Star Wars, You Are Not: The Lessons Of The Prom King Brand

Originally published at TVREV.com on December 2, 2015

Star Wars has been all over the media these past weeks. Not just news stories about the movie’s upcoming debut, but dozens (if not hundreds) of promotions on everything from Ellen’s Heads Up game to successful product placement on something like a half dozen popular ABC shows.

They’ve done such a good job of it, you might be tempted to think of it as the future of movie promotions.

But you would be wrong.

Very, very wrong.

Here’s why:

Star Wars is a unique property. With the possible exception of ET, no other movie has such a palpable hold on American pop culture. Everyone, from eight year-olds to eighty year-olds knows what “May the force be with you,” means. Ditto “Luke, I am your father.” Darth Vader may be better known than Kim Kardashian. And show anyone a hairstyle with two headphone-like buns and the immediate reaction is “Princess Leia.”

Not bad for a movie that came out 38 years ago.

Star Wars is what’s known as a “Prom King Brand.” That is a brand with such a high cool factor, people interact with it just for the sake of being associated with it. Nike is a Prom King Brand. So (for now) are Apple and Starbucks. Popular entertainment properties (“Game of Thrones”, “Big Bang Theory”) are Prom King Brands, as are popular music acts and most sports teams. (An easy test for a Prom King Brand is “would many people unironically buy a cap or t-shirt with the brand’s logo on it?” If the answer is “yes”, then it’s a Prom King Brand.)

Other brands need to work harder in social media and beyond. They need to give something in order to get people to interact with them. That something can be entertainment, it can be utility, it can be information or even a financial reward. But while Apple could put up a blank Facebook page and wind up with 2 million fans, that’s a fluke, not an easily replicable formula.

Ditto Star Wars. ABC’s showrunners are happy to integrate some Star Wars promotion into their shows because it seems natural. It’s something their characters would be talking about regardless, given all the hype around the upcoming release. To the point where I’m guessing many (if not most) viewers weren’t even aware they were watching a paid promotion.

Compare that with Creed, the latest movie in the decades-long Rocky franchise. Creed is not as easy to integrate. While Rocky was an iconic movie in its day, that day has passed and I’m not sure how many people under 30 would even know what “Yo! Adrienne!” meant.

That means you can’t easily weave the movie into existing TV shows (ABC or otherwise) without it feeling horribly forced. Ellen’s not going to come out with a “Creed Edition” of Heads up. And brands aren’t rushing to create sponsored co-promotions with Creed.

That’s a movie from a well-known franchise too, one that’s probably going to make it’s investors money back. Smaller films, lesser known films, films that aren’t established franchises are all going to have to be promoted another way. A way that gives audiences a reason for wanting to interact with the promotions. Unlike Star Wars, it’s not enough just to show up with your shiny robots and wisdom spouting elders in tow. People are going to expect something from you in return for their attention.

Brands too. When Star Wars does a co-promotion with a brand, Star Wars is the star. When the movie is the latest Jennifer Aniston rom-com, that line gets blurry and oftentimes it’s Dunkin Donuts in the lead role, with RomCom as a secondary character. And that’s okay—not every movie is a star its first time out.

The Star Wars team has done a stellar job of promoting the movie’s return. That’s a high compliment, because with great expectations also come great falls. But they were up to the task and they aced it. So a round of polite golf claps. Or maybe even light sabres aloft.

Just don’t think there’s anything your brand or your movie can take away from it, though. Unless, of course, you happen to be sitting on the next Star Wars. Otherwise, you’re going to have to work a whole lot harder for attention.

That’s not necessarily a lesser proposition.

Just a very different one.

The Ellen Selfie And Other Oscar Dos and Don’ts

Ask someone what they remember about last year’s Oscar broadcast and the one thing they’re likely to spit back at you is the Ellen selfie. Or maybe they call it the Bradley Cooper selfie, or the celebrity selfie. The one thing they won’t be calling it though, is the Samsung selfie.

Which is a shame because it was Samsung who paid for and sponsored the shot.

Samsung is just the latest in a long line of brands who missed their close-ups, who paid to sponsor or promote something and wound up getting zero credit for it.

So how can you prevent this from happening to you?

Let’s look at the Samsung example first, for it contains some excellent lessons. Samsung gave Oscar MC Ellen DeGeneres a Samsung phone to carry with her during the telecast with the understanding she’d use it to take photos and viewers at home would be impressed that a celebrity like Ellen was using a Samsung Galaxy.

Big mistake.

While Samsung executives can no doubt recognize the difference between a Galaxy and an iPhone at 50 paces, the average consumer at home can not. Providing a close-up of the phone wouldn’t have helped much either — viewers would be too busy looking to see what apps Ellen had on her home screen to notice the logo. Chances are good most viewers assumed she was carrying an iPhone anyway. (The fact that she normally does carry an iPhone didn’t help that perception either.)

So what could Samsung have done differently?

This is one case where subtlety is a no-no. They should have had Ellen mention that she was taking photos with a Samsung Galaxy. Or at the very least included #Samsung as a hashtag. That way, what’s arguably the most famous piece of #CreatedWith content would have had some Samsung branding on it.

As we wend our way through this year’s award show season, we’ve already started to get a feel for this season’s winners and losers: Nationwide was a big loser during the Super Bowl after their home safety spot #NationwideDeadKid very quickly turned into the sort of meme brands fear most. Target on the other hand, was a winner for its four-minute Imagine Dragons concert during the Grammys, the first instance of branded content advertising.


Don’t want to be a loser? Here’s some do’s and don’ts on how to approach branded awards-show promotions:

— DO make sure there is some logical tie-in between your product and the event. If not, you’re going to want to create one because the only way people are going to listen to you is if they understand why you’re there. (HINT: “Because everyone else is” is not a good answer.)

— DON’T slap your logo on a promotion that has nothing to do with your brand . People won’t see your logo and they won’t know you’re behind it. And in the unlikely event they do see your logo, they won’t know why it’s up there.

— DO make sure that the promotion is relevant to the people watching the show. A hockey themed promotion may be part of who you are, but unless it’s going to resonate with the Oscar audience, don’t go there.

— DON’T do your own thing. If you’re piggybacking off of a show’s own promotion, don’t do your own (branded) version of it. The show’s version is fun and probably has a popular celebrity attached to it. Yours doesn’t. Guess who wins.

— DO be entertaining. While that sounds super obvious, we’re always amazed how often brands assume their strategic marketing position is so compelling audience will wait with baited breath to hear it. You’re running during an award show about the movies with every star in Hollywood. You’ve got to bring your A game or go home.

— DON’T be inorganic. Nobody likes a GMOP (genetically modified online promotion.) You want to strive to feel like a part of the program, not a bolted on side show.The more organic your promotion feels, the more likely it is to resonate with fans.

Originally published at brief.promaxbda.org on February 20, 2015

In Defense Of Authenticity

I’ve been helping a friend tune up a social media profile this past month and I often find myself reciting things the social media pros call “best practices” only to find my friend rebelling and telling me “that’s not me, Alan. I sound like a shill.”

Sometimes I push back because there’s a part of me that argues that sounding like a shill is relative and that at worst, my friend will be at about 5% of the level of the biggest shills in the industry.

But then I remember being on the other side of that coin and I stop pushing. Because whether it’s for a friend or for myself, there’s nothing more valuable than authenticity.

Authenticity is personal and everyone has their own level of what it looks like. For me it’s always meant staying true to my unique writing style and to my innate blend of optimism and skepticism.

So to begin with, I’ll never drink the Kool-Aid. Never gush like a 12 year-old Justin Bieber fan about the newest app or tactic or piece of hardware. Unless I really do think it’s awesome. And even then there are caveats. Because there are always caveats. Things that could go wrong. Things that could go better than expected. Things we just don’t know and need to stop pretending we do. And it’s the role of the analyst to point those things out.

That sort of stance seems to shock people, and time and again I’m surprised to hear that something I thought was even-handed and common-sensical is being branded “bold” or “controversial.” As if the truth were bold and controversial. But it's not in me to pretend otherwise and you'll never hear me do so.

I don’t engage in social niceties on social media either. At least not the sort of social niceties the punditocracy swears by. Like ending posts and tweets with “what do you think?”

I cringe when I see those lines. An actual physical reaction. Because nothing feels quite as forced and heavy-handed. I’ve worked with publicists and gurus over the years who’ve tried to persuade me to add them and except in moments of great personal weakness, I’ve refused. I get that asking a question brings greater engagement and all that— I’ve no doubt it does. But it’s just not me. I don’t offer topics for debate, I write what I’m feeling and the comments I get are from people who feel strongly enough about what I wrote to want to respond to me. Which is never going to hinge on whether I ended the post with “What do you think?”

Now the reason I’m laying all this out isn't to brag about what a reckless bad boy I’ve been but rather to rally the troops back to the cause.

Because if everyone starts to sound the same, if every blast on social media ends with “what do you think?," if every post religiously adheres to some ninja’s “5 Ways To Conect With Your Audience," if every piece of "content" (and you all know how much I loathe that word) sounds like it was cooked up in the same corporate kitchen, then who can blame audiences for tuning it all out? For not believing a word of it? For not caring?

Authenticity is more than a word: it’s an attitude, a belief system, a way of doing just about anything and everything. Whether you’re a person or a corporation or a fictional character. It’s always unique and it's always consistent. No matter where you find it.

Those voices that manage to remain authentic are the voices that resonate, the ones that stand out, the ones that inspire, the ones that anger.

The ones that never have to ask “so what do you think?”

Six Years Later, Your Brand Is Still Not My Friend

The failure that is Facebook Graph Search illustrates how much the company is sliding backwards rather than heading forwards. While the shortcomings of the new search process have been amply documented, suffice it to say that (a) it is still easier to find something on Facebook by entering the search parameter into Google along with the term “Facebook” and (b) an article on how to rejigger your privacy to meet the demands of Graph Search has been the most e-mailed piece on the New York Times website all week. (The fact that Graph Search surfaces the likes and dislikes of friends of friends-- along with their profile photos-- has a whole lot of people freaked out.)

Privacy is always going to be an issue for Facebook, but the main failure here seems to be in misunderstanding the effect previous “innovations” have on the accuracy of their information.

Take the ubiquitous “like” which replaced having to become a “fan” of a brand page. As this recent piece from Mashable pointed out, people would carefully curate the pages they were fans of so as show off their preferred version of themselves to the world: becoming a fan was a very conscious action. And while “like” was specifically designed to be an easier interaction that carried less weight, the result was that people used it promiscuously and with little forethought and/or curation, so that the list of things a user “likes” is rarely reflective of their actual tastes and preferences. Which leaves Facebook with data that’s fairly inaccurate and thus of limited value. 

One might argue that Facebook Graph Search and the threat it offers to users privacy might be a spur for people to begin culling down their “likes.” That’s unlikely (no pun intended) as many users now have dozens, if not hundreds of “likes” and eliminating them will prove to be a rather onerous process. So Facebook is stuck with billions of  halfhearted “likes” and no real way to do anything with them.

That’s almost, but not quite, as bad as the self-inflicted wound that is the Facebook brand page. For a while there, Facebook had a good thing going: brands had somewhat standardized pages with multiple tabs where they could run contests, share photos, handle customer service issues, etc. Even better, with a little work, those pages could be customized so that the graphics were consistent with the brand’s logos, not Facebooks. 

Consumers liked the separation that brand pages offered, because, as I’ve been preaching since 2007, Your Brand Is Not My Friend™, something the current Timeline configuration ignores: with Timeline, brand messages are mixed in with friend messages and are promptly ignored as unwanted intruders. Compare that with the tabbed pages, where visiting a brand page was a conscious activity, something you did when you were in a mind frame to interact with that brand. 

It’s the underlying idea behind the Ad Locker feature on the KIT Social Program Guide - brands benefit when people interact with them on their own time, when they are looking to do something that feels a lot more like shopping (which is fun) than listening to advertising (which is not.)

I get that Facebook is trying to find ways to monetize all the data they’ve collected from the third of the earth’s population who use the site. They just need to bear in mind that people don’t always act in a way that’s most expedient for advertisers. Build your model around the way people actually behave, and you’ll be able to find a workable solution.  

10 Questions About The TV Industry 2013

All the upheaval in the TV industry (and we're just at the beginning) leaves us with lots of questions that can only be answered over time.

Here are ten of the big ones we'll be watching in 2013:

1. Will Anyone Cave? Meaning, will any of the networks give in and start selling content to a third party disruptor like Apple, Google or Intel, opening the door for the complete dismemberment of the current economic structure? Right now that seems unlikely: the TV industry is not like the music industry or even the cell phone industry - none of the major players are losing money. But stranger things have happened and it's worth keeping an eye on, particularly because until someone actually does cave, innovation is pretty much a pipe dream.

2. How Many Hours Until The Other MVPDs Start Pressuring The Networks Over TV Everywhere? As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the Sling Hopper pretty much blows the whole TV Everywhere scenario wide open in that it not only lets Dish viewers watch their shows outside the house (which was the big battle the MVPDs were hoping to win this year or next) but it even lets them watch their shows outside the country (so much for geoblocking.)  Dish is the nation's third largest MVPD, something many in the industry will soon be reminded of: in a classic case of NASCAR Blindness, Dish's decidedly downscale demographics have led many to dismiss their impact. Reality: Dish has 14 million viewers, FIOS has just under 5.)  That number may prove even more shocking now that Dish has a distinct competitive advantage to reach more upscale viewers and that should lead to a tougher stance from their competitors. Or not.

3. When Will The Networks (Finally) Sue Dish Over Sling Hopper? Soon, because if the other MVPDs start pressuring them about Sling, they're not likely to sit quietly and give up all that uncounted ad revenue. Granted, Slingbox has been around for many years, but my assumption is that it was such a niche product, it wasn't worth hassling about. Since Fox and CBS are already suing Dish over Hopper, they're probably thinking, what's another lawsuit?

4. When Will TV Manufacturers Give Up On Apps?   You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone other than the manufacturers themselves who thinks that Smart TVs with dozens of apps are a good idea. Least of all consumers who don't seem to be connecting them to the internet or using any of the apps-that-aren't-the-one-that-instantly-connects-to-Netflix. I saw a glimmer of hope at CES - a piece of demoware from Panasonic that had an iPad app that controlled search, discovery, social interaction and channel changing and interacted seamlessly with the big screen. It was very nicely designed and it was actually quite intuitive (I got to play with it some.) The switch is inevitable, it's just a matter of when.

5. How Long Before A Non-OTT Network Adopts The Netflix All-At-Once Approach To Program Release?  A lot of that is going to depend on the success of the post-modern storytelling technique adopted by Arrested Development's writers: the revived season tells each episode from the POV of a different character. If it's a hit, you'll be seeing dozens of clones and semi-clones who rely on the release-all-episodes-at-once format. If it dies, it'll be a while before the mainstream networks take that approach.

6. How Do Actual Consumers React To Google Fiber TV? My buddy Rich Greenfield was mighty impressed by Google's offering, which includes Netflix and other OTT networks fully integrated into the interface, a tablet-based remote control with voice and gesture commands along with unlimited 1 gigabyte internet. How well is this going to go over with your average technophobic consumer? I'm thinking pretty well, since Google seems to be putting a lot into the marketing of this product and taking cues from Apple and from Microsoft's successful relaunch of Xbox. But it's still an uphill battle for them and the other key thing to watch here is consumer adoption of the newfangled products, the tablet-based remote in particular.

7. Will The Other MVPDs Follow Google's Lead And Integrate OTT Services Into Their Services? From a consumer standpoint, it makes sense for the MVPDs to treat Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Vudu just like HBO and Showtime: it's one less hassle for the folks at home to deal with, one less Input device switch they have to grab the remote for. This is another one of those instances where the technology is there but the impetus is not: since none of their competitors had this feature, MVPDs  weren't at risk of losing business because of it. Now that Google Fiber's introduced it, if it proves to be a popular feature,  it won't be long before we see the other MVPDs following suit.

8. Which Of The Second Screen Apps Will Be Left Standing This Time Next Year? The consolidation and the fallout started last year and will only continue in 2013. Who remains is anyone's guess - but easy bets for roll-up are apps like Miso that don't enable discovery and are limited to one key function. Who will be doing the buying is a more intriguing question: the MVPDs, STB manufacturers, TV manufacturers, networks and other 2nd Screen apps are all likely suspects.

9. Will 2013 Be The Year MVPDs Get Into The Second Screen Business? I've been preaching this for a couple of years now: MPVDs are the logical owners of second screen apps, and those apps will mainly serve as remote controls and EPGs, with some social and recommendation engine functionality thrown in. MVPDs control the data and the holy grail of second screen app-dom: the ability to change the channel, so they're the logical choice. They can get there by buying up a lot of the current crop of apps, none of which need to actually be free-standing apps as much as functionality on a larger app (e.g. make NextGuide the search and recommendation engine for the Cablevision app.) It's a logical next step, one that Dish already seems to have put in place with their Sling Hopper apps, and that may just cause the rest of the crowd to more strongly consider following suit.

10. How Will SmartGlass Evolve: Everyone is very impressed with the automatic content recognition capabilities of SmartGlass - the way it immediately populates the second screen with relevant content once it senses what show/movie/song is on. The trick is going to be figuring out how to make sure that extra content doesn't feel intrusive or distracting, something that will be a distinct problem if advertisers get involved. Second screen is a great thing, but if it becomes an annoyance, consumers have a secret weapon: they can just put it down. The other thing to watch here is how much more content becomes available on the XBox: will FIOS and Comcast expand their offerings to include channels that are popular with viewers? Will other MVPDs join in? How the entire XBox/SmartGlass ecosystem evolves is one of the more important trends to watch this year.

These are just 10 of the issues the industry will confront this year. There are many others, from the use of voice commands, gestures, natural language recognition, the future of TiVo, the impact of the cloud, bringing social in during production... more than enough to make 2013 a very interesting year.

And we'll be following every minute of it here at the Toad Stool.

Still Not My Friend

I was at a conference the other day and much to my dismay, I heard an entire panel of what seemed to be reasonably smart people repeating the old canard about location based advertising and how great the world will be once it’s up and running.

Not at all.

I remember reading a piece by Robert Scoble about 4 or 5 years ago where he waxed enthusiastically about a scenario where he’s walking down the street in his hometown of Half Moon Bay at lunchtime, receiving text messages with offers from every restaurant serving lunch. And all I could think was “this is the seventh level of hell.”

Users, guys. Users.

So easy to forget, yet so critical to the success of whatever it is you want to do.

So, to use an example from someone on stage at this panel: I am walking down the street and pass a pub where I have had dinner before. The pub texts me with an offer for a free drink if I come inside.

My reaction? Best case is that I’m a little flattered the first time it happens and give the pub some props for being proactive. Second time, I’m starting to get a little creeped out. Third time it’s feeling a littler stalkerish.

Then every restaurant and retail store I’ve ever shopped at and every TV show I’ve ever watched starts texting me as I walk down the street. And I’m back in Scoble’s Seventh Ring of Hell.

Brands and marketers can only insert themselves in people’s lives so much before cool turns into creepy. What’s unique and sort of cool when one brand does it turns into a whole lot of noise when every brand does it.

The lesson here isn’t that proactive marketing is bad, but rather that it’s not the panacea it’s being made out to be. Everything in moderation. It’s one thing to get a text telling me there’s a new episode of my favorite show waiting on my watch list. Quite another to get one telling me that you’ve noticed I’ve got the TV on and did I want to tune into that show since there’s a new episode waiting.

One is possibly helpful (possibly, because if I’m a fan of the show and am aware of its schedule, I might find the text to be annoying. The other is just creepy and Big Brotherish.

It all goes back to something I wrote about six years ago: Your Brand Is Not My Friend™  Which is why you need to stop following me when I walk down Main Street.

Dear Zuck: 5 Ways To Fix Facebook (And Get Your Stock Back Up)

Dear Zuck:

It breaks my heart to see your stock tanking because investors aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the monetization thing. Especially since, from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem that hard. So here’s what you do to get your stock back on track again:

1. Forget about display ads. You’re never going to fix them. Apocryphal story: The other day, I overheard my eighth-grader and his friends talking about how you should never click on Facebook ads “because they’re just spam and they might break your computer.” Clearly not accurate, but here’s the thing: most of your users share that sentiment. All those years of ads for hair replacement services, Christian singles organizations and party clowns trained us to see that space as the Facebook equivalent of junk. So when you throw a Pepsi ad in there along with the miracle diets, most of us assume it’s not a real Pepsi ad and assume it’s a come-on for free Canadian Viagra, computer viruses or worse. 
2. Stop giving away the brand pages. At the same time you were delegitimizing your display ads, you were creating a whole ecosystem around your brand pages... and giving it away for free. What’s more, you’ve trained users to believe that brand pages are the only way big brands interact on Facebook. The success of all those contests and promotions bears that out. And yet you are giving this away for free. Make them pay for it Zuck. And while you’re at it, share some of the data you collect or even just give them rights to the 500K pictures users put up during a promotion. And make them pay for that too. I know you worry about user experience and all, but seriously Marc, I doubt most of those five hundred thousand people even realize that you own the pictures they’ve posted, not the brand. 
3. Get rid of the timeline from brand pages. Timeline is a great idea. Sam Lessin is a really smart guy. But the old tabs and unique homescreen format is something you can sell to brands. Every brand manager and agency I've spoken to is freaked out by timeline and they all agree it's greatly reduced the usefulness of their Facebook presence. Beyond that, consumers don’t expect brands to have timelines: they are not our friends. Ergo, friends have timelines, brands don’t. If you want to make money off brand pages, you’ve got to make them brand friendly. 
4. Stop trying to protect us from ourselves. I get that you don’t want the news feed turning into a advertising channel. But your users are smart enough to know how to block brands whose messaging has become annoying. Most of the brand messaging in my newsfeed is harmless and of the stuff I let through, a lot of it is actually useful. Put your trust in the free marketplace of ideas theory and let us eliminate the noise ourselves. (Because one person’s noise is another person’s “like”) 
5. Innovate: Once you’ve committed to brand pages, stop treating them like the crazy uncle in the basement and make them more useful. Here’s a freebie that should be pretty simple to implement: you know how I can select how frequently I hear from a person? Give me the same options for brands, only use language that make sense for those interactions, e.g. “all updates/contests and promotions only/product news only.” That’s the sort of option that works for all three parties: you, us and them. You’ve got a whole lot of smart people working for you, I’m sure they’ll come up with lots more of these. 

So take this for what it is: the semi-informed ramblings of someone who has no idea what’re really driving your decisions beyond what he reads in the trade press. If you like what you read though, you can always friend me and we’ll take it from there.

A Few Words From Our Sponsor

Tell most brands that their users are looking for "content" and their eyes light up at the prospect of being able to once again send out "push" messages, because to them "content" clearly means "all that stuff we want to tell consumers but can't because we're supposed to be having 'conversations' with them." (Today's euphemism for that is "storytelling" as in "we've got a story we want to tell you... regardless of whether you actually want to hear it.")

The savvy strategist will guide them past this momentary lapse and explain that by "content" they mean something the consumer can actually make use of, something that their broader audience is actually interested in learning about, often in a PBS/Bravo kind of way.

At which point the brand will inevitably turn to Senior Vice President X, who was part of the team that invented the nuclear widget, the greatest advance in widgetology since 1983.

Which is, in and of itself, not a bad idea, since people really do want to hear from Ms. X. The problem though, is the Ms. X is a brilliant engineer and a horrible writer.

As are most business executives. This is not intended as a slam on executives, but snazzy, journalistic style writing is no more a trait needed for success in business than the ability to run triathlons.

So what to do?

The obvious answer is one too many brands miss out on, primarily because it involves spending money (and everyone knows that social media is free!) And that answer is to hire a journalist - there are certainly a multitude of out-of-work ones-- and have said journalist put Vice President X's words into sparkling prose.

Now this is something that PR agencies often claim to be able to do, but they have self-interest - they're an outside vendor, and the journalist should ideally be working directly for the brand, interviewing staffers, becoming intimately familiar with the industry and, above all, creating "content" - stories and videos - that are (at minimum) as good as what's being put out by the industry trade magazines.

But that's not the hard part: brands have been hiring out of work journalists for decades. The trick is to take those articles and videos and put them out there in a way that gets the broader community talking about them. They should be conversation starters, not conversation hoggers. Get people talking about a topic, but give the community members, the people who really care about the topic, a forum to express their views and opinions.

Because Senior Vice President X, she's already famous. She's not looking to make her mark on the world. But all all those people who spend an hour or so a day on the message boards? They're still looking for a way in. And if you give them something to talk about, something that lets them show off their ideas and thinking, you've done a whole lot of storytelling.

It's their story, of course, not yours, but I don't think that's really a problem.

Try it.

Ending the Ghettoization of Community Sites

The other day I was on a panel when one of my fellow panelists opined that “Google is the homepage for a brand's community site.”  And while he was pretty much on target, it irked me that few people seemed to get why that was a really bad thing.

Community sites were traditionally built as bolt-ons to existing sites back in the very early 2.0 days. No one was sure what people were going to do or say on these forums (and they were always message board style forums) so the fact that they were hard to find and hidden in the navigation was actually quite reassuring.

And so, hidden from view, many of these community sites blossomed and grew. People who really cared about the brand (e.g. the evangelists) flocked to the forums, forming friendships and helping out the occasional newbie or “how do I do X?” poster that stumbled onto the boards.

As the social web grew, many brands added blogs to the mix. The quality of the blogs varied wildly, from well-thought out magazine style sites that were featured on the homepage to “the marketing department made us do this” sites that were updated once every few months with some orphaned press release. After an initial burst of “visit our blog” messaging, those blog sites were also shunted off to the “community” section and/or abandoned.

The last year or so has witnessed the flowering of brand Twitter and Facebook sites. Here again, quality (or more accurately, commitment) varies wildly, but the Facebook and Twitter feeds are usually featured on the homepage as a sort of “we get it kids, see, we get it” type attempt at establishing the brand’s “currency.” (“Currency” being the term-du-jour for “hipness” or “coolness.")

So that’s your typical brand website, circa April 2011: a homepage featuring some sort of e-commerce function or current promotion along with prominently displayed links to the brand’s Twitter and Facebook pages. The community boards, dismissed as hopelessly 1998, are buried somewhere in one of the sub-nav bars.

That’s just plain wrong.

The external social web, the Facebooks, Twitters, FourSquares and the like are great ways to establish a low-barrier exchange with the brand. They’re the equivalent of a window display that gets customers to stop and take note of the store and what it’s selling. The most interested users, those closest to conversion and/or evangelism, need to be funneled over to the brand’s own website where they can bond with like-minded souls.

Unfortunately, today’s average website doesn’t allow them to do so.

Consider instead, a site that bubbles up user content – comments, photos, videos, blog posts—to the home page where it sits alongside similar editorial content. We currently have the technology to do that: to take a piece from the brand about how green the new Kitchen Sponge line is and combine that with user input around environmental issues in housecleaning, going “green” and kitchen sponges.

Basically you are turning the entire domain site into a community site, giving easy access to everything from message boards to product ratings to Twitter comments and giving users a prominent voice on the site. (A prominent voice, not the main one: user content should be visible but should not overwhelm the site nor should it interfere with the site's user exprience by making it more difficult for users to accomplish the things they've come to the site to do.)

The benefits are pretty wide-ranging: for interested users, your future brand evangelists, it allows them to easily connect with both the brand and with other people who feel the same love for it as they do. It lets them know they are welcome and that their input is valued. It encourages them to set up their own profile and become active users of the site, the message boards in particular.

For casual users, an integrated site tells them that the brand actually does care about its customers and values what they have to say. (And if there’s anything consumers want, it’s for brands to listen to them.) So even if I have no interest in joining the brand community because it’s a low interest category for me, I’m bound to be impressed by the enthusiasm of the people who do care about the brand. In most cases, I’m going to be impressed by the fact that they even exist.

That's a great strategy for creating a useful and appealing domain site in today's social-heavy landscape. It’s also a lot more effective than crossing your fingers and counting on Google.

Just Ignore Them

Lot of bitching and moaning about the number of corporate sponsors at SXSW this year. I'm not sure why though: most everyone I know seemed to more or less ignore them. (Or at least the ones that weren't their clients.)

None of them provided anything I really needed or wanted. (Okay, I did use the very clean bathroom at some brands "party space" but the "space"-- a parking lot covered with AstroTurf- had club-level house music blasting, along with some picnic tables and chairs, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I'd want to stay there once I was done. Nor do I remember the brand.)

But back to the original topic: most people seemed to be blowing by the big brand-sponsored booths on their way to someplace more relevant. The GE Solar Carousel was cool to look at when I walked past it, but that was all they got from me: "cool merry-go-round, guys."

The lesson seems to be you can't graft something artificial onto something whose salient feature is authenticity. Both the purpose of the conference itself, and the food, bars and overall scene of the city of Austin.

Let them come. If they were smart, they'd pay for a speaker or two instead of setting up what are essentially giant trade show booths in the conference center.

Without the pens or free t-shirts

The "Respirator Idea"

One of the more frustrating things I’ve witnessed in my ad career (and one that I see repeated time and again from both agencies and brands) is what I call the “Respirator Idea.” It’s an idea that should have died because it no longer works in its current version, but it’s kept alive by people who have a vested interested in seeing something/anything get produced.

“Respirator Ideas” run the gamut from TV spots to websites to social media promotions and the one thing they all have in common is that you can tell that at some point they actually were good ideas.

But then the punch line got cut because it might have been offensive. The prize went from a two week Hawaiian vacation to two nights at the EconoLodge in Utica. Usability went from a site that did everything for you to “well, I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out for themselves.”

It’s an unfortunate aspect of business in general: people rarely know when to pull the plug on something that was once a good idea. But it’s perhaps the most important skill anyone in marketing can have. Because someone’s got to be “the one.”

The one who says “No one is going to laugh at this.”

The one who says “No one is going to want to do this.”

The one who says “No one needs a site like this.”

The one who says “No one will post this to their Facebook page.”

And then actually step in and kill the project.

It rarely happens because of all the politics involved. All the small cuts along the way didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. And a very influential group of people are still in denial about what the “Respirator Idea” has become. In their minds eye, they see the original idea, not the corpse it’s become.

And so it’s risky to stand up to them and say “the Emperor has no clothes.” You’ll be accused of being a negativist. A bad team player. An obstacle. You’ll make people look foolish and they won’t like that.

But someone must stand up. Someone who is going to look foolish no matter which way the decision is made. Because if you make the decision to cut the cord, you’ll also look brave, not cowardly.

And in today’s business environment, that’s no small thing.

Webinar Tomorrow: Social Media Integration

I'll be running an hour-long FREE webinar tomorrow here at KickApps called "No Social Site is an Island: The Key to Social Media Integration." Justin Chase, the other part of our strategy team will be joining me.

We'll be discussing the advantages of an integrated social media strategy, one that includes your brand's domain site along with your social sites.

Registration details are here.

"Suck Less" Works Too

Engineers and techies hate Verizon. They’ve got a list of complaints a mile long about the cell carrier, ranging from its insistence on filling phones with useless branded applications that duplicate superior third-party ones to the overall inferiority of its product line.

Marketing pros marvel at what I’ve heard described as Verizon’s “death wish” – the fact that the carrier has passed on opportunities that many have felt would have put its rivals out of business. (The iPhone, for example.)

Consumers, on the other hand, don’t seem to mind. They’ve focused on the fact that a Verizon phone generally does what a phone is supposed to do: make and receive telephone calls, far more reliably than any of its competitors. (This is especially true in major cities like New York and San Francisco.) For many people, that’s proven to be a far more important factor than the model of their phone or the clunkiness of its apps.

It’s an interesting paradigm: in an industry where consumers have little love for any of the major players, the company that’s focused on the basics has proven to be the gold standard.

That “best of the worst” theory doesn’t make for a sexy marketing strategy, but by actually doing the groundwork, Verizon has established enough word-of-mouth buzz to overcome its rivals marketing-based efforts at stealing the “best coverage” crown. And while no company should strive to be the least lousy player in the market, there’s a lesson in there about sticking to the basics.

Missed Opportunity For Yelp

Yelp just announced that it was giving restaurant owners the opportunity to “incentivize repeat checkins and reward patrons with three different offer types: percent off, free or fixed price offers.” (emphasis added)

It’s the “repeat” part I have a problem with: Yelp is blowing a prime opportunity by putting the emphasis on repeat check-ins rather than first-time check-ins.

I’m guessing that most Yelp mobile users are somewhere away from their home base: either in another part of town or out of town all together. If they are using the mobile service as a way to find a local restaurant, an offer of 10% off, a free soda or prix fixe dinner may well sway them towards one of two or three equally acceptable (albeit unknown) options.

They’re unlikely to use the mobile app to check-in to a restaurant they frequent because there’s no reason for them to be on the mobile app: they already know where the restaurant is and aren't likely to use the mobile app to look up new reviews. If the restaurant pushes the offer (via in-store signage or something on the menu) repeat customers might take advantage of it and check-in, but that sort of activity does nothing to help sell-in Yelp’s main advantage, which is as a restaurant review site. (A free restaurant review site, at that, which showcases the tastes of twenty-somethings versus the paid Zagat sites whose audience skews older.)

Allowing restaurants to lure in first time users would not only solidify Yelp’s reputation, but would also possibly give more gravitas to the check-ins if they are pushed out to other social media sites: a user has no incentive to say something positive about a restaurant they are eating at for the first time, particularly once they’ve received their free root beer.

The missed opportunity here is yet another example of brands jumping on the bright shiny object bandwagon and letting the cart drive the horse rather than thinking about what their ultimate value proposition is to the consumer and how to use social media tools to support that proposition.

The Value of Integration

So the 800 number at the bottom of the ad was replaced by the website address, which in turn was replaced by the ubiquitous Facebook URL. And brands are investing heavily in their Facebook pages, giving users the chance to do everything from having “conversations” with the brand to ordering pizzas and airline tickets to entering contests and games.

Which makes sense at first blush: you want to be where your users are and Facebook’s got 500 million some odd users.

But... (and there’s always a but)

All that data about all those users is going straight to Mr. Zuckerberg’s servers. Not yours.

You can make assumptions based on what you can find out about your “fans” from looking at those parts of their profiles they’ve elected to make public, but that’s about it.

What’s more, you’ve got a website somewhere that’s going underutilized, a site where you can actually collect user data and control content, plus customize the look and feel to your heart’s content.

Plus you’ve got more and more users who primarily interact with you on their mobile devices where they can’t really do a whole lot with your cool new Facebook tab.

Which is why brands need to look at ways to integrate all their various and sundry touchpoints. That doesn’t mean that they all need to look identical, but rather, that all your content needs to live on a single platform based around your brand site where it can be ported out to social media’s walled gardens and open APIs (and vice versa) without your brand losing control over user data.

And while your immediate goals may not call for any sort of social CMS, there’s a good chance that as social media becomes more ubiquitous, more like Charlene Li’s famous analogy “like air” there’s going to be a lot of value in knowing who your “fans” and "followers" are and how and where you can reach them. (Facebook and Twitter are great, low-barrier ways to initially attract users, who can then be funneled over to your site for deeper engagement. But funneling them is a whole lot easier when you already know who they are.)

An integrated approach has other benefits as well. Various social media will come and go. At some point Facebook will become AOL. (It wasn't all that long ago that ads ended with "AOL Keyword: Compaq") Mobile apps may give way to some other platform. But your brand’s URL is a constant. It’s the one place consumers will always be able to find you, the one place you own.

Now of course creating a platform with the ability to host all your content, and making your brand site the nexus of your digital presence is exactly what my current employer, KickApps does. But that’s precisely why they are my current employer: we share a vision of the web where user data is paramount and brands act like brands, not buddies. (aka “Your Brand Is Not My Friend.”)

As the social web becomes just “the web,” the ability to quickly share and control content will become more and more important. Which is why having a single, integrated platform makes so much sense.

To me, anyway.

The Next Part of the Journey

It was three years ago that I first wrote a blog post entitled “Your Brand Is Not My Friend” that proved to be the launching pad for my career as a strategist.

The premise behind it was that people primarily use social media sites like Facebook for socializing and don’t want to hear brand messages when they’re on there. (There are exceptions for “Prom King Brands” - brands with a cool factor - and for brands that have managed, a la Old Spice, to provide something uniquely entertaining.)

So it’s with that thought in mind, that I’m announcing the next step in my career. I am now the Managing Director of Social Media Strategy for KickApps, helping to start up their strategy consulting practice.

KickApps, for those of you unfamiliar with the company, lets brands build, maintain and manage custom social media solutions. That means everything from Facebook integration to video to comments to community, all of them residing right on the brand’s own website. My charge is to add strategy to the mix, to help KickApps’ clients figure out the “why” in addition to the “what” and “how.” In that endeavor, I’ll be joined by the very able Justin Chase, a Digitas veteran who tweets as @JC6451 (in case you wanted to start following him or something.)

I’ve known the team at KickApps for some time now and have spoken at a number of their events (along with the likes of Charlene Li, Mario Armstrong and Sandy Carter.) So I’m excited to be starting up a strategy consulting arm for them, as in many ways this a logical next step for me, particularly because their focus on letting brands own their own social media data is something I really do feel strongly about.

On the off chance you were worried, I will not be abandoning this blog (if anything, I’ll be posting more frequently) and I wanted to thank all of you for your support over the years: the readers, the retweeters and above all, the commenters. You’ve been what's kept me going and what makes writing this blog so much fun.

I hope you’ll stick around for the next part of the journey.

PS: You can find the full press release here, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

What You've Been Missing

Ka sf

A few weeks back I spoke at KickApps SME2010 in San Francisco. You can see the video and SlideShare above. (In case you've ever wondered what I sound like in person.)

This was one of the best seminars I've been part of and KickApps managed to capture everything on video. (Big hat tip to Stan Adams, who coordinated the whole thing.)

Go to http://kickapps.com/engage to see the other speakers: KickApps CEO Alex Blum, Dell's Heather Burnett, IBM's Errol Denger and author and Altimeter founder Charlene Li

UPDATE, JULY 6: The slideshare has almost 4,000 views thanks to a number of key people posting and tweeting about it, most notably, Faris Yakob of MDC Partners.

OMMA Social Panel: Using Paid Media to Drive Earned Media

I'll be hosting a panel at OMMA Social tomorrow (Thursday, 6.17) called Using Paid Media to Drive Earned Media: The Latest Tips, Tricks and Tools

Here's the description from the OMMA website:

It’s now commonly accepted that in order to be successful at earned media – giving people the kinds of brand experiences that they willingly share – marketers need to invest in paid media too. As the social media world keeps evolving, though, the strategies for investing in the right paid media have to evolve as well. Is it still wise to buy portals, or does buying inventory on an ad exchange at niche targets provide better ROI? How has the practice of seeding changed with the explosion in new platforms, from Twitter to mobile? A look at how to convert dollars into social media-generated distribution.

Panelists are:
Richard Jalichandra, President & CEO, Technorati, Inc.
Kristine Shine, VP, PopSugar Media
Tom Troja, Founder, Social Symphony
Josh Warner, President, Feed Company


If the pre-panel discussion is any indication, things should get pretty lively- it's a fascinating topic and I suspect five people with strong opinions could talk about it for hours.

Any input or suggestions from the peanut gallery is warmly welcome - shoot me a tweet, an email or just leave a comment down below.

We're on at 9:45 AM at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, 145 W. 44th, in the heart of Times Square.

Bonin Bough from Pepsi is the keynote and other familiar faces on stage include Cathy Taylor, David Berkowitz, Ian Schafer, Max Kalehoff and Mike Germano.

New BeanCast Podcast: The One About "Likeability"

I'm on the Hive Award-winning BeanCast podcast this week, discussing Facebook's new "like" button with host Bob Knorpp, Joe Jaffe, Darryl Ohrt and John Wall.

It's a good listen, but if you are not so inclined, my take is that it's a smart business move on FB's part, because they will be setting a standard and gathering lots of (valuable) information.

My only question is that I wonder how many people outside "The Bubble" will want to actually "like" things. Particularly because most of the time there's nothing in it for them. (Yes, Pandora can set their playlists more accurately, but not sure that's going to change the behavior of millions.)

And it all goes back to my theory in the previous post that there are many people who are just not hard-wired to share any sort of information on their likes and dislikes in a public or semi-public or even private setting.

This isn't really a huge problem for Facebook-- even if they get 15% of people using the "like" button off-site, that's huge. It's more a question about our assumptions that everyone is a participant, whereas, as one of the other guests (I think it was Mr. Knorpp) pointed out, the 90/10 split you find on YouTube is a more likely scenario. (90% of YT users are consumers, 10% are creators.)

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST HERE

Interaction Burnout

It’s hard to believe it was only around two years ago that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh started following and (more importantly talking to) people who mentioned Zappos on Twitter. This was more or less around the same time that Frank Eliason started tweeting for Comcast, talking up-- and calming down-- people who were having trouble with their service installers.

What followed was a mad rush to social media, where the goal was to obtain the level of seemingly effortless one-on-one interaction, brand love (and glowing press) Hsieh and Eliason were able to create for their respective brands.

And despite the fact that most brands are still in the consideration stage when it comes to social media, the brands that have dipped their toes into the water are already driving us towards something I’ll call “interaction burnout.”

To put that in human terms, imagine needing to have a full on conversation with everyone you met over the course of your day. Not just a “nice morning” or “looks like rain” exchange, but a full-on conversation with the gas station attendant, the dry cleaner, the security guard, the guy in the next cube.

Now imagine that almost every one of these conversations feels forced and stilted.

Because that’s what it feels like with so many brands. They all want to talk to you. Show you some pictures. Get you to play a game with them. And you know, we’re all pretty busy and there are only so many unnatural conversations we can have during the day. And so suddenly we’re wishing they’d just run a banner ad or a TV commercial and be done with it. Anything that we could just read or look at without having to stop to talk to them.

Much of this unnecessary patter is due to the unrealistic expectations brands (and the agencies and consultants that enable them) have for social media. Where, in a misguided quest for easily understood metrics, success has come to mean x number of Twitter followers or y number of Facebook Fan Page updates each month

Period.

Which basically recreates the old push media model, only with different media vehicles and ignores the presence (or lack thereof) of any actual interactions.

But there’s another side to all this I keep thinking about too. Which is that the early social media success stories happened because they were both unexpected and real. I mean most people were pretty shocked that the person tweeting as “Zappos CEO Tony” really was the actual CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh and not some behind-the-scenes PR person. The fact that Hsieh was actually  funny and had real personality only added to the mystique.

And that’s the thing: most companies don’t have a cool, funny CEO. Or one who is as comfortable being out there as Hsieh is. Brands, especially bigger ones, don’t really know how to have actual conversations (or their legal departments won't let them) so they resort to the sort of fake party banter (“Great! See you there!”) or plastic sales pitches (“Check out our new spring line!”) that only serve to make interaction painful.

We also expect them now. We’re not all that shocked when a brand follows us and then tweets offers at us. Or has a fun-filled Facebook page waiting for us to fan it. It’s kind of old hat and much as we like wasting time on Facebook, we don’t have time to interact with every single brand we like, especially if we’re mainly there to interact with our friends.

And, as we all know, Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

So what to do?

Well, social media, to repeat one of my favorite mantras, is not a series of websites with no discernable revenue streams. It’s a behavior: the ability to interact with a site or application and have that interaction recorded, publicly, online.

And that behavior is not going away.

But rather than force consumers into awkward conversations or pseudo conversations, thus guaranteeing that they’ll do their best to avoid you, maybe the thing to do is just listen. To respond when appropriate and not try and butt into the conversation every four hours because it’s an easy way to justify a community manager’s salary or because you're paying your agency based on the number of tweets they issue.

We also need to realize that the same way most people don’t become the life of the party, not every brand is going to be a wiz at charming customers. And the solution to that isn’t to try and force them to be, but rather to accept that either:

1. You’re going to need to change and that means everyone in the company, not just the intern you hired to run the Twitter feed.
2. You need to find one particular area of social media you feel comfortable with - which might just be a blog or a YouTube channel -- and concentrate on being really, really good at that, especially if it makes sense in terms of who your customers are.
3. You may decide it’s not for you and stick to a 100% traditional paid push media plan. That’s not a great long-term strategy, but it’s a lot better than keeping up a really awkward and uninteresting social media program, thus contributing to interaction burnout.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a smart young guy named Matt Daniels “Marketing has a bell curve–most companies create average marketing and achieve average results.”

Why did we think social media was going to be any different?