I'm a web strategist and aspiring know-it-all with a passion for all things digital. I've worked in PR, advertising and not-for profit industries, and now I run a creative agency. These are the things I think about, and am sometimes compelled to write. More...

Pissing away resources you forgot you had

Jun 05 2008

One of the core components of any strategic plan is the situation analysis. It’s the calibration phase of the communications planning process, and forces a methodical documentation of what’s what, both within the company and in the environment it is operating in. For a startup, the most important consideration is the state of its resources – without resources, the environment doesn’t even enter into the equation.

Of course, the word “resources” doesn’t always mean cold, hard cash. It takes into consideration the people, the infrastructure, the intellectual property and everything else that it takes to run that business. Much like a car needs gas, oil and fluids to run properly, a company needs to think of all of these resources. Running out of one can lead to serious damage. The problem is, with all of the fixation on sales and the bottom line, many young companies don’t even think of a key resource that is often one of the most important. That resource is good will.

To an aggressively sales-driven organization, good will probably sounds like more hairy-fairy pseudo business strategy, but in some cases, good will is the sole reason for the success of a company. Even the most well-funded companies and services can still fail if they run out of good will.

The most heartbreakingly obvious example of this is Twitter. Here you have a company that has built a technology that, for all intents and purposes, does nothing – it’s merely a system that allows 140-character messages to be passed into a database and then redistributed. The early popularity of the service caused a small group of passionate users to evangelize the platform, and a small group of passionate developers to create websites, tools and toys that utilized the Twitter API. For the past month or so, Twitter has gasped under the pressure of its own popularity, causing many users, myself included, to wonder about the future of the service.

Twitter has reportedly closed close to $15 million in financing, and by all accounts, is strong financial shape. But that’s not their problem. Their constant downtime and lack of transparency about it has drained a lot of the good will that made it so popular. If that wasn’t enough, they were also hit by a small firestorm when Ariel Waldman accused them of not upholding their TOS after receiving a number of hostile, threatening messages on Twitter and getting no resolution from the company, and another when they were accused of blaming their biggest users for the downtime.

Like any business on the web, Twitter faces a lot of competition and the reality that if a significant enough portion of its users migrates to another system, the rest will follow suit. No amount of VC funding will fix that problem.

In a recent interview with Robert Scoble, one of the users that Twitter was thought to be blaming for its flaky service, founder Ev Williams said “The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about.”

People really do care about Twitter. It has one of the strongest communities of any business I’ve seen, but throwing away that good will with constant unexplained downtime and unreliable service is as dumb as burning investment money to heat your office. To its credit, Twitter has recently started being more transparent with development issues and downtime, but to most of the community who have come to depend on Twitter as a communications channel, that’s of little consequence.

As of right now, the company has not yet depleated its resources of good will. Many members of the community regard the downtime with good spirits, referring to the graphic above as the “FAIL WHALE,” or posting spoofs of Twitter’s all-too-familiar “something is technically wrong” images. The reality is, however, that this good will will only last so long, and then, without warning, Twitter’s loyal and influential fan base will move on to something more reliable – Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk or any other number of ridiculously-named microblogging services that come out in the next couple of weeks.

The lesson here is not really about what Twitter should have done or could do, but their story certainly serves as a cautionary tale. Small businesses depend on community. If, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, you’re lucky enough to make one person care about who you are and what you have to say, you’ve been given a gift. If you’re stupid enough to ignore that gift of goodwill and assume it will always be there, no amount of strategic planning is going to save your business.

Social Media Breakfast is coming to Ottawa

May 29 2008

I’ve been traveling quite a lot lately, and one of the things I always enjoy about visiting a new city as a social media user is meeting face-to-face with my “social graph” – Twitter friends, blog readers and others who I may have had conversations with for years, but never met in person. Living in Ottawa, there are far fewer chances to meet like-minded people in person on a day-to-day basis, so this is always top of my list when I’m on the road.

As part of an effort to build more of that community locally, I have been working with Simon Chen of Ramius Corporation and Rob Lane of Overlay.tv to bring the Social Media Breakfast to Ottawa. The Social Media Breakfast was started in August 2007 by Bryan Person in Boston, and has since spread to cities around the world, including New York, San Francisco, Singapore and now, Ottawa.

The innaugural breakfast will be held on June 10 and will feature speaker Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA11, a company that creates custom works of art from your DNA. Adrian will talk about his experience with social media, and how it caused a spark that led to a traditional and social media explosion.

The event is free and includes breakfast, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Overlay.tv. All you need to do is RSVP at http://smbottawa.eventbrite.com/ and show up. If you live in Ottawa, I hope that you’ll be able to make it.

When: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 from 07:30 AM – 09:00 AM (ET)
Where: Ramius Corporation, 55 Metcalfe Street (at Queen – the Manulife Building; if driving, the most convenient parking is underground at the World Exchange Plaza)
More details at: http://smbottawa.eventbrite.com

Also, if you’re looking for more opportunities to connect with social media and PR thinkers in Ottawa, be sure to attend Third Tuesday Ottawa, organized by Joe Thornley and Brendan Hodgson. It’s always a great event, and an excellent discussion of social media. Ottawa may be a small market for social media, but the more we work together to create these discussions, the more the whole community will benefit.

Shiny New Objects – LIVE

Apr 30 2008

After a far-too-long winter in Ottawa, we’ve finally emerged from our igloos and thawed our Molson Canadians just in time for the return of Third Tuesday Ottawa, which will be held on Monday, May 5. That’s right – it’s about topics so ahead of their time, it’s being held the day before.

If you happen to live in Ottawa, be sure to head down to the Clocktower at 575 Bank Street (downstairs), and see yours truly debating shiny new objects in public relations and which ones we should be paying attention to along with the distinguished Colin McKay and Brendan Hodgson. Here’s the official blurb:

“It seems that almost every day, we hear an announcement of a new social media tool, social network or open standard that the inventors tell us we soon won’t be able to live without. At this month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa, we have a panel of Colin McKay, Ryan Anderson and Brendan Hodgson to lead a discussion of which social media tools are most useful and which are just code looking for a reason to be.”

So, we’re going to try to acheive the optimal level of drunkenness (obnoxious, but not quite beligerent) and try to get to the bottom of all those new and fun toys to see what’s fierce and what’s a hot mess.

The full details are on the Meetup site at http://publicrelations.meetup.com/84/calendar/7816548/. It should be a fun time, and you might even learn something… I hope you can join us.

Thanks to Joe Thornley for continuing to bring us all together for a great event!

Twitter, PR and the Amish Electrician

Apr 30 2008

There’s been some debate in the social media PR world recently about whether or not we can really profess to advise clients on reaching clients through social media if we ourselves are not on the bleeding edge. Specifically the question being asked was “do we need to be on Twitter in order to be effective PR people.”

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, there are plenty of PR people who have far more knowledge about the profession than I that are not on Twitter. Does that make me better than them? No, but it does mean that I understand an increasingly important side of public relations on a level that they can’t achieve from anecdotal accounts of what it is and how to use it.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust an electrician who didn’t have lights in his house… why should I expect clients to trust my opinion on a specific aspect of social media if I’ve only ever heard about it and visited the “about” page?

As I’ve said before, PR isn’t about the tools, but the new tools that are available to us every day of the week are changing the game so drastically that if we’re not on top of what’s happening in that arena, there’s no way we can be expected to provide our clients with a full understanding of the environment their brand is operating in, and that means either missing opportunities that would have been a perfect fit, or convincing them to throw money at everything that sparkles along the way. Either way, the client loses.

It doesn’t mean that we have to spend our entire day on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Second Life or whatever the next big thing that comes out tomorrow happens to be, but it is our responsibility to at least engage with these communities, assess the tool fairly, and understand how it will affect current and potential clients. Otherwise, we’re trying to fix the wiring while we’re working in the dark.

Bonus link: Todd Defren’s excellent post on why PR folk should be using Twitter.

The Cluetrain Ten Years Later

Apr 28 2008

I’m admittedly a little tardy on this, but a few weeks back, RichardatDell tagged me in a meme that asked five questions about the Cluetrain ten years later. It’s taken me a bit of time to put together a meaningful response, but here are my answers.

1) What does the cluetrain manifesto mean to you?

The Cluetrain Manifesto to me signaled the birth of common sense in business communications – the first principles from which almost all of the current writing on blogging, social media and connecting with people online has stemmed. At the time the book was published, I was still taking marketing at university, learning how to yell at consumers, but very little about how talk to people. The Cluetrain was a great wake-up call for the industry to remind us that a) consumers aren’t idiots; and b) the way we’re consuming media is changing drastically.

As RichardAtDell writes, the book has a very grim outlook on the future of business, which I think is vastly overstated, but the point is well taken. The Cluetrain Manifesto is about being human in order to interact with other humans. In many ways, it’s saddening that this had to be committed to paper.

While I don’t profess to be an expert on hypothetical history, my feeling is that had the Cluetrain never been written, we would be light years behind where we are now on critical thought about engaging directly with customers online and being social rather than spending more effort on foisting unwanted messages on captive audiences.

The danger of the Cluetrain is taking it as gospel rather than criticism. To me, trying to change your company radically based on new media fundamentalism is as silly as trying to run your company by any other business book alone. The power of the Cluetrain is to use it as a lens to evaluate how your company interacts and use the theses to improve what you’re doing honestly – not as an infallible guide for any business.

2) Which companies have best implemented the cluetrain manifesto in your opinion and how were they effective?

I don’t know that there is a company around today that could totally live up to the expectations set by the Cluetrain, but there many have taken the spirit of those 95 theses to heart in their marketing.

Dell is the obvious example of a major corporation that has found real value in adding a human element to their marketing through their Direct2Dell blog and the Ideastorm site, and I think they’ve proven that in order to get that value out of going social, you need to make it part of your business practices, rather than just an addition to a laundry list of marketing tactics.

Microsoft (a client) is also a good example of empowering, or at least, allowing employees to blog freely and interact with end users and developers – their clients. When something goes as much against the grain as letting every employee talk to the public, the fact that a company as large as MSFT has done so much to make it happen says something.

3) In thesis 57, the cluetrain manifesto states, “smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.” In light of that thesis, is encouraging employees to use social media and blogging a good idea? Is it really effective, when an employee is encouraged but not directed?

Effective is an interesting word to choose in a situation like this. To me, encouraging employees to blog on their own is a smart move, but in reality, it’s unlikely to directly drive more business. The benefit of such an exercise is much more indirect. Employees that are closer to the community they’re serving, who feel more ownership in what they’re doing, who are forced to organize their thoughts and improve their communication skills.

To really be effective in the traditional sense of the term, however, direction is definitely required, but should be looked at more as an overall business direction than blog direction. If an organization is well-managed and a blogging strategy has a clear sense of purpose, then the benefits of knowledge leadership, branding and communicating directly with customers can be achieved through some work. However, if a blog is approached with a “get me one of those” attitude and corporate bloggers are left to fend for themselves with no clear goal in mind, the results will most likely be unfavourable.

4) How can a company encourage employees to use social media, and empower them to answer customer questions and learn from customers?

There are a few main stumbling blocks that come up when employees feel pressure to engage in social media, but don’t know where to begin. First is the “what do I write about” syndrome, which is common for most first time bloggers. The second is more of an institutional problem – the fear of failure. Customer service failures typically happen in private – on the phone or by email. But social media failures happen in front of the world.

However, both of these problems can be solved with an effective blogging strategy, training, and management buy-in and understanding. Strategy to establish a set of first principles that employees can look to for a compass, and training to let them know what to expect. Beyond that, it must be made clear that it’s okay to fail (at least in small degrees), and that making a choice based on that strategy and training won’t inadvertently end in their dismissal.

5) Do all employees want to talk with customers? If not what percentage want to internetwork and converse

No. Not all employees want to talk with customers. Not all employees want to write. Not all employees want to engage in community. Every company has people like this, and the percentage is going to be different in every company and every industry. You can’t force social interaction – you can merely encourage it and provide the tools and the support to do so. The good news is that every company should have some employees that want to be active in their networks, and who want to connect those networks to their work.

If you don’t have people like this, then my feeling is that you’re either not paying close enough attention, or you haven’t hired the right mix of people.

So, those are my answers. I’ll keep this going, and tag a few people I’d like to hear from. I’m going to tag a couple of Twitter friends who I know will have great answers: Dave Fleet, Ed Lee and Brady Gilchrist. Can’t wait to hear what they have to say!

Today is Good People Day

Apr 03 2008

If you don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, you’re really missing out. I had never heard of him a month ago, until I kept hearing what a phenomenal guy he is. He’s a videoblogger who runs a wine business, but spends a lot of time talking about life, love and what really matters in life. And he does it in such a way that makes you want to be as passionate about ANYTHING as he as about EVERYTHING.

Gary has suggested that we make April 3 Good People Day – a day when we stop talking about the negative and recognize the people out there that make the community what it is.

You know what? I’m completely on board with this. Since I started blogging and participating in social media almost four years ago, I’ve met a ton of great people and had amazing experiences that I would not have had if it were not for the people in the community. I’m a little hesitant to put together a whole list of great people for fear of leaving someone out, but I will give a few shout outs to the good people I’ve met in the PR / Marketing community that I’m a part of.

Joe Thornley – a fellow Ottawa PR guy, who has been tireless in pulling together the Third Tuesday movement, which is spreading across the country. Joe is good people. (Gotta give Brendan props on this, too).

Joe Boughner – a friend of mine from university whose love of rants about the media is paralleled only by his love of angry punk music. He had blue hair until he sold out and started working for the man. Still, he’s good people.

Shel Israel – I’ve met Shel a few times, and he’s helped me connect with social media types in Singapore and with a lecture I gave on social media. Referring to himself as a “niceguy” in his bio is an understatement.

Collin Douma – One of the nicest people I’ve met in the advertising world, and one of my favourite bloggers to read. Definitely a good person, and definitely one to add to the list.

RichardAtDell – I met Richard at a Third Tuesday in Ottawa. I described him as “gruff and pragmatic,” and he hasn’t let me live it down. He’s more involved in the community than I think I’ve ever seen from a company rep.

Dave Fleet – Dude runs through snowstorms to raise money for cancer. That pretty much says it all.

Like I said, this is just a handful of the good people in my social graph. My friends, my family, my talented coworkers and my beautiful and talented girlfriend – it’s these good people that make life worth living. I’m going to spend my day giving thanks that those people are in my life, and I hope that you will, too.

Thanks for starting this, Gary. You’re a good person.

The playground, the jungle gym and the community

Apr 01 2008

As marketers, it’s easy to lose perspective on how the content we create affects the people we are talking to. In many ways, we’ve been trained not to even think about it and view marketing as the unwritten contract price of media subsidization. The old way of thinking is that we create ads, and the audience owes it to us to watch our ad as payment for the show they’re watching or the article they’re reading.

In reality, the consumer owes us nothing – quite the opposite. Great marketers get that, and build their marketing, or better, their business, around the idea of giving something back to the user. The question becomes – what is the role of the marketer in creating content? We used to be the host of the party, who would, in exchange for the invitation, spend 20% of the time publicly patting ourselves on the back. Now, that role has changed, and many interactive marketers moved to creating destination sites or social networks based around their brand.

Before making strategic or creative decisions, you need to decide this interaction. Most brands want to create the playground – a social network, a virtual world. They put up a few swings and a see-saw, and expect the world to come and play. The problem is that a playground is only as much fun as the equipment within it, so other companies make the jungle gym, but put it in an out of the way place that requires people to go out of their way to get their, assuming that their content will attract people far and wide.

These tactics have some validity and can work occasionally. But the most strategic marketers combine the playground and the jungle gym together, and provide the tools to the community to make it what they want, rather than prescribing the experience for them.

Twitter is an interesting example of this. On its own, Twitter is nothing at all – an empty, unlandscaped lot. The reason that they’ve been successful where other, similar but more complicated services have failed is because they gave the community the tools to build the lot into whatever they wanted. Through the Twitter API, the community created desktop and mobile clients, games, competitions, visualizers, tools and much more. As a result, the playground is owned by the community because it was built by them.

As marketers, the best thing we can ask for is to have consumers interact with our brand in a meaningful way. What we have to realize as we transition into a new phase of communications is that we can create playgrounds or we can create jungle gyms, but it’s the community that’s going to be what decides if it’s worth playing in.

Changing Media Economics

Mar 27 2008

I was in NYC last week, and got to spend a bit of time chatting about advertising with one of my favourite New Yorkers, Noah Brier. Of course, we talked about the way media consumption is changing and what it means to the traditional view of advertising, and one of his comments really clicked with me.

I won’t attempt to paraphrase, but his point was that advertising has always been about media ownership. That is to say, advertisers paid to own a small piece of the media that could be used to carry their message. Buying an ad in the New York Times is the rough equivalent of owning a portion of a page – it’s yours to do with as you please.

This was valuable because the media was controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Media was scarce, therefore it had value. Now, thanks to the web, anyone with broadband and the inclination to do so can be a media owner. Sure, a tumblog probably doesn’t have the reach of the Times, but it has the potential to, just as a YouTube video has the potential to exceed the viewership of a prime time network show.

When you’re selling media ownership in a world that’s giving it away for free, two things happen. First, as supply approaches infinity, value approaches zero. Second, the number of choices that any one person has keeps getting higher, and as a result, their individual tolerance for noise goes down. People now have the luxury of consuming media on their own terms, and if they can’t get something the way they want it from one source, they can get it from another.

Of course, none of this on its own is completely groundbreaking, but one of the nice things about talking to smart people is that it often leads to small moments of clarity, as this did for me. Hopefully it did the same for at least a couple of others. If not, go read Noah’s blog… it’s always good for a dose of clarity.

The meaning behind the measurement

Mar 26 2008

Sitting at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I sat in stunned silence as a member of a panel on gaming and engagement suggested that if interactive, gaming and social media wanted to grow its slice of the advertising pie, we would have to learn how to measure in terms of CPM. On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable proposal – after all, a unified system of measurement for advertising can only help us all compare and evaluate results.

The problem, of course, is that there can be no truly unified measurement between radically different systems any more than you can measure the distance between New York and Vancouver in kilograms. This is not a weakness of either the tactic, its measurability or the understanding of the medium, but rather a weakness in the desire to do things the way we’ve always done them.

Traditional media is measured very simply. An advertiser buys reach and frequency based on the distribution of a particular medium, for a price ususally expressed in cost per thousand. Whether the medium is newspaper, television or radio, there is a relative assurance that the advertiser will receive the number of impressions that they have paid for, and the value of those impressions is based on the value of the eyeballs it will be supposedly reaching. The key thing here is that regardless of the medium, there is always a comparative metric and a comparative value.

When the web was still in its infancy, still being formed by the collective fingers of its users, advertisers co-opted this new medium in very much the same way. If you wanted the eyeballs of Yahoo! users, you bought impressions based on CPM. But as the way we used the web became more complex, and the technology and infrastructure that supported it became much more sophisticated, it became impractical to reach people through a traditional broadcast approach.

So, the good agencies and strategists looked at how people were using the web, and eventually changed the way they thought about marketing to people online. The problem is that the way we think about evaluation and measurement has largely remained rooted to the past, ignoring the realities of human interaction and attempting to retrofit social interaction with reach and frequency, or worse – attempting to express a complex interaction on par with a casual glance at a display ad in a newspaper. The problem with this, of course, was that the measurement was left in the hand of those who were selling the advertising space. What resulted was the baffling notion that 2.5 people read a newspaper cover to cover, or that 20,000 Neilsen families that nobody has ever met decide who’s watching what based on what they watch for a minimum of 2 minutes. Understandably, when new marketers, who were measured not by guaranteed placement, but by human behaviour had to compare results, they couldn’t stack up side-by-side.

The challenge for new marketers is not measurement – any interactive medium offers no shortage of things to measure. The challenge will be to move an entire industry away from its desire for comparing apples to oranges and establishing new benchmarks for success that do not rely on comparison to an irrelevant and inherently flawed system that is clung to simply because it’s the way things have always been done. In order to do that, we need more case studies like Direct2Dell or Fiskateers, which may not have measured up in terms of CPM, but did more for a brand and for the bottom line than any print ad could have.

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