Flickr: Swamibu

Sorry, but the iPad announcement was an iDud.  Steve Jobs looked and sounded weak, and I just got the feeling that the iPad was a LARGE TYPE version of the iPod Touch. So much missing. But perhaps he’ll get the sympathy vote and the product will recover.  Just such a yawn — and after all of that uncharacteristic leaking of information and features!

And the State of the Union?  Again, the anticipation preceding any speech from the Great Orator is always high — and I’m not sure even Chris Mathews felt the tingle up his leg after this one.

Are we in a marketing malaise?  A Sargasso Sea of cynicism?

Or just the winter doldrums?

Based on the roaring finish which was calendar Q4 of 2009 (at least for us), I think it’s precisely the wrong time to curl up in ursine slumber.  And marketing must continue to lead — to set the psychological tone months ahead of consumer sentiment broadly.

Let’s be bold, people!

Now, on the other hand, here’s a new web site that has done something extremely bold: GolfTripGenius.com.  Disclaimer: I’ve advised them over the past few months.

They’ve solved several of the most annoying problems facing golf trip captains — and done so with extremely powerful technology made simple.

Whoda thunk the golf industry had much room left for innovation outside club design and fertilizers to keep those desert courses green?

You?

I’m glad I’m not responsible for a big brand.

I lie.  I would love to manage a massive “enduring promise of value” like Coca-Cola.  But the challenge those big brands face is huge and growing — and it is coming from itty-bitty brands.

May I explain?

The disruption to the nice, rigidly structured media world which the web and social media have forced means alot for big brands.  It means that their control over the publishers, represented by their multi-billion dollar budgets, is diminishing.  Why?  Because the barriers to entry, the height of the bar, the cost to gain access to buyers — have been eliminated, lowered, trivialized, respectively.

Publishers used to control access to buyers, and big brands owned the publishers.  Little bitty brands can now become their own publishers — using tools that are free and by gaining access to buyers via channels that are also (essentially) free.

Coca-Cola used to be the dominant soft drink product on store shelves in general.  Now, Coca-Cola distributors have to carry dozens of products “on the truck” in order to keep the overall sell-through volume stable or growing.  The market has been fragmented by dozens of smaller, niche products (energy drinks, water, fruit juices, teas) which have effectively ‘dis-integrated’ the once monolithic soft drinks segment.

The second place I’m glad I don’t live is in the high-end web marketing design agency world.  Just like at the macro-level described above, I believe those guys are going to be disintermediated as well.  Free open source tools (like those used to power this site), crowd-sourcing, and an ever-sophisticated generation of technically savvy young people will put more and more and more pressure on the $100,000 logo design project, the $500,000 web site redesign, and the like.  More people will simply have more access to more tools to do excellent work on their own.  Yes there will be brands that need to (and have the requisite profits to) always pay the highest price to have the Chanel or the Prada or the Coca-Cola of marketing sites and  identity systems.

I just think that buyers will begin to see smaller and less significant differences between those massive investments and the results achieved by the more agile, more savvy, smaller brands.

What do you think?

Extra credit question: What was Coca-Cola’s long term financial gain from the Coca-Cola Classic marketing debacle?

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If you were paying attention during the dot com era, there was a lot to be learned. Learned in the sense that George Santayana wanted us to learn from history — or be condemned to repeat it.

Speaking of history, the vaunted authority Wikipedia has this to say about the Gold Rushes of the 19th century:

Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a “free for all” in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly. The significance of gold rushes in history has given a longer life to the term, and it is now applied generally to denote any capitalist economic activity in which the participants aspire to race each other in common pursuit of a new and apparently highly lucrative market, often precipitated by an advance in technology.

Surely the incredible growth in the formation of businesses — complete with CFOs, HR departments, health benefit plans — around very small ideas which took place during the dot com craze was like a gold rush.

Who knew there would be so much investment available to support so much overhead when compared with the technology or product idea at the core of these internet businesses?  Thousands of companies sprang up — each requiring space, phones, furniture, accountants, parking spaces and dental insurance.  Some with ideas so small the founders couldn’t even articulate what it was they were in business to do.

Well we all learned our lessons.  Or did we?

Business Week’s December 14 issue (online December 3)  includes an article by Stephen Baker entitled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil.”  In the article, Baker does the unthinkable: he calls out the self-styled “experts” who are flogging all social media all the time.  “The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.”

Baker gets it.  Go ahead and wade into the social media… just your little toe… and you’ll be awash.  But not in gold dust rushing through the stream caught in your pie-tin pan.  Awash in an amazing volume of offers to help you get your social media mind right… or else!

Social media doctrine? “Engage your community.”  “Listen twice, talk once.”  “Be transparent.”  Don’t worry about troubling prospects for contact information… just give all of your information away.

I really loved Josh Kopelman’s post on Redeye VC that cautioned those who, when the rubber meets the road and they realize they don’t have a proper go-to-market plan, say at the last minute, “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”

After the dot com bubble burst, sales people had to sell, not just stand by the fax machine taking orders.  Lots of sales guys lost their jobs as a result.

Mark my words: we are passing through a marketing gold rush.  There’s gold in them thar hills, at least today.

But in the long run, marketing is about expressing an enduring promise of value, and delivering it.  Though the media may change, that challenge will not.

Photo Credit: flickr/Rossco

Help!

I have several clients (and I get asked for recommendations by prospects all the time) who are trying to make a decision about their social or community infrastructure.  They’ve tried a few things (or in some cases a half-dozen point solutions), and now see that it’s time to pick a more strategic solution.

I’m investigating alternatives on their behalf.  Their sizes vary, but most are mid- to large companies in the tech sector.  They are North American or European companies.

The functionality they generally describe as requiring in a solution includes:

1. Basic web content management with support for workflow / approval
2. User management (profiles, roles, access control)
3. Blogs / wikis / forums
4. Rating / voting; tagging; comments

Almost all are migrating from a hybrid environment using many technologies: some proprietary, some open source, almost all a blend.  All now see the need to consolidate / simplify the management of it all.

The goals are to:

1. Improve engagement with customers and prospects
2. Consolidate technologies, licenses, maintenance fees to control costs
3. Gain administrative control)
4. Preserve flexibility to customize (through services available from vendor or partners)

I’m seeking information like this:

1. Ranges that licensing costs likely fall into based on a small-ish implementation (dev / test / production, but small # of CPUs) vs. a larger implementation at a successful but mid-sized  company?  (i.e., not worried about cost of supporting a massively scaled-out environment like a huge consumer retail site)
2. SaaS or subscription pricing?

Daily services rates to support a project:

1. Architecture / planning – high level pre-implementation services;
2. Implementation – install, tune, integrate
3. Customization
4. Training

Please share any resources you might have access to which can help me help these worthy businesses make sense of the Wild Wild West environment they face out there.

Brew Hammerling

Plus Ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose

I’m in tears over “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley.”  I first heard about it through the folks at Version 2.0 Communications, then read a follow-up on PR2.0, Brian Solis’ blog.

This morning I checked the date on the article again to make sure I was here, in the present moment, and not somehow transported back to July 1999.

To summarize: the article is about shifts in the world of public relations, and the leadership being exhibited by Brew Hammerling.

Disclosure: I don’t know Brew Hammerling, I’ve never met Brew Hammerling, but based on the article I’m sure we were at the same industry event on a few occasions, and I think she’s got a great nickname.

Here is an excerpt which reveals how Brew earned this position of leadership:

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

OK: let me get this right.  Brew is rolling out her launch strategy — and to sound au courant, she must of course include outreach to the new media influencers.

Unfortunately for Brew, the client’s CEO has her board chairman in the room to hear the agency pitch.  A nightmare for the marketing team under the best of conditions, but in this case it’s Roger McNamee: to the manor born, Ivy Leaguer, Grateful Dead cover-band leader, chum of all the technology industry’s big names.  No problem for Brew: she knows Roger,  and Larry Ellison and Bono, too, because, according to the article, she dated one of the band members from REM.  Aha!

However busy the social calendar, Brew did not miss the class which advises: “When the chairman challenges your strategy, immediately embrace his point of view.  Make his idea your idea.”  She goes one better, proclaiming her love for the genius.  Can she get any further up McNamee’s nether portal?

The article in question is about Brew’s launch of wordnik.  Wordnik’s results page for the word “integrity” includes the following: “Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.”  To have integrity, you have to have principles.  You have to adhere to them.  If you believe in your ideas and your plans, Brew, you stand up to the chairman and you tell him what you think.  Especially when a New York Times correspondent is in the room recording the conversation.

This whole article brought me back to a time — the late 1990s — when the tether broke.  We were so high on our own fumes we thought it was sustainable that business without customers, revenue, or written plans could enjoy valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars at their hastily executed IPOs.  In those days, you could get away with making ridiculously ambitious statements.  Indeed, the more outrageous the claim, the greater the reward from industry pundits, and, subsequently, the market.

The fun didn’t end, though, before McNamee’s (and many others’) pockets were even more richly lined than they were at birth.  I won’t ever forget how Roger spoke at my Internet Startup’s launch party at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco — saying that the industry had changed forever, and there was no end in sight to how the internet and tech firms would continue to create these enormous pools of wealth.  Roger has been correct about many things, but on this occasion, March 16, 2000, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

The startup was called Bowstreet.  After gathering up nearly $150 million in venture capital, the firm soared, then crashed — unable to make the IPO window as the bubble famously burst.  What was left of the firm was sold to IBM for 10 cents on the dollar in 2005.

Dear readers, I find what’s going on in the media world today fascinating.  But occasionally it is also humorous, as I see us condemning ourselves to repeat the history from which we are supposed to learn.

Or am I naive and idealistic to think that in our professional pursuits we should have principles, integrity, and boundaries?

Oh, that’s right — we’re talking about P.R.

I would love to read your comments on this topic.

The Arrogance of Power

I had the great honor to work with Irving Wladawsky-Berger while I was at IBM about 12 years ago.  He is one of the clearest thinkers I have had the good fortune to know.  Thus, no surprise, he was at the heart of many strategic initiatives, arguably projects which saved IBM from near-ruin back in the ’80s and ’90s.  To name two: the RISC chip; the Internet Division.

He does not, however, have an eponymous entry on Wikipedia, and I love him for that.

He wrote recently about power and responsibility in the wake of the credit crisis which drove the current economic downturn: “How Can ‘The Best and Brightest’ Get it So Wrong?“  It is a compelling reminder of the cyclical cultural phenomena which occur around the accumulation of success, wealth and influence.

Soon, pride rears its ugly head, and arrogance taints clear vision and decision making.

Power clusters tend toward homogeneity — the human desire to prefer “like” people, ideas and things to “unlike” people, ideas and things.  The concrete begins to harden.  The alert, flexible and agile entity that initiated the cycle can no longer respond to changes in the surrounding environment.  A new cycle must begin again.

Irving references how arrogance led to an indefensible policy in Vietnam in the early 60′s.  The big ideas from Harvard overpowered the career State and Defense Department thinkers.

I lived through the arrogance of the Internet era, when an infinitesimally small coterie of venture capitalists infused small technology companies with massive amounts of cash in order to create vast but artificial valuations for initial public stock offerings.  I’ll never forget the photo of a dot com chairman and CEO, wearing sombreros and mounted on horses, addressing employees on the beach at a resort in Cabo San Lucas.  Not a bad place for a company meeting.  The company was called “Agillion,” an amount only slightly higher than what was spent on the off-site extravaganza.

And now it’s the banking and finance sector, the creation of highly complex derivative financial products, sub-prime… you get the picture.

Bloom off the Web 2.0 Rose?

We are seeing another power-arrogance-collapse in the magical land of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?): the new communication environment created at the intersection of the worldwide web and some innovative “social” technology: blog tools, online video services like YouTube, social networks like Facebook and Flickr, and Twitter.

Starship Enterprise

In the world of news media, communication, and culture, the rate of change is incredibly high.  I’m reminded of Scotty from Start Trek, the Scots chief engineer, warning James T. Kirk as he presses the spaceship’s engines harder and faster: “She’s breaking up, Captain.”  Somehow Kirk, the symbol of leadership and responsibility, guides the Enterprise through the threat to a new state of greater intergalactic safety and security in the end.

Newspapers are losing readers and suspending print operations, going entirely online.  Advertising agencies have had to completely reinvent themselves in order to continue to deliver value to customers: there’s no “15% of the media buy” left to pad the bottom line.  Public relations firms have to help companies find influencers not within a community of hundreds of print publications, but amongst millions of self-publishers (bloggers).  It makes your hair hurt.  And it is creating panic as brand stewards try to figure out what decisions to take under high stress.

This is due to the growing amount of that fixed-asset, time, individuals are shifting from old media, like print publications, radio and broadcast or cable television to new online communities and media: blogs, podcasts, streaming videos.

A million blog posts are published every day.  News stories are spreading instantaneously not through free online news sights like Yahoo! News, but through individuals posting micro-messages on Twitter.  200,000 new videos are posted to YouTube daily.  Microsoft, once the symbol of personal productivity, is now investing nearly $2 billion annually to brand its “Bing” “decision engine,” the company’s nth effort to respond to Google’s remarkable success in the extraction of cash from web search.

What have we lost, in finding what we’ve found?

What the old media world provided, whether we want to admit it or not, was a structure for the flow of information.  The media community had a hierarchy.  Leaders had names like “The New York Times” and “The Wall Street Journal,” Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.  There were giants with enormous power, and smaller niche players with less influence, but a role to play.

In the new media world, we have no such structure.  There are no barriers to entry.  Anyone can become a publisher, a director / producer / leading actor, a self-styled pundit.

But that doesn’t mean to new media world isn’t subject to exactly the same cutural, cyclical patterns which have shaped the human experience for centuries.

IM#1, not N1H1, is the new threat.

I have observed over the past couple of years that an important cultural side-effect of the zero-barrier-to-entry new media world is the rise of an alarming number of super-egos.

Cable news started the process with the creation of on-camera experts — that cast of characters who don’t actually have a vocation in, say, politics, they just serve as on-camera expert on politics for the cable news discussion of a real news event in the political realm.  I don’t think they own trousers or skirts to match their suitcoats and jackets either.  But I digress.

The blogosphere is clogosphered with similar experts.  And what concerns me is not that a new generation of “Rock Stars” has been created — it is the basis upon which they have been created and the durability of that foundation.

The basis of relevance in the new media world is, quite simply, the numbers.  How many subscribers and visitors to your blog?  How many followers on Twitter?  How many views of your YouTube video?  Old school publishers like bloggers with lots of online readers.  Looking for a soundbite from an expert?  Take the one with the most awareness.  Nothing new here.

But what we need to ensure, to protect the richness and texture of our culture, is quality.  We need to be able to discriminate the original from the knock-off, the sage from the lunatic.

There are thousands of technology tricks that can be put to use in order to inflate your on-line metrics.  Sign up for Twitter if you haven’t already and you will receive a thousand suggestions a day within a few weeks.

Search engine specialists are extracting thousands of dollars per month from unwitting business people in order to drive web site traffic which is numerous but completely irrelevant.  There are tools which will grow your Twitter followers by tens of thousands.

And all of this “relevance” is bogus.  With it, however, we do get the unattractive aspects of arrogance and greed.  Web 2.0 snake oil available from thousands of spammers who have made on-line millions.  “The Four-Hour Work Week.”  And worst: bloggers who from behind the avatar’s shield, and who, bearing absolutely no responsibility for the outcome, cast their judgment on others mostly for the purpose of attracting attention to themselves.

I wrote recently about the Susan Boyle phenomenon.  Don’t remember?  That’s because she didn’t win the “Britain’s Got Talent” show, her audition for which generated 70,000,000 views of her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I didn’t track the show closely, but it was clear from the snippets I heard that Ms. Boyle’s 15 minutes of fame occurred during that audition.  She just never rose to the same level of performance again.  She may have gotten the YouTube views, but she didn’t get the votes.

On a local media note

WTKK talk show host Jay Severin built an enormous ego for himself on the basis of success in the ratings book.  He also managed to wangle a contract believed to be in seven figures annually.

Then one day the ratings methodology changed.  Instead of a listener maintained written log, ratings were based on an electronic system which records listener activity electronically — no opportunity for human intervention between the listening and the logging.  Severin’s ratings dropped like a stone, and suddenly advertiser and management tolerance for his outrageous statements tanked as well.  After a particularly strong statement with racially unsavory overtones, he was suspended for a month — and presumably a contract renegotiation.

What do we do in the meantime?

How will we sort out the junk from the quality in such a media environment?  We will figure it out — and I’m certain there will be further innovation in technology that helps us apply the uniquely human constructs of judgement and hierarchy to this “flat world” and open communication platform that is the worldwide web.

The smart companies, however, will stick to their values as we sort things out — and avoid the temptation of pride and arrogance which success and power often brings.

I do a lot of writing.  I write white papers, brochures, presentation texts, speeches.  You name it.  Working on a contract basis for the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure and challenge of writing in many different voices for many different audiences.  It is a great mental exercise.

Today, I had an experience which turned out to be an exercse which I recommend to any of you who write — for fun or for a living.

Take a walk with someone who does not speak your language.  Friend of a friend, colleague of a colleague — it shouldn’t take too long to find someone who has at best rudimentary skill in your language.

I did this with a dear friend just this afternoon.  She is trying to learn French.  I work with French-speaking companies and have been fluent (or nearly so — I’ll let others decide that) for most of my life.  I learned while a student at a school where the rules were strict: only the target language is spoken in the classroom.  This rigorous discipline enabled me to become fluent in French and conversational in Russian, German, and, yes Latin.

We took a walk through a local nature preserve — the Moncrieff Cochran Bird Sanctuary — and I decided to conduct the walk entirely in the target language.  It was fascinating as a mental exercise for me as a writer.

My student had a very small vocabulary, but nature provided plenty of examples to begin to expand that: leaf; bird; grass; rock; sky; green; blue; grey.  I learned quickly that I had to cut away complexity and embellishment: only use the present tense; avoid language that exposes the “exceptions.”  Keep it extremely simple.

How refreshing.  How obvious.  What a powerful exercise.  And how pleased was the student who, immersed in the language for a couple of hours, felt so much more confident with her new language.

Narcissus by kazukichi, Flickr

I haven’t posted in quite a while; which is always a sign that lots is going on of the kind that offsets future tuition obligations, which for the next few years of my life is a good thing.

So what awoke me from my social publishing slumber?  As is often the case, it was a visceral reaction to a seemingly small thing… in this case a tweet from a friend and industry colleague — but the content of which furrowed my brow.

This friend is a great writer, speaker, affable fellow, and has been a great advisor to me personally as I gave up suckling at the corporate teet about two years ago.  He has a big following.  When he speaks or blogs or tweets, lots of people listen, read or retweet.  He’s a new media guru.

He has been a thought leader as fellow marketing functionaries sought to understand how new communication tools (blogs, in particular) and the power of web search engines turned the traditional media context upside down.

He uses his first-mover advantage to spread what was once riot-inciting marketing rhetoric, and is now common sense about social media, social networks, social publishing:

• Listen ten times more than you speak
• Give ten times more than you expect to receive
• It’s all about the virus: try to create ideas that will spread to squillions over the web

He uses his platform to challenge brands to wake up to the ways of this new world, and always acknowledges them when they respond.

He blogged recently about what one of the very large manufacturing entities bailed out by the government could do to fix its marketing.  Excellent suggestions and, as usual, steeped in the perspective of the new media.

The next day, he went out on Twitter, essentially saying:

“Knock Knock. Hello? Hey  is anyone home? Care to comment on my post??  It’s been 24 hours..”

I dashed off a reply (via Facebook, where I first saw the tweet), which said:

“Yo: Those guys have  just been told to take orders from a 31-year old who’s never held a job with products or revenue on the line in his life. Perhaps they’ll get back to the social media moguls a little later on. ”

It was meant in light seriousness… but it got me thinking.  The new media are so powerful.  And yet the temptations are so great.  Here was a case where a good guy and a bright industry light used his platform to essentially say, “Hey — I’m talking over here.  Are you listening to me?”  To me, it read like a violation of the Gospel according to the New Media Gurus.  Off to confession!

Thankfully, about an hour or so later he tweeted again:

“OK, this company has more important things than my blog to do this week.”

I was relieved.  But there’s a lesson here: with barriers to communication to vast audiences so low, people need to keep in mind that social media aren’t always at the center of everyone’s universe.

We are stewards of our online persona(e) — a very very big responsibility indeed.

There are many definitions of the marketing term “brand.”  There are brand managers.  We speak of the brand experience.

Companies craft and shape their brand image.

Loads of lucre is spent to preserve, protect and defend brands.

The definition I most like?  An

Enduring

Buyers believe that value will remain consistent.  Coca-cola conjures a shapely bottle, bright red cans.  Mouths salivate in anticipation of that unique taste.

Promise

I lace up my Nike shoes and suddenly I can “Just do it.”
of

Value.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”  “Volvo.  For Life.”

We just know these things about these mega-brands.  But we should be asking, and answering, these questions about our own brands.

If that’s what a brand is – then how can a brand be elastic?  Why should a brand be elastic?

Because this notion of a “brand” was established when the world was r_ouⁿd.

And as we know from Tom Friedman, the world is now flat.

Technological advances have not just leveled the competitive playing field.  They have redefined the cultural and commercial structures of the global economy.  The “flat world” has created both enormous threats to well-established businesses (think of the phenomenon of outsourcing to India in the 90′s), and laid the groundwork for the emergence and rapid growth of a whole new generation of businesses, business models, and – yes, brands (dare I mention Goog… nah).

And what it means to be and to manage a brand must change as well.

I suggest that along with these great technological advances and planet-flattening changes, there has been a fundamental change in the power balance between buyers and sellers.

There was a time when brands could control what information buyers had about their products.  Those days are over.

There was a time when the owners of newspapers and magazines, billboards, television and radio stations, owned the only communication vehicles consumers could consult for information about products and services.  Vendors financed those businesses through advertising, and thus had great influence over what information reached subscribers, viewers, or listeners.  Those days are over, too.

Brands, or vendors, have lost control over what information buyers have access to, and how they get it.

Thanks a lot, Vice President Gore!  Your internet has taken our flat world, and turned it upside down!

Pontiac GTO

Today, General Motors will announce the demise of the Pontiac brand.

Pontiac was the performance brand of the GM lineup, make famous by many things, among them the GTO model, permanently enshrined in the muscule car metaphoria of my generation via this Ronny and the Daytonas number:

Little GTO, you’re really lookin’ fine
Three deuces and a four speed and a 389
Listen to her tachin’ up now, listen to her why-ee-eye-ine
C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO

Not even Oprah‘s endorsement could save the brand — though she did here darndest by giving an antire talk show audience a G6 back in September of 2004.

In technology sectors, performance has been a perennial favorite differentiator: I am reminded of the great scene from “This is Spinal Tap.”  Will Pontiac’s death be a harbinger for other industries?

Is the social and political climate (pun intended) now turning against attributes that represent “faster, stronger, higher?”

I don’t think so, but I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.