At this moment I’m sitting in #DMA2011 listening to Biz Stone and trying to follow the stream on his tool… wait, that sounds odd. What I’m doing is watching the tweetstream on my preferred reader (Hootsuite) which though it does not say so is only bringing me the Top Tweets as defined by Twitter’s recently instituted algorithm. And then I have my twitter.com open manually reset to “all” with the #dma2011 hashtag and I’m getting so many more tweets and it is so much more interesting.
The irony of Twitter filtering our results, so only the cool guys show up, is that it’s exactly the opposite of the behavior that caused Twitter to catch fire at SXSW 2008 (or was it 2009?)… people in a session tweeting that there was a better session next door and everybody gets up and leaves because everybody is tweeting and following the same hashtag. If only the Top Tweets were permitted those folks would probably still be sitting in that room at the Austin Convention Center.
Just sayin. You can find a less instantaneous, more well-thought commentary on Top Tweets here.
Groupon, which was featured in an earlier post and also in my social media presentation at the DMA in San Francisco, has recently spurned a $6 billion takeover offer from Google. Pretty cheeky…. considering that there’s nothing proprietary or patent-able about its business of delivering a daily coupon to your inbox with a big discount on a local business.
Indeed, Groupon is one of four coupon outfits I now hear from on a regular basis. BlackboardEats is doing something similar for San Francisco (except they don’t collect the money up front which is good for me but a poor profit model for them), Open Table has gotten into the act with discounts as well as reservations, and LocalSavings is giving Groupon a real run for its money here in the upstate NY area.
But Groupon’s emails are the ones I always open, and why? It’s the copywriting! Today, for example, in an offering for a Portuguese restaurant, the copywriter noticed it had small plates and delivered the following riff: “Small plates provide diners with a rare chance to act like a giant and yell “fee-fi-fo-fum!” at the waitstaff. Enjoy a make-believe growth spurt with today’s Groupon: for $20, you get $40 worth of Portuguese cuisine at Atasca in Cambridge.”
That’s the kind of extemporizing that used to get us yelled at by our bosses when we were cub copywriters… but as always it’s followed by solid research-based benefits including a description of menu items, a reference to its listing on a best-of directory, and a verbal capsule of the ambience: “The in-house atmosphere is warm and romantic, bedecked with Portuguese art and fresh flowers, ideal for a smooch-inducing date or a platonic rendezvous with a band of surly Casanovas.” You can’t make this stuff up, at least you can’t day in and day out. I spoke to one restaurateur who was a happy Groupon client and he said yes, someone from Groupon did indeed call and interview him at length.
I have one worry for Groupon though, and that is its inability to attract quality advertisers in the hinterlands. In San Francisco and Boston, the specials are from recognizable establishments where I’d want to eat anyway. But in Dallas and Albany (all part of my quixotic geographical rotation) we tend to get tanning salons, car washes and second-tier pizza joints, the same folks who show up in Val-Pak.
If Groupon is going to grow beyond $6 billion they’re going to have to find a way to sell creative marketing to the late adopters. If Groupon should happen to implode, at least there will be a lot of good copywriters available for hire in the Chicago area (where Groupon is based).
I had been looking for a bad example of social media marketing to use in my DMA talk on Monday 10/11, when the good people at the Gap dropped one right in the lap of my denim jeans. Funny thing is, I don’t think they were aware they were involved in social media marketing which is part of the problem.
Gap old and new logos
Gap, as you may know, changed its logo last week. To my non-designer’s eye, the new logo looks like something I was offered free at a conference by an outsourcing design firm: I was asked to answer a few questions about my business, then come back in 20 minutes. Gap’s new logo is simply its name, set in the same font used for the table of contents in the New York Times magazine, with a little blue square at the side as homage to the old logo they’re getting rid of. On the face of it this does not seem like a particularly good change. Plus the old logo had a lot of recognition built up over 20 years; most marketers would consider that brand equity but Gap felt it was a problem. They’d had the same logo for 20 years, so it was time to get rid of it. Not evolve it, as many companies have done (think about how Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have morphed over the years in response to changing social mores). Just toss it out and start over.
The change drew over 1000 comments on Gap’s Facebook Wall, with the balance overwhelmingly on the negative side. (The Facebook page still displays the old logo as of this morning, by the way. Oops!) The critics tended to say either the new logo looked like an exercise from a beginning Photoshop class, or that they loved the old logo and didn’t want to see it go. And, not a few offered to redesign the logo themselves. That’s where it starts to get strange.
Gap's Facebook page still displays its old logo. Oops.
Gap President Marka Hansen wrote on her Huffington Post blog that “given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, we’ve decided to engage in the dialogue, take their feedback on board and work together as we move ahead and evolve to the next phase of Gap. From this online dialogue, it’s clear that Gap still has a close connection to our customers, so tapping into this energy is right. We’ve posted a message on the Gap Facebook Page that says we plan to ask people to share their designs with us as well. We welcome the participation we’ve seen so far. We’ll explain specifics on how everyone can share designs in a few days.”
Aside from the condescending we-we language (“passionate outpouring”? more like “howls of outrage), what is really going on here? Is the lame new logo actually a placeholder and publicity stunt? Does Gap really want its customers to help design a new logo, and if so why did they not say that in the first place? And if they are indeed going to hold a design competition, what are the rules of the game and how will the winner be compensated? (Designers are already posting to warn their colleagues not to offer designs until copyright protection measures are made clear.)
Right now Gap’s getting a whole lot of free publicity. Problem is, most of it is negative especially for a company that would like to have a positive image for its design and customer interaction skills. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
UPDATE: on the evening of 10/11/10, Gap announced that it was going back to its old logo. Here’s their Facebook statement, thankfully free of we-weisms: “Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight.” And according to Ms. Hansen in their press release, “There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way.” Sounds like a plan.
It’s time to start beating the drum for my session at the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, which will happen at 3:15 3:00 pm on Monday, October 11th. The title is “How Twitter Killed Direct Marketing Copywriting (Just Kidding)” but it’s really a broader look at the creative side of social media and how apparently random and spontaneous social/viral marketers actually use some very ingenious traditional communications and brand strategies to get their point across. (And, this being the DMA, I’ll also talk about how traditional DM’ers can make the transition to being successful in social.)
The DMA has just added a session right after mine, at 4:25, called “The Social Media Faceoff”, in which a number of agency luminaries will exchange viewpoints (and, implies the DMA, possibly some virtual fisticuffs) on how marketers can monetize their social media efforts. Being from the home of the Travers Stakes, I will point out that this makes the perfect Exacta: join me for the apps, then move on down the hall for the main course.
I signed myself up to do a presentation at the annual Direct Marketing Association conference called “How Twitter Killed Direct Marketing Copy (Just Kidding)”. The idea is to show great examples and tips of how classic marketing techniques still work in new media, while also giving old-school copywriters some juice and inspiration as they attack assignments in the unfamiliar and slippery turf of Facebook, Twitter and their ilk.
Click the pic to spread Otis' influence!
The conference is in early October in San Francisco, but my Powerpoint is due August 20 for “peer review” (WTF?) so it’s time to think about what I am actually going to talk about. One thing that’s definitely going to be there is Fast Company’s recently launched “Influence Project”.
Fast Company asked SF agency Mekanism for a pitch on how to make itself more successful through viral marketing. The ideas were brilliant and you can read about them all at http://www.fastcompany.com/finalists as well as download the actual presentation which is a great piece of work any creative practitioner can learn from. The chosen concept was what would eventually become the Influence Project.
The idea is that you register on Fast Company’s website, and get a special “influencer URL”. (Mine is http://fcinf.com/v/bf8c )Then promote that link by whatever method you choose. The more clicks you get (with bonus points if you get other people to join the contest), the more influential you are. The winner will be featured on the cover of the November issue as the most influential person in the world… but wait, there’s more.
The concept would have brilliant if it stopped at one winner. Maybe it would be Lady Gaga, or maybe an intrepid dark horse American Idol-style. However, in this contest EVERYBODY is a winner. Pictures of all entrants will be featured on the cover, with the size proportionate to amount of influence. If you’re too small for a dot of ink, you can still find yourself on the Fast Company website where there will be special magnifier tools and lots of cool analytics.
How this ties back to marketing is explained by the problem description in the Mekanism product brief: “Fast Company is the best thing that too few people read.” And the solution is to get people to interact with the website and hopefully stay around for other content as well as, of course, read that November issue.
To try this out, go to http://fcinf.com/v/bf8c then wait a long time for the server to load. Vote for me by clicking the “Spread Otis’ influence further” button or register yourself by clicking “Discover YOUR influence”. Email me after you do either or both, and I’ll send you a complimentary copy of the DMA preso after the conference.
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.
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]
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
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.
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?
I did a workshop last week for the DMA on social media. It was called “I’m on Twitter and Facebook, now what? How to REALLY put social media to work for your business.” The premise is that a lot of businesses jumped into social media marketing in 2009 without really thinking through what it was all about, and 2010 is the year they’ll now get analytic and practical about it.
In fact, I found that a lot of attendees are using social media, especially Twitter, to promote their businesses. They are tweeting offers, news related to their products, and links of interest to their market. Yet few of these marketers said they regularly use Twitter themselves. I think you need to walk the walk: you can’t effectively use the medium unless you invest time in participating in the user experience by being a user.
Meanwhile, almost nobody including me was paying proper attention to Facebook. This is dangerously short sighted. Facebook is amazingly successful, approaching 400 active million users of whom 50% sign on every day. A single Facebook application, Farmville, has more users than Twitter. But Facebook seems so consumer focused that many of the business marketers in the room can’t take it seriously.
The other thing is that, while Twitter is easy to play around with, Facebook is very rigid in what you can and can’t do. Twitter is the PC (or maybe the Unix workstation), Facebook is the Mac. It’s their way or the highway. But the “page” tools (used to build what used to be a “fan page”) and Ad Manager are so easy to use it is a low time investment to try them out.
Nielsen reported that 13% of 2010 Winter Olympics viewers were online while watching the competitions, and of those 40% were “Facebooking”. That is a term I first heard during the Super Bowl when the hostess of the party we attended was disappointed my wife hadn’t brought her laptop so they could Facebook with their friends about what snacks were being served, how boring the game was etc. Of course your could do this on Twitter but why? On Facebook you’re among a cozy circle of friends and there’s no 140 cc limit.
The PowerPoint of my DMA workshop is available here. Look at it in slide view mode, because almost every image is a clickable hyperlink.
