Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Resolution Effect

escala de cargol a Tivoli, Ferragosto 2008As many of you know, I’m running a startup in the social media intelligence space. I spend an inordinate amount of time scanning blogs, forums, social networks and such, studying trends in online conversation, both for my customers and my own company. December was an anomaly. In at least two completely separate non-retail industries, there was a measurable decline the number of posts as the holiday approached—not dramatic, but noticeable. I’d consider that pretty intuitive.

What was not intuitive is that the number of sources posting content and the quality of posts, as measured by relevance, went up noticeably. Many of the posts were part of a spike of 2009 predictions and 2008 in-review. But many were just good quality analytical posts on their respective industries. Which got me to thinking about the cause for this spike in quality. Not surprisingly, I have a hypothesis.

If you’re connected at all to your industry online–not only through social media, but through the Web sites of traditional media sources–you can’t help but be saturated with analysis of the year past and predictions for the year ahead. In psychological terms, this is induction. Reflective analysis of the environment and the systemic drivers of phenomena that govern your life. And it being the end of the year, we are naturally and culturally inclined to reflect on transition, on new beginnings, hopes and resolutions for change. Very reflective stuff, even if you hate it.

So. My hypothesis is that social media is amplifying the resolution effect. The traditional media channels post their reviews of the past and expectations for the future, bloggers add their own voice and their own opinions, which people comment on, post links to on Twitter and Facebook, and soon we’re saturated in ambient reflection. The increase in sources I mentioned–the suddenly rise in voices in the fray–I suspect are dormant bloggers gearing up for their own resolutions to start posting on their blog more diligently in 2009. Just like the thousands of people crowding into gyms right now to make the most of a new start. I’ll be interested to see if the trend continues much past January.

Photo credit: Perrimoon

But Is It a Burger King Campaign?

Either Burger King is enjoying some great fan promotion, or their agency is driving a savvy integrated media campaign. There’s a story unfolding that bridges traditional and emerging social media channels in a clever way–and a far more subtle way than the famous subservient chicken (which amazingly is still active after four years).

The latest campaign, if it is one, uses Twitter to pull together the threads of a number of recent commercials and announcements in a sort of media-driven narrative. There are at least two fairly new handles on Twitter. One is @thebklounge, started last month, and the other is @whoppervirgins, started five days ago. Both are commenting on recent Burger King commercials and announcements, and driving a sort of edgy banter with their tweets.

@thebklounge tweets about the latest BK announcement that they’re releasing a cologne that smells like a flame-broiled whopper:

smell like me and get the ladies. if they’re the ladies you actually want is another matter entirely http://tinyurl.com/6krhl4
@homemakerbarbi I’m at the top of the food chain if you know what I mean… and I am served, just not in that sense

@whoppervirgins a handle obviously referencing the Whopper Virgins commercial, tweets about being a burger:

Got some Ketchup seepage. Wondering if I need a doctor.
marinating in my own juiciness

Over the last couple of days, an exchange between the two handles led to a sudden interest in Burger King, and a spike in online discussion about the brand. @whoppervirgins wrote a post with an oblique reference to the virgin whopper “documentary”:

Took a drink of well water. Neighboring hamlet poisoned it with dead mule. Feeling sick
@thebklounge responded with a tweet that sparked a small brushfire of comments.
@whoppervirgins CEASE AND DESIST. UNAUTHORIZED USE OF TRADEMARK. What is your motivation by the way…?

That led to a flurry of bemused comments that maybe the Internet had just seen the first Cease and Desist by Twitter. And now, a lot of marketers are scratching their heads trying to figure out where the campaign ends and parody begins. The tone of the banter is totally in line with the tone of the whopper virgins campaign and the flame broiled cologne. But is BK that far ahead of the game in leveraging social media? I mean, most marketers on twitter are still talking about internet marketing techniques for building a network of followers. BK seems to have connected the dots between a radio announcement for their flame-broiled cologne on NPR, a mainstream television commercial, and the buzz driving power of Twitter, and that buzz is building their network. I think we’re getting schooled by Crispin Porter or Barbarian.

Never Forget a Password Again

I‘ve seen a couple of posts recently with people discussing various password managers, and I’m a bit suprised. I’ve been using a simple system for years that I figured was pretty common. I have a unique password for every site I visit, and I never forget what it is. I don’t rely on a password manager, so if I jump on a friend’s machine to access the Web, I’m never stuck. Here’s how it works.

1. I start with a short string that I use as the basis for every password–a mix of numbers and letters, but not special characters, since some systems don’t allow them. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, my base string is r7sk9.

2. For every site for which I create a password, I add a unique string derived from the name of the site. If, for example, the site is WordPress, my site string might be “wor”. If you just added those together, you’d have “worr7sk9”. If the site were Bank of America, the password using the same code would be “banr7sk9”.

Simple. But not sufficient if you’re worried about someone unlocking your code, and gaining access to all your accounts. So, you may decide you need some scheme to mix up the code in a way that you still won’t ever forget the code. Fortunately, the choices are endless.

1. You can just mix the site code with your base code by interspersing the letters, so it’s not as obvious if someone ever got one of your passwords. “ban” for bank of america might be a dead giveway. But bra7nsk9 isn’t quite so obvious–I just interspersed the first three letters of the site code into the base code.

2. Instead of using the first few letters of the site for the code, you can use the last few letters backward. Or use the first and last characters. Or some other combination that is not so obvious, but that you can use consistently with every site.

3. Instead of using the actual characters of the site, you can use characters from words that are indicated by the first, or last, letter of the site. IE: A is for apple, B is for banana–so your site code for Amazon might be “app”.

4. If you’re worried about frequently changing your passwords, you can just add a date code into your password. Like “8” in a particular slot if you plan to change your passwords yearly. Or maybe a month code if you want to change it monthly. Whenever you want to change your password, just increment the number. If you’re in the middle of changing all your passwords, and forget what you’ve changed and what you haven’t, no worries, you’re only one number, or one code increment off. You’ll figure it out.

There’s an endless number of schemes you can use to make your code unique for every website you visit, and yet easy for you to never forget. All you have to remember is the formula. A couple of hints:

1. Don’t use special characters. Some sites don’t allow them, and the last thing you want is one scheme for some sites, and another scheme for others, unless of course, you can keep two schemes straight in your head.

2. Try your scheme out with a number of different sites before you commit to it. You may run into trouble if you don’t vet the scheme and then run into a site for which it doesn’t work. The first scheme I tried was tailored for sites with at least two syllables, like Facebook, MySpace, Google. After I commited to it, I started coming across sites with only one syllable, and then I got tripped up. So make a list of 5-10 of the sites you use most often, and make sure your code works consistently in different cases.

3. Come up with a code that has a minimum of 8 characters when you include your site code. While many sites only require six, an increasing number require eight, and again, you want a system that works across all sites.

If you have any additional ideas, I’d love to hear them. As I said, I have a unique password for every site I use, and I never forget it, and never need a reminder.

Countrywide’s Concept of Customer Service

A tribute to everything I hateI hate writing these kinds of posts. But I’m pulling my hair out and I simply can’t believe that companies in this day and age are so manifestly clueless about the impact of customer service on brand.

I’m a customer of Countrywide, who holds my home mortgage. A few months ago, Countrywide had a major security breach, in which whatever security protocols they follow to protect private customer data allowed an employee to make off with the social security numbers, names and financial data of many thousands of customers, including myself. The employee turned around and sold that data to a third party, setting up a nightmare scenario of identity theft for Countrywide’s customers.

Following California law, Countrywide disclosed the security breach and provided me with access to credit-monitoring services through Experian. Not an ideal situation, but at least the law’s got consumers covered and is working as expected. Except, when I go to Experian to sign up for the credit-monitoring services, after filling out a tedious application online that kept having to reload for some unknown reason, I get a sweet message saying “We’re Sorry… We are currently unable to process your request. If you need assistance please email us at membership@experianconsumerdirect.com. Thank you- we appreciate your business!”

Really? If you appreciated my business, you’d provide a direct phone number to someone who could tell me why you can’t process my request. Oh well. So I call Countrywide’s customer service line, the one printed on the notification in which they told me Countrywide had lost my private financial data to a thief. After going through the phone tree, I get a Countrywide service rep who provides me with a phone number to call at Experian to get help. Great!

So. I call the Experian hotline. Five minutes of phone tree crap. Special offer! Press a number! Press another number! Wait while we transfer you! You know, you could do this faster on our website! Someone will be with you soon! Press a number! Press another number! Now hold! Five minutes of hold to the tune of some generic acoustic guitar riff in an endless 3-bar loop. Thank you for holding, someone will be with you soon! Did you know you could do this faster on our website?! More crappy acoustic guitar, and then the master stroke. Thank you for holding, no one is available to assist you now, please call back later! Click.

Now I’m really happy. And when I call Countrywide, they make me even happier. I get a helpful customer service rep who tells me, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do to help you.” Really? Is that the best you can do after you lost the financial data of thousands of customers? You throw it in the lap of Experian, and when they drop the ball, you just throw up your arms and say, “Oh Well!” Except, I didn’t really want to hear that message. So I asked the service rep for her supervisor, and now it gets fun. “My supervisor can’t help you.” I had to ask: is this really customer service? I didn’t ask whether you thought your supervisor could help me, I asked to speak to your supervisor. Again: “My supervisor can’t help you.” And this was Countrywide’s position, putting up stone walls against the customers whose financial data was stolen and sold by their own employee.

What did I expect, you might ask? How about this, considering I’m a customer whose financial data you lost, considering I’m one of the tax payers bailing out your industry and saving your job: “I know that credit monitoring is really important in this situation, and I’m sorry our vendor is not fulfilling their obligation. Let me see if I can find out who is managing that business relationship and see if they know what’s going on.” Or, “Let me see if I can get someone from Experian on the line to help.” Or, “Let me get my supervisor.” My helpful suggestions were not well received by the customer rep, but she did finally relent and put me on hold for another 5 minutes to wait to speak to her supervisor. To her credit, the supervisor was more reasonable, but did nothing more than call the same Experian hotline to go through the same dead end process with me on the line.

I’m still waiting to get this resolved to find out what parting gifts I’ve received on my credit report from the Countrywide theft.

Hello! Countrywide. Anyone home? Why should a post like this ever need to be written?

The Thinking Person’s Social Experience

My friends and frequent business partners at Miner Productions are at it again, driving production on a new social networking community called the Ideas Project, an interactive site featuring videos and threaded discussions on a wide variety of topics anchored by prominent thought leaders. The published content is organized primarily into Themes, People and Technology, with user generated content in the form of Questions, Ideas and threaded comments tied to the published content. There’s some interesting navigation devices used for exploring related ideas and contributors, but it’s really the quality of the thought-leader content that stands out. It’s kind of like a TED-style conference in the sustained format of an online social network.

It’s a cool idea and the content is definitely worth exploring. I’m currently listening to a video by Jerry Michalski on how the Internet represents the development of a “global brain”— check it out. The project was sponsored by Nokia, and developed in partnership with Xigi and Axis 41. As always, great work, Miner. I’m looking forward to our next collaboration.

Is Social Media Killing PR? The Webcast.

I gave another in-depth Webcast yesterday at one of BrightTalk’s online summits on social media monitoring and engagement for enterprise marketers. This presentation, “Is Social Media Killing PR?”, is about the strengths and weaknesses of the Public Relations role in Social Media Marketing. The title is a shameless ripoff of Horn Group’s panel of the same name, which I discussed in a recent post. It’s an hour long presentation, but I know that if you’re an enterprise marketer, you’ll find it worthwhile. If you’re not sure about spending the time, fast forward to someplace in the middle and listen for 5 minutes.

Marketing Trends: Public Relations Budgets going Social?

Sudden stormI haven’t been up for air in weeks. Somehow, despite the economic downturn, despite the nuclear winter in venture capital markets for early stage startups, SocialRep is humming. I’ve been buried in social media tracking scans for customers and prospects, and new inquiries are coming in over the transom. I’m also excited about an invitation to present at Thunderbird’s Winterim in New York in January, where I’ll be talking about our emerging framework for integrated social media marketing and technology. So how can I account for the uptick in energy despite the gloomy market? I’m starting to see my theory about natural selection play out.

Over the past couple of months, SocialRep has been tracking a massive swath of online dialog about marketing. Not surprisingly, the trends in dialog are overwhelmingly focused on the impact of the economic downturn, with various flavors of speculation, panic and punditry. Some examples:

  • A few weeks ago, various reports on budget planning for 2009 highlighted a marked migration in marketing spend from traditional to digital media. The nearly universal read on this move is that online marketing is more measureable than offline, but there was surprisingly little citical analysis of  the challenges with online metrics, and how those challenges are being addressed.
  • As the economic crisis deepened, the panic did too. Sequoia Capital stoked the flames with a presentation they posted online telling their entrepreneurs to “get real or go home”. The presentation went massively viral, spreading the talking points for belt tightening and death pool speculation for various startup sectors, but few specifics on the tactics companies should pursue to refine their market approach.
  • As if in response to the panic–and mindful of the bloodbath marketing usually suffers in a downturn–marketing pundits took up the mantra that, whatever you do, DON’T STOP SPENDING. Some (myself included) cited the anecdotes that companies like P&G, Kellogg and Chevy increased ad spending during the Great Depression and pulled ahead of competitors. But most simply pronounced the incantation forcefully, that smart companies don’t cut marketing, but didn’t offer specifics on how companies should adjust their programs. Jonathan Baskin called this trend perfectly.

Notice a pattern here? Lots of punditry and trend analysis, but very few specific recommendations for how companies should adjust their marketing programs to deal with the economic crisis. There were a couple of exceptions, most notably a lot of dialog about the dangers of discounting and how price cuts undermine brand equity. But in terms of substantive recommendations for adjusting marketing strategy and operations, not so much. So I was interested to see a tangible sign of how some companies are adjusting based on the sudden increase of inquiries at SocialRep.

~  free  ~We’re still in the early stages at SocialRep. After beating the streets for Series A funding over the summer, we read the tea leaves and readjusted to focus our energy on customers and product. In this market, we’re going to live or die by our success in serving customers, not VCs. But bootstrapping a technology company can be tenuous. You need customers, but if you’re too opportunistic and grab at anything you can drag over the doorstep, you’ll quickly fragment your product and team by trying to be all things to all prospects. So you have to be deliberate in choosing customers, which means being a little more slow and quiet than would otherwise seem prudent. When you find a good market vein, you mine it, and pay close attention to the way your prospects frame the problem they want you to solve.

What surprised me was the sudden influx over the past few weeks in the number of companies that found us, and how they framed their interest in our social media offering. The common refrain was that, in the face of an emerging recession, these companies were aggressively reviewing every dollar of their marketing spend. One area in particular was not standing up to scrutiny: Public Relations. These companies complained about spending 5-figure monthly PR budgets on activities that produced activity without results. The mandate these companies had been given was to take the PR budget that was not performing and invest it in something innovative, like social media marketing.

Silencio!!! by Loud VillaNow I know this will provoke some howls, so let me make a preemptive disclaimer. I believe in PR. Or, I should say, I believe in good PR. And having spent 15 years on every side of PR, I can define the difference between good and bad PR. Years ago, when I was the editor of a magazine, my inbox overflowed every day with pitches and press releases that had absolutely no relation to what my magazine covered. Today as a blogger, I still get totally irrelevant PR-spam, more artfully framed as “blogger relations”. This is the lazily “scientific” ethic of bad PR: blast a fire hose of pitches and press releases at everyone that looks like they might be a journalist or blogger, and hope someone picks up your story. In the place of actual stories that influence the market, this approach produces monthly “activity reports” and media mentions in off-the-beaten-path blogs or news feeds.

Good PR is different. It’s about relationships and market expertise. PR companies in this category take the time to hire and train smart people who get to know a market, the competitive landscape, the products, and of course, the analysts, reporters and bloggers. They don’t spam their contacts with press releases; they build relationships based on sharing knowledge and insight. Reporters and bloggers answer their calls because they know their time won’t be wasted, and they may get an important tip. This kind of PR produces relevant stories that influence markets.

The problem is, the ratio of good to bad PR is not good. And even among the better PR companies, an understanding of how to manage the dramatic shift from traditional to social media is still largely predicated on the notion of cultivating asymmetrical influence more than reciprocal dialog. Moreover, few traditional PR companies have the culture to passionately embrace the tech-driven social media paradigm. So in the face of a market downturn, when belts are tightening, we’re seeing companies looking at the money poured into PR, and deciding that now is the time to try something new.

What does “something new” look like? That’s the topic of my next post. In the meantime, here’s a hint: social media marketing is just like PR, in the sense that there’s “good” and “bad” SMM. And the distinction is based largely on the same dynamic–activity vs. results, influence vs. relationships.

Is the Financial Crisis a Preview of the Climate Crisis?

Earth EggI took a couple of hours out tonight to watch the Frontline special “Heat”, a poignant and well-produced look at the climate crisis, the tacit complicity in ignoring the problem by both consumers and corporations, and the expedient lack of leadership on the issues that really matter by both presidential candidates. The more the documentary played out, the more familiar it sounded.

Over the past few years, we’ve had very public discussions and analysis of the housing bubble and the subprime mortgange crisis, along with constant speculation of when the bottom would eventually fall out of the market. Anyone who claims to be surprised by the financial meltdown either hasn’t been paying attention or has a stake in denying the obvious and longstanding evidence of impending trouble. Now we’re on the brink of a global financial meltdown.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman was on FreshAir today discussing Ben Bernanke, and remarking how he was, by fate, the most informed person possible to heading the Fed, having based his academic career on studying financial catastrophes from the Great Depression to Japan’s banking crisis. He has more knowledge about how to fight the crisis than any predecessor, and more resources and support in attacking the problem aggressively. And yet, everything he’s thrown at the crisis so far hasn’t had the intended effect. We may have simply passed the point of being able to manipulate the the system to produce desired outcomes.

Patterns like this make my synapses light up, because patterns often show you the future in a complex system. We are living right now in tremendous fear of financial meltdown, even though we were all complicit in the leveraged consumption that drove us to this point, despite the evidence of danger–and even now, many of us are whistling past the graveyard.

Is this what we’re doing with the climate? If you missed Frontline’s “Heat”, it’s worth a look.

Get Real or Go Home

Sequoia Capital dumped a bucket of cold water over their portfolio companies, with this presentation on the economy and the road ahead for venture-backed start-ups. The message: cut costs, focus on quality, drive sales, lower your expectations for investment and valuation. Oh, and you better have a product people need.