A lot is going to be written and discussed about Weiden + Kennedy’s brilliant move yesterday when they decided to put the Old Spice guy front and center on the interwebs and have him answer questions via videos on YouTube that came from the public on Twitter, FaceBook and YouTube comments. From what I can gather, they posted around 115 videos, each of which got thousands of views within a few short hours. Who knows how much product will be sold because of the effort, but I think we can all agree that when it comes to digital PR, Old Spice just raised the bar.
But here was the most interesting part for me: Sure, they decided to respond to big name folks like Ellen Degeneres, Asthon Kutcher and The Huffington Post. But you know what? They also responded to those that the social media consultants WOULDN’T consider an “influencer” and wouldn’t give a second thought to.
There was the video for jordan_ferguson, who ONLY has 94 followers on Twitter. Or pancakehumpr (106 followers). And wheresweems with a whopping 140 followers on Twitter. And while it was cool to see Old Spice “use” those with large social media circles like Guy Kawasaki, but I guarantee that it doesn’t mean as much to them as it does to the people who don’t aren’t celebrities on the internet (or in real life).
So the lesson here is don’t forget about the everyday Joes. Don’t forget that they are the ones that actually buy your stuff. People. Not celebrities. People are your customers – not celebrities. The everyday Joes that Old Spice took the time to respond to will more than likely talk a lot more and a lot longer about how they were recognized yesterday than Ashton and Ellen will. So remember that next time you’re engaging the public – and your fans in particular.
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Posted in: brands, featured, lessons learned, marketing
Great. Great. GREAT piece on NPR last week on Nicholas Carr, the author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” Long story short, that while the internet is great at giving us a lot of bite-sized pieces of information in short amounts of time, there’s also a downside. Carr argues, “even if people get better at hopping from page to page, they will still be losing their abilities to employ a ‘slower, more contemplative mode of thought.’ He says research shows that as people get better at multitasking, they ‘become less creative in their thinking.’”
Interesting, no?
I have the same feeling about that niche of the internet called, you guessed it, social media. Bite-sized glimpses of lives. Images. Links. 140-character blips. We try to take it all in while jumping from site to site. And it becomes the echo-chamber. We get caught up in the whirlwind and we don’t deeply about anything else except social media. When I think back over the past couple of years, I can easily remember that the biggest lessons I learned or things that influenced my thinking and executions came from things OUTSIDE of social media articles. A screenwriter talking about the elements of story. A lone dancer at a music festival doing his own thing like nobody’s watching.
Even trying hard to cull down my Twitter stream, it’s still littered with link after link to social media articles that all are trying desperately to prove the worth of the medium. Oh, it has many redeeming qualities. But when we all start talking (and listening) to only one another – and especially when we don’t question each other – we’re homogenizing the thinking. And nothing new comes out of that.
So I challenge to go draw inspiration from somewhere else. Get lost deep in thought. Learn from other disciplines that have nothing to do with marketing or PR or digital or social media. (And don’t give me that BS that “everything is social.”) Go on now.
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Posted in: featured, lessons learned, rants
I admit it, I’m cynical. To a fault sometimes. I have a love/hate relationship with social media. And I’m extremely intolerant of the social media types that spend all day on Twitter telling everyone else how to do their job when they have nothing to back up their musings.
So last week, just for fun, I declared THIS week, social media case study week. I think my actual post was along the lines of “Next week is ‘National Prove It’ week. Everyone posts links to actual case studies they’ve worked on instead of just spewing stuff. You in?” And the more I think about it, the more I’m going to pursue this experiment beginning Tuesday (hey, it’s a holiday week and all). And I challenge EVERYONE. If you’re a Social Media or Word of Mouth practicioner, then post a link on Twitter this week to a case study that you’ve been involved in and use the hashtag #smproveit. If there is no formal write up, then post one on your blog or Posterous account. It’s time so separate the men from the boys…which consequently might help you thin out your “following” on Twitter.
All this to say that I’m tired of the social media philosophers. The only real way to learn the truth and what works and what doesn’t is by DOING. All the philosophers thought that the earth was flat. But one guy didn’t care and guess what? He didn’t fall off the edge. He proved them wrong. Just like you can tell BP how they should be handling everything right now, but you have no idea the internal red tape and lawyers and hoops that have to be jumped through to get something done. It’s SO easy to armchair marketing quarterback. And anyone can do that. But it takes smart people to DO. To ACT. To come out from behind a computer screen, put everything on the line and lead. Writing a blog post isn’t leading. Bullying people on Twitter isn’t leading. No matter if you have 25 followers or 25,000.
Oh, and one other thing. You can’t use yourself as a case study. You have to have a case study for a client.
So go. Use it (#smproveit). And we’ll see how far this little experiment can and will go. Oh, and we just might also have a kick-ass resource as well.
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Posted in: featured, lessons learned, rants, word of mouth
In reading this month’s WIRED
magazine (the print edition, mind you), I found a great nugget buried in an article entitled, “Lost in the Details – How breaking everything down to particles blinds scientists to the big picture” (by Jonah Lehrer). The entire article is a great read, but near the end, Lehrer brings Karl Popper (the scientific philosopher) into the picture with his theory that everything in the world falls into two categories: clocks and clouds.
Basically this means that clocks are orderly and neat and the parts of it interact in a predictable way. But clouds are unpredictable in that they are “highly irregular” and their motions are beyond “even the theoretical possibility of prediction.”
I love this concept. And taking it further and applying it to the digital and word of mouth world that we live in as marketers, I’m adopting this as a philosophy when building solutions for clients. Not one or the other, but finding the right balance of both.
Follow me down this path: The clocks are the tools. The Facebook page. The CRM Twitter account. The Gowalla pin that leads to a payoff. They are the inner-workings that can be put into place and set in motion. Yes, we are all still figuring out how to best use them, but we know the fundamentals of working with these tools.
The clouds? That’s the people. The personal interaction. That’s where emotions and personal experience and memories and word of mouth come into play. That’s where users could see a completely different use for what you’ve created. People are unpredictable. And most of the time they know your product or service better than you do. So sure, they will take your clock parts, but what they do with them isn’t always predictable and doesn’t fit into a flow chart.
So now our job is to find the balance. What percentage is clocks and what percentage is clouds? Because once you find it, you’ll have something big on your hands.
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Posted in: brands, featured, lessons learned, marketing, word of mouth
The one and only Bob Schneider
One of my favorite things in life is to go to a live show, stand in the middle of the room and listen to the voices around me sing every lyric to every song. And from the musicians perspective, I would think that hearing and watching the audience sing – loudly, even – the lyrics that you wrote, that started as just a collection of words floating around in your head – has got to be incredibly rewarding and validating.
So my question to you as a company is, are your customers singing along with you? Do they know you so well that they WANT to learn all the lyrics? Do they know where the key changes are and the origin of your songs? And are they just humming along, tapping their toes? Or are they leaning forward, arms raised, pounding the air and screaming out each and every word?
I know there’s a lot of talk out there about “fans.” But I think we have to go deeper and begin to dissect the anatomy of what a true fan really is. Without a doubt, they are the people that know you. That know your words and ways and what song is coming up next. But the other thing is that everyone has their own favorite song. And that’s why – to continue the metaphor – you need to have that killer set instead of that one-hit-wonder.
So listen to the audience. Are they singing along at the top of their lungs? Can you step back from the mic long enough to listen to them?
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Posted in: brands, featured, marketing, word of mouth
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