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

Last week I read a post from Jay Baer (in his excellent blog, Convince and Convert) where he introduced something he called The Law of Boundless Brevity.

The Law of Boundless Brevity holds that over time, our communications will become ever truncated, shortened, distilled, condensed. Take written works, for example. Over the last hundred years or so, we’ve gone from really, really, really long books (The Iliad, after all, is a POEM), to short books, to reader’s-Digest-style summaries on web sites like www.sparknotes.com. On PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation” a few weeks ago, college students were actually boasting that they haven’t read a “real” book in years.

Take also personal communication. We’ve gone from lengthy, hand-written letters, to postcards, to emails, to shorter emails, to texts, to 140-character tweets written to no one in particular.

Even phone calls are truncated. How many 60 minute calls have you made in the last year?  Rather than talking to people, we feel more comfortable leaving a voicemail. Many of us would actually prefer not to use our phones for voice calls.

The Law of Boundless Brevity has affected the way we consume media as well. TV news segments are much shorter, as are newspaper stories. What used to be told in a well-crafted press release can now be covered in a few bullet points on Pitch Engine.

Thoughtful argument has given way to the bumper sticker. It is rumored that Sir Richard Branson only accepts venture capital requests via 140-character tweets.

So what does this “fast food communication style” mean to marketers? Other than the obvious necessity for brevity and uber simplicity, it also speaks to the need of finding ways to communicate beyond the obvious marketing channels. How can you communicate your values without having to “say” anything? These days, demonstration trumps declaration.

Think about how your values can be communicated through package design? Through the choice of music and voiceover on your commercials? Through the color palate and graphics of your web site? Through the tone of your communications—not so much what you say but the voice you say it in. All of these less-literal elements contribute mightily to the perceived image of your brand.

A great example of this is BMW. For decades, the “intangibles” of the automaker’s campaign helped form a position that no individual communication could hope to do.

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Mickey Creative, Social Media brevity in advertising, fast food communication, Jay Baer, marketing, package design

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

Ah, 2009. Yeah, for the most part it’s been a year you’d like to forget. But though they may have been few and far between, there were some stellar things worth cheering about in the world of marketing. Here is a very short list of some of my favorites, arranged in a bronze-silver-gold kinda way. If you have your own list of kudos you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

Bronze: The Tourist Council of Queensland (Australia). This collection of tropical islands along the Great Barrier Reef is indeed a stunning destination. The “normal” way of promoting such a destination is to produce a stunning TV spot with great footage of all the cool stuff you can do there, then run the crap out of it on TV. The Council didn’t have a “TV budget” to work with, but it wasn’t about to let that get in their way. They created an online promotion inviting web site visitors to apply for the “Best Job in the World”—the position of “caretaker” of the islands.

In the words of their web site, “The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

This promotion was pretty much restricted to online and Social Media only, and generated more than 1.4 million application videos being uploaded to the Council’s site. Once the Caretaker was “hired,” fans were invited to follow his daily progress on his blog, creating year-round engagement. Most importantly, in a year when most destinations suffered double-digit declines, Queensland enjoyed its best tourist season ever.

Silver: The “smile” campaign from American Express. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a TV campaign with such a brilliantly simple concept, impeccable art direction and timeless music. Proof you don’t have to scream at someone to get his full attention.

Gold: All the contributors who made YouTube THE Social Media story of 2009. From Susan Boyle to the Evian Skating Babies to the Microsoft slip-n-slide to the lady who uploaded the home video of her sleep-walking dog (and to the creators of all the mash-ups that followed), the heroes of this emerging platform are many.

With broadband penetration now nearing 70%, and more than 88 million videos being upload just to YouTube every month, the computer and smart phone is becoming the “screen of choice” for many. Look for 2010 to be the “tipping point” in the video revolution, where video will play an important role across all Social Media platforms.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on who deserves to be named a “Marketing Hero of 2009.” Drop us a line.

And may you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

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Mickey Ramblings, Social Media American Express, Best Job in the World, Evian, island caretaker, Microsoft slip-n-slide, Rollerskating Babies, smart phone, smile campaign, social media platforms, Susan Boyle, Take Charge, The Tourist Council of Queensland, video revolution, YouTube

Now that 2009 is almost in our rear view mirrors, it’s time to look ahead to what’s coming in 2010. What better time to prognosticate about the days ahead.

Oh sure. We could go for the low-hanging fruit here and “predict” that mass media spending will go down, online and Social Media spending will go up, Facebook will pass 400 million users, yada yada yada. That might score us some cheap points, but really, that stuff is sort of a given. So, for better or worse, here are some of our fearless predictions about some less frequently discussed marketing and social Media issues:

1. Destination sites continue to lose their relevance. One of the most under reported stories regarding online use this year is that despite overall traffic online growing by leaps and bounds, visits to high-traffic sites like Dell, Nike and many others have been trending downward. Meanwhile, social sites like Facebook have skyrocketed. Take a step back and it makes total sense—most information-rich websites are not set up to foster an ongoing relationship with visitors. They’re pretty much “one-and-done”—you can get everything you need from them in a single visit and have no reason to return. Things like blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and some microsites are designed for people to visit them often, and to engage customers on a much deeper level. It is here where more and more of the online traffic will continue to flow.
2. The Video Revolution comes to Social Media. Video will become a more important part of every social media platform. Not long ago, if I mentioned “video” and “Social Media” in the same sentence, you’d immediately think YouTube, Vimeo or some other video aggregator. Today, with increased bandwidth abounding and the mobile platform (especially smart phones) expanding, video has become a much more important part of all Social Media platforms. Embedded “how-to” videos on web sites. Live-action video conferences and powerpoints. Video emails. Videos posted on Facebook. Even video in blogs (now called “vlogging”).
3. Behavioral Targeting continues to help marketers get personal. Improved analytics now give us a more complete picture of our customers, and puts their purchases into more relevant context. This will help us better target our efforts to ensure hitting prospects when they are at a “moment of decision” in the purchase cycle. Whereas we used to target professional women 35-54 as the likely target of our salad dressing, we can now narrow it down to shoppers who have just picked up two heads of romaine lettuce and who haven’t purchased salad dressing for a few weeks.
4. The emergence of the “Super Portal.” Right now there are many Social Media platforms to deal with. Keeping up with all of them can eat up a sizable portion of your day. But now, platforms are beginning to offer tools that make it seamless to share content and jump between platforms automatically and effortlessly. In the world of Twitter, for example, Tweetdeck and Hoot Suite make it possible to manage much of your Social Media profile from a single dashboard. This convergence of platforms is in turn going to free us up so we can have even more involvement in Social Media.
5. Great content remains the ultimate “game changer.” While a lot of factors play in to the virility of content, none is more important than having a great idea. Great content not only generates interest in the medium for which it was created, it also spreads quickly to other platforms and lends itself to being spread by the community and re-purposed and “mashed up” by the audience as well. All of which means more exposure for the producer. Susan Boyle, The Wedding Dance, and The Evian Rollerskating Babies are just the beginning.
6. Content on demand, when you want it, where you want it. This continues a trend of breaking the tether to a television or a laptop. The emergence of mobile is moving us even more into a totally “on demand” society. Comcast’s recent announcement that it will provide subscribers with anytime access to 27 channels of real-time programming through its “TV Everywhere” program (going online by year’s end) could provide a platform tipping point.
7. More information to marketers makes decisions harder, not easier. Tools like Google Analytics provide a wealth of data for marketers, but at the end of the day, data is just data. To make sense of it you need to understand the story that data is telling and what the opportunities are around it. Otherwise you will find yourself in the 2010 version of “paralysis by analysis.”

If you have any marketing/Social Media predictions for 2010 you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

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Mickey Social Media 2009, blogs, Comcast TV Everywhere, customer engagement, Dell, Facebook, Google, microsites, mobile platform, Nike, Super Portal, Twitter feeds, Vimeo, vlogging, YouTube

It’s not Tiger. Sure, he just put $90 million in endorsements at risk, but he’s doing just fine. He’s no O.J. Simpson. He may have made some miscalculations when it came to handling the aftermath of the “collision,” but the fall-out won’t last long. He’ll hire a crack PR organization to oversee his “social rehabilitation.” You’ll see pics of Tiger and his kids, and hear about the do-good projects he’s doing on behalf of the under-privileged. Even money says he regains most of his mojo before 2010 is out.

It’s not his corporate sponsors. If anything, they’ve gotten an extra boost out of the free media and publicity surrounding the affair. A week ago, I couldn’t tell you who Accenture is. Now they’re everywhere. No one really thinks a sponsor who signed a contract with Woods years ago is tied to his activity now.

It’s not Elin. Yeah it’s ugly now, but trust me, there’s a book deal or movie-of-the-week silver lining in this fiasco somewhere.

Nope. The biggest loser is the PGA.

Tiger isn’t just the brightest star on the Pro Tour. As far as most people are concerned, he’s the only star. By taking an indefinite leave from the sport, he creates a vacuum that’s almost impossible to fill. It’s not like Michael Jordan leaving basketball or Cal Ripkin leaving baseball. There were other stars. There were other storylines. But for most folks who follow golf (especially the casual followers), professional golf begins and ends with Tiger.

As proof, just look back to when Tiger took time off to rehab his knee. Ratings of TV tournaments were down by half. You can expect more of the same with Tiger on the sidelines this year.

As a short-term strategy, PGA officials need to huddle together to figure out how to get Tiger back on the tour in short order. Imagine the hype that would be generated by Woods returning for next year’s U.S. Open.

In the longer term, the PGA needs to devise strategies to create additional storylines with other players to hopefully build interest with casual followers. Utilizing Social Media to make players more “accessible” to fans, and creating real time online tournaments where fans can compete against pros, or vie to be their virtual caddies, would be a great start.

Oh, yeah. There is one other big loser in the Woods incident, of course. His Escalade.

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Mickey Ramblings, Social Media Accenture, book deal, caddies, Cal Ripkin, corporate sponsors, Elin Woods, Escalade, fan access, Michael Jordan, movie deal, online tournaments, PGA Tour, professional golf, Tiger Woods

The poet Maya Angelou perhaps said it best: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Effective marketing has always been about storytelling, but for the longest time the stories we told appealed to the intellect and were of the “factual” variety: this detergent has 25% more cleansing power; three out of four dentists prefer this brand of toothpaste; this brand of peanut butter is free of hydrogenated oils, etc. As marketers, we were trying to plant “thoughts” about a brand or product into a prospect’s mind.

Today, the role of marketing storytelling has evolved to include feelings about brands. It is going beyond logic to enabling emotional connections that have less and less to do with the actual function of the product itself.

The strongest brands have always evoked strong emotions from its users. Kleenex. Campbell’s Soup. Jeep. Nike. Feelings build loyalty and the feeling of community.

Since the emergence of Social Media, we now have endless opportunities to learn about our customers and enrich their brand experiences.

So as part of your marketing or creative brief, why not ask simply, “How do we want our customers to feel when considering or using our product”? The answer to that simple question should open up a lot of possibilities for you. Instead of relying totally on “reason” to win a customer, you’ll think more in terms of the entire brand experience.

Some marketing gurus refer to this as “360-degree marketing,” but really, it’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world of marketing, feelings trump thoughts every time.

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Mickey On Customers, Social Media 360-degree marketing, brand communities, brand connections, brand experiences, brand feeling, brand loyalty, creative brief, Maya Angelou

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