Boys Will Be Girls

Check Out This Important Announcement From Ryan Digicrest

Mr. Adam Bergman has made a delightful pledge on his blog. I love his "Rants of a Modern Day Elitist" and the things he has to say about everything.

Occasionally he also virtually invites me into Shoe Culture, though as a Boomer I use the word "Shoe" begrudgingly.

Because as anyone over the age of 45 knows, a shoe is leather, and comes in black, cordovan, or with a certain generosity of spirit, brown. What he writes about are those colorful abominations that pretend to be shoes but are actually souped up Keds. But I forgive him, because he's an amazing guy and an amazing thinker.

But just so we're clear:

This, my friends, is a hot shoe.



This, however, is an overpriced piece of plastic and polyester.



Write on, Mr. Bergman!

I Wuvs Ya T-Mobile

I just dumped the iPhone for a G2 from T-Mobile. I am so happy. It wasn’t a magical transition. T-Mobile transposed my home phone with my ATT celly number, so that took a day, and then there was a bit of a problem with what services I had ordered. That took another day. But through it all their customer service people were magical. They made it clear that they cared and wanted to put things right.

The G2 is very nice, but not as easy or intuitive as an iPhone. But then, much of the capability of an iPhone was theoretical given that I live in the Bay Area and mostly travel to NYC.

Their Australian partner managed to give me five bars most everywhere I traveled, but ATT itself couldn’t consistently connect me from my bedroom in Oakland.

Oh, I know, the iPhone users on ATT suck down a lot of bandwidth. More than anyone if I remember that market research correctly. But here's the deal, if your network can't handle more iPhones -- phones that cost a mint every month -- perhaps it's time to stop selling them until you throw a few more towers up in t
he SF financial district.

I had no complaints about ATT customer service. There people were lovely as well. Imagine what it is like to deal with jackass digital netizen webizens who are striken with the world’s most overtaxed network.

ATT had been my choice two years ago because of the mind bogglingly dreadful customer service from Sprint. And because they had iPhone. But mostly it was because being a valued Sprint customer, whose calls were very important to them, was equivalent to constant dry heaves.

I swear that their endless IVR reached through the phone and shoved needles in my corneas. Oh my god that company was the worst! I don’t blame the reps. After all, they didn’t create the system that made me wait hours only to tell me I had to call someone else. They weren’t the MFs that sent me four phones I didn’t order, charged me $2000, and then had the audacity to say it was my problem to ship them back. That EVO is darned cool, but nothing is worth the walking on hot coals required to be a Sprint custo—be a warm blooded serf that the Sprint leech drew hemoglobin from.

Off that soapbox. This is about lovely T-Mobile. Cheaper by far than ATT and Sprint were. And get this – I actually have a signal in my living room. Something ATT only managed on cloudless days, and Sprint only managed so they could deliver the cornea needles, or so I always imagined.

I wuvs you T Mobile. I wuvs my new phone. I wuvs actual mobile phone service. I wuvs the T Mobile people. If they got rid of their IVR at the beginning of a call, this would be what I imagine Heaven is like. Being with them hasn’t been perfect, but when they screw up, as everyone and everything does at times, they apologize. That’s all I ask. Well, that and not shoving needles into my eyeballs.

I'm a nice person -- ask anyone. So I suppose I should apologize for my Sprint bile above. But I've wanted to pee on Sprint for years ever since they treated me like so much gum on a shoe solle, and now that I have T-Mobile, I know that a mobile company can actually be pleasant to work with.

Three Exercises for Living a Commitment to Creativity

Each year, the organizers of the Sunday “Agency Only” program of the iMedia Agency Summit bring in an expert to focus on addressing on the most important challenges facing our industry. This year’s speaker was Tamara Birdsall, Chief Creative Officer of Real Girls Media and a veteran of both the buy and sells sides of the business.

For Tamara, the most important thing that we can do to create a more creative environment – whether we are in Creative or in another Agency discipline, is to make a commitment to walk the walk of making the time and practicing the art of creativity. And then actually walking that walk.

She demonstrated her long running belief that a series of exercises can help us:

• Break out of our linear “ruts”
• Improve our own individual creative thinking
• Drive richer and more valuable group creativity

To help attendees address these three challenges, Tamara engaged the group in three critical exercises.

1. Creative description. Tamara underscored the importance of switching gears – to break out of our day to day activities and busyness with a purely creative exercise. For the purpose of the session, she asked attendees to come up with innovative descriptions for a Granny Smith Apple. Now, obviously, this exercise was not directly applicable to a business challenge. But to Birdsall, that’s the point – that breaking free of our patterns of thought and behavior is a critical first step to being more creative more regularly. And it is the sort of exercise we should be making time for in our daily work life.

2. Mind Mapping: to help us unleash our own internal creative juices, Birdsall had each member of the Agency Day develop a Mind Map for a specific marketing challenge. The nonlinear nature of this exercise proved tremendously valuable to expanding our horizons. Birdsall asked the group to consider a fictitious financial institution considering opening a bank especially for women. By asking each of us to riff individually on the idea of “women and money,” we were each asked to create our own mind maps on the topic. When it came time to review peoples’ maps, it became clear that taking the time to stretch our own thinking can help create more truly innovative concepts.

3. Brain Writing: Her third exercise focused on the technique of brain writing, which asks people to do some initial ideation on paper, and then passing their ideas to the next person for them to build upon. For many people in the room, this written method of ideation was cathartic in that it offered so many advantages over the sort of freeform “brainstorms” that are core to the way most agencies operate, and yet don’t always yield great results.

Tamara was quick to point out that these exercises are only a starting point set of examples of things we can do – that we should explore online resources that further explain these and other tactics so we can find tools that work for us.

What made the session so powerful was the tremendous number of innovative ideas the group was able to generate in only a few moments using the exercises. For those of us who have sat in a tremendous numbers of ineffective freeform brainstorms, Tamara’s suggestions and her passion for trying to find new and more disciplined techniques were a refreshing call to rethink the tactics that aren’t unlocking our full potential.

I know I speak for dozens of attendees when I extend a personal thanks to Tamara for her passion, ideas, and participation.

Special thanks to iMediaConnection for running this first.

Brand Belief Starts with You

Do consumers believe in your brand? Do you?

I’ve talking to my Father a lot over the past few days, and one of his favorite topics is the Dodgers.

The Brooklyn Dodgers. He was a proud Brooklynite. And a major Dodgers fan. Until they moved. For him, the move was a betrayal. A realization that the team owners cared not one whit for Brooklyn or its people.

Which was, in his view, a violation of the brand though he wouldn’t use those words. But the nature of Brooklyn and its people was a big part of the Dodgers brand. They weren’t just a group of players brought together by paychecks – they were an embodiment of the spirit of the Borough – always in the shadow of Manhattan, and determined to scrap and scrape to be on top.

In my 25 or so years in marketing, I have been struck by the number of people I’ve met who were charged with building brands they disdained. People who had contempt for their targets if they were downscale or religious or extremely pedestrian in their aspirations and dreams.

Enter social media. The powerful thing about a TV ad you produce once a year or a print ad you spend thousands on is that it gives the savvy the opportunity to pretend – to pretend to share the values of the users that drive the brand. To pretend that a product is far better than it is. Car photographers and food stylists and supermodels can also be used to obfuscate product issues instead of focusing resources on fixing them.

What I love about social is that there’s no place to hide anymore. No way to paper over fundamental product issues or elitism. In this new environment, truth will out. If we don’t believe in what we are selling, we’ll surely be found out.

We have instincts about which brands care about their products – and us. Is there any doubt in your head that Steve Jobs is a believer? Jeff Bezos? Tony Hsieh?

Even when we don’t know who is behind brands, we love it when brands and the people behind them demonstrate genuine belief in their offerings. Take Cadillac. There are lots of reasons why Cadillac is back, but I think a big part of it is that Cadillac got its groove back – the brash, in your face, look at me sense of this aspirational brand returned as the design team started designing actual Cadillacs again, and everyone else – from the dealer to the men and women on the line – felt good about what they were making and doing. You could feel it. You can feel it.

What other brands feel like they believe in what they are doing?
• Tide
• Hyundai
• Contadina
• Ford
• Flip
• Tyler Perry Studios
• JC Penney
• Tourism Australia

Those are some on my list, anyway.

The popularity of cause related marketing is an interesting side to this belief thing. Many brands are using borrowed interest to give their brands a sense of purpose. I think that’s great – but it doesn’t replace the need for everyone involved in a brand to actually care about their product. Because cause related marketing makes me feel good about this purchase, whereas brand pride and brand belief make me feel good about being loyal to the brand. Now, causes can make me feel better about buying a brand, but they can only supplement – not replace – genuine belief in the things were are making and doing.

Let’s head back to Ebbets Field for the closer. There were a lot of reasons why the Dodgers moved, not least a big fight with the city over a new stadium. Sound familiar?

Anyway, whatever the reasons, there’s no doubt that most Brooklyners felt betrayed. For the Dodgers it didn’t matter much – after all, baseball was a local business and LA was a long ways away from Coney Island. But when we fail to believe in the people that buy our products -- and in those products themselves, the consumer can sense that betrayal.

Think about that the next time those consumers you disdain aren’t signing up in droves for your FaceBook page.

Thanks to iMedia Connection for publishing this first.

Ryan's First Post

Check out Ryan's first post as a Catalysta! So interesting to talk to him and see what people outside the adbiz think of our "danse brandabre."

http://www.mediabizbloggers.com/catalyst-s-f/111853999.html

So long to ya 2010

Let's Avoid Do Not Track

There's nothing like a Youtube video to show you that you are serious need of a diet. Beyond serious. Not that I didn't know, but ouch this is painful to watch.

But what I had to say was important enough for me to post this.

How to Choose a Social Media Management Tool

Thank Heaven that there are lots of companies trying to make the process of managing and analyzing social media presences better. As more and more brands recognize the importance of social, most have also concluded that they cannot effectively deliver positive social experiences manually. They need automated tools to make the process easier, more dynamic, and easier to track.

The need for powerful and efficient management tools is there whether you have one presence or hundreds, whether you’re only on Facebook or have outposts on 50 different platforms. Since we’ve helped a number of companies with social media program management, I thought it might be useful to share some of what we have learned with a larger audience. So here’s a summary of some of the most important features to look for as you choose a social media management platform to deploy across your clients or company.

1) Content Management System Features

We often think of a “CMS” in the context of a major corporate site, but it’s just as important in a social media management platform. Perhaps even more important. Because the need for constant updating is so acute in social. Here are some features to look for as you weigh alternatives.

• Ability to deliver content to lots of social platforms. As with anything else, you are going to want to work with a versatile platform. Because social is so dominated by FaceBook/Twitter, it may be OK to work with a Facebook/Twitter only tool now, but make sure they are planning to cover more platforms in the future. Because if there is one certainty in social network history, it’s that market hegemony isn’t forever. Ask Compuserve, AOL, Napster, Friendster, and MySpace. Further, you should be able to choose social media destinations for each piece of content. Because what you send to Digg should be very different than what you send to FaceBook. The easier it is to decide where a particular piece of content goes, the happier you’ll be in the end.

• Ease of Content Creation: Some platforms allow you to create content right in the platform. Is the process easy, or is it complex? Intuitive, or convoluted? Easy is going to be important to any social manager, but for people managing multiple brands, or multiple presences for a single brand, it’s going to be critical. The number of steps required for content creation is important because social managers are going to spend only a small portion of their time creating content. Most of their time should be spent on listening and responding.

• Page Aesthetics Tools or Helpers: Some social media presences open themselves to more custom tailoring of page appearance. Having ways to quickly and easily alter the aesthetics of a page can help brands reinforce messaging with their proprietary look and feel. Some services offer very easy to use tools, others don’t. If you don’t have designers on staff, easy to use tools can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that you won’t have to involve a designer every time you make a small change. A curse because most nondesigners have a knack for shocking colors and turning on the wet floor, shadow, outline, and ripple effect simultaneously. Ask our team what it’s like to deal with two color blind partners. LOL.

• Post Aesthetics and Content Helpers: There’s probably a cooler name for this. But what I am talking about is the ability to post content and ensure that a screen shot or key image are posted, not just a link. And the ability to change the text of a post is also useful. Similarly, an automatic URL shortening tool helps immeasurably. Instead of making trip after trip to Bit.ly, you can just have the platform do it. Some solutions also let you customize the shortened urls to give you an additional level of brand impact.

• Collaboration: Two things to look for here. The first is the ability to create, edit and manage content across people within an organization. Ideally, a platform lets content developers input their work, and then manages the flow of edits, updates, and approvals across an organization. Permissions capabilities are going to be important here for many companies, especially those to the left of the “risk-o-meter”. Obviously, the need for failsafe procedures and processes varies somewhat depending on the size and type of organization. For example, a large company in a highly regulated category like pharma would probably want features that prevented posting of content without prior approval from legal, etc.

• Multimedia capabilities: You’ll want to be able to post a variety of file types. Text is so cheestastik. Actually that’s not true. But brands cannot build by text alone.

• Prefab applications: Every social program I have worked on benefitted from interactivities that tackled the challenge of making passive likers into brand participants. A platform can make that much easier by offering built in applications that work on at least some social media sites. A drag and drop poll. Virtual gifts. Ecards. People are far more likely to respond to “apptivities” than to make freehand comments or take it upon themselves to spread your message virally. Most of the current social service offerings provide these features primarily for Facebook.

• Provisions for scheduling of posts: I’ve seen a lot of data on the relative effectiveness of pre-scheduled posts. By which I mean the use of a platform that allows you to specify the date and time of future posts. From the anecdotal info I have seen, it appears that for many brands advanced scheduling can be just as effective as managing everything in real time. Of course there are exceptions. If you are BP trying to message during the worst ecological disaster in North America, you aren’t going to want to “set it and forget it.” But if you are in a fairly sleepy category and realistically don’t have a plethora of posts to make every day, scheduling tools can reduce the time commitment necessary to operate an effective social media program.

2) Listening, Response, and Analytics Tools

Listening to fans, followers, and likers – really really listening – should be the primary task brands assign to social manager. We all talk about the 20/80 rule – the principle that a small number of users purchase the lion’s share of your product is well known. So, if you accept that your social media “fans” are in the 20%, then shouldn’t you take loads of time to listen and understand what folks are saying in the aggregate? In my view, there are two kinds of listening that are critical.

Identification and escalation of “acute” response needs: For this challenge, you are going to want a service that makes it easy and fast to review site posts and comments. From policing profanity and personal attacks, to responding to questions and requests for information, to quickly identifying and escalating complaints or other acute problem posts.

Aggregated insights into all of the commentary: Simply responding to issues and problems only scratches the surface of the value you can glean from social media fans. By pairing the richness of being able to see real commentary with the ability to use quantitative analysis to assess the overall tenor of discussion and topics, brands can get ideas and feedback that can fuel a host of marketing initiatives.

As you evaluate platforms, consider whether or not the alternatives offer the following:

• Automatic escalation of posts and comments containing profanity, or posts and commentary that have been flagged for review. Keeping a “clean” group generally helps grow brand connection and group participation.

• Console showing all recent commentary from users so the social manager can scan posts for items needing immediate follow up. Obviously a service that includes these follow up needs within its CMS would make things easier for all parties.

• Platforms that flag competitor names and keywords to make it easier for the social manager to spot and address the comments, or escalate them to appropriate team members.

• Ways to respond to the comments from the CMS rather than having to manually find the comments within the social media presences.

• Tools that provide insights into ALL of the commentary on a group. Measures like sentiment, KW analysis, themes, etc. can help a brand gain insight into what consumers are really saying and needing.

Many of you may find this last point a bit of overkill, especially if you are already monitoring social through a listening or analytics platform. But remember that some of the most popular social platforms, including FaceBook, are very challenging for social listening tools to monitor.

3) Metrics Considerations

While most brands still find it difficult to track social media activity back to sales, we can do better at using surrogate indicators and other admittedly “softer” metrics to assess impact. Many of the platforms available today are quite effective at providing this sort of information. I suggest you look to insure that the platform you select be able to track the following:

• Clicks on Posts
• “Likes”
• Clicks on Links
• Plays of Multimedia Content
• Responses to Interactivities
• Shares/Retweets
• Time Spent

Further, the ability to get reporting on these measures in real time or near real time will help you make timely decisions on how to alter or augment your social activity with regard to a piece of content. For example, you may post a video to one Facebook presence, and see that it gathers significant views and shares quickly. This could help you decide whether to expand the reach of that content across more sites/presences.

4) Price/Value Concerns

Social media management tools can have wildly different pricing, from free to quite dear. Cost of services broadly relates to the extent to which they make tasks, easier and more intuitive, as well as the availability of “drag n drop” apps. In working with clients on this challenge, I have found it helpful to do some simple calculations to identify money versus time tradeoffs. Social media management has both direct and opportunity costs, and it’s relatively simple to compare the cost per year of one service versus another if you have taken both for a test drive.

Final Thoughts

The number of social media management tools out there is mushrooming. One rule of thumb I suggest people use is a simple annoyance test. Take the platforms you are considering for a test drive. If you find some aspect of it unintuitive, talk to the seller about how you can address it. But do talk to them. Because something that is annoying to do once is rage-inducing when performed 192 times a day.

There are certainly very good platforms that don’t do every single thing I have mentioned above. I suggest you work closely with your marketing and social media teams to identify the features that are going to be most important to your business. This is definitely NOT a decision to make in an afternoon because the effectiveness and efficiency of what may well become your most frequent consumer connection is at stake. What’s also at stake is the sanity of your social media manager. Choose wisely.

Special thanks to iMediaConnection for publishing this first.

Silicon O'Valley

Recently I had the good fortune of getting to go to Le Web, the biggest digital conference in Europe. As I wandered the booth section, I came across an interesting participant: Enterprise Ireland and some of the start ups they are helping to support and promote. Enterprise Ireland is the Irish State Development Agency.

EI reports that The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Ireland 17th in the world in digital activity. Not impressed? Well, consider that it’s 4.6MM population ranks it 119.

As a deeply committed Hibernophile who actually once turned down a trip to Hawaii to vacation in Cork -- in February -- I am never above giving shameless publicity to Irish things. So I thought I’d give some ink -- err, electrons to some of the interesting companies emanating from the Emerald isle. There are clearly some sharp people working away every day there.

PinPoints

Pinpoints is a mobile application from Limerick-based Cauwill Technolgies that automatically programs your mobile phone’s navigation software to provide turn by turn directions to a destination. It converts a given location to a shortened url, and when you click it, it uses the native GPS in your phone to plot your starting point, your end point, and the best available route. It works on all smartphone platforms.



Teamwork PM

TeamWork PM is a web based project management platform that I found very easy and powerful. Simple, intuitive, and graphical, it offered great usability versus other platforms I have tried. Pricing ranges from a free limited features edition to an enterprise version costing €149/month. From the nine year old (that’s 63 in Internet years – a testament to good products) Digital Crew Developers in Cork.

Feed Henry

FeedHenry offers a development and deployment platform that makes it easy to create and distribute apps across all types of smart phones, and across the organization. “Build once, deploy to all.” Further, it makes it easier to integrate with existing business systems, report and optimize, and defend via enterprise quality security.

Gruupy.com

Gruupy.com is a Groupon-style deal a day site focused on offering Europe’s best deals on electronics and gadgets. Discounts of 50%+ seem to be the norm, though it’s a bit challenging to evaluate because most stuff is cheaper over here, what with VAT and all. What interests me here is the vertical play – that with Gruupy you will generally know what sorts of things to find ad you go back every day. And because the deals are relevant across Europe, it’s focused on goods rather than local services.

Louder Voice

Louder Voice is a tool that adds reviews, ratings, and commenting to a web site in just a few minutes. With offerings for everything from SOHO websites to enterprise ecommerce sites, Louder Voice is focused on improving sales for businesses by including personal endorsement and recommendation in more selling experiences. Integrated with FaceBook profiles, registration for consumers is easy, which increases the number of comments on a site. The reviewer also has the opportunity to send their review to their own FB page or twitter stream. The tool also offers SMS and Android review tools.

LouderVoice Customer Reviews Overview from Conor O'Neill on Vimeo.

Me really likey.

Weedle.com

Weedle is a massive network of “people with skills.” You join, quickly create a skills summary web page, and connect it to pages and profiles of people you know. Photography, web development, catering, you name it. The personal networks feature is important because it serves to highlight your profile when someone looking for your skills is just a degree or two of separation away from you. Their studies indicate that, not surprisingly, these sorts of connections can be very valuable ways of improving your close rate.



There are lots of other companies – these are just a few of the ones I felt qualified to briefly describe. It appears that there is also a robust sector for enterprise security and SaaS offerings in the snake-free land. While many of the companies are in Dublin, there are also a surprising number in the other cities and towns.

The economic news from Ireland has been rough of late – but it appears that whatever happens to the budget and relationship with the IMF, Ireland’s tech sector is going to continue to perform well.