The Quisenblog

We’ve written often about how the dynamics at play in Social Media aren’t new. Once you get past the nomenclature many have adopted for Social Media (“crowdsourcing,” “the long tail,” “viral buzz” etc.), what you really have are just people sharing something with others, peer to peer. In Social, what you want to “share,” you pretty much just put it out there for everyone to see, and if someone likes it, they can join you, or pass it on to others through their own networks.

The following video probably tells the story of Social Media simpler and better than any blog post I could hope to write. It is an amateur video (approximately 3 minutes in length) taken at last year’s Sasquatch Music Festival at The Gorge.  It starts off with one guy in the crowd doing his own goofy dance. Slowly, a few other join in. After a while, it appears as if the “dancers” outnumber the rest of the crowd.
Check it out.

The first time I viewed this video, I was struck by a couple of things. First, that the original guy was REALLY into his dance. He was doing his own thing, going for it 100%. And he kept at it. He was the only one doing the dancing for quite some time.

Next, there was guy number two. For whatever reason, he thought the dance thing looked fun, so he jumped in. He was key because it provided “permission” for all those that followed to join in. Same for the third guy.

Once this small community got into it, it wasn’t long before people started joining in ever larger numbers. While it took more than half the video to get past the first few guys, the Tipping Point had been reached early in the third minute of the video.

But back to the first guy. Was it his intention to get others to join him, to “start a movement?” Who knows. All we can tell is he was really into it, and he kept at it for quite a spell. I would venture to say his enthusiasm for what he was doing is what attracted others to at first check him out, then join him. The same can be said of creating a Social Media program. If we start out just wanting others to “join” us, we’re doomed to failure. We have to do what we do well—and what we enjoy doing—if we are to get anyone’s attention. And you need to draw attention before you have any hopes of getting anyone to join up.

Note, also, that building a true community takes a while to build. You don’t want to “rent” followers, you want people who really get it. And that’s going to take some time. But if you keep at it, and stay true to your intentions, your community will grow.

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Mickey New Media, Social Media crazy dance, peer to peer, Sasquatch, Social Media

Funny how a scene from a movie set in the 1930s can help provide a lesson for audience engagement in the 21st century.

This 2½ minute scene from Jean Shepard’s classic holiday film “A Christmas Story” provides a great example of how a “worst practice” can kill a community of followers.

Nine-year-old Ralphie is a devoted follower of the “Little Orphan Annie Radio Hour,” and listens to the program religiously. In an effort to build a community of dedicated followers, the program’s sponsor allowed kids to become “members” of a special club: “Annie’s Secret Circle.” Club members received an official-looking letter and a special decoder ring which allowed them to decipher coded messages that were broadcast at the end of each program.

Only Official Club Members with the official decoder ring could decipher these messages. Once you opted-in, you were part of a community of kids who also followed Little Orphan Annie and her adventures. You could identify fellow members by the ring they proudly wore. Suddenly, you had a connection to kids you didn’t even know through membership and shared allegiance to a radio show. Only this community had the ability to decipher Annie’s secret messages.

While this was a great way to build and engage a community, the sponsor ended up blowing it. As demonstrated in this scene, as Ralphie was decoding his first much anticipated secret message (hoping no doubt to discover the location of a hidden treasure or find a clue to next week’s adventure), he was let down to find the coded “messages” were no more than “lousy commercials” from the show’s sponsor, Ovaltine. In frustration, he threw his decoder ring away.

This scene dramatizes an important point in engaging your audience. Once you have a community, be sure the content you send them is relevant, useful and wanted. If your content becomes about “you” and not about “them,” you’ll see followers drop off and fall away, just as Ralphie did.

From a content standpoint, it always helps to be thinking in terms of the next engagement. Filter your content by asking, “Is what I’m about to send enough to get my followers to come back the next time?”

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Mickey New Media, On Customers, Social Media, Uncategorized audience engagement, building community, Christmas Story, Little Orphan Annie, Ralphie

What does it take to attract a half million fans to a Facebook page in the span of seven days? A celebrity? An event? A monstrous give-a-way? A cause, like donate to Haiti or breast cancer awareness? A Super Brand?

Not necessarily.  What has attracted over 500,000 fans (and growing) is…a pickle.

That’s right, a pickle. On a Facebook page titled “Can This Pickle Get More Fans Than Nickleback?”  fans are signing up at the rate of about 3,000 per hour.

Pickle Facebook page

Silly? Definitely. But it speaks to the power of Social Media, and how a simple premise with a unifying hook can spread like a virus through social communities in a blink of an eye.

What brought people to the page? Was it a deep-seated hatred of Nickleback? A curiosity? A desire to belong to a group of like-minded people? A hunger for controversy? A chance to be silly? Or did they come just because their friends did?

The great thing about a page like this one is that you can come and join for whatever reason. You don’t have to say. You don’t even really need to be aware of the reason why. Just know that it’s possible. Something catches the fancy of America, and boom! The amplifier of Social Media gives you the tools to spread it instantaneously. Past phenomena were inhibited by the lack of  “social viscosity” of the time. Think back to the seventies. How long did it take to sell 500,000 pet rocks?

Because Social Media works quickly, it helps to be prepared to work quickly as well. Opportunities appear then disappear with the frequency of the critters in a game of whack-a-mole. Deep reflection is not something that is rewarded when it comes to Social Media.

That doesn’t mean you have to fall back to a ready-shoot-aim model of dealing with Social Media. It primarily means once you understand your purpose, what your value is to your followers, and discover your voice, the reactions should come naturally. You won’t have to make an executive decision every time you see an opportunity come out of the woodwork, whether in the form of a user comment, a shout-out from a blogger or a quirky social phenomena.

After all, if a pickle can do it, so can you.

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Mickey New Media, Ramblings, Social Media Facebook fans, Nickelback, Pickle Facebook, Social Media

If a 1990s version of ourselves appeared before us, replete with a walkie–talkie sized cell phone and a CD good for 120 hours of AOL, how would we introduce us to the new decade? If we’d just dropped in from the 20th century for a quick latté, what would we need to know to be an effective communicator here in 2010? Here are a few salient points you may wish to impart to your visitor from a strange time:

Content has truly been democratized. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has a microphone. Instead of standing on a soapbox in Hyde Park, today folks can start a blog, write a review, post a comment on Facebook, send a Tweet or forward an email. And because every member of our “network” has his own network, our voice has the potential to reach way beyond the sound of our small voice.

Connectivity is universal. Ten years ago, when cell phones and mobile communication was in its Early Adopter phase, the promise was that you were within reach, no matter where you were. Today, mobile communication has evolved to the point where you are not merely “within reach,” you are totally connected to your personal network and news feeds, can find new communities easily, can conduct virtually any kind of commerce anytime and anywhere, and have the entire 9 billion pages of the Internet at your disposal 24/7.

Today our role is not so much to search for information as it is to filter it. Information and content have become ubiquitous. It finds us. Our role is to cull what is relevant and useful from the mass of data and information thrown at us on a daily basis.

Just because it’s loud doesn’t make it true. The speed of communications has led even “reliable” sources of information to forego traditional fact-checking. More and more, rumor is reported as fact. Punditry is being conflated with truth. Self-proclaimed “experts” seemingly pop up at every turn. This is what happens when there is no gateway to access. It is up to each of us to dial up our critical thinking skills.

With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, who spoke of the how authoritarianism trumps democracy in his tome “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” this past decade has shown that precisely the opposite is occurring.

Now quick, usher your former self back into that time capsule and send him back from whence he came. His John Grisham novel awaits.

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Mickey New Media, Social Media AOL, blog, content filter, content revolution, critical thinking skills, democratized content, Facebook, factual information, Gil Scott Heron, John Grisham, mobile communication, network, reliability, Tweet, universal connectivity, walkie-talkie

Here’s a scene that plays out over and over on a regular basis in living rooms across America. The specifics may change, but the overall dynamics are pretty consistent.

You’re sitting there with family or friends watching football or ‘Dancing With the Stars’ (or my favorite, ‘Mad Men’) on TV. Suddenly, a commercial spot comes on that you find entertaining (let’s use the “Shankapotamus” spot for E*Trade with the lip syncing baby as an example).

You get to talking about the spot, laughing about it, and decide to see if you can find it online. So you whip out your laptop, call up your favorite video site and view the spot a couple more times with your friends gathered around. You might look at other spots in the campaign, some long-form video on the ‘Making of Shankapotamus’ and maybe some viewer-created mash-ups of the spot. Then you decide, hey, your brother in Eugene might get a kick out of the spot, so you email the link to him.

So essentially, the creation and placement of a single 30-second spot resulted in way more views, way more engagement, and way more eyeballs than you have a right to expect from a TV spot alone. Part of this is due to the tools of Social Media—the ease at which it is to find, view and forward content. Part of it as well is due to the fact that the brand or its agency had the forethought to re-purpose the content online. But the “igniter” in this case was the creative itself. Without the content being fun and engaging, the search never would have happened in the first place.

Great creative has a life well beyond its intended medium. Create content and ads that people like and find entertaining, and suddenly you have an exponentially larger audience for your efforts. With unique video searches on YouTube at 88 million per month and growing, you get a sense of how large this potential “after market” of ideas is. Branded commercial queries are now the fastest growing category on video search.

The moral of this tale is that there has never been a greater business reason to demand break-through, viral-worthy content. Marketers who stick to the old ‘tried-and-true’ solutions that communicated clearly but offered the view little in the way of entertainment value (however you wish to define it) flat-out will not have the success in Social Media that marketers who continually create ‘talked about’ spots will have.

More than 40 years ago, famed adman Howard Gossage made the observation that, “People don’t pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to what interests them, and sometimes it happens to be advertising.” These days people not only pay attention to great content, they move it forward.

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Mickey New Media, Social Media campaign success, commercial spot, E*Trade, Howard Gossage, online audience, Shankapotamus, viral-worthy, YouTube

With the explosion of blogs and other “user created content” has come the growth of what some in the media have coined “citizen journalism.” The idea here being that in today’s information-rich world, often the “media professional” is no more than a middle man or filter through which information passes, and that a dynamic is on the rise whereby ordinary citizens are using inexpensive web tools to make and report news to thousands (and sometimes impacting millions).

With the growth of Social Media, could the same dynamic be at play in the world of marketing? Could we now have Citizen Marketers who operate outside the basic control and auspices of marketing/advertising professionals who are so adept at crafting the message?

In a word, absolutely.

Conversations are going on online about every subject you can think of, and in nearly all these cases, these are authentic communications initiated by consumers for the consumption of other consumers. Occasionally a brand or its representatives may be involved, but most of the time, beyond creating the initial framework of the community, the brand serves more as observer and facilitator than contributor.

This speaks to the importance of transparency in the process of online communication. Attempts to control the message, set forth an agenda, or “spin” the news are often met with consumer indifference or outright anger. Key to keeping communities engaged is to make the primary voice in the conversation that of the consumer. A recommendation from a fellow customer, or a impartial rating from someone who has tried the product or service carries way more weight with the casual consumer than any corporate message will.

Let’s be clear, however. While there is unequivocal value in many of these conversations between visitors, there’s also a great deal of superfluous noise and pointless navel-gazing. Here is an opportunity for the marketing pro—to delve into the conversations and determine how to insert a brand in a meaningful way.

So rather than shying away from communities, embrace them. You want to be talked about. Even when conversations go in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily script them, keep an open mind (and an open ear) and ask what you can contribute. Remember, most people are online because they are looking for some sort of solution. See what you can do to facilitate that solution for them. You’ll earn high ratings from John Q. Marketer.

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Mickey New Media blog, citizen journalism, citizen marketers, online communication, online communities, Social Media

Evian’s rollerskating babies. The Kid From Brooklyn. The “Will It Blend” video series.

Viral videos. We’ve all seen them. Is there a formula to creating a viral video millions will want to see? With around 70,000 new videos a day being uploaded just to YouTube, the odds against your viral video catching on are slim to say the least. But is there a method for creating a viral video that has an edge in capturing viewers’ attention? What is the “secret sauce” behind some of the most successful viral video campaigns out there?

In this video, Martin Lindstrom tries to find the answers. In his interview with noted viral video creator Mads Holman, Lindstom hits on the three main characteristics of a successful viral video strategy:

• It must embody a “talking point” that people can easily share with one another.
• It must be outrageous or sensational—something that is somehow “too much” for TV. It is this outrageousness that makes us want to share it with others.
• It must be able to be “serialized”—the concept should be able to lead to a series of follow-up videos that build on the same audience. One-offs may gain some attention, but tend to fizzle quickly unless something’s there to keep the interest going.

Lindstrom’s report points out that while the idea of viral videos has long generated interest from marketers (whoa, million of viewers FOR FREE!), very few have been able to do it right. While more than 30% of major advertisers worldwide have attempted to launch a viral video program, fewer than 5% continue to have a viral media strategy.

The good news about launching a viral video program? It doesn’t take a big budget, a big staff or a big infrastructure. The key is to think outrageous. Relevently outrageous (so your product or service doesn’t come out of left field). Make it easy to share and respond to. And above all, fun.

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Mickey Media, New Media Evian, Mads Holman, Martin Lindstrom, Rollerskating Babies, viral media strategy, viral video campaigns, YouTube

Well, according to the judges at the annual International Cannes Advertising Festival, it is. A simple “help wanted” ad was the anchor of an integrated social media campaign for a small tourism board of a little-known destination. The campaign won three Grand Prix Awards at Cannes, the first time in history any campaign achieved such an honor.

The winning campaign was called the “Best Job in the World” and was essentially a tongue-in-cheek online job search conducted through social media for a new “caretaker” for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia.

The campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.

Fast Company featured this campaign as a reference in the article “6 Lessons in Creating an Effective Social Media Campaign.” They provide some good pointers, and you can read the entire article here:

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever

I have to take issue with the content of the campaign, however. “The Best Job In the World” is the guy who gets to write about campaigns like this.

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Mickey New Media Fast Company, Grand Prix Awards, Help Wanted ad, island caretaker, marketing, Social Media

Now that we’ve had smart phones, behavioral targeting, intelligent search and content on demand, what’s next?

My buddy Dave Sanchez forwarded me this video of Dr. Pranav Mistry, Professor at MIT, and one of her PhD students demonstrating what could be the next platform in interactive.

This platform could be less than ten years away. What will this mean to marketers? Most likely, that you will have many more ways to touch the customer, all more organic to their immediate needs and behaviors. And that the control that has already shifted to the consumer since the explosion of the Internet will continue to the point where almost all information, be it media, news, reviews, product information entertainment, etc., will be totally available in a contextual sense on demand.

Is there anything you can do now to help prepare your company and its products and services for this “brave new world?” My guess would be to simplify your offerings. Be clear on the one simple reason your audience would prefer your product or service, and stand for that 100 percent. Make sure it is something that is meaningful, unique and true. And hopefully, something that can’t be copied.

Also, get to know the context in which your products or services are consumed. What else are customers doing at that time? Where is their attention? What is it they are trying to get done? What is the one thing you can solve for them?

The better you understand these things, and the simpler you make it for people to connect with your products or services on an emotional level, the more successful I think you will be. Both tomorrow and today.

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Mickey New Media Dr. Pranay Mistry, interactive platforms, MIT professor

What could be more ironic than this? A so-called digital media “expert,” who when sent to present to a Fortune 500 company on social media, gets bit on the butt by…you guessed it…social media.

It happened recently when an executive named James Andrews from Ketchum in New York posted an unflattering Twitter entry while en route to present to the worldwide communications group at FedEx in Memphis, Tennessee. Andrews tweeted:

No doubt Mr. Andrews was playing to his buddies back in New York. But this particular microblog blew up in his face. Turns out a FedEx employee found it online and forwarded it up the ladder to much of the FedEx corporate brass. The shake out was swift and sure. To say Mr. Andrews presentation was not well received would be an understatement. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this 24 word entry costs Ketchum a major piece of business. At the very least, it would make any thinking executive question the agency’s “expert status” when it comes to social media.

This is a great lesson on the power of social media and the Internet. Once you put something out there, it’s out there, for all eternity. It’s sorta like being overheard at a cocktail party, except there are 80 million people who might have heard you, and your conversation is recorded for all future guests, in case they missed it.

These days, anything you say online (or anything that is said about you online) is a simple Google search away from everyone. And we mean everyone. Your customers. Your employees. Your co-workers. Your boss. That account you just pitched. That employer you just interviewed with. Your second grade teacher. Your cousin in Wenatchee. Everyone.

So maybe you oughta think twice before putting those drunken photos from Cabo on Facebook. Or sending that vitriolic rant to the local paper in support of marijuana decriminalization. Or, in Mr. Andrews case, making disparaging remarks about the hometown of one of your key clients.

To sum it all up, you are what you post.

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Mickey New Media advertising, marketing, microblog, Social Media, Spokane, Twitter