Greg Verdino

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.

5 ways every marketer can have a "dancing man moment"

Last night, social media serendipity led me to a video of a man dancing at an outdoor music festival. The dancing man himself isn't anything special -- a clumsy show of flailing arms and legs that wouldn't get him through the first round of auditions on So You Think You Can Dance. 

What happens next is pretty special (or at least interesting.)

When the man starts dancing, he is the only member of the crowd moving.  In fact, it almost seems as if the rest of the audience is blissfully unaware that they're at a music festival at all.  But within seconds he's joined by one, then two, then three other dancers.  Within three minutes, hundreds of people are dancing.

And like countless other seemingly insignificant moments, all of it was caught on video and uploaded to the web.  Within a month of being shared on YouTube, more than one million people have viewed the clip, more than five thousand have rated it, and more than three thousand have left comments. And it turns out that these few minutes in time were captured and uploaded by several different amateur shooters who were there to witness it, so the cumulative numbers are higher still.

That's a pretty impressive ripple effect (or maybe it's a butterfly effect) for something that began with literally just one person willing to do something nobody around him was doing.

Now is probably as good a time as any to watch the video, if you haven't seen it:

[Feed and email readers, click through to view.]

OK, so what does this have to do with marketing?

Certainly the dancing man provides a clear (if trivial) example of how the actions of a sole individual can provide the catalyst that not only directly influences the behavior of the people around them, but also have the potential to scale up to have something approximating mass reach.  Rather than reaching out to millions in the hopes of finding and connecting with "the one" (who responds, who buys, who changes their behavior), why not start with the one who can influence hundreds and ultimately reach millions?

Perhaps the dancing man also offers a lesson about risk and reward -- as a marketer, are you willing to try something (and potentially look foolish) on the off chance that it will deliver an exponential result?  Or will you sit on the sidelines for fear of failure?

But mostly, it leads me to ponder how marketers can have their own Dancing Man Moments.  Off the top of my head, here are five ways:

1. Be the Dancing Man: do something remarkable to spark a movement; star in the story yourself
2. Bear Witness to the Dancing Man: document his actions; capture the moment; be the storyteller
3. Put the Dancing Man on a Bigger Stage: celebrate him; tell everyone you know (your customers, audience, fans, friends); provide access to your larger network of distribution (after all, chances are your brand is bigger than his...)
4. Join the Dancing Man: tap into the momentum of the movement; follow the dancing man's lead but play your own unique part in how the story unfolds
5. Be the Song to His Dance: go beyond just joining in; contribute something unique and different, yet complementary; in fact, why not inspire him to dance in the first place

But enough of my yammering. I'd love to hear from you -- what do you think marketers can do to have their own Dancing Man Moments?

Storytelling at the brink of the future?

Although the odds are pretty good you'll never read a fiction review on this blog, I can't help but tell y'all about J.C. Hutchins' forthcoming novel Personal Effects: Dark Art.  It's a supernatural thriller that pits an art therapist at a psychiatric institute against a blind serial killer/patient -- it may or may not be your cup of tea, and the actual content of the book isn't why I'm telling you about it.

The thing that probably will interest you is the way (ways plural, really) J.C. has taken what he has learned through years of social media self-publishing to create a work that goes well beyond the printed page, encompassing digital, mobile and the physical world to create a fully participatory multimedia narrative.  In many ways, Personal Effects is a novel custom-designed for digital natives (although J.C. and his publisher may not think of it that way) and it just might offer a glimpse at the future of storytelling.

 And the future of storytelling should matter to you no matter what products your company produces or promotes because, as marketers, our success often rides on both our ability to tell compelling stories and our customers' willingness and ability to spread their own stories about their experiences with our brands.

 Of course, everything begins with the book itself.  Let's assume it's good -- I haven't read it yet, but look forward to digging into the advance copy I received over the weekend (thanks J.C.)

But Personal Effects really gets interesting when it gets innovative.  If you aren't familiar with J.C. Hutchins (frankly, I only knew of him through some mutual contacts and from hearing his name bandied about in social media circles), he is a good example of what I have called a "whatever expert" -- someone who is good at what he does and has found a way to succeed at it through smart, effective use of social media.  Although Personal Effects is his first published novel, he has been writing for years, releasing his work as free audiobooks and using the web and social media to build a loyal audience.

J.C. isn't a marketer by training or trade, but the digital and multimedia components of his project offer a practical blueprint for any marketer looking to transform their brand storytelling into an active, participatory experience that is fueled by community and optimized for customer-to-consumer word of mouth.  Readers can enter the world of Personal Effects in a variety of ways:

• Technology-Fueled Calls-to-Action: Clues peppered throughout the novel and in the killer's personal effects packaged with the novel (e.g., a drivers license, photos, hospital paperwork) drive readers to companion websites, forums, onto email lists, into mobile phone voicemail systems and opt-in text messaging programs and more where they can find and explore additional layers of narrative.

• A Distributed, Online Experience: Readers can get inside the heads of key characters through their social network profiles, personal blogs and Twitter streams.

• Original, Distributable Content: Tapping into his heritage as a popular and well-established podcaster, J.C. has produced an exclusive audio-only novella prequel, as well as a series of YouTube-friendly video promos featuring well known horror personalities.

• Seamless Integration with Relevant Third Party Sites: One of the characters (yes, a fictional character from the book) has written columns for Suicide Girls, a site (some content NSFW) whose readership seems to be well aligned with J.C.'s audience, and there is a planned deep integration that brings Suicide Girl models into the novel's fictional world and provides readers with an additional web-only subplot.

• A Fan Community: Readers can 'commit themselves to the Brink' (aka Brinkvale Psychiatric, where the novel takes place), submit their own artwork for display in the community gallery (a logical tie-in with the fact that the book's protagonist is an art therapist at the Brink) and receive personalized intake paperwork.  In other words, readers don't just consume the story; they become part of it.

• Creative, Innovative Influencer Outreach: This is how I became aware of the book in the first place and may bear some of the most relevant lessons for social media marketers.  Over the weekend, the mailman delivered an unexpected package, a good-sized box that contained materials that immediately piqued my interest, earned my attention and (true to the spirit of Personal Effects) drew me directly into the fictional world of Brinkvale Psychiatric.  Containing not only a reviewer's copy of the book and the obligatory media kit, the package was filled with my personal effects from my own stay at the Brink.  Everything was hyper-personalized and it was impossible not to dive in (and just as impossible not to tell others about it -- and last time I checked, that's what influencer outreach is all about.)  Here are a couple of photos and you can check out more on Flickr -- but be warned, you're bound to dismiss your run-of-the-mill blogger outreach emails as downright asinine...

 

 

So what's the bottom line?  J.C. is tapping into the power of digital and the potential of social to turn the lay-back (and some might say dying) act of reading a novel into a fully immersive lean-forward experience.  It's equal parts fiction and alternate reality game, powered by a healthy dose of practical Web 2.0 know-how. Followers of pop culture may draw parallels between Personal Effects and the similarly rich multimedia storytelling approaches used to fuel films like Blair Witch Project, television shows like Lost, video games like Halo 2 and even a recent album release by Nine Inch Nails.  Brands have occassionally tapped into this form of multimedia storytelling to do cool and interesting things -- see Audi's Art of the Heist, for example.  But to my knowledge, this is the first time an author has undertaken something so ambitious in association with a novel -- and it just might get digital natives to pick up a plain old printed book. 

Am I gushing?  Sorry.  It's pretty cool and makes me want to curl up with Personal Effects, my laptop and my iPhone right now.

Barring that though (damn you, workload, damn you), I'd love to hear from you.  Which of J.C.'s approaches do you think you can apply to get your customers involved in your brand's story?

Want to get the most from social media? Look inside...

    Regular readers know that I've sometimes criticized companies for dressing up their marketing plan with a superficial layer of social media without first understanding how the very same tools and technologies, when applied inside their own organizations, can have truly transformational impact.

Needless to say, I like what Pitney Bowes' emerging media manager Aneta Hall has to say in her latest blog post:

"Don’t forget that social media is not limited to your customers and external stakeholders. Through Enterprise 2.0 tools including wikis, blogs, instant messaging, internal social networks and microblogging apps, social media can help improve your employee communications and help them collaborate with one another regardless of office location, business unit association or position on the corporate ladder. At my workplace we are exploring several social media applications to help us share information in real time and be  more productive which, in today’s economic environment, is no longer an option, but a requirement."

Smart advice -- and even smarter actions for a corporate giant like Pitney Bowes.  This is just one of five insights Aneta offers, so give her post a read if you want to get her take on how any company can tap into social to listen, learn, love and live.

Aneta is one of the panelists participating in my "What Will Social Media Do For My Business?" session at the MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum on June 9th.  We'll be tackling this question with a clear focus on what social means to marketers working in the B2B sector specifically, and delivering straight talk from actual client-side marketers who are doing social today.

If this sounds interesting, there's still time to register.  Use this link to register and receive a $200 speaker's guest discount.

[Image: Rob Howe]

All marketers really need to know about social media

This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

It might be an overstatement to say that Twitter would blow your mind, but I think it might be fair to say that the work of University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral candidate Adam Wilson will.  Adam and a network of others have been working on a brain-computer interface that will allow people to, among other things, tweet hands-free using nothing but brain waves to type and transmit 140-character messages.

Here's how it all works:

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says UW Assistant Professor Justin Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."

However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Adam Wilson.

Sounds impressive, but you've really gotta see it in action.  Watch:

[Feed and email readers, click through to the blog to watch.]

Total, geeked-out coolness but -- more importantly -- tremendously useful for individuals whose brains work well but whose bodies don't.  Nice counterpoint to last week's celebrity-twit chatter, dontcha think?

You can get all the details about the brain-tweet work coming out of UW here or you can follow Adam (and Adam's brain) on Twitter.  He's @uwbci and you can distinguish his brain-tweets from his regular tweets by the fact that the brain-computer interface transmits in ALL CAPS (ooh, just like Oprah.)

May I market for you?

Complete this sentence:

I work in marketing for _________.

Unless you're a smart ass and thought something like "I work in marketing for the money and the honeys," you probably filled the blank with the name of your company, the brand you represent or the category your product falls into.

I'd wager you didn't fill the blank with "customers."

You should have.

Of course you work for a company (or for yourself, if you're a consultant.) And of course your boss expects you to deliver results.  But if you still think in terms of delivering your services for the benefit of your company rather than for the benefit of your customer (or prospective customer), you're missing the point.  Smart marketers look at the transaction not as the thing itself, but as the by-product of the thing -- as the benefit gained as the result of a well-built win/win relationship.

I know.  You read lots of blog-like-objects and heed the advice of social media gurus (LOL); you've heard this before.  Marketing isn't about buying reach, it's about building relationships.  In the age of social marketing, companies need to think less about delivering messages and more about delivering value.  Massive TV buys be damned; you can rarely buy your way into people's hearts.

But here's the twist.  Maybe it was supposed to be this way all along.  What if marketing (as a concept and maybe even as a profession) actually started out as a service that was provided for consumers rather than a service that aimed to target them?  What if this thing that we have called "marketing" for the past 50 years or so has been nothing more than an ill-advised detour.

Everything old is new again, people.  Everything old is new...  Read on:

A couple of years ago, a super smart friend who had studied linguistics at university (and generally seemed to know a lot about a lot of things) told me that, in an early usage of the word, "marketing" referred to a service that one person performed for another.  For all I know, this friend was full of crap (quite possible, since he is also the creative director of a large digital agency) -- but the notion stuck with me and, if you think about it, is a pretty powerful one.  It kinda implies that marketing as we know it is just a big misunderstanding.

By this definition, marketing was not a service that people performed for the companies that employed them.  Marketing referred to a service that people (or companies, I suppose) performed for other regular people.  An offer to "market for you" would have been akin to saying to a friend, "I'm running out to the store.  Do you need me to pick up anything for you?"  If you were a particularly enterprising lad or lady you might have even found a way to earn your livelihood by marketing for others.  Run out to the marketplace, pick up a few things for a few people, earn a pocketful of pence and -- voila -- you, my good sir, were a marketer.

So you see?  Marketing was the act of procurement.  Not the act of promotion.  Did products get bought and sold because of this service?  Yes. Did 'marketers' match needs or wants with products that satisfied those needs or wants.  You bet.  Did the companies that provided those products, and the intermediaries who procured them on behalf of other individuals, profit from the transaction?  Presumably so.  But at the heart of the transaction, was a simple service provided for the benefit of an individual consumer, not the overly complicated service most of us provide for the benefit of the corporate entity that hands us our paychecks.

If we go along with its early definition, marketing wasn't about helping your company sell.  It was about helping people buy. Is that how you think about your job?  Are you helping people buy?  Or are you just foisting your wares upon a bunch of unsuspecting people, in the hopes that you might sell a few.

So let's take another stab at filling in that blank.  Then get out there and market for people.

Transform: possibly the best 10 minutes of your day

I happened upon an interesting short film by a photographer named Zack Arias and liked it so much that I decided to share it here.  I'm not much of a photographer and maybe you're not either.  If you are, you certainly don't read my blog for photo tips.  None of that matters.  I'm not sharing the video because it will help you take better pictures.  I'm sharing it because it contains lessons that just might  help you be better at whatever matters to you - whether you strive to be a top marketer, a successful leader, an inspired creative or just an all around good person.

Entitled "Transform," it contrasts the drudgery of the day-to-day details that define what you do with a more profound meditation on who you are and how you can be who you want to be.  In other words, it contrasts the crap that doesn't really matter with the vital things that do.  Very, very inspiring stuff -- whether you're a creative soul or a stodgy suit.

The video runs ten minutes but I can guarantee it will provide ten of the best ten minutes of your day.  As a side note, you'll need to watch through the first minute and a half to get to the good stuff -- but the first minute and a half provides good context so don't just drag the status bar to 1:31.

[Feed and email readers will need to click through to watch -- and everyone should think about toggling this to full screen.]

Hey chicken, where's your head?

No doubt, you're familiar with the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off."  In fact, if you work in media, marketing, advertising, PR or (let's face facts) just about any industry at all you're more than just familiar with the phrase -- you might be a living embodiment of it.

For the past few years, we ran around trying to get ahead of the proverbial topple of "old marketing" and get up to speed on all of the new media goodies we now had at our disposal -- from web video to social media, and everything in between.  Sadly, for many this amounted to little more than a series of pointless sprints across the shifting sands of early adoption.  We'd read an article about some hot new Web 2.0 tactic or catch wind that a key competitor was trying something "innovative," and we were off and running.  But rarely did we look where we were going, or even look around to figure out where we were starting out.  I can't even count the number of times I ranted (on this blog) or advised clients to slow down and take a more measured, more strategic approach to new marketing -- not to the detriment of progress, but for the betterment of the business.

And now we've got the current round of economic woes to deal with as well.  They're certainly cause for concern.  Budgets are being slashed, people are losing their jobs, entire companies are going out of business.  Scary times.   Client-side marketers are scrambling to cut-cut-cut-cut-cut.  All of those experimental tactics that they couldn't wait to try before the recession are now being left on the cutting room floor.  If you're an agency-side marketer (whether traditional, digital, social or PR) you're probably so afraid of being slashed along with those cutting-floor-things that you're killing yourself to over-service your clients for less money than they paid you last year.  

I get it... Times are tough, and we all need to do what we need to do in order to survive.

But here's the sad truth about chickens with their heads cut off -- they can run around all they want; they're still gonna die.

The good news is that you're (probably) smarter than a chicken.  If you're really smart (and the company you work for is smart too), you probably already had a hard times plan in place long before the economy took a downward turn.  You exercised a bit of foresight and managed to keep your neck away from the blade -- maybe you had a few feathers plucked but at least you still have your head.

Now might be a good time to use it.  Stop running around in a state of panic.  There is plenty of chaos already (in the world, in your industry, probably in your company as well) -- nobody needs you to create more chaos.  But others can probably use your help in creating order. 

Try this:

• Take a deep breath.
• Think about what needs to get done.
• Come up with a reasonable plan to do it.
• And then do it... and do it well.

As I read those four sentences, they seem laughably simple.  But is there really any other way?  Has there really ever been any other way?

OK - end of rant... :-)

so_many_a_second: global data on a human scale

As a former sociology major, I have a thing for statistics.  But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes find it difficult to wrap my head around big numbers -- especially when we're talking about numbers that are global in scale.  For example, there are 19 blog posts published per second.  Sounds like a lot of activity, but is it really, when you compare it to the 787 porn searches that happen each second?  This kind of analysis can sometimes make your brain hurt.

Enter data visualization and a nifty little service called so_many_a_second.  In their own words, so_many_a_second "is a visualizer that shows mondial statistics on a human scale.  Depicting the ongoing stream of events, this application tries to get the user in touch with the emotional actuality of these objective data."

In practice, it lets you see and compare a handful of population, technology, internet and product stats, using simple animations that represent volume of change per second.  It's hardly comprehensive and not entirely scientific (the site's disclaimer indicates that they've done a bit of homework to ensure that the stats are correct, but obviously can't guarantee accuracy) but it's no less interesting for the casual observer looking to dramatically illustrate a point. 

A point like: for every one computer purchased, there are three mobile phones purchased.  So hey, do you think maybe marketers need to think harder about how to engage increasingly mobile consumers than they do about, say, building that next super sticky (ack) microsite?

For a few moments of distraction and maybe an eye opening (or at least eye pleasing) visualization or two, check out so_many_a_second.  And if you're feeling ambitious (and have access to any interesting data points), you can even create your own custom visualizations and submit them for inclusion in the site's main drop downs.

Related: If you dig infographics and data visualization, you might also want to check out the Information Aesthetics blog.  Just discovered it today and it looks pretty rockin' (in a "don't-tell-the-guys-down-at-the-local-watering-hole" data geek kinda way.)