It may be funny to think that a technology that didn’t even exist in 1989 could do a nice job of commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But http://www.berlintwitterwall.com is a pretty cool mashup of Twitter feeds from around the world. You don’t need to be a Social Media wonk, or even have a Twitter account to enjoy it.
Category: Marketing (Page 11 of 26)
(Finally something somewhat social media related.)
Here’s a fun little ticker from a guy named Gary Hayes and his blog Personalize Media. Who knows if the data is accurate, but it’s fun to watch numbers go up…
To the faithful 49 of you, my apologies for my week away. I headed out to New York for “Ad Week” and a bunch of interesting meetings and assorted merriment. Anyway, I read an article a few weeks or months ago about some poor guy who told everyone on his blog that he was leaving town for a 2 week vacation, only to to return to a house devoid of all his valuables. So until I get a Doberman, I think talking about leaving town, or alerting people to when I’m out fo town, is a bad idea.
Now, I’m no prolific blogger who is going to give you a play by play from all the evnts at Ad Week in New York. Clay and I hung near the more social media related events and seminars, and here are a couple of things I took from the week.
1) I’m not sure where all the unemployed people are in New York, because every good restaurant in that town is still hard to get seated in, even at 10:00pm on a Monday night.
2) At the risk of annoying all my friends and partners in the Ad World, I posit this theory. It’s possible that the explosion of Social Media is a direct result of consumer backlash against advertising. People (aka Consumers) got tired of a one way communication channel. Then things like blogs, facebook and Twitter appeared, and suddenly everyone had a way to talk to each other and ignore the advertising. Only after the social media attack on advertising did the agencies decide to embrace Social Media. In fact, the agencies did everything they could to dismiss it as a passing fad. And so now, to hear all the agencies on stage talking about the power of Social Media and how they are integrating it into client strategy, is kind of funny to me. It’s kind of like a coal or oil company suddenly recommending what solar panels you should buy. It’s just my theory.
3) A quick note to all panelists and keynoters: Please dial down the hyperbole about “Social Media Revolutions” or “The Incredible Power of Social Media.” The reality is that consumers have always wanted to tell companies what they think of them. They’ve always wanted to tell the Slurpee Product Manager that Banana sucks and to quick wasting a spigot on such a dumb flavor. Or that the battery life of their laptop needs to be as long as a movie, otherwise it’s worthless. People have had these opinions forever. And now they have a megaphone, and their friends have megaphones. It shouldn’t be a gigantic revelation to think that people who spend money on a product they like would want to have interaction with that product and provide ways the company could make the consuming experience more enjoyable and effective. I’m not saying your keynotes are wrong, you can just dial down the rhetoric a little.
4) Before I get accused of being negative, I want to add that I think it’s great that the agencies are now going full steam into figuring out how to build creative campaigns for customer engagement. I’ve always believed the creative teams at the big agencies are more representative of Joe Consumer than Malcolm Corporation III. And now instead of using their creative powers of good in a way that cost them part of their soul, they’ll be able to unleash themselves in ways that develop connection and goodness. So I think we’re going to see some really cool experiments in the next 12 months.
5) I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Ad week was going on the same day of the UN sessions where Khadaffi (sp?) and the Iranian President (whose name I won’t even attempt Spellcheck to fight with) went off on crazy soliloquies.
Overall, we had a great time chatting with partners, clients, friends and colleagues. Lots of neat announcements and fun times. Thanks to everyone who made it a good, fun and productive week.
If you’ve read this blog a few times, you know that I have unabashedly praised the management of Sounders FC since Day 1. I admit I’m a little biased due to my previous professional relationship with a person in a high level of management there, plus my overall interest in soccer. But I have objective arguments for how much I admire their work.
That being said, I’m not going to shy away from saying that tonight’s match with FC Barcelona left me underwhelmed for the first time out of the 11 or 12 games I’ve attended so far. On one hand, maybe my expectations were too high. The best team in the world comes to town, I want to see magic. And in the first half, I saw some really cool things from Messi, Xavi, Henry, etc..
Then a funny thing happenned at halftime. The Sounders decided that this was indeed a friendly, and they didn’t need to play any regulars for the second 45 minutes. After all, the team is 2/3 of the way through their season, in a playoff hunt and coming off their worst loss of the year. It made tactical sense to rest the starters.
And so for the first time all year, they forgot who they were. They confused themselves with the Seahawks and 1996-2003 Mariners. They forgot that out of the 65,000+ who came to the game tonight, 25-30,000 of them had never been to a Sounders game before. They forgot that the MLS is the MLS. And for the first time all year, they forgot to put on a show.
The result was 45 minutes of second half football that resembled 2 people kicking a ball of yarn away from a cat. The Barcelona second team seemed to be under strict orders not to attack the goal until at least 10 passes had been completed. (And yes, we were counting as they passed the ball easily from one side of the field to another.) The Sounders first team is a very competitive MLS team.. With all due respect, the Sounders second team is made up of guys who can’t play on a first team in Norway or Sweden. I don’t say this with contempt. I’m just saying when I fire up my Xbox 360 and play Fifa 09, a game with about 1.2 gajillion players in its database, the guys on the Sounders reserve squad are not in that database.
So, imagine you are the Sounders management. Your immediate response is, “Andy, what do you want? I brought you Chelsea and Barcelona. Oh, and we’re in 2nd place. Oh, and we made it to the US Open Cup Final. So take your blog and smoke it.”
And that is an argument I can totally agree with. So maybe next year, bring me one of Chelsea and Barcelona. And maybe bring me someone else not so good that we can actually compete with. Maybe AC Milan and Watford. Or Tottenham and PSV. Or maybe the MLS needs to give the teams a week off o they can book friendlies and not get screwed by the schedule.
My rambling point, is that the MLS lost out tonight when Barcelona’s subs playes Seattle’s subs for 45 minutes on front of 65,000 people that paid full price to see at least one of the teams play starters all night long. Or if you were going to sub everyone out, at least do it at the 50 minute mark and pull them off the field to a standing ovation. Instead, we got one half of fun soccer, then the teams sneaking the players off the field at halftime, with a level of play in the second half that simply confirmed for soccer haters why they dislike the sport. Blame it on the MLS, blame it on Barcelona, or blame it on the Sounders. But I think for the first time, they allowed a crowd to leave the stadium saying, “I don’t get what the excitement is all about.”
Ok, this is whay I deserve for watching Fox Soccer Channel on a Saturday evening.
Channel 401 is awesome if you want to see some of the most random commercials from companies who can’t afford stations that receive am actual rating point. But this one takes the cake.
Imagine a young 19 year old girl standing in her lingerie. Starting with some line like, “Guys, don;t you wish you were out of your pajamas right now?” And then she goes on to tell us how important it is to get an education, and since watching soccer on a Saturday night obviously makes us uneducated, we should get an online degree.
You might think they’d spend the 60 seconds talking about a brand we could Google or Bing (heretofore to be simply called “Bingle”) later. But instead they have bought a bunch of urls to test their ad effectiveness, and thus drive the unique url the whole time. So they own http://10connect.com, http://20connect.com, http://30connect.com etc all the way up to 100. (Trust me if you don’t believe me.)
Anyway, I’d love to understand more about this campaign. Do lingerie-clad teenagers really drive signups for online education? Weird.
With the Sounders selling out their entire season, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the MLS is not sharing the same attendance success.
BigSoccer.com has a good article about how Frisco, TX (suburn of Dallas), used their MLS squad as a way to get an entire community complex developed, and how everything works together in a nice synergy. Perhaps there’s a way to do something similar with a basketball/hockey/concert arena type complex in Seattle?
In the last few months, thanks mainly to my association with the UW Foster School of Business, I’ve been able to meet with a number of top flight students and recent graduates hunting for jobs in Advertising or Marketing.
I keep seeing a few common themes. There aren’t that many new marketing jobs out there, many firms who have marketing jobs are cutting people, and many people who currently have these jobs are reinventing themselves so they can keep getting their paychecks. This does not lead to a simple path to employment for a rookie.
So, as a person at a company who is hiring, not firing, at the current moment, here are a few things from my personal perspective that I think can help you. (Please note: this point of view is not necessarily endorsed by my company and will not necessarily help your resume get through our screeners. It’s simply my opinion.)
- If you are going after a job in marketing, first and foremost, you better be able to market yourself. Think about the 4 P’s and apply them to you. Your personal “brand” should be packaged professionally, priced appropriately, promoted in the right areas and you should come to the table with the proper set of skills to provide solutions to the problems that job is designed to deal with.
- Remember that the job opening is there for the benefit of the company, not you. Some executive, director or hiring manager has a specific and relevant problem that needs to be solved. It’s not an opening for a “job.” It’s a call for someone to provide a solution to an outstanding issue.
- There is no such thing as “menial work” while you search for a career job. The market stinks. We get that. But showing up every day for work at your barista job shows you understand customers. Working as a deckhand on a fishing boat illustrates that you will work hard. Spending 20 hours a week donating time to a non-profit proves you have a general interest in learning skills and networking. Any of those things prove you are scrappy and worth hiring.
- This environment favors the scrappy. The Social Media world makes it easy to prove competence in the field you are interested in. Take side projects, help friends, work on any marketing gig you can find.
- Start a blog. It’s free. It takes 20 minutes a day. Write about anything professional you read and have an opinion on. If nothing else, it proves you are reading the things I want my employees to know something about.
- Know all the tools. Basecamp, Google Docs, Office Live, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Digsby, etc… just know all the online applications that make collaboration easier.
- Above all, remember there are two type of people who are distinctly different. There are unemployed people who want a marketing job, and marketing people who aren’t currently employed. Be the latter.
- Finally, for the non-recent grads. If you are applying for a senior level role in a small firm, come with a book of business, or at leastthe willingness to build one. Senior people are expensive. Small firms rarely have a stack of cash sitting around in which to donate to a new person. Show that you can generate clients, no matter how small, so that you can help the firm justify your senior level paycheck.
So this is simply for the Social Media folk in the massive crowd that visits AndyBoyer.com. Here are a few notes I took away from WOMMU in Miami this week. This is certainly not representative of all the things that were said down there, but a few things I remember while jotting down notes on the plane.
- Loved that a Disney SVP said, “You don’t own your brand. Your customers do.” I know thi sis not a revolutionary thought, but it’s noteworthy that someone from Disney said it.
- There really is no good way from Seattle to Miami and back again.
- Everyone Twitters. Everyone.
- It’s time to stop bashing Motrin for the Motrin Mom debacle. Sure their ad was shite, but by now, Motrin actually gets more sympathy than outrage. Every conference in America talks about Motrin now, so in the long term, the lunatic fringe that attacked them to no end has actually done Motrin more good than harm.
- Facebook no longer views MySpace as a competitor. Think about how intersting that is for a sec.
- The marketing folks from Ore-Ida gave a brilliant presentation on how they used Social Media to sell Frozen Mashed Potatoes. When Frozen Mashed Potatoes are using Social Media, we are no longer in Innovator and Early Adopter territory. Social Media has reached Mainstream plus some.
- I ran into two brand managers who’s clients had sponsored full-show in product placement on The Celebrity Apprentice. Cost to run these promos is multi-multi million dollars, and both brands felt they received a positive ROI.
- BlogTalkRadio.com might actually be the coolest thing I’m not using but should be.
- 15 minutes of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. So when someone in your marketing department says, “We should create a Viral Video,” just continue with the meeting like you heard nothing.
- If you go to Prime Italian, get the Kobe Meatball. Just know that the meatball is the size of a small moon, so your table only needs one.
- The Lenovo Bejing Olympic Promotion is worth looking at from a case study perspective to see how to run a major international promotion.
More to be added as I remember.
If you are sitting in a classroom at the School of Visual Concepts right now, then chances are good that you’ll come across this post.
Now if you are at this site because you are using your laptop to search on the names of your presenters in order to find out who the heck we are, well pay attention to the front of the room. We spent a lot of time on this powerpoint – far more time than was spent on this blog post.
But, if you are here because we are at the part of the preso where we talk about discoverability and why it’s important to control your SEO fate, then thanks for attending. Also, I think we’re almost done with the boring part of the discussion, and start getting to some case studies soon.
Now if we’ve completely bored you to tears already, I suggest you tune us out, and enjoy the Social Media commentary from the experts at www.springcreekgroup.com/blog. The small group workshops are only a few hours away.
One of the funny things about Social Media is that the whole idea is based on the theory that the Product and Marketing teams care about what is being said out in the blogosphere. Sure it seems obvious that they would care, but then again….
Consider an offline situation I’ve run across from a Pioneer Square bar called Fuel. Other than being the proud host of a party hosted by Mary Kay Latorneau and DJ’d by her young husband, the bar’s claim to fame is being the home of the hardcore Sounders supporters before each home game. The bar is a natural choice for a rowdy supporters’ group because no one else really goes there. So the supporters can sing, chant and spend money for 4-5 hours before kickoff.
You’d think the owner of this bar would be appreciative. At least, if one of these customers mentioned to the waitress that the beer tasted of soap, that offline customer feedback would be registered, and the beer taps examined. I myself have been a victim of these soapy taps, going as far to recommend other bars to friends thinking of pre-game settings. It surprised me when I heard the same soapy beer was beiing served weeks later.
What’s shocking though, is when a bar owner serves the same soapy beer week after week, and instead of fixing the problem, basically throws a patron out for protesting the taste of soapy beer, using the rationale, “The rest of the crowd doesn’t seem to notice.” Now the people associated with that patron have shifted their dollars to the bar across the street, called McCoy’s.
So back to my point. Igoring what you hear in social media is no different than being a bar owner who ignores a patron. If someone is going to take the time to say, “Your product is causing me harm and pain. Here’s an easy way to fix it,” then you really should listen. Otherwise, you are simply the equivalent of an ignorant bar owner serving soapy beer.