Demo featuring some graphic looks in health related videos that I’ve edited.

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Who is your public?

Public, which means “of or concerning people as a whole,” is a vague word, but the book “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations” tries to unravel the mysteries of the public by honing in on Web 2.0 strategies that will focus the communicator. In Public Relations in the Digital Age class (JHU Summer 09) we learned that there is no “public” only an infinite number of audiences that each have specific interests. Unless you define the audience or publics that you are trying to reach, you will be an unsuccessful communicator/brander/ relationship builder.

The Scolis/Breakenridge book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, explores the new ways public relations can be ineffective as well as effective. As Robert Scoble, master blogger points out, if you don’t communicate with him in a form that he likes (i.e. twitter v. email) you may as well not even try. In much the same way, Scolis urges people to do their homework when contacting him–mass emails are headed straight to the trash.

This book is also an excellent primer on the value of blogs, social media release and my favorite, the video news release. But again, targeting and honing the message is crucial in a world of 24/7 news cycles and constant message bombardment. Bloggers are becoming more influential and trusted. Media snacking is the norm and tools like Twitter are replacing email.

While it’s truly unfortunate that traditional media is contracting and withering away during this perfect storm of digital dominance and global economic crises, in some ways this is a necessary wakeup call. Media needs to become efficient and alert. Google has personalized YouTube now, with localization of citizen journalism.

The Long Tail discusses audience segmentation, and provides many real-life examples that show how targeting a niche market can lead to profits otherwise unfound. And Here Comes Everybody discusses the power of crowds–but crowds that are built around specific urgencies (a lost cell phone) or building a new online information source like Wikipedia. And Groundswell discusses real strategies for putting the power of the new social media to work
Comcast is on the verge of taking over NBC. The Associated Press is losing customers and the Huffington Post, a blog aggregator, is one of the most popular sites on the U.S. internet.

The Scolis/Breakenridge tome doesn’t provide the same valuable insights as The Long Tail, which discusses audience segmentation and provides many real-life examples that show how targeting a niche market can lead to profits otherwise unfounded. Nor does it discuss the power of the crowds as does Here Comes Everybody, which illustrates the power of crowds that are built around specific urgencies (a lost cell phone) or building a new online information source like Wikipedia. And while Groundswell discusses real strategies for putting the power of the new social media to work, Scolis and Breakenridge take all these strategies and more, and put them to work in our 2.0 world.

I saw an amazing documentary on ARTE (in Paris) the other night. It was about the astrophysicists in Chile, China, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the good old USA, who are working together to solve the mysteries of the universe. One Chinese scientist explained that if you can take images from two radio telescopes at the same time and pool the results, its the same as having a telescope whose lens diameter equal the distance that spans the distance between them. This is a truly amazing cooperative power of the crowd. If only the “public” could cooperate, might we solve the social problems of our own world.

Social Marketing Via the Long Tail

Using mobile phones for HIV/AIDS education might seem oxymoronic to American teenagers. Using mobile phones for anything other than watching Youtube videos, texting, taking photos or even making a phone call doesn’t enter their realities–at least among the ones I’ve spoken with recently. But contrary to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory, early adopter aren’t always the only innovators and creatives . People who have to wait often value things more than those for whom things come easily.

As Clay Shirkey mentioned in Here Comes Everybody, social media tools have been a boost to the oppressed–allowing a way to practice free speech even in societies that are less than free (Egypt, Belarus). We’ve also just witnessed the birthing pains of a democracy via Twitter reports of protests over the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections in Iraq. But if the power of the crowd is helping to organize without organizations, then The Long Tail is helping to match every product with a buyer.

Chris Anderson, writes that the secret to creating a successful Long Tail business depends on two things: make everything available for purchase and help the consumer find it. These are the rules that propelled Internet companies like Amazon and Netflix into market dominance. After realizing about 80% of their profits on the 20% of items that have great popular appeal (best selling books, hit movies and gold record albums) companies that aggregate huge inventories can push the profit envelop by selling the other 80% of books, videos, music, etc., to niche audiences. For every item, there is a buyer.

While Anderson didn’t write this book to explore the moral issues of a culture of abundance and infinite choice, one has to wonder whether being presented with so many choices can be counter-productive. As explored in the study on whether a display of 6 jams or 24 jams will garner more sales, the display with 6 jams sold more, while the one with 24 left the consumers confused and indecisive.

The Long Tail, in a similar way to Groundswell, a book about the power of the crowd, shows how the Internet is being used as an endless supply of information and connectivity that can be tapped by people and institutions to create more complex products, more targeted product placement, and even prove to be a force for social justice.

For Population Services International, long-tail thinking has a lot of value. But here our message is not to sell products, but to sell ideas. We serve many diverse populations, and each deserves a specialized message to be served up through specialized social media channels or messaging. Whether promoting condom use to teenager girls in South Africa, encouraging the use of mosquito netting among young mothers in the Congo, or teaching South Koreans how to sterilize their drinking water, each population is a tiny segment on the long tail of public heath promotion. And using the technologies available today can and will work. It’s much cooler and hipper to interact with a pda or a cell phone than to check in with a school counselor. Or following a soap-opera on Facebook that espouses the virtues of a monagamous relationship is infotainment. The key to effective social marketing, as evidenced by the key to effective sales in the Long Tail world, will be that the audience is presented with the message that will help it gain better health.

Everybody, Time to Get to Work!

Collaboration and interaction are here to stay. Whether searching for a lost cell phone, tweeting the revolution, or decoding the SARS genome, many hands make lighter work. With tools like blogs, wikis, web 2.0, and Twitter, groups working together, with faster results tackle formerly unsolvable problems. NYU Professor Clay Shirky has synthesized and analyzed the current and future of the internet revolution, presenting the reader with amazing examples of the power of social media in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

We are now living in an era where information is cheap and readily accessible by most people in the developed world and a growing number in third world countries. The Internet is a tool that takes communication — which was formerly the domain of newspapers and magazines, television stations, movies, radio, and the recording industry, — and amassed it into one place with an endless supply of information and connectivity. The filters and gatekeepers are removed and information  flows freely from bottom to top as well as top to bottom.

While institutions used to have the collaboration and coordination ability to create more complex products, such as cars or airplanes, now a restructuring is taking place and the spontaneous division of labor is possible.

Shirky gives the reader more than just an overview of the technological advances of the Internet, however. He explores what ordinary people can accomplish when armed with powerful collaboration tools. Using Flickr as an example, Shirky show how old ways have yielded to new: “Gather, then share,” is now “share, then gather.” Only with the efforts of millions of users organizing their own material could a site such as Flickr be sustainable from either a financial or a managerial sense. Shirky explores the state of journalism today, and whether having a publisher who’s financially invested in the tools of mass communication means someone deserves more credibility as a journalist than, say, a citizen sending photos of the London bombings to Flickr? A good case is made on behalf of these citizen journalists to be recognized as valuable forces in society in the downfall of Trent Lott example.

Moreover, one-way communication, from the newspaper publisher or movie executive to the audience has become democratized. Anybody with a computer can be a publisher; anyone with a video camera can become a YouTube phenomenon. But groups that have more members are harder to manage and once you’ve hit 10 or so people, it’s almost impossible to continue communicating in any intimate way.

Shirky explores the actions of groups that spontaneously form on the Internet. These groups involve sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. Users have different motivations for working within the groups: to exercise unused mental capacity, to make a mark on history, and simply to do a good thing. But the benefits to society at large, no matter what the motivation, is vast, with communities of practice, Wikipedia, and ITunesU, for example, as the fruits of collective labors and actions.

More examples of how one individual can change the status quo through collective action— including synchronizing the wills of the passengers who had to sit for many uncomfortable hours on the tarmac, to generating flash mobs that demonstrate an oppressive dictator’s reaction to ice cream-eating kids — enrich the reading experience.

Today millions of groups of people are spontaneously forming to share, converse, collaborate, and act. Many will hold political power, investigative power, intellectual power and social power. The printing press, telephone, television and digital recorder have re-emerged as one gigantic medium that lets people turn words into action, through the power of collaboration: The new hometown paper for a global world.

It’s Getting Loud out There

The world is radically changing: Print media is suffering, online video is displacing what’s left of broadcast television, and while radio listenership is up, niche marketing is narrowing any given station’s appeal. The days of one-way, broad-sweep communication are over and the “Groundswell” is here to stay. The collision of people, technology and economics, authors Li and Bernoff say, has revolutionized the formerly one-way business-to-consumer communication process into an infinitely linkable, incredibly powerful multi-way dialog.

Groundswell looks at the way people are using social media tools, such as blogging, Facebook, YouTube, etc., to empower each other rather than relying on the traditional hierarchy of advertising and public relations within institutions and organizations. In other words, the power of the crowd is being tapped and then listened to as a source of credible, authoritative information on a given topic or cause.

Li and Bernoff lay out some ground rules on how corporations and organizations might best participate in this emerging, undeniable phenomenon. First, they suggest profiling your audience or customer base by performing a social technographics profile. While they offer a few names of companies that can perform this service for you, spending the time and energy to search the blogosphere for conversations related to your particular interest will garner similar results at a much lower cost.

The strategies for “tapping the groundswell” include a four-step “POST” process, according to Li and Bernoff. The process involves people, objectives, strategy and technology. You must figure out who the thought leaders are and where the dialogs are taking place. Once you listen to and talk with your audience, you can begin to energize, support and embrace your base.

Li and Bernoff present several examples of how forward thinking individuals have embraced social media as a way to garner good public relations for their organizations. On a tour of his company Blendtec, a new marketing manager saw engineers testing blenders by grinding up wooden two-by-fours, creating a spectacle of sawdust. His incredulous eyes had the foresight to realize that others might enjoy witnessing such an unusual use of the product. A Youtube sensation was born. One has to laugh in amazement at the story of WillitBlend?

Ernst & Young used Facebook to begin conversations with college students who might be suited to their corporation.  EBags, an online luggage company, successfully energized its biggest fans by “turning them into word of mouth machines.” By allowing and encouraging ratings and reviews of its products through email follow-ups to purchasers, the company was able to tap into the zeitgeist of business and vacation travelers alike. I know that when I’m looking at products online, I read customer reviews with great interest and give them a great deal of weight in my decision making process.  So this strategy of emailing recent customers for reviews, and then sharing them to enlarge the dialog, is an excellent use of social networking.

Building community forums is another strategy that uses social media to create communities that energize, support and embrace. And like blogs, viral videos and other social media, the voice is stronger when it emerges from the crowd, rather than being force-fed from above. In the crowded media mélange, only a strong, clear, authentic voice will have the authenticity and attractiveness to be of value in the groundswell.

Crowdsourcing a Film: Are you In or Out?

As Matt Hanson, director of the crowd funded, open sourced upcoming film called “A Swarm of Angels” says, you have to “dig through a lot of dirt to find the diamonds.” That’s basically what’s wrong with a lot of social media sites today. From YouTube to blogs, you have to spend a lot of time in the mine before the jewels are revealed.

During the research phase of our upcoming class presentation for CutLab, I looked at a lot of mundane, although highly rated, videos on YouTube. Many of these “honored” clips were basically shaky-cam, unfocused, and, to me, somewhat pointless. Who has time to watch all this stuff? Although the services offered by YouTube and other online video sites are a great resource, and for many a source of great entertainment, having to dig through the dirt makes me wish there was a better gatekeeper acting as a filter.

So this experience leads me to wonder whether the “crowd” has the wisdom to make the best possible film of “Angels.” As Stephen Spielberg once said (and I paraphrase), if there was a magic formula for making hit movies, I’d use it and release a killer production once a year. So, while my logic might be a little off, I ask, if one of the greatest, most experienced directors in the world can’t figure out how to make a sure-fire blockbuster, how will the wisdom of a not-so-experienced crowd come up with something that’s good?

The concepts behind the open sourced filmmaking venture are good ones: for a 25 pound subscription fee (around $50 US) the participants have input into a film script, and may potentially get paid work on the actual production. The logic behind the subscription fee is good: People are more invested emotionally in something they in which they invest their hard-earned cash. And, another concept I especially like is the letting the subscribers download the raw footage to create their own “remixes,” using their individual voices and talent. With 50,000 subscribers at work, something resembling art is sure to emerge.

Hmmm…. On second thought, maybe Matt Hanson is onto something here. I’m in!

When is a Mashup a Smashup?

When people work together for a common goal, rather than just the goal of creating more individual wealth for themselves, good things happen. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe such collaborative endeavors as the Human Genome Project, Wikipedia, and even user-created Lego sets. They offer three rules for open source collaboration: “Nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can improve it.”

The example of the Katrina PeopleFinder project particularly amplifies the good that a self-actualizing creative computing community can accomplish. Here, “three thousand people, lightly coordinated” were able to aggregate information about Katrina victims, and personal messages to those victims, that was popping up in a multitude of places all over the web. These volunteer computer heroes were able to accomplish more in 4 days with a loose, self-made mandate, than the federal government or any other large, bulky, 20th Century institution could have done with millions of dollars in resources and one or two years.

So why is it so hard for institutions to embrace the open collaboration manifested in such success stories like GoldCorp, Wikipedia, The Human Genome Project or PeopleFinder? The record industry, for example, has fiercely opposed the bending of Intellectual Property (IP) laws as they fight against mashups of popular songs. But some argue that allowing sampling would generate renewed interest in many artists who escape current notice due to the plethora of emerging artists.

I recently received a message through a professional list serve that NBC is inviting submissions for a new diversity program. You’re allowed to use images, music, and other elements of NBC shows including The Office, to create a promotional advertisement that promotes diversity in the workplace. This open call advertising contest seems like a good idea on the surface. NBC is releasing its IP for mashups and collaborative filmmaking. The contest is even called WithoutaBox. But some deeper thought on the matter unveils the dark side of the story. Some highly paid creative types employed at either NBC or their advertising partners are being displaced by citizen filmmakers. I simply ask: Does this cross the line from collaboration to exploitation? Are the rights of the NBC staffers being undermined by mashup artists? Are the old rules out the window, smashed to smithereens?

While the motives behind NBC’s contest are not easily determined, I don’t think the efforts of the contestants are all that compelling. The ad agency people shouldn’t worry about being displaced. (Not that I watch very many commercials anymore, having just purchased TiVo.)

There are many instances where collaboration has led to better reporting and greater common good. CNN makes good use of viewer supplied videos and photos in its I-Reports, most recently with the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis. Bloggers have revealed scandals such as the Mark Foley intern debacle and the unveiling of the widespread dismissal of Democrat-friendly U.S. Attorneys. So on the whole is it seems that collaboration even in the media is in the best interests of society at large.

The Power of the Crowd

In their book, Wikinomics, Donald Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams present some intriguing, thought-provoking examples of how mass collaboration is radically transforming the worlds of business, education, and leisure in the early 21st Century.

First, by defining the word wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”), the authors set the stage for the torrent of examples of how myriad companies have used wikis to create value and promote intellectual development on a global scale. Wiki, as pertaining to Wikinomics, is software that enables a number of people to collaborate on documents, software, business problems, etc., over the web. Other useful wikis mentioned include those used in creation of mutual funds, the creation of online textbooks, and the grand dame of them all: Wikipedia.

The best part of Web 2.0, which is based on xml instead of html, is that interactivity becomes paramount to a fulfilling experience. The Net generation, which has been raised on a diet of bits and bites, is hungry for interactive online experiences. Unlike the baby boomers or the Gen-X crowd, who accept the one-way flow of information from the “experts” to the “common people,” the “Net-genners” would like to post comments, vote on their favorite pictures, videos, songs, etc.; converse with others across the globe; and contribute to the online global community with their own points of view through their Facebooks, MySpaces, blogs, vlogs, and the like.

But I digress. We were talking about business, using free agents and creating value. In today’s marketplace, Tapscott and Williams state, openness, peering, sharing and acting globally are the keys to success. An example of one company that found success through just this ideological journey is GoldCorp. After coming to a dead end in its search for gold, the company decided to hold a contest for mining ideas, and in the process released its precious intellectual property to see if the world would answer their call for prospecting help. Sure enough, chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians and others were able to analyze GoldCorp’s geological data in new, ingenious way, leading to the eventual mining of more than 8 million ounces of gold. (The prize money in the contest was $575,000. At today’s gold prices, that’s about a 9 million to 1 return on investment. Shares of Berkshire Hathaway can’t come close to that!)

Tapscott and Williams purport that if a company can outsource work for less money than it costs to do the same job in house, it should do so. They define Coase’s law: “A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm becomes equal to the cost of carrying out the same transaction on the open market.” GoldCorp saw the value in following this law. They also acted followed Tapscott and Williams principles of Wikinomics: “openness, sharing and acting globally.”

I think that this book contains a wealth of good information, ideas and gems that any person or company could put to use in moving into the era of mass collaboration in order to tap the power of the crowd.

“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness”

This is a quote from the new series, Mad Men.

If you didn’t catch the new AMC show Mad Men, which started last week, it’s worth a catch up over the weekend. The show is about the early days of television advertising and its Madison Avenue creators. In this drama set in the 1960s, the FCC has just ruled that advertisers can’t claim health effects for smoking. So what do they do? Create the Lucky Strike tough guy image that smokes the brand because “It’s Toasted.” The amount of smoking in the show would give anyone cancer! (I wonder if Big Tobacco has paid for product placements on the show.)

Socially Responsible Marketing

Philip Kotler, professor of International Marketing at one of the country’s preeminent business schools, the Kellogg School of Management, examines ethics in marketing, as well as cigarette marketing in particular, in his article on marketing ethics. While the central axioms of marketing are proffered, “steady profits come from holding onto customers, satisfying them, and selling them more goods and services,” Kotler goes on to question this mindset. He basically asks: What should a marketer do if the customer wants something that isn’t good for him, or for others in society or the world?

What about the Government?

Kotler discusses the ethics of public interest groups and government’s rights in interfering with the free choice of an individual. Should we impose sin taxes on such goods as tobacco and alcohol? Would public information campaigns be successful substitutes for government mandates? Should companies be encouraged to make products safer?

Two companies that have chosen to take the high road by making their products safer are Frito-Lay and Kraft. Both have chosen to voluntarily make their products safer by eliminating trans fats from their food products, and are spending tens of millions of dollars modifying recipes and production lines in doing so. Procter & Gamble developed the partially hydrogenated, revolutionary cooking product in 1911. Until the 40’s it was considered safe. When an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1990 drew a clear link between trans fats and bad cholesterol, the food industry responded with corrective actions (read more about trans fats here).

These companies have proven to embody the spirit of a socially responsible company as Kotler defines it:

• Living out a deep set of company values that drive company purpose, goals, strategies, and tactics
• Treating customers with fairness, openness, and quick response to inquiries and complaints
• Treating employees, suppliers, and distributors fairly
• Caring about the environmental impact of its activities and supply chain
• Behaving in a consistently ethical fashion

Instead of spending money trying to bury the scientific data with more studies (think global warming, or for that matter, the tobacco industry), the food industry rose to the occasion. And just in time. New York City, Philadelphia and Montgomery County, MD, are among the municipalities that have taken it upon themselves to ban trans fats in restaurants. More will surely follow in the short term.

We all need to eat. It’s good that some parts of corporate America are ahead of the curve when it comes to the health of the American people. And when you tune in to Mad Men, just remember, its TV, not real life. People don’t have three martini lunches anymore, nor do they smoke in elevators, in the office, or even in restaurants, at least in DC. And to me, that’s happiness.

Let’s All Try a Little Harder

When I was growing up, my dad would often travel for business, and like most business travelers, he would rent a car. He would rent from Avis. How do I remember this mundane piece of history? Their buttons. Avis used to give out “We try harder” buttons.

The fun part was, the buttons were translated into more than 30 languages, as esoteric as Arabic, Japanese and Russian. They gave them out to their customers, who like my dad, would bring them home to their kids as a little novelty gift. This Madison Avenue-created, genius marketing idea got the point across: We may be #2 (to Hertz) but we’ll go the extra mile because we want your business and we will try harder to get it, and try harder to keep it. I don’t know if Avis is still trying harder (I haven’t seen any buttons lately) but they certainly increased their market share in the short term.

Good Word of Mouth is Good Marketing

Increasing market share for the long term, with good customer word of mouth (WOM) is what Fred Reichheld writes about in “The Ultimate Question.” Reichheld writes about a few simple, common sense themes: Follow the Golden Rule (treat others as you wish to be treated) and make sure that your company and every person in it does too. Because the answer to his ultimate question, “Would you recommend our business/services/company to others?” is the main determiner of whether the WOM is going to be good or bad. And good WOM means good profits; bad WOM means bad profits. The good CEOs want good profits from repeat, happy customers, and shy away from bad profits that result from unhappy customers who feel that they’ve been swindled and will proceed through their lives slamming the company.

Reichheld describes the success of a good company, HomeBanc Mortgage throughout his book. The company has become very successful over the past few years by paying close attention to who they hire, putting major resources into training new employees, and making each employee accountable for their actions. In fact, an employee with more than one bad customer experience per year is at risk of being fired, and, as a teaching tool perhaps, is not eligible for a bonus in the year the experience is reported.

It all sounds like a wonderful plan. If only the country could be run with enthusiasm and mottos such as the “treat others as you would want to be treated yourself” and “we try harder.”

Marketing’s Powerful Reach

On the front page today’s Washington Post, there’s a story about how the Pentagon is going to enlist the help of Madison Avenue to help win the war, or at help to stop making more enemies out of innocent Iraqis.

Karen DeYoung, of the Washington Post writes that the results of a $400,000 Rand study released this week concludes that “the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.”

The Post article continues, “The most successful companies, the Rand study notes, are those that study their clientele and shape their workplace and product in ways that incorporate their brand into every interaction with consumers.” We live in interesting times. Marketing is now shaping U.S. Army tactics. Wow.

Sprint to customers: “You’re Fired!”

In the truth is stranger than fiction business news of the week, Sprint/Nextel announced that it was firing about 1,000 customers. These customers, in the eyes of the company, were trouble makers, calling the company repeatedly, sometimes as often as hundreds of times a month, to complain. Most of the complaints were about billing errors.

Rather than continue to provide less than stellar service to these customer-service sucking mischief-makers, Sprint’s response was to send a Dear John letter:
“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.”

Well that’s one way to boost your Net Promoter Score (NPS), as described by Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question.

Personally, I think that instead of a big public breakup, which can only generate bad word of mouth (WOM) for the wireless giant, the Chief Customer Service Officer would have been smart to have taken a few lessons from companies such as Enterprise or HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation, as describe in Reichheld’s book.

HomeBanc Mortgage experiences major good-profit growth, year after year, by investing heavily in their employees. They train new hires in a seven to nine week boot camp. This training, pays off with “higher caliber service, infrequent errors, and happy customers,” according to Reichheld.

Reichheld also describes the Enterprise Service Quality Index (ESQi) developed by the car rental company, which measures customer satisfaction on a granular level that is fast, simple and transparent. The results of monthly branch surveys are reported with profit figures, allowing each branch to see how it stacks up against the other branches. And by tying personnel promotions to results of these surveys, a greater accountability is attained.

So how could Sprint have acted differently? I guess when you have 53 million other customers who need occasional attention, you should focus on them. But is dropping the miscreants a good precedent for any quasi public-utility company? Could my electric company drop me because I didn’t use enough electricity, and they decide that sending out my bill each month is too expensive? Could my gym drop me because I was there too much (in my dreams!)? A better solution for Sprint may have been to examine what these disgruntled customers have in common and what the most frequent individual complaints were. As stated above, and in the news and on the blogs, most complaints were about billing. We all know how confusing and tax-loaded any kind of communications bill is. And the calculations for options such as text messaging, roaming, off-peak, on-peak, rollover minutes, etc., can overwhelm even a Ph.D. in mathematics. For these special 1,000, I guess I would have set up a special subscription rate that is fixed-fee, flat-rate, never goes up, never goes down. Eventually they’ll move or die, and in the meantime, we will have peace over the airwaves, and Sprint wouldn’t be committing WOM suicide.

Marketing: How to hit a home run

On July 3rd I attended the Nationals baseball game with some friends, including three boys under the age of 12. Now this was the night before our country’s birthday celebration, and we were in the nation’s capital. The mood was festive even though we were down to the Cubs, 3 to 1, in a pretty slow moving game, even for baseball.

After a few innings the crowd started getting bored, and one of the dad’s offered to take the boys inside for some ice cream. While this group was making its way out of the stands, the marketing people down on the field started rocketing t-shirts into the crowd. (Have you seen these t-shirt guns? Kind of like a rocket-launcher, but instead of rockets, rolled-up t-shirts are fired into the crowd.) One of these t-shirts landed right in front of 10-year old, 4’5” Lee; he reached for it. An older man didn’t see the 10 year old and inadvertently kneed him in the eye while he grabbed the shirt. Most people, I think, would give the t-shirt to the 10 year old. Our big bully guy didn’t. He took the t-shirt for himself. The crowd booed him for a few seconds, but then turned back to the game, and the boys went out for their cones.

Good Marketing is Very Sportsmanlike

About 30 minutes later a green-shirted stadium guy came to our row and spotted Lee. “Are you the dad?” he asked my friend Tim. “Yes.” “Well here, I’d like to give your boy this,” he said, and handed him a brand new official Nationals baseball.

Lee shyly accepted the gift and continued watching the game. Tim, Paige and I talked about how wonderful this gesture was for about five or ten minutes. How any negative feelings about the bully in the crowd have now been dissipated by this generous act of the stadium and the Nationals team to a small boy. About how Lee will remember this game forever as one when he scored a team ball, etc., etc.

According to knowthis.com, “Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer.” Whether in the visual or virtual world, the basic tenets are the same. In this case, a season-ticket holder, who is not sure whether he would spring for seats in the new stadium, (i.e. make a major re-purchase) was positively influenced by the marketing efforts of a losing franchise.

Or, should I say, the efforts of a franchise whose strength may be in places other than on the field. For the act of the green-shirted guy plays on all three influencers of a buyer’s decision: internal, external and marketing. The negative feelings of a few minutes earlier were quickly mitigated by the speedy act of the stadium guy in the green shirt. Tim needs to decide pretty soon whether to spring for four seats in the new stadium, which, even in the $15 seats, represents about $2400 for 20 games for a family of four, including peanuts, cokes, beer and the requisite ice creams.

Now as a blogger, I’m chatting about this incident, providing good word of mouth marketing that is further elevating the reputation of the Nationals. The bully guy knows who he is. Maybe next time he’s battling a little kid for a t-shirt, he’ll let the kid win. And who knows, maybe the stadium guy will give him a team baseball–and give Tim four seats on the third baseline. Now that would be a home run!

When is enough, enough?

Americans revel in the fact that in our land of opportunity we have choices. I have 26 different brands of bottled water in my grocery store, 450 channels of television and music on my cable, and 930 news sites on my browser’s RSS feed. I can download any of 5 million songs today into my Itunes. In 21st century America, we’ve all got a gazillion choices of what to wear, where to eat, what to do, what to read. But enough is enough. I’m experiencing informational overload and I’m starting to get sweaty palms.

Sometimes too much information or too many choices are a bad thing. I appreciate all the new community powered sites that allow blogrolling, and the fact that Technorati is uncovering the link farmers as the shysters they most certainly are. But sometimes too many choices make for bad choices and can be detrimental to your mental health. In fact, googling “too much information” uncovered an actual scientific experiment by some phychologists trying to determine if there is such a phenomena. Not surprisingly, there is. “If the number of variables to be considered exceeds human processing capacity then the worker will drop his or her mental bundle and become unable to proceed,” Professor Halford said. Forgive me if I’ve got the processing power of a 12 year old, but the variety and quantity of Gen 3.0 search engines are making my head spin.

I checked out Swickis for Avian Flu, avant guard filmmaking and Michael Moore. WhiteSpider has a wonderful aggregation of blocks and websites on Avian flu. Michael Moore or Cut Lab, not so much. (I chose Michael Moore simply because he’s in the news right now with his film Sicko, and I’m going to see that tonight). Clusty had more than 59 million results for Michael Moore, 8 million for Avian Flu, but nothing relevant for Cut Lab. IPhone, however, got 696 million results. Everyzing by Technorati is my favorite new media search tool. Michael Moore had 6542 hits in audio and video in 1.422 seconds. Cut Lab seemingly had 9859 hits, but on closer inspection it was just the meta tags that had cut or lab. No real CutLab material was there.

So while there seems to be a lot of wonderful work going on in the world of search optimization, what really is of value to me today? How would I attempt to get through the millions of relevant results for Avian Flu? I think right now I prefer Google. It’s my old reliable standy, that, for my personal needs, does its job very well. But I’m excited about the new ways data is being mined and processed, and I hope that someday soon, my computer can tell me which bottle of water is the best for price and nutritional value, what channel I should turn on for relaxation, or which new story is most relevant and of interest to me.

On a More Positive Note

Guy Kawasaki, author of the blog “How to Change the World,” helps blogging neophytes refine their skills in this emerging communications channel. For example, in an interview with David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, the importance of linki-ness and RSS feeds are explained. Making it easy to let both Technorati and your blog-fans know when you’ve posted new insights, opinions, and knowledge is a common courtesy that will also help you get noticed and highlighted on search engines. Sifry goes on to explain good blogging etiquett. He states that, “The hyperlnk is becoming a new form of social gesture used between people” in their blogs to signify respect. It also, obviously, allows readers to examine the whole conversation that was going on before they arrived to the site. I really appreciate the ability to really get to know who these bloggers are, their expertise, and the relationships that exist out there in cyberspace.

Like Citizen Marketers and Naked Conversations, Sifry suggests the best blog practices: post often, write about your passion and area of expertise, link prolifically. He then reveals advanced blogger applications, which I am still struggling with myself: tagging and rss feeds. So while I still awake, I’ll go back to the wordpress tutorials. In my dreams I’ll be conjuring up an Iphone that will do my laundry and drive me to work, and add tags to my blog.

Is Blogging the New Killer App?

During the birth of web commerce and the Internet frenzy of the late 90’s, through the turn of the century, before the bubble burst, everyone talked about the next killer apps. Killer apps, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe PageMaker, or Google, are forward leaps in technology that add huge efficiencies to our work lives. People clue in right away to their positive applications and don’t question their values. Today’s killer app very well could be the blog. Bloggers have brought multinational corporations to their knees (Dell Hell), caused investigations into Attorney General Gonzales’s hiring and firing practices of U.S. Attorneys and raised awareness on issues from the environment to the plight of the elephant. So why are so many people opposed to them?

I have many friends who have spent their careers in the marketing departments of large corporations, doing important work positioning important products. So it is a total surprise to me that they have absolutely no interest in reading blogs, learning about blogs or trying to write one. No matter how much I try to enlighten them with my newfound knowledge on the virtue of the blog, they still don’t want to hear about it. Is it because blogs are still too new and undefined?

Blogs might be newest form of communications in Web 2.0, but they’re clearly making their impact known. In Naked Conversations, I found the section that explained how Google’s search engines are so finely tuned into the blogosphere very compelling. Scoble and Israel state that “For now…the shortest, cheapest, fastest and easiest route to a prominent Google ranking is to blog often.” Wow. If blogging is the secret to search engine supremacy, why all the resistance?

There are plusses and minuses to the new killer app. On the plus side, blogging is fast, cheap, viral, linkable, etc. On the minus side are the seeming lack of traditional measures of authenticity or legitimacy. These are the reasons for blogging resistance cited by my friends who are opposed to blogging. There is also a widespread perception that blogging is all about one individual’s opinions or deep thoughts, and why would I or should I want to read such drivel?

First Person, Singular

Well blogging is all about one person’s thoughts and opinions, and maybe most importantly, passions. Naked Conversations discusses the world’s most famous Savile Row tailor, Horsefeather’s Restaurant and Sun Microsystems comeback from the verge of oblivion. These success stories epitomize the five success tips that Scoble and Israel lay down for the newbie blogger: Talk, and don’t just try to market yourself or your product. Post daily, or even more often—but be interesting! Write about things that you care about, are expert/experience in. Blogs are free to start, but cost time to nurture. And finally, they say, listen and learn!

I hope my marketing friends will give blogging another look. I’m convinced and hooked on the merits of blogging as a two-way communications tool, truly the next killer app.

We’re not all Jack Kennedys

We’re Not All Jack Kennedys
(or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog)

If the old success model for public relations was, “He who shouts loudest wins,” then the new model may well be, “He who listens hardest prevails.” As Ogilvy PR guru John Bell offers in his blog on Leader’s Perspective: The idea is to actively engage in a two- way discussion with customers and influencers. Really listen and respond to your customers, especially when they are intelligently commentlng and/or complaining about valid concerns, as in Bell’s experience with his new Bose earbuds. NeilsonBuzz Metric’s Pete Blackshaw even offers a new acronym: Listening-Centered Marketing, or LCM. Both advocate that building greater brand loyalty or issue advocacy through the new two-way communications paradigm is of much greater long term value than a single sale or single vote was in days past.

But in today’s crowded blogospheres, congested internet highways and overfilled portals, how can a PR voice of reason rise above the din? How do you single yourself or your message out with class and credibility?
The Trusted Advisor offers a simple plan: get good people on your team to represent the company, look for win-win solutions to problems a customer may be having, and commit to next steps.

Today, I’m wearily happy to report that both Apple and Avid are actively listening and working with their customers to ensure brand loyalty and positive solutions.
This week I’ve been in my own version of “Dell Hell.” On one side I’m a MacAddict with unfailing loyalty to the brand (only ever owned Apple, never wanted or needed to be PC.) On the other side I’m a loyal Avid user. Avid, which makes the absolute best video editing software ever, defected to Microsoft a few years ago and has ticked many, many people off in the process. Many of my clients have moved their Avids to PC workstations, or even worse, to Final Cut Pro, Apple’s poor man’s version of the Avid. FCP is way, way cheaper, and works without going through hell and high water with every software upgrade. Anyway, this “Perfect Storm” combination of Intel Mac upgrades and Avid dongle dumper disasters has made my life miserable this week. After working in Final Cut Pro for the last five (count ‘em one, two, three, four, five long) months, I was so excited to be back on Avid.

Anyway, long story a little longer (hope you’re not totally confused or bored), both Apple and Avid rose to the occasion in terms of customer service. Apple walked me through downgrading my system to 10.4.8. Avid twice Fed Ex-ed the software and hardware I need to get back in business.

Golden Lessons Learned

So my lessons learned, that I would share with the public relations professionals of the world: Make sure that the people on the your side of the customer service lines are professional, courteous and dedicated. My long, painful saga took many forms: online help, telephone help, physical help. (And I can only hope and pray that on Monday it is over.) But in the meantime I’m at peace that the issues will be resolved in a way that makes me happy.

I’m a member of two professional groups and one discussion group in which Avid is a frequent topic (or the central topic). By keeping one customer happy, with some hours of support and hand-holding, along with minimal shipping charges to swallow, the public relations gained is pure gold. Instead of blasting Avid, I’ll continue to be a disciple.

So what does this have to do with the price of oil in Scotland or my reference to Jack Kennedy?

The problem with User Generated Content, or Social Generated Media is: Who cares? What makes my blog, or Slave to Target, or any of the 48 million blogs out there stand out? Why should I read any of them? What makes one special? I guess it’s the pureness of intent. We are all just expressing honest opinions about what matters to us. (Although maybe I’ll be lucky and crowned “authoritative” by Technorati one day, or maybe someone will start paying me to have an opinion, like my fave columnist Jeanne Marie Laskas.)

In the meantime, I can swim through the digital ocean in my quest to find connectedness and meaning in my day. As Jim Nail says, sometimes a marketer finds answers to questions they didn’t even know they were supposed to ask. I guess that’s the ultimate point. How can we know everything we’re supposed to know? There isn’t enough time in a lifetime, much less in a day, to absorb the knowledge and information out there. First there was Gutenburg and the printing press. Then, Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, and you know I have to plug him, Al Gore, who came in and championed the internet.* Okay, so he’s no Jack Kennedy, but he’s a lot closer than Dan Quayle ever was, or for that matter, Bush 41’s little boy.

*According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who’s been called the Father of the Internet, “The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator.”