Got it. What's Next?
Old Seth Godin quote that I recently was reminded of:
“First, ten. This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing. Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.”
What happened to my Nigerian bankers, miracle curing pharmaceutical companies and SEO firms? This spammer deserves a Webby for their brevity I guess.
So I work in social media. I teach some social media. I play around in some social media channels. I own a blog with my own name as its url simply so I show up in Google searches. Through all these years playing around in social media as a profession, I’ve never really made it a huge focus of my personal life. Maybe I’ll make a connection here or there. But nothing substantial.
And yet today, a simple tweet seemed to strike a chord with people.
All day long Occupy Seattle mayhem shut down streets downtown. People couldn’t get home from work. Rogue anarchists broke windows. Children couldn’t be picked up from school. Store clerks feared for their safety. Middle class parents – and their bosses – had to figure out what was best for their kids, their businesses and their co-workers.
I was unaffected by the chaos despite being right around the corner from it. I took my wife home from her surgery but thought to myself, “Thank God this mayhem didn’t affect us getting to the hospital, or home from it.” I tried to rid my mind of thoughts of how angry I would be if I was stuck in traffic due to a protest, while my wife sat groggily in pain in the passenger seat of our car.
I scanned the Twitter stream and noticed that people who supported OWS had lost patience with OccupySeattle. OccupySeattle wasn’t about a revolution anymore. What started with good intentions but no real purpose, had transformed into an incubator for people with negative intentions and directed purpose. The movement had created a dark side, or at least allowed the dark side to breed.
And so I said:
Dear #OccupySeattle. The 99% has gotten together & decided we need better representation. Thx for the effort. Good luck w/ future endeavors.”
It was exactly 140 characters. My point was pretty clear. Whatever goodwill the original Occupy movement had generated had been pretty much decimated here in Seattle. The most liberal town in America was saying, “WTF are you guys doing? You are totally destroying this.”
Meanwhile, my most nagging thought as I hit “Tweet this” was whether I should be using “has” or “have” for the verb. I was out of characters, so I went with the former. It was a quick line, and after I sent it, I had all but forgotten about it.
A few hours later, it’s become the most retweeted thing I’ve ever sent out. For the first time ever, I started trending in Seattle. People we retweeting this because they agreed with the sentiment. And yet two tweets back at me stand out:
To the 1st repsonse I counter, “I agree. To the normal everyday 99%, the rogue hooligans have nothing to do with OWS. However, Occupy Seattle has little to do with OWS as well. Somehow OccupySeattle has developed an identity of its own, and not in a good way.”
The 2nd response made me realize I had struck a nerve with some folks. I run a small business, invest in a startup and teach at a University. I enjoy creating commerce and inspiring others to do the same. More commerce means more transactions. More transactions means more jobs. More jobs means more wealth for everyone. But to this person, I was simply “snarky.” Trying to build small businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship isn’t enough. I’m evil because I don’t want to join or represent a revolution with no goal or purpose.
It will be interesting to see if this tweet fades away into the night as May Day passes. Maybe more and more people will agree with the sentiment and retweet it. Or, will we see more of the negative side of #OccupySeattle come out tomorrow. Either way, it’s a great social media lesson in progress.
You have no idea how much I want to work on a project like this someday.
Sony PS3 Video Store – Realtime Projection Mapping – Part2 from The Found Collective on Vimeo.
Hot Wheels
Sometimes, you generate interest by simply not saying anything. All it takes is one person to be excited about the unknown, and that excitement can spread.
I don’t know anything about Wendr. In fact, here’s everything I know:
That’s my old friend from New Orleans, Marc Calamia, seeming to be excited about Wendr. I clicked through and landed here:
They’ve told me nothing. No reason for me to join. But also, no reason for me not to. So naturally, I signed up.
Sometimes we just want there to be more cool things, and we’re willing to give up an email address to hear about them. Moral: Don’t underestimate the fact that people want to like things.
Digital Buzz Blog is one of my favorite reads. And they recently posted some stats which I believe came from Media Bistro. Now, after you read the stats below, I’m going to give them to you in the exact opposite way. Tell me if any of the story seems any different.
Version 1:
It was a huge year for Social Media and here is a great infographic that rounds up the key Social Media Statistics to kickoff 2012. It’s pretty impressive to see that Facebook has grown to more than 800 million active users, adding more than 200 million in a single year. Twitter now has 100 million active users and LinkedIn has over 64 million users in North America alone.
A few interesting take outs for social media statistics in 2012:
Facebook Statistics 2012:
Twitter Statistics 2012:
General Social Media Statistics 2012:
Facebook Statistics 2012:
Twitter Statistics 2012:
General Social Media Statistics 2012:
Michael Neu posted this article on our company blog. I think it’s a good summary and am re-posting it here.
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Techcrunch posted an article today called “Cheezburger’s Ben Huh: If GoDaddy Supports SOPA, We’re Taking Our 1000+ Domains Elsewhere”. The story is in reference to GoDaddy’s support of SOPA the (Stop-Online-Piracy-Act). Although the bill sounds like a good thing many people are worried that the bill goes WAY too far. If SOPA passes it would makes it really easy for copyright holders to censor content and shut sites down that they think are offensive. The censorship issues go far beyond that as well.
Ben Huh, The CEO of The Cheezburger Network, has decided to pull his names from GoDaddy because of their support of the bill. Many other big media companies support the passing of the bill as well.
This is very hot topic right now #SOPA and many sites have spoken out against the bill including Google, Yahoo and others.
I completely agree with Ben’s stance and think he is giving GoDaddy a chance to make it right before he moves his domains. However, as the article stated it GoDaddy is used to taking some heat, and it will probably take a lot more for them to change. There seems to be a push to transfer domains away from GoDaddy because of their support of this bill so we will how GoDaddy reacts if that trends gains any more momentum.
People need to familiarize themselves with what is happening with the SOPA bill, and how poorly it was written. It truly is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and needs to be stopped before it passes by a completely technologically uneducated group of political representatives.
I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with what is going on and take action like Ben did.
What are you doing to stop this bill from passing?
We’ve all seen Mad Men. Well this is the kind of video you get when your Creative department is drinking scotch and hitting on secretaries all day. Take a drink every time you see something sexist and/or something that would get a Marketing Director fired today.
It’s hard to think back to 2008, back before the Seattle Sounders officially existed in anything more than everyone’s imagination.
The Sounders were to become the 16th team in a league with a couple of marquee names in David Beckham and Landon Donovan. LA, DC and Toronto were the only teams to draw more than 18k fans a game.
So when the Sounders announced that Xbox was going to commit $20 Million bucks to the team and the league, it really seemed like – and was – a large sum of money to risk.
But now as we look at the end of the 3rd year of the deal, it’s the Sounders who can’t wait for the contract to expire. Unfortunately for them, they still have 2 more years of the deal. When you look back, the Xbox media team made a heck of a deal.
At $20 Million over 5 years, you are looking at a deal that is only $4 million a year. For that 4 million Xbox got rights to the front of the jerseys, signage in all MLS stadiums, naming rights to Xbox Pitch at Qwest (then Century Link) Field, and TV spots on all broadcasts.
Let’s look at some of the other deals in the MLS (sourced from The Brotherly Game):
So if we assume the national value to the Sounders sponsor is roughly the same as the value any other team’s sponsor receives, the delta is in the value at home. So lets say maybe 1/2 – 2/3 the value is in national exposure, and 1/3 – 1/2 is in local. If that’s the case, then the national value is about $2 million for each team.
So in those terms, the local value of DC United’s sponsorship would be about $1 Million per year. For Salt Lake, it’s $3 Million per year. Now the 38,500 fans per game in Seattle just about doubles everyone but the #2 LA Galaxy at 23,000 per game. So if the Sounders drive 2x more fans than Salt Lake, and 2x the TV impressions, you’d have to estimate the local value is at least $6 Million per year (2x Salt Lake).
There are probably more scientific ways to figure this out, but we don’t have access to impression volumes, jersey sales and hard stats. And we haven’t included the premium that Xbox pays for being the local guys recruiting employees, and the international value of having the team play across Central America and Mexico, or the fact that they’ve gotten a smoking deal the last 3 years.
So let’s ballpark a number of $9 Million per year to start the new deal in 2014. ($2 Million National Value, $6 Million Local value, $1 Million Premium.) How does that look?
Quite often in marketing, we focus on the “Acquisition” aspect of the formula. How do we make someone aware of what we’re selling and then get them to buy it? And usually, the marketing team will get laser focused about the campaigns they are running, evaluating whether those campaigns are being successful.
But only the savvy marketer will audit the entire company. Is there anything else going on in any other division, where customers are literally being driven away?
Let’s take a personal example. Years and years ago I bought an Acura from Acura of Seattle. No, out of good marketing, personal laziness or just because I don’t know any better, whenever I need something fixed, or just to buy a certain part, I call Acura of Seattle. The number is even in my Contacts List. (Well, it was. Not anymore. Thanks Apple. Different story.)
So I need a simple part, so I call the guys down at Acura of Seattle. They don’t have the part, but it can be there in a few days. No big deal. Inconvenient, but not inconvenient enough for me to go looking somewhere else. But then comes the kicker.
Acura of Seattle: “We’ll need you to come down and pay for it in person, then we can have it sent to you.”
Andy: “I’ll just give you my credit card over the phone.”
Acura of Seattle: “Can’t do that. Need you to drive down to Tukwila and pay in person, then we’ll ship you the part.”
Andy (Staring at phone): “Or I can call Acura of Bellevue.”
And so I call Acura of Bellevue. They need to order the part as well, but tell me to just come in tomorrow and it’ll be there for me. Done deal.
So when it comes time for me to buy a new car, it really doesn’t matter what kind of clever marketing campaign Acura of Seattle throws at me. Facebook, Twitter, Direct Mail, it really doesn’t matter. All I’ll really remember is that Acura of Seattle wanted me to drive to Tukwila for no reason and Acura of Bellevue was helpful.
Moral for the marketers: Find out if other parts of the company are crushing your campaigns…
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