I am not yet seeing the new ads in any of my Gmail or Google Apps accounts. Of course, one can avoid ads by using ad blocking browser extensions, or by signing up for the $50 per account per year Google Apps for Business service (previously called Google Apps Premier).

It could be that the new ad placement, if it becomes more widespread, is an attempt by Google to increase signups for their paid service, which, in addition to being ad-free, offers more features, including bigger mail storage, additional business apps, enhanced security and spam-fighting tools, as well as an uptime guarantee and priority support.

Would additional ads change your use of Gmail or Google Apps?

Image courtesy of Google Operating System

On rare occasion, you can find one shop that does all of these tasks and does them all well. More likely, as new forms of communications and marketing crop up with the development of new technologies, you have to go to a newly formed shop that is well-versed and immersed in the new ways.

So what happens when you start your foray into social media marketing by outsourcing to a new agency? You face a number of challenges, not the least of which is some tension from your existing agencies who may insist they know everything there is to know about social media while simultaneously scrambling to get up to speed.

Bringing in a new agency can be fraught with pitfalls, but the most common seems to be the creation of “silos.” Your other agencies — or even in-house marketing and communications departments — can cut out the new guys from key conversations or withhold critical information so your social media marketing team can’t properly integrate their work into your outreach efforts.

What you want to see happen is:

• Communication. Open discussions from the moment the new agency is introduced to establish that nobody is in competition but are all working toward a common goal.
• Cooperation. Willingly and frequently sharing information and assimilating the new agency as an integral part of your communications team.
• Collaboration. Bringing the new agency into projects from the start, not as an afterthought.

But with dispersed teams often vying for as much of your business pie as they can slice off, how do you foster an atmosphere of cooperation instead of competition?

If You’re Hiring the Team

If you’re the one hiring the new team to bring into the mix, there are some steps you can take to ensure that all your teams work together:

• Be open. If you are hiring others to carry out your communications work, everything starts with you. So from the start, make sure you are open with all your teams as to your expectations, particularly as to how you expect them to work together.
• Be clear. Clearly define roles, communicate who is responsible for what tasks, and outline your expectations to everyone separately and then together so everyone is playing by the same rule book.
• Be inclusive. If you are leaving someone out of the critical initial strategic conversations, you set a tone and pattern for others to do the same.
• Don’t create new silos. Including new teams at all stages of your planning and execution processes could mean discovering new opportunities and enhancing existing tactics.
• Don’t take sides. You may end up taking an almost parental role if your agencies begin finger pointing, but nip that in the bud immediately and always do what is best for your company as a whole, not what satisfies one agency or team versus another.
• Ask for something from everyone. If you want to see some creative from the advertising team, you should include your PR and social media marketing teams in the mix. Integrated marketing is not a new concept, but you need to put that into practice every day.
• Re-examine your workflow. Have touch points over time (maybe monthly and quarterly) to make sure that your new social media marketing team is becoming an integral part of the process. Have open and honest conversations and get critical feedback to make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Measure and leverage results. Don’t look for ways to prove or disprove that one type of marketing is better than another. It isn’t about pitting PR against advertising against social media marketing. It is about finding what works and building upon successes.

If You’re Part of a Team

The flip side of hiring an agency is being part of a team or agency that is being hired to assimilate into an existing group to provide social media marketing services. Here are a few things you should consider as you enter into the new relationship:

• Be aware. Understand the dynamics of different business interests. Each agency has their own bottom line on their minds but all the teams should be working toward a common goal: Helping the client to succeed.
• Be available. Establish and maintain open lines of communications so other teams or agencies can’t accuse you of being unavailable or unwilling to participate in planning sessions or other key events in the creative and execution process.
• Extend a hand. As new kid on the block, look for ways where you can help other teams or agencies get a win. Offer to help where you see others needing additional support. Prove yourself to be the asset that you know you can be by making the first overtures to participate.
• Play nice in the sandbox. Your goal should not be to win additional business by taking work from another agency. If you win new business from the client, it should be on the merits of your work, not because you stepped on toes, threw sand in faces and undermined others. You’ll lose in the long run.
• Look for collaborative opportunities. Maybe the other agencies aren’t bringing you into the fold as readily as you’d hoped. Don’t be discouraged but instead look for ways to bring them into the social media marketing realm in meaningful ways. Prove that everyone can win when working together.
• Give kudos. Regardless of how other teams are reacting to you, be the first to say something positive about others. Compliment their work, celebrate their wins. You know what they say about honey versus vinegar. But be sincere. You’re all part of the same team even if you might reside at a different company.
• Keep good records. Even while keeping a positive attitude and being professional, you shouldn’t be Pollyanna about everything. Keep careful records of work rendered, goals achieved, lessons learned and communications and interactions with other teams. It’s both good business practice and also protection in case there is ever a conflict.

No matter which side of the fence you sit, it is up to everyone at the top to set positive examples to everyone else on each team. Don’t approach inter-agency relationships from a position of scarcity but instead employ an attitude of abundance. There is enough work to go around for everyone who does good work. And the more you all work well together and better serve the client, the more work they’ll gladly outsource to build on that success.

How are you working social media marketing teams into your process?

stockxchng image by ljleavell

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Here’s what happened to me: I used Register.com to register a domain name. I know, it isn’t the cheapest domain registrar, but it has been reliable with excellent customer service, so I’ve been a customer since the 1990s. The other day, I was poking around for new domain names (because one can never have too many domain names), and purchased one. Then I went off on my merry way surfing the web for other things.

Much later on, I was on a site entirely unrelated to domain names and an ad on the side of the page I was browsing caught my eye. It contained the exact domain name I had recently purchased, but with a different suffix. It was telling me that I could purchase a variation of the domain name I already had. And right away it creeped me out. Upon closer inspection, it was an ad from Register.com. My geeky, I’ve-been-doing-this-stuff-for-years brain knew that this ad was most likely generated by tapping into the cookies on my browser, and that someone, somewhere, got the wacky idea that customizing my advertising experience would be a good thing — not just tailoring the ad to my interests (travel, parenting, Internet services) but literally lifting what I now felt was my domain name and putting it in the ad. Even though it was supposed to serve me and entice me to purchase more, I was annoyed.

How Social Media Can Help

Where do we draw the lines between connected and disconnected? Where do we draw the lines between opting into personalization and customization and having it automatically appear because our activities online are being tracked and tagged? My thinking on this is if a company wants to get social with me as a customer, it should use social media tools, not cookies and automated tools to track my every move and then spit information out to me based on some kind of algorithm.

What I would have rather experienced with Register.com could fall under a number of social media marketing tools and tactics. These are simple things that, at first, might seem like unrelated to the sale of a domain name, but hear me out.

1. When I bought the domain name, it would have been nice to be led to a page that thanks me for the purchase and encouraged me to connect with the company on Facebook or Twitter.
2. Once I “liked” the company’s Facebook Page, I’d pay attention to specials or discounts offered via the Page. I’m fine with consuming messaging from a company via their Facebook page, even if the messages are merely reminders to buy that domain name that I’ve been thinking about.
3. If I followed the company on Twitter, ditto. I’d be happy to see a discount code running through my Twitterstream that I could act on immediately, perhaps prompted by the nudge: “Hey, thinking about getting a new domain name for that project you’re working on? Act now…”

I probably wouldn’t visit a Register.com blog or subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. As a consumer, my plate is overflowing, but it’s easy enough for me to connect to a company I like and have a varied stream of messaging from them in my two most frequently used social networks.

Isn’t that how social media marketing should work versus old-fashioned, clunky and invasive advertising? Let’s connect, feed me some valuable info over time interspersed with marketing messages and some coupons or discounts, and I’m a happy camper. Trust builds between us. I’m not creeped out by your connections to my communications streams. It’s a win/win scenario.

What do you think about the old ways of advertising and the new ways of connecting to customers via social media?

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Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. I’d argue that any publisher that has their eggs completely in the ad banner basket is missing the boat and is in for a Titanic-sized rude awakening.

The good news is that I’ve seen inklings of integrated campaigns online from some forward-thinking advertisers who are realizing that the old advertising methods don’t work so well online and that ad banner fatigue hit consumers in about, oh, 1999. Kudos to the companies who may not yet be getting it right, but are fighting the good fight to bust out of the old models and create some new ones.

So what are the new options for advertisers to reach potential customers? I don’t have a magic bullet for you, sorry, but I do have some wild and wacky ideas about advertising (hate it) versus social communications (love it).

• integration — think of how you can integrate your brand appropriate into conversations. Hint: Strategic social media marketing.
• placement — find interesting ways to place your brand into someone’s information stream. Hint: Virtual goods and gifts.
• overlay — develop ways to put your content into new places and spaces. Hint: Augmented reality.
• cross-platform — don’t just think Mac/PC or Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Hint: Hybrid online/offline.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts and then let you ruminate — or argue with me, if you like. Most people do not want to consume ads. Many just barely tolerate them. A growing number of people completely reject them. If you look at the trends in communications over the last two decades, the patterns are clear. Learn from our past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to be different. Just make sure you have a strategy, some patience, and a flexible plan.

And please…don’t be an ostrich.

What is the future of advertising on the social web?

Photos by stock.xcnhg users flaivoloka and josecarli respectively

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

A few of the characteristics of an influencer, according to Brazell, are:

1. Quality. Says Brazell, “It’s not numbers. It isn’t the number of followers you have. You can be the best marketer in the world but nobody cares if you don’t have quality.”

I agree with Brazell’s statements about quality over quantity, but if you’re working with clients or trying to convince a decision-maker  — such as your boss — about social media, they still expect numbers. I may argue with my business partner every time she is looking to find the numbers to show our clients that “it is not about the numbers,” but I know I have to understand that when the person holding the purse strings demands those numbers, we’re just between a rock and a hard place.

But for those who are chasing the big numbers like thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers at the expense of quality content and engagement, they are in for a very rude awakening as the marketing and advertising landscape continues to change. It isn’t how many eyeballs you get in front of, but how engaged the people behind those eyeballs are with you that matters.

2. Transparency. “With an influencer you know what they are thinking, what they are going to do, why they are doing it — because they’re transparent. You do what you say, you say what you do. Transparency builds trust,” says Brazell.

I couldn’t agree more. Whether you’re a blogger or other kind of content producer — even if you’re just commenting in someone’s else’s forum — be transparent about who you are, what you do and why you do it. People appreciate that honesty. And they resent it when you hide your identity or intentions; trust is broken. Don’t go there.

Brazell also mentioned two other qualities of influencers: they have charisma and are inspiring. He says that there is a motivational aspect to what influencers do. “Know how to talk to people. When you motivate people, you start building people up, and you give somebody something that is worthwhile.”

What do you think makes someone an “influencer?“

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The idea is simple: companies pay Twitter users to mention their products in a favorable light. It’s paid content, not uncommon in the blogging world, brought to micro-blogging for the first time in a concerted, organized and coherent way. It even includes an attempt at transparency, via a “disclosure engine,” use of which is required for Sponsored Tweets posts.

For celebrity bloggers like Jessica Gottlieb, it’s a system that pays admirably. For every sponsored tweet she makes, she’s compensated to the tune of around $22, according to a Fast Company article on the new service by Lydia Dishman. Dishman’s own sponsored tweets would only be worth about $3 by comparison. Sponsored Tweets takes into account your number of followers and the frequency of your posting, among other factors, when determining your rate of compensation.

Arguments in favor of and against the scheme have already been popping up all over the place, with people making good points on both sides. Personally, I like to keep social networking and advertising as separate as possible, and have been known to delete Facebook friends after receiving a pitch message. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the same sort of thing on Twitter, since a 140-character tweet in my stream is much easier to ignore than a message that triggers an email, but at first blush, it isn’t something that sits well with me. I think the degree to which it becomes popular will end up having a lot to do with how tolerant I am of paid tweeting.

What are your thoughts on Sponsored Tweets? Do you produce paid content as a web worker already, and would you consider moving into this new space? How do you see tweet sponsoring affecting your Twitter usage, if at all?

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But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?

There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:

The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.

While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.

An Anti-ad Network?
Siegler discussed online advertising while covering Contenture, an “anti-ad network” that allows publishers to group themselves together with the idea that Contenture members can pay a subscription fee to gain access to a group of member sites that have the ads removed.

Think about what the future of online browsing might look like when you take this idea to scale. For example, what if you could one day pay Contenture (or Facebook Connect, perhaps) $5 a month — a fee I’m grabbing out of the ether — with the blessed result of being able to visit thousands of high-quality web sites, absolutely ad-free? That could theoretically provide both an important revenue stream for publishers while improving the user experience at the same time.

Subscriptions For Mobile Content
Amazon, with its handheld content reader Kindle, is steadily moving forward — using a similar strategy as Apple in terms of monetizing the sale and distribution of MP3s to iPod devices — with the creation of a massive and sustainable business in getting people to pay for digital content.

While the Kindle is best known for selling books available from the Amazon.com catalog, there’s a growing number of magazine, newspaper and blog subscriptions that can be paid for using an existing Amazon account. Importantly, the Kindle is “training” a mainstream marketplace to pay for digital content, including a subscription component.

While an announcement on Wednesday (again covered by Siegler on TechCrunch) that Amazon is opening all blogs to become part of the Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta program was not front-page news, it could be another notable step toward building the importance of online subscriptions for online publishers.

Consider, too, that the Kindle’s forthcoming DX release, with its 9.7-inch screen, has the opportunity to further challenge both the computer monitor and print for the attention of readers across the planet. Therefore “training” people to pay for content in the form of subscriptions on the Kindle may have vast repercussions for the future of digital content.

What is your take on the future of the online paid subscription model for online content?

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The problem, as is always the problem with internet advertising, is finding a simple, cost effective way to bring my ads to potential customers who’re actually looking for my services. Google Ads are one way to try to insure you reach the people you intend to, but advertising networks are another.

Design Ads is a brand new network (doesn’t officially launch until 2009, in fact), which provides a targeted solution for those in the web design field. Ad network models are successful because they ensure a healthy cycle of targeted material that will remain fresh and relevant to viewers, so you’re ad won’t become stale or melt into the background by virtue of visitors seeing it every time they go to a specific site.

The people behind Design Ads clearly know their target market. They list among their discriminators for publishers the fact that the advertising is simple, and clutter free. Design blogs and online magazines will, after all, be more concerned than other outlets about the effect of advertising on their site’s layout. Revenue rates are reasonable, and are priced according to unique visitor statistics, not click-throughs.

One-at-a-time ads is a boon for advertisers, as well, since they will get the the exclusive focus of visitors to member sites. Cost of ads is variable, depending on a number of factors, including network membership and traffic numbers. Design Ads currently projects a cost of $2,500 per month, which isn’t that much if the network becomes your primary advertising outlet, as it is designed to be.

Design Ads is just getting started, and whether you’re looking to advertise, or you have a design site and want to generate some extra revenue, it might be a good time to get on board.

Full disclosure: Design Ads is operated by David Appleyard, who is a freelance contractor for TheAppleBlog, part of the GigaOmnimedia network.

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