It's with mixed feelings that I announce we're completely sold out for seats at next month's CM Summit. We squeezed as many folks as we could in, but the fire marshall's going to be very upset if we keep it up. Next time, we'll get a bigger venue! For the 350 or so of you that are coming, I can't wait to see how the conversation goes!

It's a big day at Boing Boing, with a redesign, a new Gadgets section led by Joel Johnson of Dethroner and the return of comments on every post. Mark Frauenfelder explains the changes and who's behind them in a post that already has more than 100 comments. Congratulations to Mark, Cory, David, Xeni and Joel for making something great even better.

I'm an old magazine guy, folks know. We have a partnership with Ad Age on our Conversational Marketing Summit, and today our ad ran on the back cover. Cool! Thanks for the photo, James....

The second of a series, here's my four questions with David Veneski, who has worked with FM on Intel's integrated campaign over at Digg and Digg Labs (Check out Arc!). David is Intel's Digital Campaigns Manager for the Americas Marketing Group, and he's been a lot of fun to work with.

To kick things off: Why did you decide on working with Digg, and what have you learned from it?

I have been a big fan of Digg since its inception. I think that they attract a very smart and influential subset of an audience every technology company is trying to reach. The power of Digg has been more and more evident as the notion of 'social media' has become part of a marketer's strategy. If you put it in a more personal context, we are more likely to turn to our peer group as trusted advisors when it comes to making large $$ decisions rather than relying solely on our own individual research. I believe that to be true in business decisions as well. Several industry studies have shown that we are seeing a shift in how IT decision-makers and influencers conduct their research when making fleet purchase decisions. We are seeing that the IT Community spends a significant amount of time consuming social media along with their standard editorial media or vendor content. They are lending more credence to the opinions of their peers than their more traditional information resources.

Digg, being on an astronomical growth path (having just surpassed 20M unique visitors), provides an environment that houses an extremely large population of 'trusted advisors'. Equally as important - these trusted advisors are genuine with the technology stories they 'digg' - self moderating the chaff to the bottom and bringing the important news or research nuggets to the top, and promoting these key stories to the rest of the Digg population. This casts a wide net of influence that is accepted and trusted by the end users frequenting this site.

At Intel, we see the importance of social media as a key growth segment of the marketing mix. It is our goal to integrate ourselves in a positive way and to maintain the integrity of the community environments that we are becoming more involved in.

Intel is such a big company - how do you focus a marketing message on just one idea, or do you have to?

Bit of a long answer back to you, but there are some key points I wanted to touch, and tie it back into how we structure our campaigns here at Intel: I don't think that you necessarily need to focus a marketing message on one idea but that is the traditional approach. Consistency is the key when it comes to effectively reaching our target audience(s).

A marketing campaign has to be recognizable to the audience we are interested in reaching, in order make an impact and have an influence on their decision making process (the whole 'Effective Reach' concept of a consumer needing to see an advertisement 3+ times before it is retained and makes a memorable impact). This is especially important in advertising. You have to consider that you only have a flash of time to capture your target's attention. The school of thought for advertising is that you MUST limit your message to one unique and compelling idea (commonly referred to as the Unique Selling Proposition).

At Intel, we have done a pretty good job of breaking through the clutter and developing marketing messages and ad campaigns that concentrate on a single idea to effectively relay our value proposition in a busy marketplace. In today's environment, a consumer has so many options for good technology and are constantly bombarded with advertisements promoting product 'X' or product 'Y'. To effectively break through and make an lasting impact, your ad better be good and the potential customer must see it multiple times (and typically across several marketing mediums).

Take our 'Multiply' campaign as an example. The concept of Multiply allows us to show the benefits of our multi-core processor technology in a variety of ways, across a business and consumer audience set. It's a very simple but effective message - your technology experience will be enhanced by the power of our multi-core processor offerings. The main idea of 'Multiply' is consistent across our campaign, but the specific marketing message to support that idea is tailored to fit the business or consumer segment we are striving to reach and influence as they make their purchase decisions. One consistent theme, a set of customized marketing messages, and multiple exposures (across all marketing mediums) should prove to be the recipe for success for ensuring that your campaign is effectively impacting the target audience.

In these times of shifting media formats, how do you measure success, particularly online?

Measurements of success can look very different from program to program - depending on what it is we are trying to achieve with each media spend. Some programs such as Online Resource Centers and Microsites done with major media partners are very easy to measure from a raw data perspective across the standard web metric set - impressions, clicks, engagements, time spent, return visits etc. Those measurements give us behavioral data showing the rate and frequency people are consuming the content of the program. Other programs are not as easy to measure as it is a more nebulous 'movement of the needle' with the audience we are marketing to.

Take conversational media for instance. We can measure the number of times a blog is viewed by consumers visiting the site, but how do we measure the personal impact that we are making with our audience by having that live, real time conversation with them? That is difficult. The key is to analyze how people actively participate in the program. What we have found is that to get them to participate, we need to focus the conversation around what THEY care most about with regards to our products or technology. This is a learning opportunity for many large companies. Often times, through listening to the passionate comments or responses around product related issues, companies are able to uncover ways to build a loyal customer base and influence them to be faithful advocates of their brand. An increase in brand loyalty by a company's customer base, spells success - all initiated by listening to what they have to say.

In summary, I would say that there is more to measuring success than just hard data coming from your web analytics team. You have to be willing to incorporate the tone of the conversation, the quality of the interactivity, and the enthusiasm of the audience you are trying to reach to truly understand the success of a program, especially as we move more and more into social and conversational media as a marketing vehicle.
Thanks. Last question.

Digg recently updated the Arc feature that Intel is underwriting. It strikes me this is something new - a marketer underwriting a new feature on a site, and then that feature being iterated after feedback from the community. How did you respond to the changes?

Agreed - underwriting a new feature on a site is definitely something new for us here at Intel. The compelling thing about our sponsorship of Digg Labs and the underwriting of the development of Arc is that we are supporting innovation - which is a key tenant of Intel. We have a strong history of innovation internally and have also built a credible reputation of supporting others in the tech sector with their innovation efforts. The bonus in all of this is that we are being organically recognized by some leading industry publications for our involvement with Digg by helping them continue to grow the Digg Labs environment.

We, Digg and Intel, were definitely appreciative of the feedback we got with the Arc visualization. The great thing about a community site like Digg is that you get real time feedback on the products you are releasing and have the ability to be very nimble in your reaction to that feedback. The community was quite receptive to the first iteration of Arc but definitely had an opinion on how it could be made better. Digg and Stamen Designs did a great job of listening to what the audience wanted and implemented the key changes that made Arc even better.

One of the things that strengthens our relationship with Digg is that both companies realize our users and customers are critical to our present and future success. To continue to be a leader and improve our technology offerings, we feel it is paramount to listen to the feedback we are getting from these users. The ability to implement that feedback in a 'next release' obviously has a more expedient turn around with the likes of Digg and Arc, however we support a similar philosophy here at Intel - listen to user feedback and improve the lives of our customers through better technology.

Thanks for your feedback, David!

Chas Edwards has several new posts that are relevant to FM authors, including ones about the HP-sponsored "voice posts" campaign and an advertiser landing a healthy round of funding.

He also points out that, after the Glam network announced a new proprietary search tool, "in a crass ploy to boost FM’s valuation, we rolled out our own proprietary search tool aimed at delivering top quality and highly relevant content from the 130 sites in the FM family."

Here it is:

Why would an advertiser dare to sponsor a conversation without having any influence over the content? Because it works. Chas Edwards explains.

WebbAlert, a new daily technology news roundup starring X-Play host Morgan Webb, hit the Web for the first time this morning. It's already drawing positive reviews, like these from TechCrunch and A VC and Gizmodo. More information is in the press release.

Morgan partnered with FM to develop the show. She uses the top tech news sites, including a number of FM authors, as sources for the stories and offers her viewers links back to the full posts on those sites. Video delivery comes from our friends at Castfire.

We're thrilled to welcome Morgan as the newest FM author.