Greg Verdino

The ghosts of media and marketing past

I feel like it has been a while since I've written a nice, meaty blog post here -- but I've been tweeting and posting regularly at Verdino Bytes. As a reader, you know that my posts focus mostly on the future of marketing or, at least, the present with one eye trained on the horizon. So tonight, I laughed when I realized that three of my most recent Bytes dug deep into the past of media, marketing and branding.

I thought I would share the links here -- hope you enjoy the posts. I think they're kinda fun and, of course, you need to know where you've come from to truly understand where you're going.

Evolution vs Consistency presents the work of an anonymous snarkster who recently contrasted the frequent changes to Pepsi's logo over the years vs. the consistency of the Coke logo since the 1800's.The graphic shown here is edited down from the original. Check it.

 

The DVR's Grandfather hammers home the point that clutter and the consumer's desire to avoid advertising are hardly new. This post presents a 1930s ad for a device that allows users to skip radio advertising, automatically re-tuning the station to music or other interesting content. Well worth reading the copy...

Delicious Ad Geek Goodness for Breakfast looks at a batch of original package design art -- illustrated by hand or mocked up with good old cut-and-paste -- for Post cereal boxes (including some for cereals that evidently didn't make the grade: Digits anyone?) Here are just a few:

Books, bucks, buzz and the bux on beancast 63

Last night I joined George Parker, Angela Natividad (of MarketingVOX and AdRants) and host Bob Knorpp to record Episode 63 of the BeanCast, Bob's marketing podcast that features commentary on some of each week's biggest industry stories. Even though I'm fairly certain sleep deprivation is getting the best of me as I try to balance my day job and my writing schedule, I think my part in the show passed my podcast golden rule:

Try to sound reasonably intelligent at least 50% of the time my mouth is open. I'd give myself a 52% passing grade, but George, Angela and Bob hit it out of the park. Well worth listening.

Learn more about the episode, listen to BeanCast 63 online (embedded QT player), or if you like what you hear subscribe to BeanCast through iTunes.

The show runs about an hour and we hit on the following topics:

• Amazon's acquisition of Zappos
• Walmart demanding ad dollars from suppliers
• Twitter's buzz buzz buzz
• Target as taste-maker
• McDonald's coffee ads growing Starbucks revenue
• The Plaidnation tour (w00t!)

Check it out and give a shout.

Bad Pitch teleseminar to teach PR folks how to pitch so good

Over the past few years, just about every snarky marketing blogger has written a post (or two or ten) about poorly done influencer outreach -- sometimes just to shame boneheaded brand or agencies, other times to offer their own set of tips for how marketers can do a better job of talking to those of us who create content.

I wrote mine almost exactly two years ago and although I haven't written much about blogger outreach since, trust me, I get bad pitches all the time.

Just today, I received an email that began, "D------------ear Greg" (exactly like that, with the dashes between the D and the e), and only went downhill from there.

OK. So we all make mistakes. 

But the sad truth is that we're already a bunch of years into this social media PR thing and, if anything, the quality of the pitches I see might actually be getting worse.  I receive far too many unsolicited, off-topic pitches with no customization -- and you'd probably be surprised if I told you the names of some of the worst offenders.

Well, I must not be the only one noticing because the boys at the Bad Pitch Blog (who have elevated PR faux pas snark to an artform) are running a one-time-only teleseminar that aims to teach attendees how to get PR right. Kevin Dugan (@prblog) and my blogosphere-buddy Richard Laermer (@laermer) know their stuff, so if you're a PR pro, have yet to crack the code on outreach, and/or just want some new ideas that you can use to up your pitching game, you might want to sign up.

According to the teleseminar website, CrappyPR.com:

Call attendees will learn a smart, step by step approach to pitching that includes hilarious case studies and goes beyond that simple email. From looking at the whole pitch lifecycle, including the truth about pitching bloggers and using social media, to tips that will no doubt make you better-informed (and tell you how) plus the keys to pitch inspiration, we'll help you improve your game. Plus we will show you our tricks!

The throwdown goes down on Wednesday, July 29th at 1pm Eastern, so you can listen in while eating takeout sushi at your desk.  Admission is $49 but everyone who buys a seat gets a complementary electronic copy of Laermer's Full Frontal PR handbook. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Don't forget to tell Richard I sent you. ;-)

NOTE: I am not affiliated with Laermer, Bad Pitch or this event. Just got a not-so-bad pitch about the event and thought I'd share the info.

Mobile in the middle

While mobile still has a long way to go before it becomes a key channel for most marketers, it would be foolish not to keep an eye on new developments in mobility.

Although I don't write many posts about mobile on this blog, in the past couple of weeks on Verdino Bytes I blogged about two separate and very different mobile implementations.  Looking back at those posts now, I think they are even more interesting when viewed in tandem than they were individually. So I thought I'd take a second look at both technologies and provide some additional context.

On July 8th, I wrote about the incorporation of 2D barcode technology into this year's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Black-and-white visual codes developed by a company called Jagtag appear alongside one of the photo spreads. Readers can use just about any camera-phone to shoot and send an image of the barcode to receive an MMS message containing a set of additional mobile-friendly model photos. Super simple in its execution, this implementation offers consumers, publishers and advertisers a practical way to extend old world media (in this case a magazine, but it would work equally well with newspapers and out-of-home) into the mobile channel via exclusive content and supplemental information.

The following day, I happened across a company called TAT and posted a video demo of their Augmented ID offering. Augmented ID is a super-practical spin on shiny new augmented reality technology that, via your mobile phone's camera, "visualizes the digital identities of the people you meet in real life."  Let's say you're a social media geek who writes a blog and networks on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  You step away from your computer to attend a conference or tweetup where you meet lots of new people face-to-face. With Augmented ID, you point your camera-phone at one of your fellow attendees and, through the viewfinder, see his live image enhanced with a series of floating, interactive icons representing his online social media profiles. In the grand scheme, this blurs the increasingly narrow line between online and offline identities, and online and offline social networking. In the less-than-grand scheme, it allows us to avoid stick-on name tags and nerdy small talk like, "So, are you on Twitter?" 

See it in action (feed and email readers click through to the blog for the embedded video):

So now, I'll tell you why I find these two technologies interesting although, of course, I already tipped my hand in the title of the post.  The first offers an enhanced traditional media experience to the mobile device. The second extends the social media experience into the real world by way of the mobile device. 

I'm not going to pretend I have any clue about where this might be headed, but I'm intrigued by the notion of mobile as the glue that binds together our online and offline experiences.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

5,000 words and 6 random thoughts about writing them

When I announced my book deal, I promised occasional updates on my progress. I figure now is as good a time as any to let you know where things stand.

As I write this post, I'm sitting on roughly 5,000 words of my manuscript. I've written more than that and have plenty of jotted notes and typed-up transcripts from conversations with people I may quote or feature in the book, but I feel pretty good that the 5,000 words are pretty close to finished product. If nothing else, they are in the right order and seem to follow something that passes for a logical flow of ideas.

Beyond a simple status report though, I would like to share a handful of random thoughts (or get a few random things off my chest) about my writing experience. Quite frankly, this post is mostly for me (it's my blog, so I suppose I get to do that every now and then) -- but I hope that you find it at least somewhat interesting, to the degree that it provides some backstory to the process.

Writing a book is harder than it sounds. This is a big honking statement of the obvious, but this point didn't hit home until I was actually in the process. Of course, I knew that I had a lot of hard work ahead of me to get from proposal to published book but the concept feels more real now than it did a month ago. While I could have written 5,000 words of rough-and-ready blog posts in a week or so, it has taken me several times that to write the same number of 'book words' with the proper amount of polish and flow. While I often use my blog to float new (sometimes half-baked, sometimes barely researched) ideas, anything that makes it into the book needs to be pretty buttoned up, even if only because I don't want to be embarrassed when I see my work sitting on a shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. I can't just casually peck out a batch of disjointed ideas and call it it a book, can I?  On the other hand...

I have a strong tendency to overthink things. Having read enough marketing books (especially social media marketing books) that all seem to tread and retread the same ground as dozens of other similar books, I am hyper-conscious of not falling into that trap. I often find myself scrutinizing every word (can I say "permission" or will people think I'm ripping off Godin; if I use the word "groundswell" will Charlene Li kick my ass) and worrying about whether readers might already know (and be tired of hearing about) an example I've used to illustrate a point. On the other hand, when I do light upon an idea that seems to be all my own I sometimes wonder why nobody else has written about it before and begin to discount the validity of the idea.  I'm slowing coming to the realization that I need to cut the crap and get on with it. Some duplication is inevitable and, as long as I bring my own perspectives to the table, it's all good. 

It's shockingly easy to lose sight of who I am. This probably sounds more like existential angst than I intended, but my point is this: having read hundreds of marketing books over the course of my career, having read thousands upon thousands of great blog posts, and of course armed with my handy dandy McGraw-Hill style guide, I will sometimes write a passage that, upon further review, reads as if it were written by someone else. The ideas are watered down, the language isn't really my own, the tone isn't as conversational as I'd like it to be, the structure feels a bit off. Sure, it reads like it could be a passage in a book -- just not a passage in *my* book. That's when I know it's time to go back and edit, edit, edit or -- in extreme cases -- hit the delete key and start again. The cost is lost time and wasted effort; the benefit is a book that I can be proud of.

Being a 'working marketer' is both a blessing and a curse. As an active marketing practitioner who works with clients day in and day out, I can bring plenty of first-hand experience and practical lessons to my writing. On the other hand, this first-hand experience consumes forty (who am I kidding? it's more like sixty-plus) hours per week -- leaving precious little time for writing the book. It's kinda shocking to me that I am writing this big thing in drips and drabs between client commitments, helping to run my company and (of course) dealing with the small issues of life like eating, sleeping and spending time with my kid. I suppose this last bit means that being a 'living person' presents its own set of writing challenges. :-)

The Internet is my friend; the Internet is my enemy. Given my subject matter, much of my research points me to the web, both for real examples and third party commentary (by industry media and bloggers) about those examples. But true to the nature of the web -- and especially the social web -- one thing always leads to a dozen others, and those dozen always lead to dozens more. What often begins as a focused fact-finding mission (I need one stat, I need to confirm a name or title, I need a link or a Wikipedia definition of a commonly used term) sometimes, after an hour spent surfing rather than writing, unearths lots of great information but at the expense of tangible productivity. At the end of an unproductive day, I might console myself that "at least I did a bunch of research" but -- let's face facts -- that's kinda bullshit. (As a related side note, it probably took me about an hour to write this post -- an hour I just spent writing Internet stuff rather than book stuff. The irony is not lost on me, but I do believe that sometimes you just need to purge random thoughts like these by putting fingers to keys.)

I need better ways to capture thoughts as I have them if I want to make sure my best thinking makes it into the book. While I began with a reasonably high tech approach--clipping things and inputing random ideas into Evernote--and still use Delicious to compile interesting and relevant links, I now do most of my thinking on paper using a pocket-sized Field Notes memo book. It works, but sometimes an idea will have come and gone before I can even fish the notebook out of my pocket. Jane Quigley pointed me to a 37signals post about thinking out loud and capturing the results on audio, then suggested a handful of iPhone Apps that I might find useful for capturing thoughts (by audio or otherwise) while on the go. I definitely suck at this but didn't know it until I started writing the book. Interesting lesson learned...

 Have any suggestions or words of advice? I'd love to hear them.

Writing what you know and knowing what you write

Earlier this morning, I posed a question to my Twitter community:

Here's what some of my followers had to say:

 

Mostly what you'd expect, but with a few (reasonable) dissenting opinions thrown in for good measure.

I'd love my blog readers to chime in as well, but let me add some additional context.

First, my question isn't just about Twitter -- the same could be asked of any new experience, but since Twitter is the current media darling and since I posed the question on Twitter it was a good hook to spark conversation. 

Second, because of my own frame of reference (and the focus of this blog) I was thinking mostly about the coverage of Twitter from a business and marketing perspective.  As a marketer, should you be taking your cues about if, how and when to add Twitter into your mix from someone who writes for a reputable industry publication, very well may be a solid journalist, but is basing their POV and advice on second and third hand knowledge? So while, to @seanscogin's and @jmoonah's valid points, a journalist couldn't possibly be expected (or required) to experience everything they write about first hand (drug abuse, violent crime, war, disease, tragic loss) it doesn't seem too much to ask that a media and marketing reporter actually make the time to get at least some first hand experience about new media and marketing tools before writing articles advising agency and brand people about how to think about those tools.

Third, while my question was specifically about journalists you can, of course, ask the same about practitioners. It takes the form of the commonly asked, sometimes debated, question of whether a social media consultant needs to be personally active in social media. In my opinion, the answer to that question is a resounding yes, so should the answer be any different for a reporter covering the media/marketing beat?

Finally, I should point out that - yes - my question was spurred by a piece I read this morning by an ad industry reporter who, as far as I can tell (and it isn't that hard to tell), isn't on Twitter. I won't name names; kudos to you if you can suss out who it is. :-)

Have at it, gang.

Search ads are now more clickable than ever

Like most marketers nowadays, I understand the importance of both organic and paid search as key components of the digital media plan but (confession time) I don't have even half a clue about how SEO or SEM really work -- or how to optimize either to deliver maximum results.  Sure, I know enough to hire someone who knows more than I do when my clients ask me for help with search. And I've somehow managed to dominate the first page of Google results for my own name but don't ask me to tell you how. I don't know.

But I'd like to learn more.

Enter Clickable's Max Kalehoff, an innovative program he has been spearheading to help marketers get the most out of their search initiatives, and a free e-book that presents some best-in-class thinking about search.

In Max's own words (from the Clickable blog):

When I joined Clickable in late 2007, we began assembling a team of experts dedicated to public service - to help struggling marketers succeed in search advertising. We named them "the Clickable Gurus." For over a year, they've contributed expertise directly to hundreds of marketers in popular online communities, face-to-face, and on this blog. They've indirectly helped tens of thousands of marketers by leaving a permanent record of their wisdom and teachings on the Web. Indeed, the Clickable Gurus have been one of Clickable's most valuable investments to listen and connect with the search-marketing community. As a result, we've made better products for our customers. We all thank the Gurus for their great work, including: Andrew Bernero, Hanny Hindi, Trace Johnson, Ehren Reilly and Tony Soric...

To commemorate the Clickable Gurus' debut after one year of undercover service, we've released the first anthology of their teachings... The Guru's Guide To Better Search Engine Marketing is full of practical tips and best practices that demystify search and help marketers succeed. Just like Clickable's award-winning products, the Guru's Guide is simple and accessible to beginners, yet equally valuable for advanced search-marketing professionals.

If you're all geeked-out on digital you can download the free electronic version of the Guru's Guide. If you prefer good old fashioned wood pulp, Clickable offers a $10 hard copy through LuLu.com. They're also offering free hard copies to blogger who promise to write reviews -- not the reason for this post by the way. This isn't a review and I haven't read the book yet, but if you blog and think you'd like to review it you can get the details from Max's post.

To extend a great-sounding program and promising book, they also offer online forums where you can interact with the Gurus, ask questions, get answers and add your own advice. And they're running a contest that gives search experts an opportunity to vie for their own place in Clickable's Guru gang.

And finally, like all good content marketing efforts, this one supports Clickable's own brand positioning as "a trusted advisor" that helps clients make better search marketing decisions, is bound to generate enough social media buzz to fill at least a few big plastic cups with some extra Google juice, and (the clincher) actually intriques me enough to make me want to find out what that actually means.

I hope you find The Guru's Guide useful. Feel free to drop a comment with your own thoughts.

First we'll land on the moon. Then we'll buy blouses.

If hindsight is 20/20, then foresight is -- well -- sometimes shockingly accurate too, even if some of the fine details are a bit blurry.  This video from 1969 (that's 40 years ago people) extols the virtues of a connected future: online shopping, webcams and live video streaming, electronic banking, email, touchscreen-based devices and even content delivery networks.  Plus it has a suitably creepy soundtrack. 

[If you're reading the feed or get my blog posts delivered by email, you may need to click through to watch the embedded video.]

So here we are in 2009 and I'd wager most of us would be hard-pressed to make predictions that will hold up 40 days from now let alone 40 years.  OK - maybe 40 days is a bit of a low estimate, but you get my point...

What do you think 2049 holds in store?

via Get Elastic.

Coopetwition gives two soda giants bubbly feelings

The story: a member of the Twitterverse suggests that @pepsi and @cocacola put age-old competitive rivalries aside and become Twitter friends.  The brands agree and shake virtual hands.

Sure the person who made the suggestion isn't quite an everyday Joe -- he is the founder of the Aussie arm of Razorfish and has done work with PepsiCo -- and the gesture between the two soft drink giants is as silly as it is symbolic.  But still, it makes for a fun story.

Can Twitter teach the world to sing in perfect harmony?

 

(via Darryl Ohrt; image reposted from my Posterous.)