn’t going to own the New York Jets if I didn’t make a change…It took 6 months before anybody really took notice of what I was doing.” /Nick – so incredibly inspirational. This portion of the interview was by far my favorite.  Getting the background of success stories.
     • “You can’t be a fake brand.”
3. 3 Realities of Social Media by guest author Michael Brito on PR 2.0
   • Why I liked Michael’s post so much – The 3 realities that Michael points out in his post hit the nail on the head.   It’s concise and straight to the point, but also very true.
   • What are the 3 realities?  Consumers already get it, brands still trying to figure it out, Brands should focus on people first, No such thing as a social media expert yet.
4. 5 Must-Read Social Media Marketing Studies compiled by Social Media Examiner
   • Why I liked this compilation of studies so much – I personally love stats, but only from relevant and respected sources.  Yes, there are about 5,365 social media “studies” out there, but only a handful of those studies are from reputable sources.  Just a good, take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt-but-still-interesting read.
   • The numbers discussed: 26 million (1 in 7) adults will use Twitter monthly, Americans spend 17% of online time on social media sites, over half of marketers will be using social media, blogs are considered most useful tool by over half of businesses, 3/4 of marketers plan to increase social media use in 2010.
5. Future of Deliverability: The Role of User Interaction by Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports
   • With all the talk about social media and how those 5,365 (made up number FYI) studies are saying the usage of social media is increasing in popularity, email marketing is still an essential part of one’s business.  The ROI is tremendous so I was pleasantly surprised to read such insightful posts by Mark on email marketing especially this post.
   • Why I liked Mark’s post so much – Mark talks about the engagement aspect of email marketing by discussing user interaction and reputation.  I liked the fact that he was able to get feedback from several deliverability experts.
6. Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent by Google Analytics Blog
   • Why I liked this post so much – More power to google analytics is always a good thing.
   • The major takeaways on the enhancements: define up to 20 goals per profile, ability to track mobile websites/apps, advanced table filtering, multiple custom variables, “Analytics Intelligence” which will provide automatic alerts of significant changes to your data, among others.  Videos are available.
7. Want More Clicks?  Tweet Less by Dan Zarrella
   • Why I liked Dan’s post so much – I personally like Dan’s analytical approach.  Perhaps it was the pretty graphs and all the neat colors used in the graphs, but let me tell you that you will get at least one takeaway reading Dan’s post.
   • What does he go over: CTR (click through rate) by links per hour, Average CTR by links per hour, CTR by links per day, Average CTR by links per day.
   • What is the main takeaways besides reading the title of the post?
     • “The more frequently you tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get”
     • “If you want your tweet to get noticed and RT’ed, slow down your posting rate”

The Marketing Videos I Enjoyed Most This Week

• I never get tired of the always interesting, extremely fascinated, where-did-they-get-the-numbers-from-please-show-me-the-sources video titled “Social Media Revolution” that answers the question, “Is Social Media a Fad?”.  The answer is obvious -NO-, but the stats in this video are quite amazing.

• Notice how quickly the buzz around Google Wave died down.  I was pumped when I received a Google Wave invite, but after approximately 1 min 52 sec, I logged off.  However, this user has made Google Wave very entertaining by utilizing one of the most memorable scenes of Pulp Fiction.

See you next Friday for more top online marketing posts of the week.

[Transcript of the video is included]

From the mouth of the lion himself, Matt Cutts explains in this video that Google no longer takes the meta keyword tag into much consideration.  Although it might be hard to take for some of us that painstakingly coded meta keywords by hand for extensive online catalogs, fear not, other search engines may still rely on that information for help in ranking their indices.  I have included a transcript of the video below.  I can now recite the explanation by Matt Cutts because I had to “rewind” so many times…good stuff.

From Matt Cutts at Google talking about the keyword meta tags and the importance of meta description.

“So let’s talk about that in a little more detail because sometimes people file lawsuits. Alice has alice.com and Bob has bob.com and maybe Bob takes Alice’s name and puts it into the keyword meta tags and Alice sees that and she gets really angry and she talks to Bob and maybe sues Bob.  Well, how much should Alice be worried about Bob using that one term, Alice, in the keywords meta tag?  The answer is, we (Google) don’t use the keywords meta tag in our (Google’s) search ranking; other search engines might, but Google doesn’t.  But for our main core web search, whenever we look at the keywords meta tag, we say, you know what, too many people have spammed that too much; we really just don’t use this information at all. Now that’s not too say we don’t use any meta tags.  For example, there’s one called meta description and often times if you have a good meta description tag, we will use that info or part of that info in our snippet. So, if we’re going to return alice.com and your meta description is something really useful, we might show that as a snippet in the search results.  But if you’re looking at the keyword meta tags, we really don’t use that at all so don’t bother to get frustrated if somebody else is using your name in the keyword meta tags. It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our ranking even in the least little bit.”