Church of the Customer: Social media archives
May 05, 2008
Jargon and marketing maturity
There's an inverse relationship between a company's ability to communicate well and its public use of jargon.
Facebook is a good example. Smart people run the company, but their communication with the world is usually pretty awful.
From my vantage point at a packed coffee shop in Austin this weekend, Facebook's familiar interface illuminated laptop screens on multiple tables. The scene was a typical cross-section of the site's users.
But very few, if any, of the people behind those laptops would describe Facebook to their friends as a "social utility," as Facebook describes itself on its home page.
Jargon is easy. Simple is hard.
Update: Jennifer weighs in on how jargon creates a cloak of online obscurity.
Update 2: Kara Swisher reports that Facebook has hired Google's head of PR to be Facebook's VP of communications and public policy. Public policy? Huh.
Anyway, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg emailed his employees about the new hire, saying: "He (Elliot Schrage) will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do."
Yes, the key messages we want people to understand.
Sounds positively Web 1.0.
April 03, 2008
Keeping up with the social media fire hose
A few days ago I marveled how Salesforce.com rapidly responded to my tweet on Twitter about one of the company's products.
I asked Kingsley Joseph of Salesforce how he saw my tweet so quickly. He sent me a link to his Yahoo Pipes setup that tracks Salesforce's online word of mouth.
Yahoo Pipes allows you to build a single feed that is made up of other
feeds and data). Kingsley's pipe tracks online mentions of Salesforce and other
company products across social media sites like Flickr, Technorati,
Bloglines, Digg, Techmeme, YouTube, Friendfeed and Quotably Tweetscan (for
Twitter.)
Kingsley is kind; he coded a generic pipe for CotC readers to track mentions about your company. Here's the pipe.
According to Kingsley, here's how to use the pipe:
In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: "salesforce+ideas", ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important.
The first time you run the search, Yahoo might return an empty list. To force it to go fetch feeds, click "More Options" and then click "Get as RSS". You can then hit back and re-run the pipe successfully.
Titles are de-duplicated and sorting is reverse chronological. Multiple search terms can be used and the matched term will be prefixed to the title of the post. This doesn't do mass media, because there are good tools for that (Google Alerts come to mind). Send any feature requests Kingley's way, but don't hold your breath. He's a busy guy : )
March 26, 2008
How companies connect using Twitter
Ben Martin sent me a question today via Twitter: What do you think about corporate branded Twitter accounts?
I'm a Twitter n00b, but already I've seen companies using Twitter to help me connect with them. Here are a few examples:
- Promotions. Southwest Airlines uses Twitter to let customers know about deals. Today I got a tweet from them explaining that if I book a ticket using PayPal, I'd get $50 back in PayPal credit. Southwest also tweets press happenings and pointers to blog posts, as they did recently about their plane inspection issues.
- Listening and responding to customers. A few days ago, I tweeted about how Starbucks and Dell are using Salesforce.com's Ideas product for their Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea.com, respectively. But I had inadvertently linked to the wrong page on Salesforce.com's website. In less than 30 minutes, someone at Salesforce saw my mistake and tweeted the correct URL to me. I posted the correction back to Twitter along with a compliment about Salesforce listening in on the Tweetersphere.
- Employees as ambassadors. Dell leads the world with employee representation on Twitter. Check out the conversations that these Dell employees are having on Twitter: LionelatDell, RichardatDell, JohnatDell, APaxtonatDell, KellyatDell. Unlike many Twitterites, I met most of the Dell people in person before following them on Twitter. Because I had a chance to cement a relationship in person, I'm a big fan of the Dell people I follow on Twitter.
March 24, 2008
Overcoming the skeptics
Clifford Stoll probably didn't imagine that his 1995 essay in Newsweek dismissing the Internet as a "trendy and oversold community" would ever become an item for discussion again, much less 13 year later.
It did yesterday (thanks to Digg), mostly because of extreme irony: his various points of skepticism, that computer-aided education would ever become important, that we'd buy books and newspapers over the Net, or that ecommerce would ever take root, have largely come true.
They were big ideas then. They didn't have a clear pathway to fruition, which is where skepticism breeds. Skepticism about technology is easy. Skepticism about ideas is not.
The big ideas of today, like making all of your intellectual property available for free, or launching a social network for customers or developing an extreme niche like space tourism, are easily dismissed because they're not safe bets, and they upset the existing balances of power -- two additional sources of skepticism.
Just as they did 13 years ago, the big ideas of today don't have simple and clear pathways to fruition that anyone can understand, but someone probably does. You'd better believe that virtual communities dismissed by Stoll in 1995 are breeding grounds for idea generation in 2008.
The big ideas Stoll dismissed required years of evolution to become viable. They went through a period of natural selection and homeostasis, where the idea remained intact but the external forces around it changed.
These days, a big idea person has to be a biologist just as much as a marketer and a technologist.
March 19, 2008
Starbucks embraces the 5th P
Everyone's favorite marketing patient, Starbucks, has launched a suggestion box-cum-social network for customers.
MyStarbucksIdea collects the ideas of customers (my guess: just as many employees as customers), puts the ideas up for discussion and a vote. Starbucks says it'll keep members of the socnet updated as the popular ideas work their way through the company.
If Starbucks really follows through with its promise, this suggestion box-on-steroids idea is meritocracy via social network. The congregation is smarter than the preacher, so this could develop into a valuable, and tangible, asset for Starbucks.
March 18, 2008
Monitoring your WOM on Twitter
Twitter continues to grow in importance as a source of word of mouth. Forrester says 6% of U.S. adults who use the Internet, use Twitter to converse.
Twitter itself doesn't release number of users but anecdotal evidence points to fast-growing usage.
Even if you don't, or won't, use a Twitter account, you can, and should, track what might be said about you or your company, products, mascots, etc.
Tweetscan is a great tool to do this. Type a keyword into the field and it'll tell you if anyone is talking about you. You can set up automatic alerts via RSS or email if anyone Twitters about your keywords.
Here's a Tweetscan on what people are saying about SWOM:
February 22, 2008
Social marketing vs. social media marketing
There's growing confusion between the decades-old discipline called social marketing and the new concept of social media marketing.
Social marketing is the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing. Social marketing "products" are big ideas meant to change attitudes or behaviors, such as getting kids to stop smoking, protecting the environment or encouraging condom use. It's agenda-based marketing often driven by non-profits. It is a recognized marketing discipline that was popularized in the early 1970's by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman.
Social media marketing is a new flavor of marketing that uses social media such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo groups, etc. to create communities of like-minded interests and, perhaps, interact and converse with customers and potential customers. Social media marketing doesn't work too well with an agenda, unless it springs from a collaborative, grassroots effort from inside the community. It was popularized by bloggers .
I've noticed numerous references on blogs and podcasts that mislabel social media marketing as simply social marketing, probably for reasons of shorthand.
Let's not shortchange the real social marketers who've been working hard for years to change the world by confusing the two disciplines with an incorrect shorthand.
UPDATE: Nedra Weinreich in the comments points us to her side-by-side comparison chart of the two disciplines.
February 05, 2008
Why Howard Schultz should blog
Surely if the TSA -- yes, the Transportation Security Administration -- can blog to help stem its sinking reputation, then Howard Schultz can, too.
John Moore makes a case for why it's a perfect time for Starbucks' CEO to keep employees and customers updated on his turn-around plans via a blog.
After all, Schultz will garner more support by talking about his work to everyone rather than just to Wall Street analysts.
[Hat tip on the TSA blog: Betsy Weber]
January 25, 2008
Brand manager as star
If you've worked in a big company filled with dozens of brand managers, you know how "the process" can often dictate the outcome, rather than the other way around.
Young, idea-filled brand managers sometimes work in slow motion treading the many layers of protection that surround marketing planning. The older the brand, the more traditional the tactics, be they celebrities or PR stunts, all of which are, of course, first tested via multiple focus groups.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese is a brand that's 128 years old. But this old-timer is breaking a few conventions. It's using social media to launch a new, low-fat version of its product.
Adam and Tyler are two of the product brand managers. Along with their boss, Ericka Gettman, they're using a blog and YouTube videos to document the launch campaign for their new product. The traditional model might say at this point, "Great idea. Now hire actors to portray the brand managers. Then focus-group test it!"
The threesome certainly aren't actors. While the early results may be a bit campy (and they call us regular folk "consumers" a bit too much), the idea of removing the one-way mirror and turning the marketing into a public beta helps us understand that real, everyday people are behind something ubiquitous.
The Philly Creme Cheese people have created an initial bridge between end-customer and brand to help close what has been traditionally been a significant gap.
January 11, 2008
The good pirates
If you're a football fan, you haven't escaped seeing the YouTube-like Coors Light commercials that employ fake fans holding their cans of Coors (in a most improbable way) and ask dumb questions of actual coaches.
The gimmick is that the spots splice in the coaches' answers from their actual post-game news conferences. Funny premise, but most fell short of actual humor.
The commercials have succeeded, though, in inspiring a bevy of online copycats, precisely because it is an ode to amateur culture--mashing up actual footage with fake footage for humor. One of my faves features Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. The Pittsburghese is dead-on funny.
Not a bad blueprint for future TV ads: pay homage to amateur culture, and amateur culture will return the favor, spreading word of mouth.
Amateur ad featuring Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy [RSS readers click here.]
Amateur ad featuring Steelers coach Mike Tomlin [RSS readers click here.]
October 30, 2007
Fakers are bad for business
People hate fakers when it comes to buying stuff. In fact, more than half of the people asked for a recent survey said they avoid buying from a company if they even suspect a paid professional is secretly behind the review of a typical, everyday person.
This comes from PR firm Burson-Marsteller and its new study about "e-fluentials," people who are more likely to share their opinions and experiences with others because they typically speak with 50% more people than the average person every day. About 30% of the survey's respondents said fake reviews are a big problem, compared with 20% in 2001. That rise in concern largely mirrors the findings of a recent Nielsen study.
To keep momentum building for user-generated content sites, at least two things should happen pretty quickly:
- Opinion sites must dramatically improve vetting systems for reviewers. Amazon set the standard a few years ago with its Real Name functionality. It's time for the biggies like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and CitySearch to step up.
- Companies of any size, in any industry, must understand that giving yourself glowing reviews using fake names (or hiring or encouraging others to create fake reviews) is not only unethical but bad for business. The amateur Internet detectives always find out. Of course, they're not shy about sharing their findings.
October 10, 2007
Please hammer, don't hurt 'em
Following up on fun with Comcast:
Mona Shaw, a 75-year-old granny in Virginia, got so fed up waiting for Comcast to change her phone service that she smashed up a few items in her local Comcast office with a hammer, all the while shouting, "Have I got your attention now?!"
Let's hope.
And 16 months later, Brian's infamous "sleeping Comcast technician" video is still going strong. It's now been viewed more than 1 million times. Google "Comcast" and the video still shows up on the first page of results.
For most companies, these would be iconic stories that would illustrate how bad word of mouth eventually devastated them.
But Comcast isn't like most companies.
October 09, 2007
Bob Garfield is funny
Ad critic Bob Garfield has launched a blog called Comcast Must Die.
"Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity," Garfield writes. "What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change their ways. This site offers an opportunity -- for you to vent your grievances (civilly, please) and for Comcast to pay close attention."
Yes, vent your grievances civilly on a blog called Comcast Must Die.
October 04, 2007
Word of mouth number 1, again
Create all of the advertising platforms you want, word of mouth is still the most-trusted form of advertising in the world.
That's the sentiment from a new Nielsen study that polled 26,000+ people in 47 worldwide markets, confirming similar results from other studies.
Seventy-eight percent of the people Nielsen polled trust the recommendation of a friend. That's 15 points higher than the next ranking, newspaper ads. Coming in second must surely be good news for worried dailies.
The hot horse, of course, is citizen-created content; it's the third most-trusted form of advertising, just two points below newspaper ads. (Nielsen unfortunately calls this "consumer opinions posted online." C'mon Nielsen, dump that disparaging term and just refer to us as people or citizens.)
Here's how the top results play out:
What's interesting from the study is how trustworthiness of personal recommendations varies by region then trickles down to individual countries.
For instance, word of mouth is trusted by nearly everyone in the Far East compared to parts of eastern and western Europe. In Denmark, fewer than two-thirds of the people trust what others tell them. Too much paranoia-inducing hash, perhaps? I keeeed.
One interesting study that could be spun out of this: Are lower levels of recommendations a reflection of the history of the culture or the contemporary practices of media or government?
While word of mouth has probably been the most trusted form of advertising since the dawn of time, citizen-created content is the new wunderkind. Dozens of web 2.0 companies are forming around the idea. Fortunes have already been earned, and dreams of future fortunes dance through imaginations. You might even call this the golden age of amateur media.
Underpinning much of this entrepreneurial euphoria is the inherent reliability of citizen-created content, which is trusted most in North America, followed closely by the Asian-Pacific rim. That's not too surprising since most citizen-created content originates from those two regions.
What should be of concern to popular opinion aggregators like TripAdvisor and Yelp, or budding entrepreneurs or existing media companies is that only about two-thirds of the world trusts online opinions.
Lest those numbers fall, recommendation sites should be working diligently on preventive measures, like identity-verification systems and algorithms that root out sock puppets. Bad news about poseurs gaming the system will spread faster than good news about efforts to fix systemic problems. Trust is your most valuable, but least tangible, asset.
As bloggers, blog readers and contributors to the common good, we must remain vigilant against the scammers and the ethically uneducated. Truth must win in order for trust to prevail.
In the meantime, all of you true believers in word of mouth, community, evangelism and grassroots organizing, take heart: what you're doing has the most inherent trust and therefore value as an marketing platform.
September 06, 2007
The Marie Digby head-fake
With a few million views of her homemade music videos on YouTube apparently leading to a rash of TV appearances and a song being featured in a high-profile MTV show, musician Marie Digby seems to be the latest break-out amateur star discovered by the grassroots.
But in another example of how shortcuts on the road to authenticity eventually lead to a cliff, the WSJ tells us in a page-one story that Digby's do-it-yourself music videos were part of her record company's carefully crafted plan to feign amateur status. It's the amateurs who often benefit the most from grassroots-driven word of mouth in our social-media world.
Digby never disclosed her record label affiliation as she worked her way through the world of social media, an important consideration for many music lovers in the search for Artists Who Matter. Digby's MySpace page checkbox for "record label" was blank until the Journal started asking questions (now it says "major" for "record label.") At a recent gig in Los Angeles attended by her own record company executives, Digby said of her YouTube videos, "I just turned on my little iMovie, and here I am!" Nifty-presto!
The fuller story was that her record label, Hollywood Records, had signed her 18 months ago, gave her a Mac, consulted with her on what songs to videotape and even created a studio-level recording of "Umbrella" to post to iTunes.
So Hollywood did what Hollywood does: it airbrushed out parts of reality to create a better illusion, and Digby played along. The grassroots bought it, just as it did for another nubile amateur-out-of-nowhere, Lonelygirl15. Like that young and sweet-faced ingenue, Digby had plenty of professional, behind-the-scenes help.
But if Lonelygirl15 taught us anything (she was quite the precocious type) it's that once the facade of amateur status is broken, a significant portion of the grassroots crowd feels duped. Buzz built on trust dissipates.
When it was announced this summer that Lonelygirl15 was killed off -- she was sacrificed by a cult for her blood... yeah, happens every day around here! -- the world yawned and scratched itself.
Young singer-songwriter Marie Digby is, after all, a real person but launching a promising career (or product, or company) with such careless consideration for authenticity demonstrates remarkably poor judgment about the nature of word of mouth.
Update: Buzz built on trust dissipates because disappointed or even angry buzz can be toxic. There's plenty of the latter spreading hours after the Journal's story appeared. A few of the comments now on Digby's YouTube profile page:
- "It was a lousy thing to do to her true fans."
- "Thanks for selling us out to the corporate machine and lying about who you actually are."
- "The very *reason* so many of us liked her was *because* we thought she wasn't a fabrication of corporate marketers."
- "Building your career on a lie, instead of trusting your own talents and abilities enough to let them do the talking, it won't pay, not in the long run."
Digby has talent and her evangelists are trying to neutralize the naysayers, creating a classic showdown in the theater we cover. Too early to tell if all of this will harm or help her career. After all, publicity built on controversy requires the context of purposeful intent; Marie Digby isn't Madonna, Marilyn Manson or even Mark Cuban, intent on changing the game.
The real point here is that as Bob Dylan once sang, "To live outside the law, you must be honest."
September 04, 2007
The sale of TiVoCommunity.com
If you've read "Citizen Marketers," then you're familiar with the story of TiVoCommunity, a citizen-created site dedicated to all things TiVo.
David Bott founded the digital community in 1999. Back then, it made sense to him to start a community around the digital video recorder since he'd already been running an online community for audio-video enthusiasts.
With TiVo Community now at 161,000 members, Bott sold the site last week to Capable Networks, a Chicago-based company that specializes in online communities, for an undisclosed amount.
We asked Bott to tell us about the sale and what it could mean for other citizen-created sites dedicated to brands.
Q: Capable Networks purchased the community you founded and have been running for several years. Why sell now?
A: A lot has happened in my life over the past year, one of which is health-related. Not that running TiVo Community was a lot of work, but when you consider the other communities I run plus my involvement in the audio-video industry, it adds up. TiVo Community will be better-served by Capable Networks, which has developed a business model on what was started with TiVo Community Forum. I cannot give it the attention it deserves. They can. It is a great fit, and I feel very well with the choice.
Q: What exactly does Capable get with this purchase?
A: Capable Networks received all the domains for TiVo Community, the community itself, the data, the archives, the interest in TiVo Community Store, and the license agreements from TiVo, Inc. Not to mention my thanks for its interest in working with the community along the same lines that I have set into place.
Q: Will you continue in your virtual mayoral duties and moderate the community?
A: I will be around, can't keep away. But I will act as a consultant to Capable Networks on the site itself and on other sites it operates under the same principles. The moderators that help out on the site will be staying on board.
Q: To some outsiders, it may seem a bit disconcerting that a community has been "purchased;" it's almost like saying the city of Austin was bought by a private-equity group. How have the members of TiVo Community reacted to the news?
A: Well, not quite the same really. But an interesting analogy. You need to think of it as a business regardless. If not, you will get very, very personally involved and that could be a very bad thing. Members of such sites have their own thoughts on how things need to be run. And that is fine, but they're not laying down the dollars to keep it running or putting in the time to run it. Unlike a citizen who needs to pay taxes and have a say via votes. The members can just come and go without regard to the site at any time without issue. But a forum operator can not. Bills need to be paid and thus you need to work on it as a business to fund it. If you mess up, it is all on you. Thus you do what you feel is right for the community. You have to have a passion for doing it for it to work.
As far as the community reaction, they seem fine but are of course wondering what changes may come done the road. But then again, they always wondered that. New owners does not necessarily mean major change. After all, it would not be of interest if it did not work well the way it was.
Q: Another party with great interest in the outcome would obviously be TiVo. What has its reaction been?
A: I, of course, checked with TiVo before the sale went too far into the talks. This is not something that happened overnight as we have been working on this for quite sometime. TiVo checked into Capable Networks and seemed to agree it would be good fit; Capable can bring more to the table for the members of the site than I currently have the time to do. I would not have moved with forward without their OK. We have a great relationship.
Q: How has the community changed since we first talked with you in early 2006?
A: Not that much. The site is very attractive to TiVo owners and continues to see over a million unique visitors a month. A store was added to purchase TiVo products and upgrades right from the community site. Other than that, things are moving right long.
Q: Does this sale mean there's a bright future for other citizen-created brand sites?
A: Yes, for sure. Other dedicated product sites could be of interest to companies like Capable. But I think it would come down to product type, membership size, and the number of unique visitors per month.
August 30, 2007
The Facebook factor
Sue points us to the story of a UK-based bank that was inundated with the complaints of thousands of Facebookers who'd banded together and threatened a boycott.
It was because the bank decided to eliminate interest-free overdrafts for students. Many students said they had joined the bank because of this benefit that was now being eliminated. The bank smartly gave up the idea in the face of fast-moving word of mouth.
The lesson to this story is that social networks as word-of-mouth networks create strong immune systems to poor decisions. The bank's decision may have looked good on paper but the real world of word of mouth told it otherwise.
SquidWho: The Whos of Whoville
Seth and the gang at Squidoo have released a tres cool application.
SquidWho is a people-powered web-based "Who's Who." Type in a name of a person and the program will search web media sources to build a page of blog posts, videos, books, photos or what-have-you about the person. It'll even start a fan club. Then you can edit any of it for completeness.
Think of it as either an instantaneous bio page or fan kit in a box. Neat.
Even neater: Proceeds of ads on the pages go to charity.
Admittedly, it feels weird creating a page about myself, so how about a contest? The first person to build a complete page for either Ben or me that fills in all of the SquidWho profile fields will win an autographed book of their choice ("Citizen Marketers" or "Creating Customer Evangelists"). Post a comment here when you're done.
UPDATE: The 2 pages have been created for both me and Ben. Thanks for playing! Now go back to SquidWho and create a fan page for the really famous people in your life, like your mom. Or your dog.
August 27, 2007
The grassroots Wispa campaign
The British candy bar Wispa will be revived this fall thanks to the petitions of 14,000 people across dozens of different Facebook user groups.
Manufacturer Cadbury Schweppes said it was the first time "that the power of the Internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand."
If this is truly a grassroots, nostalgia-driven effort (Cadbury insists it is), then the company has a unique opportunity to parlay that revival interest into strong customer ownership: hand over levels of brand management to a dedicated Facebook community.
Give 'em a voice and a vote on decisions. It would immediately propel thousands of evangelists to the top rung of the loyalty ladder. It would be an excellent R&D vehicle for learning how to apply the work of a community across other brands.
After all, 14,000 Wispa fans have already proven their votes can make noteworthy things happen.
(Thanks, Peter!)
August 06, 2007
Friendraising before fundraising
Here in Austin, as in Chicago and cities across the nation, busy sidewalks are sometimes filled with teams of young and ambitious people hoping to persuade passersby to give money to their cause.
But they are wasting their time. The collateral pollution of spammers, scammers and phishers who disguise nefarious intentions to steal your money are turning street-team awareness-generators or money collectors into dinosaurs. Sure they can wear matching t-shirts or official-looking badges, but the scams we're increasingly subjected to online is making all of us wary of people we don't already know offline.
Social networks are replacing old-school street teams. Social networks do the work of street teams and create hoped-for network effects: they create friends, spread knowledge and as some political social networks are demonstrating, raise significant dollars. And they can do it much more efficiently than street teams.
Social networks work for cause-driven organizations because they focus on friendraising before fundraising. They create the necessary social capital that makes raising budgetary capital more efficient, eliminating the need for street teams, cold-calling or mass-market appeals.
Friendraising before fundraising creates better friends who will lend you their time, their attention or if you do an exceptional job of creating trust, their money.
July 26, 2007
Why everyone wants a viral video
More evidence of how the proliferation of home-based broadband is changing the media landscape: Pew says that 57 million Americans watch online video content every day. That's 19% of American adult Internet users.
Americans between ages 18-29 are the most video-voracious; 31% of them watch online videos every day.
What are American adults watching? News, primarily, followed by comedy, movies or TV, music and surprisingly (to some, I imagine) commercials! 13% of American adults report they have downloaded or watched video ads.
The upshot of Pew's report is that word of mouth figures prominently in the spread of online video: Two out of three viewers ages 18-29 send links to video files, compared with half of Americans age 30 and older. Forty-two percent of the 18-29 year-olds send video links a few times per month or more. With numbers like that, it's little wonder that creating a "viral video" is the elusive emerald that so many marketers romance.
My take on this is two-fold:
- You are either old or a laggard if you aren't producing video-based content on a regular basis. Right now, that makes me an old laggard.
- A job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer. Like a news producer at a television station, she decides every day what's worth covering at the company and produces a short video segment for YouTube, the company blog or even the company intranet.
When the media landscape changes that dramatically, it creates significant ripples. Telling your company's ongoing story on a daily or weekly basis via online video is looking a lot like the future of marketing and advertising.
July 23, 2007
McNuggets and ethical taffy
In 2006, Fernando Sosa was munching on some McNuggets from McDonald's while waiting to perform at Chicago's Second City theater.
A whiff of inspiration came over Fernando's friend and comedy partner Thomas Middleditch, who improvised a rap jingle about the fried chicken pieces. Fernando jumped in as an accompanying human beatbox.
Their compatriots at the theater loved the bit, and told them to start the show with it. Another friend suggested they film it as a portfolio piece. Soon they were in front of a McDonald's near Wrigley Field; 20 minutes later, their "ad" was finished. Total cost of production: $1. For the McNuggets.
Friends posted it to StupidVideos.com and YouTube. Word spread.
More than a year later, McDonald's paid the duo for rights to the work, edited it slightly, and released it as a broadcast commercial on the East Coast. (RSS readers click here to watch.)
This story might end here as another example of the growing influence of citizen marketing on commerce and culture. But this story has a twist: When we interviewed Fernando and Thomas in 2006 for Citizen Marketers, we asked if they were fans of McDonald's. Thomas blanched. "I try to stay away from it; it’s pretty bad for you… I helped this big evil corporation out -- for free. Oh, it’s so bad.”
He said this like a comedian would. We laughed. Fernando nodded along but was mostly quiet. They scolded the company for its "I'm lovin' it" campaign, which they imagined being created by 50-year-old white men hoping to appeal to urban teens. They said McDonald's should learn the value of customer participation, especially with its marketing. It was savvy stuff from two young guys with no marketing backgrounds. (Thomas was a dog walker at the time; Fernando worked at an accounting firm.)
That two guys whose flash of inspiration, wit and quick work would turn into a handsome payday (Fernando told us he is sworn to secrecy on the amount; he won't even tell his mom), creates an ethical taffy: Must citizen marketers be unimpeachable supporters of a company and/or its products in order to maintain their aura of authenticity?
What if the company is huge and has multiple divisions or units whose work is disagreeable? What if some products aren't worthy of devotion or are outright bad?
Must evangelists or citizen marketers support a company's broad portfolio of work to remain credible, especially if they turn momentarily pro like Thomas and Fernando? Or do they get branded as sell-outs, capitalizing on an unexpected payday?
Virginia raises this issue, and a few of her commenters take Thomas and Fernando to task. What's important to remember about citizen-created content is the original context. Thomas and Fernando created their ad as a lark, poking gently at the company's calculated hip-hop marketing. It wasn't necessarily a love note. A true firecracker effort. Nor were they long-time critics of the company, so suggestions that they're selling out are a bit harsh and probably unfair.
If anything, withholding an opinion for the promise or desire for a payday is probably more inauthentic than anything.
I chatted with Fernando last week about the news; he said he occasionally eats at McD's but wouldn't call himself a fan of the company. That may well describe tens of thousands of customers, too.
Fernando was offended by the notion that taking the company's money makes him less credible. They never expected to be paid for the video. It was just a fun thing to do.
That McD's offered them money, and that the Fernando and Thomas took it, just makes the subtle irony in this story a bit richer.
And kind of funny, too.
UPDATE (7/27/07): McDonald's NY marketing director says the commercial, which has been running on about seven New York TV stations for two weeks, has helped increase sales of McDonald's chicken nugget meals "and the buzz that has been generated has been substantial. I've heard radio station DJs chattering about it. You can't pay for that."
This isn't the only YouTube video that McD's is using as a commercial. The company is running this video in some midwest markets, created by two 18 year-olds from Waukesha, Wisconsin.
June 25, 2007
Being Kevin Nalty
Last week I met Kevin Nalty, a certifiable videoblogging star of YouTube.
By day, Kevin, or Nalts, as he's known to YouTubers, is a marketing director for a Fortune 1000 company; he'd attended a talk I did at his company. At what must be every other conceivable waking hour of the day, he produces videos. Lots of them. Nalts has submitted nearly 400 videos to YouTube; his wife says he's addicted. Of course, she and their kids and their neighbors are often stars of his quirky and funny productions.
Based on our discussion of word-of-mouth ethics at the talk, Nalts produced this video spoofing bloggers and video creators who take money to generate buzz.
A few other Nalts productions worth watching: Viral Video Genius and the one that propelled him to fame. Or infamy :)
June 05, 2007
Anatomy of the new customer complaint meme
Delivering shoddy service or selling defective products happens, but there's nowhere to hide from unhappy customers who use social media to highlight a problem you've created and refuse to address.
If the story pings its way across enough blogs, the traditional media quickly notice and happily amplify the story.
The latest example is that of CompUSA customer and blogger Terry Heaton who bought a digital camera from a store's liquidation sale only to find out at home that it was empty box. Let's recount the series of events:
June 2: Terry posts on his blog the response he got from the CEO's office about his empty box problem. A CompUSA exec tells Terry that he should have inspected the box before taking it home and all sales are final. Never mind that Terry was a longtime CompUSA customer and had spent $3,500 that day at the liquidation sale.
June 3: The Lost Remote blog writes about Terry's story. 211 people comment.
June 4: The story is posted to Digg where it's digg'd 2,607 times with 210 comments and rises to the number 2 story in the Digg Business section.
June 4: The story hits the front page of BoingBoing.
June 4: CNET.com mentions the story in their video show "The Queue."
June 4: Over 50 blogs write about Terry's story.
June 5: Terry finally gets a call from CompUSA apologizing for the situation and promising a $300 gift certificate from the store.
June 5: Terry's story is on the front page of FoxNews.com, with the caption "Image problem."
Image problem on the outside and a marketing education problem on the inside. Other than the soft-headed explanation that Terry should have the checked the box before he left the store, this story illustrates why companies need to be word-of-mouth and social-media smart if they're going to avoid PR problems like this.
Hat tip to Steve Safran of Lost Remote for the heads up.
April 24, 2007
How to use Twitter for marketing
I haven't gotten into Twitter, despite Mitch Joel's evangelism of it to me recently.
But this makes sense. Rohit Bhargava outlines four ways to use Twitter for marketing.
April 21, 2007
More data for the 1% Rule
Just 0.16% of all visitors to YouTube upload videos to it, and 0.2% of visitors to Flickr upload photos. That's according to data shared by Hitwise's Bill Tancer this week at Web 2.0 Expo, adding a few sizable blocks of evidence in support of the 1% Rule.
But apparently Bill also reported that "4.6% of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site." If that's the case, that's a new number for Wikipedia and a significant breakout from the 1% Rule, which has governed Wikipedia's growth since day one. But data shared at the Expo isn't found on Hitwise's site, so it's not clear whether 4.6% represents the creation of new entries (the basis of the 1% Rule) and editing of existing ones, or just editing of existing entries (the 10% Rule on synthesizing content). For any democratized content-creation forum, it's considerably easier (and probably more tempting) to tweak what's already been created than start something new.
It would be interesting to learn the breakdowns of the YouTube and Flickr percentages -- do 20% of those 0.16% and 0.2% visitors upload 80% of the content? Or is it closer to 1% as well, i.e. a 1% Rule within a 1% Rule.
April 18, 2007
How not to pitch a blogger
In my previous post, I recommended that PR professionals not pitch bloggers the same way they pitch reporters for newspapers, TV and other traditional media. To consider bloggers who blog on certain subjects the same as reporters (and therefore fair game) for carpet-bomb pitches is a poor use of a client's money.
So, for purely educational purposes, here are ten actual pitches from PR people whose email showed up out of the blue. We never asked to be on a press list. We'd never met or heard of the PR people, or their firms. For all we knew, they were Nigerian princes needing a secure place in America to hide their sudden riches. Which kind of makes them spammers.
The names have been changed to protect the guilty. A news release is not attached.
- "We have been following your blog for a while and we find it very informative and interesting. That's why we invite you to visit Uninterestingsite.com and comment on the post titled..."
- "I wanted to let you know about a new advertising and online marketing campaign Company X is launching this week aimed at the office market."
- "I thought you might be interested in this newly launched campaign from Company X promoting a Product You Would Never in 50 Years Care About."
- "We thought you might be interested in the latest resource that Company X (www.companyx.com) is putting out there as a handy service for the marketing community. A news release is attached."
- "Please consider speaking with Ima Wastecapital, founder and CEO of Company X, to find out what the secret of their success and how Ima knows others in the industry are sure to fail."
- "This is an email to let you know that Company X has just launched a new viral campaign called WTF."
- "Lots of things going on with the
Company X Ad Challenge. I've attached a calendar of events (with links)
if you're interested. If you want to talk to an executive from Company
X about all this, let me know."
- "Feel free to add the following hilarious videos to your blog. I can imagine that your readers might get a kick out of them. And, of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to be in touch."
- "Today at DEMO 07, Company X released Big Whoop. I have included a copy of the press release below. We would love to get a few minutes of your time for a briefing with Company X's CEO, Rich Moneybags."
- "Hey, wanted to let you know that Stanis DaMann, CEO of Company X, has launched his new blog. You will find his most recent blog posting about email marketing here. Feel free to post it to your blog if you like."
The myth of "cultivating bloggers"
A communications expert is quoted in the paper advising companies to "cultivate popular bloggers in much
the same way they traditionally have sought to make contact with reporters for
newspapers, TV and other media."
No, no. Please do not do that. Reporters at newspapers, TV and other media are inundated with bad PR pitches every day.
Bloggers are not traditional media, so the last thing a PR person should do is create another column on a spreadsheet that includes bloggers in future email blasts.
PR companies could actually become more strategic service providers by helping their clients cultivate relationships with existing, well-connected customers. Appeal to the people who already love your clients and foster those relationships.
Cultivating bloggers like traditional media is an old-school view of people as message receptacles. But involving customers in a strategic communications plan is a better form of message management, especially if it's not about pitching them. It recognizes that people are the message. They'll spread the word if it's worth spreading. If it spreads far enough, then the popular bloggers will pick up on the grassroots phenomenon.
Save your client some money: stop pitching bloggers you don't know.
Update: The last sentence may have been too subtle. Its implication is: Get to know bloggers before pitching them. Build a relationship before a pitch. Introduce yourself to a blogger with an email or phone call. Explain your work and your clients. Ask if the blogger if future news about your industry or clients is of interest to them. Seek permission. Relationship-building goes a long way. To me, the lack of relationship-building with those whom they seek to influence is the primary sin of PR.
April 17, 2007
Communities vs. neighborhoods
The smaller the online community, the more that members may participate in it.
That's the contention of Communispace, a Watertown, Mass. company that creates private online communities for companies. The company analyzed participation behavior among the 26,539 members of 66 individual private online communities it manages and found that smaller, intimate communities seem to inspire greater levels of participation. More like a neighborhood, if you will.
The company says that roughly 86 percent of people who log in to private communities with an average size of 300-500 people contribute content to it. They post comments, initiate conversations, participate in chats, brainstorm ideas or share photos. Fourteen percent of members in smaller communities tend to lurk. This contrasts with the 1% Rule, which posits that about 1% of visitors to an open, democratized forum will create content for it, while 10% of all visitors synthesize that content and the remaining 90% lurk.
Communispace does not create the typical customer community. Their small private communities are designed to deliver feedback on products, advertising campaign ideas, etc. That contrasts with open, user-generated content communities such as Wikipedia or Channel 9, where a good deal of the site's value is generated by larger numbers of participants who use it as a peer-to-peer support forum and/or a social network.
The company's white paper (PDF) on its community work is here.
April 09, 2007
Tim O'Reilly: Kill your code idea
Tim:
We know you mean well, but it's time to bag your "blogger code of conduct" idea.
The marketplace of attention and the established laws of slander, libel or criminal behavior are sufficient to govern boorish behavior. Codes of conduct are meant to regulate practices within established organizations. The blogosphere is not an organization.
Just like in Life 1.0, freedom of speech is messy, unpredictable and occasionally crosses the lines of taste or civility. Redress is the solution, not prevention. Anything beyond that is a threat against the First Amendment, whose 45 words we hold sacred.
Scuttle your idea and chalk it up to a learning experience.
Ben
April 04, 2007
The Channel 9 success story
This month's Wired writes the early history of Microsoft's transparency-pioneering Channel 9 community site for developers and ends up exposing traditional public relations message management.
A Microsoft PR person accidentally emailed Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein a 13-page internal dossier (PDF) about him, his story, the angles he was pursuing, sources he was talking to and talking points for Microsoft executives to hammer home. Is compiling a comprehensive dossier smart public relations management, of being prepared and serving the needs of the reporter, or is it a reflection of the cynical view of traditional public relations and its on-message management, steering a reporter to the story you want him to tell?
For any company of 1 to 100,000, being prepared is paramount when an influential publication wants to tell your story. Anyone would want a solid understanding of a micro-biographer who's poised to tell your story. But it's hard not to cringe a bit when reading parts of the dossier; it's one group of people telling other people what to say, as opposed to them providing answers in their own words.
Despite that fender-bender of old-world stage management with new-world transparency, Microsoft continues to make smart choices and investments in other loyalty-based assets, such as its MVP program, community evangelist roles, and its 4,500 employee bloggers. Social media is the company's most effective and cost-efficient flank in steering large-scale public relations. The upshot is that PR control over those big efforts is fruitless, if downright impossible. (Disclosure: We've conducted training sessions at Microsoft on word of mouth and customer evangelism, but nothing directly related to Channel 9.)
The other interesting plank in Vogelstein's story is the internal strife and often in-your-face hostility the Channel 9 founders faced shortly after launching the site. "Who gave you the authority to do this?!" one executive barks.
Contemptuous intimidation and skepticism is nothing new to change agents who are trying to scrape away the goopy bindings of message control, but the challenge is more entrenched for some. We know of people inside well-known companies who aren't allowed to read this blog post simply because it's from a "blog;" some mid-level pinhead director tarred all blogs and social media sites as a drain on productivity, not a vehicle for fostering communication and ultimately, competitive intelligence.
Once the pinheads of overbearing control are removed or run over, then companies can start to catch up to the Microsofts of the world.
March 15, 2007
The new picket line
Todd tells us that a union representing 122 employees of Miller Brewing Company is using YouTube to create publicity for its grievances.
Employees wrote a song to the tune of "Norman" outlining their issues to Norman Adami, president and CEO of SAB Miller Americas, a division of SAB/Miller Plc. They're no American Idol winners but as a tool to create momentum for a cause, it sure beats marching with a picket sign in 20-degree weather that no one cares about anyway.
The video hasn't gone viral just yet (maybe due to the video's sound quality), but who knows. Mainstream media is writing about the video as we speak.
March 07, 2007
Link farm
* Mack points us to a Rolling Stone account of how Nine Inch Nails has launched what could only be called a peel-the-onion, online and offline marketing effort to introduce a new album. Since it's from the dark and twisted mind of Trent Reznor, it's insane, brilliant and designed to appeal to core fans.
* If you read French, Patrick has this Q&A with us for Montreal's Infopresse.
* A look at outsourced video-based social network vSocial, with Jackie on the assist.
* "Starbucking," the documentary that chronicles the quixotic Winter and his hobby of visiting every Starbucks in the world, is set for an April 24 release on DVD. Speaking of world domination, former Starbucks marketing gunslingers John and Paul each dissect the now-famous "Starbucks has lost its way" memo with a good deal of thought.
March 06, 2007
The kids are alright
This is the best idea I've seen from a big-media company on how to compete with the YouTubes of the world: hand the keys of content over to the community.
MTV says it will create thousands of new niche-oriented sites based on its programming and invite viewers to participate with shows and remix their content. Control is really out of control now.
This announcement is a significant breakthrough. The arbiter of cool cannot possibly run its pop-culture school the same way today as it did 20 years ago. The kids are in charge today, not some executive my age who's trying to fit in with kids half his age.
This is exactly how big media companies should fight the third-party sites; not with lawyers but with vast amounts of free content, tools to play with that content and vast new forms of particpation. To out-do YouTube, big media should be encouraging joint ownership of content. That'll help build loyalty, discover trends and uncover new talent. Besides, there's more important work to do than send hundreds of take-down notices to YouTube and MySpace every week.
The AP calls this a "risky move." Hardly. The risk is really maintaining the status quo of retaining control. MTV has never been able to find momentum online because it has always behaved like a broadcaster online. It controlled the viewing means. Design trumped usability. The community was just another message receptacle.
Now it has realized that to win, MTV must open up its garage door and invite everyone in the studio at the same time to play in the control room. Depending on your viewpoint, this is either astoundingly cool or alarmingly dangerous.
March 01, 2007
Preparing for bad (and good) buzz
Yum Brands has closed a number of restaurants run by the franchisee who had rats running wild in a combo Taco Bell/KFC restaurant, as seen in newscasts and newspapers around the country. The New York City inspector who'd given the restaurant a passing grade is in trouble, too.
When I originally posted about this six days ago, none of the video footage had yet made it to YouTube. Now there are at least 27 videos on YouTube with approximately 660,000 cumulative views. Because of social media, stories like this will have stronger and longer legs, as they say in the news biz. Trackbacks, word of mouth and Google keep buzz-worthy stories alive longer.
That's why being prepared and reacting quickly to unfortunate (and good) buzz is key. On the TacoBell website, under the "latest news" tab (the site's Flash-based navigation prevents direct-linking) Yum Brands president Emil Brolick apologizes to customers in a short video and says, "Frankly, we're embarrassed."
Good move and good use of video, even if his response could use a bit more detail about future plans. Yum should also post the video to YouTube, where the rats are still running a bit wild.
It took at least five days for a public response from Yum, though. That's a long time, figuratively, when it comes to word-of-mouth and its spread among social media.
Now is the time for Yum (and other big brands) to prepare for the already arrived social media future.
February 28, 2007
A great set of pipes
Call it linkbaiting or call it a helpful mashup of a list, Nick has assembled a multi-purpose feed that highlights blogs that focus on social media strategy.
Personally, I think it's the latter.