Facebook Accidentally Lifts & Supports Cancer Group Memberships
I don’t know how I missed it, but I was apparently in the minority. A few months ago someone on Facebook started a movement with one simple message, asking women to post their bra color on their status. The request took hold and as it spread across the globe, the wording changed slightly and as it began to gain full momentum, changed enough to give false credit to several cancer groups. See more on this in this post by Sarah Brown for examiner.com. Or at Snopes.com.
Does social media work? The end result of this little game for the Susan G. Komen Facebook group was an increase in followers by more than 950% in less than a week!! Although this particular movement blossomed from what began as a simple, “let’s see if we can get people to do this,” then morphed into what some deem a scam, the outcome was a needed boost for one of the highest-profile charitable organizations in the country.
The lesson: YES. Social media works. YES. Social media can be used to benefit the healthcare industry. And YES. There are some beautiful bra colors out there.
This was posted by Kristan Braziel on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Featured, Healthcare, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, it contains the following tags Bra Color, breast cancer, Examiner, Facebook, Facebook status, Healthcare, pink ribbon, Scam, Snopes, Susan G. Komen.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Don’t Take That Tone With Me!
If the 3 rules in real estate are location, location, location then the 3 rules of marketing are audience, audience, audience. ProBlogger Kelly Diels recently posted “Do you hate your customer?” and examined what can happen when contempt replaces a deeper understanding of your audience. Kelly reminds us that no one does business with companies “that don’t even like them.” Take a look at your own blogs and marketing messages. Do they express a thinly veiled disdain for the values of your audience? If so, you may be ostracizing the very people you hope to attract. This was posted by lherbert on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Creative Team Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags Blog, Kelly Diels, language, marketing, messaging, tone, understanding your customer.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
If You’re Smart, You’re Social!
comScore, Inc. released its MobiLens report today on trends in the US mobile phone industry. Surprising almost no one who has been paying attention, accessing social media sites or blogs grew at more than 3% for the period October 2009 through January 2010 over the previous three months, making it the number one growth activity, ahead of “used browser”, “played games”, or “listened to music”. That’s nearly 8 million people Facebooking, Tweeting and blogging without being tethered to a computer. And the number is growing rapidly.For brands that may still be on the fence about the need or desirability to have a social media strategy, the jury is in. This is particularly true for certain brands and business types.
To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if your brand/product/service…
- appeals to early technology adaptors
- relies on word of mouth referrals
- provokes an immediate emotional response or opinion from its consumers
- prompts shoppers to seek advice and referrals from friends
- has a limited marketing budget
- wants to engage with customers in addition to creating transactions
- has a need for immediate customer feedback
… you just might need a social media strategy.
Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers, Jan-10
There are 42.7 million people in the U.S. using smartphones. That’s 18.25% of total mobile phones in the U.S., and that number grew by 18% from just the previous three months. You might ask what percentage of smartphone users actually uses their cell phone for social media. The answer? Nearly all of them; 94%.
Other key findings:
- 234 million American (ages 13+) were mobile subscribers
- Motorola was the top handset manufacturer (22.9%)
- RIM (Blackberry) was the top smartphone platform (43.0%, or 18.36 million)
- Apple ranked #2in smartphone platforms (25.1%, or 10.7 million)
- Microsoft was the only platform to decline in share (down 4.0%)
- Google had the biggest growth among smartphone platforms (+4.3%)
Additional information and the complete report can be found here.
This was posted by Steve Calkins on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
War is Over
“The true nature of marketing today is not serving the customer; it is outwitting, outflanking, outfighting your competitors. In short, marketing is war where the enemy is the competition and the customer is the ground to be won.”
—Al Ries and Jack Trout, Marketing Warfare, 1986
How the times have changed. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of those changes still lags behind the reality. This is nowhere more apparent than in the language many marketers continue to use. We still launch a campaign and conduct a media blitz. The writings of Sun Tzu, von Clauswitz and even Mao have been quoted for decades as having vital lessons for marketing. But the continued use of this metaphor propagates a false reality: that in the 21st century, a docile audience can be “won” by some overwhelming show of marketing “might”.
The talk about your company was never a one-way affair. Consumers talked to their friends, family, and neighbors. It was common wisdom that word-of-mouth was persuasive and effective in a way that traditional advertising messages were not. And this worked both ways. In fact, if a customer had a bad experience, they were more likely to talk about than if they had a good one, a phenomenon that gave rise to the expression, “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.” This is still true today. But what has changed is that the consumer’s voice is now amplified by the power of the Web.
Thanks to the Web, the consumer is now in control to an unprecedented degree. First, it was the availability of huge amounts of information. Then it was the ability to search and filter for specific, relevant information. Social media has now amplified this by enabling virtual communities — tribes — of folks with common interests to communicate in real time, globally, 24/7. These communities thrive on authenticity, value and trust. And the recommendations, referrals, and reviews (positive and negative) carry a weight that no advertising campaign could ever match.
Marketing is no longer just about your company and the competitors. It’s about communities. Communities that are cynical, savvy, and empowered. Using the language of conflict and war is a legacy practice that persists through inertia, mental laziness, and force of habit.
If war provides any lessons for today’s marketer, it may be that the new metaphor should be counter-insurgency, not conquest. Not a win-lose mind-set, but winning hearts and minds. And you can’t do that while shelling large populations with irrelevant ads. Think of the waste. Think of the collateral damage. …OK, so maybe some war metaphors are still useful.
This was posted by Steve Calkins on Monday, March 1st, 2010 and is filed under Brand, Featured, Interactive Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Remember When a Pre-Owned Vehicle Was Just a Used Car?
During a recent interview segment on American Public Media’s Marketplace program, the guest, novelist John Lanchester, used the term “re-branding” to describe a contributing factor in our economic meltdown. Here’s the quote, in context (emphasis mine):Kai Ryssdal (host): That’s a great word, actually, frictionless-ness because that’s really sort of what happened to cause this whole thing. I mean, money was moving all over the place and nobody really knew it.
John Lanchester: Yeah, I think that is it. It’s strange how easy it is for that to seem natural. It’s almost a trick of re-branding. They didn’t so much call it money, they call it credit. Once upon a time credit used to be called debt, which is what it is. But if you rename money as credit, and give people the idea that access to credit is something that is almost a right, it’s something that should be easy, that should be freely available, that shouldn’t really have consequences, I think it becomes much easier to jam people with all the debts that they got stuck with.
This “trick” of simply calling something by another name, can be powerful. Remember when a “pre-owned vehicle” was just a “used car”? Wouldn’t you rather get behind “revenue enhancement” than a “tax increase”? Or does “climate change” sound more benign than “global warming”? Taken to the Orwellian extreme, this manipulation of language results in people believing “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”, and “ignorance is bliss”.
As with any trick, it helps if it plays into what the audience wants to believe. And it seems you can never go wrong by appealing to self-interest and/or baser instincts. Therein lays the power of substituting the word “credit” for the word “debt”. It changes the focus from the consequences to the reward: instant gratification.
But does this constitute “re-branding”, or is this simply “spin”? And what’s the difference? First, it may help to define what we mean by “brand”:
According to Seth Godin,
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.
The genius of changing “debt” to “credit” goes deeper than just the words. Indeed, our whole perception has been altered. What was once a mark of weakness and shame (you can’t afford to pay for that?) or even a crime (debtors prisons operated in America until 1850) was transformed into a mark of status (do you carry a green American Express? Gold? Black?) The amount you could owe became a source of pride and power. Who knew that people would actually spend money that they didn’t have, and probably would never be able to earn? Or that our bankers and financial institutions would do the same? Yeah, right.
Looked at in this light, it is easy to see why the growth of our credit culture qualifies as a true re-branding. Additionally though, it is a reminder that we need to be more discerning about the way we process and the way we use words. As brand signifiers, carefully chosen words can be the front line of the re-branding cascade. This kind of re-branding may become more difficult in the Internet age, where peer-to-peer communication, social networks and instantaneous access to information had led to increased value for authenticity. But then again, maybe not. Just look at some of the examples in Frank Luntz’s book, Words That Work. If you notice “energy exploration” replacing “drilling for oil” in public discourse, you can blame Frank. “Spin” — a simple choice of words or turn of phrase — can be the seed of re-branding.
This was posted by Steve Calkins on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Brand, Creative Team Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Spam the Sham
I edit a military culture and history blog called civilianmilitaryintelligencegroup.com. We get spam from all over the world, and I am commenting on it because this is a blog about marketing and spam is the basest form of marketing in my not so humble opinion. I think about Spam as a marketing in the same way you might think about living in a gated community, and anyone with something to sell begins yelling at you over your fence with offers. Or they throw rocks with notes tied to them through your windows. They do so much of it that even a .001% return makes it worth it.
Our domain is housed at GoDaddy and if you have ever seen the GoDaddy commercials, you have some idea where their heads are in regards to taste and discretion. I believe they are successful because they offer a lot for a little. On the other hand, I am convinced that they believe their silicon enhanced well-endowed models are the reasons why they are succeeding. I know it’s frustrating.
That said, about a month ago we started getting twenty or more spam messages in the admin box. And whaddya know….Go Daddy started offering spam filters for just $30/month!!! What a coincidence.
Most of our spam comes from Russia and I will not even open it. Thanks to free online translation sites, I can sometimes cut and paste and it basically is the same crap that I see in English. Some of it nonsensical babble. Some of it is pretend sycophancy, i.e., “I really loved rading this. Please keep it up!” You just know some poor sap in a cave somewhere in Tajikistan is typing out this crap to get out of debt.
But the interesting thing is that some companies, most of them online businesses inundate our inboxes with fake letters. It’s as if some company is trying to disguise itself as a real person who has actually read the article and is trying to fool me into approving the comment.
I will post a few of these and I urge you not to go to the sites marked .ru as Russian spam is known to be trojan horses for malware.
Today, a “woman” named Krista, whose track-back is a company website called Magicoservices wrote me a comment posted on an article entitled Barrage Balloons at Normandy. Defending Freedom With A Lot of Hot Air.
“She” writes: “I know you speak at great risk. Thanks for taking the opportunity to share deeply.”
Then I received this kind thoughtful post from a gentleman named Make Money At Home In Your Spare Time: “He” writes: “Arrg, my mouse got jammed. What I was about to say, was that this is a terrific post. Very insightful and informative at the same time.”
Sometimes I get really well thought out comments, like this one from a person named Ssnbzx:
“[url=http://rphktefhxjmk.com/]rphktefhxjmk[/url],[link=http://wtuyrhwflhon.com/]wtuyrhwflhon[/link], zxvycznhyl”
(I mean, I have to say that THIS I why I take the time to blog. There is nothing more satisfying than to know I have really made a difference in Ssnbzx’s day).
Of course occasionally I will get a spam from a really depressed Internet marketer like this one I found on an article we posted called The Northrup P-61 Black Widow, America’s Fight Operational Radar Equipped Fighter. This is from a Mr. Banking-On-The-Web/Spare Time writes:
“I think that is an interesting point, it made me think a bit. Thanks for sparking my thinking cap. Sometimes I get so much in a rut that I just feel like a record.”
Of course I often get great tips for making my blog more interesting. This one came from a fellow named “naturalseaweedfertilizer.blogspot”
“He” writes: “Have you ever considered adding more videos to your blog posts to keep the readers more entertained? I mean I just read through the entire article of yours and it was quite good but since I’m more of a visual learner.”
Of course every third post is a video as it has been since we started this blog. I wonder if he was beaten up in school for his weird name. “Hey naturalseeweedfertislizer, you’re Mother’s a Carp!”
I am always glad to know that our blog is reaching people across the globe and building a sort of mini global community. Last week a Mr. Каталог статей wrote me a long letter. It said:
“Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection,
Bactrium for boils, Viagra for erection”
He goes on:
“Casino, online betting, bib boobs, bacterium, Viagra, Halidol, bacterium low cost, bet on horse, bet on car, bet on game, casino, online betting, bib boobs, bacterium, Viagra, Halidol, bacterium low cost, bet on horse, bet on car, bet on game, casino, online betting, bib boobs, bacterium, Viagra, Halidol, bacterium low cost, bet on horse, bet on car, bet on game.”
I mean, I was literally moved by the passion. This guy must be related to Chekov.
Last night a “Ms. Eboniemoorhead45” wrote this to me: “I really liked reading your post!. Quallity content. With such a valuable blog I believe you deserve to be ranking even higher in the search engines . Check out the link in my name. That links to a tool that really helped me rank high in google. This way even more people can enjoy your posts and nothing beats a big audiance ”
I wanted to email her back to tell her she spelled audience improperly, but did you know that it just tracked me back to a site about oral sex? (Is that when they just talk about doing it?) I guess I never thought to connect the dots on her name, Eboniemoorhead45 might be a name like Dick Goesenya or Ben Dover.
All I can say I wish the rest of this industry would catch up with Spam. Not particularly it efficacy. It’s entertainment value.
Daniel Clay Russ
This was posted by Daniel Russ on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Number of Social Media Experts May Surpass Number of Bacteria
. . .I’m just saying. If you Google “social media experts on Twitter” you’ll get more than 44,000,000 results. That’s a lot of mass-distributed expertise! By the way, these people are also experts in walking upright, chewing gum, and aging one day at a time. This was posted by Steve Calkins on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Social Media, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Brand Fragility in the Age of Twitter
UPDATE 2/1/10: Amazon has capitulated to Macmillan’s terms. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/technology/companies/01amazonweb.htmlAmazon’s Statement: “We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles,” Amazon said. “We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”
Amazon continues to position itself as being on the side of consumers in this dispute. But in the age of Twitter, this kind of half-truth gets torn to shreds by consumers and bloggers at lightspeed. It’s all about Kindles and a bigger piece of the pie for Amazon, and any halfway interested consumer could sniff this out with one quick search.
Original post (1/31/10):
As I write this, a firestorm of controversy is lighting up the net. A dispute between Macmillan publishing and Amazon over pricing for Kindle e-books has resulted in Amazon pulling all Macmillan-published titles, both electronic and physical copies, from its store. As reported on BoingBoing.net (emphasis mine):
“The New York Times quotes an industry insider as saying that Amazon pulled these books in retaliation for a demand from Macmillan to raise the price of Kindle books from $10 to $15. Presumably, Amazon perceives the $10 price-tag as a way of encouraging people to buy its Kindle platform, which itself is a kind of roach-motel for books: the license terms and DRM on the books in the Kindle store prohibit you from reading your Kindle books on competing devices. So books check in, but they don’t check out. (I believe that Amazon’s terms, patents and trade-secrets also prohibit its rivals from making software that converts or renders Kindle books for that purpose. I have asked Amazon whether this was true on more than ten occasions over the past several years, in my capacity as a writer, publisher, and columnist for the Guardian and Publishers Weekly, but they refuse to answer.) If the NYT’s report is true, then this is a case of two corporate giants illustrating neatly exactly why market concentration is bad for the arts: * If true, Macmillan demanding a $15 pricetag for its ebooks is just plain farcical. Although there are sunk costs in book production, including the considerable cost of talented editors, copy-editors, typesetters, PR people, marketers, and designers, the incremental cost of selling an ebook is zero. And audiences have noticed this. $15 is comparable to the discounted price for a new hardcover in a chain bookstore, and it costs more than zero to sell that book. Demanding parity pricing suggests that paper, logistics, warehousing, printing, returns and inventory control cost nothing. This is untrue on its face, and readers are aware of this fact.
Update: not to say that all ebooks should cost the same. But they should be cheaper than print editions. * If true, Amazon draping itself in the consumer-rights flag in demanding a fair price is even more farcical. Though Amazon’s physical-goods sales business is the best in the world when it comes to giving buyers a fair shake, this is materially untrue when it comes to electronic book sales, a sector that it dominates. As mentioned above, Amazon’s DRM and license terms on its Kindle (as well as on its Audible audiobooks division, which controls the major share of the world’s audiobook sales) are markedly unfair to readers. Amazon’s ebooks are locked (by contract and by DRM) to the Kindle (this is even true of the “DRM-free” Kindle books, which still have license terms that prohibit moving the books). This is not due to rightsholder-demands, either: as I discovered when I approached Amazon about selling my books without DRM and without a bad license agreement for Kindle and Audible, they will not allow copyright owners to modify their terms, nor to include text in the body of the work releasing readers from those terms.”
You can see similar statements of outrage being expressed by other prominent writer/bloggers all over the net. Examples can be found here, and here.
From the first link above, John Scalzi says:
” If nothing else, this bit of asshattery on the part of Amazon has well and truly cured me of any desire to ever get a Kindle. If Amazon is willing to play chicken with my economic well-being — and the economic well-being of many of my friends — to lock up its little corner of the ebook field, well, that’s its call to make. But, you know what, I remember people who are happy to trample my ass into the dirt as they’re rushing to grab at cash. The money I don’t spend on a Kindle will mean more to me than it does to Amazon, but I’m fine with that. The money I don’t spend on electronic books bought from Amazon over the next couple of decades will also probably mean more to me than Amazon, but I’m okay with that too. I’m not really trying to make a huge statement about it, and I’m not suggesting anyone else join me. Enjoy your Kindle if you have one. Buy my books for it if they ever come back to it. All I’m saying is: I remember how I’m treated and for what reasons. And you know, I do buy a lot of books.”
You can bet their tribes are listening, and spreading the word.
In fact, a quick search of Twitter for Amazon, Macmillan, or Amazon/Macmillan gets you a host of similar sentiments and a lot of links to these blogs and many, many more like them. The tribes are restless.
What does this all mean? Well, first, that these kinds of disputes and business moves can no longer be made to disappear simply by trying to bury the move late on a Friday afternoon. The online world is never sleeping, and news spreads at an exponential rate. Second, that a certain segment of the devoted Amazon tribe will feel betrayed. Amazon, in their eyes, will have violated a part of its agreement with consumers and fans in a cynical attempt to make money rather than to serve its customers and its mission. Macmillan doesn’t have much of a brand identity, and will probably not suffer much. So Amazon will “win”, but at what cost? How many will abandon the service for good, decide not to buy Kindles, and encourage others to do the same? A betrayed follower could be even more fervent in his vocal dislike of the brand than he was in his evangelism when he was a happy member of the tribe.
In the end, Macmillan books will probably end up back on the Amazon store sooner rather than later. But Amazon’s brand has taken another beating in a series of recent mini-scandals, this one coming on the heels of last summer’s controversy over its de-listing of sales figures for gay and lesbian books, which resulted in the coinage of the term “AmazonFail.” How many more AmazonFails can the brand sustain? The tribe is watching. And growing restless.
This was posted by Steve Calkins on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Brand, Creative Team Blog, Design, Interactive Team Blog, Media Team Blog, Misc, Optimization, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
What’s driving you? What’s driving your customers?
Imagine telling your employees “You can work on anything you want, any way you want, with whomever you want.”There’s an Australian software company called Atlassian that’s doing just that, once a quarter with their software engineers. They just have to show the results to the rest of the company at the end of 24 hours. That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes, a whole array of ideas for new products and a whole array of upgrades for existing products.
According to author Daniel Pink, there is scientific evidence that demonstrates that humans have a natural desire to be autonomous — empowered, if you will — and that this is often a much stronger motivator than any external reward. In a recent interview on NPR, Mr. Pink cited the case of a famous study involving a group of kids who liked to draw. They were told that if they drew, they would receive a shiny certificate. Two weeks after this reward system was introduced, they were no longer interested in drawing.
In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the author posits that the intrinsic human motivation toward autonomy is both strong and at the same time very fragile. And often external motivators — including money — can dampen it.
Another employer that understands this principle is Zappos. Eschewing the regimented, mind-numbing protocol of the typical call center, where operators key in the complaint and read from a script, Zappos gives their call center operators a single directive: solve the customer’s problem any way you want. They don’t time the calls. They don’t monitor the calls. The representatives don’t have scripts. Insane? You’d be forgiven for thinking so. It turns out that Zappos is one of the country’s top rated customer service firms.
As marketers, we need look no further than the Internet to see the increasingly strong role that autonomy plays in consumer behavior. Consumers now have the autonomy — and the tools that empower it — to select which messages they receive, which brands they relate with, even what information the consume — and when they choose to consume it. Marketers can no longer rely on reaching prospective customers by interrupting their viewing, listening or reading. Turns out they don’t much care for that interruption (surprise!), but up until recently there wasn’t a lot they could do about it. That’s most certainly not the case now.
So how can we apply this knowledge as marketers?
For a start, let’s not presume that but for a carrot, human beings would just sit there inertly and not do anything. And since we are apparently wired to be active and engaged, let’s also acknowledge that people’s attention will shortly no longer be available for sale or rent; brands will need to offer them compelling reasons to spend time with them. That means meeting the consumer on their terms, offering them information and entertainment that is relevant to them, that they want to share with their friends, family and neighbors. And when they are gracious enough to spend time with your message let’s understand how much they value authenticity and transparency. It’s simple, but not necessarily easy: Be who you are. And tell the truth.
This was posted by Steve Calkins on Friday, January 8th, 2010 and is filed under Blog, Interactive Team Blog, Social Media, Strategy Team Blog, it contains the following tags autonomy, consumer behavior, empowerment, marketing, motivation.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Accidental Discoveries and New Ways of Seeing
While catching up on some work online, I quite literally stumbled upon (I accidentally hit my “Stumble!” button) the amazing photography of Nick Brandt. Mr. Brandt’s work overturns the conventions of wildlife photography, and in so doing transcends the genre, creating a singular artistic vision of the iconic animals of east Africa. While my accidental exposure to these photographs is not nearly in the same league as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (or even James Wright’s discovery of Silly Putty), it reminded me of both the value of serendipity and the value of being a contrarian. This was posted by Steve Calkins on Monday, December 21st, 2009 and is filed under Blog, Misc, Optimization, Social Media, it contains the following tags .You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
