Month: March 2010

Why you should send your copywriters and designers to trade shows

Colleague Carol Worthington Levy just wrote a great piece in the LENSER newsletter on the benefits of sending creative employees to conferences such as the DMA’s annual event. I’m a big fan of this and in fact I send my entire creative department, i.e. myself, to an average half-dozen trade shows per year.

But as Carol points out, most creatives don’t go to conferences because the management won’t let them. The suits are afraid of being caught short-handed while the lead designer or writer is out of the office, or maybe they’re just tight fisted. As a result, the few creative events the Direct Marketing Association has tried to put on have languished.

Here are four good reasons copywriters (and designers) should get to go to trade shows:

1. To see how the competition is advertising. In the petri dish of the exhibit hall you can quickly get a cross-section of images and messages your competitors are using to market… and better yet, you can see how the audience reacts by gauging the floor traffic.

2. To see your audience in the wild. I don’t know about you, but when I write I frequently have an imaginary picture of my prospect in my mind. It makes the copywriting task more focused. So what could be better than actually seeing real prospects to add detail to that visualization?

3. To see what hot buttons work for your audience. Hang back when a product demo is going… observe the phrases the demo person is using and how the recipient of the demo reacts. This is a great way to find out what is truly important about a complex product so you can use it effectively in your own selling.

4. To learn something new. I am generally pretty disappointed in the educational sessions at conferences (other than SXSW, and even that had some clinkers this year). But if you look at learning as a nice bonus instead of the focus, you’re OK. You’ll always learn SOMETHING new.

If you’re a laborer in the creative trenches, please pass the above list and Carol’s article along to your management. I’m doing a session at the DMA this October in San Francisco, and I’d rather not be alone in the room.

Why Facebook will buy Yelp

Robert Scoble had an example at one of the SXSW panels on how the “check-ins” we were all getting from Gowalla and Foursquare (“Jim Wood has just checked in at the Blogger’s Lounge”) could be made useful, instead of annoying.

Suppose he wants a recommendation for a barbecue place in Austin. He’s going to browse among his thousands of contacts for the handful of people who have completed the Gowalla BBQ hunt, requiring them to check in at six different BBQ spots. He can assume they know more about BBQ than 99% of the rest of us, based purely on their activity stream.

Of course, we don’t know if these reviewers have good taste in barbecue, but there are  tools for that as well. It’s what is done on Amazon and Yelp, where reviewers gain authority based on how active they are and how useful their reviews are to others. Combine an authority ranking system with check-ins and you’re getting some pretty good info, all auto-generated.

The biggest user of check-ins will soon be Facebook, the 800 pound gorilla that nobody at SXSW wants to talk about even though they reccently surpassed Google as the #1 Internet destination on the Web in terms of daily visits. Facebook users are already conditioned to share their activity streams with their friends anecdotally, and Gowalla and Twitter are adding links to make those streams geographically meaningful (Gowalla through geolocation, Twitter through its newly added “location” feature). You’ll know how popular your local Starbucks is with your friends and how often your best friends can be found there.

And wouldn’t it be great to add to this a coolness factor, what the smart and savvy kids are recommending? Well, that’s what Yelp is for. How about adding a Yelp tab at the top of your Facebook page where, after you visit a place, you can Yelp it? How about assigning reward points for the frequency of Yelp reviews; wouldn’t that be at least as satisfying as feeding the animals in Farmville?

Facebook also gains a bunch of new users (plus many already on Facebook who will become much more active) and a sales force trained in micro-targeting local businesses. It’s just too good a fit not to happen.

How to make your CEO a better blogger

Your CEO/boss/client wants to have a blog (or maybe just be on Twitter), and that’s a fine idea.  An informal but authoritative voice for the company is a great way to engage customers, especially if it’s on an otherwise dry corporate website. Unfortunately, your boss’ blog posts are REALLY DULL… or, worse, sound like best of breed innovative corporate b.s. What to do?

I asked this question of the panel in the fabulous “Marketing Goes Social” panel at today’s South by Southwest Interactive. And got some great answers. Here they are as quick as I could transcribe them. As you’ll see, most are clever gambits to get an egoistic executive to take an objective view of their work. DMS=David Meerman Scott. NB=USAF Capt. Nathan Broshear. MB=customer service specialist Melanie Baker.

1. Ask them to sit down and show you how they use the Internet… what sites they visit, whether they’re on Facebook and what their update stream looks like, who they follow on Twitter. This gives them the opportunity to realize the content of interest to them may be very different than what they’re putting out. [DMS]

2. Find ANOTHER blog or site that is very similar to your CEO’s and critique it together. Through this third-party bashing you can make valid points without making the boss defensive. [DMS]

3. Take two highlighters of two different colors and track a printout of your CEO’s blog. Put everything that’s self serving in one color, everything customer focused in the other color. Review it with the CEO. [DMS]

4. Ask them why they want to have a blog in the first place. The person writing should be the one who has the story… in the military that would be a sergeant in the field vs a general officer. In a company it might not be the CEO, especially if they’re writing for their ego gratification. [NB]

5. Show them some of the resources the Air Force has produced on how to intelligently engage with the public through social media. If it’s good enough for our armed forces, it should be good enough for your boss. [that’s mine, but I got a fist pump from NB when I mentioned it.]

6. Ask CEO to tell you what questions people ask about the company. Then suggest blog posts on that. [MB]

Facebook as silent majority

Here’s a good strategy for working a conference as unpredictable as South by Southwest Interactive. Give yourself an assignment, e.g. a resource you need to find or a topic you learn about, then refer back to it whenever there’s a choice to be made in your activity flow.

The Silent Majority: Facebook developers at SXSWi
The Silent Majority: Facebook developers at SXSWi

Here are my two. First, I wanted to find out about Facebook and SXSW. Specifically, I wanted to follow up on my hypothesis that while it is a vast online community, people in the geek world don’t want to talk about Facebook because it runs on a proprietary platform. I started by putting up a #Facebook #sxsw hashtag search in TweetDeck and watching the traffic. Yep, not a lot of it. I did run across the Facebook Developer Garage off site event and spent a couple of hours there yesterday. Show of hands requested from the audience: how many of you are Facebook developers? (almost everybody) How many actually use Facebook? (quite a lot fewer.)

We all love Twitter because it’s an erector set, but meanwhile Facebook is Dad’s muscle car (or maybe Mom’s) idling in the driveway. You can’t ignore 400 million users indefinitely. Josh from Gowalla got cheers on the stage and everybody loves Josh/Gowalla and how they now have their Facebook Connect check-in. So what happens in a few months when Facebook introduces its own check-in feature?

Meanwhile, my second assignment was related to the fact that several folks have recently asked me about being a social media consultant for them. I’m not sure it’s a good fit because social media marketing requires constant attention (similar to good P.R.) and as a freelance copywriter I sometimes need to hole up for a couple of days at a time. So I wanted to find folks who actually are social media consultants and are good at it. Through the #facebook #sxsw tag I ran across the the folks at The KBuzz. I went to their mixer to meet them and talked to some of their clients and was impressed. Mallorie Rosenbluth is their Director of Small Business which is what most of my inquires would be; for $1000 they will design a Facebook page for you and do a detailed analysis of your business and your social media opportunities, then provide recommendations which you can execute on your own or through a monthly contract with them.

Check them out. UPDATE: Mallorie contacted me to say that if you use the code OTIS10 they’ll give you 10% off above pricing.

Social breadcrumbs from my first day at SXSWi

Breadcrumbs are those little links you see on a website that help you to retrace your steps; “social breadcrumbs” is a phrase Jeremiah Owyang came up with (new to me anyway) a few minutes ago to describe the cumulative record of your presence you leave in social media that can be followed up by your friends or others interested in your activities or wanting to know what you would recommend. This was from the best panel I attended today, except it was in stealth mode. Supposedly Brian Solis as sole speaker but @jowyang, @comcastcares and some heavy dude from FourSquare were all up there unannounced talking about how to listen to the customer in social media.

This is what is so frustrating and fascinating about South by Southwest: the unpredictability. Before I got to this panel, halfway done, I had walked out on two completely packed rooms presenting astonishingly basic insights on how Google developers work long distance and what web content is all about. You just don’t know.

My other accomplishment so far is to run into and spend time with the folks from The Startup Bus: “25 strangers board a bus in San Francisco – and at 60 miles an hour and over 48 hours – they are to conceive, build and launch 6 tech startups in time for a SxSW party in Austin.” In other words, you got a free ride to the show in return for agreeing to put together and pitch a concept with several other people you’ve never seen before. The teams are presenting their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists tonight.

Also, the registration process is much less stressed this year, even though anecdotally there are more people. Stay tuned and I’ll report if I run into anything else interesting.

First timer tips for SXSWi

So I am going again to South by Southwest Interactive, and glad of it. As I mentioned last year, this is the conference where everybody has something interesting to share and everyone is interested in what YOU are doing. The days (and nights) are packed and it’s frustrating if you happen to miss out on anything because of logistical problems. Here are a few tips from a last year first timer:

  • If you have a car, you can park for free along one of the frontage roads near the freeway below the convention center. It’s a 10 minute walk from there, probably faster than paying for parking and waiting in line to get in/out of the garage. UPDATE: on Saturday and Sunday parking in metered spots near ACC is FREE.
  • The check-in process was horrendous last year and I hear there is 40% more registration this year. It’s a mystery to me why you should register in advance and still have to wait for an hour or more to get your badge. Bring a fully charged iPhone (hopefully the ATT network is not overloaded like LY) and strike up a conversation with your line mates. UPDATE: vastly improved for 2010.
  • Don’t get too wedded to the program list online. Many of these descriptions are off the wall and written months in advance. Plus, you may not get in some popular sessions. If you do see something you really like, get there early and grab a seat… near the aisle in case you are disappointed.
  • The conference center is shaped like a U with no direct access from one end of the U to the other. You may end up walking 10 minutes or more between sessions so look at the map and factor that into your planning. Sessions in double rooms (eg 18AB) are organizer picks for those likely to be popular, as are those held in ballrooms. “Core conversations” are generally moderated audience participation and if the topic isn’t of passionate interest you may not be happy there. The sessions in the Hilton are very developer focused even if the title may sound somewhat general. CORRECTION: this year the Hilton sessions are on BUSINESS and the first I attended was very interesting indeed, see next post.
  • UPDATE: the A, B, C ballroom sessions are developers and designers talking about their personal perspectives… essentially, why I am up here at the podium and you are in the audience. These have great attendance but the few I’ve seen are very basic.
  • The parties really do have free food, booze and music but GET THERE EARLY… as soon as the doors open is not a bad idea. Late comers will stand in long lines and find many of the freebies gone.

Any more tips? Comment here or to @otisregrets, or just look me up when you get to the show. Let’s ride!

Hmm… possible problem with social media peer reviews

Go look at the reviews for a popular item on Amazon.com. Compare the volume of people voting on the “most helpful favorable review” and the “most helpful critical review”. In most cases, the number of “helpful” votes on the “favorable” reviews will swamp the “critical” numbers. My hypothesis:  people reading these reviews mostly want to support their own positive impression because they’ve already decided to buy the item.

Some time ago, I accepted an invitation to be a “Vine” reviewer on Amazon. This honor came to me because I had written a couple of reviews on the site that got a high number of “helpful” ratings. Now I get a monthly email offering me some products for free as long as I agree to review them. This is not a boondoggle: if you regard your time as worth anywhere close to minimum wage, the hours you spend in reviewing the items are going to be far more than the value of the goods received.

But here’s the thing. Most of my Vine reviews have been negative and POSSIBLY as a result I’m getting less attractive Vine offers now. I have no ideas how this algorithm works. Maybe Amazon merchants are subsidizing this effort in some way? I’m certainly not suggesting that there has been any pressure to give a positive review but maybe Amazon is able to say “we’ll offer your product to a certain number of our top reviewers, they’ll likely review it favorably because they’re getting it for free etc.” In any case the net result is that fewer people are giving me a “helpful” nod now and I’m less well-rated as a reviewer since I started to write more negative reviews.

I love peer reviews and am a frequent contributor to Yelp, as well as Amazon. I read and use these reviews in my own buying decisions. If I want to know how to do some trick with a kitchen gadget that came with a poor instruction manual, I can bet that an Amazon reviewer will have filled in the gaps. But Amazon and other social media outlets need to make sure they provide a venue for intelligent negative opinions to express themselves, even if those reviews are not beloved by the readership. Maybe a helpful negative review gets extra weight, if it’s of a certain length and not a rant?