Strategic Public Relations

Fight Club 2.0: AdWeek’s Digital Hot List | Brian Morrissey Interview

Reading AdWeek’s “2009 Digital Hot List” it becomes clear we’re in store for a dynamic and competitive digital landscape in 2010.

As the brands on the list fight for market share, it almost reads like a script for Fight Club 2.0.

Brian Morrissey provided Strategic Public Relations his opinion on some of these brands and, in the process, some insight into the Hot List.

1) Social networks are comparable to a bar scene. There's always a hot bar everyone goes to until it gets old and they move onto the next hot bar. How long can Facebook hold onto their hot bar status that, in part, put them in your top spot?
MySpace was 3rd or 4th on this list a few years ago. The same could arguably happen to Facebook. Will it become uncool now that the demographic is expanding? Keep in mind the list is a present to near past snapshot of digital category leaders vs. a forward-looking prediction. That said there’s no reason to believe it will be less popular in the near term.

2) Hulu announced a pay model is forthcoming. With cable TV challenging Hulu with TV Everywhere coming from cable as a challenger, what do you think will happen next?
Hulu has been a trailblazing video delivery platform. They took a lot of heat initially. TechCrunch used to mock them – not anymore. They’re a catalyst for change in an industry desperately needing it. Digital distribution can work well for the television industry. The impact of a subscription on Hulu remains to be seen. But as I understand it, this will be a premium option and the base content will continue to be free.

3) What can mainstream media learn from the brands on this list? Bob Garfield would remind us they're all (f-ing) doomed, but if social is more popular than porn as your article states, can social save mainstream media?
There are challenges facing traditional business models and traditional distribution models. There are some traditional media on the list represented by their digital offshoots...but not many. WSJ.com is succeeding with its subscription/advertising model mix. Other media are now trying to organize around social as a delivery model. Readers are gaining increasing amounts of control based on their recommendations. They are beginning to determine traffic patterns instead of a Google algorithm.

4) Twitter is polarizing to say the least with lovers and haters. Can Twitter make money? It would seem that would quiet both camps and Twitter would settle down into a platform you either use or you do not use.
As far as making money, it’s not a question of if Twitter will make money, simply a question of when. Twitter is sitting on a mountain of real-time consumer intention data. There is a significant business leveraging this facet of Twitter. The recent Google and Microsoft deals underscore the importance of this information. If you start looking at Twitter as an intention data platform instead of a microblogging platform, it gets interesting.

5) OK, Rocky IV reminds me of Google and Bing. Bing seems to be Rocky to Google's Drago...they made Google bleed! Less than 10 percent market share/blood, but still. Is social search the next big fight between the two search super powers?
There was much debate with my colleagues at AdWeek on whether or not the $80 million marketing spend around Bing’s launch also bought it a spot on this list. Will it keep the gains it made on Google? As long as marketers want an alternative to Google, they have a shot. What’s a market without any competition? Bing is hope for marketers. As far as which one will own social search, that remains to be seen.

6) My last fight with a brand on the Hot List is iPhone and Android. The iPhone has more than 100,000 apps in its corner. But Android seems to be gearing up for a serious cage match with iPhone. Will the consumer benefit?
The consumer will definitely benefit by having another alternative to the iPhone. It’s tough to compete with THE mobile platform with 100,000 apps in their store. But if there is a digital war waged in 2010, iPhone and Android will be one of the battles in this war.

Storytelling’s Link to Social Marketing Success | SummitUp 2009

SummitUp brought together some of the best and brightest in Ohio's social media scene as well as industry luminaries like Chris Brogan and Bob Garfield. Fueled in no small part by the passion and determination of David E. Bowman, the event was a complete success and I was honored to kick it off with my keynote presentation.

"What's Your Story?" details how the craft of storytelling can help us deal with the challenges social media creates. I consider these challenges a bit of a paradox as my slides and video will explain. But the very technology that is bringing us together with people from around the world also prevents us with truly connecting with people.

My presentation serves as a refresher course on storytelling, gives some examples of how it's being used in social media by non-profits and consumer brands in everything from big strategic plays to the littlest of details. It also gives 12 action items to challenge attendees to apply storytelling to their job and improve social marketing efforts.

Some additional resources from the presentation can be found here.

What's Your Story?

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AMP, #PepsiFail and staying on brand

There's been lots of discussion around the iPhone App "AMP UP Before You Score" from Pepsi's AMP Energy Drink. Let me see if I can sum it up.

The Issue: The AMP app profiles 24 types of women, from "Cougar" and "Athlete" to "Out of Your League" and "Married."

Each profile provides unfortunate content including pickup lines and other information to help the user "score." It also has a brag function which allows users to promote and share their efforts via email, Facebook or Twitter. The app states: "Get lucky? Add her to your Brag List. You can include a name, date and whatever details you remember."

The Outrage: Needless to say, the immature, chauvinistic app has Twitter frothing. The vitriol is understandable. It even elicited an apology from AMP.

"Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback. #pepsifail"

Whether or not it's a genuine apology, it's smart because it:
* acknowledges the issue
* addresses the issue where the conversation is taking place vs. on the company's web site
* uses the #pepsifail tag to ensure the apology reaches the right people on Twitter. While some feel they should distance themselves from Pepsi, I highly doubt that's even remotely possible.

But AMP has done nothing else. And by not removing the app from the iTunes store, the amount of ill will for the AMP brand and for Pepsi has snowballed.

The Brand: It's obvious and understandable why people are offended by this app. I downloaded it to write this post and will be removing it promptly. But it bears noting that, if nothing else, it appears to be on brand. I'm not the target audience. Disclosure: Starbucks is the only energy drink I consume and have been happily married for more than 11 years.

But the site, including the Yo Mamma Slam and extreme sports sponsorships, seems to be geared to the same target audience. While AMP takes a slightly different approach, it reminds me of the positioning around Axe grooming products. 

The Strategy: The brand claims the app is a lighthearted attempt at humor vs. a misogynistic tool. But the concept and a variety of details in the app are a bit over the top. AMP knew it was competing with 76,000 other apps in the iTunes store. It even created a YouTube video riffing off the Apple "There's an app for that" commercials to promote it. AMP knew it needed to push the envelope to stand out. Perhaps they planned for controversy to fuel that promotion. Mission accomplished.

The Hypocrisy: If AMP had pulled the app, I can already see pundits like myself saying that AMP over-reacted to a Twitter mob mentality. Motrin received a similar rap when it responded quickly to a negative response one of its ads received online. AMP acknowledged the situation, something other brands don't always do, and they moved on.

We criticize brands for not responding online. Do we also get to criticize them when we feel they haven't responded to the degree of our expectations or even exceeded those expectations? Every "social media expert" shaking their head to the affirmative as they read this might also want to consider the cost to develop an iPhone app and then shelve it.

The Bottom Line: Does Motrin Moms set up the expectation that brands must instantly go to extremes when negative conversations first pop up? Perhaps, but I think Motrin Moms did so because its target audience was up in arms – the very consumers they’re trying to get buy their product. And, while I agree that the app is in poor taste, this does not appear to be a similar case.

I'm impressed by brands that use Twitter to monitor the conversation and respond as quickly as possible. But at the risk of increasing ire, I'm not sure AMP should remove the app. I think this is a new wrinkle. Brands might not be able to do everything we want. Or they simply might not be willing to do everything we want -- when we're not the target consumer.

We’re certainly reinforcing AMPs stance by drawing even more attention and Google juice to the application. That’s the real energy drink fueling this conversation.

AMP assumed its app would be ignored during the concepting stage. They designed it to get attention. Perhaps the lesson is that the proper response from Twitter, and consumers like me, is to do the exact opposite of our reaction up to this point. We should move from outrage to silence.

Much Ado About Avatars

From the minutia department, I’ve been talking a lot about Twitter avatars lately. I enjoy swapping out my avatar. It’s my version of a t-shirt --expressing my personality in a small way. And, as I have my pic on my Twitter background, people can put a face with the name the first time a person follows me.

This goes against conventional Twitter wisdom. In Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith recommend using your picture across all social site profiles in an effort to be more human online. Even Twitter notes: “A real picture of yourself is encouraged. It adds personableness to your tweets.”

But avatars are very polarizing. The Bob Ross and Big Boy avatars never fail to encourage Twitter love. While the Charlton Heston and Hanson Brother avatars usually wig people out a bit. The end result is that changing out my avatars has become a great conversation starter on Twitter.

At the same time Trust Agents also talks about the benefit of going against conventional wisdom. The book devotes an entire chapter to making your own game. Now I’m not going to try and tell you that swapping out my avatars is a strategy or a game-changing technique on Twitter. Or is it?

Millions of Mad Men
AMC’s MadMen Yourself is the most recent avatar-swapping craze to hit Twitter. It resulted in 1 million visits to AMC’s microsite and 600,000 avatars have been created. This is a great example of everyone wanting to wear the MadMen t-shirt by turning themselves into an early 60’s cartoon. And it successfully flies in the face of Twitter wisdom. Sure I can see a resemblance between people and their avatars, but only if I already know what they look like.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m saying there’s more than one way to skin your profile on Twitter. Whatever approach you take, make sure your tweets, background and profile give potential followers a good idea of who you are as a person.

avatari uploaded by prblog

Does Your Brand Have a Point of Difference or a Red Flag?

During a recent hotel stay, I saw a brochure promoting a cultural destination that singled out two of its accomplishments. This destination was chosen as “one of six best buildings in the world for 2007.” It was also the first building of its kind in the world to meet a set of exacting environmental specifications.

While both accomplishments were surely hard-earned and worth touting to some degree, are these dusty factoids drawing visitors to this destination? Similarly, if it turns out I’m the tallest marketer in the 45202 zip code, does a basic fact do anything to establish my abilities?

When choosing ways to differentiate your brand from the crowd, claims like “first one in the world” seem like a safe bet. But if these claims don’t resonate with your target audience and reinforce your goal they’ll come off as overcompensation.

The next time you’re establishing a brand, topic or source with a target audience make sure you ask an important question on behalf of your audience: “Who cares?” This will help you stand out for the right reasons.

Altered Reailty VI uploaded by Yushimoto

Google Sees All. Get Over It.

Between some well-intended privacy stories, some (very) sensational privacy stories and recent news from Google, I’m compelled to state what might be the obvious.

----

You need to be smart about what you say and do online. For example, when creating a company policy about social media usage, I suggest that if an employee can’t say it in front of their Mom or in front of a competitor they probably shouldn’t put it online.

As marketers, however, we should be taking full advantage of the fact that Google sees all. We should be syndicating content across as many platforms as our customer community frequents. If they look for us in these 2.0 hot spots we want them to find us.

Consider the search implications of this distributed approach to content. In the past we created walled gardens to aggregate all of our content in one place. By turning that content into spreadable media, the opportunities to impact search results increase exponentially. And if in turn all of this media has distribution capabilities like ShareThis the search impact increases even more.

It all starts with Google
Have you Googled yourself, your client or your company lately? A brand’s search results are the first moment of truth online. Google now allows you to improve these results by creating a Google Profile.

It’s imperative that we make sure that everyone understands the implications of Google’s ability to catalog and cache seemingly all online activity. But we should also be deliberate in making sure Google finds our story in as many places as it makes sense. If we don’t? Google might find someone else’s version of our story instead.

10 Years Google by Patrick Chappatte
© Copyright 2007

Free Agent Nation 2.0

The news media have been making a lot of historic comparisons when serving up various economic statistics. The journalists are simply trying to depict the level of economic turmoil around us. But, more often than not, their readers are already living it.

In fact I started working four-day weeks in January. So I launched a new site promoting my consulting practice. It’s hard to believe I’ve had my vanity URL parked since March 11, 2000. But nine years later, I proudly launched kevindugan.com.

And the timing couldn’t be better for my launch. As of April 1, I became a full-time, free agent. So my silence here has been due to my full frontal consulting efforts. I’m also exploring full-time opportunities.

Powered by Ample
The site was created in Ruby on Rails by the team at Ample. Josh, Rob, Bobby, Kevin and Adam do great work and I enjoyed working with them.

Eating my own Dog Food
The site design is based around the concept of content distribution, something I’ve written about before. The definition of content has changed and, more importantly, how content can be shared and served up in new ways. Kevindugan.com serves up my content from a variety of online properties. I’ve aggregated these content streams into one site to “get credit” for all of it in one spot.

So I appreciate your patience as my reports might be a little spotty until I either settle comfortably into free agent nation or find another full-time gig. In the meantime, there’s plenty more on the concept of slippery content to dig into. Henry Jenkins calls it ”spreadable media.” Check it out, stop by my shiny new site and watch this space for (so. very. much.) more.

Pepsi’s SXSW Mash-Up Creates Content from Twitter Cacophony

Social media continues to morph the definition of content -- the latest example of this evolution comes from Pepsi. Pepsi Zeitgeist, a Twitter Mash-Up, tracks activity at the SXSW festival to serve up content that is equal parts fun, pretty and impressive.

Fun: If you’re reading this blog, odds are good you’ve seen more than a few tweets in your Twitter stream sporting a #sxsw tag. Pepsi categorizes all of these tweets into one of six buckets (arriving, drinking, registering, eating, connecting or partying). The tweets are aggregated into a simple visual so you can keep your finger on the pulse of the event.

It’s a smart way to aggregate the metric ton of #sxsw tweets being dispatched from the army of mobile phones and laptops in Austin, TX for the next few days. It also gives the event’s non-attendees a fun way to easily connect with it (and Pepsi).

Pretty: The interface is dead simple. The content is served up as easy-to-digest visuals and the end result is powerful in its simplicity. If I tried to wade through 500 tweets and create something like this for a tracking report it would not be as easy on the eyes.

Impressive: This is only one facet of Pepsi’s efforts at SXSW this year, including their own Twitter ID, blog posts and their Podcast Playground. But for someone not at the show, the Pepsi Zeitgeist site is their crown jewel. The site is a simple way to make a big impact.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the site is the Swarm page. The Swarm page measures the sentiment of food-related tweets and maps them to eateries around the Austin area. So someone tuning into the site can get a great WOM recommendation to see if it’s worth their time to stand in line at that barbecue joint they’re anxious to check out.

The Zeitgeist site is a smart use of Twitter data and a great example of how even thousands of tweets can become visual content.

Zeitgeist also provides a memorable brand experience for consumers by providing value without requiring anything in exchange.

screen grabs uploaded by prblog
tags | public relations | PR | social media | marketing | Pepsi | SXSW | brand

Being Digital at P&G, Raising $100K for Disaster Relief

To inspire some of its key employees with the power of social media, P&G held a social media experiment tonight.

Folks with social media experience of one kind or another from around the country converged on P&G to team up with employees and help raise funds for disaster relief through Tide’s Loads of Hope project.

And we did just that…$20 at a time. $50,000 was raised in four hours employing everything from Digg, blogs and Twitter to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a host of niche community sites. Tide matched the $50K for the $100K total.

What did I learn?

It’s not about age, it’s about attitude.
This event reinforced what I’ve been seeing anecdotally at every event I attend. Many assume that high school kids fall out of bed knowing how to create profiles on these sites and become power users and that, er, more mature folks don’t know a tinyurl link from a sausage link. This is just not always the case. While digital natives might figure out online more easily than others, you cannot assume your audience’s technical ability based on age alone. It boils down to attitude.

Fast-Moving Collaboration
The teams that broke their groups down into smaller groups around specific strategies were able to test more ideas more easily and quickly, focus on the ones that did work and drop the ones that did not gain traction.

The competitive nature of the event was intense as the final minutes approached. It felt a bit like being on The Apprentice--less the washed up celebrities of course.

There was an amazing dashboard in every room that listed sales, site visits and conversion rate for each team with a Tide Twitter Feed running beneath this information. As my team fell behind, I wanted to invoke the spirit of Glen Garry Glenross and note that "coffee is for closers." But I needed to focus. By the way, if you still want to get a vintage t-shirt orders will be taken until 11am EDT on Thursday, March 12.

A Benefits Extend Beyond Event
The real benefits from this exercise for the P&G participants are yet to come. Social media is an investment that increases in relevance over time. While a newspaper ad loses its value a day after printing, social media content increases in value over time. And this fact alone is an exciting opportunity for brands, individuals and great causes like Loads of Hope.

tags | Tide | P&G | Loads of Hope | social media | advertising | marketing | brand

Mitch Joel Brings Social Media to Shopping’s Center at the NRF Show

Last week I attended The National Retail Federation Show in New York City and, like most industries right now, the economic outlook is grim.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman moderated a panel where economists are predicting that it will get worse before it gets better and a rebound won’t come until 2010.

Sh!t.

News of this magnitude can cast a pale on any event so I was pleased to attend one of the more inspirational and upbeat presentations during the show. Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation showed retailers how to take part in communities and conversations. In doing so he covered some important concepts that apply to anyone tapping into social media to create communities instead of customers.

Can Social Media Save Retail?
Social media is not a silver bullet. But Joel certainly gave retailers hope when he outlined the potential opportunity for them to compliment their other online and offline efforts with a real social media presence. He prescribed six steps to explore how social media might impact a retailer.

1) Think in terms of tribes | Instead of looking at customers in one bucket, consider their affinities. JCPenney could create a travel site for its customers, giving them a place to talk about shared interests. This would build on efforts like JCPenney’s Doghouse campaign where they relate with their customers. But JCPenney would facilitate conversations around this topic of interest.

2) Everything is with, not instead of | The old “integrated marketing” chestnut holds true. Social media is another channel and it must work with all of the other marketing efforts to make sense and to be successful.

3) Don’t be fleeting. Build, Share and Grow | This takes more than merely building a Facebook page and then ignoring it. To see results you must build relevance/content/space, let it be distributed by customers across the web and let it grow. Think in terms of a long-term commitment and not a campaign mentality.

4) Earn the right to get customers out of lurker mode | The key is to facilitate discussions about a brand and not necessarily try and start them. You want to be found on sites like Flickr and YouTube if customers look for you, but you need to “empower them to talk about your brand and not pander to them.” By focusing on offering great products and services customers will do this on their own. A “community can be earned, but not bought.” And if a retailer does not have a solid product or service it won’t work.

5) It’s attitudinal, not generational | This one is a common fallacy in my experience. Everyone assumes that kids under a certain age are soc med savants and people over a certain age are either confused or a complete luddite. This is far from the case.

6) Do something (now) | The relationship between technology, people socializing online and content creation becomes clear after uploading a video to YouTube or spending some time on Facebook or Twitter. Experimentation helps this, but the key is to “focus on the why before the what.” The strategic drivers of a project may dictate that social media is not the answer. Worrying about whether to create a LinkedIn or Facebook profile for a brand is a what/tactical question that is not important until answering the question “why social media.”

Now is the time to innovate
Now is the time to get involved in social media projects. Innovation occurs during recessions and there is a lot of room left for innovation by brands in the social media space. Better customer relationships are the end result which will impact sales. Both Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters have been doing better than most in sales. While this is for a host of reasons, it is also interesting to note the unique projects both brands have launched online, including Hot Topic’s Shockhound and Urban Outfitters’ culture, music and event blog that focuses on local content for Urban Outfitters’ key markets.

Free Hugs
To illustrate some of the concepts above, and end on a positive note, the crowd enjoyed Juan Mann’s “Free Hugs” video which is a great way to end a presentation.

It was great finally meeting Mitch after reading each other’s blogs for a few years now. But it was even better seeing the impact his presentation had on the audience.

Open Sundays uploaded by Thomas Hawk
tags | social media | advertising | marketing | consumer-generated media | brand | retail | NRF