Web Phenomenon

Buzz Off, and Please Make It Viral

beeThere are a lot of terms in this new world of marketing that I really hate.  I’ve written before about how I believe that nothing is really “viral.”  I work in an industry where I get calls out of the blue asking me how much it would cost for us to do a viral video for brand X.  Or how can we stop the “blog chatter” around some bad news (this is usually involving a blog with millions of readers).  Or how do we generate some early “buzz” around an announcement that no one really cares about.

Ben McConnell tackled the issue of word-of-mouth vs buzz quite adeptly in a recent blog post.  He defined “word-of-mouth” as follows:

Word of mouth is a byproduct of a remarkable culture. It’s how companies like 37 Signals, Discovery Education, and The Container Store grow and flourish. Their companies are organized around a well-defined purpose and strong values, which may not be for everyone, but they’re important enough to a significant group of people.

Subsequently, he describes “buzz” quite differently:

Buzz is the result of word-of-mouth marketing. Its results are typically short-term. Gimmicks are common, and examples abound.

I would take it one step further.

Word-of-mouth is an actual marketing behavior, like executing a call to action.  It’s a marketing conversion that can be measured.

Buzz is the perception of word-of-mouth activity.  You can manufacture buzz, much like McConnell shows in his post, but it doesn’t have to be real.  While buzz can be the result of widespread word-of-mouth activity, it can also be created in a void by PR and advertising.  How often does a film having “Oscar buzz” actually result in an Oscar?  There’s often no delivering on the buzz promise, which is a pretty good sign that it’s been manufactured.

It will be a good day for all marketers when terms like “viral” and “buzz” are put to bed and we can finally focus on measurable behaviors that actually support quality brand values.

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Greatest Internet Phenomenon of 2008: Data Portability

data-portabilityI know I made this into a series last year but I think I’ll keep it simple and just stick to one prevailing concept since 2009 is already nipping at our heals.

Now I know that there were plenty of negative phenomenons that happened this year, which all probably had much more severe impacts than data portability, but I think the fluidity of personal data is really the one area of online media that experienced the most important shifts in 2008.

As we all know, this all started much earlier with RSS and related technologies but, to stretch a comparison, Chuck Berry’s groundbreaking guitar work doesn’t make Are You Experienced? any less of a game changer in the grand scheme of rock and roll.  What 2008 really did for me was deliver on the promise of Web 2.0.  I now have control over my media in ways that quite simply weren’t possible in 2007.  It’s not just news media either, I’m now able to manage almost all categories of media in the way that best suits my personal taste and lifestyle.

How about a few examples:

  • Like many people, I have multiple bank accounts, loans and credit cards.  They all have separate Web sites and passwords with drastically different interfaces and user experiences.  I now use Mint to access all that information in one place and see things about spending habits and budgeting that weren’t possible a year ago.
  • I’ll just say it: I hate Facebook.  Unfortunately, it’s a social (and professional) necessity.  Add that to the fact that you can’t really delete your profile and I was forced to find a way to deal with the endless pings and pokes of this social network of the year.  Luckily, Digsby came along and gave me a multi-platform IM program that allowed me to maintain Facebook without having to wade through the endless noise on their site.  Supposedly a Mac client is on the way soon.
  • My digital entertainment has made it to my living room.  I now stream NetFlix through my Xbox and often rent movies through my AppleTV.  I also control my music going to my AppleTV (basement) and AirportXpress (living room) with my iPhone rather effortlessly.  I fly a lot as well and keep a season of whatever show I’m watching ready to go on my iPhone at all times.  This has increased the money I spend on iTunes, which I find to be an honest value considering the convenience.
  • Google Reader is my newspaper.   Sure this is just RSS but I now have all my favorite sites organized into categories like Friends, Design, PR, Music and I just click from section to section like you would with a newspaper.  According to my Google Reader stats, I read between 100-200 articles a day and I don’t feel like it’s an intrusion at all.  I also never feel like I’m falling behind in the news since it’s so easy to catch up.
  • I blog in a few different places, for very different reasons.  Of course I blog here mostly about things related to my work.  I also Tweet (mostly work related) and Tumbl (definitely not work related).  Through those three channels people can pretty much choose how much they want to hear from me.  I’m also on Last.FM, LinkedIn, Yammer and a few other social networks if people really want to stalk me.  That said, I don’t post my photos online because I choose not to but my friends and colleagues of varying levels of Web sophistication can all follow me without any problems.
  • It’s unfortunately in enternal closed beta but I manage all my work related phone activity with Google’s Grand Central.  I have a New York based virtual number and I can manage my voicemails and missed calls much like I can manage mail with Gmail.  I decide what phones will ring and how calls will be handled and my contacts only have a single number to dial.
  • I consistently work between three computers; a speedy new iMac, an older Powerbook and an HP/Compaq (client) laptop.  I also work across the country from most of my team so sharing a drive over VPN is incredibly slow.  Now I use DropBox to create shared folders that sync up automatically on all my computers so I never have to worry about not being able to access a file on one of them.  I’ve tried a bunch of different things but this is by far the easiest and doesn’t change the way I work with files at all.
  • I’ve used notes programs for a long time and used to be tied to my various Palm Pilots, iPaqs and various PDAs specifically for this simple function.  Evernote is like a dream come true.  It works on all my computers and my iPhone, allowing me to take any kind of note, anywhere and have access to it just about anywhere.  I use it for certain kinds of account information, random ideas, recipes and just about anything else you can imagine.  All notes can be tagged and organized any way you want.

Ok, I realize most people aren’t like me.  That’s ok.  Maybe Facebook is all the social technology you need in your life.  No problem.  The reason why 2008 was significant to me is how all this information just came together so seamlessly, which is what I really think Web 2.0 was supposed to be rather than a bunch of AJAX and RSS feeds.  While much of the debate about data portability has centered around being able to move your social network profiles to another network, I think some of the real benefits of having control over your data and how you consume media has made giant strides this year.

I’m always curious to hear how other people have been affected by these kinds of technologies over the past year.  Any predictions for 2009??

(Image courtesy of Social Ecommerce)

Don’t Mess with Motrin Moms

Apparently Twitter can cause quite a headache for the people over at Motrin (how could I not?).  Yes, this ad motivated hundreds of young mothers to light up the Twitterverse with a defense of their baby carriers and the other tools of motherhood.  Apparently, mother’s don’t like to be told that they “look crazy” and now that mommy bloggers are a significant, and quite cohesive, part of the blogging community it doesn’t take long for them to take action.

Motrin reacted much as you would expect.  There is an apology on their Web site and they are trying to remove the ads from everywhere they can.  Obviously the ads will never go away and now, thanks to the controversy, they will probably reach more people than originally intended.

So, did Motrin do the right thing?  Were the ads offensive?

I say no.  While I can certainly understand why this can hit a nerve with new mothers, I don’t think the message is that far off for a lot of mothers that probably do feel strange walking around with a baby sling and do feel pain from carrying around the extra weight.  Is it disrespectful?  Not really.  Does it stereotype mothers in a negative way?  Not really.

This is a classic overraction by a company that sees one channel flooded with negativity.  I’m sure this spot could still do very well with focus groups and they’d find that the overwhelming majority of their target market isn’t offended.  The reality is that a few very vocal women were offended and the people they influence just fell in line.  I don’t think this affects their mainstream consumer and, if it did, I doubt the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative.  This was simply an Internet phenomenon and it will soon die exactly where is began.

Yes, listening is important but your reaction is equally important.  If every brand acts like Motrin then all advertising will become so safe and white washed that it will lose all impact and just turn into wasted media dollars.

Plus, have you ever held one of those things for a long time?  Dem babies is heavy!  Baby hauling pain may need something a little stronger than Motrin.

The Julia Allison Guide to PR

Julia Allison isn’t selling an iPhone.  She’s selling Julia Allison.  Julia Allison is pretty, writes well, can hold the attention of a camera, is stylish and has a social interest in Web 2.0 companies and their scruffy founders.  On paper, you probably wouldn’t want her as a client because you wouldn’t think there was much you could do with her.  There is no shortage of pretty girls who can write and look good in fancy dresses, right?

That why I think other brands need to study how Julia pulled off one of the best PR success stories in digital media.

Ms. Allison will grace the cover of Wired this month, talking, presumably, about this very same topic.  Granted, this isn’t exactly Time Man of the Year but it’s certainly the kind of PR hit that could sustain a high tech client for about six months.  But yet, she didn’t discover a faster processor or start a company that allows you to cook an egg on your Blackberry.  She’s promoting her new Web idea, Nonsociety, but she’s really just promoting Julia Allison.

She did it the (new) old fashioned way too.  Julia jumped on Tumblr when it was new and hot and hit the ground running.  She also regularly puts up videos on Vimeo (it never hurts to have dated one of the founders) and she regularly responds to commenters.  When she sees people trashing her on Gawker, she doesn’t sit back and check with her legal team…she responds.  When she’s writing an article for Time Out, she asks her readers for feedback and they give it to her.  She puts it all out there and accepts the consequences.  This is not paid media, it’s PR – the new way.  The result is that she’s found her audience.

She’s also found people who take a lot of offense to the fact that she’s famous for doing nothing.  Although she’s been silent since June, the woman who anonymously writes the Reblogging Julia blog spares no amount of venom in ripping anything that Julia publishes.  Loren Feldman has also taken an unhealthy interest in her, but that too has tapered off once he actually met her.  There are other detractors now too, just as there are legions of people that hate the iPhone, but she’s being sustained by the people that support what she’s doing, which quickly cancels out the naysayers.

The reality is the Julia is one of the best PR minds of a new era of digital media.  Imagine if she put this energy into your crappy product.

Update – As expected, Jason Tanz at Wired covered this in a little more detail, with an interesting twist on why people are really interested.

Should You Retire from Blogging?

Jason Calacanis did.  You may remember Jason from founding the Silicon Alley Reporter in New York.  Or perhaps from Weblogs, Inc.  Or maybe even Mahalo, his new social search engine.  You may even remember him from when he friended you on Twitter, something he did to try to gain the most Twitter followers (he follows 34k and is followed by 31k).  You may even be one of those VC stalkers who just knows Jason because he sold his company to AOL for a lot of money.  Either way, if you haven’t been following him closely, like the “Jason Nation,” you probably won’t be hearing much from him anymore.  Jason has retired from blogging.

Calacanis claims that he has retired because he wants to have a more meaningful relationship with a smaller amount of people, which is quite the 360 from his Twitter spamming.  If you were one of the lucky few to make it into Jason’s treehouse, you have been privvy to his email newsletter, which goes a little something like this:

Most folks have no tolerance for ambiguity, and when faced with it are extremely uncomfortable. This lack of comfort makes them think, and my goal with the blog was always to challenge people’s thinking–most of all my own. Confusion is attention of the best kind–I long to be confused. I’ve become addicted to playing poker because your constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

The email goes on at length to say how blogging has died because bloggers spend more time on SEO and social bookmarking than they do on content so the conversation becomes secondary.

Sadly, he’s probably right.

While blogging remains highly interactive among bloggers in certain industries, it is largely becoming a broadcast platform.  Social distribution of content seems a lot more geared towards garnering more eyeballs than it is about inspriing great conversations.  The original purpose of technology like trackbacks was to let the blogger you were responding to know that you have written something but now it’s more about getting your link on their page and gaining residual traffic.  Maybe it’s about the natural desire to be heard or some dream of making millions in advertising revenue off your blog but somewhere it has moved away from being a platform for organic conversations.

In all fairness though, it depends on how you do it.  Jason, like most bloggers, is an attention whore.  If you go into blogging with the goal of connecting with a small group of people, there is a good chance that your platform can remain effective.  In just PR alone, there are many bloggers that produce great content without trying to get on the front page of TechMeme or embed their links into the comments of a more popular blog.  A few of them are in this blogroll over here to the right.

So move to Friendfeed or Ustream or your own private Ning community if you want.  Heck, you can even keep your blog.  Just keep yourself in check and make sure you’re using the right channel for what you really want to accomplish.

As a side note, Jason is actually a great guy in my limited exprience with him.  When I was starting in PR during the dot-com boom in New York, Jason would always give me a fair shake and helped me to determine what was news and what wasn’t.  I once even had a client at PC Expo in New York and we had a interview booked with Stuart Elliot of the New York Times.  Elliot never showed up and my client was growing increasingly pissed off.  I ran out into the hallway and noticed Jason mulling around, as he always was at industry events, and he agreed to save my ass by doing an impromtu interview with my client.  It never appeared in the Silicon Alley Reporter but it saved my ass for a day.  Thanks Jason!  Too bad I missed the cut off for your newsletter.

Users are Defining Emerging Social Media Platforms

Twitter history

Although almost universally dismissed when it began to catch on, few can dismiss Twitter as anything less than a phenomenon now. Yes, like a lot of content on the Internet, you have to do some digging to find the good stuff but most experienced Twitter users claim that the larger conversation happening in their friend circle is more organic and unique than just about anything happening online.

After weeding out some of the ranters a couple weeks ago, I’m having a much easier time managing Twitter and can stay up-to-date with most of the people I follow pretty easily. While I find the Twitter site fairly useless, except to read the profiles of other Twitterers, software like Twhirl and my new IM client Digsby make it easier for me to follow people and send off a quick tweet without stopping what I’m doing.

What’s becoming clear with the rise of Twitter is that being an agnostic platform is one of the keys to growth in the Web 2.0 world. With social networking, it was the flexibility that took people from Friendster to MySpace and then streamlined functionality is what eventually drove them to Facebook. Web 2.0 took a cue from that development and focused on delivering streamlined tools but the one’s that really took off are the open technologies that didn’t try to dictate how end users interact with their service. This can definitely be said for the social bookmarking technologies and is probably, at least tangentially, responsible for the rise of Gmail.

Jeremiah Owyang is an example of this with Twitter. He uses Twitter as a social computer and states that it has many benefits over technologies like Google:

While Google is great for finding information and websites, it’s NOT great for getting opinion, hearing nuance, or telling me relational information. With Twitter, I can ask information about opinions, and receive responses from real people (many I know, most I don’t) that often have first hand experience with the question at hand.

Pamela Seiple says that Twitter is her favorite social media tool. She compiled a list of uses for Twitter, describing as a source of timely news and insight:

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are active social media players – bloggers, PR professionals, tech-enthusiasts. Therefore, the tinyurl’s they share are usually useful for me to check out. My logic is, if the people I interact with and respect on Twitter think something is important and worth a click, chances are I will, too!

The truth is that Twitter is a lot of different things to different people and, while many people were repelled by their “What are you doing?” tagline, there are probably just as many people who have redefined what the purpose of Twitter is and are using it on their own terms.

(“History of My Blog” cartoon by Hugh MacLeod)

Lifetimetv is Now Following You on Twitter!

Lifetime TVOMG! The Lifetime television network cares about me enough to follow me on Twitter!  I wonder why the television network is interested in me.  Could it be that they think I have script for a great relationship drama that can be shot in periodic soft focus or perhaps they’d like to cast me in one of their signature shows like “How to Look Good Naked“?

Of course @lifetimetv has no real interest in me other than hoping that I will choose to follow them as soon as I find out they’re following me on Twitter.   So far the company has actually tweeted eight times since July 2007, consisting of insightful messages like “ looking at http://www.lifetimetv.com some good stuff up right now.”  They also managed to follow 1,067 people, convincing 153 people to follow them back.  Some marketing person, whether internally or at thier agency, is hoping to report thousands of people are following them on Twitter to justify their existence.  

While this is only mildly unethical – since it is, in fact, spam – it certainly is bad marketing.  Friending as many people as possible to gain brand awareness is the social media version of blind reach marketing.  Additionally, if you’re adding all these people to your social network and not providing anything of value past “snow and now rain? at least Jersey Girl is on tonight” then you’re actually providing a negative brand experience and the whole thing is backfiring.

Then again, “me too” marketing isn’t new to Lifetime…their Web site is mylifetime.com.  Mygodwhycantyoubeoriginal.com!

I guess I’ll have to wait another year to meet Carson Kressley.  *sigh*

Theme of SXSWi: Online Transgressions

SXSWA lot happened at SXSW this year (and I’m not even including the music portion, which I’m posting my terrible camera phone pictures of on my Tumblr). Regardless of many people claiming that there were no great technology innovations, I got the sense that streaming video technologies like Kyte, Qik and UStream are way ahead of their time and will someday reach Twitter-like status. Oh yeah, speaking of Twitter, was anyone not Twittering at SXSW? Then, of course, there was the Sarah Lacy pile-on.

Trumping all of these trends, in my opinion, was a new awareness of online transgressions and the way different people deal with them. Regardless of how bad you felt the Sarah Lacy interview was, there was no way it justified the response from the crowd or the tsunami of social media vehemence that came afterwards. Tim Russert’s softball interview of George W. Bush didn’t even get this much criticism and that was a president in wartime. What happened to Sarah Lacy was the result of two things: she didn’t know her audience and the current state of social media technologies like Twitter give the average SXSW attendee a new way to vent to a group of highly influential like-minded group of people.

Apart from a minority of people that are willing to approach the microphone during the Q&A, most of this extremely rude reaction was due to the fact that people feel a sense of insulation in social media. If you look at the bigger players in social media, like Scoble, you can see that they quickly retracted some of their earlier vehemence since they realized in retrospect that Lacy is a real person and maybe venting their frustration isn’t worth straining a relationship with her or Business Week. Take away the insulation and people are a lot less likely to slip into these transgressions.

There was an amazing panel at SXSW that tackled this issue in virtual worlds called “Virtual Scandals and Sacrilege: Who’s grieFing Now?” The panel featurd academics from around the world discussing the behavior of people in virtual worlds and how there are groups that perpetrate acts of transgression that they would never attempt in real life. The panel discussion focused on how the users are often pitted against the system and administrators but something very interesting happened during the Q&A. The former head of governance at Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, stated how many of the perceived actions of the administrators of SL were untrue and they actually respected the rights of virtual world “griefers” like the W Hats. By the end of the session, the man from Linden Labs was sitting with a member of the W Hats, pleasantly discussing community issues. Again, take away the insulation and the transgressions are gone.

In light of these experiences, my main takeaway from SXSW was not some new whizbang technology or an insightful keynote address. What I walked away with was a sense that in order for social media to become truly organic we need far more than just transparency. Making people take ownership of content is no use if the insulation is still there for them to act in ways that are far less sensitive than their real world behavior. Perhaps when all your social media activity is available in various personal feeds and more people are held accountable for things they have said in the past that many of these transgressions will be eliminated and there will be a more natural discourse that adds credibility to the whole medium.

Greatest Internet Phenomenons of 2007: Twitter

Twitter

Just as blogging had to get over the stigma that it was just an online diary for the attention starved, Twitter has finally benefited from people who have taken a second look after dismissing it as a place where the attention starved would log what they just had for breakfast. Although the service itself hasn’t changed much in the past 12 months, apart from the tweaking of a few features, Twitter users appear to have finally figured out how to use the technology

As Peter Kim writes on Forrester’s Marketing Blog, it’s not really about the rate of adoption with Twitter as it is how the technology is carving out it’s niche and microblogging is becoming a real channel. Forrester’s report on Twitter claims that 6% of adults use it regularly (although some question this number).

I’ve used Twitter for a few months now and, while I was extremely skeptical at first, I now use it to tap into a large group of people who’s opinion I respect or I have a generalized interest in. I can also dig a level deeper into the blogs I enjoy on a daily basis and really see some of the process that is helping formulate their points of view. When a story like Facebook Beacon breaks, I can get a feel for the sentiment from marketing bloggers within a couple minutes as the links make their way around and before many have had any opportunity to write anything thoughtful. Isn’t tracking sentiment important to marketers?

The term microblogging is a little misleading though. Twitter is essentially more of a “feed” technology than a blogging platform. About 1/3 of the profiles I follow on Twitter are news feeds of some kind who I don’t want to clutter up my RSS reader. Sure, I miss a few posts but it doesn’t bother me (just like it doesn’t bother me when I miss a couple rants from people I follow who are stuck in airports). Thanks to the Twitter API and applications like TwitterFox, I’m not really bothered by the volume of Tweets and I generally only look at it while I’m at my desk and ready to be part of the conversation that is taking place online. All my must read feeds still go into Google Reader, with no overlap.

It’s also worthy to note that there are no permalinks to Tweets. Sure, you are accountable for anything you write but it is a lot easier to have a Tweet buried than it is for a blog post that is indexed on search engines and cached in more places than any of us would care to imagine. You can always get burned, as Steve Rubel discovered, but Twitter is still probably your best Platform for off-the-cuff reactions.

2008 is proving to be an interesting year for microblogging. With Pownce and Jaiku gaining more steam, it’s going to be interesting to see whether or not Twitter’s limited functionality will be its savior or its fatal mistake.

The Case of the Missing Zeppelin

ZeppelinAs someone who once had a shrine to Jimmy Page in his bedroom, I followed last week’s Led Zeppelin reunion show pretty closely.  Originally I was upset that I would be out of the country for the concert but when I learned that there would be no telecast or webcast I was complacent to watch for the YouTube videos like everyone else.

Sure enough, within hours of the concert being over, dozen of shaky mobile phone videos were uploaded to YouTube for the world to see.  After experiencing childhood memories like the Fantastic Four and Hulk Hogan being destroyed by recent incarnations, I was relieved to find out the the band performed admirably and look forward to the opportunity to spend an embarrassing amount of money to see them at Madison Square Garden during their inevitable follow-up tour.

One strange thing did happen though.  When I went back to watch the videos, I noticed that they were being taken down one-by-one by, what YouTube was claiming to be, Warner Music Group.  Naturally, I Twittered off a few expletives about the ignorance of the music industry and got on with my life.  Fortunately, the good people over at Silicon Alley Insider had a little more tenacity.

As SAI’s Peter Kafka found out, a small company out of Brooklyn called GrayZone was actually responsible for having the videos taken down, albeit mistakenly against WMG’s wishes.  Apparently, with the exception of the five minutes they spent on their Web site, GrayZone is a small company that scans the extensive directories of the Interweb in hopes of finding illegal uses of one of the more than 17,000 songs on their list.  The company has access to special versions of sites like YouTube where they can simply mark the offending entries with an “x” and they will be taken down almost immediately.  To the company’s credit, when they found out that their client, WMG, actually didn’t mind the videos being posted, they corrected the deletions and had the videos reinstated.

While the SAI reporter called it a case of “well-meaning people who made a mistake,” I was more shocked to learn what a complete hack job the whole practice of piracy policing actually was.  Sure, most of the people involved in busting the music torrent site Oink didn’t even understand that it wasn’t a pay site but I had hoped that there was at least some sort of spider or pattern recognition software employed by this beleaguered billion dollar industry that seems so intent on preserving an outdated way of doing business.

The bottom line is that protecting copyright for digital media is a lost cause.  We’re getting closer and closer to the point when all music, video and software will be available free and on-demand that sloppy fumbling efforts, like employing GrayZone, are  more of an admission of failure than a productive way of stopping pirates.  As Mike from TheMusic.FM said in his comment to the SAI post,  now that the case of the missing Zeppelin videos has been solved companies like GrayZone can “get back to projects like removing videos of little kids dancing to Prince tracks.”  Sad.

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