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    Doing Goods Work.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     

    We had a tragedy in NJ this week.  A Rutgers University student took his life after having an intimate relationship with another dude secretly videotaped by a roommate and posted to the web. Prior to taking his life, the young man spent some time online talking about this invasion of privacy, presumably seeking advice and counsel from other young gay men. Sadly, it did not work.

    What makes the web important is that you can go online and find communities of people with whom you can open up.  Because we’re human you’ll get good advice and bad but at least you can chat with those sympathetic and experienced – and not feel alone.  Mom’s with kids with allergies, for instance. This is a very good thing and we can thank the web for it.

    In the case of the Rutgers man, the online community he turned to did not change the outcome but it could have.  The web may be vilified as the place to “learn how to make a bomb” or “place for pedophiles” yet that is glass half empty stuff. (I love Danah Boyd for her undying perspective on this.) Finding and talking to likeminds privately can be a very good thing.

    Teen Suicide.

    If this thesis plays out, the teen suicide rate will reduce in time.  People by nature are good — even callous, hurtful teens. To those kids on the website who tried to help the Rutgers student, I applaud you. You were doing goods work. Don’t stop. Peace!

    PS. “Doing Good’s Work” is a line I’m recommending to a nonprofit in Brooklyn. (No poaching please.)   Is it better with our without the apostrophe?

    Coach Does Social Media Right.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    A lot of people ask “Who is doing social media right?”  Tough question. What they’re really saying is “Who is using Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare effectively?”  

    Social media is complicated and often convoluted. It is actually many media types: blogs, simple messages, texts, video, audio, pictures, email, etc. They are all social because they are shared.

    So who is doing social well? Coach. They have a good mix of media and are using the right tools for the right part of the sales cycles: Awareness – Interest – Desire – Action.  Of course there’s some cross over, but the people pushing and pulling the buttons at Coach are leading the way and have a plan.

    Motivation in Social Media

    Readers know I advocate that brands using social have a motivation, kind of like actors in a movie. Each person at the controls of their social media channel needs to understand their role and stick to it. Understanding which social media type is used for which purpose is a start and Coach’s people are pretty close to delivering on that.  Twitter is for building real time, meaningful communal discourse.  Facebook is for selling so long as it’s not too smarmy or heavy handed. YouTube is where Coach creates desire and loyalty, though this is one area still under development.  Coach also gets it’s brand motivations: “fashion”, “NYC-culture” and “lifestyle” which are all clean and discreet.  They just need to continue to live and breathe the motivations and innovate with them. Get the motivations right and the media delivery will follow.

    Good job Coach! Peace.

    Brands and Social Media Noise.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     Branding is about creating muscle memory around a selling idea. It’s not about the color of the idea. Or the smiling faces.  It’s not about the talent or the sing-songy tagline.  It about finding a powerful selling idea and organizing it in a way that consumers can play back.  It’s what good brand managers and their agents go to school for. 

    What makes one hospital better than the next?  The stuff that’s been planted in your head.

    Social media and its ability to make everyone a media mogul is having an impact on brand management.  The Brett Favre brand has just taken a major hit thanks to recorded cell phone conversations and some unseemly texts.  Sorry Wrangler Jeans. Social media created a torrent of unintended and, often, untended information about brands.

    “Hi, I’m Amanda.  I’m from DDB Tribal. I teach clients how to use Facebook.”

    As an ad agency kid in NYC I once suggested giving away free tee-shirts sporting our logo to bicycle messengers. Messengers were everywhere in NYC…in and out of some of the world’s most important marketing offices. My boss said “No, what if a bike messenger broke the law and got his picture in the paper.” Like it or not, that’s brand management.

    The pop marketing psychology of the day is “Companies don’t own their brands anymore. Consumers do.”  I argued this point with the chief strategy and innovation officer at an IPG promotion agency earlier this year.  He agreed with the pop marketing thesis. I do not.  As social media allows more and more consumers to make fake ads and weigh in on products that others spend millions to build it becomes more important for brand managers to tighten up. We can’t silence the masses but we can friend them, hopefully program them toward our way of thinking, and maximize the share of message to noise.  

    Find your selling idea, campaign it, refresh it, invest in it.  And manage it. Because social media for all its good can create noise that is not always brand and sales-positive.  Peace!

    Google Trivestiture?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    3

    I’ve been writing for a few years, with great admiration, about Google and its amazing, transformative search tools.  Sergey Brin’s original vision “We deliver the world’s information in one click” is what allowed Google to become the NASA of the web. Case in point: Yesterday I was looking for one of my blog posts on my own machine using the Windows search tool.  After three strikes I Googled “whatstheidea+things we remember” (the title of the post) and in less than a second I found my entry. No on my machine, but on the Web.

    More recently, though, I’ve found myself commenting about how Google has wandered from its original mission – getting into the productivity software, social networking, chat and now the phone business.  The brand planner in me asks “How does one now articulate the Google Is-Does?” The Googleplex is filled with amazing minds but many seem to be trying to out-engineer one another; me thinks they have lost a sense of mission.  Steve Rubel’s post today on Google Buzz so reflects.

    Culture of Technological Obesity.

    Google’s amazing growth and economic success has spawned a culture of technological obesity.  It’s time for a change.  Here’s what will happen.

    The company will go through a corporate divestiture or as was the case with AT&T, a Trivestiture.  It won’t happen now…probably within 48 months.  My bet for the three parts? Search (text and video), Mobile (OS, apps, and tools), and Advertising Analytics.  How would you break it up?  Peace!

    Coke Journey and Facebook Envy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The Coca-Cola Corporation marketing story is simple but has many layers. The latest layer is the Coca-Cola Journey — a website built to engage, entertain and build loyalty among the family of Coca-Cola brand drinkers and enthusiasts. It’s a corporate website so you can find Minute Maid orange juice, Sprite and other family members represented. Coke learned through its Facebook experience that if it could dally with drinkers and they dallied back – the result would be nice lifts in traffic and presumably consumption. So Coke now fancies itself in the content business. Ding dong, Bud TV anyone?  A business goal, one might surmise, would be to draw users back from Facebook to the new Coke Journey site. Normally, I would applaud this activity, but not if it is going to change the business. Not if it promotes non-endemic brand experiences and cross-product ones at that.

    You might say Coke is using only 5 or 6 full-time employees as content creators/curators – so how does that change the business?  I say these 5 or 6 may have large reach. And a few altered cells in the DNA can be a problem.

    Were I running this show, I’d continue to host sites for each unique brand. I’d add the full-time content creators to each site, but make the content specific to each brand promise. Have them support the “motivation” behind each promise. If AOL and Yahoo! can’t get content creation to run on all cylinders, why would Coke be able to? This is another story of Facebook envy. Mr. Tripodi, I think you went a little bit off-piste with this journey. Peace.   

    The Ascent of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

    Television

    The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

    The Web

    Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

    Social Media

    Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

    A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

    Hashtags and Deeds.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    It’s easy to make a hashtag. Getting people to follow a hashtag is an art. A hashtag can start a movement…and mobilize a movement.  “Binders full of women” was a meme started on the web as a hashtag. Someone with a good ear hit it and it likely will become a campaign mantra, even an ad.  President Obama’s reference to Lilly Ledbetter, an amazing debate uppercut, should have carried more weight but the hashtag slingers went with binders.  Probably started by a NY-area, skinny jeaned brand planner. And I say that with mad respect.

    The idea of a movement though is pretty critical.  It sets objects in motion. Sitting on one’s coach or favorite chair while on a device is a precursor to movement. Precursor to a deed.  Occupy Wall Street was all about deeds. Getting off the couch and voting, going to the school board meeting to talk about teacher assessment – these are deeds.  Ceasing to buy high fructose corn syrup?  Deed.

    What is so exciting about social media today is that as a precursor to deeds, it is an amazing tool.  Let us not forget however movements without marchers a wan.  What user experience designers on the web need to know and what brand experience planners need to know is that “likes” and tweets and strategy are great, but marketers need us to finish. Marketers need the ball in the hoop. (Lavinwood.) Engagement without sales is not a valid return. Social is too exciting a new tool to overlook and to diss, but it really needs to understand how to finish. Peace.

    Social Media Winning: Map and Manipulate.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Do you know what is driving all the “free” on the Web?  Marketing. Not just advertising but marketing.  Why is Facebook so valuable?  Why does Google have more money than Allah? Where’s that money coming from?  Yep, Toyota and P&G and Verizon.

    And as we glance beyond the dashboard at the future and see, as the iPad commercial puts it, newspapers with videos and magazines that sing, we see a world in which the Web and mobile devices are the primary instruments of marketers. The devices know what we like and where we are.  They know when we are sleeping. They know when we’re awake. Dare say, they know when we’ve been bad or good.

    As the social web evolves and the big ad and marketing shops learn how to “map and manipulate”, it will become more apparent that people with influence are the drivers of marketing.  Kim Kardashian, for instance, earns $30,000 for a tweet.  To a tech start-up a Robert Scoble endorsement can mean the difference between being funded and being fun dead. So where am I going with this?  To Klout.

    Klout is the new online oxy. It’s a drug…and more and more Posters will be talking about it. The Klout score will identify those people who advertisers want to target. And revere.  High Klout scores and predictions thereof will be the things around which ad agencies develop departments. Klout is on to something and they know it.  Get it right dudes and dudettes. And get it right soon before a competitors snaps it up. Peace!

    Scott Monty, keep running those fingers.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I dig Scott Monty, yet I don’t really know him. Well I know him in a half-duplex sort of way.  I’ve seen him on YouTube.  He came out of the ad business, he’d contributed to Ford’s turnaround – a brand I’ve railed about and at different points lauded, and he has really done stuff — not just talked about stuff.  He got Ford CEO Alan Mulally not only to recognize the power of social, but to fund and personally participate in it.  

    Mr. Monty’s first blog post, near as I can tell, was in Sept of 2006. He’s very prolific – running his fingers, if you will.  Mr. Monty posts a lot and shares a lot. His blog also contains what might be a new feature — I’m not sure – called “This Week in Social Media,” which is something a number of media socialist do.  Readers of WhatsTheIdea? know I refer to this as “Pasting.” Pasting other peoples’ links.  Pasters who do so while providing analysis are moving the ball ahead. Much love. Pasters who simply aggregate OPC (other peoples’ content) are moving laterally.  Most Pasters enjoy routing topics with numbers in them, e.g., “7 critical rules”, or “5 habits of…”

    Mr. Monty is no Paster, he’s a Poster. He loves original content and has built businesses and his personal brand providing original ideas and content.  We loves us some Posters.  Stay original Mr. Monty. Peace

     

    An Unexpected Show of Caring.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    My wife does Yoga at Fitness Incentive in Babylon a couple of mornings a week and she just retuned asking if I would smell her.  The instructor, you see, had sprayed some lavender on her at the end of today’s session, saying something about its soothing properties.  This was an unexpected show of caring on the part of the instructor. 

    Marketers would do well to learn from the instructor and offer unexpected demonstrations of caring to customers.  Bob Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, is building a brand and a movement around Marketing with Meaning.  Is an unexpected show of caring marketing with meaning?  Most certainly.  

    Expected

    When leaving a store and someone says “thank you for shopping at ____” it’s nice, but not unexpected.  While at a restaurant with spoon to mouth and the proprietor sticks his smiling face in asking “Everything alright?” — this may be unexpected but it is not a real show of caring. While at Mary Carrol’s Pub and the bartender buys back after your third quaff, unexpected?  Not really. Good business, yes, but not necessarily a show of unexpected or caring. 

    Caring and thank you are two different things.  The latter requires thought; it’s a skill actually. Twitter can be used as an example of unexpected caring, used correctly.  A coupon dispenser is not caring.  Customer service is not caring, it’s the price of doing business. When Steve Jobs, as was reported in the news yesterday, answers an email to a customer it is unexpected. And it’s caring.   

    Let’s get on with it marketers!  When you leave the building each day ask yourself “What did I do to show a customer – not every customer – I care about them in a surprising way. Lavender anyone?

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