Greg Verdino

Jack Welch, Greg Verdino and you

If you're even remotely interested in personal branding or advancing your career, you should think about subscribing to Personal Branding Magazine.  The brainchild of Gen Y personal branding rock star Dan Schawbel, PBM is a quarterly e-zine that features great tips and advice about building and managing your personal brand (both online and off) and insightful profiles of brand-name business leaders.

If you're even remotely interested in me (and how could you not be), you might want to start your subscription with issue #2, out tomorrow and available for sale at the Personal Branding site.  The new issue features a "Living The Brand" interview with yours truly, in which I talk about everything from Tom Peters to Twitter, how blogging has helped my career, and lay out the good, bad and ugly of this thing called "Greg Verdino."  The issue also features a profile of Jack Welch, an interview with Linden Labs' Philip Rosedale and 30+ other articles by a wide variety of business writers.

It's should be a good read and, if you need another reason to crack open your wallet, all proceeds generated from subscriptions benefit the American Cancer Society.

Burning vs building the brand house

If I asked you to demonstrate how an average Joe, empowered by social media, can wreak havoc on a brand, what examples would you choose?

You might point to our industry's three best known examples of companies getting burned by dissatisfied customers -- Dell Hell, the sleeping Comcast technican and Vincent Ferrari's attempt to cancel his AOL account -- all of which not only set the blogosphere afire but also sparked mass media coverage and caused the corporate villians a world of hurt.  (Of these three, it's worth noting that only Dell seems to have learned anything from the experience.)  Or you might point to some more recent disasters-in-the-making.  Either way, you probably wouldn't have too hard a time coming up with plenty good examples.

And if I asked you to demonstrate how an average Joe (or even a band of average Joes and Janes) has made a similarly large positive impact on a brand, what examples would you choose?

Can you think of even one?  I'm not talking about cases where the companies themselves make good and appropriate use of social media channels to market themselves or tap so-called "regular people" for the creation of brand content.  I'm talking about instances when actual consumers -- unprompted, uncompensated and of their own accord -- commend a company that has delivered a great experience, leading to an explosion in blog and mainstream media coverage and tons of positive brand impact.

Here's the thing -- lots of people are talking and blogging about great brand experiences every day but, taken one at a time, each seems to be a quiet affair.  Nearly 20,000 people subscribe to the Ikea Hacker blog but I don't believe I've ever seen coverage of Ikea fandom on the evening news.  The same could be said for the thousands of people who trade Coke memorabilia in this online forum or the thousands that participate in the SaturnFans community.

I'm sure you get the point.  So why is it what truly organic social media can play such a pivotal role in burning brands but seem to play a lesser role in building them up?

Maybe it's just human nature -- we're obsessed with bad news (you don't see too many puppy-and-kitten stories on the evening news either) and we like rooting for the underdog.  Or maybe even the people who love our products and services simply don't love them enough.  Or perhaps the unfortunate reality is that bad experiences are far more common than good ones, so they resonate with a much wider audience.

What do you think?

Where do you find inspiration?

Before you scoff, I should point out that I'm not going soft on you.  I have an ulterior motive for asking.

For the most part, I find my inspiration in the social mediasphere -- not exclusively (I get plenty of ideas from mainstream media and good old fashioned books too) but when it comes to blogging, I have typically found that the writings of other bloggers spark a lot of the ideas that eventually turn into my own posts.

But here's the rub...

I find myself reading the same blogs over and over again -- and the more I look in the same places, the less inspiration I find.  Don't get me wrong; the blogs I read haven't gone downhill and I'm not looking to dump any of my blogfriends.  They're still great and they still bring their communities great ideas, insightful commentary and plenty of entertaining rants.  But at the end of the day, they are all marketing bloggers that work roughly the same territory as I do -- social media, old marketing, new marketing, emerging technologies. Welcome to the echo chamber. :-)

So here's where you come in. Check out my blogroll to get a sense of what I read (it's about halfway down my sidebar - feed/email readers will obviously need to click through to the site.)  I pull feeds from lots of other blogs too, but my blogroll is a pretty accurate reflection of the types of feeds you'd find in my reader.  I think I've fallen into a bit of a rut and I could use some fresh perspective.  I'd love your recommendations:

• Who else should I be reading?
• What's your favorite blog outside of the marketing sphere?
• What's the last post you read that really made you stop and think?
• Who's writing posts that you wish you had written?
• Or maybe you'd like to point me to your blog?

You recommend it and I'll check it out.  Anything is fair game - business blogs and personal journals, a-listers and feisty upstarts.  For that matter, you can even recommend podcasts, books and mainstream media sites if you think they fit the bill.

Drop me a comment and let me know some of the folks you count on for inspiration and new ideas.

links for 2007-10-27

• MProfs Get to The Po!nt | Putting the V.I. Back Into V.I.P.
  MProfs newsletter for small business riffs on one of my older posts about how marketers make VIP meaningless by overusing (and misusing) the term.
  (tags: advertising brands marketing media mediabuying)

links for 2007-10-26

• Interesting Snippets Book
  Flickr user LynetteR has turned her Interesting Snippets images (I blogged em a couple of days ago) into a Lulu book - very cool. Proceeds go to charity.
  (tags: web2.0 blogs change emergingmedia trends technology creativity innovation)
• The Strength of Weak Ties
  Sociology meets social networks. I still remember my first boss in advertising asking me why I studied sociology if I planned to work in marketing. Ummm...
  (tags: socialnetworking community reference socialmedia ideas research)

All I ever do is talk talk

This is just a quick post to let everyone know about a couple of upcoming speaking engagements.

On November 15th I'm a panelist for PR News Digital's webinar, "Building Community & Reputation Online with Social Media & Other Digital PR Tools."  You can probably guess the topic based on the catchy title alone.  This one isn't a freebie but PR pros get PRSA credit for attending and social media public relations is a top topic right now.  You can register here.

And on December 4th, I am part of the iMedia Agency Summit power panel in lovely but really-friggin'-hard-to-get-to La Quinta, CA.  The topic is "Myth Busters" -- my co-panelists and I will be on tap to separate the leading edge wheat from the bleeding edge chaff.  What's hype and what really matters?  Brad Berens, Adam Broitman, Jeff Minsky, Garrick Schmitt and I will let you know.  The event is sold out but if you're an ad agency type you may already be going.

Let me know if you'll be at either - hope to see some of you there.

links for 2007-10-25

• Henry "Convergence Culture" Jenkin's Blog
  (tags: blogs media bloggers culture convergence emergingmedia)
• CK | Social Media Made Easy (Well, A Little Bit Easier)
  Good set of resources - from sites to books - for social media beginners.
  (tags: bloggers blogging web2.0 socialmedia socialnetworking reference marketing branding culture community age-of-conversation citizenmarketers books)

links for 2007-10-24

• Business Week | Dell Learns to Listen
  Article by Dell Heller Jeff Jarvis and video interview with Michael Dell.
  (tags: jeffjarvis blogging socialmedia wordofmouth web2.0 brands emergingmedia marketing change business buzzmachine)
• WSJ | Marketers Explore New Virtual Worlds
  A look at virtual world marketing beyond Second Life. Includes gratuitous pic of crayon's Coke Pavilion.
  (tags: secondlife advertising brands marketing emergingmedia technology metaverse future socialmedia crayon)
• Nokia Futures Presentations from "The Way We Live Next"
  (tags: design future web2.0 mobile internet technology change innovation emergingmedia trends)
• TechCrunch | Liveblog of the Facebook/Microsoft Investment Conf Call
  (tags: microsoft facebook socialnetworks socialmedia web2.0 business strategy media)

Would you hire this PR agency?

Where do you draw the line between stepping outside the box and doing something downright stupid?

I received an outreach email pointing me to a viral video entitled, "Mother Nature is a Bitch," that is meant to promote the services of a boutique public relations firm called PJ Inc.  I don't know much about this agency and I'm sure they do good work, but I wonder if this was the smartest way to experiment with new marketing approaches. 

I've got nothing against being unconventional (I am wholly in favor of it) -- and given that they handle clients like Vegas.com, maybe unconventional is just the right angle for PJ Inc.  But they also claim to be a go-to agency for "top global brands."  Something tells me that "Mother Nature is a Bitch" won't have the Fortune 500 banging down PJ's door for help with merger announcements and crisis management plans. 

And so, without further ado...

(Feed and email readers, click on through.)

So what do you think?  Did the video make you want to hire PJ Inc?

It's worth noting that, as of now, the company's entire "corporate" online presence comprises this video on YouTube, a placeholder website that doesn't present any information other than this video, and a MySpace profile that clearly demonstrates that the agency knows how to have fun but says nothing about what they do, how they do it, who they do it for, or if they can deliver results.

You'd think that expert marketers wouldn't fall prey to the same faulty impulses that doom so many so-called buzz marketing campaigns -- to be outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, to do something simply because you can, to chase the buzz rather than run the business.

Very strange... And now I guess we'll see if they monitor the blogosphere. :-)

So Greg, what's new at crayon?

Thanks for asking.  Actually, I'm pleased to announce some exciting goings-on inside the crayon box. 

ooVoo

First up, online video chat pioneer ooVoo has chosen crayon as its new conversational marketing agency of record.  ooVoo's free software allows PC users with broadband connectivity to engage in high quality multi-user video conversations.  You can get the full story at the crayonville blog.  We crayonistas have been using ooVoo to connect with one another for a while now, so this is a really cool assignment for us.  If you want to ooVoo me, you can download the software here (PC only right now but Mac is coming soon) and my ID is gregverdino.

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AAdvantage MileFinder Map

This week, we launched our first program for American Airlines -- AAdvantage MileFinder Map a Google Maps mash-up that allows AAdvantage frequent flyer members to find, rate and review participating Aadvantage Partners (including hotels, restaurants and rental cars) in 11 U.S. cities.  AAdvantage MileFinder Map is a service for American's frequent flyers only, so if you have an AAdvantage number, check out this great utility and help make it better by rating and reviewing the establishments that you know.

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Firebrand

And last but not least, Firebrand -- the multi-platform interactive advertising destination that we helped announce a couple of weeks ago -- began its "friends and family" closed preview last night.  It's looking good and we are just weeks away from opening the doors to select bloggers and mainstream media reporters.  After that, it's all systems go for the public launch.

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More to come.  Stay tuned.