Over at eMarketer they have an interview with Michael Donnelly, Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola.

Two particular things struck me as interesting:

First, Donnelly says, “I recently completed an analysis of the top five global brands and it showed that they’re primarily talking about themselves, while we’re primarily enabling people to talk about our brand.”

As Donnelly says, talking about themselves is working for some of those brands, but his is a much different, and much riskier option. It gives the detractors a place to vent their hatred, promote their own stuff, or place your brand name next to curse words on your home page like the skittles twitter home page debacle (3rd section) back in March. But on the flip side, if you approach it properly you can cultivate a devoted, authentic following that loves your product, tells everyone else about it, and, most importantly, are believed. This can be a difficult environment to set up though as a fully successful campaign requires steady navigation through the rough waters and a captain who’s in sync with his/her crew.

Coke’s latest foray is a fascinating, if not fairly self-serving, campaign.  It’s called the Expedition 206 and will send three user chosen Happiness Ambassadors around the globe into the 206 “countries” (The United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and even Atlanta, GA are all separate “countries”) where Coke operates, looking for what makes people happy. The concept is a novel one, but the nomenclature and the locations make me feel that these “Happiness Ambassadors” won’t be much more than globe trotting corporate shills.

**Begin Rant** An ambassador represents the ideals and culture of their native country, right? So a Happiness Ambassador has theoretically already found the answer to what makes people happy and it ain’t Pepsi. The journey can then only be to take a picture of people being made “happy.”  And if Coke really cared about the question why not send them to parts of the world that Coke doesn’t operate in? Why pay to send these people around the world in the first place unless you’re doing it for one giant publicity stunt?!? Oh, wait… I get it…  **End Rant**

Second, he talks about trying to bring together all of the different social channels, “It’s conceivable that people use YouTube for their videos and Flickr for their photos and Facebook for their social networking. We are trying to figure out how we tie all that together.”

Having everything in one location would make it easier to better quantify and analyze what they have, but it’s also interesting that an outside company, particularly one the size of Coke is interested in bringing all of those diverse channels together into a single location.

I wonder if this sort of desire from large companies will lead to a comprehensive dashboard or more of an aggregation approach (pulls together content rather than info), either internally within a company or as a separate service with a common login etc. Facebook already allows for much of the user functionality, but being a closed network it cannot provide everything YouTube and Flickr does. Could Facebook’s increasing encroachment on making user data publicly available be a step in this direction, to attempt to provide the best of both worlds: for users a one stop sharing platform and for marketers/advertisers a one stop selling platform? Or will the populace resist, wanting instead to keep their digital life compartmentalized and using a service like OpenID to ease the login load?

Have you ever really taken a hard look at where your Yahoo PPC traffic is really coming from?  Recently I was working on a web analytics project for a client and was doing a deep dive into their referring sites.  I noticed a number of sites that were driving a fairly high number of visits, but none of them were converting.  I dug deeper and began to notice some strange abnormalities.

These sites appeared to be some of the “made for adsense” type sites that only have ads.  They had some navigation and a search box, but everything always led to ads.  I could see that all the traffic coming from these sites had PPC tracking strings so I figured it was from the Google content network.

Google AdWords, however, wasn’t reporting any clicks from any of these domains.  I was a bit perplexed and so I went back to take a closer look at the tracking stings.  I was very surprised to see that they were from Yahoo.  The reason why I was so surprised was that the client isn’t running on the Yahoo content network.

I figured somehow the content network had been turned on by mistake, but that was not the case.  I kept poking around Yahoo and to my surprise found a Referrer report (which apparently is new as of the middle of October).  There I could see all the sites that Yahoo apparently deems to be “search” partners when in fact the only available content on the site are Yahoo ads.

In a few campaigns well over 50% of the monthly budget had come from these so called “search” partners with zero conversions.  These domains are now blocked, but that doesn’t mean the client or I am happy.

There will need to be follow-up calls with Yahoo to figure out how these sites can possibly be regarded as “search” partners.  In addition Yahoo only allows you to block 500 domains, so what is the client supposed to do once they reach that threshold?

Many questions still need to be answered, but I would strongly suggest doing a deep analysis using your web analytics data to see where exactly Yahoo is showing your ads.

Does your website have a 3rd party ad server that loads slower than John Goodman at an all-you-can–eat buffet?

If so, you might be in for a rude awakening when it comes to search rankings. Today, Google announced that it has added a new tool to Google Webmaster Tools: Site Performance. This information should be largely viewed as a precursor to the inevitable: sites with slow load times will be buried in search engine results pages.

Google’s mantra for websites has always been simple: do right by your user. Making your user wait 30-45 seconds so they can view an intrusive interstitial or banner is definitely not doing right by your user.

The pressure isn’t just on publishers—accountability is going to be placed firmly on the ad servers such as Point Roll and Double Click that can have the potential to greatly inhibit site load times. What’s the point of an ad server if it’s crashing your traffic?